Object Centric Requirements

The idea that you can look at a problem and find the solution as a set of objects has been a powerful one. There still are very good uses for functional programing and I think there always will be, but in terms of abstractions,  object oriented programing is a good one.

Object Oriented Programing has shown up in our project design documents as well. Look at UML, its all over. But what about Requirements?

Thoughts on Game Complexity and Minecraft

As you all know Minecraft is awesome! Because of that I was trying to figure out what made Minecraft soo awesome. My thought path came down to complexity.

Really enjoyable games are complex. I strongly believe that the more complex a game it, the more rewarding it is. This presents a major problem for game developers, they need to add this complexity. Complexity creates two problems that I see.

Ryan is Definitely Cool Enough!

A recent scientific study has proven with a 2.5% chance of error that Ryan is most definitely cool enough to make up words. This has come to a surprise to most, but there were many hints of this actually being the case.

“I had seen him do it one, it was magnificent” said John Browning, “It was the best word I have heard in a long time!”. John owns a local Subway restaurant.

“This means big new things” said Dustin Hamershine, a Material Engineer that works HP, “This opens up a whole new way of thinking about how to store data on disk!”.

Ryan has refused to comment.

Nice Electro Beat

I stumbled upon this set of interesting songs a while ago. There so good I’m still listening to them now. You should feel obligated to check them out now. They are free to download. I ❤ Creative Commons!

The Signal

TA Spring Oh nose…

For those of you who don’t know TA Spring is a really nice open source 3D RTS Engine, with some nice games and AI… That is, if you can get it to work. 😦

I play Balanced Annihilation and Complete Annihilation mods, and I love them, its a great game. The engine standardizes all of the user commands, if you know how to play one mod, you can play them all, and enjoy all their uniqueness.

Windows Application Icon using Mingw and CMake

If your a cross platform game dev like me, one of the many issues that come up are how to get an exe to have an Icon on windows. Well it turns out you can do it easily with mingw (I’m sure you can get it to work using other compilers).

Here is the link to the stack overflow article  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/708238/how-do-i-add-an-icon-to-a-mingw-gcc-compiled-executable. All you do is create a file, run this program called “windres” on it (It apparently comes on Windows). That turns the file into object code that you can statically link into your binary. Works awesome,  but “windres” is picky about the image file format, so watch out.

It isn’t really very strait forward to get this to work on CMake. The following is code out of my CMakeLists.txt file that seems to do the trick:

# This sets up the exe icon for windows under mingw.
set(RES_FILES "")
if(MINGW)
 set(RES_FILES "Win32/client.rc")
 set(CMAKE_RC_COMPILER_INIT windres)
 ENABLE_LANGUAGE(RC)
 SET(CMAKE_RC_COMPILE_OBJECT
 "<CMAKE_RC_COMPILER> <FLAGS> -O coff <DEFINES> -i <SOURCE> -o <OBJECT>")
endif(MINGW)

add_executable(OpenSpaceClient client-main ${RES_FILES})

 

This works by creating some sort of additional compiler that calls “windres” as a RC compiler (RC is a made up name, I think you can use anything). As you can see this only gets run if the development environment is mingw.

I hope this is useful.

Vector Online Gaming

I am currently in a gaming community called Vector Online Gaming (http://vog.vectorcmd.com/). This is a really nice group of people who play games, and enjoy a nice level of social interaction over their Ventrilo Server (and yes, I have tried to get them to switch to Mumble).

I haven’t been on lately and I wanted to give a shout out to Deszeraeth, homeofmew, oORaZoROo, Zamana, and Raccoon. You guys are awesome!

I am in one of those times in my life when I am not on Ventrilo. This is nothing against the people on Vent, I just go thought these kinds of phases. Ill probably be back on within the next week.

❤ Xello

Humble Buggy Indie Bundle

I never got around to participating in the first HIB so when the second one came around (The Humble Indie Bundle #2), I thought I would jump in. Besides, 5 games!! That’s a steel. I payed 60 USD to get my bundle of joy and set aside the rest of my night to try all the games. I should note that you can pay what ever you want for the bundle, apparently nothing less than a penny. I was feeling generous because I like games that are made for Linux.

I started off with Osmos and Machinarium, for some chill gaming. They were both really good games. I ended up getting stuck in Machinarium and Osmos got difficult (I didn’t expect this). Having tried and enjoyed these games, and the fact that my frustration level was rising, I decided to jump into Cortex Command as it looked really cool.

Then sadness struck. Right out of the box, the 64bit installation of Cortex Command was borked on Ubuntu 10.10 64bit. I chatted with the person behind the chat at the bundle hoping there was a quick fix, he/she couldn’t help me, and redirected me to the fan base forum. I wasn’t the first person to have this issue. All that was offered was condolences and instructions to download and install the 32bit of the game. Luckily the 32bit version worked, but not great.  I was crashing due to audio issues and I got a kernel panic here and there. There was nothing about this on the forums, so this might be a configuration issue on my part.

Long story short, I spent the rest of the night debunking Cortex Command. I did get some play time in, and I really liked the concept of the game. I know its not finished yet, but seriously, did they even test their linux 64bit build? If they did, did they have to skip over Ubuntu? After looking around it seems that people were having problems with  Braid and Revenge of the Titans as well.

I guess this is just a re-education for me to avoid non-open source software. Yea, I would have been in the same situation with games not working and such, but at least I could get it fixed with in an hour,  I could do it my self without having to bother the one or two devs, and finally I would have that open source happy fuzzy feeling that I was lacking with these games.

In the end, it has been 12 hours since the post about Cortex Command x64 not working in Ubuntu. The Cortex Command devs have not made any statement acknowledging our existence while many other linux users are waiting for some returned value on the money they spent on the game. I am trying to figure out what exactly my $10 (approx) got me.

My expectation is if I pay for a piece of close source software, then that software should work just out of the box. If your an independent developer of this nature, and you cant handle this, go home. You are just going to upset and frustrate your customers.

Ok, so, I have stated the problem. The solution, IMHO is to have the source code distributed with the game. I don’t mind paying for open source software. Or have the ability to link the game or something. As a linux user, I understand the difficulties that are involved in getting software to linux users, I am willing to work to get the software to work, if only you will give me the tools I need.

Minecraft

I know I just mentioned it, but I figure I will write a review now.

Minecraft is difficult to describe mainly because its not really a game, more like a sandbox. So I guess I will just give you all a scenario, as I think this will be the best way to describe the game.

You start off as a character in first person view. If you look around, you will notice that everything is made up of cubes. There is a cube for grass, a cube for dirt, a cube for rock, a cube for wood, and cube for leafs. Lots of different types of cubes that are interacting with each other. You can watch a dirt cube turn into a grass covered dirt cube if sunlight is hitting it. You will also notice that the world is huge (I haven’t found the end, and its randomly generated)!

So what do you do next? Start punching trees. I’m not kidding, after you punch some trees down you collect the wood. You can turn this into may things using crafting. I have build axes, shovels,  picks, work benches, torches, etc…

You can also place block and build your own little structures. I usually build my self a house to stay safe at night (Monsters come out at night).

This all may seem quaint and simple minded, you would be right. There is an addictive element here that I have yet to pin down. Some sort of primordial drive to survive, build, and create. Also right now its a cheap game, it’s about 15USD.

Here are some things you can do in this game:

• Dig a hole to survive the night.
• Dig a mine to find coal, iron, gold, red stone, and diamond.
• Fall into a lava pit and die
• Get eaten by zombies, spiders, and slimes.
• Make torches to light up the area so monsters don’t spawn.
• Make a mine cart track.
• Use red stone dust to create elaborate logic devices
• Kill chickens for feathers and kill pigs for ham
• Cook ham for better healing affects.
• Grow Reads, and Cacti
• Make mushroom soup.
• Farm up some wheat to make bread.

Its a really good game, and worth looking into.

Sick and Addicted :(

Well, I have come down with a bad cold the last couple of days. I hope the worst of it is over, I had to skip work yesterday. If your a hyper-intelligent race of space-fairing robots from the future and you would like to know if having a cold is worth experiencing. The answer is simply no…

 

Being sick has taken me away from my most recent and longstanding addictions: Minecraft. Waiting for the end of the month update, along with playing online with my friends has resulted in a game I simply can’t stop playing. If this goes on for a year, I will have to get help. I think that it wont last that long though.

Minecraft has been the main excuse for me ignoring my blog.