Dawn of the Geeks

Great Books Games

Great Books Games aims to develop gaming franchises centered about rich stories contained in the Great Books. Dante’s Inferno, with it’s descent through nine levels of Hell and ever-more-sinster demons leading to a three-headed Satan, is the obvious place to start.

The first ten Great Books Games will be: Dante’s Inferno, The Iliad, The Odyssey, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, The Red Badge of Courage (Civil War), Moby Dick, Treasure Island, Bible Stories, The Aeneid

Generally speaking, this isn’t a bad idea. Some people just aren’t ideas people. They’re programmers. I’m not an artist so it’s rare that I create graphics for the web-site. And if I do, I keep it simple or modify existing art. The Icarus Independent logo’s background is actually a picture I took in Colorado. It’s a good idea to look to books for game ideas if you’re not able to come up with original ideas on your own. You just have to be careful that you pick a story that you can actually make interactive. If you turn the Tortoise and the Hare into an interactive game, it kind of loses its meaning if the Hare can win. But if the Tortoise always wins, then it’s a pretty sucky game. This is why it’s a fable and not a game.

The problem right off the bat is that their Dante’s Inferno game is a shooter. Inferno is actually an observation of hell with religious and philosophical contexts. The main character in the book isn’t there to interact with hell. He’s there to see what it’s like. Once you start shooting up the place (for pete’s sake, they’re already dead and where exactly do you think your sending them?) it’s no longer Inferno. It’s a crummy Doom clone. At least in Doom the creators had the sense to take the demons out of hell so that by killing them, you send them back to hell. Maybe GGB will pretend you can vaporize demons entirely out of existence. The BFG can only destroy the body, finally a game with a gun that can destroy the soul more completely than hell.

Generally speaking, it’s better to turn non-interactive mediums only into other non-interactive mediums. Books to movies. Movies to books. Books to songs. Etc. But taking a song and turning it into a game or a movie into a game or a book into a game, is most likely going to fail. Turning real life sports or real life games into computer games is logical and is a huge business. It’s a very rare movie turned into a game that doesn’t suck. It’s even rarer that a game turned into a movie doesn’t suck.

Books have a much better chance of being movies and vica-versa because it’s still non-interactive and you’re only limited by time. You don’t have to add something that wasn’t intended to be there; interaction.

Games to movies have a low chance of success because you’re taking away what made the game fun; interaction.

The main idea of The Most Rediculous Game Ever, is to create a product that a beginner programmer could put together in about a year. By beginner, I don’t mean one who has never programmed before. I mean someone who’s done some programming and is ready to start putting various complex concepts into one product. You have to learn how to program one concept at a time just like you have to learn anything one concept at a time.

I think that’s a key reason newbies run into trouble right away. They havn’t yet learned how to break problems down properly and so they think they can make a Quake 3 clone in a day. After all, you just slap some libraries together and voila! They don’t realize what it actually takes to program. Wolf5k is a relatively simple program. So what I’m doing is taking a “simple” program and building the level of complexity.

If you want to learn how to program I suggest taking an existing simple program and then breaking it apart and expanding on it. If you think Wolf5K is too advanced, there are simpler games out there.

My first big game was called “Cradle Quest.” It actually started as the “Big” program. I found this simple bit of code in a book. All it did was print text on the screen and then read it one pixel at a time and print it out scaled to be larger based on the value you enter. I took that and then expanded it so it could read only a section of the screen at a time. Then I added smooth scrolling. Eventually from that simple program I had a full top down 4 directional scrolling maze game written in QuickBASIC complete with animated sprites, cut scenes and an animated ending.

My first real experience coding was entering code from 3-2-1 Contact magazine and then modifying it. I also learned alot about how the code worked just by fixing typos. Which also taught me how to debug programs.

If you rush into complex projects you’re going to get overwhelmed. Start simple and then build in complexity.

movie review by Jeffrey Westhoff, Northwest Herald (Crystal Lake, IL)

The most shocking thing about “Land of the Dead” is not the vivid dismemberments but how boldly Romero holds a macabre mirror up to post-9/11 America. In several senses of the word, this is one gutsy film.

A decade or so after the zombie invasion begun in Romero’s 1968 “Night of the Living Dead,” the surviving humans have barricaded themselves in the inner cities. In Pittsburgh, where the film is set, the rich have sealed themselves inside a glass skyscraper called Fiddler’s Green.

Led by the unscrupulous Kaufman (Dennis Hopper), the tenants of Fiddler’s Green have manipulated the middle class and the poor into distrusting each other. The plutocrats guarantee no one questions their life of luxury by keeping the peasants focused on the zombie threat, even though the wandering undead haven’t come near a city in years.

The only people who encounter the zombies anymore are paramilitary raiders who supply the cities by riding into outlying towns to scrounge for food, medicine and other essentials. The leaders of Pittsburgh’s team are Riley (Simon Baker) and Cholo (John Leguizamo). Riley and Cholo can’t stand each other, but they are both a day away from retirement.

Interesting. If we want to pretend this movie is about post 9-11 America then let’s consider the principle characters. We have the rich liberals tucked away in their urban glass castles with constant messages that everything is great. A leader (Kaufman) who is behind this deception. The only people in post 9/11 America telling people that terrorists aren’t a problem are the far left liberal leaders and movie makers like Michael Moore who call terrorists “minute men” and actually admire them.

The movie review is also wrong, the outsiders use the zombies as photo-ops and have them cage fight for bets. Those who live with the zombies have learned to use them for monetary gain. Amnesty Internation recently pulled a publicity stunt refering to Guantanimo Bay as a Gulag. They even later admitted it was just to get attention. Using terrorists for monetary gain by pretending that those who defend us are the real bad guys. Or as Senator Durbin called them “Nazis.”

Then we have the middle class people that the upper class people shun. When a hooker gets on the wrong side of Kaufman, he has her thrown in a cage to be eaten by zombies. Sounds familiar. When people speak against the far left they’re compared to Nazis and shunned. The far left has no problem with those who fight the terrorists being killed by terrorists. After all, the terrorists aren’t terrorists at all, they’re just “minute men.” Revolutionaries.

Those in the glass tower have no respect for those outside the tower. Like the liberals in post 9/11 America. They feel that anybody who isn’t a liberal is stupid. We live in the real world, they live in a glass tower. This is why Senator Durbin was shocked, shocked I say, to find that only 20% of Americans think he’s right in his view of Guantanimo. While tucked away in his glass tower, all he saw was people who saw things his way. He assumed his opinion was the popular opinion. Not only is it’s the far far minority opinion, but it’s wrong. It’s based on zero facts. And us “stupid red state” citizens know this.

Then we have the people actually fighting the zombies. They know they’re a threat. The “stupid and worthless” people outside the tower know this. The only people who don’t know this are the mindless liberals in the glass tower who eat up their leaders’ propoganda that everything is fine. I think you can guess who ends up dead at the end. Those who are willfully oblivious to the evil in their world, or those who recognize and meet it head on?

Someone once said, during the Civil War the North saved the South. Now, we’re returning the favor.

If Ramero really was trying to make some political statement with this movie it in no way supports the liberal viewpoint. If he was and it was intended to show how the Right is manipulating the people then he did an excellent job showing how in attempting to assassinate the leader (there are many exibits and images depicting the assassination of Bush) they are really killing themselves.

The ending also demonstrats a liberal spin. After an hour and a half (not including the prior 3 movies) of the zombies going through and killing people, they decide to let them alone since they’re “just looking for somewhere to stay. ”

As Karl Rove said

“Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.”

But this is all pointless. Land of the Dead is a great movie. There’s no reason to drag politics into it. If Romero was looking to present the Liberal world view of post 9/11, he did an excellent job of showing what an upside down view they have. I’d rather just enjoy the movie for the horror movie it is.

stress.embeddedplus.com

This is the public mail server for the company I work for. Feel free to sign up for accounts and abuse them. The goal is to see how much abuse this mail server can take. Accounts are subject to deletion.

No personal information is required to sign up for an account. Just enter the username and password and click on “Create Account.” That’s all there is to it.

It seems as though Tomcat 4.1’s session handling is broken when it comes to proxies. I have an Apache 2.0.54 proxy set up on server A pointing to server B. Server B is running Apache 2.0.54 and Apache Tomcat. Apache 2 on port 80 is running a PHP script that does a simple session. When A points to Server B port 80 the session works fine. Tomcat is running on port 8080 and also is using sessions. When A point to B on port 8080, sessions don’t work. When I do a localhost:8080 on B, the sessions work like they’re supposed to.

If it’s a proxy configuration problem then that’s pretty silly. It shouldn’t take special configuration to use Java and Tomcat behind a proxy vs Apache 2.x and PHP.

The solution is to give the Tomcat server it’s own IP address. It simply doesn’t work behind a proxy. My plan then is to run Apache 2.x and Tomcat on the same server and see if sessions work. If that’s the case, then it’s acceptible. I just don’t want a Java only server. I want it to be versitile. The plan is to have a web-based email administration page like Indie-Mail. I could do it in Java, but Java is not the ideal solution. And I shouldn’t have to create crutches for something that shouldn’t be a problem in the first place.

Maybe Tomcat 5.x has fixed the problem but it shouldn’t have made it to 4.x with the problem in the first place.

From Gamedev.Net

In order to make it as easy as possible to install Panda3D, the Panda3D engine team is happy to announce that we are now distributing precompiled packages for several operating systems: Mandrake 10 RPM, Debian Sarge DEB, Ubuntu DEB, Redhat 9 RPM, Fedora Core 2 RPM, Fedora Core 3 RPM, and Microsoft Windows Installer EXE. The installers also supply the Panda3D sample programs, which are in /usr/share/panda3d under Linux or the start menu under Windows. Panda3D is a free 3D engine designed to reduce the time and cost of game development.

I remember back when Klik ‘N Play came out. It’s a software package that allowed you to drag and drop a game together. Little to no programming required. It was/is a joke amongst programmers. But now Klik ‘N Play type libraries (like Panda 3D) are becomming standard. Even required for beginners to have a chance at making something that looks modern. Even professional game makers are using pre-existing game engines to make new games. There’s a huge moding community that puts out their own games simply by editing existing games like DooM 3 and Quake 3 and Counterstrike. DirectX and OpenGL are also high level libraries that take most of the math out of making 3D games.

Back in the day one had to know assembly to make games. The hardware just wasn’t fast enough. The original Wolfenstein 3D was written in assembly. “The Most Rediculous Game Ever” is modernized clone written in C++. No assembly required since modern hardware is fast enough. One texture in TMRGE can take up more memory than all the sprites in Wolf3D combined.

I’m not saying kids need to step back and start at a lower level. I’ve used DirectX and OpenGL. I modded Wolf3D back in the day. But, what is unfortunate is that kids think they need to make a Quake 3 clone right away. They’re not satistfied starting with the basics and making simple, ugly games. There are essentially two ways of learning to program. Starting at the bottom and working up or starting at the top and working down. There’s nothing wrong with starting out programming by modding Quake 3 and then digging deeper and writing your own engine in OpenGL or DirectX and then going to software rendering etc and so on. You can also do the exact opposite and start with software rendering, then go to OpenGL or DirectX and then go to modding existing engines. John Carmack’s education is found in his games. He started with side scrollers (Commander Keen), then went to ray casting (Wolf 3D), then advanced ray casting (Doom) and then raster graphics (Quake) and now works with OpenGL and DirectX for his modern games. Or you can even bounce around.

How much you know determines your value. That’s the only thing you need to consider when deciding what to learn. If you don’t want to learn assembly you don’t have to. If you don’t want to learn all the math that makes 3D graphics work, you don’t have to. But you have to remember that if you don’t know how to make the tools, you’re only as good as the tools made by others. If you don’t know how to chart uncharted waters in modern graphics then you’re limited to the engines that those who can put out. A company then has to consider when looking at your resume if they want someone who can use tools or someone who can write them. And someone who can write them is far more valuable.

DoubleClick Warns Against Ad-Blocking Browsers

The basic premis of the article is that if ad-blocking becomes standard then ad revenue will disappear and so will free web-sites. Of couse many of the slashdrones disagree with this obviously true statement. They harken back to the days of the ad free internet. This internet never actually existed. The only thing that has changed is how the ads are displayed. But there have always been ads on sites that provided free services. According to ads on the Internet advertising on-line started on October 27th, 1994. 1994 happens to also be about the year that the net was going mainstream. That site links to another page with more information but isn’t available any longer.

Repeat after me: There is no such thing as the bandwidth fairy. It costs money to run a web-site. The more people that view a web-site the more that it costs to run. IcarusIndie.com needs to make $0.92 a day to cover costs. $2.24 a day if I were to include the home server which is leaching off a connection paid for by my family. Neither of those numbers cover paying for my time spent working on the site. The question is not “does it cost money to run this site” it’s “how do I cover costs?”

The history of ads for this site begins with no ads with everything paid for out of pocket. Living at home without a car payment made that easy. Then I went to Commission Junction (ads) which sucks beyond all human comprehension. Tens of thousands of ad impressions and never made a dime. Then I introduced subscription based access which never covered costs but did pull in some money. And now I use Google AdSense which does cover costs. I also sell content CDs (mainly for the drivers section). Although that’s generally more of a hassle than it’s worth and so I don’t push them. I’d rather people just download the content.

The fact is, the cost of running a web-site has to come from somewhere. What slashcommies assume is that if a site that uses ads or subscriptions goes under, someone somewhere will put up a reasonable alternative and happily pay for it out of pocket and not subject them to ads or subscriptions or whine for donations. Good luck with that.

I can pay for IcarusIndie.com out of pocket, the visitors can pay for it out of pocket (subscriptions, donations, services, whatever) or the advertisers can pay for it. I happen to think that letting the advertisers pay for it is a marverlous idea. And if anyone thinks I owe them an ad free, entirely free web-site, they can go suck an egg. There is no bandwidth fairy. The money has to come from somewhere.

Wiki entry which will be updated as I dig more into this story.

Bill HJ109-24

Republicans Are Trying To Repeal the 22nd Amendment says The People’s Voice.

But lets look at the bill itself.

Introduced: Feb 17, 2005
Sponsor: Rep. Steny Hoyer [D-MD] Status: Introduced (By Rep. Steny Hoyer [D-MD])
Last Action: Feb 18, 2005: Introductory remarks on measure. (CR E302-303)

Looks like the sponser is a Democrat from Maryland.

IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES

FEBRUARY 17, 2005

Mr. HOYER (for himself, Mr. BERMAN, Mr. SENSENBRENNER, Mr. SABO, and Mr. PALLONE) introduced the following joint resolution; which was referred to the Committee on the Judiciary

Howard Berman is a Democrat from California
F.James Sensenbrenner, Jr. Republican from Wisconsin
Martin Olav Sabo Democrat from Minnesota
Frank Pallone, Jr. Democrat from New Jersey

So lets see. 3 out of 4 are Democrats but it’s the Republicans that are at it again.

I would mark this as politics and keep it off the front page, but this is a pretty big story. If you look up the bill number all you see if whining about what the Republicans are doing. I think it’s important that someone point out who’s really behind this.

Update: My friend thinks that the motivation for the Democrats is to get Bill Clinton back in office. It’s also important to realize that the term limit came into effect in 1947.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/amendment22/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-second_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton has recently voiced his opinion in favor of modifications to the 22nd Amendment. According to Mr. Clinton, former presidents who have already served two terms should be allowed to run for the office again, after some interim period has passed. He reasoned the country may wish to trust leadership onto an already tried and proven candidate in times of great need. Sherman Adams quotes Dwight Eisenhower expressing in a press conference his strong opposition to term limits: “The United States ought to be able to choose for its President anybody it wants, regardless of the number of terms he has served” (”First Hand Report”, 1961, p. 296). Both Clinton and Eisenhower were affected by the 22nd Amendment, as they each served two terms.

High Tension

Roeper said it was good but too clever (whatever that means). Ebert called it “nasty, brutish and short.” I decided that I should use a couple of my free passes to go see it since I’d seen previews and I was expecting a standard cheesy horror movie (is there any other kind? apparently). Turns out the dubbing was horrible. It’s actually a French film and they speak both english and french. I can’t really complain too much about that though as most english speaking Asian films like Kung Fu Hustle (fantastic movie) have the same audio issues. But what finally got us to leave the theater was the violence and distinct lack of plot. It opens with some guy getting head in a truck. Turns out it’s a decapitated head and when he’s done he drops in on the ground for us to see. This would be our killer. It just gets more gruesome so we left and saw another movie. I’ve never actually walked out of a movie before. It’s not scary. It’s just disgusting.

We caught the end of Batman Begins. Judging from the last 30 minutes of the film it was excellent. We’ll definitly be seeing that one. On Friday we’ll be seeing “Land of the Dead” which will hopefully be a more enjoyable horror movie. Dawn of the Dead (both versions) are excellent examples of what a horror film should be.

I’m pretty sure that spyware/adware authors are sheep humping brainless scum. By mistake my girlfriend clicked “yes” when she should have clicked “go to hell.” The result was a barage of popups on my computer that wouldn’t go away. After a few ineffectual scrubbings with AdAware I finally updated and ran McAfee on it. That solved the problem pretty quick. It also took me awhile to remember to check my registry settings to see what’s being run at start up. Once I deleted those key, McAfee did the rest. It had some trouble otherwise deleteing files that were in use by the adware.

I have to wonder what poses people to write this junk. My assumption would be that they’re talentless rejects who wouldn’t qualify for a job at McDonald’s.

Whatever she clicked on also installed some piece of junk software that whined when I uninstalled it. “Why are you uninstalling this?” is literally asks. Gee, that’s a mystery. You write software that nobody wants, that not even it’s mother could love and you wonder why I’m uninstalling it.

I’m uninstalling it for the same reason that I uninstall Linux. It takes over my system and serves no useful purpose…BURN!