Session 2.
Session 1 here.
February 24, 2009
February 22, 2009
February 21, 2009
The Art of Game Design
Read the book review at Gamasutra.com. The print version of the review.
[...] There is a wonderful field of research called distributed cognition that starts off with the concept that even smart people can only keep a few things floating in their head at once.
[...] Business models are changing rapidly with many upcoming games focusing on downloadable content, subscription models, advertising, microtransactions, free-to-play and more.
[...] The closest the book gets to a grand vision for game design is the importance of the “Loop”, the iterative process of building, playing, analyzing and improving that all great games undergo. This is fundamental stuff, but in general the book’s value remains in the wisdom of a hundred details as opposed to a big unifying idea or philosophy.
February 20, 2009
Warrior Code
[...]We are going to need a warrior code.
[...]How do we protect our robot armies against terrorist hackers or software malfunction? Who is to blame if a robot goes berserk in a crowd of civilians—the robot, its programmer or the US president? Should the robots have a “suicide switch” and should they be programmed to preserve their lives
Scary huh? This reminds me a video game from 1995 – Crusader: No Remorse and Crusader: No Regret (details, tools) That game had lots of those warrior robots in it.
Download Crusader 1: No Remorse and Crusader 2 – No Regret.
If you are running Vista like me, remember to unmute dosbox if applicable.
[...] that people liked to break things, and then showed him how much fun it was – even without an enemy in the room – to just unload machine gun clips and RPGs into a room that behaved like it might in the real world. Glass walls shattered, computers and monitors exploded, chairs spun, cameras were blown to bits and stopped moving, and doors were blasted apart.
See also:
February 19, 2009
February 18, 2009
VPC to VMWare with sysprep
After downloading the .cab file it needs to be extracted to “C:\ProgramData\VMware\VMware vCenter Converter Standalone\sysprep\xp”
As I am running Vista I also ran the converter as an administrator.
The next step is to start the player. If you forget like I just did to run that too as an administrator this is what you get:
Error while powering on: The following error occurred when starting VMware Player.
W32AuthConnectionLaunch: Reply error “The system cannot find the file “” (code: 3).
“.
You can safely ignore the missing floppy drive warning.
Update: Another take on this. And here. And here.
Extension Method ToChainedFunc
Lets assume you have a function which takes an offset as input and provides another offset as output.
97 Func<int, int> ScanSingleResult =
98 offset =>
I have ommited the actual implementation for clarity’s sake. Now lets assume I will need to the function to be called multiple times each time passing previous output as the next input. For that functionality I will define the following extension method:
22 public static Func<T, T> ToChainedFunc<T>(this Func<T, T> e, int count)
23 {
24 return
25 value =>
26 {
27 var p = e(value);
28
29
30 for (int i = 1; i < count; i++)
31 {
32 p = e(p);
33 }
34
35 return p;
36 };
37 }
Now I will be able to chain three subsequent calls to the implementation method with ease like this:
165 var resultend = ScanSingleResult.ToChainedFunc(3)(headend);
February 16, 2009
Flash Lite Developer Challenge
The Flash Lite Developer Challenge was launched on 16 February 2009 and is the leading competition for developers working with Flash Lite.
The competition challenges three groups of developers:
- those currently working with Flash Lite
- Flash developers interested in developing applications for mobile devices
- mobile application developers interested in using Flash Lite.
You must be authorized to represent a registered legal entity to participate in this Competition on behalf of the legal entity in question (the Participant). Individual persons are not eligible to participate in the Competition.
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/distributableplayer/
I found this by Digital Back Country blog.
Update:
A full-fledged version of the Adobe Flash player is coming soon to a whole slew of smartphones.
Update2:
MochiAds does not currently support Flash Lite, no ETA on if/when we’ll release support for it. It’s unfortunately not the same as regular Flash.
February 13, 2009
Group Report: Multiplayer Game Atoms
Go and learn how to diagram multiplayer games using skill atoms. This will defenetly be an interesting read for anyone into multiplayer development.
February 12, 2009
JavaScript Games Portal Found
There is finally a portal for JavaScript games. I will try to send some of mine to that portal 
Good job Jacob!
February 11, 2009
Store multiple values inside an integer
A 32 bit integer can contain 32 booleans. How many 3 bit values could it contain?
32 / 3 = 10
We could be packing up to ten 3 bit values in a single 32 bit integer. Using least amount of storage room is important for distributed applications while synchronizing.
6 namespace ScriptCoreLib.Shared.Lambda
7 {
8 [Script]
9 public class PackedInt32
10 {
11 public readonly int BitsPerElement;
12
13 public readonly uint[] Elements;
14
15 public PackedInt32(int BitsPerElement)
16 {
17 this.BitsPerElement = BitsPerElement;
18 this.Elements = new uint[Convert.ToInt32(Math.Floor(32.0 / BitsPerElement))];
19 }
20
21
22 public uint Value
23 {
24 set
25 {
26 var mask = (1 << this.BitsPerElement) - 1;
27
28 for (int i = 0; i < Elements.Length; i++)
29 {
30 this.Elements[i] = (uint)(value & mask);
31
32 value = value >> this.BitsPerElement;
33 }
34 }
35 get
36 {
37 var mask = (1 << this.BitsPerElement) - 1;
38 uint value = 0;
39
40 for (int i = Elements.Length - 1; i >= 0; i--)
41 {
42 value = value << this.BitsPerElement;
43
44 value += (uint)(this.Elements[i] & mask);
45 }
46
47 return value;
48 }
49 }
50 }
51 }
February 10, 2009
Where’s The Cash For Flash?
Flash seems to be a gold mine and micro-transactions is the new trend!
Stream one involved micro-transactions. While Dino Run is free to play, a small donation gives gamers a code that enables them to customize their dinosaur, perhaps change his color or put a hat on him. Some gamers send a penny, others have sent as much as $100. “We let people decide what the game is worth to them,” comments Tilmann. Micro-transaction donations generated about $4,000, lifetime to date all told. – read more at Gamasutra.
Update: Already there are people talking about it.
LorenzGames has a cool post about ways of making money with flash.
YouTube has a document on how to possibly make money from video itself.
February 6, 2009
Distributed Agents
The world is changing around us. Sooner or later the artifactial intelligence will rise. Until that we can enjoy creating agents, that based on their sensors and current beliefs of the environment perform rule based decision making. I think this will be important for distributed multiplayer games like flash games powered by Nonoba.
Read more about it over here at Rock Paper Shotgun blog and check out the article over here.
When playing an rts there is no point me trying to guess the actions of a random number generator.
But another person? They haven’t seen i have unit x which means i’ve teched up to building y which means i’m weak against z. But like i said, they don’t know so if i hold back unit x and let them capture that hill but offer as much low tech resistance as i can they will think the distribution of my forces is consistent… They have unit p? Perfect\fuck!
February 3, 2009
Unable to install SQL 2005 Express
If you have just uninstalled Windows Sharepoint Services 3.0 then you need to consider this:
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/920277
If you are running an x86-based edition of Microsoft Windows Server 2003, use the following command line to remove Windows Internal Database from the computer:
msiexec /x {CEB5780F-1A70-44A9-850F-DE6C4F6AA8FB} CALLERID=ocsetup.exe
