robots love bacon bits

You can probably play RA3 on the show floor anyway.

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 14:49:20 -0600

Packing up for PAX today. I also did my first shoutcast for RA3; I was always thinking about doing so for Company of Heroes, but setting up all the software and hardware to get it right seemed like such a hassle, so I kept putting it off. Despite some odd initial issues, the WeGame client is surprisingly good; easy to use, unobtrusive and free. Not as flexible as the FRAPS and Audacity method, but far more convenient.

It’s a shame that now that I’ve just started to do some shoutcasting, I have to take off for at least a week and a half. Then again, is heading to PAX really a /bad/ thing?

Almost better than Quicksilver.

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:12:50 -0600

Had Gnome Do bork on me today. I couldn’t figure out what exactly was wrong (even did a re-install from Synaptic). But it seems a purge of all my old settings and plug-ins seemed to fix it.

$ killall gnome-do
$ rm -rf ~/.local/share/gnome-do ~/.config/gnome-do
$ gnome-do

https://answers.launchpad.net/do/+question/37248

Rock, paper and hydralisk

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 20:04:36 -0600

The EndWar beta is over (and has been for a couple weeks now). My RTS odyssey has continued nonetheless. I’ve been faithfully watching a lot of professional Starcraft; my weekly GOMTV sessions augmented by some great YouTube-hosted english commentated pro matches. The highlight of which has definitely been the OSL final with one of my favorite players taking the championship, JulyZerg. In addition, the CoH gamereplays.org section is starting to reach critical mass in their videocasting, with some significant numbers of new and recent matches getting the videocast treatment.

The more matches I watch, Starcraft or Company of Heroes, the more I think I’m starting to understand how to play RTS’s in general. Which is why i’m a bit confused by how EndWar works. Since the beta’s over and since I’m not revealing unit specifics or anything, I think this is not NDA-breaking to talk about. But EndWar’s unit balance revolves around what is basically a Rock-Paper-Scissors system, with tanks, light vehicles and gunships/helicopters taking the roles respectively. I think this is a mixed blessing.

First of all, Rock-Paper-Scissors, or RPS, is a well-understood system. This confers a bit of an advantage as a game designer, as it simplifies the learning process on behalf of the player. Once you establish which units generally inhabit which role, you have to do very little to teach most players which unit to use at which point in time. It’s also a bit of a crutch. I don’t mean to belittle EndWar, since there is some genuinely innovative stuff in the game. But it seems somewhat, for lack of a better word, non-mindblowing, for a game which seems so intriguing to rest atop such a familiar foundation. To be fair to EndWar again, this may be somewhat related to one of the above mentioned innovations: This is a console RTS. Simplicity and ease of use have to be one of your core goals if you plan on assaulting the seemingly impossible goal of marrying “console” and “RTS”. But does that necessarily mean simplicity in game design? The problems with console RTS, in my opinion, revolve around control scheme and precision of control, neither of which are particularly related to game balance per se.

A game like Starcraft, or even Company of Heroes now in its newly well-balanced form, don’t use this approach. This may take a bit of explaining. Imagine you’re playing EndWar. What would your ideal army be? Assuming you don’t know what your opponent is fielding (if you do, it’s a simple case of building massive numbers of the appropriate counter unit as per the RPS system), you have 2 choices:

Create a balanced army of nearly equal numbers of all three roles
Play the odds and build an army of mostly one role (ie. a heavy tank army)

Assuming both you and your opponent choose option 1, the game will be decided by your individual skill and finesse in handling the units in tactical battle: In other words, your micro. The problem is that if you keep army cohesion (which you should at the risk of being out-flanked and having one third of your army decimated), this micro will consist of units not trying to shoot each other, but the group they’re specifically weak against. It would be like a three-way gunfight where none of the fighters are shooting back at the person who’s shooting at them. It feels strange. I’m not disputing that you can’t build a game around it, but it feels less like a tactical war game in my opinion. And my analogy degrades somewhat since EndWar includes infantry units, which don’t really fall into any of the three roles. But games like Starcraft and Company of Heroes involve terrain, environment and formations more in the determination of who wins individual battles. Whereas a game like EndWar would find terrain/formations to be important only in battles between like-groups (tanks versus tanks according to the RPS model), a game like Starcraft would have formation and terrain be important factors in all match-ups, even such that it would swing victory in the favor of those who would normally lose, if all things equal. A medic/marine ball in Starcraft, normally decimated by lurkers, can suddenly and swiftly turn the tide with a well-placed comsat scan. And the Zerg player in turn can counter by a swift retreat and by fortifying another position outside of comsat range. A well-rounded Terran force of siege tanks and vultures is on equal if not superior footing with masses of dragoons, but flanking or the addition of a small number of game-turning units (dark templar, reavers, arbiters) turns the tables back. In all of these cases, it is not the presence of a counter unit to a specific role within the routed army that causes defeat, but rather knowledge of the map or the addition of small numbers of “enabling” units, that somehow augment the fighting capabilities of the large majority.

I’m generalizing a lot here, since Starcraft and CoH aren’t quite so easily summarized. Plus, I’m sure I’ve overlooked something. There’s also still the fact that hydralisk spam is so much fun when I’m playing Zerg. That’s gotta count for something.

Dude Huge is displeased.

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 23:03:10 -0600

And Gears of War 2.

Clearly the TV jingle didn't stick...

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 22:24:59 -0600

Oh yea, forgot to add Ghostbusters to that list. So awesome…

Most anticipated from E3 coverage...

Fri, 18 Jul 2008 17:53:00 -0600

In order of most anticipated:

Dawn of War 2
Mega Man 9
Prince of Persia
Pixeljunk Eden
Resistance 2
Rock Band 2
Tales of Vesperia
Dragon Age: Origins
Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia
Resident Evil 5

Oh man, that list turned out longer than I had thought.

Estrogen and TF2 make for a powerful combination.

Wed, 09 Jul 2008 00:45:54 -0600

I had lunch with a couple of old high school friends today, and it came up in conversation that one is recently engaged. After thinking about this later, I realised that this was now no longer an uncommon event among my friends; sort of.

A large number of my female friends are now engaged or even married. And those that aren’t are in what I would imagine are serious long-term relationships (say, over a year).

I have far more male friends than female ones. And only two of them have girlfriends. The rest of us poor shmucks are blissfully single. Also of note is that all of the friends in question are geeks to various degrees.

My only conclusion therefore is that it is far far better for your social life to be a geek chick than to be a nerd guy.

Some noob is botting at iTunes

Tue, 08 Jul 2008 09:25:44 -0600

There are a lot of differences in the philosophy of software engineering when it comes to games versus pretty much anything that’s not a game with the exception of DRM. A game, while designed to be fun and (hopefully) easy to use, likely has limits on its usability.

Whereas the ideal, for example, web browser is designed to be as usable to as many people as possible, a game is not. Sort of. Most RTS’s are illustrations of this problem. In Starcraft, many pros would consider the addition of multiple building selection and/or automated mining to be a detriment to the game. The skill required to micromanage multiple buildings individually and manage your economy (the “micro” and “macro” of the game respectively) is a huge part of what separates a pro gamer from an amateur.

I think however, that there are some games that try to buck this trend by trying to make the game as usable as reasonable. Sins of a Solar Empire and Company of Heroes both allow the player to manage multiple buildings and automate resource gathering respectively. But both fall short of allowing for full automation of the game by the player (for obvious reasons). If a non-gaming app was fit for automation, most people would consider such a feature to be a boon; Applescript support for iTunes, TextMate and other apps is usually a good thing. But botting is universally regarded as cheating in games.

Testing Tumblr with Ping.fm

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:06:02 -0600

Let’s hope it works?

Two RTS's, one iCCup?

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:14:08 -0600

I’ve been going on a bit of an Strategy/RTS binge lately. Although I’ve done a lot of TF2 and am thinking of joining/creating a TF2 casual league with my friends, a lot of my mindshare has been taken up by thinking and planning RTS strategies in a variety of games. My DS time has been completely occupied by Advance Wars: DoR (although I am more than mildly excited by the previews of Castlevania: OoE). I’ve gone and special ordered Homeworld and Homeworld 2, although I much prefer Homeworld 2 since Wikipedia has spoiled the plot of Homeworld and there isn’t much that the original has over the sequel if the plot is no longer a surprise.

Tuning into live Korean Starcraft every week has convinced me that foreign (ie. non-Korean) matches might be worth watching. So I caught the TSL Finals live yesterday. Oh man, it was actually extremely entertaining. While some of the excitement was gone knowing that it wasn’t technically live (the stream was of commentators viewing a previously recorded match whose results were kept secret until broadcast time), the fidelity and the attention to detail for the statistics was somewhat worth the trade-off. No one can truly replace Tasteless’ commentary skills.

I also spent the majority of the wee hours before going to bed last night trying to get Command & Conquer 3 working again on my comp. For some reason the registry had borked in the time since I had last played it, so getting it working again necessitated a complete reinstall. Which meant nearly one and a half hours of first waiting for the base install from disc, then waiting for the 250MB+ patch to download and install. It was glorious.

When I get home, it’ll be time to practice my 12 hatch. Perhaps I’ll even play against live opponents, if any of the D-ranked people on iCCup mind playing a total noob. Too bad there isn’t really an iCCup for C&C3.

Impulse running smoothly but solely on sub-light engines

Thu, 15 May 2008 09:41:15 -0600

I couldn’t sleep last night. I felt like playing some SoaSE, but I thought that this would be a good opportunity to finally get around to doing two semi-related things:

Get Galactic Civilizations II plus all the expansions
Get them through Impulse

I’d wanted to see Stardock’s Steam alternative was any good. Their DRM-free policy along with the fairly pleasant experience I had getting SoaSE through their now-obsolete Impulse predecessor convinced me that it might be worth my time to try to get the Impulse Beta working.

In short however, something small component of Impulse seems to be critically broken. It is indeed very slick, and arguably zippier than Steam is. I haven’t gotten their Friends system working yet, primarily due to my lack of any friends who have also opted into the beta. I’m definitely happy about how games operate independently of Impulse (and Stardock Central too, to be fair), even though having Steam running concurrently with my games hasn’t bothered me so far. Whoever is managing their network infrastructure seems to be doing things right, as my GalCivII download was chugging along at an impressively consistent 1500 kb/s. This is consistent from what I observed when I downloaded SoaSE two days after it was released, when one could assume there would be a reasonable amount of traffic on their servers. On the best of days, Steam manages around 800; getting TF2 on release day was pretty much an exercise in futility. To be fair however, Steam manages far more traffic than Stardock probably ever will.

The one thing that bothered me however, was the fact that Impulse seems to have a bug in it which renders it completely unusable. As in, unable to install and update games. The above instance of GalCivII was purchased on Impulse, but after a half-hour of wrangling with the Impulse auto-update, I was forced to utilize Stardock Central for the actual download. I assume that since Stardock manages the networks of both SDC and Impulse, that the front-end client, whether it be SDC or Impulse, would have little effect on download speed and server stability.

I have yet to start playing GalCivII, but I would imagine it would do little to raise or lower Impulse in my eyes since as I mentioned above, one of the advertised features of Impulse/SDC is its complete independence from the games it installs. I think Impulse looks damn pretty, and has huge potential given how smooth at least the purchasing component was. It’s a shame someone doesn’t do the occasional test from a fresh install as I have found few forum posts with my specific issue, leading me to believe that this is a problem only with people doing a brand-new install.

Was wondering why my work computer failed to recognize my 360 controller. I just had it upgraded by...

Wed, 14 May 2008 12:55:27 -0600

Was wondering why my work computer failed to recognize my 360 controller. I just had it upgraded by sysadmin for some new software so it went through a complete reboot. I thought something borked in the update, but it turns out I forgot to connect it to the network, ergo Windows couldn’t connect online to download the controller’s drivers. Problem solved.

Best episode of the week without 'splosions? Unheard of!

Sun, 11 May 2008 15:24:44 -0600

I’ve been diligently keeping up with this season’s anime line-up, and even added a few more to my list: Toshokan Sensou and Kurenai. Kurenai is especially good, in an artsy kind of way. But by far the best one of the bunch, further reinforced by this week’s fantastic episode, is Macross Frontier. I would’ve thought that their somewhat shallow but heavy on the production values first episode hinted at this season’s incarnation of Gundam 00, but I was very wrong. The writing is fantastic. Gundam’s weakest link is one of Macross’s greatest strengths.

Now I’m not saying that Macross is on par with Serial Experiments Lain or Ouran. But for a mecha anime, it has a surprisingly amiable cast of characters, none of which (so far) annoy me to the huge extent that Gundam 00’s Gundam Boys did. Even the supposedly snotty brat archetype, Sheryl Nome, is quickly becoming my favorite female character of the bunch. Even above loli-favorites Ranka and now Klein Klein (Klan Klein?).

The last 5 minutes of episode 6 reinforced my love of Macross. It shows that even without the glorious mecha battles, which from episodes 1, 2 and 4 we know they can do a fantastic job at, Macross can still create an episode that I could rank at the top of the season.

Pwning n00bs in the name of hardware testing.

Tue, 06 May 2008 07:50:00 -0600

UWS has finally gone live in the computing science centre, where I’m working for the summer. While this would normally be worthy of celebration for the day, the fact that we just got an Xbox 360 in at work trumps this by several orders of magnitude. I brought in my wireless controller, Halo 3 and GTAIV for…”testing purposes”. Yes.

I’m still wondering about several things however. One, what’s the best way to move my profile back and forth between home and work? I know the simplest way is to simply import it over the interwebz each and every day, but given how large I’m afraid my profile is, this may take half an hour or more every day. I’m thinking I might buy a dedicated memory unit that I can just keep attached to my keychain so that my profile can live in a portable fashion. The problem however, is whether or not this would bring along my Rock Band DLC. I would assume it wouldn’t, as the memory unit only holds 50 mb and songs can range from 8-10 mb each. But would loading up my profile automatically download the DLC on the Xbox? Or at least allow me to do so without having to pay for it again on my work Xbox? Cuz having to pay for the Boston album twice would be hugely stupid. At least Still Alive is supposedly free in perpetuity.

I AM BULLETPROOF! ...kekekek?

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 00:41:50 -0600

I’m waiting for a spot on my daily TF2 server.

I’ve spent the past week brushing up on my Starcraft, watching a lot of replays and practicing some Zerg builds. I played Starcraft way back when, but I never did anything more than cheesy Map Settings games and the campaign (and even then, I did it when cheats on). My recent fixation with Company of Heroes has progressed to RTS’s in general, spawning interest in C&C3 and Sins of a Solar Empire.

Now that I’m actually developing some skill with Company of Heroes, I’m suddenly really keen on learning how to play not just competently, but well. In between watching Tales of Heroes and picking up the fine subtleties of riflespam, something clicked in how I see RTS’s.

And now I’m spending my summer practicing Zerg rushing. Kekekeke I suppose.

Spot just opened up in TF2.

My Muta micro is sub-par.

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 15:45:33 -0600

I’m following a lot of anime this season. So far this week has had some good episodes. Macross Frontier was great, and i think it’s been consistently the best so far this spring. The OP comes out this week. Woo! The first episode of Allison & Lilia didn’t blow me away, but the second episode has definitely picked up, and now I think I’ll followi t regularly till season’s end. Code Geass is still both incredibly hard to watch and incredibly exciting to watch. For continuity’s sake, and because I love seeing Lelouch smirk and Suzaku get all emo, I’ll probably keep watching it to the end. Kurenai is another show that I didn’t think I would like, but it looks like after the second episode, it’s grown on me. Not quite as high as Macross Frontier in my ranking, but solid enough to warrant watching. Special A has that Ouran High School Host Club feeling to it, but it seems much shallower than Ouran. I think I’m going to give it another two episodes before deciding whether or not to follow it for sure. Also, going back to emo, if Code Geass was bad, Vampire Knight is indescribably worse. Vampires? Goth chicks/guys? Copious amounts of bishounen? Nonetheless, it still seems intriguing on the drama front, if not the action or comedy front.

As for the series’ I’m probably going to stop watching, Kanokon and Itazura na Kiss. I couldn’t stand Itazura past the first 10 minutes without getting annoyed at the character design. And Kanokon is too shallow. I enjoy the “overbearing girl meets confidence-lacking guy” as much as the next trend whore, but the character design and the decision to make Kouta look like an elementary student to Chizuru who appears to have the body of a college student at least, makes the whole thing creepy.

Also, started learning how to play Zerg in SC. I’ve almost got the 9pool start going flawlessly against Protoss and Terran on Luna. Now to expand to 12pool, ZvZ and the other tournament maps.

I love variable fighters.

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 21:14:42 -0600

I could blog about my anemic bioinformatics project or the fact that I may fail my statistics final, but that would be too depressing.

Instead, I’ve come to realize that this is the start of one of the best TV seasons in a long time. Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who for my western sci-fi fix. As for anime, there’s a lot of good new shows this season. Soul Eater, Macross Frontier, the second season of Code Geass, Vampire Knight and Special A. I’m thinking of following Allison and Lillia as well, but I’m still unconvinced that it’s worth it.

Macross Frontier is probably the anime I’m most interested in following, followed by Special A and Soul Eater.

"Meowth, that’s right!"

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:20:33 -0600

“Meowth, that’s right!”

- http://www.vgcats.com/comics/?strip_id=260

XNA, GSoC and iPhone apps are very much for the lulz.

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 10:35:00 -0600

I pre-registered for PAX a couple days ago. Summer looks like it will end in an exciting manner. Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, it looks like the rest of summer will be hectic.

First, I’m returning as a high school camp instructor for the CS department. Except this time, instead of using the fairly outdated Neverwinter Nights camp framework (Much love Bioware!), we’re going to be using XNA. With all the news that came out of GDC regarding XNA, this is actually fairly exciting. Not only that, apparently the department is springing for an Xbox 360 for the camps, so that we could load and play the campers’ games on a 360 as well as on their PCs. Of course, that’s the official use. We’re totally going to use it for Rock Band in our off hours.

I’m also hoping to get into GSoC again this year. This time around I’m poking around three organizations: Webkit, FreeBSD and Thousand Parsec. Mmm, operating systems, web browsers and gaming. All three are near and dear to my heart.

And one last summer project I’m thinking of doing is a small iPhone app that I might do with a small circle of Mac-using friends. We’re doing it for the lulz.

As awesome as it could be, using anti-armor weapons isn't actually effective.

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 02:56:43 -0600

I finally caved in and took up the recommendation by TRS to watch Avatar: The Last Airbender. And in my customary obsessive compulsive fashion, I’ve gone and watched every single episode. I really like this show. I wish I had a show like this to watch when I was a kid. I love you Transformers, but your writing is not nearly on the same level as Avatar.

After watching for the entire day (Ah, the price I pay for TV geekery), I capped off the end of my Easter Friday with a ranked 1v1 game in Company of Heroes. Here’s another match recap:

I’m lucky that I’m at a point where I’m mostly playing against fairly green players. I’ve been watching a lot of replays and doing a lot of CPU skirmishes, so I’ve had a chance to raise my skills in such a way that isn’t reflected in my online ranking, so the automatching service is matching me against people who are comparatively less skilled than me. Case in point, this game against someone named Garnir (playing Panzer Elite) only lasted 13 minutes, when the average game can last from thirty minutes to an hour.

One of the maps I had checked off as “prefer not to play” was Beaux Lowlands, and unfortunately it was the map chosen to play on. I think I had an admirable start, quickly taking complete uncontested control of the left side of the map. So I moved nearly all of my riflemen (and therefore my combat power) to the right hand side to try and secure a quick win and to just get into some conflict and try to do some damage to my opponent. Luckily what resistance I met was pretty light; a procession of scout cars, later followed by two squads of infantry, which were easily taken out by my four and later three squads of riflemen. What was interesting, and later confirmed by going over the replay, was his choice of sending two Marder III’s after me after I had repelled his scout cars and infantry. Marder III’s are powerful anti-armor units, and are brutally effective versus vehicles. But they’re equally ineffective against infantry. And after seeing his scout cars, I quickly teched up for anti-vehicle sticky bombs for my riflemen, so his first Marder was easily disposed of when I encountered it. Followed up by a couple squads of Airborne troopers with their anti-vehicle recoilless rifles, and after losing his second Marder III to my Airborne, he conceded the game.

I think Garnir lost because he was inexperienced not only in micro’ing his squads (he continued to attempt to capture points when I engaged him in combat), but also in reading what signals I was sending him during combat. My heavy use of riflemen and infantry in general should’ve signalled to him that double Marder III’s were not the answer. He was smart enough to try to use anti-infantry assault grenadier squads, but his poor micro made it so that I could flank them from behind during the confrontation and easily wipe them out.

When reviewing my own play however, I definitely made some mistakes. In some cases, I chose to hold back when I should have pushed. Perhaps I was being hesitant; at the time, I wasn’t sure if I wasn’t simply just walking into a trap, since I encountered little resistance and was unsure as to what Garnir’s true skill level was (he was a rank 1 PE player according to the automatch system, and I was a rank 1 American player). Some more scouting would have been advantageous on my part.

Now that I’ve got my daily dose of CoH, I want to watch more Avatar.