Category: Games

Anything having to do with games (Computer & Tabletop)

PMOG: An unforeseen boon to the atheosphere.

Db06 Comments

Fellow Atheist, did you recently notice a sudden flux of visitors from blog posts that are not seemingly linking to you? Is so, this is because I’ve been playing around with a new online game and I’ve chosen some of your articles, that I consider interesting, to insert into the playfield, so to speak.

But even if you were not one of those few bloggers who’s posts I’ve chosen for my initial experiment, please bear with me and read the rest of this post. It might be interesting to you.

What I’ve discovered is a very new and fresh on-line game which does something novel. Instead of making players actively participate in the game, like all othe browser games, and as a result require a level of attention that not everyone can afford; it turns the concept on its head and makes the whole internet the playing field. This name of it is PMOG and I think it might have the capacity, if used right, to help the blogosphere and especially the atheosphere, become both more contextual and fun.

I will not go into the details of what PMOG is or how it’s played but I want to explain why it has such a potential.

if you set aside than silly mine pranks and random fooling around with friends, the game’s true power appears in the form of missions. Basically what missions are (at least currently) is a collection of links to various pages in a serial format, along with a short description provided by the player who built the mission. This seemingly simple concept, allows something that is sorely missing.

You see, we currently have so much content produced every day that it is night impossible to find the truly interesting posts.The atheist blogroll is closing to a 1000 active blogs and it will only keep growing from there. I’m currently subscribed to almost all the blogs in the blogroll through an aggregator and I have to wade through a lot of uninteresting and repetitive posts every day just to find one or two that say something worth reading (for me).

Yes, I’ve prioritized a few blogs where almost everything written is interesting but I truly feel that there are underdogs out there who’s thoughts remain untapped while the big hitters like Pharyngula draw all the attention. Sure, places like Challenge Religion and the Carnival of the Godless help to cut through the mud, but their posts always seem disconnected from each other.

My idea then, is to use the mission capability of PMOG in order to create ad hoc “carnivals” that follow a theme and can also provide a customised commentary from the organiser in the form of pointers or clarifications.

This will have two effects that I can initially see:

  • We have cohesive groups of posts that do not depend on a computer algorithm or people belonging to the same group. Thus I may have a mission about ethics and link to people who are members of the atheosphere (generally Atheist blogroll or Planet Atheism) along with ones who are not but have something relevant to say and most of us would miss.
  • Given enough of us participating on this and allying with each other, we can push our missions to the top of the pile. This provides us with access to eyes we could not reach before.
    Already, one mission on morality that I’ve created which hit 4/5 stars rating, generated 50 hits to my article which is almost as much as a CotG. If you consider that this game is still very very new and attracts people outside atheism as well, there is true potential to increase readership on the articles that are worth it.

Now, this is just the tip of the iceberg as well. Using items like portals for example, we can utilize our distributed power to create a network of relevant links. Imagine for example someone visiting the Expelled official website and the first thing that pops up is a 5-stars Expelled Exposed portal that the owners of Expelled cannot remove. As the popularity of the game increases, this can only grow more powerful for us, which is an even better reason to join in early.

Currently most missions are the random favorite sites each player has which just as fun (AKA not) as surfing on del.icio.us and makes the overall quality very low. I believe that if we can start improving this quality through the blogosphere, with better descriptions and interesting (underground or not) articles, we can easily take over.

Finally consider that the game can only become more interactive as time goes on. It will not be too long until we can create missions with riddles, votes and whatnot.

In any case, this was my little idea for the day. You can see the two initial missions that I’ve created as a proof of concept. For them, I used the items I marked as shared and starred in my google reader (It pays to do that sometimes).

Hopefully, I’ve managed to convince at least a few of you to try this out just in case it’s worth it. In case you do, please add me as an ally so that I am aware of you and we can run & rate each other’s missions.

One last thing. Currently the game is under a lot of load from a recent sudden popularity hit so you might run into the occasional slowness or outright failure. Also, I failed to mention it until now but it requires Firefox and a special extension in order to play it.

How I made Steam play nice with my Ubuntu

Db02 Comments

I tspent last afternoon trying to make this damn program work normally but for some reason I was always getting stuck when trying to register an account. Eventually I traced the problem with wine’s iexplore version which for some reason would freeze as soon as I start it. It would ask to download the gecko engine (if I hadn’t already downloaded it) and then display a white screen and become unresponsive. I tried various things, even testing it on a clean profile, but nothing fixed it (Wine 0.9.56 btw). This not working IE caused in turn Steam not to work well. It would open but it would also crash when clicking on the “create account” button.

Hopefully a quick googling directed me to the Ubuntu Forums and from there to the IEs for Linux page. Fortunately, that version of IE worked in my PC (PS: I was amazed by the simple and easy installation. Props to the developer!). Unfortunately I couldn’t it run through my normal wine installation. As it is installed on a different .wine directory, I tried linking to the iexplore.exe over there and replacing the one coming with wine but apparently due to different dlls, it didn’t work out. In exasperation, I renamed my .wine directory to winebak and copied the .ies4linux dir as .wine. I then installed Steam in that and started it.

It worked. And it worked perfectly. I was able to run it, create and account, log in and buy a game (which was the sole reason why I wasted my time making wine work) via a credit card (because paypal didn’t work).

Unfortunately, even though navigating steam worked very well, playing the game didn’t 🙁 Steam would vehemently complain that I didn’t have the current DirectX version when trying to run the game, even though I knew from the cracked version that it works without a problem. I could see no way around this unfortunately as I couldn’t figure out which .dlls are necessary to make Steam think I’ve got the correct one.

So, once again in exasperation, I renamed the current .wine dir to winebak2 and renamed winebak to .wine. I then copied the Steam client (which has Audiosurf installed) from winebak2 to .wine and tried again. Now steam would launch but would crash as soon as I logged in due to the annoying iexplore problem. Very fortunately for me, since Audiosurf created a program shortcut in the wine menu, I run it from there and lo and behold! It worked. (Albeit with the same problems as before)

So I now finally have an up-to-date version of Audiosurf and can finally submit my scores to the servers (which seem to running at a crawl, I guess do to the unforeseen popularity) . I must say that I’m loving it. A great luck that the game run on wine out of the box 🙂

Ryzom extinction

Db01 Comment

Do you remember approximately one year ago when the Ryzom MMORPG was going bankrupt and a group of fans started a movement to buy the Ryzom assets that were being liquidized, and subsequently release them under the GPL (I even blogged about it here)? There was quite a number of donation promises coming in as well, with the FSF also promising (if I remember correctly) 50.000€  if the Free Ryzom movement was granted the assets. In the end there were about €200k promised in donations which is quite impressive if you think about it.

Well, even if you didn’t see it or don’t remember it, the end result was that a third company, Gameforge, bought the assets instead (after convincing the judge that they would be more capable on keeping a larger number of the workforce employed no less) and the Free Ryzom movement was put on hold (they did try to keep it going but it didn’t take off it seems).

To tell the truth, I was very curious on how a company could buy Ryzom which had already proved to have failed commercially and what they were planning to do with it. More importantly, how were they going to use this failing business to keep the previous employees working.

Well, it seems that they couldn’t. I just received a message from the Ryzom.org mailing list that they informed me that not only had the Gameforge France (the subsidiary that took over) had closed down 7 short months after taking over, but has also left their employees unpaid for quite some time and hasn’t even payed the first liquidator what they owed them.

Now, If you remember, the whole reason why Gameforge was granted the assets over the Free Ryzom movement was that the judge assumed that a corporate entity would be better suited to take care for the well being of the game and its supporting personnel than a rag tag bunch of hippies (or at least, that’s what I assume he thought). Does anyone else see the irony here? You can be damn certain that if Ryzom had gone free, not only would have the developers probably be better off, but the whole world would have benefited from the buyout. You can also be certain that the liquidator would have received a larger amount of money than they did now.

Currently, Gameforge Germany (the original company that has taken over, now that Gameforge France has liquidated) has shut down the game servers and many fear they will shut down the forums as well, leaving the remaining players no venue for information. This is actually the main reason why the announcement was sent to everyone who has registered in the past, so that the remaining player might be informed.

The actual time line of the situation is this:

  • January 2007 : Gameforge takes over Ryzom, creating Gameforge France.
  • August  2007  : Gameforge France stops paying its creditors, starting
    the shutdown procedure. The employees haven’t been paid since June.
  • October 2007  : Gameforge France enters the liquidation procedure
    (public announcement). Unlike the first liquidation, the judge
    immediately shuts down the company and fires all the employees.
  • Nov-Dec 2007  : Issues in the procedure (see below) arise and add
    further delay to an already lengthy process.
  • January 2008  : Gameforge Germany announces it will soon shutdown the
    game servers.
  • February 2008 : The game servers are shutdown.

Now it seems that the previous free Ryzom movement is still waiting for the second liquidation to complete before they take any further actions. This might take a while as the situation has become even more complex by the gross mishandling of the situation by Gameforge. Nevertheless, once that is complete, hopefully, there will be another chance the acquire Ryzom and release it under the GPL and hopefully with a lower price tag as well.

However this whole situation irks me to no end.I just hope that no other “suitor” comes in and tries to take over Ryzom only to park it somewhere never to be seen again. I hope the judge will understand this time that giving the game to its own players who actually want to see it succeed instead of a random corporate entity with the only worry being it’s bottom line, is the better choice.

Let’s wait and see what happens. You check out the original announcement here

Slow days

Db0

It’s been a while since I’ve posted hasn’t it. Fortunately it was not because of any dubious legal action against me (although I have taken steps to protect myself from any such actions from terrorizing estabilishments). I don’t really know why I have not been writing more this month but I guess I was simply not in the mood for it.

Various stuff have been going on then in December. Mostly I’ve been spending time with [tag]Viola[/tag] and helping her get her house in order (Fortunately that is over with). Other than that I’ve been using the rest of my free time reading for my upcoming Vista exam and playing The Witcher. This game is pretty much to blame to totally ignoring the blog in the last two weeks (as well as ignoring other unimportant stuff like, cleaning the house, exercising and bathing). It’s just hooked me.

It’s not so much that it’s revolutionary or unique or anything like that but it seem to have the correct combination of storyline and combat to keep my interest held. I especially liked how you seem to end up getting mixed up in politics and diplomacy without even wanting to. What really annoys me however and is also a reason why the game takes so long is the loading times. It is just horrible. Every time that enter a house or a small area, the loading time is quick enough, but as soon as I want to go out to the main part of the map it takes up to 30 seconds each time. It might not seem much but if you consider that it takes me about 10 seconds to go into a house and search for loot, and 35 secs to load the map, well, it starts to build up, especially if you consider that I have to enter a lot of houses for the various quests I take on.
I tried a defrag on both my main hdd and the game installation hdd but none worked so I guess I’m just stuck at this situation. Oh well, at least I can enjoy my new VGA 🙂

Other than that, I’ve spent the last few days configuring a laptop to play nice with Ubuntu and after some headaches I think I’ve managed to bring it up to a stable level, but I’m planning to write about this in a different post.

As for the Holidays, as always I did not bother to really get into the spirit of [tag]Giftmas[/tag]. I was happy that people decided to present me with gifts but I would appreciate it more if they felt like doing this outside of this celebration of consumerism. I was especially glad however that my sweet girlfriend gave me a gift she created herself. It consisted of a little booklet with a short comic story she drew herself (incredibly cute) and a gift of chocolate (along with a biscuit house). Great stuff 🙂

Now, new year is approaching fast and it just serves to remind me that the third decade of my life will not be long coming…

Supreme Λιώσιμο

Db04 Comments

Τελευταία εβδομάδα, αμέσως αφότου γύσισα απο το Λονδίνο με μια εβδομάδα διακοπές να περισσεύει, το υπέρτατο λιώσιμο στον υπολογιστή. Ο Λόγος; Supreme Commander.

Τι παιχνίδι είναι απίστευτο μιλάμε ναούμ! Τεράστιοι χάρτες, άπειρες μονάδες για μάχη, γαμάτα γραφικά και στρατηγική…αλλα στρατηγική λέμε όχι μαλακίες. Όταν έχεις μονάδες Γής, Νερού, Αέρα και υβριδικές καθώς και το κλασσικό παιχνίδι πέτρα-ψαλίδι-χαρτί-πυρηνικό ολοκάυτωμα, βάλε και τους άπειρους τρόπους προσέγγισης του αντιπάλου, χώσε και δεκάδες τρόπους να αναπτύξεις την βάση σου, οικονομικά, αμυντικά και ακόμα και επιθετικά (ναι ναι, επιθετική “βαση”), χωρίς να περιορίζεσαι στο ποιός θα βγάλει τα περισσότερα παπαδάκια με τσεκουράκια να κόβουν ξύλα…ε ΓΚΑΒΛΑ

7 μέρες δεν ξεκόλησα απο την οθόνη και το campaign, δωδεκάωρα και βάλε. (Εύκολα κάθε αποστολή μπορεί να σου πάρει 2-3 ώρες.)

Λιώσιμο

Τα μόνα άσχημα είναι οτι το campaign δεν λεχει παρα πολύ ψαγμένο storyline αλά blizzard φάσεις, και ακολουθεί το κλασσικό μοτίβο των τριών διαφορετικών campaign, μια για κάθε faction που είναι ακριβώς ίδιες στο storyline (δηλ εκεί που με τους μεν κάνεις επίθεση και καταστρέφεις την πόλη του άλλου και προσπαθείς να εξοντώσεις όσους περισσότερους πρόσφυγες μπορείς, στους δε προσπαθείς να καθυστερήσεις τον άλλο μέχρι να φύγουν αρκετοί πρόσφυγες κλπ. Μόνο στην τελευταία αποστολή διαφοροποιείται το όλο θέμα, ανάλογα με το ποιος θα νικήσει. Ενδιαφέρον θα είναι στο expansion να παίζεις κάθε campaign σαν το faction σου να ήταν το νικητήριο.

Anyway, αρχίζω να ξεφεύγω. Πάρτε μια ιδέα απο παιχνίδι με μερικά screenshots, αν και είναι πολύ εύκολο να δείτε το πολυ καλό trailer.

Η επίθεση του Γαλαξιακού Κολοσσού. Το πιο μεγάλο και δυνατό unit του παιχνιδιού

SCFrame_Sun_Feb_25_173915_2007_00000.jpg

Μια επίθεση σε βάση απο μακριά

SCFrame_Fri_Feb_23_205552_2007_00011.jpg

Η ίδια επίθεση, zoomed in 🙂

SCFrame_Fri_Feb_23_205721_2007_00012.jpg

Φυσικα το παίχνίδι είναι γουρούνι στα resources. Εαν θέλεις να το παίξεις με άνεση, τουλάχιστον dual core και 2 gig ram καθώς και μια VGA 400 τουλάχιστων έουρο.

Αυτά

Animated

Db02 Comments

Yay! I now have my very own animated avatar (a few of them actually) 😀


On other news, I’ve reinstalled Eve Online to check out the gameplay with all the new expansion and patches. It seems pretty good but slow as snails. It took me four friggin’ hours to complete my training and get my first frigate. At the time it was 1:30 am and I didn’t have time to kill any nasties. I tried to go on the missing my first agent gives me and I got my ass handed to me by about a dozen pirates, even after I spend all my money on firepower and defence. How the hell do they expect us to complete these?
Last time I played Eve, I stayed for about 1.5 months until I got bored, but maybe this has to do with the fact that I was mostly playing alone. I’ll try to get more social this time in case it helps.

Aaaanyway, at least my character portrait is kewl (Damn, wanted to upload it but it is not available on the site. Maybe because I have a trial account).

Update: and here it is

Fygokentros

He is supposed to be blind and I’m planning to have an interesting background for him to fit with his drone fetish 🙂

So if you’re playing eve atm, look for Fygokentros 😉

Free Ryzom

Db01 Comment

Now this is damn interesting.

Μια προσπάθεια γίνεται αυτή τη στιγμή ώστε το MMORPG Ryzom να περάσει σε μία άδεια ελεύθερου λογισμικού.

Διαβάζοντας λίγα πράγματα περι του θέματος, φαίνεται οτι το Ryzom είναι ένα αρκετα ενδιαφέρον παιχνίδι όσον αφορά τον τρόπο που λειτουργει. Αναφέρω 2 πράγματα.

  1. Ο κόσμος είναι συνεχώς μεταβαλόμενος, αλλα όχι απλά με την πρόσθεση περισσότερων περιοχών όπως είναι κοινό για την πλειοψηφία των MMORPG. Αντιθέτως, τα πανίδα και χλωρίδα έχει εμπλουτιστεί με τεχνητή νοημοσύνη. Τα ίδια τα ζώα και τα φυτά δουλέβουν μέσω του οικοσυστήματος και έχουν φυσικούς εχθρούς καθώς και φυσικές άμυνες. Σαν αποτέλεσμα, το περιβάλλον μεταβάλεται καθώς, πχ ένα δάσος επεκτείνεται μέσω της νέας βλάστησης και ολόκληρα κοπαδια ζώων αποδημούν σε άλλες, πιο εύκρατες περιοχές για το είδος τους.
    Ακόμα και εποχές έχει, που επηρρεάζουν τα είδη των ζώων που είναι ενεργά και κατά προέκταση των υλικών που μπορείς να βρείς.
  2. Δεν έχει το κλασσικό στυλάκι του D&D με τα levels και τα classes που είναι κοινό στα MMORPG. Χρησιμοποιεί κάτι παρόμοιο με το Dungeon Siege όπου όλοι οι νέοι χαρακτήρες ξεκινάνε με 4 βασικές ικανότητες και καθώς τις χρησιμοποιούν αυτές βελτιώνονται και ο παίχτης αποκτά την δυνατότητα να ειδικευτεί. Αυτό έχει σαν αποτέλεσμα οτι ο κάθε χαρακτήρας έχει πραγματική ελευθερία ως προς τον τρόπο που θα λειτουργεί μιας και οι ικανότητες όχι μόνο μπορούν να συνδυαστούν αλλά σου δίνουν κάτι σαν υπο-δυνατότητες που μπορείς να συνδυάσεις για να κάνεις κάτι προσωπικά βολικό.

Anyway, εχει δημιουργηθεί μια κίνηση γύρω απο αυτό που αυτή τη στιγμή προσπαθεί να μαζέψει “όρκους βοήθειας”. Αυτό σημαίνει οτι υπόσχεσαι ένα ποσό, το οποίο θα χρησιμοποιηθεί ωστε να αγοραστεί ο κώδικας του προγράμματος, όταν γίνει η ρευστοποίηση της εταιρίας. Μετά αυτός ο κώδικας θα μεταφεργεί στο GPL.
Αυτό είναι σημαντικό σε πολλά επίπεδα. Κυρίως θα μπει στο ελεύθερο λογισμικό ένας αρκετα μεγάλος όγκος κώδικα για MMORPG και ακόμα καλυτερα μεγάλος όγκος απο Γραφικά και Ήχο, κάτι στο οποίο το ελεύθερο λογισμικό υστερεί.
Δεύτερον, όλοι ξέρουν οτι τα παιχνίδια ελεύθερου λογισμικόυ δεν συγκρίνονται σε ικανότητες με τα υπερθήρια των κλασσικών εταιριών. Το Ryzom θα μπορέσει να δώσει μια επιλογή σε όσους δεν θέλουν να είναι κλειδωμένοι με ένα συγκεκριμένο διανομέα και ίσως κάνει ορισμένες εταιρίες να ξανασκεφτούν το πόσο βιώσιμο είναι το όλο θέμα.
Τέλος, το Ryzom θα επιζήσει άσχετα με το πόσοι παίχτες υπάρχουν. Τα Open Source προγράμματα ποτέ δεν πεθάινουν, κυρίως γιατι εαν ο developer χρεωκοπήσει δεν παίρνει μαζί του και τον κώδικα.
Έχω ήδη υποσχεθεί 100€ σε περίπτωση που κερδηθεί η δημοπρασία και ελπίζω να βοηθήσουν κι’αλλοι. Πιστεύω οτι αξίζει τον κόπο να ρίξετε μια ματιά.

Starting adventuring again.

Db0

After this last Sunday, I got in the mood to work on [tag]Chronopia Adventures[/tag] again. I don’t know why but I think it was the board game I played, Hunt for Dracula or something, that did it.

It’s been a long time since I worked on that game and the rules are more polished than I remember leaving them at. Still, I never liked that fact that all dungeon encounters were from the same, which meant that every dungeon, of the same level, had the same creatures inhabiting it.

My idea now is to have dungeon types, so for instance a Warped dungeon will be inhabited more by demonic forces while a Desecrated one will have more undead. This will help, imho, to keep a sence of “focus”/realism and not have everything be so random.

Right now the idea is to create a Generic encounter table for each type, that the characters roll at when encounting hostile forces and that is the same for all levels. However when you look the results at their own table, they vary depenging on the level of the party.

The other idea that occured to me is that it would be great to create a program to handle the encounters for the game, in order to cut down on the paperwork. Then all one had to do is bring in a laptop instead of flipping through dozens of papers to find the right tables.

It would also be a great start to pick up on python as well as I’ve been meaning to do.

Sorry Bob

Db0

Well, I managed to get someone angry with me without really meaning to. You see, there is a group of boardgamers that gather every Sunday at a guy’s house and play games and I contected them in order to meet up with them. However due to heavy amount of drinking and dancing the previous night at Slime Light I ended going home at 8 and sleeping until 1 (and that was lucky).

Problem is that I was supposed to let him know if I was coming or not by 12 and I should be there by 2. I didn’t have his phone number and I didn’t have his address since I was planning to get them from the library on Saturday, which I didn’t find the time to do so afterall.

So, I just thought that since I didn’t call, he would assume I’m not coming and decided to go and find another gaming group that was gathering downtown.

Unfortunately, I didn’t understand how things work exactly and the guy who was hosting the event at his place called me, being a little pissed off, to ask me if I’m going after all. Well, I didn’t really have a good excuse, and I could only apologise.

Well, I blew my chance with that specific gaming group unfortunately and that’s a pity but at least I won’t be here long so it doesn’t make much of a difference. Still, I dislike pissing off people.

Γουέσνοθ

Db0

Δεν το έχω αναφέρει μέχρι τώρα, αλλα έχω αρχίσει να προσφέρω στο Wesnoth τον τελευταίο καιρό. Κυρίως δημιουργώ ένα campaign, εν ονόματι Forgotten Legacy καθώς και να κάνω επιδιορθώσεις στα κείμενα απο άλλα campaigns.
Δυστυχώς η μικρή διάρκεια προσοχής μου, με αποτρέπει απο το να προχωρήσω γρήγορα με το δικό μου (έχω κάνει μόνο 3 σενάρια μέχρι τώρα) αλλα ευτυχώς οι επιδιοθώσεις είναι πιο χαλαρές.
Το πιο δύσκολο campaign να σουλουπώσω φυσικά είναι το Legend of Wesmere στο οποίο τα κείμενα είναι επιεικώς απαραδεκτα. Μιλάμε ώρες ώρες νομίζω οτι το έγραψε παιδάκι του δημοτικού, για τόσο χάλι λέμε.
Ευτυχως τώρα για αλλαγή άρχισα να φτιάχνω το Invasion of Arendia το οποίο είναι πολύ πιο καλοφτιαγμένο και έχει επίσης και καλύτερο σενάριο. Πρίν απο λίγο έστειλα τις αλλαγές μου στον δημιουργό του και κατενθουσιάστηκε (θα μου πεις, σχολείο πηγαίνει ακόμα οπότε αναμενόμενο).

Πάντως αξίζει να το παίξεις το [tag]Wesnoth[/tag] τώρα. Αφότου πήγε στην 1.1 version έχει αναβαθμιστεί πολύ και σιγά σιγά πλησιάζει στην κρισιμη μάζα απο Developers στην οποία η ανάπτυξη του θα γίνεται με πολύ γοργούς ρυθμούς.
Εαν είχαμε και περισσότερους ζωγράφους & σχεδιαστές θα ήταν καλύτερα φυσικά (Εαν το διαβάζεις αυτό και έχεις όρεξη να επιδείξεις την τέχνη σου σε ένα μέρος που θα την δει πολύς κόσμος, άμε μια βόλτα απο εκεί.) αλλα ακόμα και τώρα τα πράγματα προχωράνε όμορφα.