West Karana

Step 1: Start browsing the games Xfire claims are installed on your system and come across a children’s version of that old game, Mastermind:

Step 2: Spend 15 minutes writing a program in Python to solve it for you.

Step 3: Suddenly realize you missed the point of the puzzle in the first place :P

We had to do a version of this game as a programming assignment in Pascal back in college. It took a lot longer than 15 minutes back then. Python > Pascal. That’s all.

Raph Koster today posted an article proposing that the reason people flock to games similar to ones they have already played is because they have no easy way of finding the alternatives. I agree! That’s a HUGE problem! How can I convince anyone Pi Story is a good game when they assume all MMOs must be 3D? How can I convince myself that oh, I dunno, Age of Conan is a game I’d like without going to the effort of buying it and installing it?

I really like Nexus: Kingdom of the Wind before EQ came out. What games are like that NOW? Without having a complete knowledge of all MMOs available, you can’t know. Raph even points to a comment to a Keen and Graev post that does a decent job of “sequencing” the modern EQ-type MMO (this includes WoW and its descendants).

Coldheat and I talked a lot about this last night. I talked about how we can look at modern MMOs as continually adding complexity (and in some cases, removing complexity) from older games (like Rogue, Colossal Cave Adventures, Risk), and how each decision made by a game designer could be thought of as adding, deleting or rearranging “genes”. Successful genes — design decisions — would be passed on to new games. Unsuccessful ones would not be copied.

Weighting these genes appropriately (which is the hard part), you could tell how similar two games were, which ancestors they shared, and hopefully, how much you might like a game given games you already liked. Or even more fun, proposing a bunch of characteristics (like Guild Wars, but with mandatory grouping and permadeath…) and getting a list selected from all the hundreds of MMOs that meets your needs.

So this morning, as I was setting up Shifter, my Shapeshifter solver, which required setting up some Python stuff since I hadn’t run Shifter since I re-installed Linux on Baphomet, I was thinking about what a web-based front end to such a database might look like. And today I am browsing Wired.com and see an article about the Python-based web framework, Django.

I’d briefly used other Python web frameworks, like Turbogears, but that was too much like work. I’d thought about making some Ruby on Rails stuff when I was between jobs, but I had nothing in particular to make with it, so that died. At work we use Struts and Hibernate with Java, and that REALLY seems like too much work. But a really simple Python-based framework…

So it’s all coming together. Since I have Friday off, I might use that time to try and pull together a data entry page so I can start breaking down the very earliest RPGs and MUDs into their component features. I think this “sequencing” of games will likely take the longest — how do you enumerate every feature in WoW? There must be millions. But until I get to entering data, I won’t know what the important ones are, the ones that by their very inclusion, advanced the genre. And this page must be robust, because if it works out, I will be making it public to hopefully get other people to help analyze the games they play.

I did something similar with my old book collection using keyword fields in a Q&A 4.0 database 20 years ago. Plot elements — time travel, romance, horror, elves, etc — cover artists, everything. But I never did much with it (aside from looking up cover artists) because I was pretty familiar with the books I had already read. Here, though, I will be entering information for games I have never played. So we’ll see how that goes.

I have lots of projects I start and never finish, but I think there is a real need for a MMO database that goes beyond just name and genre, and tells you its features in a way that can be compared and contrasted to other MMOs. So maybe I’ll be able to make time for this.

I spent hours last night running around Norrath on Test, killing stuff and doing quests, just so I could write about the Void Storms coming in EQ2’s Game Update 46. Is the next expansion The Void? Or is this just a red herring? Regardless, the appearance armor and weapons are kind of cool and there are a lot more benefits besides, and you can read all about it over on Massively. Fair warning: You will be doing a LOT of cleansing to earn the nicer rewards.

Last week, I had the honor of being taken to a quick tour of the new 80+ Runnyeye instance, “Runnyeye: The Gathering“. Insert “Magic: The Gathering” joke here :P I didn’t get a chance to really explore the instance, but even the little part I saw showed that the devs must have had a blast when they designed the adventure. R:tG is this year’s Nizara — awesome loot, but it’s not going to be a walk in the park. You can read all about it on Massively as well.

Time was also spent helping my son with his epic (good thing I hadn’t transferred my troub and inq to Najena; both were needed), and feeling crappy in the hot weather and falling asleep on the couch while Chime urged me to go to bed (in My Life as King for the Wii).

I can’t be a full time raider, perform my day job competently, be a professional blogger, play the wide variety of MMOs I need to play to do my job, participate in the two betas I am in (don’t ask), and also sleep. The past couple of weeks, sleep-debt has been killing me. Simple fact is, I need to be in bed 11PM each night. Staying up until 1, 2 or 3AM writing after raids is killing me.

The other writers warned me I wouldn’t be able to keep up a six night a week raiding schedule. I thought I could, but… well, I need to be awake when I write. I make stupid errors otherwise. So I’ll be talking to my guild leaders about cutting back my raiding obligation to two nights a week, or maybe it’s time to just go completely casual. I’ll never see my mythical epic, but the ordinary one is pretty sweet by itself… and there’s always pickup raiding.

Anyway, off to the dentist (yay).

I wrote a piece yesterday about MissBimbo.com, a game that teaches young girls how dieting and boob jobs are the path to a successful and rewarding life… and on the way to work, what drives by but a truck full of Bimbos… or something :)

Came across this Python sprite package, Rabbyt while looking for Python gaming development sites with searchme.

The current game I’m writing (when time permits) doesn’t use sprites, but some tech demos I wrote do, and this looks like a pretty darn amazing package, able to do rotation and scaling and handle thousands of moving objects and collisions at incredible speed. My PyGame-based tech demos were struggling to get 60fps out of just forty or so sprites — and I wasn’t even testing collisions (well, they were supposed to be avoiding each other anyway). So I may have to revisit those demos and maybe there will be a game in there, after all.

I’ll leave the difficulty of distributing a Python-based game in this era of Flash-based browser games for another time.

I haven’t done even a tenth of the gaming I usually do in a given week. Between my sister Hillary getting hitched in Boston; my sister Genjer and niece Jazzmin coming up from NYC to spend Easter weekend here in Connecticut; and the siren’s call of Rock Band demanding the return of the (in)famous Buzzkillaz, well, that was pretty much it.

But though I didn’t get much gaming done, I did get a lot of writing done. I am absolutely delighted to announce that I’ve been hired on at Massively to do what I can to make Massively the number one destination for hot news and features about every single game in existence. I’ve patched Test and re-installed EQ1 because I can think immediately of three or four games which could use a lot more coverage, and I aim to see they get it.

I hope also to introduce Massively’s readers to all the amazing bloggers whose sites I read every day. If you have some news you want to share with the world, shoot me a note and I’ll do my best to see it on Massively.

Nobody was more shocked than I when my application was accepted :P I was giddy for hours…

This is such a rush :) You’ll notice a new “Me @ Massively” link on the sidebar; this will point to my latest posts there.

Kind of a mishmash post today. I start out with some EQ2, then move on to TV and lastly a little bit about work right at the end.

Being a recruit in a highly successful raid guild going through Veeshan’s Peak for the first time leaves me plenty of time to play alts and watch TV shows :) The night before last, I worked a couple more levels with Winterwing, my Arasai bruiser who is bringing the fear to Butcherblock and about whom I’ll write later. Last night, I played Dera, whom I hadn’t played much since she reached 80 over the weekend.

Those 35 AAs won’t earn themselves. And I don’t see any inquisitor masters in the mailbox, so there’s work to be done here. You can see from the picture that I’ve decided the look I used for her when we first got the appearance slots turned out to be exactly the look I needed all along, and so that horrid swirly hypnotic gag-inducing RoK armor is safely hidden, and you may look directly at the halfling once more.

The Crypt of Agony was the first dungeon of the evening. I’d just finished getting the last two Adept 3s for my class — Ministration, my fast heal (thought I’d done my heals FIRST, but not this one), and Tenacity, my stamina/dps buff. Tenacity… hey, didn’t I cast that waaaaay back in EQ1? Yes, I did. In fact, I could MGB it — cast it on everyone in the area all at once.

When will EQ2 stop slavishly copying from EQ1…. Sheesh…. the name doesn’t even make sense unless you know it was part of a spell line that included Virtue and Conviction. Here in EQ2, it’s just dropped in with no history.

I met up with Glokk in the group — I used to be in Revolution with him, and he used to blog as Quylein the Mage. And probably still gets more traffic to his blog than I do :) He asked me near the end if I knew he was Quylein, and I sat there stunned… did he think I had been pretending to know him all night (and other nights when we chatted without necessarily grouping) because I was being polite but actually had no idea who he was?

I mean, that is something I will do (hi, Bremia)… but not in this case… (Bremia, I know who you are now. But sometimes I wonder if YOU do.)

Anyway, CoA went swimmingly; I got the Tiki healer shield (holding it… doesn’t it look awesome? The face is sculpted — you can tear someone up pretty bad with that nose).

That wasn’t going to last. Next up was Vault of the Eternal Sleeper. They were going to go hardcore. Just me solo healing, no mezzer, nobody who could root, level 77 tank who’d never been before. But what, the heck. We ROCKED. We cleared that place MERCILESSLY. We wiped NINE TIMES. Only one of the previous three statements is true, by the way. Can you guess which one?

I don’t know if it would have gone any better if I had been heal specced. I truly and honestly believe Inquisitors need to be melee specced to unlock the power of the class — otherwise they are just wannabe Templars. I just don’t think anything could have saved the group with that collection of classes.

A halfling dirge who came to replace someone who cut and run was a gas, though. I was in dark elf form, just for fun, and when he zoned in and I saw he was a halfling, I said what any good citizen of Freeport says upon meeting one of the shrub elves — “Ah, a Halfling. Brell’s most imperfect creation.” Well, actually it’s the gnomes who say that, but I thought he would get a kick out of a little roleplaying.

Little did I know he was very hurt by the comment. How was I to know he was, in real life, a halfling and really worshiped Brell and took offense at the notion that Brell wouldn’t love him. Or something. I sent him a tell and explained that it was a joke, a little RP, and that’s what a halfling might hear on the streets of Freeport. “*I*,” he huffed, “am a citizen of MAJ’DUL.”.

Yeah. Good luck with that.

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James Bernandelli over at Reelviews.net noted recently that he’s watching a lot less television. Perhaps because the writer’s strike has effectively weaned America from television, but mostly because, like me, he doesn’t channel surf looking for more TV to watch. He just watches specific shows. And since he has a Tivo, mostly he records them and never does get around to watching them.

This is one of the downsides of our modern life. Not enough time for television. Too many other things to do. I never saw that Terminator show (though from guild chat last night, I needn’t bother looking it up). And I just discovered Jericho.

I’d heard the name before, but had absolutely no idea what it was about. Just this weekend, a blurb on io9 told that it was a show about the survivors of a nuclear war and trying to stay alive and sane in the small Colorado town of Jericho while the nation struggled to rebuild — sort of a “Testament” meets “The Postman” without as much suck.

Now if I had channel surfed onto it last year, I would have watched it. As it is, I never even heard of it. I immediately begged the Internet to deliver unto me the pilot episode, and I watched it. Good stuff.

Because I’ve been a bad person, I haven’t been keeping up with Goong, so last night I finally got to Episode 3. The seeds for Yul’s strategy to get himself installed as Crown Prince are being sown as Chiang and Shin finally tie the knot and Chiang gets elevated to royalty. Her friends think she’s abandoned them, though — and perhaps there’s the first small glimmer that Shin may feel something for Chiang?

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Drew and I saw Cloverfield over the weekend, the movie that does for kaiju films what “The Blair Witch Project” did for horror films — put you into the movie via the handheld camera. Go see it. io9 (how did I ever follow SF before they started? Well, aside from religiously reading everything Cory Doctorow pointed out on Boing Boing, I guess I did not.) points out that the last scene, a tape of Rob and Beth’s day at Coney Island, shows a Japanese satellite smashing into New York harbor, over there at the edge. Ah, now we know what woke it.

I’m always a big fan of underwater nuclear tests. Traditionalist, you know.

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And if you’ve read this far, you’re probably related to me, and so you won’t care that I am finally getting to use Perl on a real project at work :) I’ve never had a chance to really get my hands filthy with Perl before now, and I think I might just become a fan of the language. It just does what you WANT in a way I have never experienced before in a computer language, not even my long-time fave lang, Python. That built-in regular expression stuff is a monster all by itself. I am seeing why people swear by it so much.

It hasn’t replaced Python in my heart. But I’ll save a spot for it.

Today’s XKCD is about my favorite programming language:

I was thinking… ya know, I’d like to do some fan art with Portal’s Weighted Companion Cube, but I couldn’t find a model of one that worked with a modeler I could afford — i.e., a free one. So I did my own from scratch with the Persistence of Vision ray tracer.

I haven’t put in any textures yet… but I think it came out rather well for an hour’s work.

Edit: Finished the model. Not perfect… close….

For Povray modelers, here’s the scene file for the final cube:

Weighted Companion Cube Povray scene file

I’m getting a little tired of job spammers. It’s time to fight back. Letter to someone who has spammed me three times with the same spam…

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And Lord knows, I love pudding. But this is getting a little funny.

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I’ve cut down on my blog writing (and reading), cut down on my game playing, cut down on nearly everything. I’m extremely uncomfortable, it seems, with doing anything but looking for work.

My days are spent working on job skills (I have tried out some new development environments and today am looking at the Lua scripting language), posting my resume places, following up on anyone who shows interest.

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In my job search, there is a question I dread hearing from an interviewer. And that would be, “Do you play World of Warcraft?”

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Surya laid me off this morning. And after all the nice things I said about them!

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