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05/27/05
The game Descent to the Underworld has gotten some front-page attention today. The articles I’ve seen all focus on the way it was developed: 6 universities all across the world, all connected via super-high bandwidth. The articles make it seem like the game is some AAA retail title. But in fact it is a Web-based Flash game. But no mention of the fact that it is “Web-based” or “Flash” appears. I’m not sure if that is a positive sign or a negative one.
The game seems good, but I’m having trouble playing it on my PowerBook. I think it is a typical case of Flash slowness. They’ve got a pretty large movie size (800×600) which is probably causing the trouble. It would mean that Flash is rendering the screens as 3200×2400 and shinking them to get anti-aliasing. So I might have to play it in “Low” quality mode to avoid the issue.
The game is a point-and-click adventure game with a lot of animation and some real video. I think point-and-click is a great genre for aspiring game designers to tackle use to learn their skills.
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05/22/05
Not exactly a “developer” topic, I know. But I doubt you’ll find a Director, Flash or Web develop who hasn’t been talking about Sith this week.
I saw it on Friday afternoon, adding myself to the loss of productivity that the nation suffered on Thursday and Friday.
Sith wasn’t bad. But it definitely fits into the prequel series in terms of quality, not the original series. I’m one of those people who considers Episode IV to be the best movie ever made. It has nothing to do with special effects and everything to do with story, characters, drama, and so on. It might also have a little to do with teh fact that I was at the perfect age and place when it came out. A 7-year-old boy growing up between the city and the suburbs. Star Wars dominated my imagination for the rest of my childhood, and continues to be a major influence.
I don’t know. The prequels just didn’t grab my attention like the original movies. We went home and watched Episode IV that night. There is definitely somehting about how the characters took screen presence in that movie that isn’t there in the new ones.
Or maybe it was the fact that in the original movies, the characters of Luke and Han were unimportant until the story began. A farm boy and a smuggler. Then they got involved in things and made a difference. As a boy, I liked that. But in the prequels, it is all about “chosen ones”, Jedi masters, elected officials and grand conspiracies.
Oh well. The prequels are fun, but that’s about it. While Star Wars is my favorite movie of all time, and Empire ranks in the top 10, none of the prequels will be my favorite movie of the year, or even get close to Return of the Jedi for that matter.
Now that Sith is over with, I can look foward to Serenity.
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05/20/05
So a new bill about to be approved in Illinois (AP article) will outlaw video games that are violent or sexually explicit. It is up to store owners to determine which games are or aren’t. Then they have to make sure they don’t sell them to minors. I’d imagine that doing so will be such a huge legal liability for the store owners that they will have to close shop. I know I would.
The most disturbing thing was what Sen. Deanna Demuzio said: “Video games are not art or media. They are simulations, not all that different from the simulations used by the U.S. military in preparation for war.”
Video games are not art or media?! I’m sickened.
Why don’t they ban games like “tag” or “hide and go seek?” They seem to me to be not all that different from military training.
Seems to me that Illinois has determined that parents are no longer able to raise children and are starting to take away some of their responsibilites.
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So I signed up for a GoDaddy virtual dedicated server this week. I’ve already got a real dedicated server at ev1servers.net plus my main domains hosted at a managed server. But I have one site that has a ton of traffic and it was weighing down my other sites. So I thought I’d offload it onto a GoDaddy server that boasts a 500GB/month transfer rate for only about $30 a month.
All is well now, but I had a ton of trouble getting it to work. I’m pretty good at configuring and securing Linux servers. You have to be. It is almost like a survival technique for someone like me.
But a few weird differences at GoDaddy’s service threw me for a loop. The first was DNS. Instead of having a GoDaddy DNS server that I should point the domain to, they expected me to set up my own DNS at my virtual dedicated server. Very different than how I thought it should be, and it wasn’t obvious from their online docs. I actually decided to pay for a dynamic DNS elsewhere for $10/month instead.
But even with that figured out, I couldn’t get the server to work. It seems like the DNS wasn’t resolving, but in fact nslookup and dig showed that is was. I eventually determined that the server was overloaded. But it shouldn’t have been. The sites gets a lot fo traffic, but not that much.
Finally, I got some advice from a friend (Steve Loyola at Best Web Buys) about tweaking the MaxClients setting in the httpd config. Sure enough, GoDaddy’s default is set insanely low (like, 5). 150 is a better number. Sure enough, that did the trick.
It just goes to show that no matter how much you know, there is more to learn. Especially when it comes to servers.
I’m surprised that no one has come up with a hosting service that takes care of all of this. I thought maybe GoDaddy was trying to do that. If someone created something like Ensim, cPanel/ or Plesk, but was easier to use, it would really be worth something.
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05/17/05
I have to say I disappointed in Tiger (Mac OS 10.4). This makes two in a row, as I was disappointed in Panther as well.
It is not that either OS has problems. On the contrary, they are pretty much problem-free. That’s their best feature: they work well. I like that they don’t get in the way of my work, but at the same time offer huge depth. I love that I’ve got Linux and Apache running in there and can do Web work locally.
What I don’t like are the “features” that Apple pushes as the main reason to spend the bucks. Panther had Expose. That was the thing where you could hit a key and all your windows would rearrange themselves so you could find a window faster. It was supposed to change how I work. It didn’t. I think I used it once.
Now, Tiger has things like Spotlight and Dashboard. Spotlight so far has made it harder for me to work. It used to be that I could press Command+F, type a part of a file name, and then fine the file. Now, I type that file name, I get teased for a second with a glimpse of the very file I was looking for, and then 100+ entries fill the window, 99 of them not what I wanted. The file I want is now burried under a collapsed list or some such. I know you can tweak Spotlight to work like you want, but I shouldn’t need to do that just to get back to what Panther did.
As for Dashboard. I love it. I loved it even better when it was called “Desktop Accessories” back in Mac OS 6.
Don’t get me wrong, I love OS X. It’s the price that I have a problem with. Since I have a laptop, a work machine, my wife’s laptop and her work machine, it means that it costs 4x$130 to upgrade. Don’t even mention the “Family Pack” that the license is strictly for “non-commercial” use which rules me out. So paying $500+ to upgrade to Panther and then another $500+ to upgrade to Tiger really bothers me when all I’m getting is more speed and stability. At half the price I’d be much happier.
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