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It's bonkers. Tiny pixel art, incredible procedural animation for limbs, massive menus, it's like Worms and Soldner (was it Soldner?) and loads of other things all rolled into one. And they're still working on it.
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"…most public objects – and certainly all municipal objects – should offer APIs. Furthermore, specifically with regard to public infrastructures like transit systems, I believe that this should be a matter of explicit government policy. What’s a public object? A sidewalk. A building facade. A parking meter. Any discrete object in the common spatial domain, intended for the use and enjoyment of the general public. Any artifact located in or bounding upon public rights-of-way. Any discrete object which is de facto shared by and accessible to the public, regardless of its ownership or original intention. How’s that for starters?"
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Better than GetBundle, apparently – hunts down unofficial bundles on github and the like, as well. Nifty.
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"What a wonderful idea," Jennifer noted. "We never get to see the people who make the games." Michael Abbott is talking about LittleBigPlanet.
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Leanoard rounds up his favourite DS homebrew games. Some good stuff in here that I didn't know of.
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"This is just one of many examples that show you can participate in online community without having to pretend to be something you’re not. In fact, participating with authenticity is not just morally good, it’s measurably more effective."
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Powazek is right; this is definitely smart advertising, and full props to EA/W+K for just taking the credit and not trying to make it "viral"; it'll do that anyway. Although: it really is a glitch, you know.
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"Every year on or around the same day … at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser's death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist." Tom Phillips project, as mentioned in Reading the Everyday.
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"Boxer is a DOS game emulator for OS X, built around the powerful DOSBox. Boxer aims to make it easy and painless to play your DOS games."
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"Microsoft may very well not be broken. The world needs reliable bureaucracies that mollify the needs of corporations and individuals in the center of the market. But if it is broken, advertising isn't going to fix it."
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"Some people believe that there's no correlation between quality and sales, and thus think that the way to make money is to make things that are easily marketable (read: licenses). Game developers themselves usually argue that sales above a certain level require a game to be sufficient quality. I decided to see which of these perspectives was correct for the Playstation 2 era." Datanalysismachinego!
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"Of course, to get the most points, your band needs a bassist. And nobody wants to play bass. So if you want to lead a full band, you're going to have to play bass yourself. And this is like life!" Lovely article from Torpex' Jamie Fristrom.
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"After replacing the old plist, you can use your Hori stick with MacMAME!" Fantastic. Six-button fighter action agogo.
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"A version of the match-three game is set to launch next Thursday within the World of Warcraft MMO (massively multiplayer online), letting players kill time with puzzles during raids and long stints farming rare items." Oh god no. Don't cross the time-sink streams!
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"Well-designed games make us forget the technical impediments to the enjoyment of art, and this is more than half the battle."
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Yes.
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"KeyCue gives you an instant overview of the overall functionality of any application, plus lets you automatically start working more efficiently by making use of menu shortcuts." Awesome. Really, really awesome. I might well end up registering this.
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Jos Buivenga's font foundry, with many free faces (usually in a few weights – other weights are paid-for). Some beautiful stuff in here.
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Beautiful, free, sans-serif font. Gorgeous – especially at 900-weight.
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"His advice for those attempting a project like this, is to get people who understand the web. DICE hired a web development director, and a web producer. "Without those people, we would have never made it as far as we have," he says. He also recommends a web tech director, which DICE did not need to hire "because we had a team in DICE who were pretty strong."" Excellent article about building games for the online age; the section on the socially-driven BH website is very incisive.
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"Bandcamp isn’t Yet Another Place to Put Your Music. We power a site that’s yours. So instead of our logo plastered between banner ads for Sexy Singles Chat, your fans see your design, your music, your name, your URL. You retain all ownership rights, and we just hang out in the background handling the tech stuff." Via Waxy; looks really excellent, and some wonderful stat-gathering tools for bandowners.
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"The application works by assuming a constant viewing angle (35-45 degrees), typical for when the device is placed on a tabletop. The 3d scene’s perspective is warped using anamorphosis…" Awesome.
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"OmniDiskSweeper is a utility for quickly finding and deleting big, useless files and thus making space on your hard disks."
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"Mockups feels like you are drawing, but it's digital, so you can tweak and rearrange controls easily, and the end result is much cleaner." Interesting-looking prototyping/wireframing tool.
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"The Tinkering School offers an exploratory curriculum designed to help kids – ages 7 to 17 – learn how to build things. By providing a collaborative environment in which to explore basic and advanced building techniques and principles, we strive to create a school where we all learn by fooling around. All activities are hands-on, supervised, and at least partly improvisational." Sounds fantastic.
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"What do we sing about, when we sing about the body?" Lovely infographic, ever-so mildly NSFW. Hint: hip-hop talks a lot about bottom.
Mac OSX 10.4 still only ships with PHP4, which is fine and all, but I eventually bit the bullet and decided to install PHP5.
The most immediately obvious way to do this is with Marc Liyanage’s excellent installer. I unzipped, installed the .pkg, and rebooted Apache.
Except Apache didn’t want to reboot. Apache refused to start, actually. Looked like a potential crisis!
Fortunately, a few minutes of digging found the solution. Pretty obvious, really:
you can’t load both mod_php4 and mod_php5 Apache modules at the same time.
I had mod_php4 enabled already. By commenting out the lines referring to it, Apache started up just fine, running PHP 5. Crisis averted.
Severe Powerbook problems.
06 December 2005
A very bad night. I’ve recently been blessed with this particular problem: iChat quitting seconds after launch.
Reinstall iChat: no luck.
Reinstall iChat, patch through Software Update to 10.4.3 : no luck.
Run Combo Updater as recommended after reinstalling iChat: no luck.
Only now Mail is broken too; all my messages are there, but there’s no text loading in the panels. I’m loathe to reinstall Mail – I’ve backed up the Mboxes just now, even though the GUI is broken, I’m guessing the data is OK. It’s 3 years of Mail I pretty much can’t bear to lose.
So right now, I have a 12″ Paperweight. I’m really, really low about this; no idea how to fix it, no time to reinstall it for a good couple of days. Terrified. Depressed.
Kenta Cho shmups for OSX
13 October 2005
Webpage detailing ports of Kenta Cho’s shmups (shootemups) to OSX. Noiz2sa and Rrootage had been available for a while, but this ports all of them – Torus Trooper and Tumiki Fighters are good, but Gunboat is probably the standout of those three previously unavailable ones. They work pretty well, and they’re colossal fun. Cho’s shmup games have been available for a while on PC; it’s great to see them all ported to OSX now.
12″ Powerbook Battery and Firewire: big problems
22 August 2005
So, my 12″ Powerbook, which is now well over two years old, is beginning to be a little unhappy. So far, it was nothing more than being strained a bit by Tiger (despite 640mb ram) and spluttering a bit because of its lowly graphics card.
But the battery is getting to me. Currently, I get a bit under 2 hours out of it. It drains quite consistently, until around 32%, at which point it immediately leaps to 0%. Bah.
Tonight, though, for the second time in a week, a slightly more disturbing problem has arisen. Namely: no matter how much battery is in the laptop, plugging my external Firewire HD in (Lacie 200gb) promptly zaps the battery life to 0%. Instantly. Zero.
This is not very useful, especially given how much I paid for the drive (just so I could back things up), and I’m a little edgy. The rest of the laptop is working perfectly, and I’m loathe to have to replace it just yet – for financial reasons if for nothing else. But it’s all a little too worrying for comfort. Anyone have any ideas about the Firewire problem?
(And no, I do not have Applecare any more).