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.

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.

Trolling…. IRL!

So 9/11 … So yea touchy subject. People died and it was horrible, some people think the US government was involved… I’m not going to get into it, by now you all have solidified your thoughts. All I’m going to say is that I wouldn’t wish this on any one or country.

However after 9/11 it seems that the Trolls are out and about. You know these people, trying to build mosques at “Ground Zero”. Others saying that all people of Islamic faith are terrorists. Other saying we are the ones that deserve to die…

And then every one stops doing useful things and starts going nuts. Seriously, this is just like a prepubescent chat room! I am so happy that just one person can make a statement that makes an entire nation angry. I really don’t like being part of a country that is so easy to get a reaction out of.

Yes, we could have turned all of the middle east into a parking lot, and we would have been slightly justified in doing so. But how is this going to help anyone? Hell, while we are at it, lets start stabbing people who insult us or throw a temper tantrum if we can’t get our chicken nuggets at MC Donald’s.

When we live in a world where its every person for themselves and we are all self-sufficient, I can understand these tactics, but right now every person is heavily dependent on other people.

In this world we cannot survive without one another, even if we are in a different country. And to make it all very easy we are all pretty much the same. We all hate work, we all need food and water, we all love at least once, we are sad when people die, we want to feel important and loved.

How is it that we have so much in common and we still continue to fight it. I think we are all idiots.

Let me get back to my point. Basically if we as a nation keep reacting to the Trolls like this, then we are going to get terrorized again. We are making our self look like an oppressive hateful country that is just asking to get its ass kicked.

So everyone… Please stop feeding the Trolls.