Firefox 3

Yes the RC1 was released last night/today or whenever. If you are currently on FF2, I’d recommend upgrading immeadiately. The only caveats are the normal, extensions may not work. And if you really need them you can try Nighty Tester Tools, which attempts to force through your extensions.

It has a lot of impressive improvements which I appreciate highly. It also seemed to fix a problem I was having with Gskirm where it wasn’t working FF 3 Beta 5. I couldn’t tell what the problem was, but I have a feeling it had to do with how it was loading scripts. One of my current goals for the game is to remove the dependency on a single API (in this case Google Maps) thus making it easier to port. Probably the first thing I’ll try porting it to (once I get enough of it done where I feel it would be cool to port) is XNA. When I first heard about XNA I thought it was a great idea, and I’m in a great situation to be able to try it out and see what it has to offer for board games -> video games.

Well, I’ve definitely learned things that are necessary for personal projects. Documentation, specs, and avoiding feature creep. Also to factor in dead times. I don’t know if I like the idea of having a schedule. But maybe for features that I’m currently working on, I can set a date. And just repeat that cycle every time I’m working on something. We’ll see how that works. I’ve been trying to setup some talks with one of my friends about a Game idea he had. I think that one will be fleshed out way more before it comes to the internets.

Game ideas

So I can’t remember if I ever mentioned this, but I thought of a few things recently that I want to “add” to the game. The first of these is an alternate battle system. This system would allow for the game to blend into a “true” board game by using real dice, that you can buy in any gaming store. It may use some funky sides like d4, and d12, but so be it. More feasible than finding those d3s and d7s.

The other, if I were a true software team with a project manager and fancy specs, and fancy MS project files everywhere, they would push off for a time in between cycles. So we’ll see when I decide to do it for, butttt I’m planning for a second refactor (the first was to the improved JS prototypes), but this one would be to separate out all of the game logic and fun stuff, from the UI/Google Maps API stuff. If I could do this smoothly, I’d be able to port the game to a different form (like say maybe XNA) with more ease cause the parts would already be noticeably different. I have to check how much work that entails, but it might be something I can do that doesn’t require tons of brain cycles.

Wellll.. that’s all I have for my bimonthly post.. good enough from my point of view.

April Fool

Now… I also kinda enjoyed April Fool’s Day. I’ve done a handful of pranks in my time, only a few of them coming on 4/1. And every year while I’m in the height of my website maintenance I tell myself I’m going to come up with something hilarious for April 1st. Well, as you can see, nothing happened. Maybe one year when I’m more adamant about posting towards the end of March.

But the real point of this post isn’t to woe on about my lack of posting (all of my previous posts have some of that). Really it’s to complain that the internet is completely unreadable today. My RSS is filled with junk. Most of it is funny the first time, but some sites are taken over by a running gag that floods my RSS with cakes or other nonsense. Also, nothing you read can be trusted, which basically means reading the internet is useless. I feel like I’m trapped in ytmnd-land. Oh well, it appears my complaints will do no good. Next year I’ll just avoid reading the internet on this date, and on the 2nd find out what all the fools day jokes were through wikipedia or some other means. Everyone go back to their site transmogrifying and your fake game update news.

Gary Gygax

Well, as an avid gamer as myself, I’ve been playing all sorts of games since the tender age of whenever I first started games. If we aren’t going to count things like Hi Ho Cheerio and Hungry Hungry Hippos. I’d say I started gaming at 4, when my father taught me how to play chess. It’s definitely the game I’ve been playing the longest, even having gone to chess school for a handful of years during that time. Games unlocked a lot of things for me. I’d probably consider the big three game influences to be Chess, Magic (yes that Magic), and D&D. And got me to explore my creativity on “okay” grounds, start reaing heavily, and solve puzzles.

While I don’t pen and paper roleplay as much as I used to, I started probably about the same time I started burning my life savings into collecting Magic cards. Ahhh the addiction levels. Anyways, I’ve been roleplaying since about 7th grade (about 12 or 13) which would be considered half my lifetime. So Gary Gygax’s death got an “oh shit” out of me when I read it at work yesterday, and I wanted to post yesterday but wasn’t sure what exactly to say. Gary and Dave got the whole ball rolling some 10 years before I was even born, and still managed to have a major influence on me. I still play in an online 1st edition campaign that I’ve been playing for what feels like forever. Even people who don’t roleplay they’ve seemed to have a major influence in.  How many hours does the average person play WoW? It looks like just a fancy UI and a larger world than a single DM could handle. Even back in the day of dial-up modems, and  America Online I was mudding.

So yesterday was a said day. I know Gary was semi-retired and did manage to do a lot. I just hope he didn’t have something up his sleeve that never got to see the light of day.

Oh and you can enter the obligatory failed his saving throw joke here.

St Paddy’s Day

So I haven’t been up to too much on the creating games front, but I have been doing a few things on my other lists of stuff that I try to get done. I’ve got a few books off my “reading” list, which is nice because most of them are 800 page fantasy novels. Yes yesI know it isn’t even March yet, but Hoboken always has it’s St Patrick’s Day parade in Hoboken two weeks before NYC has its, so that’s this coming Saturday. I’m not expecting too much besides Corn Beef, Cabbage and Car Bombs. (Oh and potatoes but that would have ruined the alliteration)

St Patrick’s Day always has a special place in my heart, not only from my Irish heritage but because of everything occurring around it.  This year I’ll be a turning ripe old 25 just before Saint Patrick will be reminisced for slaying all the snakes. Turning a quarter century is kinda weird, considering 5 years ago I wouldn’t have expected myself to be doing the things I am, but I was figuring on being somewhere close.  Well… I dont know what else I was planning for this post, and i figured I hadn’t posted in a while so you deserved something. ::shrugs:: Back to watch the end of the Oscar’s

The Super Bowl

So before the Super Bowl occurs in.. oh 5 hours, I’d like to put a prediction up here.

I will be cheering for the Giants cause I really don’t want the Pats going 19-0. But the prediction is unfortunately gonna lean the other way. 30-28 Pats.

Here’s to a good game, some good friends, and the hopefully the Golden Boy losing.

Companies and IP Law

Well, I don’t really have too much to say about this, besides companies should get stronger leashes on their lawyers. But Hasbro has dropped the hammer on Scrabulous a word-tile game on Facebook. Sounds familiar eh?

http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/technology/tech-britain-facebook.html

Updates to newest version

Alright so here’s the deal. I’ve had some decent progress on Global Skirmish in the last few weeks… If you’d like to see the current tutorial, with the partially written tutorial boxes, check that out. If you just want to check out the current version of the game, which is working pretty well right now, sorry no internet multiplayer support and no there isn’t any AI. Of course comments are welcome, post here or send me an email as usual.

Multiplayer is a higher priority to me, so once I get the tutorial written, a rules sheet up, and a few other niceties that I have listed then I’ll mark the version up to 1.0 and start on sometype of multiplayer, it’ll probably be some type of save system to allow an email multiplayer.  Alright that’s all I got. I’d call this version 0.7.5 even though I didn’t update that in the actually files. We’ll see if I remember the next time I submit my local builds.

Tutorial Work

So lately I’ve been working on the tutorial for Global Skirmish. Surprisingly, it’s led me to reexamine some of the old leftover code and clear some of the leftovers out. Reorganizing a few other things that looked ugly. I’m sure any programmers in the crowd know the feeling. I’ve got the first portion of the tutorial completed, but I doubt it’ll help much out until it talks a bit about the battle mode so I won’t be posting that yet. I have a bunch of minor things that I want definitely fixed for the next version I put on the web, so we’ll see what happens.

Well, let me get back to that.

Indie Revival

And I’m not talking indie rock. So I’ve recently had a bit of revival for Indie Games. Between amazing things like Little Green Pod Man and Mondrian Provoked and Passage and XNA 2.0. Yes yes I’m sure I should have used commas in between all of those but whatever. So the good news of this story is that I have some days off from work coming up and with noone around (and hopefully if I finish Mass Effect before than) I’ll have plenty of time to muck around.

Definitely on the list of things to do is some upgrades for Global Skirmish. I do want to get Multiplayer in next, but it may take me a day to figure out what the hell I was doing the last time I was coding. It has nothing to do with not trusting myself, it has everything to do with where I was going with things. I probably need to take better notes about things like that.  And the other thing is to play around with XNA a bit. Now I only had one graphics class in school and I hadn’t really touched the stuff since then, but it’d be nice to be able to play around and maybe make GSkirm in an environment like XNA. It already has all of the networking stuff intact, and it would be more graphics intensive, but I think it’d be a fun poject and a good way to explore XNA, and get really back on gear with GSkirm. Well that’s about it for me.

Say hi to your friendly indie developer if you ever see them.