Doug’s Blog

10.27.08

Damnit, get rid of that extra dimension!!

First up on my list of things to discuss: World of Goo. It’s so great to see a game that breaks all the rules and is actually fun for once. I mean, look at EVE Online; it’s a pretty decent game, but you have to work for two months to get some big omfg super lazor battle ship only to get it destroyed in one small raid. That happened to an acquaintance of mine on Xfire, and he literally was crying when that happened. Really, what part of ‘fun’ is being misinterpreted by game developers nowadays? Back in the day you had new games coming out all the time like Megaman for the NES, Fantasy Zone for the SEGA Master System, hell even Zero Wing was original enough to be called fun. Now all we have is a bunch of crappity crap that’s made exclusively to be monetized, and while it may seem fun in the beta, it’s then raped so “casual gamers” find it enjoyable. For the latter, see Spore. Seriously, what the hell is this shit? Somewhere along the lines, developers completely lost the meaning of the word “fun”.

Anyway, enough of my rant; back to Goo. Simply put, it’s an amazingly fun game. I’ve always had a thing for physics games and games that have stories and settings that make no sense. I think Earthbound fits into that category, so that must be why I like that a lot too–minus the physics. World of Goo is a refreshing reminder that games can be fun. It’s also an even more refreshing reminder that games do not need DRM. (Take the hint, EA) I don’t really know how to describe WoG, so just watch this video I made.

World of Goo on Xfire

Now, tell me that isn’t an amazing game. Come on, do it! Ah, see? You can’t. Overall, I highly recommend World of Goo to anyone that likes games, and most especially developers. This is what a fun game should be like. In fact, lets use it for an example. So, what exactly is World of Goo in terms of development? Well, it’s 2D… It’s a physics-based game… It has nice music… Oh, and of course, it’s very fun to play.

Well now, what do we have here? Oh, I see! It’s my own 2D game! It’s physics based, has nice music, and is v–ah hell, who am I kidding, it isn’t even done yet; how is it going to be fun to play if it isnt anywhere near complete? Basically, I’m eventually going to be turning this into a 2D multiplayer sidescrolling GMod. I discovered a 2D game engine today called LÖVE which uses OpenGL and–get this–Lua. It’s written in C++, but you make your actual games in Lua. You can also compile them to an EXE to make a standalone game, which is great. As for my game, all it is right now is a landscape with barrels that you can spawn by right clicking, move by dragging left click, and explode into particle-y goodness by shift-clicking. For such a simple engine, it has pretty damn good physics. I just hope I can continue to get 60+ FPS with an assload of physics simulations going on at once, like you’d expect in a multiplayer sandbox game. There will be a spawn menu and stuff where you can spawn some premade ‘props’, as well as scripted ones like explosive barrels (which are quite buggy right now), or you can create a custom prop by inputting the width and height of your desired rectangle and it’ll put it there. Physguns will work just by clicking and dragging, and there will be guns and jumping and stuff. Pretty much, anything you’d expect from a 2D sidescrolling multiplayer sandbox game. More on this later, but here are a couple screenshots. Feel free to ask me on Xfire or Steam or something if you’d like a copy to try out.

And about to wind it up… I got my XCM and a buncha cables this weekend. Apparently UPS delivers on Saturdays, so that was nice. I’ve gotten my 360 and Wii working perfectly with it, all I need is my TV tuner card (which arrives tomorrow) so I can record and broadcast. I can still play now, but it’s more fun when other people can laugh at you over the internet. Meh, just a theory. That’s just about it, then. I’ll keep you posted on the sandbox game, as long as you keep giving me suggestions. Now, back to testing Son’s epic GMod map. And when I mean epic, I really mean EP-

10.22.08

Cables Galore

I’ve done some more work for my dad, this time a shopping cart-based IPN script for use with Paypal. Basically, a person clicks the “add to cart” link on one of his client’s sites, then it, well, adds to their cart. Then they can checkout using Paypal and it automatically sends them a dynamic download link to the e-book they bought. Anyway, pretty nice project–I like working with PHP. It’s something I enjoy doing, and I get paid for it.

This time my payment was a bunch of cables. I know you’re thinking that I’m lame, but hear me out: These cables are so I can play and record console games on my computer. I plug the console into a splitter, and basically one end goes to the monitor and another goes to a tv tuner card to record/broadcast. Pretty neat, I think. Took me a while to figure out the best way to do it, too. For that reason, I have provided you an expertly-made diagram. Yes, it’s Paint.

All in all: I bought an XCM composite to VGA adapter, component coupler, and two component cables. I also needed to get an s-video cable so I could record/broadcast my PC without lag by plugging the GPU directly into the tv tuner, but I forgot. I also forgot the RCA audio y-splitter, but I can just pick these up at any Radioshack anytime. Total, this hit me about $130; but I had $45 left over from when I returned my original 360 VGA cable, so it actually run me $85. Pretty good investment if you ask me, 1080p on my monitor and the ability to record for machinimas and broadcast for shits a giggles–it’s all good, it’s all good! TV tuner was quite cheap, too; only $30. Component tuner cards usually $60 or more, around $100 if you want to get a good one–so I got a good deal there. I had to order everything from different sites though which really sucked, it’d be nice if I could’ve gotten them all from just one site but oh well, couldn’t find them. Only downside is multiple shipping charges, as well as the fact that everything will arrive in ‘pieces’. Should be coming in late this week or early next week, though, so don’t fret; you’ll be able to watch me play old games on a Justin.TV stream real soon.

Anyway, for the upcoming holiday season and my birthday in February, I’ve compiled a list of games I’d like. I also put in a PS3 since I don’t have one, but I’m pretty sure I won’t be getting one. And for that reason, none of the games on the list. LittleBigPlanet looks awesome though. The problem is that it’s not worth getting a $400 console just for one game, and nearly all of the other good games for the PS3 are multiplatform with the 360 or aren’t even out yet. Meh. I don’t know about Sonic Unleashed for the 360 though, as most sonic games since SEGA disbanded sucked. Hopefully it’ll break the cycle, though. As for the Wii, I’m really disappointed in Nintendo right now. So much shovelware, so little good games.

360

• Dead Space
• Fable 2
• Gears of War
• Gears of War 2
• Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts and Bolts
• Bionic Commando
• Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
• Indiana Jones
• Sonic Unleashed
• Tom Clancy’s H.A.W.X.

PC

• Far Cry 2
• Left 4 Dead
• Call of Duty: World at War
• Mirror’s Edge
• Diablo III
• StarCraft II

Wii

• The Conduit

PS3

• a PS3
• LittleBigPlanet
• Infamous
• Velvet Assassin
• Killzone 2
• Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

05.10.08

Fortune Cookie

I went to Juarez today for mothers’ day, since some of my mum’s family lives there. It was pretty nice–I brought my laptop, Zen, and DS, and my aunt had DSL. On my way back, I wanted to eat something light, so I picked up some Chinese food. There was a small Chineese food place kinda hidden in a strip mall, so I figured I’d try there. Simply put, it was great. Since it’s run by actual, traditional Chinese people, the food was as authentic as it gets. It has that certain…. Not grease, but creamyness to it that lets you know it’s just right. I got take out, but the sit down looks good too so I think I’ll have to go back sometime. Regardless, I thought my fortune cookie was really good…

You create your own stage and your audience is waiting!

Sounds like EXRP’s reopening on the 6th is gunna be a success! Unless the audience is waiting and I screw up, then I become a public mockery. Hmm, could be one of those tricky Chinese double-meaning voodoo things, better watch out…

Anyway, nothing too much. A little coding here and there, but nothing major. There isn’t much left to do anyway, so I figure it won’t hurt to take my time. Either way, I don’t care if I’m finished or not–June 6th’s the date, regardless. I’ve gotten pretty much everything left planned out, so we should be good to go.

Cops

• Glock 18
• Cuffs
• Night stick

EMS

• First aid kit
• Morphine
• Shock paddles

Firemen

• Fire hose (or extinguisher? that may be a bit more realistic… none for the public)
• Fire axe (chops down doors, bashes opens cars)

Public stuff

• Flashlight
• Radio
• Metal detector (detect guns)
• Skillbook to kick down doors
• Skillbook for unarmed combat
• Food (melon, orange, banana)
• Drinks (soda, beer, milk)
• Cigars
• Chairs, beds, and sofas
• Paper (press e and a VGUI comes up to write stuff)
• Containers (put stuff in to carry lots of stuff at once, or bypass metal detectors)

A lot of things will be quite expensive (at least compared to the equivellant stuff before), so it’ll be more of a ‘delicacy’–like cigars. Consider them Cuban. Skillbooks’ll be quite interesting, too: read one (it’s a SENT), and you’ll get an SWEP to perform a special function for you. Maybe… I’m thinking it might just run off the unarmed SWEP. For example, read a skillbook on unarmed combat, and then you can use the unarmed SWEP that you spawn with normally to punch and kick. Then if you read a skillbook on kicking open doors, you can use the unarmed SWEP’s kicking functionality to kick open doors. It’ll be quite good, and add a lot of value to RPs. Also, I’ve decided to make your active, unholstered weapon drop when you die. Sure, it may allow minges to grab a hold of it, but I think the pro’s outweigh the con’s.

Not that much left to do, though! I’m really pumped about our reopening, as I’m sure you are too. Only 26 days, people! That may seem like a long ways away for you, but for me, it’s just barely enough time to get everything finished. School’s about come to an end, so I’m just a bit tired out from all that. Just relaxing, chilling, you know the drill. Even though there’s no stress on me, since school’s ending, we all act like there is. For some reason a couple of my teachers are still giving out homework, so I’m a bit screwed if I don’t do that. Who in their right of mind would give out homework now? We’re done. We’re all done, we wanna go home and stay there. Just stop with the homework and get to babysitting us, that’s all you can really do now.

04.13.08

Loverly Weekends

I was hoping to finish EXRP-Script this weekend, as I’m not really adding content but instead the ‘framework’ for companies and the buy menu–easy stuff–but I thought too soon. My dad’s hard drive went completely corrupt yesterday, so naturally I had to fix it. I really don’t know what happened; it just got stuck in a loop where Windows wants to “scan your drives for errors”. Safe mode didn’t work, trying to boot to a floppy and mount C didn’t work, trying to access the drive with Knoppix didn’t work–nothing worked. I had to resort to extreme measures and get a new hard drive. Great. Okay, so we have an XP disc somewhere and I used that, but it couldn’t recognize any of my dad’s hardware–not even the motherboard correctly. The idiots who created this preassembled abombination didn’t bother to give us a disc with the drivers. We tried multiple XP discs, some from other machines and some “updated” from the net–none worked. Looks like XP isn’t an option, so we’ll have to buy Vista. Great. Although I highly dispise Vista, it seemed to defuse this situation–albeit having to spend more money to get a new graphics card. It was just peachy with everything except the integrated graphics card, which was too damn old to even be on a Windows ME machine; so we bought a cheap 6200. (It’s PCI, we had no choice) After dicking around with the drivers for about an hour, I started mucking around with the BIOS, and that worked somehow. The mouse rapidly clicks for no reason at all sometimes, and his motherboard can only hold two drives. He had two before, so now we have to keep swapping them while he backs things up onto his new drive.

In other news, I started on the companies system for EXRP-Script and I finally finished the mail system. My mini RC helicopter finally arrived in the mail after DHL randomly shipped it to my post office and not me, and after my post office took another two days to deliver it while not letting me pick it up myself.

What a loverly weekend.

03.15.08

DR. STILES!!?!1

I’ve been making major headway on EXRP-Script. I’ve finished the phonebook and inbox sections. I’m just touching up the latter, however. I’ve also started on the classifieds, as those are pretty important to the gamemode. There’s some neat new loading screens on the roleplay menu, which is nice, since you don’t have to stare at a blank screen wondering where the hell all your mail is. Too bad the inbox doesn’t receive all the usermessage packets sometimes, causing the “loading” window to never close… Ah well, at least you can close it manually.

As you might already know, the limit for usermessages (raw packets from the server to the client) is 256 bytes. That’s about 254 characters that you can fit in one of these packets. However, I don’t want to limit peoples’ mail to only 254 characters–you won’t be able to fit anything in there! So I’ve had to break up the body into several ‘packets’, and send them all in different usermessages. (And hope the client gets them…) Robbis_1 from Facepunch helped me a lot with this (in fact, he made me a nifty little function to split things for me), so great kudos to him. I can also do this with the letters system (once I get around to making it–it’s easy though), so there won’t be a limit as to how long a letter can be–except how much you can type in the chat or console. The latter is infinite as far as I know, however.

More tweaks to make things look nicer, function more optimally, etc… I don’t want to get your hopes up, but I *think* late spring break will be do-able. Just remember not to take too seriously to my estimations, you remember what happened last time. However, if I’m as pumped as I was yesterday and today, I’ll be able to do it. The problem is getting me pumped; I tend to have ‘coding streaks’, which are periods of time that range from a couple of days to a week or two, in which I don’t want to do anything but code. I’m currently in one of those now, but I don’t know how long it’ll last–so I’d best finish all I can within this time.

A week or two ago, Roggy sent me his SWEPs. Since I suck at figuring out the correct accuracy, recoil, damage, etc… for weapons (I’d probably make all the weapons feel exactly the same–and overpowered), I asked Roggy if he could configure them for me. Of course, he did. Yay for Roggy! I’ve been playing around with them a lot, and they look and feel a lot like CoD4 weapons. I don’t know what Roggy did, but he managed to stumble upon a glitch that changes the FoV on the weapon models, which makes them look more like CoD4 weapons for some reason. The ironsights help a lot, too. So anyway, thanks Roggy! I’m sorry I forgot to mention this before, but I was completely out of it the last couple weeks. I’m very happy with them, and I know everyone else will be, too. Realistic, yet not overpowering; perfect.

As for my personal life, as if anyone cares, I didn’t get too much done today. My grandma is still ‘recovering’ from the move, as her house still has a lot of boxes lying around, her TV’s not set up properly, random hanging of pictures to be done, etc… It’s coming together nicely, though. So today we went there, me bringing my laptop in hopes of catching some coding and/or playing Ashen Empires, but of course, we (I say ‘we’ loosely) randomly returned the DSL modem without telling anyone. (I say ‘anyone’ loosely as well.) [On a slightly related note, I oughtta' make an SVN for myself so I can code away from my desktop.] I was forced to watch the Disney channel in Spanish, listen to SSBB music on my Zen, and play all the DS games I had on my flash cart. The latter two weren’t so bad, of course. I didn’t notice how many good DS games there were out there–Phoenix Wright, Trauma Center, Advance Wars, Star Fox… I can’t believe how I had missed all these before. They’re possibly some of the best games for the DS, although I hate randomly hearing “DR. STILES!!?!1″ being blasted out of my DS speakers. I swear they’ll break someday if not just because of that.

Anyway, that’s pretty much it. Not too much sleep this weekend (so far), but hopefully I’m still pumped tomorrow–and of course the week after that. Really, it seems as if I have more will to code if I’m tired. Weird. Since I’ve pretty much already figured out how to finish everything off in EXRP-Script, I’m starting to think about my other projects some more. The game about Excel, Khan, and The Agency, mainly. Tony and I have some really good ideas up our sleeves for that game–story-wise, of course. I can hardly wait to play it myself.

(WARNING: punctuation cluster ahead) Time to test my theory on “not sleeping giving me more will-power to code”–hopefully it doesn’t work; ‘night.

02.29.08

Birthday

So it’s my birthday today. I keep on forgetting.  I got a really early night last night, mainly because I was sick, but I’m still sick today anyway. I have some kind of stomach flu. Yesterday it was vomiting and some sharper pains around my tum tum, but today it’s mostly just gurgling inside my tum tum and a headache. Maybe a fever too, I’m not sure. Yesterday I was at 101. Meh.

Anyway, I got a Creative Zen, a couple LEGO sets, and some chocolates. I’m happy–that more than makes up for the tum tum stuffs. Yes, I like saying tum tum. I was going to go to dinner with my parents, but I don’t know if I can. My tum tum still isn’t feeling too well. (Okay, I’ll stop.) We’ll have to see for later.

I’m 4 today, so, thanks to everyone who said “happy birthday” to me today! Tony, especially. You know why. ;p

Lets hope I get better soon so I can continue coding. I’m back in the zone.

02.21.08

Slow Progress

I’d hate to say it, but I’m not progressing as fast as I was before with EXRP-Script. It’s one of those, “It’s a work in progress. How’s progress? Not working” type things. I’ve been really tired this week, probably from all those late nights helping my Grandma move, and I’ve just been vegging all week, really. I can’t find it in me to do anything that requires any effort, and if I do work on the script, it’s just a line or two and then I get tired and bored. I’ll be taking a relatively early night tonight since I’m going to a friend’s birthday party tomorrow at Bob O’s. It’s a neat little Playdium/arcade type place that has laser tag, go karts, batting cages, pizza, and a lot of arcade games. We’re all FPS players so we’re gunna play laser tag quite tactically–though I don’t think it’ll stop the little annoying kids from jabbing their gun directly into your sensors. I really hate that, and then you can’t push them away or anything ’cause they’ll go cry and you’ll get in trouble. Not that I have any first-hand experience with that, or anything.

For the script, I still want to have a February 29th launch. The problem, like I outlined above, is that it isn’t finished yet, and won’t be for the 29th. Right now I have little placeholder labels saying “coming soon…” everywhere I have something that I haven’t finished yet. Assuming it still isn’t done for the 29th and I can’t be arsed to push the date back even more, that’s how some things might be. I’ll be sure to finish the main stuff if that’s the case, though. Let me know what you think, though. Would you rather have a 100% complete gamemode in a couple weeks, or 3/4ths of a gamemode on the 29th? Let me know what you think in a comment or something.

Also, I finally got Audiosurf. So far, I’d say it’s a pretty good game. The download is pretty fast. I’ll post a makeshift-ish review tomorrow once I’ve played it and it’s finished downloading–though not necessarily in that order. I can’t wait for my Zen, at least, assuming I’m getting one for my birthday. I hope I do. It’s an MP3/MP4 player like an iPod, except not crappy beyond all belief. I don’t really have too much time (or energy) to give you all the details, but lets just say it’s better for the inner pirate in you. It can play DivX and XviD, which I like. It also has no DRM or anything, which is a real big bonus. Anyway, I’ve got nothing else. I’ll leave you to play with this image my dad sent me.