Down to the Bones ...

GameLog 232-235

2012-01-24T07:28:00.002+10:00

Doh, missed another bi-weekly update. Going to have to dig back into the memory banks to remember all the steam sale constituents and surrounding holiday period goodness. for now, here the steam list:

Total War: Shogun 2 (60h) - Still trying to win the legendary campaign. Got very close with one Shimazu game, but am now finding it hard to even conquer Kyushu.

Grepolis (50h) - Couple of coordinated assaults. Looks like I might have to give this one away when school starts back up though

Might & Magic: Heroes VI (30h) - Kinda got into this after remembering about the Kingdoms online game. Campaign is still somewhat enjoyable as an optimised exprience, but has still lost something.

OpenTTD (20h) - Went hunting for Railroad Tycoon and ended up finding OpenTTD. Plays pretty well multiplayer, but is a little obtuse to get into.

Dungeons (5h) - A little more through it. Campaign has some quirky triggers that have detracted, but it's still a good baseline for comparing Notorious to.

EYE (5h) - LAN fun with guns

Demigod (5h) - On ultrafast setting it's more action oriented, but misses some of the subtler elements of the game. Still, as a multiplayer it gets the game over quickly.

The Ship (1h) - LAN fun with paddles & knitting needles.

TF2 (3h)
LoL (3h)
Blight of the Immortals (5h)
Kingdoms (2h)

Wooden Starburst Puzzle

2012-01-17T18:50:00.000+10:00

First attempt at solving a wooden puzzle I got for Christmas. Spent about 1/2 hr previously pulling it apart and sorting it, but that's about it. In the end the middle concourse was the hardest to figure out. I'd solved it another way, but found out the whole concourse slides off when I was pulling it apart to record. Maybe an hour all up.

No more coal ..

2012-01-03T09:24:00.000+10:00

It's a somewhat sad day. The Steam winter sales have all dried up and there's no more coal in my gift pile. Unfortunately it didn't turn into one of the mega prizes either, but I'd guess there would have been over 10 million chunks of peaty potential out there to compete with my remaining 4.

This holiday sale has reached a significant milestone in my love / hate relationship with Steam. I KNOW that the achievements are made to get me to buy new games (even old games with achievements are there purely as a reminder that the game was good, and you might want some DLC or new version before you're done), but I just don't care. It's fun. The first day had Dungeons of Dredmor and Orcs Must Die on sale along with snowy achievements. Both of those games I'd looked at in the past, but the achievements and cheap price were enough to get me to buy and play both of these. And it was fun. The next day the same. Wake up and load up steam, what will I be playing today? I trusted Steam to look after my holiday entertainment and it duly delivered.

Toward the end of the sale my interest had waned a little from that initial excitement, but looking back over the whole 12 days I've probably played 75% of my games directed by the achievement list. I was a little disappointed that there wasn't a list of things that you could win, or what you might be able to craft coal into, but rumours of winning all valve games was enough to keep converting the coal into something.

There has also been 2 significant advancements in the steam interface; you can store gifts instead of immediately passing them on, and you can now open gifts yourself. I know you used to be able to wangle both of these previously, but the recognition that people want to do this is what I'm happy about.This leads to a new purchasing method for me, especially in sales. If I like the game, but am not going to play it immediately, I can now buy it as a gift for myself, then only open it when I want to play it. This way if I haven't gotten around to opening it and someone else wants it, I can pass it on or trade it rather than having it sit uninstalled and locked into my steam account. I know it means that I'm probably going to buy even more 75% sales as speculators, but it's purely because it's making it easier for me. Convenience = win!

Steam is doing more and more things right. And best of all, it's getting out of the way for me to just play the games I want to play. I haven't had too many intallation or game issues recently, and my gripe list is getting smaller.

Speaking of the gripe list:
- Please default games to NOT automatically update. I'm sick and tired of firing up the PC in the morning and having TF2 download another 2Gb. There has got to others that are conscious about their bandwidth usage.
- "Do not automatically download this game" means DON'T DOWNLOAD!! There's been a couple of games that keep updating regardless of the setting. The only fix seems to be to pause it during an upgrade and never unpause.
- "This game is currently unavailable" meand that the game wants to be patched before you can play. Don't know why because most were single player games. It's getting in the way of me playing the game. Remove it or at least make the message a little more informative.
- DX11 / .NET framework checks. Why does every single game want to install one or both of these common components? Can't steam detect that they are installed and skip this step? I know that they are probably embedded within the actual game installs, but I'd like Steam to be at least be able to provide games an idea of what's currently installed. Actually if this causes more games to not run on load, it can stay as it is, but I'd see this as the way of the future.
- Allow an option to be less viscious with the SteamGuard checks. It feels like every month I've had to verify myself again, even though I have Steam open almost constantly. Yes, it's me. I'm still here. Considering turning it off, but I do like the idea and I do have almost $2000 to protect.

Creative 15

2012-01-02T10:22:00.001+10:00

New year's resolution: spend the first 15 minutes of every day doing something creative.

While teaching I noticed that I was needing to go to bed earlier and earlier each day; an odd occurrence as I'm usually craving for more night time and can usually get by with 4-5 hours sleep. By the end I was taking a power nap straight after work before tea to keep some sort of regular pattern in my day.

There have been other times when I've used power naps to solve problems. If I'm stuck on a difficult Programming problem, I'd take a 15 minute nap and almost always wake up with the correct solution.

While writing assignments for Uni it felt like what I need to start writing is a good sleep. I had put this down to my finely honed procrastination skills, but maybe there's more to it?

Teaching has been far more creative than I'd expected. Even fully prepared lessons seem to go awry and require to to think on your feet to get the topic covered another way, and most of my lessons weren't as prepared as I'd have liked. It seems that I can easily function in a logical and analytical manner on hardly any sleep, but to be creative I need a good sleep.

To test this theory, I'm planning on spending the first 15 minutes of each day on something creative. Drawing, building, writing, blogging, coding, designing, singing, playing. Something. Hopefully 15 minutes at the start of the day won't take out too much from the craving to catch up with what's going on in the world, and maybe even make enough time to get some ideas down.

First creative15 was to get the blogger app for the iPad so that I could quickly write if that's what I wanted to do. Turns out 15 minutes is out to about 45 by now, but I'm Ok with that too.

Here's a picture done on the iPad in procreate when testing the concept. It's not finished, but I'm happy with the result and it felt good to draw again.

Hmmm, colours on the iPad screen seem different. Oh well ..

Notoriously Databased

2011-12-30T14:43:00.001+10:00

Over the holidays I've been building a google spreadsheet along with some forms to play a light version of Notorious. A play-by-email if you will. The game is intentionally stripped down as far as I can go while still retaining the higher design elements to test whether there is still any 'fun' or 'game' there. If there is, remove more. If there isn't, add some back in.

Notoriously Databased

Dungeon stats
At the start of each round, your dungeon is essentially a couple of stats:
Notoriety: How much the town fears you. Expect an attack each turn at a level based on this number.
Treasure: The amount of gold / equipment / tradeable stuff you have in your dungeon
Dungeon size: The amount of space dug out so far.
- Minion living space: Amount of space dedicated to housing minions
- Prisoner Space: Amount of space dedicated to housing townsfolk to help dig. Prisons can hold 10 prisoners per space.
- Fortification space: Amount of space for traps / secret doors / dungeon layout.
Total defense: Total defense = Dungeon security + Minion security
- Dungeon Security: Provides additional defense, as well as maintaining this amount of gold if a wipe occurs.
- Minion Security: Total amount of security offered by elites and normal minions.
Minion Defenders: Amount of minions allocated to defence.
Minion Elites: Elites are 2x more effective at fighting (Defending / raiding)
Minion Diggers / Builders: Amount of minions allocated to expanding your dungeon size.
Prisoners: Amount of captured townsfolk currently expanding your dungeon size.

Actions
Each turn a player assigns these actions to their dungeon:
Order digging: Amount of minions ordered to dig instead of defend
Raid town for treasure / prisoners: Choose the amount of minions to send on the raid and the amount of treasure / prisoners to go after. Monsters on a raid will not be in your dungeon next turn. If successful, returns the amount of treasure / prisoners requested. Can choose to disguise as another player to give them the notoriety instead. Raid success is calculated by the amount of town security compared to the amount of monsters sent. The town's prosperity will indicate how deep into the town they will need to go to get the required resources.

Raid another dungeon for treasure / prisoners: Choose the amount of monsters to send on the raid. They will not be in your dungeon next turn. Note that dungeon raids happen AFTER heroes have softened them up.
Ransom prisoners: You will receive 1 treasure per prisoner ransomed and reduce notoriety.
Increase fortifications: Requires 1 space and 5 treasure
Equip Minion: Requires 1 treasure per minion converted to an elite. Elites fight 2 times better and are last to be killed.
Hide Hide this many elites. Implemented as raiding 'no-one'. They just spend time away from the dungeon when you expect a wipe.

End of Turn resolution order
Hidden minions / treasure are set aside
Raiding parties are set aside
Ransom prisoners - Remove prisoner.
Convert minion to elite
Assign minion diggers
Increase fortifications - Remove money

Raid town - Add ALL player town raids together to calc total desired resources
Raid town - Calc defense per treasure and per villiager
Raid town - Assign defense to each player's raid and kill off raiders per defense. If they have minions remaining, raid is successful
Raid town - Successful raids either set (disguised) player notoriety to amount stolen, or increases notoriety by 1 if already higher

Hero Attack - Heroes (elite) of fighting skill equal to player's notoriety attacks. Player with highest notoriety has 1.5x notoriety heroes attack.
Hero Attack - Hero kills off an amount of minions equal to their fighting skill. If any heroes remain, wipe.
Hero Attack - If no heroes remain, add treasure to dungeon per hero (= 1/2 fighting power = 1/2 notoriety)

Raid dungeon - Add ALL player dungeon raids against that player together. If greater than the dungeon defense, wipe.
Raid dungeon - If multiple players attacking, highest army kills others and takes all spoils.
Raid dungeon - Successful raids remove all gold & prisoners

Amount of space is increased by remaining (diggers + prisoners) / 10
Increase fortifications - Assign fortification space if not wiped

Ransom prisoners - Add gold, reduce notoriety
Successful raids return
Hidden minions / treasure return
Fill remaining space with minions (or remove minions if space smaller)

Allocate 1 notoriety to each player that an adventurer didn't return from.
If all actions gain no notoriety for the player, and they have been wiped by the town, reset notoriety to 0.

Town report - Build a notoriety list
Town report - Add all actions against the town
Player report - Collate all actions that the player knows about

GameLog 228-231

2011-12-28T18:59:00.000+10:00

Ahh holidays!

Grepolis (100h) - Holidays started out with a big revisit to Grepolis with many operations and defensive maneuvers to dive back into.

AI War: Fleet Command (50h) - The first of many games to be wheeled out again for the steam christmas achievement list. I'd given this one a go a while back, but I couldn't get into it. 2 things changed, both from replaying the tutorials:
1) The game is more of a puzzle / grand strategy rather than RTS. The unique starting positions with the AI owning everything and you with nothing makes a very interesting tak on the Genre.
2) Turn on the option for ships to be automatically placed into defensive mode, and engineers to be on auto fix / help too. Makes the game actually playable rather than incredibly frustrating that you'd missed one single ship attacking and he'd wiped out half your main base while 100's of ships watch on.

Gratuitous space battles (14h) - Another one that I'd tried the demo of earlier, but couldn't get into. Was the sweetner on a very good Humble Bundle. Once again it was understanding what the game was about; you don't just beat a fleet and move on, the whole game is about beating the fleet again and again with smaller and smaller fleets. This one is definitely for the optimisers, and that's me.

Demigod (12h) - Early 4-pack pickup from Ben for LANs. Older than LoL and it feels like it's from a different time. Plays Ok. No real bugs that I'd heard about on launch.

EYE Divine Cybermancy (10h) - Steamy sales. Had kept a bit of an eye on this one, but for less than 5 bucks it's definitely worth a go. Hacking started of being pretty cool (in all the things you can hack), but turns out to be rather boring. Game itself is interesting enough to continue regardless.

Dungeons of Dredmor (10h) - Interested in this one after listening to a dev chat on Roguelike Radio, and a steam sale + steam chrissy achievement was certainly enough to get me into it. Pushed enough to get the achievement, but will probably leave this one for later.

Orcs Must Die (7h) - Another cheapy with christmas coal at the end. Good atmosphere, but moved on to other coal-givers.

Civ 4 (6h) - LAN game with Levi. Bit of a blast going back after Civ 5.

League of Legends (5h) - Always the LAN staple.

Grand Prix Story (4hrs) - More of less completed it. Once I found out about accessing better cars and parts purely through upgrading the current parts (rather than seeing the investment as pointless) it was pretty easy.

Guardians of Graxia (2h) - More Coal.

Jametown (2h) - Humble Bundle for coal!

Frozen Synapse (2h) - Indie coal!

Terraria (1h) - New patch with hardcore mode. Lasted an hour by the looks.

Notorious: Rumour System

2011-12-10T13:32:00.001+10:00

In an attempt to kickstart my programming of Notorious, I had a look again at the rumour system for the game:

Rumour System

As the player interacts publicly with the villiage or other players, the rumour system will transfer information between NPC’s to build their own world view. Ultimately this world view will generate the notoriety that each player needs to advance in the game. Players can also subvert, create or enhance events that others know about in an effort to manipulate the notoriety of themselves or others.

World Views:
Each individual NPC will have their own world view of the events that occur in the world. These events can either be picked up as primary sources (the character participated in the event or was an eyewitness to the event) or secondary sources if someone else told them about the event. Characters may have conflicting reports from different sources, but will attempt to resolve these into a consistent world view that they are satisfied with. Players will also have a world view of everything that has been revealed to them in the game, and can use this to compare against others for detecting or interrogating inconsistencies.

A world view consists of a list (or tree structure) of events. Each event will require:
Description: Written text describing the event / rumour.
Source: Person establishing the event / rumour. Primary sources would have their own name here, otherwise it will be the name of the person who passed it on.
Characters: List of characters involved in the event. May also include items if they are unattached.
Evidence: Direct evidence that was used to confirm this event / rumour.
Links: Other rumours that are related. May possibly be the same event witnessed by others.

There will also be a way for multiple events to be collated into meta-concepts, with links and evidence used to support the concept. As an example, a farmer notices an ogre approaching, the ogre attacking his cattle, then leaving with the corpses. Instead of running to the village and reporting each individual event, they can combine it into an “attack” rumour to talk about and link to each individual event. Multiple attacks with similar characteristics can be combined to generate a “pattern of attacks”. Ultimately these can be used to guide the creation of quests for heroes, and the general notoriety of the player.

When a character interacts with another, they have a list of events that they wish to tell others (depending on their personality; gossipy types will have a long list) ranked by their assumed importance, as well as a list of questions to ask to attempt to resolve internal world view conflicts. If a character hears a new rumour, that rumour is stored with a confidence level of how well they agree with it.Confidence can range from 100% (fully confident, adamantly so) to 50% (happy to accept as true) to 0% (not sure) to -50% (Rejected) to -100% (absolute rejection). Events left between -50% to 50% are contested and are issues that the character will attempt to resolve through conversation with others. [May need a sigmoid function for confidence]

Player interaction with the Rumour System
Any character holding a linked gem will give the player complete knowledge of their world view. The player can automatically merge this information into their own world view, bring in any consistent events / rumours and manually handle conflicts, or manually process each event. Even if the information is merged automatically, it should be up to the player to agree or dispute certain events to create a consistent world view. This would entail viewing all the known details of a conflict, highlighting what the general consensus is so far (eg: 3 in favour, 4 not sure, 2 against), and allowing the player to shift their opinion either one way or another.

Creating Rumours
To create a rumour, the player can inject a new event into the memory of a linked creature, then give the creature an action of gossip in town (if needed). If the new event is consistent with other NPC’s world view, it is likely to be adopted and spread.

If there is an internal conflict within the linked creature there will either need to be more changes to make space for the rumour, or more power to add additional certainty to an idea. Complex changes may have even more difficulty in conveying to others.
There should be a way of predicting whether the changes will “take” before accepting the use of power. Rejected rumours stay within their memory as an “idea” that was eventually thought to be inconsistent, which will make successive attempts even harder (and possibly even make the creature doubt themselves as a primary source)

This is also the technique for removing events or modifying events, although care will need to be taken to make sure that these events are not re-exposed to the creature through talking to others.

To make use of the rumour system, the player may wish to use a reliable villager to start rumours. They may be able to capture a local farmer, give him a gem (in a ring), link to it, then modify the event of him receiving the gem so that he thought it was given to him from his mother. Once you release the farmer, they can then be used to keep track of what is happening inside the city, as well as injecting and denying rumours. The credibility of the character is damaged if injected rumours are found to be false, or they are disagreeing with the general consensus on a rumour. Reduced credibility makes it harder to get others to support their primary sourced events / rumours. This could be used for “boy who cried wolf” scenarios too.

*NOTE*: Unsure whether power use should be continuous to support a rumour, or a once off that is either accepted and assimilated, or rejected.

GTX560 & PSU

2011-12-03T11:53:00.001+10:00

Friday was also a good day. The new parts I'd ordered to help with my failing computer had arrived and was waiting for me when I got home. I only had a couple of hours between packing up at school and the staff Christmas party, but it was enough to install my new GTX 560 and NeoECO PSU. Not as big of a step up from the GTX260 as I'd have liked, but it definitely looks like it's solved the lockups 10mins after starting. Not sure if it was the PSU or the graphics card, but with the salt air down here, parts don't seem to last that long and both were the only things left from the last upgrade.

Fans ... Lots of fans.

Last day

2011-12-03T11:00:00.001+10:00

Open space ...

Last day at St Luke's came to a somewhat sad close as I packed up my desk. Everything I needed to keep all fit into my backpack, and a lot of paper went in the bin. I guess I'm lucky that most of my work is already digital and constantly with me anyway.

Thanks for the year must go to:
Chris: An excellent mentor and unfortunate neighbour to cope with all my questions.
Cassie: A great HoD who gave me a lot of support with my wild ideas for teaching. Thanks for all the help in verification, moderation and reporting.
Martin: Helped guide me into teaching when it was really only a wistful idea. His support and that of the school has given me the absolute best transition into teaching that I could have hoped for.

I know I'll be back next year in a limited capacity, but it really felt like leaving for good. St Luke's has been a wonderful place to work at for the past 6 years, and I'll have many fond memories & friends from the experience.

So why leave?

I'd been constantly asked that by all sorts of people at St Luke's. I had a standard response, and longer response and a how-long-have-you-got response, but really it came down to a feeling of entrapment. I've been heavily involved with computers and IT for the majority of my life, and even while teaching I would have put IT as about 2/3rds of my focus. Without the ability to teach IPT in the senior curriculum there's a big chance that I'd have to lose more and more of that IT experience as I become more heavily teacher focused. If I kept going, there would be a good chance that I would be teaching for 3 years or more, and that would pretty much rule me out of returning to the IT industry. I still like teaching, but resigning was a way to force me to look for other opportunities that may have both an IT and teaching focus.

There are many companies that are getting close to my vision of future learning and maybe I should be working heavily in that area. I know I don't have the entrepreneurial drive to go out by myself, but if I could guide some other companies a little closer to the end goal, then that would be a worthwhile contribution.

I'm still keen on giving University lecturing or some form of adult education a go. I have strong reservations about the way Universities are when MOOCs and open learning are becoming viable alternatives, but I'm not sure how to monetise the new breed of courses. What I definitely want to do is to put more work into my own model. Flesh out all the parts into a full design. Hopefully this will both force me to look beyond my own ideas and see what else is out there for referencing, and also help isolate specific opportunities to aim toward.

There is also some local opportunities to get back into tech support and business analysis. I must say that the best part about contract programming was getting right into the heart of a business and looking for ways to improve existing processes (whether that was through a program or not). If that opportunity comes up like I imagine, it will be a good change.

On the programming front, I'm also keen on getting back into working with Notorious. I'd made a bit of progress last time Andrew came down, but when I'm teaching it really felt like any time devoted to anything else was guilt-ridden. I think that'll be another post...

Like David, I'm also keen on getting back into more regular blogging. This one is a pretty good sign that being out of teaching mode will help.

GameLog 226-227

2011-11-28T21:24:00.001+10:00

I never thought I'd see the day when steam stats went blank. Admittedly I've been playing a couple of game outside steam, but the real killer has been the pressure to mark and report for the end of year. 65 hours. That'll be another story.

Grand Prix Story (6hrs) - Picked up this iPhone/iPad game after hearing a brief mention on 3 moves ahead. Plays pretty well, and lightweight enough that it feels like I'm not really playing while on a mini-break from marking.

Grepolis (3h) - Finally placed into vacation mode as it wasn't going to be an option with the workload I had.

Bookworm (1h) - been playing on and off for a bit, especially at the in-laws where sudoku and word games feel more appropriate.

Couple of other slight dabbles, but nothing to really report. Under 10 hours :/.

GameLog 224-225

2011-11-14T17:35:00.001+10:00

Grepolis (20) - More war and development.

Space Pirates and Zombies (12) - Steam special. Been looking at it for a bit to see if it's like Space Rangers. More actiony and a different beast, but probably not a big attention getter with other titles on the horizon.

Heroes of Might & Magic 6 (10) - 2nd Campaign.

Skyrim (2h) - Veeyar Lv.2 - Picked it up for Sandy as a gift, but looks like it'll need to be run on mine. Doubt I'll be able to sit down seriously with it until school finishes.

Minecraft (1h) - New server for the LAN

GameLog 222-223

2011-11-02T04:57:00.002+10:00

Grepolis (20) - Almost walked away, but now that there's a war on, it's getting interesting again.

Heroes of Might & Magic 6 (20) - Clean and slick, but somehow not as fun as what I remember the series to be.

King of Dragon Pass (14h) - Finally picked this up for iPhone as I'd baulked a couple of times at $10 for an indie title on that platform. Plays well, and has a good atmosphere to sink into. Very kind on the batteries, which is a good thing for long-haul trips.

Dungeon defenders (6h) - Looks like an interesting LAN game, but solo isn't too much fun

Terraria (2h) - Still can't beat the dungeon skelly

GameLog 218-221

2011-10-17T01:33:00.000+10:00

Sengoku (70h) - 2 campaigns and a couple of AARs

Fable III (35h) - Another steam sale weekend deals. Played somewhat poorly compared to the original Fable. There seems to be LESS open world than before, less control over what you can do, and even less valid decision making. I know they have also tried to go for a minimal interface, but there are some things that you want to know at a glance. How much gold do I have right now? (not in 3 minutes when I get more), how healthy am I? This leads to convoluted methods to just see stats that are usually readily available. Maybe I'm just a traditionalist, but google searches on the more irritating aspects leads me believe I'm not alone.

Grepolis (16h) - Still ticking along

Heroes of Might and Magic 6 (12h) - very slick, but feels a little devoid of emotion. Playing through the game on hard seemed, well, hard. Harder than it usually is, which just left me repeating the battles to get the most out of it. Might tone it down and treat it more like a walkthrough. Multiplayer and online stuff looks interesting, but haven't ventured that way yet.

Mount & Blade: Fire & Sword (6h) - LAN multiplayer fun. Wish it didn't randomly dump people out of the game though :/.

Civ5 (4h) - LAN game with Andrew. Played pretty well as a tag-team, but probably needed a step up in the AI even with Andrew just starting out. probably 2 vs 4?

Dwarf Fortress (4h) - More expansion while waiting for Fable III to net me some money. Outer wall complete. Now for level 2.

Terraria (2h) - Found another meteor crater, and nearly enough gold to start making fire armour.

Gran Turismo 5 (3h) - Andrew's visit in the holidays led to some racing with the wheel. Unlocked the TopGear test track after much frustration.

DiRT 2 (2h) - Tried a couple of laps with the driving wheel to see if it was different to GT5

First the worst, Second the best, Third gets the Golden Chest

2011-10-06T10:55:00.000+10:00

Cam has been saying a little playground chant at home sometimes:

First the worst
Second the Best
Third gets the Golden Chest
...

It hadn't dawned on until recently that it describes Notoriously Carded quite appropriately. First does finish the worst, Second is the best for that round, but aiming for third will more likely produce consistent results, giving the final win at the end of the match.

GameLog 214 - 217

2011-09-23T13:14:00.003+10:00

Crunch time of the year for teaching, so the games dried up. 4 weeks and the total game time is nowhere near my average weekely total :(.

Sengoku (15h) - Picked up Friday night on sale. Looks like a Japanese Crusader Kings, which is perfect to lose myself into for de-stressing. Played a couple of games and it seems a little easier than even Crusader Kings.

Terraria (10h) - Mainly in the weekend after finishing up. Cam's go-to game still.

CivWorld (5h) - Last part of the CivWorld game before shutting up shop. Ended up winning the game and making the 1000 point mark to get the top unlockable achievement.

Grepolis (2h) - Put myself into vacation mode to survive crunch month.

Notoriously Carded

2011-09-23T13:08:00.000+10:00

[ A game of getting big, but not too big ]

This is a card game developed to test a high level game mechanic for the upcoming Notorious computer game. First play-through seemed to generate the desired reaction from players with many strategies in play. Seemed good enough to be released in its own right.

Concept
A game is divided into 5 rounds, after which all but the top player’s points are counted toward your final score. Each round you may play a card either in front of you to increase your game score, or in front of another player to increase their score. Cards may be either face up or face down, however any card played face up generates a bonus point per round that it is in play for the player that it is in front of. These bonus points are counted no matter who has the top score for the game.

Materials
Players: 3-7 players. More the better.
Cards: 1 card deck is sufficient for up to 7 players, 2 card decks can be combined if more players wish to play.
Space: Typical arrangement would be players sitting around a table. A dinner setting space per player is sufficient.

Rules
1. A match is divided into 10 games, where each game consists of 5 rounds of play.
2. At the start of each game, shuffle and deal 7 cards to each player.
3. Nominate a starting lead-off player (or randomly choose using a dice roll).
4. The the lead-off player may play one card either in front of them or in front of any other player. The card may also be played either face up or face down.
5. Play continues clockwise for each player to play their single card per round (either in front of them or in front of another, either face up or face down).
6. After each round, the person leading off for the next round continues clockwise.

Scoring
1. After the 5th round has finished, count up any bonus points first by tallying how many rounds each face up card has been in front of you and add them to your match total.

Eg: A card playing face up in the 1st round will have been in 5 rounds, so scores 5 bonus points, whereas a card played in the 4th round will have only been in 2 rounds, scoring 2 points. As a total, having a face up card played in front of you on rounds 1,2 and 4 would gain 5,4 and 2 points respectively, tallying to a total of 11 bonus points for the round.

2. Flip over any face down cards and tally up the total face value of cards in front of you. Picture cards count as 10 and aces count as 1.
3. If you have the highest points for the round, you are disqualified and score 0 points. Everyone else adds their points to their match total.
4. If there is a tie for the highest points in the round, both players involved in the tie can place an additional card onto their opponent’s score as a tie breaker. If it still remains a tie, play your final card onto your opponent. If there still remains a tie, continue to draw cards from the undealt pack and place on your opponent’s score until there is an eventual winner. This additional score is also counted in the match total for the eventual 2nd place getter.
4. The winner is the match point leader after 10 rounds.

Hint: To aid tracking of bonus points, you may wish to create a play mat by drawing 5 boxes in order on a piece of paper and labelling them from 1 to 5 for each round. Play your cards into the box for that round, even if it is on someone else’s mat. Make sure that each face-up card’s value remains visible, and that the number of face down cards is known.

Negotiation

2011-08-26T04:05:00.003+10:00

Negotiation is convincing others to accept a sub-optimal personal solution for an optimal group solution.

GameLog 212 & 213

2011-08-23T03:06:00.002+10:00

Space Rangers 2 (25h) - Couple of impossible difficulty games. Looks like reboot has the dominators really cranked on impossible as I had 3 games reduced to a single solar system rather quickly. Though I'd play one out, but I think it might be unrecoerrable once yo lose a merchant facility to repopulate fortresses once you expand out again. Trying a 4th.

Grepolis (15h) - 80th. More scheduling in the night.

CivWorld (10h) - Far too addictive to play during school time.

Terraria (15h) - Cam's multiplayer time.

Bastion (1h) - Started out to see if it was a game Cam liked. "So you want a go?" Cam replied, "Naah, I want to play starcraft"

GameLog 210 & 211

2011-08-10T00:04:00.002+10:00

CivWorld (25h) - Beta version of Sid's facebook game. Finally a decent facebook game with no energy bar in sight! There are some mundane bubble popping features creeping in, but there's plenty of variety and a definite feeling of pulling together as a civ. Seems to have about a week-long game cycle, and it's quite intense at times. Better than grepo at the moment, but it might also be the shiny ...

Grepolis (18h) - 90th. Couple of organised battles, but losing ground to CivWorld in terms of maintenence time.

Elemental: War of Magic (10h) - Tried once again to see if the game is playable. Last patch made some odd design changes, but th lack of heroes in 2 games made me even madder. Booted it up on a whim ove rthe weekend and found that it had sorted it out somewhat. Heroes are back and I could get into the mid-game.

Allowing armies right off the bat has changed the game significantly (for the better) and even though heroes are still powerful, a 4 or 8 stack of peasants is now the main part of early armies rather than cannon fodder. It also leads to interesting choices of concentrating power into a single 8 stack unit for better tactical play, or diversifying a little more through 1-stack and 4-stack armies. 1-stack armies are a little useless now, and the interface is stuffed trying to produce them too. I'd dearly like to have single unit for scouting, so I hope the interface cludge is an oversight. The game feels more meater now with more item drops and WAY less health for all units making battles somewhat trickier.

VRKnight build still romps away with a couple of early city sweeps. I'm not keen on shelving a build that's still available on startup yet as there's been many other builds nerfed into oblivion by the changing face of this game.

I still have my cities being randomly called other city names in the game (indexing issue?), and some battles automatically resolving causing king deaths, but Greig doesn't seem to have either of these problems and no real mention of them on the forums means I might have something left over from the beta. Wiped the image and re-downloaded, but I still have these bugs. The city name thing really destroys confidence that ANY of the data being displayed is actually correct, but the autobattle thing is a deal-breaker. Only recourse is to save before every battle, and reload to try another battle first to try and get out of the autoresolve.

Terraria (8h) - Cam's multiplayer time.

Civ4: Colonization (8h) - Tried a single city challenge. Got a little stale, but seemed achievable.

GameLog 208 & 209

2011-07-28T20:53:00.002+10:00

Back to School, along with the inevitable drain on my energy to produce these lists:
Grepolis (20h)
Battlefield: Bad Company 2 (10h)
Terraria (5h)
Magicka (4h)
Sanctum (2h)
Hoard (2h)
Team Fortress 2 (1h)

Exerting Control

2011-07-20T21:01:00.005+10:00

One of the key facets of Notorious will be the ability to exert control over the various NPCs in the game. This could be mercenaries hired to guard your dungeon, or to dig it out, or even heroes attempting to raid someone else's dungeon. Here's the new section on how I plan to have the player influence their actions.

Exert control
- Mercenaries and heroes wearing focus amulets can be controlled, or grant vision, communication, etc. by applying your power through the linked focus gem.

- Gem size allows a maximum amount of power to be channeled through to it. Overloading the power level of a gem increases the chance of destroying the gem.

- Spell power modified by the distance to the home stone. Travelling through rock increases power cost, so that there is a risk / reward for exposing your home stone for greater power, or hiding it for greater security (especially from unlinking). Power investment set at time of change, so there is a benefit to bringing the mercenary close to your home stone before setting up their new default behaviour.

- Linked gem spells

Vision: grants vision from the gem’s location. Flat fee, relatively inexpensive so that it can work on heroes a long way away exploring other dungeons.

Communication: Talk directly to the mind of the person/monster holding it. Flat fee, relatively inexpensive so that primary minion and informants can use it to carry out most menu interactions (checking prices, buying selling, rumours, etc). Raises suspicion if used on heroes.

Control: Attempt to influence the bearer to take a certain action. Power required is variable and competes with the bearer’s own priorities. Needs linking into the AI system to give options of (go to location, attack, capture, flee, search, rest, dig, build, give, take, etc). Control is either sustained until the player removes the power investment (default), or placed as a once-off so that the power is immediately returned once the specified action is completed.

Cloaking: Attempt to hide the presence of a gem from attuned people / players. Variable power required and competes with the opponent’s detection power.
Mimic: Attempt to make it appear that someone else is linked to the gem.

- General spells

Link to gem: Create a link to a gem to allow powers to operate through it. Maintaining a link to a gem increases exponentially depending on how many other gems you have linked to. Should be possible for beginning players to have 2-4, medium players to have 6-8 and end game players to have up to 10.

Detection: Attempt to detect gems in your vicinity. Competes with cloaking (ground may also cloak gems). May choose a level to be used constantly which will add detection of other players attempting to scout / raid your dungeon.

Trace link: Attempt to find out who has a link to to a gem. Competes with Mimic power level to reveal all players / mimics currently linked.

Artificial Intelligence

Exerting control will be dependent on modifying the behaviour of the Mercenaries under your control, so it will be fairly important to design an AI system that is robust enough to allow independent emergent behaviour, but make sense enough that players can interact with the system in a meaningful way.

Actions and Needs
Each NPC will have a list of needs that change over time (the need for happiness, riches, sleep, food, chaos, etc). These needs will lead to actions fulfilling that need such as sleeping, fighting, etc. Each action that the AI can make is given a weighting depending on the expected need reduction that the action will take, then organised into a priority list of highest to lowest need reduction. The highest action is the one that is executed until the need is satisfied enough that the action is no longer the highest (plus an additional ‘resistance to change’ amount to keep them from always swapping from one task to the next and losing time on travelling).

Exerting Control
The player can interact with the Actions by placing more or less emphasis on that action by spending power points. This can be used to raise non-desirable actions (such as digging) into top priority, or to remove NPC actions that are not contributing to the player’s expectations (such as relaxing). Since the actions are given inputs from the need system there will be no way to completely stop a mandatory action (such as sleeping or eating) but they can be suppressed so that other action can take precedence for longer periods.

Needs
This is a list of needs and a brief description of how they will be expected to change over time.
Sleep - ramps up on an exponential scale
Eat - Ramps up on an exponential scale
Chaos - Slowly increases over time depending on their desire for chaos.
Safety - Usually 0. Increases when enemy is in sight, and ramps up depending on their assessment of a battle. Should be maxxed if they think the next round will kill them.
Happiness:

Owning space gives a set amount of happiness per hour depending on the mercenary’s desire for space.
Owning items gives a set amount of happiness per hour depending on the mercenary’s desire for that type of item. May be too complex an interface for little reward. Might simply make a ‘desirable item’ shortlist akin to dwarf fortress preferences and mainly include useable weapons.
Increasing Riches gives a one-time boost to happiness depending on the desire for riches. This may be triggered by getting %loot from kills, or by regular negotiated payments. Happiness gain indirectly proportional to their current wealth.
Doing Work drops happiness depending on their desire for the task done (Guarding, Digging, Building, Set traps, etc)
Faction likes/dislikes can influence happiness when they see mercenaries or heroes of an opposing faction. Can be used to introduce incompatible mercenary mixes such as dark dwarves and dark elves, Ors and goblins, etc, or encourage hiring similar types of mercenaries (or keep them VERY separated)

Actions
This is a list of actions and the needs that they fulfil
Eat - Attempts to go to home or designated dining hall and eats. Should drop hunger to 0 in a couple of turns.

Sleep - Returns home or to a designated barracks and sleeps. Should drop need for sleep AFTER waking (~5 turns?), so if they are sleeping they will still be unsatisfied if another action takes priority (an attack occurs threatening safety)

Guard location - Attempt to go to a location and remain alert. Generates unhappiness depending on desire for guarding. Player needs to exert control for this action to be considered. Elevates attack options once location is reached. Can also be used to suppress prisoners if guarding an prison area.

Patrol between locations - Attempt to walk between multiple locations and remain alert. Generates unhappiness depending on desire for guarding. Player needs to exert control for this action to be considered. Can also be used to suppress prisoners if guarding an prison area.

Defend Home - Return home and guard. Increases priority if enemy in home. Increases priority if personal safety is at risk. Increases priority depending on mercenary wealth. Decreases happiness depending on desire for guarding, but not as much as guarding location (1/4?)

Attack Character - Attacks the designated character. Can be elevated into priority by sighting someone when guarding, or to a lesser extent sighting an enemy when doing another task. Use aggression attribute? Decreases Chaos need. Increases safety need (indirectly proportionally to aggression?)
This action will be replaced by modes of attack such as:

Attack character with melee weapons
Attack character with ranged weapons
Attack character with ability X

Attack toward location - Move to location with very highly elevated attack character action pending. If any enemy is in sight, attack nearest. Player needs to exert control for this action to be considered.

Hide for Ambush at location - Move to location and wait for adjacent enemy before initiating an attack. Generates unhappiness depending on desire for guarding/ambush.

Flee - Generic flee action that will attempt to run away from the source of the damage. May lead to mercenary getting caught or corralled into a corner. Increases priority with Safety need and escalates so that it should be top priority if they perceive that they will die next turn. Reduces with reduction in safety concerns (no-one hitting them last turn, no-one in sight, health above 50%, etc.)

Flee to location - Uses flee mechanic, but has a specific location that they will attempt to get to rather than simply going away from the battle. Will usually be lower than Flee itself, but offers the player a way to exert control over where the mercenary should retreat to. A* to location needed as a weight against this action, especially if it takes them through the battle. I’d anticipate that building small hides and a fairly large sustained investment into this action will keep most mercenaries alive, even through wipes.

Go to location - Basic movement. Most actions will incorporate this action into their own, so this one is specifically designed for players to dictate a location change (say, going to the throne room for further instructions). Most likely used as a once-off power placement. Little to no interaction from needs. Possibly generate unhappiness at same rate as transporting goods.

Dig Nearest - Assign character to continually dig out designated areas. Decreases happiness depending on desire for mining. Player needs to exert control for this action to be considered. Digging skill increases digging speed.

Dig Location - Assign character to dig out a specific location rather than digging any designated area. Decreases happiness depending on desire for mining. Player needs to exert control for this action to be considered. Digging skill increases digging speed.

Mine nearest Gold - Phase 2 of digging that separates extracting gold from deposits rather than simply digging anything. Designated area produces a large quantity of gold before disappearing rather than being mined out quickly like any other rock. Digging skill increases quantity of gold mined.

Mine Gold at location - As above, but with a specific location designated.

Extract nearest Gems - Phase 2 of digging that separates extracting gems, rather than simply digging anything. Designated area will eventually produce a large gem capable of channeling power, along with potential minor gems for throwaway use (on heroes). Digging skill increases chance that gems retain their maximum size.

Extract Gems at location - As above, but with a specific location designated.

Build Wall - Construct a wall following the designated tiles. Need to also remove ownership of tile, or reduce their potential to provide happiness. Decreases happiness depending on desire for building. Player needs to exert control for this action to be considered.

Build Trap - Construct a trap at specified location. Need to reduce the potential of the tile to provide happiness to owner. Decreases happiness depending on desire for building. Player needs to exert control for this action to be considered. Trap skill increases the level of the trap set (to compare against hero detection / disarming skill)

Manufacture item X - Phase 2. Construct an item using materials. Priority increases with availability of resources and desire to construct. Decreases happiness depending on desire for manufacture. Some mercenary types (or captured blacksmiths) may spontaneously attempt this, but will be predominantly player driven.

Transport item to location - Move an item from its current position to another. Most likely triggered by heroes dropping loot. Can be used by player to reorganise gems and equipment use. Decreases happiness depending on desire for transporting.

Relax - Returns to home and slowly generates happiness. More or less a default action for unhappy mercenaries. More than likely this one will be reduced, or other actions that gain happiness increased for more efficient happiness management.

Raid village - Should have a number of options under this one for each type of raid (raid for items / money, Capture prisoners, Cause chaos). Priority changed by chaos, security, unhappiness. Successful raids reduce chaos and increase happiness.

Capture character - Make into prisoner. Can be used against raiding heroes, or against town.

Raid dungeon - Send them out against another player.

Pick a fight - Increases with Chaos and presence of opposing factions.

Revolt - Severe unhappiness for an extended duration. Usually means that space / money / items are not sufficient to keep the character under control. Will attempt to leave the dungeon. May also be used for prisoners who feel that potentially dying on their way to the front door is better than continuing on.

Get Payment - Go to vault and attempt to extract any outstanding payment. Priority increases with unhappiness. Successful payment increases happiness by an amount dependent on the character’s current wealth. Failure to retrieve payment decreases happiness further, but also dampens this type of happiness gathering for a moderate period so that they may try other avenues of gaining happiness (like relaxing)

Take ownership of location - Increases the space owned by the character. This may be available under severe unhappiness, but will be mainly used by the player to increase the happiness regeneration flowing from the character’s increased levels, or increased wealth.

Take ownership of item - Marks the item as now belonging to the character. Triggered by loot drops when %loot contracts are used. Can also be used to forcibly transfer someone else’s item to this creature, with appropriate anger from victim. Can be used by the player to give new weapons or gems from the vault.

Give ownership of location to character - Remove ownership of space and transfer it to another character. Creature competing the transfer will be angry on the loss of space, but not as angry as if it’s been taken from him. Very unlikely to be triggered naturally, but gives a way for the player to adjust their mercenary structure.

Give ownership of item to character - As above, but utilising item in the creature’s posession.

Sign new contract - Demand a new contract be signed. Priority increased through consistent unhappiness or multiple gains of levels. One step before revolting, and possibly linked to an email out to the player. Can also be triggered by the player to negotiate different payment methods (most likely with a once-off power payment)

(Mainly) Hero Specific:

Escort Prisoner - Attempt to move with the prisoner to the entrance. If they make it they are credited with rescuing that prisoner.
Disarm Trap - Apply disarming skill to any detected trap. Priority increases significantly when a trap is near and known. Ramps up with expectation of successful disarming.
Search for secret doors / traps - Apply searching skill rather than moving on quickly. Priority increased with searching skill and hero aggressiveness.

A Notorious Holiday (Pt 2)

2011-07-11T19:31:00.002+10:00

After fleshing out the design document with all the new ideas, it was time to start looking into coding. My first port of call was the ToME engine as it had a promising glimpse of a realtime roguelike example module. Unfortunately the module didn't work out of the box, but finally a forum post cleared up the issue.

Spent a couple of hours setting up the dev environment and compiling the ToME source code, only to find out that the vast majority (if not all) of the module can be handled exclusively by the LUA module documents. First impressions of the system are great as it was pretty easy plugging in a bit of code from the ToME module and getting it working. I did have some issues trying to debug certain errors, but once I realised all output was going to the log file and not to the console, it made it a lot more straightforward to see what needed to be imported to get a certain piece of code working.

The development path is pretty much set for either the full game or along way into the prototyping phase with the wealth of extras that T-engine4 gives me.

Projected development:
- Recompile T-engine - Done, although not needed
- Set up a new module based off the realtime example - Done. 30 mins
- Bring in new entities that are on the player's side - Done. 4h. Pinched the summoning code. Bit messy as it used the party system that was non-existent in the example module. Lots of new code brought in that may or may not help.
- Bring in the party system - Done. 2h. After revisiting the ToME module it seems like the party system might work well for flipping control between the mercs on your side. I'm not sure whether I'll need the party display though.
- Have vision from all minions. 3h. 80%. Worked in the first 1/2 hr, but now it seems inconsistent. Hopefully it's only an incorrect assumption about the caching, but I've seen enough to know that it's definitely possible.

- Spawn in a hero and move it toward the player. Hopefully the minions are able to react and fend off the hero. Will need to open up state-based AI transitions.
- AI code to move hero toward arbitrary location.
- AI code to make hero explore.
- Build governor AI to swap between AI states depending on priorities.
- AI code to make hero retreat.
- Allow minions to retreat to arbitrary point
- Create a digging AI task for minions.
- Allow player to influence minion priorities.
- Build power system for player
- Tidy up minion influence interface to make it viable for realtime play. Goto X, stop, Fight, Flee, dig, transport.

- Create standard dungeon layout with initial home stone placement and initial Gemkeeper minion.
- Limit movement and appearance of player to home stone.

- Build Gem Detection spell
- Build Gem Linking spell
- Build Vision spell
- Build Communication spell
- Build Exert control spell (interface onto merc AI priorities?)
- Create 10-20 mercs and test.
- Build Merc selection interface
- Integrate merc happiness system into AI priorities
- Designation of ownership
- Designation of rooms (vault / prison / throneroom / retreats)
- Collect hourly payments from vault

- Design village raids
- Design rumour system
- Design village (?). allow swapping of interfaces to see village raids
- Design notoriety boards
- Design merchant
- Design Black market

- Link notoriety to power gain.
- Create more heroes / Mercs and play-balance notoriety.
- Release version 0.1

GameLog 206 & 207

2011-07-11T03:48:00.004+10:00

Steam summer sales to the rescue. Lots of bargain bin play and additional achievements to chase.

Civ V (22h) - Rome Rising scenario. Almost a total conversion, and the changes have made the game feel very much like you're playing Rome in its infancy. Map, Tech and AI gives rise to a typical Roman expansion path. Reminds me somewhat of Philip of Macedon in that it makes me want to know more about the actual history of the Roman rise to power.

Grepolis (15h) - 12 cities. 105th. Back into a groove of morning, midday and night time farming runs, plus a little bit of occupation with the freedom that the holidays allows me.

Terraria (12h) - Digging with Cam.

Solar 2 (9h) - Exceptional little Indie title I picked up just before the steam sales. Feel a long time ago now though.

Magicka (8h) - Fun little game. Controls take a bit to get used to, but should be great at LAN.

Mount & Blade: Warband (7h) - New female campaign to chase a ticket.

Shogun: Total war 2 (6h) - New Date' and Tokugawa campaigns to chase tickets.

Guardians of Graxia (6h) - Was meaning to pick this up and give it a go earlier, but never got around to it. Plays somewhat like a tabletop game mixed with Magic: the gathering. Seems a little limited to keep me entertained with all the other stuff I've just picked up.

ToME (5h) - New work starting on Notorious using the ToME engine. Started another play through to see how the new party system works.

League of Legends (5h) - A couple of games a night up in Mackay with brothers.

Hoard (2h) - More fun chasing tickets.

TF2 (2h) - Even more fun. With TF2 going free 2 play, it's going to get a bit more of an airing.

AI war (1h) - Bit too complex to get into during alll the mayhem of the sales and the Mackay trip. Might need to revisit it once things settle down.

Dawn of War 2 (1h) - Last Stand fun at LAN.

Moonbase Alpha (1h) - Limited LAN airing. Pretty fun pinching the dune buggy, but the interface is pretty bad for serious play.

A Notorious Holiday

2011-07-07T08:36:00.003+10:00

The semester break has been great, especially after finding out I had 3 weeks off instead of 2. I know I'll need about a week to get things organised for next semester, and we'd already organised a week up in Mackay, so the additional week has meant extra time for Notorious design and possibly programming. I've already spent about 3 days going over the design with anyone that will listen, and have discovered a couple of critical pieces to smooth out the concept into a logical, cohesive environment. I've also moved the majority of the documentation into a google document for easier layout control, but will attempt to log the design progress here too.

Focus gems
I'd been flitting around with the idea of using some sort of amulets or the like to utilize the powers of the player, or possibly direct spells, but it was all a bit up in the air. Making the decision to move to exclusively gem-based spells have tidied up a lot of loose ends. Now the players are effectively ethereal beings (more work on that yet) that use gems to focus their power. They have a 'home stone' (a large gem located somewhere in the dungeon) that they primarily link to, and then can manipulate other gems in their immediate vicinity. Base spells are available to discover gems and link to them, then linked gems can have vision, communication or control over the bearer. Limiting the amount of focus gems allows players to make interesting choices in terms of utilising them for scouting, more minions, infiltration, etc.

Having the home stone instead of the actual player allows a logical way of keeping the player safe through dungeon wipes, but also allows high level play to include unlinking the player from their dungeon effectively starting them again (depending on their latent power).

Gemkeepers
The Gemkeepers are a Hidden Society that knows somewhat of the player's ability to link to gems. They believe that by helping these beings, they too may be able to claim power over the world. Gemkeepers actively seek out gems large enough to be linked to and attempt to prepare the gem to be linked. Contrary to the Gemkeeper’s beliefs, the gems do not need any special preparation for linking, but the existence of the Gemkeepers does make it easier to get started in your notorious career.

Acolyte Gemkeepers have no master, and scour the countryside looking for a suitable gem. Once located (using Gem Detection spell at power level similar to their level), they dig out a corridor to the gem and, while they are waiting for a presence to appear, they keep digging out more and more of a throne room around the gem as well as a place for themselves to live. They also make themselves known to the local town or village using a secret identity to hide their real aim of being here. Acolytes spend as much of their time as possible in the throne room, hoping to be the first one that the presence links to. For this to occur, Acolytes carry a quite precious gem (or possibly several) with them to make the linking process easier.

The number of Acolytes are significantly higher than the number of Linked Ones (full members of the Gemkeeper Society who have successfully been linked to an Ethereal Being) and it may take a lifetime for an Acolyte to become linked, if ever. Acolytes learn from the Linked Ones about what generally goes on once linked in somewhat vague terms. It is common knowledge within the society that a gem of a certain size and quality is needed to host a presence, that they will then use the main gem (home stone) to link with other gems, and that the presence can then communicate to and influence creatures holding those gems.

If an Ethereal Being links to an uncovered gem (new players automatically find uncovered gems), they will often see the Acolyte Gemkeeper in the throne room, calling out ‘Link to me master!’, ‘Speak to me!’, ‘Let me be your right hand man!’.

GameLog 202-205

2011-06-27T15:55:00.003+10:00

Work got crazy. 120 hours of marking & reporting done outside of the usual teaching & planning.

Grepolis (10h) - VRBones, rank 148, 9 cities. Placed Grepo into vacation mode until reports had been finished, but it's feeling a little too grindy now. Might be on its last legs.

League of Legends (10h) - Comp Stomps are still entertaining, if only to see other players bring in the new chars.

Frozen Synapse (10h) - Picked this one up after reporting as it sounded interesting from the GWJ podcast. Plays pretty well, but not sure if it's going to be around in a while.

Civ 5 (5h) - Rise of Rome scenario. Seemed to be running really slowly. Not sure if it was the huge map size or the mod, or the windowed mode. Ended up being pincered by the Illyrians. Makes me want to play Hegemony: Phillip of Macedon again.

Learn 2 Fly (3h) - Kongregate winner.

Hacker Evolution (1h) - Demo. Thought I'd played it, and after one level I remembered why I stopped. Everything is scenario based rather than being an open world like Uplink.

Monday Night Combat (1h) - Plays Ok as a potential LAN game, but now that TF2 is free it's dead in the water.

5yo StarcraftII Tutor

2011-06-26T04:09:00.003+10:00

Cam had one of his friends over for his birthday and tried to teach him Starcraft II. It was quite interesting seeing all the things he knew about the game, more than I thought he had digested. He generally plays vs Easy AI's in 1v1, 2v2 and 4v4, but spends a lot of time watching others fight (or being distracted by the TV or other PC) rather than concentrating on his own build. He's also completed some of the challenges, but it doesn't look like the strategy of counter-building has transferred into his gameplay.

What's interesting is the battle over the mouse. When I taught Cam Starcraft at the start of the year I went through the same pains of just wanting to show him with the mouse rather than letting him maintain control. It was almost unbearable watching him struggle with communicating what steps were needed to be done next, and attempting to keep his hands off. I managed to only butt in twice, both times simply to correct pronunciation of words.

Audio was pretty low and I missed an entire section when setting up the bath for them, but still happy I got that recorded.

GameLog 200 & 201

2011-05-30T19:48:00.004+10:00

Was going to do a reflection piece fo rthe 200th GameLog, but it'll have to wait for the holidays, totally snowed under at the moment.

Grepolis (40h) - VRBones, rank 159, 5 cities. Guesstimate at the time as it keeps sneaking a 1/2 hr or hour off me a couple of times a day. Farming is still painful, but the alliance certainly makes it play out longer.

Terraria (15h) - Steam says 35h, but I've left a server up and I think it must have tracked that (or Cam has been sneaking in more than I thought)

League of Legends (5h) - little filler time between the 40 minute grepo farming runs. Record for comp stomp now 15:57

Nothing else to report. Not even a facebook game. Feeling very edgy to code something, so I think oveer these hols in a couple of weeks I might start on Notorious or finish up Factor Friends

GameLog 198 & 199

2011-05-15T23:22:00.003+10:00

Grepolis 2 (30h) - Maturing into mid-game. Alliance banter and teammanship is keeping me in it.

Mount & Blade: Fire & Sword (24h) - Present from Greig for my birthday. Plays a little more randomly as one stray bullet can kill you instantly. More like a lottery whether you get through a battle unscathed. Bit more work on the quests and storyline, but it still has a number of times when you know what you want to do, but don't know how to tell the game how to do it. Played a number of characters, but I don't seem to be able to get in on one of the sides. They want me to be more noted, although it feels like I've been playing more than native mode.

League of Legends (8h) - vs AI games go less than 30 mins now; just neatly under a 40 mins grepo farming pass.

Universe Sandbox (2h) - Another steam game for my birthday. Pretty impressive real time gravity manipulation. Might be a good one for Cam, or school science.

GameLog 196 & 197

2011-05-02T19:41:00.002+10:00

2 weeks of holidays. Far too many games to catch up on.

Grepolis 2 (65h) - OCD heaven. click, click ... click. New farming system is worse than farmville, but the alliance is worth the hassle.

Portal 2 (12h) - Pretty good single player, but puzzles and a single path means either the story or the puzzles suffer. It's the puzzles.
Multiplaye looks pretty good so far, and hints at a long term release of puzzles (hopefully with a level builder)

League of Legends (10h) - vs AI games go less than 30 mins now; just neatly under a 40 mins grepo farming pass.

Starcraft 2 (4h) - Cam has been playing lots of starcraft, and has recently found 2v2 and 4v4 maps. Played a couple myself and can handle 4v4 mediums vs hards. nice way to ease into a balanced competitive environment. Cam spends most of his time looking at what the other AI's are building though.

Hoard (2h) - LANs a bit.

Warhammer 40K Dawn of War (2h) - Some last stand shenanigans

Dragon Age Legends (1h) - Facebook game from Soren Johnson.

GameLog 189 - 195

2011-04-18T21:13:00.003+10:00

Wow, 6 weeks since a GameLog.

Shogun: total war 2 (95h) - Played througha couple of campaigns to get the feel of it, and have just about finished a legendary campaign for the Shimazu. I'm afraid that the Tokugawa are only a couple of turns away from winning though. Plays really well, and feels like a well polished version of the original.

Grepolis 2 (15h) - High Notes alerted me to a new version of Grepolis, but I missed the start due to teaching. I'm 4 days behind, but keeping pce with the leaders. Currently 400th on server. Virus seems fresh and active, so I think that'll make the game stay in rotation for a while.

League of Legends (10h) - Off and on again relationship with LoL. Pretty much only play with brothers or at LANs now. Versus AI has been a nice change and I'm surprised they are offering IP for it.

Hoard (9h) - Been following this for the 360, and it's finally made a debut on steam. A little bit buggy, but an excellent LAN game.

Dragon Age Legends (3h) - Facebook game from Soren Johnson. Plays Ok, but still is a little light on for me to take it seriously.

Minecraft (3h) - Little bit of LAN filler. New versions are coming out a lot more regularly now, so it's good that it's getting more assets and ideas. Feels more and more like Dwarf Fortress ...

Feels like I'm missing a few, but that'll do for now ...

Factor Friends v0.2

2011-04-12T16:19:00.004+10:00

Ok, main look and feel all done. If you select any of the cards in your hand it is highlighted in gold, and all possible places where you can put the card on the board are also highlighted. The check to see if one is a factor or not (one of the key parts of the card-based game for year8 maths) is probably going to be the shortest function in the whole program.

Next up, moving the selection to the board if it's a valid choice, then swap the players. All the back end is done for player hand rotation, all I need to do is flip a turn counter and refresh the hand area.

Might even be able to get a quick end-game check in there and have a fully functioning game for next revision (albeit with pre-determined cards).

Factor Friends v0.1

2011-04-12T13:08:00.004+10:00

After a couple of days of solid game playing, I feel back to normal. The last couple of weeks have been so crazy marking and preparing for classes that I've hardly played a thing (I guess I should get back into GameLogs too).

I woke up this morning with a hankering to code. Might have been some of the TopCoder vids I found on youTube, or just something in my mind wanting to relax in a different way. Anyways, I've found myself happily coding away for the past 3 hours (with a splash of Grepolis).

One of the students at school is working on developing Factor Friends for the iPhone (or Mac at least), but I thought I'd give it a go too using some stock VB stuff. The aim would be how much of the game I can get done in a day.

Well, so far so good. I have the basic game board laid out using buttons and another set of buttons for the player's hand. The pic to the left shows some test data overlaid onto the buttons (showing the coordinate system used for the underlying array) as well as a sample starting hand.

There are 6 arrays so far that store the data for the game: BoardValue, BoardValueOwner, HandValue and HandStatus for each player. With these in place and the refresh subroutines built, I can now simply call RefreshBoard or RefreshHand to display whatever the game logic dictates.

Biggest hurdle so far has been attempting to use pointers. I wanted to store a similar sized array of pointers to the buttons so that I could refactor the refresh code into a simple loop rather than having many repeated lines of code for each array position matching up to the correct button. Wasn't a big deal at the start, but once there started to be 7 or so lines per button, the code looked pretty unmaintainable. Searched around for a bit, but nothing seemed to allow me to reference the buttons using a stored pointer or the like. I eventually came up with a new subroutine that accepts a button, and the current staus and value to set it to. Worked a treat and much neater.

With the board in place, the next thing to do is to get the player interaction working.

Looks like I can bind multiple buttons actions to the dame subroutine, and I can also reference the sender to the event handler as the button clicked. That will make the hand and board UI pretty easy.

I'm also hoping to have the clicked card eventually track to the clicked board position (if legitimate, need to get a validation routine working too), then disappear from the player's "hand". Should be pretty easy using a timer and some slide-in, slide-out animations. Not sure what happens to the button when it's in transition though, can I lock the whole UI down until the animation is finished?

GameLog 187 & 188

2011-03-07T18:13:00.002+10:00

Champions online (10h) - Just gone F2P in time for the Saturday LAN. Plays a lot like City of Heroes, and seems to have enough to play without bouncing off the paywall.

Football Manager 2011 (7h) - Currently ~10th in Conference Premier with a fairly good run under our belt. Team is confident, but a mid-table or slight chance at playoffs could be all that's achievable this season.

Shogun: total war 2 (2h) - Played through the 5Gb(!) demo

League of Legends (1h) - LAN starter

GameLog 185 & 186

2011-02-21T19:11:00.002+10:00

Football Manager 2011 (30h) - Steam reckon's 70 hours this fortnight, but I know there was times I left FM11 going while I did other things. I'd even had it going in the background as Cam played Civ, so I'm thumbing about 30 hours of actual play time.

Finished Conference South in 2nd and managed to claim the promotion spot. Now with 18 new signings we're settling into a mid-table position. Hopefully there's some extra spark to take the team further, but even a year in conference won't be too bad as div2 looks a big step up indeed.

Dungeon Demo (2h) - Played the demo to see how it compared to notorious. Couple of interesting takeaways:
- They have an avatar in the game constantly
- area is controlled instead of assuming it is yours
- Heroes are encouraged to take treasure to mak them happy, then you bleed them of happiness to power spells. A somewhat convoluted way of converting money into mana.
- Instead of blocking off dungeons ala TD, dungeon structure is more about enticing the heroes further in.

Rift (2h) - New MMO I'm betatesting.

Vintage display ensures Woking victory

2011-02-13T02:20:00.003+10:00

Woking 2 - 1 Dover Athletic (Blue Square Bet South Playoff Final)

Woking taught Dover Athletic a lesson at Kingfield Stadium this afternoon.

Striker Leighton McGivern gave Woking the lead with a real poacher's effort in the 21st minute. An error from Dover's Tom Wynter allowed centre-back Adam Doyle to score a good header from just inside the six-yard box. Striker Adam Birchall had a chance to score from the penalty spot for The Whites on the 38 minute mark but missed his spot-kick.

He was able to make amends for his miss however by scoring an accurate finish after 77 minutes.

Talented manager Veeyar Bones has been at Woking for 7 months, having joined them in October 2010.

Attendance: 3,705

Bones praised by Woking faithful
Fans of Woking were justly proud after the team gained promotion from the Blue Square Bet South.

Fans and pundits alike were unanimous that the person responsible for the team's success was Veeyar Bones.

One fan commented that with Bones at the helm he felt that anything was possible.

Starting unemployed, I joined Woking at about October with the promotion candidates languishing down in 15th. Cleaned up the Back-room staff and brought in one or 2 players to turn the season around, with a comfortable 2nd in the league and an easy 5-2, 2-1 finals campaign to get the promotion. Now to clean house with the players to get the finances back on track.

Teaching week 2 & 3

2011-02-11T12:06:00.003+10:00

It seems like Friday of week A has enough spares that I can set time aside for reflection, so a bi-weekly summary might be enough until I can get everything else under control. Hopefully this will be a couple of updates a week once I settle on a format I'm comfortable with.

With week 3 done, most classes are now firmly into the topic for the first term. I've had to take a reality check with most of the subjects, as I'm simply unable to implement all the changes I wanted this year. For some classes I might have another opportunity to get stuff ready by 2nd semester, but for now I'm a little disappointed that I have to 'lean' on textbooks to get through.

The reason for the cutback is pretty simple. Time. My initial intent was to stay back after school and prepare everything for the next day before heading home. I seem to work well in a work environment, even if it means working until a problem is complete rather than working up to a certain time. When I used to work from home as a contract programmer I found it hard to get going (too many games?), but once I'm in the zone late at night, I'd work into the wee hours of the morning. With a rigorous timetable, the late nights will need to go...

Time. The first couple of weeks were pretty crazy with a lot of extra time devoted to getting changes to the work program in place, but I was expecting it would settle down by, say, about now. It doesn't look like it's happening though. Most nights I'm still here after 6pm just covering the basics for the next day or responding to issues or emails arising from the day. I need to bail by then so that I still get to have Dinner with the kids, but even that's been missed more often than not. I'm left with an option I wanted to avoid, take work home. Recently it's also been exacerbated by meetings for school council and youth ministry cutting short the preparation time at the school. There's more meetings on the horizon too, so it's only going to get worse.

All the new teachers to the school gathered on Monday to discuss any issues, and although there were a dozen new teachers to the school, only 2 of us were first year teachers. The prognosis about the workload seemed to be confirmed: Yep, that's natural when you're starting off. You will get better at it, but it might take a couple of years. Probably 5. Holidays also came under the firing line and it was revealed from long-time teachers that only the Christmas holidays allowed you to actually relax. The other times you're still in 'teacher mode'.

Getting used to this 'teacher mode'. Always a teacher. Always...

GameLog 183 & 184

2011-02-07T20:10:00.002+10:00

Teaching-constrained gaming looks like it's going to be the norm for the forseeable future.

Football Manager 2011 (25h) - Finally got the full version. Started off unemployed and landed a spot at Woking in Conference South. I think they were supposed to be conference or maybe even div2, so it's been a pretty easy road to bring them out of the doldrums and almost into promotion contention. Some VERY nice deals landed a div1-worthy goalkeeper and a couple of loaners to prop up the wings and forwards. A bit over budget, but I'm confident we'll do enough to get the promotion.

Rift (15h) - New MMO I'm betatesting. Plays like WAR, but with dynamic public quests. Would be very interesting to explore more fully if I had the time.

Sentimentality: an interesting choice?

2011-02-05T10:12:00.002+10:00

Recently Ben published his list of attributes and features for the Game That He Would Like To Play. This is a ramble on one facet; Sentimentality as an item statistic. I don't know where it's going to end up, but it feels like a topic worth exploring.
The trigger text:

Rather than having players continually searching for new better items like in Borderlands I’d like them to all be like the Angband ego artifacts that level up as they are used, slowly getting more magical and more powerful. The longer the avatar uses a weapon type the sharper and sturdier it becomes because the avatar looks after it. This maintenance is a part of the weapons skill.
Also the avatar becomes used to the weight and feel of the weapon and so grows sentimentally attached to it, after certain time periods they notice new places that magical gems can be placed to give the weapon special abilities, like firebrand.

I, too, enjoyed ego items in angband. They were never the most powerful items you could get, but the agency they gave you in helping shape the weapon you require made them very desirable in the mid game, and certainly helped you connect and appreciate the item more. Sentimentality is certainly a neat way of attaching an in-game mechanic to an external feeling. They also happened to be a great money sink as each new ability cost more and more.

One of the problems with ego items from a gameplay standpoint is that if they are too powerful, there is no need to keep looking for other items as you have the best in the game. Each new weapon found from then on in would simply be an inconvenience, or a resource to convert to money at best. If it's inconvenient, then why have it in the game at all?

A while ago I read another article by the developer of 100 rogues on the decision to cut out the store because it didn't actually add any interesting choices. This is kind of the same topic, but from the other side. Keith saw that a game should be stripped down to a series of interesting choices, and attempted to remove any such items or game devices that seemed to get in the way. My comment on 100 rogues was that the removel of the shop didn't increase the set of interesting choices, but simply moved the same choice to the point of pickup, rather than at the point of sale once you know there is no shop.

Once you know. That's another part of analysing gameplay. It may take a number of playthroughs of a game to realise that there are elements that are simply not required. I played many, MANY games of 100 rogues with a full inventory out of sheer habit. True, I didn't come across a shop, nor did I ever actually use anything that I was carrying, but in my mind they were somehow intrinsically useful. I had to make an interesting choice as to whether the item on the ground is better than any item in my backpack (and shuffle around accordingly), with a glimmer of hope that upon completing the whole dungeon there would be a shop or possibly just a highscore modified by the loot picked up. Realising that this wasn't to be the case meant that there was no point carrying items that you had no intention of using, and therefore the item found on the floor lost their interestingness unless it competed successfullly with the items I was currently wearing.

Once you know. I've been playing ToME4 recently and have been noticing that the game is intentionally set up to be replayed. Not only does the game slowly expose other races and classes to play, but knowledge gained in previous plays can change the way you play it on subsequent visits. Once I'd cleared the starter dungeons, Bree is inundated with lightning elementals, which in turn leads the story through to a large boss battle with predominantly lightning damage. My mage had been cruising up until that point, but with no resistance to lightning damage the game got incredibly hard. My next play through as a fighter, I kept an eye out for lightning resistance items to help get past this stage. Items that may have been deemed useless in the first play through are now worthwhile, but do they warrant space in the backpack (and the weight limit) to carry through until they are needed? An interesting choice. I know most roguelikes have this type of player knowledge vs character knowledge mechanic (and some could say that it's the hallmark of a roguelike embodied in permadeath), but ToME4 seems to make it more front and centre with a more scripted experience.

On the point of ToME4, I have also stopped playing recently as a new patch removed the ability to sell items at the store. My lament was exactly the same as with 100 rogues; all it does is remove another avenue for making an item interesting (to gain money for that once-in-a-lifetime deal in a shop), and leaves the decision squarely at the point of pickup. I used to prize a girdle of carrying to give my characters more lugging power, but now you may as well just go for a resistance girdle as the only things worth retaining are gams with 0 weight and artifacts.

So back to sentimentality. As long as we're prepared to give up a reduction of choice from items, maybe there are other benifits to be gained from having sentimental items? Maybe (in a Daikatana-like fashion) the item leveling is a mechanic itself that allows for lots of variability, and that the player more or less stays with 1 item for the duration of the game? Is making an item more personal and meaningful worth it?

Recently I picked up Football Manager 11. I'd played the demo when it came out and didn't seem to be too much different from FM10, so I thought it'd be Ok to skip this year's incarnation (or at least wait for a steam sale). A number of personality oriented games had me pining for FM again, so I fired up the demo and saw how far the game had come in making the people in the game more alive. In the demo I'd received some recommendations from my back-room staff that a player wasn't performing and needed a rest. With the new interaction system I invited the player into my office for a conversation. I started off by stating what my back-room staff picked up, that he needed to have a rest due to poor performance. He responded negatively and said that he thought his performance was Ok. My options in the conversation tree were somewhat limited in how to respond, one giving an ultimatum, one conceding, and one somewhat concilliatory. Still relying on the advice of my staff, I thought that the lad just needed some discipline so I gave the ultimatum. His tone turned sour. "I don't like the way I've been treated, I'm not sure I made the right choice coming here". Hmm, wait a minute. This was someone I just put on? Upon looking at his record for the month he'd been with us his performance had been Ok. I can see why he's upset and now here I am, stuck in a room with a person that has legitimately claimed to be mistreated. The options in the dropbox weren't pretty either, so I'd effectively scuttled my relationship, and thus the performance of this player for the team by not paying attention and investing time to know the players.

On the other side of the coin were a number of players that, through multiple seasons of winning against all odds and massaging them through games with half-time and full-time talks, had me down as their favourite person. It's hard letting go of someone that has you as their favourite, even if that's the most economically sound thing to do. Both of these scenarios indicate that there is intrinsic value to develop a relationship or increase sentiment with in-game objects without the need for bonuses. Or is the game giving bonuses by allowing players a little extra oomph if I'm their favourite coach? You can certainly help prolong a winning streak by keeping everyone's morale high. I don't get the feeling that a player, through sheer sentimentality, will stay with the team all the way from Conference South up to the Premiership. The emotional attachment still is evident in the game, and the game encourages and rewards sentimentality, but not at the expense of the core mechanic of continually needing to search for the next big star.

Teaching week 1

2011-01-28T14:24:00.003+10:00

At the end of Week 1 into the journey of high school teaching I'm a little stressed, a little excited at the opportunities, and tired, very tired. I knew toward the end of last year that I'd be revamping the 11/12 work program, but arriving at the school for the first time as a teacher it seems that the 7-10 work program is also inline for an upgrade.

I knew last year that I'd be wanting to use Moodle for most of my courses. The content is largely self-paced already, so having the course work in Moodle allows easier submission / marking than before. Homework wasn't a strong point in the old work program, so moving to moodle will also allow students to continue their work from home, or catch up lessons if missed. The main reason though, is the hope that moodle community hubs have a very big opportunity to bring the diverse leaning environments I would want in a VLE of the future, and I want to be there either as a course creator, a community hub manager, or simply as a teacher with many more options.

Maths has been a dream compared to ICT/IPT. So structured, so precise. The content is still a little steep to get through, but at least you know exactly where you're going and that there's no real wiggle room. I like wiggle room, but I have that in spades through the ICT/IPT shakeup, so having a couple of courses that are largely taken care of has been an unexpected blessing.

Of the 4 classes that have participated in the "Introduction to Moodle" course that I put together, most have had difficulties with technology at some point through the process. New accounts and password resetting eats up a more time than it should, emails are finally being set up properly, but there are still teething issues with that process, and the login process onto moodle itself is not straight forward and needs direct instruction at critical points along the way. One class was completely derailed by student not having access to their documents directory. I know it's teething issues, and I know from being over on the other side of the phoneline that there are legitimate reasons for the hiccup, but it still wiped out all the progress the students could have made during that lesson to establish their moodle access. When technology fails, it tends to fail specacularly, and that 1-2 minute window you have for attempting to fix the issue before the kids lose patience is too narrow to do anything substantial about it while standing up the front.

Thinkin' on your feet? Yep, need that.

GameLog 181 & 182

2011-01-24T22:52:00.002+10:00

Teaching starting to take its toll on games played.

ToME 4 (35h) - Lots of different characters, but more importantly more inspiration for Notorious.

Football Manager 2011 Demo (12h) - Revisited the 2011 demo and it's a more complete game than what I recalled. More dynamic and alive players, with more personal feel to it. Steam still has it at $90 which is completely unacceptable for a 4 month old game in post-steam-sale times. Found it for $30 in a

Dwarf Fortress (4h) - Few more dwarves. Almost time to dig down.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (3h)

Green Artery

2011-01-23T23:28:00.001+10:00

View Larger Map

My new desktop ...

Notorious Scenarios

2011-01-18T22:01:00.003+10:00

Here's 2 different scenarios of the way people might play Notorious :
A casual gamer starts off and designates a large cavern to be dug initially. 1/2 way through digging it all out they decide to pick up some gobbos to protect the front door and choose a regenerative contract/agreement. They leave the game for a day, and come back to a completely dug out cavern, in which the gobbos are currently wiping out a level 2 warrior. They tinker with 'Gobfast', the elite leader to help gain a win in the battle. They then review the summary reports and find out that they have managed to kill a level 3 mage at some point (named Dorf the Magnificent) so they are now rated at level 3, and they have had 5 'wipes' by seeing 5 other elite gobbo names in the death register. They go about designating another 3 caves to be dug out, and also upgrades the contract to get more out of the open space that's available.

Next day they have gone through another 7 wipes, but the improved contract means they managed to squeeze the life out of a level 4 druid named Fenris. 1 of the 3 caverns have been dug out, so they go about setting up another regenrative contract in the new area. After viewing a couple of their friend's dungeons, they decide to change the layout a little to set up a trap room first up, as well as a space for tresure toward the back. They also manage to pinch some villiagers to get the digging going. Logging back in the next day they see another 2 rooms have been opened up, but it looks like there's just been a wipe. Instead of waiting for the place to repopulate through the contract, they cancel it and set up a few new ones to try out skeletons instead. The trap room needs a bit of investment, so they raid the villiage for money, then spend it on buying traps. They tinker with exploring a couple of other dungeons before logging off.

An active gamer starts the game and designates a large room. After a couple of minutes poking around they realise that they can get in villiagers to help dig. With virtually no cash, they sign up an ogre with 80% salvage rights in the new space dug out. The ogre is sent off to the villiage to grab some farmers. The ogre arrives back with 5 farmers and they are immediately pressganged into digging. While they dig, the player looks into the rumours and sees that the ogre has attracted attention. He successfully plants a rumour that the ogre headed east instead of south. Most other rumours from the east seem to be also talking about an ogre, so he elects to pay 5 gold to share sight with Rofl, a human invoker heading east. Rofl successfully navigates a trap field (through a map from previous heroes that have wiped the dungeon), but gets nailed by a boss ogre that rushes out of a hidden door. With new information about a neighbour and dungeon layouts, the player then looks into picking up some hidden doors and decides to immediately start building a vault room with secret door instead of finishing the main room.

More rumours surface that the ransom for the missing farmers is now 10 gold each, and Flippit the thief managed to find the dungeon and excape before being pasted by the ogre. Fearing a big attack, the player ransoms the farmers to drop his notoriety and gain some cash. He puts in some low level bandits into the 1/2 built vault, and puts them to work digging. The bandits impression of the player drops pretty quickly and before long they are revolting. they go out into the main hall to protest, but fall victim to an ogre club through the brain. Oh well, at least the ogre is a little more experienced. The player sends out the ogre again to pinch some peasants, while installing a skeleton into the 1/2 built vault. The ogre dies in the attempt, so the player sets up another contract for a goblin elite to stay in the 1/2 dug main hall with up to 5 goblin minions, then logs off. They log on in a couple of hours and the report shows that the goblins managed to kill 5 heroes (Highest lvl 3) before they fell, but the skeletons haven't been touched. The player then goes about recruiting more goblins for the space freed and replacing the skeletons with a paid outright ogre (since the vault has survived and is now large enough to house an ogre).

After the first day, the active player has a little more space due to the farmers in use early, and has been able to react to new information more quickly to advance his dungeon layout. He has also had more fun interacting with the world and other players. The causal player sees greater increases in play between sessions because things set in motion (digging out rooms, etc) have come to pass by the time they log in. If played well (eg; a restarting player), the casual player could be very close to the level of an active player as ultimately dungeon design and size is what opens up higher and higher levels.

Notorious ideas

2011-01-16T08:10:00.003+10:00

I've been playing ToME a fair bit recently (mainly due to the automatic uploads ) and have been mulling over whether it's a good platform for Notorious. ToME is module oriented already, and has a demo real time mod already available! It doesn't seem to work on my machine, but the idea that a real time mod is at least known and (supposedly) working at some point is a great start. I'd miss out on the whole facebook gaming and socialisation side of things, but would have a much bigger head start and have a number of roguelike qualities for 'free' that I wasn't intending on using. This is some thoughts on how Notorious would change if developed as a ToME module.

Elites
I had an idea initially that the majority of contracts would be with some colony of orc/gobbos/etc to supply minions at a certain rate and up to a certain limit, but also to be able to set up individual contracts with monsters that 'level up' to champion status. In ToME you already have an elite and boss status for certain monster types, and they are usually able to summon in or be in command of other minions themselves. What if all contracts are to elites or bosses, but given the space allocated and their level, they can automatically control a set number of minions?

Example: An orc elite wants an area of size 20, 50% of all money dropped, and first pick of weapons. For that he'll command up to 5 orcs, and take limited instructions. If any orcs die, he'll call for replacements that appear at the front door and walk to him.

This should make the interface a lot cleaner in that you will only have a small number of elites / bosses that you have limited control over, and your ever-faithful servant. These could be represented as icons with the elite/boss image along the top to quickly jump to them or communicate with them. it shouls also give more scope for personality within the game as you will be dealing with individuals on a regular basis.

Infinite monsters / items
One great thing about going the ToME route is that there would be many MANY monsters and items pre-existing within the game's structure that are at the game's disposal. I'd imagined having random loot drops, but having a whole swathe of monsters to potentially deal with changes the game quite considerably from the somewhat boardgamey feel I was initially thinking of. Now it's getting firmly into the simulator territory ala Dwarf Fortresss mixed with Majesty

Established hero classes
ToME already has a multitude of hero classes / abilities for the hero raiders to draw upon. The background when logging on is an AI playing the game as the hero, so the code for that section is also in place (or at least possible). This was certainly on the drawing board, and I probably don't need heroes built using a skill system such as ToME, but if they are already there and available, it will add an extra layer of realism to the game.

Communication
One of the areas I've been mulling over is how do you (the player) communicate directly to your elites / bosses? Once the agreements are in place you could assume that you have some method of communicating directly to them, but it may be more meaningful / realistic if there was some sort of focus like an amulet/ring of control that you use. This would mean that you can talk directly to them through this device, as well as have the device exert a certain amount of control
over their actions. The more powerful the amulet, the more options you have available without ruining your relationship with them. It also gives a tangible thing for the elites to take off / break if they are rebelling.

If communication happens through a device, then it would make it easier to give the device to a hero for the visibility / communication of exploring other people's dungeons, and also leave a trail of your spying if they were to be captured/killed. It would also give evidence that the dungeon you own is actually yours if you lose an elite and the hero makes it back to town.

A problem with the communication device method is that it lends itself to be a purchasable item, and thus not a sustainable resource that survives a dungeon wipe. I was hoping to use the dungeon size and decor to be the main determining factor of how big an elite you can get as that will not change (much) if the dungeon has been completely raided. If you return to the game and you have nothing left, I want it to be easy to re-establish a couple of elites into the regions that are empty (with the possibility of a totally different cohort of monsters) and get up an going again. Since your notoriety would be largely reset, the first couple of heroes entering your dungeon should be a cakewalk, and there's going to be many, many ways of raising notoriety quickly if you wanted to (town raiding/pillaging, etc). How do amulets of control survive a wipe?

Maybe the amulets are actually quite cheap for the base model (purely communication), but more expensive if you want to add additional control? But if they were cheap, why wouldn't you give one to every single minion? Maybe the amulets are generated only by your loyal servant and have a limit? this seems artificial.

Another way to look at communication is that even if you could speak to anyone, it's your reputation with them that allows you to exert any sort of control over their actions. Establishing an agreement with an elite/boss gives you a certain amount of goodwill that you can then expend through demanding actions. This would fit with my ideas of coaxing an action, not outright control. Additional goodwill can be 'bought' through the additional items / gold on top of your agreement with them, as well as increasing naturally with their general happiness inside the place.

Another way of approaching it is that a certain level of control is built into the agreements with the elites/bosses upon setup. This would give more certainty to the actions you can do, but may involve more staccato agreement re-negotiations rather than a more fluid coaxing.

Wild creatures
I was thinking this morning how you can communicate with base creatures like jellies and worms. Maybe you don't have to? Maybe you have a WildThing-in-a-box vendor that will sell you outright a critter that you can release into an area. This may also be a way for indirect leveling up if you place one inside an elite's are of control?

More ideas bubbling ...

Highscore table = win!

2011-01-10T22:43:00.003+10:00

As an old arcade fanboy and with a house of 4 boys and 1 computer, the highscore table has become somewhat of an icon for me. Being at the top is great, and being not at the top compels me into 'just one more go'. At christmas time we'd gather around someone ELSE's machine and make sure a game somewhere (usually minesweeper) has your name up the top waving down at their attempts.

When we were designing games back in the Uni days, the finishing remark was usually "Slap a highscore table on it and we're done!". Recently though games have been shying away from them, apart from notable exceptions like Bejewelled Blitz, whose highscore table is as compelling as ever.

I'm not sure I've mentioned it, but I've certainly been thinking that roguelikes really need a worldwide highscore table. Yes, there is oook as an upload spot, but in today's day and age I can't see why that couldn't be integrated into the game so that the uploads happen automatically. As it turns out ToME 4 has done just that. An automatic character progress and highscore table, with the promise of more stats to come. It's only been announced so I don't think it impacted on the Roguelike of the year votes, but it certainly will have me playing it more, and donating too.

I still think there's more to go too. World of Goo and Tower Bloxx have integrated highscores to keep you going, whereas Facebook games have a constant reminder of your position relative to friends. Maybe there's opportunity for in-game acknowledgement of a previous owner of an item, or the first person past a certain point?

There's another angle I've been mulling over too. Instead of just a highscore, have the player's story as an output. Some roguelike dumps have all the components required to tell the player's story, but leave them as cold facts sitting in their respective fields. I'm not expecting a quality AAR, but something you could read back on in a couple of months and go, yeah, that was me. I remember that.

More wishful thinking ...

GameLog 179 & 180

2011-01-10T21:47:00.004+10:00

Fantasy Wars (52h) - Hooked by the infantry upgrade system and the tactical combat optimisation. Not sure why I kkept playying this one rather than going back to elven legacy, but it was fun!

Civ V (27h) - New patch was supposed to improve the AI. Played through an interesting campaign on 7 difficulty with England. Their shipping bonus didn't seem to make tooo much difference, but 3 rang archers are AWESOME. Started sharing an island with Alexander (Greeks), and he decided it was war time just as my longbowmen arrived. Apart from a little maneuvering, I couldn't have asked for a better time. He challenged 1 city until I had the archers in place, thenn I rolled him back and took his capital before he sued for peace. 10 turns later we were at it again anf pushed him right off the island without loss.

Dwarf Fortress (20h) - Fleshymines met a sudden end when I was set upon by 3 raiding parties at once. The game seems way more agressive now and that's the firt time I've been forcibly removed rather than bailing over heavy losses. They didn't stand a chance .. and it made me sooo want to play again. New place is up to 75 strong again and has a massive drawbridge to lock us up tight in case there's a massive raid again. My 2nd level archer compound seems ineffective though as they just want to rush out instead of plugging away from their tower. Preparing for a new entryway across the river as it already looks like a fortress.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (10h) - Vargoose (50 hunter) - I'd been thinking of giving this one up before the next month's paydate as the ability for it to put me to sleep is disheartening, but the flooded thousand needles questline got me interested again. Just about finished Felwood.

Grotesque Tactics (5h) - Another steam sale. Storyline was pretty funny, but the tactics seemed off. There doesn't seem to be a rationale why you could start the turn by moving all the way to the back of your movement zone, wait, then after the AI have advanced come in and move as far forwards as if you were at the same positon as at the start of the turn (effectively doubling movement)

Minecraft (5h) - Sam started up a server on his netbook, which lasted less than a day before major lag issues kicked it into the void. Another 1-tree challenge too.

ToME 4 (5h) - As the winner of Roguelike of the Year, I picked up ToME again to see what had changed. Hmm a signin? why? Could it be? .. YES! A roguelike that finally does an autosubmit! I last played ToME back in 2008(7?) when the rebuild of 4 was being aired for the first time. It looked like it was going to be a long way off and it seems like it was. A number of good things have happened though and with a real-time module I'm very tempted to dump the HTML5 code and build Notorious as a realtime ToME mod. As I've been playing there has been more and more opportunities to leverage existing roguelike characteristics much more than I was planning. Even if it's a proof of concept it would seem easier to get up and running.

Academagia (5h) - Interesting life simulator that reads like a Harry Potter book. Nice feel to it, and you need to read through all the stuff to get the most out of it. Might be worth a rerun, but there's so many games waiting to be played ...

Prophecy

2011-01-09T11:39:00.003+10:00

Today's message was about the predicting the messiah:
prophecy.mp3

Isaiah 42:1-9

The Servant of the LORD
1 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him,
and he will bring justice to the nations.
2 He will not shout or cry out,
or raise his voice in the streets.
3 A bruised reed he will not break,
and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out.
In faithfulness he will bring forth justice;
4 he will not falter or be discouraged
till he establishes justice on earth.
In his teaching the islands will put their hope.”
5 This is what God the LORD says—
the Creator of the heavens, who stretches them out,
who spreads out the earth with all that springs from it,
who gives breath to its people,
and life to those who walk on it:
6 “I, the LORD, have called you in righteousness;
I will take hold of your hand.
I will keep you and will make you
to be a covenant for the people
and a light for the Gentiles,
7 to open eyes that are blind,
to free captives from prison
and to release from the dungeon those who sit in darkness.
8 “I am the LORD; that is my name!
I will not yield my glory to another
or my praise to idols.
9 See, the former things have taken place,
and new things I declare;
before they spring into being
I announce them to you.”

Acts 10:34-43

34 Then Peter began to speak: “I now realize how true it is that God does not show favoritism 35 but accepts from every nation the one who fears him and does what is right. 36 You know the message God sent to the people of Israel, announcing the good news of peace through Jesus Christ, who is Lord of all. 37 You know what has happened throughout the province of Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John preached— 38 how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power, and how he went around doing good and healing all who were under the power of the devil, because God was with him.
39 “We are witnesses of everything he did in the country of the Jews and in Jerusalem. They killed him by hanging him on a cross, 40 but God raised him from the dead on the third day and caused him to be seen. 41 He was not seen by all the people, but by witnesses whom God had already chosen—by us who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. 42 He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one whom God appointed as judge of the living and the dead. 43 All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name.”

Matthew 3:13-17

The Baptism of Jesus
13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to the Jordan to be baptized by John. 14 But John tried to deter him, saying, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?”
15 Jesus replied, “Let it be so now; it is proper for us to do this to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John consented.
16 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

Floods
- Survived the floods?
- Safe in Bargara
- Mum & Dad not being able to get back to the farm
- Wallaville cut. Splitters creek over.
- No Mackay trip
- Dam releasing water.
- Why? It's causing minor flooding already, why add to that?
- Prediction. There's more on the way.
- Watching the flood levels on the BoM site.
- pattern repeating itself down the river. Amount going over the dam was the same as the amount going over the weir, then the amount going under the bridge.
- There was more coming. Worse without releasing the water early?
- Weather prediction getting better?
- 9.4 metres predicted at Rockhampton
- Predicted same type of weather up to May?

What about predicting events 500 years in advance, or 1000 years or 2000 years?

Predicting the Messiah
In today's Old testament reading, Isiah lays down a glimpse of what is to come. Over 500 years before Jesus is baptised, God, through Isiah, speaks these words:

Isiah 42:1
1 “Here is my servant, whom I uphold,
my chosen one in whom I delight;
I will put my Spirit on him,
and he will bring justice to the nations.

Then in Matthew we read the baptism of Jesus:

Matthew 3:16
16 As soon as Jesus was baptized, he went up out of the water. At that moment heaven was opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. 17 And a voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”

500 years. That's a big prediction. And it doesn't stop there. Matthew, of all the Gospels, points to the fulfillment of prophecy through the life of Jesus.
The book of Matthew starts by listing the Geneology of Jesus. An interesting tactic, but probably not a best seller:

Matthew 1:1
Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac begot Jacob, and Jacob begot Judah, ...

Lots of begotting. Lots of names. The reason Matthew starts this way is also to do with prophecy. The messiah had been promised to Abraham in (Genesis 3:15), then through the line of Isaac instead of Esau (Gen 22:18), then to Jacob, Isaac's son (Numbers 24:17), Then through Judah from the 12 other sons of Jacob (Gen 49:10), all the way through to Jesse, father of David (Isiah 11:1), then to King David's line (Jeremiah 23:5). The israelites were waiting for a descendant of David to be the messiah.

Matthew continues with events surround Jesus' birth, with Mary falling pregnant as a virgin, and Joseph, a descendant of David, told to accept her as a wife and name the child Jesus by an angel. All this for another one of Isiah's prophesies. Matthew writes:

Matthew 1:22-23
22 All this took place to fulfill what the Lord had said through the prophet: 23 “The virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and they will call him Immanuel”[g] (which means “God with us”).

Next, men from the east appear proclaiming the stars have foretold a King of the Jews has just been born. More predictions, but this time ancient astrology pointing toward a momentous event.

Herod checks into it and finds that Bethlehem (King David's birthplace) is predicted by Micah (Micah 5:2) to be the birthplace of the messiah. He sends the Magi on their way to worship the new king, but then lays plans on wiping out all the kids under 2 for fear that the new king might take away his throne. A rather selfish thing to do, but it, too, fulfilled the prophecy of Jeremiah:

Matthew 2:17-18
Then what was said through the prophet Jeremiah was fulfilled:
18 “A voice is heard in Ramah,
weeping and great mourning,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.”

Mary and Joseph had been warned by an angel, and had fled to Egypt to escape the slaughter. Once herod had died they returned home back to Nazereth, which fulfilled another prophecy of Hosea:

Matthew 2:15
And so was fulfilled what the Lord had said through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called my son.”

So how many are we up to? 12? Is that enough? Not for Matthew. Even before we hear of Jesus approaching to be baptised we hear of John the Baptist's life in the desert, telling people to repent for the kingdom of heaven is near. This, too, fulfills Isiah:

Matthew 3:3
This is he who was spoken of through the prophet Isaiah:
“A voice of one calling in the wilderness,
‘Prepare the way for the Lord,
make straight paths for him.’”

You can almost hear Matthew pleading with our rational senses, and our faith in the Old Testament. How could all these things come to pass and you not acknowledge the messiah before you? And Jesus has only begun his ministry here on earth!

Apparently there are over 60 prophecies fulfilled by Jesus himself, and over 270 other phophesies and ramifications that came to pass during his time. That's a LOT of coincidences.

How much coincidence? 8 of the more notable prophesies of the messiah were examined mathematically in the 1950's. Nothing extravagent like being born of a virgin, but things like being born in Bethlehem, betrayed by a friend, for 30 pieces of silver, that they bought a field with. Things that could potentially happen to anyone.

Through conservative probability estimates they deduced the chance that this could happen to anyone that has EVER lived is 1 in 100 million, billion. Sounds big? Unimaginably big. Here's an example of how big that might be:

Imagine trying to pick the same book as me, from any book ever written, then turning to the same page, then finding the same letter on the page. 1 letter out of all the books ever written.
That's impossible? Sounds impossible. And that's 8 of the more definable prophesies out of the 60. No wonder Matthew directed us to the fulfillment of prophecy.

Jesus, too, discussed the prophesies throughout his ministry. Pointing to them as he fulfilled each one. Sometimes the disciples or the crowds gathered understood, but most times they did not. As Jesus approached Jerusalem for the last time, he became more insisent that the main prophecy was about to occur, that the "son of man was to die". He told them over and over again, but still they ran when the time came.

Alone, Jesus hung on the cross. The prophesies of Isiah from 500 years before ringing true:

Isaiah 53:3-9
Surely he took up our pain
and bore our suffering,
yet we considered him punished by God,
stricken by him, and afflicted.
5 But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
6 We all, like sheep, have gone astray,
each of us has turned to our own way;
and the LORD has laid on him
the iniquity of us all.
7 He was oppressed and afflicted,
yet he did not open his mouth;
he was led like a lamb to the slaughter,
and as a sheep before its shearers is silent,
so he did not open his mouth.
8 By oppression and judgment he was taken away.
Yet who of his generation protested?
For he was cut off from the land of the living;
for the transgression of my people he was punished.
9 He was assigned a grave with the wicked,
and with the rich in his death,
though he had done no violence,
nor was any deceit in his mouth.

Jesus, broken and battered. Hanging there. The first part of the prophecy coming to pass. The reason for all that suffering and hurt is also made clear in Isaiah as we read on:

Isaiah 53
10 Yet it was the LORD’s will to crush him and cause him to suffer,
and though the LORD makes his life an offering for sin,
he will see his offspring and prolong his days,
and the will of the LORD will prosper in his hand.
11 After he has suffered,
he will see the light of life and be satisfied;
by his knowledge my righteous servant will justify many,
and he will bear their iniquities.
12 Therefore I will give him a portion among the great,
and he will divide the spoils with the strong,
because he poured out his life unto death,
and was numbered with the transgressors.
For he bore the sin of many,
and made intercession for the transgressors.

After he has suffered, he will see the light of life.
For he bore the sins of many and made intercession for the sinners.

This is the story we all know, predicted 500 years before it happened. THAT's amazing. That's the work of an all powerful, all-knowing God. Through the prophets God revealed his way of bringing us back to the fold. To send his one and only son to take the blame for our sin and its punishment. Death. Then to rise again triumphantly.

Jesus, after living with the disciples and opening their eyes to the prophesies, lays out a final promise for them, and for us as christians as he ascends:

Matthew 28:18
18 Then Jesus came to them and said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age.”

A promise to us. I am with you always. Through rain and floods. Always.
Amen.

Foundness

2011-01-09T11:04:00.005+10:00

This was a message delivered a while back that I hadn't been able to level and upload:
Foundness.mp3

Luke 15: 1-10

The Parable of the Lost Sheep
1Now the tax collectors and "sinners" were all gathering around to hear him. 2But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."

3Then Jesus told them this parable: 4"Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it? 5And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders 6and goes home. Then he calls his friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost sheep.' 7I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

The Parable of the Lost Coin
8"Or suppose a woman has ten silver coins[a] and loses one. Does she not light a lamp, sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? 9And when she finds it, she calls her friends and neighbors together and says, 'Rejoice with me; I have found my lost coin.' 10In the same way, I tell you, there is rejoicing in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents."

Something Lost
- 2 parables today about losing things
- Expert in losing things
- Keys
- Wallets
- Bum bag fixed that
- Earliest memory of losing teddy when he was right there under my arm.
- Losing things

Are we lost?
- When I first read the 2 parables, I wondered about the coin itself. Does it know it's lost?
- Parable of the lost sheep. Does the sheep know it's lost?
- Mustering cattle. Calling the cattle with a horn. Going to new pastures. Starts a chain of moos echoing through the paddock.
- Finding the lost ones in the good places. Up in the ridges, too far away to hear the horn.
- Some even run away. Enjoying the current situation more than seeing what else is on offer.
- Are we like cattle? Too mixed up in the good things of the world to realise we're lost? Do we realise when we're sinning? Sometimes we hear Jesus' call when he comes looking for us and we turn and follow him, through the gate to the promised land. Sometimes we run.

"I cannot come to the banquet, don't trouble me now
I have married a wife, I have bought me a cow
I have fields and commitments that cost a pretty sum
Pray hold me excused, I cannot come"

We all have excuses to ignore the call of Jesus. It makes sense, totally justifiable! I have things that just can't wait! Just give me a little bit more time. One more go.
And we're the ones that know his voice. What of the people that don't know Jesus? How are they to know they are lost?

Foundness
- Todays reading starts with Jesus in the presence of "runners".

1Now the tax collectors and "sinners" were all gathering around to hear him. 2But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, "This man welcomes sinners and eats with them."

Jesus goes out, makes himself available and welcomes those that are lost. Jesus goes.
As Jesus relates the 2 parables of one lost from many, he makes clear the reasons why; the joy of finding one and bringing them back to the fold.

7 I tell you that in the same way there will be more REJOICING in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent.

The parables aren't really about losing things, it's the joy of finding.

That joy is open to us too. We, the wayward cattle that hear the call and follow to the new pastures can call out ourselves to tell others. We can echo out Jesus' words to those close to us. "Do you know him? Do you know what our lord has in store for us?".

Like a peanut planted to yield a hundredfold, and those peanuts planted to yield 10,000 fold, our faith, planted by knowing Jesus is a faith that's meant to spread.

So fill up, fill up from Jesus' cup. Drink it to the end. Then reach out, reach out with open arms!
Amen

2010 Game Time

2011-01-05T17:55:00.002+10:00

Continuing on from the 2008 Game Time and 2009 Game Time summaries, this year I placed up the 2010 Game Time onto google docs for further analysis of the GameLogs. The spreadsheet can be organised by total hours to see the winners, or by order enetered to get a more historical feel.

Top 5 Game Time 2010

Grepolis	309
Civilization 5	214
League of Legends	171
Football Manager 2010	111
UnAngband	104

I was expecting League of legends to dominate somewhat, but was a little surprised to see Civ5 eclipse it with some solid hours out of the gate. Grepolis also surprised to take the top spot, although reminiscing back to the clan play it was a pretty intense, special time. Football manager put in another good show, and adding on to last year's score, it would have been up in the 270 hour range (although so would have Civ 4).

Grepolis: I played a LOT of web based MMOs this year, but Grepolis still remains the standout in play as well as the only one I actually put money toward ($15 for 300 hours is still a pretty good deal though). The placement of ~20 people on the same starting island gives an immediate competitive perspective, even though you can't atttack each other. Later you can indirectly attack or work together through use/abuse of the NPC villiages, then opens up to inactive player farming once the protection comes off, then builds to a competitive game with others in your region. There are certainly other elements that might need improving, but it seemed to be a new generation of web-based MMOs. I recently looked at wild west on Facebook by the same developers, but they, too, seemed to fall into the recruit-a-friend trap of facebook games. The last shining light for a decent facebook game might be Sid Meier himself and Civilization, but there's been so many disappointments this year with attempts to make a proper game work on facebook I'm more hopeful than confident.

My game habit is back up to around 40 hours a week after a couple of years down at ~30 hrs while the Teaching Degree took its piece of the time pie. The LANs have been consistent, but we are really need a solid LAN game. If the LoL server restarts weren't on Tuesday I'm sure it would have fit the bill perfectly.

GameLog 177 & 178

2010-12-27T13:57:00.002+10:00

Batheo (15h) - New online game that has more focus on battles and tactical setup than simple time-based progression. Managed to jump into the start of the second server where they had a competition for the first 10 to get to the end of the second campaign. Managed to get into the top 10 on score, but was ~13th to beat Paris.

Fantasy Wars (14h) - Looked very similar to Elven Legacy, and turns out it's a precursor to it. Mechanics seem very similar, but the graphics have been smoothed over in Elven Legacy. Still worth a shot.

Minecraft (11h) - Took up most of the Christmas LAN building up an old settlement. With monsters and damage enabled on the server, it's a different, more exciting game (with even more potential for griefing). Built up Teldrassil

Reign: Conflict of Nations (8h) - Started a couple of times. First I missed where the tutorial was taking me, then had issues trying to go to war with someone who had already decalered war with me. In the end it seems less that Knights of Honor, which is less than Crusader Kings in dynasty management.

Dawn of War II (5h) - Bit more last stand while waiting for the LAN to kick in, as well as a few multiplayer games.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (5h) - Into Feralas.

Dwarf Fortress (4h) - Fleshymines, Pop 52. Broke through to the first cave, and managed to get out before opening it up totally. Dug down another route to get a barracks set up overlooking an entrance to the caverns.

Delve Deeper (3h) - Great little boardgame-like indie game picked up for Cameron.

Gran Turismo 5 (1h) - Played a little on the big screen at work on the last day.

League of Legends (1h) - single game at the breakup LAN. Pretty laggy for 5 people on the one connection.

Games of the year

2010-12-24T06:22:00.002+10:00

That was ... wierd. I just finished voting in the AusGamers game of the year and, although I've played well over 50 different games this year, I found myself skipping almost all the categories. Shooters? Nup, only TF2 needs to be on my rotation to get my fill. Racing? Lots of that, but GT5 is leaving a sour taste in my mouth, and TM Nations is the only one I've been constantly going back to. Handhelds? No iPhone games in the list, and too many to really pull one out (maybe NinJump, but that's really because it's currently in the frontal cortex).

One thing I did notice was that of the AAA games I did own that made the list I felt a little underwhelmed by, which makes giving the nod to a game I didn't even buy seem overly optimistic about how they play too.

I felt the same way when surveying the roguelike game of the year voting over at ASCII Dreams. I played a handful, but really didn't have a standout apart from returning to the well of Dwarf Fortress again and again.

Maybe it's the whole indie scene that gets game of the year?

In a couple more days I'll do a time based summary of the year by tallying up the GameLogs. I'm of the opinion that the game that can keep my attention the longest is as likely a candidate as any for GotY. I'm guessing League of Legends will be one of the frontrunners, and I'm happy with that.

AR Drone

2010-12-23T09:05:00.001+10:00

MUST... BUY... !!!
.. Sandy says no :(

GameLog 175 & 176

2010-12-13T18:41:00.003+10:00

Dawn of War II - Chaos rising (27h) - Picked up an 8 pack for all & sundry. Played through the first mission of the expansion beofre realising I'd rather go back and build up my chars through the original scenario. Just about complete now with most above the level 18 starting level for new chars in Chaos Rising. Winning most abattles , although somewhhat slowly, but losing defense missions badly. Finally got terminatr armour and that made the difference. Played a couple of Last Stand and comp-stomp multiplayer games too.

World of Warcraft: Cataclysm (18h) - Got very annoyed that the expansion had to download an additional 4Gb the day before it released (meaning ~10Gb for the month and additional limits paid for), then found out that it didn't come with any game time, then missed the launch because the login client wasn't responding. All in all a very poor launch and took the edge off my enthusiasm to get back into the game. Later on I found myself getting tired well before midnight. Not an obvious sign, but I usually have to wrench myself away from games to get to sleep by 2ish, so to me it means that the gameplay just isn't there anymore. It's definitely worth it for the co-op play with Sandy, but I give it a month, maybe 2.

Dwarf Fortress (8h) - New fortress on the laptop to take into work: Fleshymines

Patrician 4 (7h) - Steam sale. Plays pretty slowly and found myself falling asleep, or wondering what else is on sale.

Gran Turismo 5 (3h) -Finally got the wheel, but it's not that big of a difference. Couldn't get anywhere near my time on the Top Gear Elise challenge, but at least I wasn't sliding all over the place. Loading times are a killer though. They are long enough to look for other things to do, like flip over to TV, or play DF on the laptop.

Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - More matching mayhem.

Various Facebook games (5h) - After the lament about facebook games and the development of Notorious, I spent a while looking through lots of different facebook games for something with gameplay. Anything. Backyard monsters looked pretty interesting and very similar in concept to notorious, apart from being stuck in a number of FB tropes. Kongregate is still looking like the place for innovative games, but the just aren't making the transition to FB, or the search / broadcast is so weak that I'm not finding them.

A thing for Hematite

2010-12-13T17:18:00.000+10:00

Ebalromek, "The Revered Length", a hematite coffer
This is a Hematite coffer. All craftsdwarfship is of the highest quality. It is encrusted with hematite. This object menaces with spikes of hematite. On the item is an image of "The Revered Length" the hematite coffer in hematite.

Wow, this dwarf had a thing for hematite ... and recursion.

Playing through Dwarf Fortress again as a lunchfiller at work and after losing 2 dwarves to madness, I finally have an artifact to grace the halls. We have a population of over 50 at the moment and are just getting into our second year at "Fleshymines".

There's been a little altercation with goblin thieves with VERY sharp knives (resulting in a number of reduced appendage dwarves), but apart from that it's been going pretty well. Managed to get an underground farm working fairly quickly as well as most initial services. There's only been one caravan so far though, so there's masses of mechanisms and toys clogging up the place. Opened out a large cavern directly under the trade depot so that most stuff is within easy hauling distance when one finally arrives.

Our position is slightly elevated abover the river too, so I managed to dig out an underground channel at river level to a spot under the new dining hall. Hit an aquifer layer on that level (and possibly higher) too, so the new hall has both aquifer and channeled in fresh water.

A couple of ghosts are making a nuisance of themselves so I might have to make a new area for burial. I wonder if they like recursion too?

Notorious

2010-12-06T18:27:00.003+10:00

Concept
A game where you build dungeons, raid the locals, and fend off heroes to become the most notorious in the land.

Facebook implementation:
The problem with most new games is that they either follow the social obligation path of Farmville or the energy-as-limitation with artificial missions akin to Mafia wars. I want to design a game where the interaction between players is a little more meaningful, and the interaction with the game is not as artificially limiting.

Even though the digging out of dungeons and conducting of raids takes time, the planning is freely available at any time, as well as the interaction with other dungeons through heroes and the rumour system. Matters still need to be addressed as things may not go to plan on the raids, diggers may strike unknown obstacles (monster pits / gold veins), or new areas need to be designated once dug out. There should be enough activity for new players and invested players to be able to play as long as they like, but players seeking only small doses of fun can still plan out a fair way into the future, and also have many things to do when returning from a period of time away.

Most monster contracts and built areas are designed to be replenished over time, so the dungeon will settle about a certain level of notoriety if left alone for an extended period. Heroes will attempt the dungeon at somewhat regular intervals (~1/2 hr?), and non-returning heroes will raise the notoriety of the dungeon, which in turn inspires higher level heroes to attempt the dungeon. Once a high enough hero comes through to wipe out all the monsters and take most of the gold / equipment away, the notoriety drops so that minor heroes will attempt it next time.

Things to do
Build a Dungeon
Conduct Raids
Hire Mercenaries
Buy / Sell Equipment
Ransom Prisoners
Bribe Heroes
Listen to Rumours / Spread Rumours
Replay events
View Highscores

Build Dungeon
- Pick starting location (allow restart / multiple dungeons?)
- Designate areas to be mined out
- Designate a room (Storage / bedroom / training room / patrol room / eating / vault)
- Start with dirt around entrance, but get into different types of stone further in, with gold / gem seams / caves / ravines / streams. Stone needs mining equipment and a lot more time to get through. Gold seams could take a long time to go through, so they provide a steady source of income

Conduct Raids
- Capture prisoners. Designate prison areas. If area contains digging designations, prisoners will also dig. Each prisoner has a name / occupation and a bounty that is used for notoriety
- Target equipment / gold
- Spreading chaos. Raises Notoriety. Increases happiness for chaos creatures.
- present 3 targets with easy / medium / hard options. Give percentage chance for success, appproximate time to get there and approximate rewards.

Hire Mercenaries
- Set up contract with goblin camp to provide up to 5 goblins at 1 per hr for a wage of 5 gold per hr each.
- Contract with a Troll for modest lodgings and 40% of all loot found
- Mercs will take wage from whatever drops, or through trips to the vault. No payment angers mercs, granting greater autonomy to take their payment through other means.
- If mercenaries level up while in base, you can attempt to offer them individual contracts
- Provide a choice of 3-5 contracts at the "villians'r'us" trader. Go between for nefarious rulers of the world
- Make names and random stats for mercs. Light hearted like Majesty.

Buy / Sell Equipment
- Purchase goods through middle man
- Sell manufactured items and old items from heroes to black market

Ransom Prisoners
- Negotiate through ransom broker
- Ransom for prisoners continues to rise from their base level (set by profession/level), giving bigger rewards, more notoriety, but also more incentive for heroes.

Bribe Heroes
- Pay minimal cost to cast spell of seeing on hero so that you can observe what someone's dungeon setup is like.
- Can organise a more tougher hero than the dungeon warrants if you pay the difference. This should allow even level 1-2 players to see what a level 20 dungeon is like from both the hero and dungeon creators perspective. Negotiate deal to split profits for upfront cost.
- Cast spell of control to give player the choices the hero would have automatically made. (Move to grid coord / fight / search / free prisoner)

Listen to Rumours / Spread Rumours
- Find out what townsfolk have to say about your dungeon. Multiple perspectives available to hear different variants, plus a general consensus of notoriety.
- Choose rumours by dungeon (player) / monster / town / hero / prisoner / rumour type
- Heroes use the rumour system to pick their next targets.
- Information leaks through public interaction of your dungeon with the town, as well as returning heroes.
- Spread rumours allows the player to either agree or disagree with certain rumours (through a conversation with townsfolk, with chance of them believing) or make their own rumours up. Allows the user to control the notoriety of their dungeon (and other people's dungeons) and tailor the types and level of heroes that attempt to take on their dungeon.

Replay events
- review events hapening in your dungeon since you were away
- sort by time / level of importance / characters involved / room involved

View Highscores
- sort by highest level of hero killed (main criteria) / current notoriety /notoriety change / rumoured wealth / rumoured size

GameLog 173 & 174

2010-11-30T17:46:00.000+10:00

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon (40h) - More Philip campaign stretching all the way down to Athenia, and more east toward the second port city needed for boats. Seemed to get bogged down in constantly monitoring 5 battles at once, but eventually it didn't seem to be too much of a callenge with phalanx and cavalry ruling everything else.

Gran Turismo 5 (10h) - Ordered a new force feedback wheel for this one when I pre-ordered a week ago, but the wheel still isn't here :/. Plays Ok on controller, but there seems to be no real direction as to what cars you should (or shouldn't) be using for the next challenge. What it really needs is a way to filter all cars in the dealership and 2nd-hand lot according to a challenge. Even worse, future challenges don't even show you what the requirements are until you're the right level :(. The game also is unbearably slow between races, even after clearing 8Gb on the HDD to "speed up loads". I didn't notice that much speed up. Lucky the Cricket was on at the same time and I could catch up with the score while it all loaded up in the background.

Bejewelled Blitz (3h) - More matching mayhem. New catseye gem is a bit weird. Way more powerful than the moonstone gem that seems to have dissappeared, and as it's shareable you can also more or less trigger it when you want rather than hoping a lucky moonstone lands when you have the cash to use it. I'm predicting scores approaching 1 million with cateye, although I've only got up to ~550K using it with other multipliers.

Team Fortress 2 (2h) - Twiddling time waiting for GT5 and Cataclysm to hit. Going through some of the older stuff as it might be a long time until they see the light of day.

MtG: Duels of the Planeswalkers (1h) - Another twiddler. Not sure why I put this one down, but after a few games I remembered the arbitrary nature of the interface. Almost always feels sluggish until you WANT to cast an interrupt, then there's no time at all. Lucky I didn't lose a game because of it, but it was frustratingly close.

Civilization 5 (1h) - Loaded up some uploaded scenarios and I finally found how to trigger the 'scenario' button, but they still seem end immediately with no opponents.

Ravenwood Fair (1h) - I'd heard that Romero was developing a facebook game, but was incredibly dissappointed to find it's another Farmville clone. In frustration I also dug through some more games and for the explosion that Zynga had back a couple of years ago, there's bugger all available. There seems to be either farmville clones, mafia wars clones, or travian-like web games shoehorned into the facebook juggernaut. Really dissappointed. I'm hoping Sid Meier can do better.

The lament had me put some time into designing a new game that allows a different type of social player interaction. Like all my games it's probably never going to get past the design stage, so I'll publish it up here once I've fleshed out the idea.

60Gb internode plan

2010-11-22T14:00:00.002+10:00

After lamenting the previous internode offerings while mired deep inside Telstra's price squeeze, Internode have finally released their new plans for people still on the Telstra monopolized DSLAMs. Well, they're awesome. Going from $70 per month down to $60 per month and going up from 20Gb, to ~50Gb (60Gb, but measuring down and up traffic would equate to ~50Gb down for me).

In Simon Hackett's rant about the Telstra price squeeze, there's one thing that is painfully obvious:

This situation also underscores that a key and critical requirement for the future National Broadband Network, in whatever form it takes, which is that there is an ironclad legal requirement that the NBN Company must only be a wholesale provider – that it must not directly offer retail services to consumers.

Moodle 2.0 presentaion

2010-11-20T12:23:00.003+10:00

Found a link to Martin's recent talk to a polish MoodleMoot on the new featuress of Moodle 2.0.

One of the main features that has me excited are the community hubs. Not only will it be easier to see good moodle courses, but I believe it quite possibly could be the silver bullet to bring about my vision of the future of education. The key will be to establish a framework of authorative tags to represent the skills that the course will teach, and the skills required for entry to the course. Once these are in place, there will be both an open market available using community sites (from the community hub model) and the easy contribution to the market by publishing sites. Even the ability of creating your own hub will mean that there doesn't need to be an authorative global tagging system. Each authority (Eg: Queensland Studies Authority, or the approaching national curriculum) can establish their own hub of approved courses, and set their own tagging practice up to allow the courses to merge seamlessly.

We're living / teaching in exciting times!

[Edit] More links
Community hub discussion
Learning Object Metadata
Australian Classifiication for Education standard (used in Moodle)

USB memory sticks are good for transfer, bad for storage

2010-11-16T10:22:00.003+10:00

Here in the IT department we would get on average a student a week with problems accessing their stored files on a memory stick. They are almost always attempting to retrieve a critical file for an assignment or presentation due today. Even though we have many options to recover damaged files, over half are simply not recoverable due to physical damage to the memory stick. Put simply, they die. Often.

The great thing about memory sticks is that they are very portable, and have a relatively good transfer rate. This makes them excellent choices to transfer files from one computer to another (Eg: from school to home), but their unreliability means that they are poor choices to store data for an extended period of time.

To offset this unreliability, it is recommended that you copy files to and from your memory stick, but never run or edit anything on it. Here’s an example:

Fred has started work on an assignment at school. He finishes up for the lesson and saves the file to his ‘My documents’ drive located on the server. He wants to continue working at home, so he manually copies the file to his memory stick. That night Fred wishes to continue work and inserts his memory stick. Instead of working directly on the file, he copies it to the desktop or an allocated space on the hard disk. From there he can work quickly and effectively on the file. Once finished he can then copy back the updated file onto the memory stick, possibly renaming it to another version. At school the next day, Fred continues his assignment by copying the previous night’s file onto his ‘My Documents’ drive and working on it from there.

In this example, the assignment will exist in multiple locations and have multiple versions. If at any point the memory stick dies, or even the home computer or school computers become inaccessible, the file will be recoverable with a maximum of a few hours of work lost. For times when you REALLY need that file, even copying it to multiple memory sticks is a wise choice. They don’t need to be super expensive, anything in the ~$10-$20 range should be sufficient for a simple transfer.

GameLog 171 & 172

2010-11-15T13:05:00.003+10:00

Hegemony: Philip of Macedon (40h) - New steam pickup while waiting for GT5 and Cataclysm to hit. Very polished for a 5-man indie title, and has a good historical feel along with open ended play. Replaced it with Hegemony gold alpha as it handled a slower pace of recruits. Means less troop for me, but mainly allows taking out enemies in pitched battles then having time to siege the city before they regenerate. Still trying to come to terms with utilizing the population effectively between offense and defense, but at least it makes for an interesting game.

Currently playing through the Philip campaign and have pushed back the Illyrians out of Diabolis and the Athenians almost back to the Thermopylae pass. Hopefully I can sweep up north and force the Illyrians into submission, then swing onto the peonians before moving east. Not sure whether I push further down the greek peninsula. Don't have ships yet and Athens is already raiding my shorline back near the capital

Civilization 5 (25h) - Finished off the emperor Mongol scenario in under 60 turns. Downloaded scenarios don't seem to be working? A little more on the Terra Australis map.

Dungeons and Dragons Online (6h) - Already picked up Cataclysm, but this was an interesting diversion to get back into the MMO space.

Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - Free multiplier weekend ended with a new record: 626,100

Telstra monopoly?

2010-11-11T13:26:00.004+10:00

Internode released some new plans recently and it looked like I'd get an extra 5Gb for the same price, but when attempting to sign up for it, the price jumped by another $10. Upon investigation, Internode buried this little gem in their press release:

Due to Telstra pricing that differentiates between exchanges in different areas, Internode has applied a two-tier price structure for its Home-Fast2 broadband plans. The prices for Zone 1 exchanges, where a Telstra competitor has DSLAM equipment installed, are lower than for comparable plans in Zone 2 and 3 exchanges, where Telstra retains a monopoly position.

Did they just specifically state that the price change isn't per region, but whether your exchange has competitors?? How is this not monopoly abuse?

Google Reader: Star, Like or Share?

2010-11-11T08:35:00.003+10:00

My use of google reader has slowly declined since I have finished the uni course, but I still see the need to follow smart people, and google reader still gives me that instant hit of something to think about.

About a year ago Google Reader updated their social features to first let you star an article, then star or share, and finally star, like or share. It seemed a bit confusing when you would want to do each, so I generally found myself either checking all of them, or none at all. I finally figured out it's all about context:

Star - It's of personal interest: You might star something as a reminder to get back to it, because it's important to you personally, etc. I'll generally star things I've responded to so that they are easier to check followup comments, or make the whole conversation easier to find when I'm searching for a previous article.

Like - Attribution back to the author and other readers of that feed: This is an easy way to communicate simply with other readers of the same feed. Liking every single article on that feed doesn't really help you or the other readers, it's best used as a tool of discernment. I'm also far more interested in seeing who else liked the article if there are fewer names, and repeat names are worth investigating. Likes are one step above a comment as a way to easily engage with the audience of the article.

Share - Distribute the article to your friends that may not know about it: Share the link with others. Need to check the publicity settings before mashing this button to see where it'll go. I also send my shared feed out to a widget on this blog as a semi-kudos instead of writing up something specific about it.

Teaching IPT

2010-11-04T11:07:00.003+10:00

Firstly the news: I've accepted a position at St Luke's as a full time teacher next year. Mainly IT subjects, but a little splash of maths too.

To prepare for next year, I'll also be putting together a work program for 11/12 IPT as the syllabus for 11 has changed this year. It'll most likely change again next in a couple of years when the national curriculum comes in, but we'll tackle that one when it comes. So, for the next couple of research Thursdays I'll be reviewing the syllabus and sample work programs to try to build a work program that doesn't restrict all the things I have in mind.

First up is a work program for teaching a composite class with the same content. I'd wondered if that was possible because the current composite class has effectively 2 different subjects being taught at once. It's possible by designing a largely self-driven learning environment, but it would seem more appropriate in keeping both classes on the same subject, just modifying the assessment for either 11 or 12.

Lots of reading, lots of decisions ...

GameLog 169 & 170

2010-11-01T20:09:00.002+10:00

Civilization 5 (70h) - Majority of the time in the SDK looking at making a mirror map and documenting stuff for the CiV Wiki. Recently the Mongol Scenario came out and plays very well. Really captures the spirit of a highly mobile army hellbent on burning europe.

Minecraft (20h) - Tinkered a bit with multiplayer, then started building some challenges for myself in single player to make it a little more interesting. First the one tree challenge, then a spelunking challenge where you have to find diamonds while only modifying the landscape by 1 tile (makes you explore open caverns rather than dig to the bottom). Took Ben and I about 1 & 1/2 hours to finally find some in a huge cave system.

League of Legends (4h) - Might shelve this one now, player base is getting too narky.

Bejewelled Blitz (4h) - Some light entertainment after work. Been using the musical method of training where you start slow and methodical for 2 runs, then fast as possible for 2 runs regardless of position, then settle to fast & accurate runs.

Minecraft: One Tree Challenge

2010-10-21T23:37:00.010+10:00

After fiddling around with the single player, I was hunting around for a way to make the game a little more challenging. I had thought of a 'naturalist' challenge where you couldn't destroy any existing Flora or Fauna. Without wood from existing trees it severely limits your startup to scavanging seedlings and planting them in open caves, and using wool block housing for the first couple of nights. In the end it felt too much like a surface crawl instead of exploring the depths, but at least I found some awesome natural Wonders.

Massive caverns beneath a duck's head

Moo...

Floating fire. I'm assuming there used to be a tree where the lava landed

Water and lava from the same rock.

So the next challenge I thought up was a 'one tree challenge': Spawn, find the closest tree and chop it down, then dig directly down where the tree stood and never come back up again. Since wood is needed for a workbench, the first pick, handles and torches, you really need to think about what you dig. Hardcore mode as well, death = regenerate the world.

The first attempt I dug around the shaft of light to the bottom of the map, but didn't hit any coal to get torches going. Tried getting a space big enough for a tree to grow at the bottom, but eventually ran out of handles.

2nd attempt I tried a shallow tree directly under the shaft of light to see if it was even possible to grow them underground, but I punched through the roof of an enormous cavern just below my starting box. There was a waterfall and pool right next to where the shaft of light landed, so I plonked a tree there and waited.

There was also some coal available, so risking some wood for a set of torches helped me explore the caverns a little as well as making night-time mining a little more fun. I'd also started spreading grass down from the top by rebuilding the staircase with dirt. Don't know if it's required for trees to grow, but it can't hurt (and digging out dirt saves the handles while I wait for the tree).

A couple of days had passed and I was getting worried about the tree. If it doesn't grow then it'll be a pretty useless challenge, but if you're able to build them anywhere it'll also be somewhat useless once you get going. I had one more seedling from the original tree, so I tried another spot just in case, and splurged another couple of sticks for torches to ring the seedlings. Please work!

Coming back from another spelunking expedition (groans are pretty scary when you have no equipment and only 4 torches to cycle through) I noticed the greenery. Yes! Trees! The bottleneck was more or less gone now, but I kept up preparing the initial cavern for more trees just in case there was an accident. I also splurged on a hoe to place some wheat next to the tree trunks. Not sure whether the grass triggered the trees growing, but it was essential to get the farming up and running. 1 chook had managed to fall through the hole, but pigs couldn't fit so I needed the bread in case the groans became serious.

Greenified the 2nd cavern and established a channel for the water to follow my journey deeper into the cave system. I'd seen some lava, and had learned from previous adventures that being on fire is lethal without water handy. Eventually made some iron armour for confidence to push further down, but died to a cave-in before it was put to the test. I'd followed a cave heading up toward the top and had simply placed a torch near some sand when it all came down on me.

Initial cavern with entry point visible up in the roof.

A view down past the 2nd cavern with viaduct and trees. Seedling in the bottom left is the initial landing point bathed in sunlight (and torches).

With trees able to be grown almost anywhere once you have torches, the challenge loses its teeth after the first tree grows. The initial resource limitations certainly helped give it a more desperate feel which carried long past the point of safety, so overall I'm pretty happy how the challenge went. It's a pity that Multiplayer has infinite health and no durability issues as it would have been an interesting challenge with a couple of people. Might try it again at the LAN anyway.

GameLog 167 & 168

2010-10-19T17:09:00.003+10:00

Civilization 5 (65h) - Steam clocked it at 80h, but there were a couple of times when Cameron had been playing as well as times when I'd left it on. Completing the Deity difficulty level took up the most of it. Currently I'm attempting an emperor 1-city challenge as the Indians. Culture victory still looks a fair way off and Montezuma and alexander are >10 cities, but I'm more or less winning the tech race.

I've also started fiddling with the modding tools. Tried at first to fix the wonder placement, but it doesn't look like it's in the XML or Lua scripts. Next up is to build a 'Conquer Australia' mod where everyone starts on a boat in 1770. AI and happiness mods to follow if it's successful.

League of Legends (6h) - Couple of big sessions. Keep going back to Rammus for high level play. Should really be looking at other chars.

Bejewelled Blitz (5h) - Couple of large scores to show for the time investment, but really just looking at the phychology behind the game and its interaction with your social graph. Once again the highscore table is king when it comes to getting me interested in repeat play...

Dwarf Fortress (2h) - about 25 pop now, but still no caravans. Tempted to dig deeper to open up any caves I find.

Civilization V - Flawless Strategy

2010-10-14T01:50:00.004+10:00

After beating Civ V fairly comfortably on King, I cranked it all the way up to Deity to see what strategies were going to work, and whether the AI improved any more from a pretty lacklustre showing so far. The plan was to go for a diplomatic Greek victory on a duel map so that there were less city states to deal with. I had tried a number of starts, one going pretty well against Siam until a couple of city-states were mysteriously annexed without being attacked (is there a buyout once you get them past allied?). I had also noted that even on duel maps, the space allocated for each player's expansion is more or less the same, so the game doesn't compress that much apart from making the world a bit easier to totally explore.

In the new setup, I chose archapeligos to limit the land mass for the AI expansion, and add another AI as well as a couple more city-states. There was a danger that I may not be able to control all the city-states, but I was a little afraid that some might be culled or absorbed into the AI monolith.

I needed to restart a couple of times to get a feel for the archapeligo layout, and to look for a start that I thought would take me to the end (plus being one of the more enjoyable parts of the game, starting out afresh with optimistic hopes of what the fog would reveal). Finally settled on a small river with 2 fish, marble and silk in sight. Turned out later to also have 4 fish in total as well as whales. Really was an ideal location in terms of special squares for the capital.

With a good idea that I'd be on an island by myself, I went immediately for the worker and left the initial warrior to mop up any barbarians. Milked a couple of them for added XP, but eventually swept the island clear. I'd rushed calendar first to get the worker occupied in opening up the resources, then pushed through fishing and optics to get my lonely warrior out and about.

On the next island over was England, but I noticed a peninsula projcting toward me that had dyes on it. My settler was enroute to a somewhat ordinary 2nd site on my island, so I diverted him to the peninsula to pinch the resource. My philosophy is that any new happy resource is worth a city, a legacy tactic from Civ4 that still seems appropriate.

With me in their back yard, England wasn't exactly chummy. By the time I had my 3rd city placed back on my continent, England was amassing at the borders. I'd scouted a fair bit of the map through an early trireme and had met most of the city-states, but none close were militaristic AND providing a resource I didn't have. England had also bagged 2 allies by this stage and had 2 main cities (~12,8) with 2 new ones on a seperate island.

It was a little suprising that Siam led off the combat, but both of us were significantly down on England's score. I'd jumped in on Siam's request, but soon was alone after Siam bailed at the first chance. My peninsula city was regularly surrounded, but I always seemed to have enough to pick off the melee units with only 2 land units and the trireme. The peninsula worked in my favour as there was only space for 2 units at a time to progress down from London, and one space was holed up by an archer unit. This forced wave after wave of units into the water for a simple trireme cleanup. After about 50 turns we still had control of the peninsula city and had killed at least 1 unit a turn for the entire battle with our 3 units. England sued for peace a couple of times demanding I give away just about everything, so it may not have dawned on the AI that I'm actually pretty happy with the current war. I'm raking in the experience, I'm not in any real danger, and I know that England is spending the majority of their Deity bonuses on making units.

Seeking some allies I signed up one of the city-states, but it turned out to be a poor choice as it simply made an them easy target for England to pick on instead of me. England had just researched their longbow archers for additional devastation, but unfortunately didn't support with a serious melee army. Once the city-state had wiped out the solitary melee unit in the attack, the rest of the archers ringed the city and rained arrows from afar. The ring couldn't let any other units in though, so the City-state sat at a near-destroyed state for the rest of the battle (another 50 turns or so)

England finally came to their senses and gave very favourable terms for peace. I'd contemplated continuing the war, but the appearance of cannons was more a deciding factor in signing than the promise of 20 gold per turn.

With so much fish and the Colossus of Rhodes, I'd been highly cash positive throughout the war and had managed to snag a couple more city-states onto my side. Now with peace through the land I teched hard to education, then back to the technology dregs to push exclusively for the United Nations. England went on an expansion spree at one point, settling any outcrop of land to take them out past 9 cities. I'd contemplated restarting the war to puppet the 2 colonies on my island, but Siam wasn't interested in starting up hostilities again and I'm sure I'd have lost something somewhere else (likely one of the city-states) in the process. We settled for puppeting one of the hostile city-states that happened to provide ivory, the only resource I needed from England.

By the time I finally got the Scholasticism bonus from the Patronage social policy, I had all 6 remaining city-states allied away. Scholasticism more than doubled my research, which was by that stage par with the AI anyway. We hit Globalization by the late 1850's and had a capital primed to build the UN in 11 turns.

Once I had built the UN, I'd prepared for war as I was expecting some fireworks from the AI now that I was so close to victory. Alas the AI was happy signing up for more research while the final 10 turns of the game ticked by. The rigged election in 1878 proclaimed me diplomatic winner with little fanfare...

Overall I'm fairly happy with he game. The start was excellent and it certainly felt like the long battle in the middle should have wiped me if the AI had any tactical awareness. If I'd known how powerful scholasticism was to this type of strategy I'd have pushed a little harder to get it earlier and possibly had the UN by the late 1700's. The game was running really slowly toward the end (much slower than even some of the larger maps) so I'm not particularly looking for a repeat outing any time soon.

Now that I've got that game out of my system I feel better about checking out the modding sections. I have a partially complete huge map of Australia to polish up and release, but I'm more keen on modding up an enhanced AI, a storymaker / exporter, a random terrain generator, and a per city happiness mod.

Bejewelled Blitz 75k > 50k

2010-10-10T18:20:00.003+10:00

I've been working toward it for a while, but I finally hit the gold level of 75k before the 50k gold level. The significance is that the highest score is so random, and relying on a high score as feedback for good play is not enough. What is important is a high average, a consistently high score each time you play.

When looking at people's scores you can usually distinguish a bubble around a certain point (wins in each 25K bracket slowly increasing until falling away). Increasing that bubble point is more important than waiting on a massive score to land in your lap. Of course the more efficient you are, the more likely you are to take advantage of a lucky streak.

With each iteration of the game, the average scores have slowly increased. Initially it was almost impossible to land a 250K+ score, but now with the instant moving and bonus gems it's possible to get a 250K each week, and a 500K+ score to get onto the top of the friends list. This makes it hard to read exactly where long time players are at, but at least the stats are now visible. What I'd like would be a simple way to map your own graph against someone else's, or a way to compare your stats this month against last month to give a better indication of progression.

GameLog 165 & 166

2010-10-05T17:57:00.002+10:00

Civilisation 5 (53h) - It only came out on Friday, but it's been compelling to play and experience the new system. The game feels more like a new franchise than a continuation of civ 3 -> civ 4. It's not the hexes, but mainly the global happiness that changes the idea of how to construct an optimal empire. The game seems to lose something with this simplificaiton, as well as having no gold / research slider. Growing large empires still have their limitations, but they seem more arbitrary than before.

The directable expansion is a really neat concept, especially with the ability to "guide" the expansion through payment. Puppeting captured cities is the same choice of giving up money to have more direct control. Sometimes it's an interesting choice, but for the vast majority of cases it's simply not worth annexing.

The city-states are done well and seem like they could be good tug-of-war bags in the late game, especially if you're going after a diplomatic victory. It would be better if there were other ways of influencing them with, say, gifting research or bullying them for tribute.

The mods are looking promising so far, and with it built in to the system it seems like lots more exposure will inspire quality mods. I'd missed the modding episode of 3 moves ahead initally and only lisetened to it a couple of days before getting civ5. I was hoping for FFH2 discussion and was chuffed that both Soren Johnson and the FFH modder were on together. The discussion regarding more exposure to the mods and how to manage that from within the program seemed to parallel the model civ5 was attempting. I'm really tempted to mod up a city based happiness system and bring back sanitation, or work on a better AI

Played through as Hiawatha after a random choice on prince setting, and then campaign with the french romping through a pangea on King. King seem easier than in previous editions, but I think there's another level higher too. Next up in the steam achievement quest is emperor mode on an archapeligo dual map with the greeks.

Dwarf Fortress (17h) - Turns out I was a little hasty to call my fortress a cursed death trap as the immigrants have dribbled in for the next 3 seasons. Still no caravan though. I now have a very solid fortress, but still feel hesitant on breaking open anything lower. I like the tension of wanting to explore deeper, but not wanting to open up a can of whoopass on my stunties.

League of Legends (10h) - Went up north for Jemma's baptism and this seem to be all that's played up there. Add a couple of LANs too and it's stil alive and kicking.

Elemental: War of Magic (5h) - New patch, same bugs. Arrrgh.

No one even considered making the journey to such a cursed death-trap this season

2010-10-01T17:30:00.000+10:00

Inspired by the new Minecraft uploader, I re-downloaded Dwarf Fortress to have a look at building a new fort for it. Since it's been a while, I had also missed some neat changes that makes the game more like, well, a game.

- Major work done on the map design and history. Now cities are connected with roads and villiages with fields are commonplace. Makes the place feel more alive and had me generating a couple of maps just to check out how well it was doing. Unfortunately adventurer mode still seems underdone, and once you start a fortress the outside world seems a distant memory. Recently I've been keeping the map of the world open as a backdrop to the game.

- There seems to be no lava tubes anymore (or very rarely) and there's no method for searching for them on the expedition setup screen. I found out later that every map has lava if you dig deep enough. Great! at least it's now opened up way more sites to build.

- There's most likely to be underground caverns too. Big, 5-10 level caves with seperate rooms, columns, pools, and nasties. In my first real excursion down I bumped into one and had a fun time looking around the cave system, but some crocs and trolls quickly destroyed my bearded populace.

- The caves offer muddy ground, a new prerequisite for underground farming. I'd built out my typical subsurface farm system, but no planting choices had appeared. Thinking it was just a glitch, I ignored it and finally set up a farm on the surface as the new maps had done. Once I'd broken into a cave, I'd seen the muddy floor and twigged on the change. Natural cave farming was ultimatly my downfall as I really wanted to keep the cave open. Should have sealed it off until I had my military ready to go.

- The new fighting and reporting system toook a little bit to get used to as there were no main messages as to how things were going. The reports are way better once I found them, but I stil haven't found a way to have the reports open as the fight is going on. Seems to be an unpause / pause / read reports type of staccato battle.

I embarked again into a new world with an aquifer layer instead of a running stream (usually a mandatory requirement for fishing and early channeling) and set about designating the new fort. Our random expidition name turned out to be "The Balded Machine", a name I can do something with later on. I missed the fort name though, so "Fortresssearched" it is. I'm hoping it's a practical joke on Dwarves with lisps.

Season 1 passed and we'd set up most of the critical areas for the first 7 adventurers, but no migrants or caravans were a little worrying. We pressed on and, apart from a little food crisis, built out the fort though season 2 with no real concerns. As far as fort progress, I feel we're way further ahead than previous attempts, and have even begun strip mining some seams for more lucrative rocks.

Then I got the message. "No one even considered making the journey to such a cursed death-trap this season". Another missed migration? Usually dwarves are clamboring to get inside my undefended,ill-provisioned,infested hovel. Why don't they like this place? It's ROKKIN! My suspicions turned to the caravans. No caravnas means no exports or new (meaty) provisions. I've checked the depot access an it seems to be fine, but no civilisations appearing on the civ list might indicate that there's no-one around. The island is quite small, so I'd be surprised if no-one knows where we are. I'm sure there were some farming areas on the same startup screen as out place. Hmm, might need to read up a bit on migration. There may be some serious changesthat have jeopardized our expedition.

It might just be and unlucky season too. The changes to buildings means I've gotten crossbows and bolts relatively easily, so I might stick it out a couple more years and work on upping my trapper into a fighting machine. Once he's there I can go digging for any caverns. Dogs are breeding well too, so our army is going to be mainly 4 legged.

Working alone

2010-09-24T08:46:00.001+10:00

Client: So, you're the King of the castle today?
King: Yeah, but I have to be the peasants too...

GameLog 163 & 164

2010-09-20T09:15:00.003+10:00

Mount & Blade (17h) - Built up to 19, but reminiscing with Ben regarding the old M&B modifications made me dig up some mods for warband, particularly autolooting. Tried Diplomacy first, but it looked like the autoloot stuff was only once you set up your own feifdom. A little more digging revealed the open source project that combined Custom Commander with Diplomacy and others. Just getting started again and have picked up most of the companions and horsified them. Didn't notice a huge speed increase when they all had horses, so there might be a different travel calculation ?

Elemental: War of Magic (15h) - Dominions had me hankering for Civ5, but having a dig for something similar reminded me of this Stardock game that had just come out. Picked it up with some credit left over on impulse, and started playing before reading the reviews. Yep, it's pretty bad. Lots of little interface issues and barely any documentation. Went digging for a way to kick in the dynasty system and found out a lot of people were having the same issues.

Brad Wardell apeared on a recent Three Moves Ahead podcast to 'face the music' and I can sort of see where he's coming from, but the mistakes are amateurish. Coming off a very in-depth game of Dominions 3, I felt that this title was a long way behind even indie titles. It reminds me of Hinterlands in ambition and execution.

Downloaded the new version and I'm still getting interface issues like cities being named another city on the map, or images of heroes chinging between turns. Still feels early beta ...

League of Legends (10h) - Social game now. Had some epic 1Hr+ games on the 3v3 including a 1Hr 10 games last night with ben. We started off Ok, but got behind by level 6. Once againa rampaging Xin was dominating mid game. Eventually we turtled up and managed a couple of clean kills. In the last 20 minutes we were on top, but still almost lost the core to a desperate push. Luckily an inhibitor came back and locked it off just as it was about to fall.

Dominions 3 (10h) - Playing as Caelum, I raged all over the guys through the tunnel that had declared war on us. Wiped them out and now looking at either going further west or down through a peaceful neighbour to protect a weak link of my empire. Even though there doesn't seem to be any diplomacy, I've noticed in the last game that if you don't build up on the border of a neighbour, they will tend to leave their border undefended too, a sort of pact through demonstration of motives? Happy with that if it's the case, makes the AI a bit smarter than I'd thought.

Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - Filler after work before tea ...

GameLog 161 & 162

2010-09-06T00:38:00.002+10:00

Mount & Blade (37h) - New char pushed out to about level 14. I'm a member of the Kergit clan at the moment, but lost my given villiage. Looks like you really neeed to go far into the game to get a castle & eventually a kingship.

League of Legends (10h) - Back to playing casually

Dominions 3 (10h) - Ran into an old savegame that turned out to e a pretty good start. I pushed a little too hard and imploded. Restarted with a less interesting map, but better traits.

Sims 3 (5h) - Progressed the next generation a bit, but not significantly. Aaron is going to school and I have the 5 kids now (just need to wait for them to mature).

Worms Reloaded (3h) - Didn't download correctly (which was VERY frustrating) but evemtually fixed with a validation through steam.

Bejewelled Blitz (2h) - new levelling system, but I'm more interested in looking at what it takes to map out 500K scores. Hope it's not just luck ...

Trackmania Nations (2h) - More nascar league with cam.

Factor Friends

2010-08-31T18:31:00.004+10:00

Factor Friends is a simple game that can be played by 2 people with pre-made cards, or even 3 pieces of paper. The game uses a skewed list of associations to provide strategic depth, as well as meta-game elements to enhance continuous play.

FACTOR FRIENDS CONCEPT
Factor Friends plays on a 4x4 grid (16 squares) where each player attempts to place as many number cards as possible. Players take turns to place a unique number card in any free square of the grid, however adjacent numbers must have one number being a factor of the other (EG: a number card played adjacent to a 6 could only be a 1,2,3 or 12).

SETUP
Create 2 different coloured sets of 16 cards (EG: one set blue, one set red) and label them with the numbers 1 through 16. Create a 4x4 grid as a play surface where each square in the grid is slightly larger than the size of a card.

HOW TO PLAY
- Players start by choosing 8 number cards from their set of coloured cards. This becomes their "hand" for one round.
- Choose who plays first (or alternate starts if playing multiple rounds)
- The starting player places any card from their hand into a grid square on the play surface
- The second player may then place a card from their hand onto the play surface, while maintaining that adjacent cards need to have one number being a factor of another.
- If an opponent plays a number that you have in your hand, discard it as it is no longer unique
- Play alternates between players, each placing a unique card in a legal position or passing.
- Play continues until both players pass.
- Score the round by counting who has the most number cards in play. In the event of a tie, the player going second wins.
- Continue to play a pre-arranged amount of rounds to find an eventual winner of the match.

STRATEGY
- This game is all about controlling space on the board, and predicting what your opponent has in their hand.
- The low numbers have many factor relationships, so they are ideal for leaving toward the end of the game where the available space may be limited from multiple sides. However, leaving a low number card toward the end may expose you to your opponent playing the desired number card before you.
- Playing prime numbers (or numbers with very low factor relationships) can limit the adjacent space available for your opponent to play.
- Construct a hand with cards that can create limited space that only your cards can fill.
- When playing multiple rounds, be observant of what numbers your opponent favours. Either get those number cards and play them before your opponent (thus eliminating a card from their hand), or avoid those numbers so that they do not have an opportunity to clobber your cards.

ALTERNATE SETUP
Factor Friends can also be played with only 3 pieces of paper and 2 different coloured pens. Draw the 4x4 grid on one piece large enough so that a number can be written in each square. Players write down their 8 chosen numbers on their own piece of paper, then mark them off when "playing" them or when they are no longer unique.

Criteria for selecting a competitive game

2010-08-31T15:46:00.002+10:00

For a game to be selected for inclusion into Competitive Computer Games, it will need to be strong in these 4 areas:
1. Be Competitive – The game itself needs to have an aspect built toward competitive, multiplayer play. Any game could be used competitively, but certain games lend themselves toward fostering a competitive environment.
2. Be Internationally Competitive – The game should have some recognition by major esport organizations at an international level. This gives weight to the competitiveness of the game and ensures an existence of a competitive culture independent of Competitive Computer Games.
3. Have content appropriate for a school environment
4. Ease of installation – This would include the cost of the game, the cost of hardware / software peripherals to make the game work competitively, the effort to set up, etc.

Reaching Out

2010-08-30T16:32:00.002+10:00

(So) drink up Jesus cup, drink it to the end ...
Reaching out by Robin Mann

On Friday I had the pleasure of officially welcoming the dignitaries as we opened the new multi-purpose hall at St Johns School. The official opening followed the regular school service of a Friday, as well as being Grandfolks Day and book week!

The service had a theme of community, and the call to love others as God loves us. Jocelyn had prepared a short video of how current members of the school see our sense of community and our response to this call to care. We finished with Reaching Out, an apt choice for the service, but the words to start the final verse really struck me: Take up Jesus cup and drink it to the end. Being greedy? 'Drink it to the end' certainly conveys that sense of thirst and desire for more. And we do! We would dearly love o sit at Jesus' feet day in day out. That's the promise of heaven anyway isn't it? But the kicker is the next few lines:

Love, give, start to live. We are Jesus' friends
May we care with our actions and our prayers
We've been given so much, people, let's all share

If you drink up Jesus to the end, I dare you to NOT love. It's a natural flow-on effect from basking in the grace given to us.
Reach out. Reach out with open arms!

GameLog 159 & 160

2010-08-23T01:08:00.002+10:00

Sims 3 - (30h) - Picked up this as a trade for fixing a PC after being inspired by Alice and Kev and Troy Goodfellow mentioning there's something in it for the strategists. Turns out he's right and I love the new wish system as an optimising mechanic. Built out a computer whiz with a dream of a large family, but got caught up in the music business for a but too much of his life. Finally managed to get the ring out and pop 3 kids before everything dried up. 2nd generation is still interesting too, but it's suffered a bit recently with LoL taking out the nightshift.

League of Legends (20h) - level 30!!@! - Finally got back into ranked matches, but it wasn't as entertaining as the initial launch. Might have to revert back to SC2 for my RTS competitive urges.

King's Bounty (5h) - level 10 - More diggin' and lootin'

Starcraft 2 (2h) - Stalled mainly to keep LoL going.

Alien Swarm (1h) - Smal LAN trial. Thught it was a bit more complex in terms of finding gear.

Ranking vs Matchmaking

2010-08-20T19:29:00.005+10:00

Sirlin wrote up an interesting post regarding the new Starcraft II ranking system with insights from his discussions with Rob Pardo about the merits of different systems such as Elo and TrueSkill. The focus is whether the ranking system used for matchmaking should be different to the displayed rank for player satisfaction. I like a lot of his conclusions, but found this quote a little odd:

Microsoft [through TrueSkill] makes another good point here that ONLY winning and losing can be allowed to affect these stats. You can't adjust the matchmaking stat by "experience points" or even by any skill-based stats such as headshots, number of kills, time to finish a lap in racing, etc. All those stats can be gamed, and you will end up trying to get more headshots or something instead of winning. Any formula that equates number of headshots (or any other stat besides wins/losses) with how likely you are to win or lose introduces a layer of imperfect simulation. If we want to know how likely you are to beat someone, we should only consider your wins and losses, and not any in-game stats.

When looking at a mathematical ranking system this makes sense, but it doesn't make sense if you are purely interested in efficient matchmaking. Here's an example:
Starcraft starts off and all players have no wins or losses and no stats. Legionnaire (pro player) gets drawn against a scrub in his first round and wins comfortably; the scrub had not even managed to get out of his starting area. Analysing the statistics after the game also indicate a cakewalk to even casual observers. Quick game time, aggressive economy expansion vs staggered economy graph, little waste vs high average waste, etc.
Another game is played between 2 average players which happen to be closely matched. The game includes a number of pushes, each player's expansion being demolished and culminates in a pitched battle at the 40 minute mark. The statistics show a variety of interesting observations for astute players, but a big dip in army count for the loser is probably the only giveaway as to who won.

In TrueSkill these 2 games would both have winners on 1-0 and be equally ranked. For their next match they would be as likely to be matched together as it would be for Legionnaire to be matched against another starting pro player. If there was a pool of 50,000 starting players (first day numbers), it would take ~10 matches before the top ten would even play each other, and many more before the win/losses settled into a nice 50/50 pattern indicating you're playing at your level.

If a human were in charge of looking at all the matches played and given the task of suggesting new evenly matched pairings for the next round, they would be easily able to break up the whole group into, say, 10 pools of varying skill level by looking solely at the stats. They may even pick up on the fact that the 2nd match documented looked to be pretty even, and would be worth a rematch immediately for added context to the players. Repeating this process only 4 times should have people within the top 10 getting matched up together to get right into those super-fun, closely matched games.

It would seem that additional statistics can be useful in terms of matchmaking, so why the intolerance from mathematical systems such as TrueSkill? To me it comes down to a couple of issues: differing goals of ranking vs matchmaking, ignorance of bias inherent in matches, and the need for objectivity.

Ranking vs Matchmaking
To me the main issue is that TrueSkill is both a ranking and a matchmaking system. If you replaced "matchmaking" with "ranking" in the above quote I'd agree wholeheartedly; you DO need a very rigorous way of ranking people. If you brought in anything else other than wins / losses you give advantage to those who play a certain way (finish quicker, headshot more, etc). As an aside this would also reduce the potential for innovation and metagames.

A good ranking system requires an independant, unbiased method of delineating between players of different true skill (the player's inherent skill that ideally would be on display in each match, but can be clouded by a number of factors) so that each player feels as though their attributed rank is in line with their perceived rank. There needs to be justification for your rank so that if someone questions why another player is higher or lower than them, there is evidence available to alleviate their concerns. Any biases in the ranking process detracts from the validity of the entire system.

Matchmaking, on the other hand, has a goal of maximizing entertainment to the competitors (and spectators). The premise is that closely ranked players are more likely to play epic battles with high engagement and player satisfaction. I have long supported this notion and have built it into a number of leagues and tournaments, however it's not the ONLY thing. Sometimes players enjoy playing above their rank for that underdog win feeling. Players may get more out of playing with/against friends. Players may enjoy certain matchups, or certain maps.

In one of the grand finals for Australian Warcraft 3 I had an interesting conversation with another tournament organiser. 2 of the favourites for the title who were long-standing rivals had been drawn in seperate pools, but were to meet in the semi-finals of single elimination rather than the finals. The pool allocation was seeded as much as possible through prior matches in the tournament, but as these players were from different states, there was no justification in placing them over and above other state winners. The other organiser was just trying to see the best match in the finals and wanted the pools reorganised. This is a classic case of conflict between ranking (through merit) and matchmaking (for entertainment).

Matchmaking for entertainment becomes a bit wishy washy. How do you know that someone is going to enjoy the match you just created? For a start you could give opportunity for the player to select certain traits before the game starts (initial team etc) that the player KNOWS they want, but you could also give opportunity for players to rate their enjoyment of a game after the game has finished (or after watching a replay for spectators). This needn't be an exhaustive analysis of the game, a score out of 10 or even a thumbs up / thumbs down would suffice as this would give rise to a new method of optimisation: to matchmake games that maximize player/spectator satisfaction. Could it be gamed? Sure, but the eventual loser would be the players themselves. The more accurate information you can give as to why it was fun, the quicker a system could deliver games that increase your entertainment.

Objective vs Subjective matchmaking
Putting the idea of matchmaking for entertainment to the side, let's revisit the intial premise; do you only need to wins/losses to adaquately matchmake? Yes, if you want to maintain objectivity. The example of using a human to view the game and statistics to more efficiently separate people requires having faith in a 'gut feeling'. A human can look at a short overruned game and see that the opponent was outclassed, but it's not just because of the game's length. A human can see that a better player can outmaneuver troops to maintain a winning advantage, but that's not a hard and fast rule for winning either. There is, in fact, many opportunities through the game that pro players can demonstrate their skill and these build up to give a general feeling of confidence that one player is superior over another.

When building back propagated AI networks in my uni days, we would continually use problems like these. You can't quite put your finger on what are the hard-and-fast rules to follow that led you to a decision on who is better, but you're pretty confident of giving a judgement either way. With the volume of statistics available after Starcraft matches, it should be achievable to devise an AI that delivered, say, 7 levels of superiority (totally pwnd, much better, better, same, worse, much worse, totally outclassed). After many games I'd hope that the system would be delivering 'same' players all the time, but the ability to recognise a large discrepancy in skill can help the initial setup as well as tracking large changes in behaviour (rapid improvement in play, returning from a long absence, etc). Would it deliver better matchmaking? yes. It would also be objective, but not justifiable. Without justification you'd have a hard time convincing others that the system is rigorous enough to provide a rank, but it might fly if rank and matchmaking were seperate beasts.

Controlling Bias
Another issue that a pure win / loss ratio overlooks are the biases inherent in the games played. If, for example, Terrans are heavily favoured in a TvZ matchup, then this should be reflected in the prediction of who is more likely to win. There are 3 different biases common to tournaments and ranked games, the player's playstyle (race choice and preference for certain strategies), the map bias (some maps are more suited to certains race / playstyles, or more well known than others) and the individual head-to-head bias (where someone just seems to have the wood over someone). In tournaments you also have a tournament bias where some players perform better or worse depending on the importance they place in a specific tournament (homeground advantage for international events). These biases are once again somewhat subjective, but could be deduced from large samples of games played. It is also a moving target as the biases could change through the metagame, direct patching, or sustained effort from players to eliminate weak points in their game.

Biases do not have to mean that the game needs fixing; biases can add strategic elements to play (zerg rush will always be faster, but weaker). It does mean that matchmaking needs to consider any biases if the goal is to ultimately produce epic, engaging games that are desirable for players and spectators. Placing a higher ranked player in a weaker position could still achieve this.

Summary
Wow, this went a lot longer than I meant and it feels like it needs a wrap-up. To me, matchmaking is about providing entertainment to the player and spectators. Players of close rank can LEAD to entertaining games, but I don't believe a rank based solely on wins and losses provides the most efficient method of matchmaking.

Faith in God's Promises

2010-08-12T11:08:00.004+10:00

More sermon notes and recording from last Sunday's service:
Faith in God's Promises.mp3

Hebrews 11:1-3,8-16

1Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see. 2This is what the ancients were commended for.
3By faith we understand that the universe was formed at God's command, so that what is seen was not made out of what was visible.

8By faith Abraham, when called to go to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. 9By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country; he lived in tents, as did Isaac and Jacob, who were heirs with him of the same promise. 10For he was looking forward to the city with foundations, whose architect and builder is God.
11By faith Abraham, even though he was past age—and Sarah herself was barren—was enabled to become a father because he[a]considered him faithful who had made the promise. 12And so from this one man, and he as good as dead, came descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as countless as the sand on the seashore.
13All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. 14People who say such things show that they are looking for a country of their own. 15If they had been thinking of the country they had left, they would have had opportunity to return. 16Instead, they were longing for a better country—a heavenly one. Therefore God is not ashamed to be called their God, for he has prepared a city for them.

Hitchhiker
- Jimboomba to Brisbane, running late, Browns Plains
- Where are you headed? Ipswich
- What's in Ipswich? Work
- So you don't own a car? No, I'm a christian and know that God will provide.
- You don't fear that you'll be late for work? Have been sometimes, but I've been doing it for more than a month and I get there eventually.
- Exchange pleasantries, and dropped him off where our destinations parted. I offered to drive him further if he wanted, but he insisted he will be fine.
- Why was I late? Why did I stop? Am I being an instrument of God to this hitchhiker?
- Feeling challenged by this outward display of faith. Do you? Is this Faith? Is this putting the Lord God to the test? We pray for God to provide us this day our daily bread. Is getting to work by faith the same as daily bread?

Abraham

Hebrews 11:8 - "By faith Abraham, when CALLED TO GO to a place he would later receive as his inheritance, obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. "

- Abraham had faith in a promise of God
- Covenant between God and Abraham
- Scene of the Heifer, Goat and Ram cut asunder.
- Covenants of the day.
- "What you do to these animals, you can do to me if I break my promise"
- Getting late, getting scared.
- God alone passes through the dead animals.
- This is my promise to YOU. This land will be yours, your descendants will be as countless as the stars.
- Abraham just had to believe that what God said was to come true. He obeyed, sort of. Hagar.

Noah

Hebrews 11:7 "7By faith Noah, when warned about things not yet seen, in holy fear built an ark to save his family."

Genesis 6:13-22 "So God said to Noah, “I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth. 14 So make yourself an ark of cypress wood; make rooms in it and coat it with pitch inside and out. 15 This is how you are to build it:" ...

Gen 6:22 "Noah did everything just as God commanded him."

- Noah's faith was once again to follow the command of God, to expect that what God had said will come true.
- Evan Almighty
- Looking silly, News sensation.
- Noah feeling the same?
- Journey of faith may not be the easiest path to live through the world, in fact it's almost guaranteed not to be.
- Noah's actions are rewarded however, quite literally through survival. God's word did come true.
- God then set another covenant with Noah to never flood the earth again. A promise from God.

Listening to God
So how do we hear God's promises to us? Listening to His voice through the Bible. Is there time set aside to hear God?
- Faith 5
- Highs & Lows, Read, Talk, Pray, Bless
- 5 minutes. Enough?
- How about church attendance too?

Not enough for God, he wants to be with us more than that. He loves us more than we love our children, more than newlyweds. When you're in love you can't think of anything else better than spending time with your loved one. It doesn't even cross your mind that 5 minutes should be enough. God wants to be with us, to talk to us and share our lives every second of the day. He's there when we go to work, when we're eating dinner, when we're sleeping, even when we're in the shower. God wants us to walk with him.

Genesis 6:9 "Noah was a righteous man, blameless among the people of his time, and he walked with God."

Enoch

Hebrews 11:5 "By faith Enoch was taken from this life, so that he did not experience death;"

Genesis 5:24 "And Enoch walked with God: and he was not; for God took him."

God's Promise
There is a promise of God to be found for us. It's there in the Bible for us to read, and up on the front of St John's church for the rest of Bundaberg to read.

John 3:16 "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that whoever believes shall not perish, but have eternal life".

God's new covenant prepared for us also required the ripping of flesh, but not animals, Jesus life. This is how serious the promise is. Paid in blood.

God's love for us is so great that he would suffer the humility and pain of crucifixion just so that he gets the chance to spend eternity with us. Us, the ones drenched in sin.

Our faith starts with believing this promise. Holding it as a certainty in our lives. It's a promise God intends to keep so that we may be free to respond in kind and love God and one another with no bounds.

We join with the giants of our faith written in Hebrews, Abraham, Enoch, Moses, Noah:

Hebrews 11:13All these people were still living by faith when they died. They did not receive the things promised; they only saw them and welcomed them from a distance. And they admitted that they were aliens and strangers on earth. 14People who say such things show that they are longing for a better country—a heavenly one"

Hold in your heart the promise of God.
"Whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life"
This is most certainly true.
Amen.

GameLog 157 & 158

2010-08-10T02:01:00.002+10:00

LoL (20h) - level 28 - Lots of LANs and late night sessions looking for that last win before bed. Suffered a bit with SC2 being close-but-not-quite UI, but it won out in the end.

King's Bounty (15h) - Had a hankering for this one again, but couldn't find the save so I rerolled. Still had an odd question like last time; what's the rage for in the beginning? I knew the answer this time, but I still had to look up how to get the rage box started. Needed to be brought to the fore much earlier or have the rage meter hidden ...

Starcraft 2 (12h) - Moderate way through the campaign and it's feeling really good. Reminds me a lot of the dawn of war II campaign. No multiplayer yet, LoL fills that gap atm.

East India Company (2h) - Yeah, as poor as they made it out to be. Just no real feel of trading.

Alien Swarm (1h) - managed to get a few games in, but really haven't been around for LANs with it.

Head to the Heart - Register ActiveX

2010-07-29T13:59:00.002+10:00

I've continually come up with an issue while building the Head to the Heart powerpoint slides in my MSOffice 2007 Virtual Machine. It keeps complaining when I open it that an ActiveX is not registered, but doesn't say anything else past that. There are shockwave flash objects used in the powerpoint, but they visible on the slides as flash objects and listed as registered in the developer tab of ActiveX items. Seems tied to them though as the music or filmclips they should be bringing in disappear if you save the powerpoint once opened with the registration error.

Turns out Flash is NOT registered in Internet Explorer (since it's a custom VM just for Office), so the fix was to simply reinstall Flash into IE.

GameLog 155 & 156

2010-07-26T00:20:00.002+10:00

Civ4: BtS (20h) - Fall from Heaven II game with the Grigori. Took a while to claw into 1st place, but fell by the wayside once I got there.

League of Legends (20h) - Picked up an 8/5 win/loss record in Season 1 before they tossed out everyone under level 30. Picking up a couple of games a night to run up the XP.

Cosmic Supremacy (15h) - another Free-to-play web based strategy game. Has a really interesting AI builder to help administer the planets & fleets, but was a little too sanitized to keep me going. Was in 2nd of 20 probably due to the AI programming.

Puzzle Kingdoms (15h) - Sandy managed to finish it, so apart from helping out Cameron, it time to move on. Bit disappointed you don't get to build an army larger than the 60 points initially given. Seems an arbitrary limit and I'm not sore whether we just missed something. Playing the quick battles there are MUCH lager point armies that are fielded.

King's Bounty (10h) - Got a hankering to play through this one again. More or less done the first island again with little to no losses.

East india Company: privateer (8h) - Another cheap steam purchase. Seems very lightwweight for a Paradox game. Even the expansions offer a different game type on top of the core game rather than cleaning up the interface.

Team Fortress 2 (2h) - Tester for the megapatch.

Trackmania nations (2h) - Back at TrackMania for Competitive Computer Games at School.

Thresh and Fatal1ty in Hall of Fame

2010-07-23T13:59:00.002+10:00

Fatal1ty and Thresh have been inducted into the gaming's Hall of Fame amongst a assortment of American-centric gamers and games.

lol season 1: interview

2010-07-13T20:31:00.003+10:00

PC Games - E3 2011 - League of Legends: Clash of Fates

Lotta hype, but the league structures (especially draft mode) are shaping up to be awesome. I really hope it catches on for large scale leagues and tournaments (like the upcoming WCG demonstration event), but I also hope mini tournaments are able to be pumped out to whet the appetite. Simple ones like 8 team beginner tourneys with a new skin as a prize (or simply riot points). Getting very VERY interesting.

GameLog 153 & 154

2010-07-12T00:38:00.003+10:00

Civ4: BtS (33h) - 1 LAN while LoL servers were down, but I've been keen on getting Fall from Heaven II mod working in the steam version. Started a couple of games, but I'm very pleased at the moment about a Grigori campaign ona tiny map with 6 other AIs and barbarian cities. The place feels more alive right from the start.

Uplink (22h) - Whole introversion pack for $5? done! Mainly wanted to play multiwinia, but uplink downloaded first and it's been great getting back into it. More or less setup at the moment apart from a beefier system to crack LANs before being booted off.

League of Legends (15h) - Game of choice for LANs and multiplayer over the net.

Grepolis (8h) - Helped in a merc war, but an analysis of the 'fantasy of Labour' by Naomi Clark in 'Another Castle' made me sit up and take notice on what the game meant to me. Seems like showing up is all the skill you need in it too if you're not attacking or being involved in an alliance.

Puzzle Kingdoms (7h) - More fiddling around with Sandy and Cameron

For the Glory (7h) - Tinkering more, but fallen by the wayside to ffh2.

EVE (5h) - Victim of a massive steam sale.

Trackmania nations (2h) - more Cameron making maps than actively racing.

Puzzle Quest: Galactrix (1h) - Showed Ben how to win without the other player having a go. took a bit to remember the exact sequence, but managed to beat every ship he had without him getting a turn.

FaceBattle.net to put real names into forums

2010-07-07T23:12:00.003+10:00

Blizzard announced earlier today that their RealID system will be even more integrated and will enforce people to use their real names (first and last name) when posting in their forums. Initially RealID was posited as a way to have all Blizzard related games combined under one account, but recently expanded to allow a mutual swapping of RealIDs to see your real friends playing on any game or any toons. Now the net has spread to make your real name your default public handle on the only outward-facing part of the game (so far).

Reminds you of Facebook-like failure of privacy? That's funny, they just announced facebook integration a couple of weeks ago.

Amidst the outcry, a moderator showed it was Ok to post his real name and got eaten alive by 10,000 posts in 6 hours detailing just how easy it was to get to his facebook page, his phone number, his address, a streetview of his house, what he paid for his house and what it's worth now, his recent felonies, etc.

For all the hullaballoo about stalkers, prospective future employers digging up their posts, etc, for me I'm more concerned about a degeneration in our ability to communicate...

Establishing an Online Identity
Ever since I set up my handle on IRC back in 1990, I have made a deliberate distinction between an online identity and my real life name. I have been fortunate that no-one's ever used my handle online, so I can maintain the same 'name' throughout many games and online communities. My handle IS my online identity, my real name is nothing online.

This isn't to do with anonymity, quite the opposite. My handle remains more or less unique while my real name would not be. There are a select few times when these 2 identities are interchangeable, and that is only while playing with my immediate family online while skyping. Even attending LANs I'd rather know people by their handle than by their real name.

Facebook's insistence of using your real name has been the start of the rot, and with Google profiles following suit, there's definitely a move to quash online personas. While there are certainly asshats happy to hide behind an anonymous nick to troll away, the vast majority of people I know have used the ability to have different handles to promote different aspects of their life. This more directly mimics what our intent is within our minds, and as such is a BETTER form of communication than just simply plonking your real name onto something. Think of the conversation style, the attitude and social context used while at work compared to at home, and at the golf course with mates, and online inside forums. Many may wish to lump all these together (as I do for all my online presences), but there remains no need to mandate it. You're destroying something that's important to the conversation, an idea of identity within context of the conversation.

Next thing you know they'll require people to have their own pictures as avatars. Some people do already by choice (hi trog), but forcing everyone to do it limits people's ability to emphasize their identity in a new space. Allowing people to express themselves more easily means that I don't have to read as much to get an impression of whether someone's worth following, or is simply a troll.

Identity is relative?
This news comes in only a couple of weeks after another article I read that identity is relative on the internet and that too many people place too much trust in the personas people create. Right, you may not know if BobTheBuilder is a guy or a girl, a troll or someone genuinely looking for answers, a person being truthful or someone intentionally being deceitful for the lulz, but to say that we should not trust people on the internet is once again ignoring conversation's greatest assets; context. We assume many, MANY things while having a conversation because it allows for a more efficient flow of ideas from one person to another. We don't always get it right, but we have also adapted many verbal and non-verbal queues to aid in conveying whether there has been too much or not enough information provided to set the right context of the conversation for optimal transmission of information.

In an online space you miss out on a number of those tools, but a consistent name and avatar aids in the bonding of those cueues to your impression of who the person is. I'd more likely start out at a higher level of conversation with someone called ProfessorX because even though their handle could have been chosen by anyone watching X-Men, the people who would choose ProfessorX over, say, Wolverine are unconsciously (or possibly consciously) placing more emphasis on scientific reasoning and thought. I would be surprised if they turned out to be a teenager who could not spell, but not shocked.

Trust is more or less the same as building assumptions. We trust that the sun will rise tommorow as it has a lot of evidence to point to that being the case, but it is still an assumption about a future event. People may be intentionally deceitful online, but our experience with people offline and (more importantly) in other online areas should give us an appropriate starting point for how much we can trust what they say will be correct. To say we should not trust at all would mean that every conversation would start with pure, verifiable facts, and be built from there. No conversation is like that, not even scientific ones. There is ALWAYS context to aid in the quicker transmission of information. Even in programming (a conversation between programmer and machine) there is context. Do the assumptions come back and bite us? Sure, but the benifits of quicker coding vastly outweigh the failures.

So back to FaceBattle.net. Their problem is that trolls are ruining their forums, and they believe that they will remove all the trolls by forcing everyone to use their real names. By doing so you also toss out all that expressive context associated with a handle and avatar and replace it with all the baggage that comes with people's real names (like gender & race).

Everyone right now has the ability to call their avatar after their real name and project their actual identity into the forums, but I see none. It would then seem that this option would place EVERYONE at a disadvantage by commnicating under a non-preferred handle.

I'm currently not a battle.net member as my WoW account has lapsed, but these issues really are questioning whether Cataclysm and SC2 are worth the pain of putting my name out there. It's not just the forums that I'm worried about, but the pace at which it's spreading to everywhere else.

From the Facebook integration official post:

This new functionality will START OFF by allowing you to quickly import Facebook friends into your Battle.net friends list, and ADDITIONAL FEATURES will be added over time.

DO .. NOT .. WANT!

GameLog 151 & 152

2010-06-30T20:32:00.002+10:00

Dominions 3 (18h) - Dominated an Aran map, but felt the need to a longer game to get into the mid/end game. Now playing Caelum in the dawn of discovery campaign.

EVE (17h) - Big session with Lance, but it seems the driving force of the game is just making money. Need a clan or something to get past the interface and into the game. Picked it up for $2 on steam though ...

Puzzle Kingdoms (14h) - God bless steam sales! seems like every game on steam is now on sale, and there's some awesome gems that I meant to get earlier that are now practically free. $2 for Puzzle Kingdoms? SOLD! Plays differently enough to Puzzle quest to keep me interested.

Grepolis (10h) - Ticking along. Neighbours got a little restless, but at least I have a steady stream of battle points now.

League of Legends (10h) - Big, big LAN session and more people to the meatgrinder that is lvl 1 LoL.

For the Glory (9h) - More steam sales. Playing through as the Danish to try to keep the nordic empire together. Got taken in by the starry lights of Mecklenberg and now no-one in europe like me very much. Gave up after continually losing battles in russia when outnumbering them > 5-1. Couldn't see any correlation to the stats it was giving me, they just keep fleeing at the sight of blood. Might restart to see if it's an endemic problem.

Civ4: BtS (6h) - More LANs

Final Fantasy XIII (4h) - Almost able to change team members, but it's still linear. Heard an interesting talk from Dr Julian Dooley about a broad literary review on violence in video games and the impact on the brain. Seems the causal link is sronger than smoking to cancer, so for the moment FF XIII is off the rotation for Cameron and me :/. Need to find his lit review and do a proper analysis.

MtG: Duels of the Planeswalkers (3h) - Ahh, good old magic. I miss modifying the deck, and somethines the turns grind on a bit while other times you miss your chance to cast that interrupt, but it's still a great take on the game.

TrackMania Nations (1h) - Nascar races after drawing racing tracks with Cameron.

48 Hour game design + Sid

2010-06-30T20:29:00.001+10:00

Sid Meier at a 48 hour game building challenge.

eLearning Explorations

2010-06-15T14:25:00.002+10:00

We're drawing to a close for the day-long workshop on eLearning explorations: Virtual Learning Spaces. It started out pretty badly with my expectation that sippy downs was off the Pomona turnoff; a whole 1/2 hour away from where it actually was. Luckily I was early enough to make it on time, but it's going to make the journey back even longer :/. Upon arrival I found out that I wasn't on the list of attendees, and was also the only one not from EQ. Being outside the EQ system became an issue as we immediately went to log in to the Blackboard system entrenched inside EQ's MOE. Finally got a jury-rigged account together that let me fiddle with the instructor's section of Blackboard, but everyone else immediately hopped into their own personal course. The realisation dawned that this workshop may be all hands on Blackboard and not a discussion into WHY you'd use Blackboard (or any other VLE) that I'd hoped.

...

GameLog 149 & 150

2010-06-14T14:28:00.002+10:00

EVE (15h) - Lance has gotten me back into EVE.

Grepolis (14h) - Found an open spot on the island next to me for a cheap 2nd city.

Star Wolves 3: Civil War (12h) - Still pretty linear, but it also made me link up with EVE again.

League of Legends (10h)

Dominsions 3 (10h) - New game after a podcast of Simtex's Master of Magic got the juices flowing again.

100 Rogues (5h) - iPhone rogue. Thought it'd be a bit better than it was for a paid game.

Neptune's Pride (4h) - More or less game over now with Sandy mopping up and me holding on to 2nd.

Civ4: BtS (3h) - LAN game with Ben and jo

Final Fantasy XIII (2h) - Still liner :/.

Borderlands (2h) - LAN games.

TrackMania Nations (2h) - Winter sport started up.

GameLog 147 & 148

2010-05-31T22:50:00.004+10:00

Star Wolves 3: Civil War (36h) - FINALLY got my birthday present from Greig to download over steam. When steam fails, it FAILS. Took a little to get into as the 8600 couldn't really get it cranked. The interface was also a little clunky, but that seems typical for 1C games; almost there, just not quite. The story has been pretty linear too. Although it feels you can deviate from the main plot if you really wanted, you can't as your ship randomly explodes if it goes somewhere unexpected. Reminds me of Final Fantasy and both don't fit the type of free exploration games I'm used to playing.

League of Legends (15h) - Game of choice for all concerned at Matt's place. At one point there was all 4 of us sitting in a room playing LoL, but all in different games. Ahh the potential!

Neptune's Pride (14h) - More or less game over now with Sandy mopping up and me holding on to 2nd.

Grepolis (10h) - Ticking over in the Delta region now. Lot slower paced than Epsilon.

Final Fantasy XIII (6h) - After dinner game with Cameron.

Mount & Blade: Warband (4h) - Another present from Greig. Online play felt a little underdone and is a total gankfest, but after looking at how it plays and comparing it to the campaign battles, I'm not sure I should have expected any different. Started a new campaign, but there's not too much in there compared to the mods of the original. Combat seems tougher now, but the same old tricks work.

FIFA world Cup: South Africa 2010 [Wii] (3h) - Game from Matt while up in Mackay. Even though it's an EA game, it controls and plays differently than normal FIFA. Not sure whether that's the Wii or the game, but probably a bit of both. Shooting and corners are now incredibly easy, while passing and transitioning from defense into offense are abysmal compared to previous games. Just ... wierd. One thing it has going though is a good feeling of the sense of occasion. I can see me popping this one in a couple of times in the leadup to the World Cup to get in the mood.

Borderlands (2h) - LAN games.

TrackMania Nations (1h) - Shalom finally made it over for a matchup, now they'll hopefully join in for winter season starting next week.

Wait - Ascension Sunday

2010-05-20T14:38:00.004+10:00

Last Sunday's sermon on waiting.

Ascension.mp3

Acts 1:4
On one occasion, while he was eating with them, he gave them this command: "Do not leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my Father promised."

Luke 24:45-49
Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things. I am going to send you what my Father has promised; but stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high."

Even though today is ascension Sunday, the ascension was to happen 40 days after the resurrection, so that puts it at about last Friday. At the moment we’re in a bit of a gap in the Christian calendar. After ascension, waiting for Pentecost.

Waiting
In today’s text we hear an odd command. Wait. “Don’t leave Jerusalem, but wait for the gift my father had promised.” The disciples, too, have a gap to fill. Waiting for Pentecost. We know Pentecost was to come a bit more than a week later, but how would it have been just sitting and waiting for the outpouring of the spirit?

The disciples were Jews, and from the Old Testament the Jews didn’t have a very good track record of waiting. When Moses was receiving the 10 commandments, he told the elders and people of Israel to wait until he returned. While Moses was gone for 40 days, they wavered and faltered.

Exodus 26:13
Then Moses set out with Joshua his aide, and Moses went up on the mountain of God. 14 He said to the elders, "Wait here for us until we come back to you. Aaron and Hur are with you, and anyone involved in a dispute can go to them."
Exodus 32:1
When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, "Come, make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don't know what has happened to him."
Exodus 32:7
Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf."

Then God got a little angry.

So back to the Disciples. They were given the instruction to wait for things to come. The gift God had promised is on the way. Wait. Earlier on, not 40 days beforehand, they also had been given a prediction of what was to come. Jesus mentioned many times that he was to be crucified, but on the third day he will rise again. Here is another gap where there seems to be nothing to do but sit and wait, but the disciples react badly. They huddle up in their rooms in fear. Fear of getting caught, fear that their world that has all fallen apart. Jesus had told them first in parables after clearing out the temple:

John 2:19
Jesus answered them, "Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days."

Then throughout his ministry more plainly. After feeding the 4000 and healing the blind:

Matthew 16:21
From that time on, Jesus began to explain to his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and suffer many things at the hands of the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and that he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.

And again after many more miracles and parables:

Matthew 20:17
Now as Jesus was going up to Jerusalem, he took the twelve disciples aside and said to them, "We are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be betrayed to the chief priests and the teachers of the law. They will condemn him to death and will turn him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and flogged and crucified. On the third day he will be raised to life!"

The time of waiting from Christ’s death to eventual resurrection should have been one of anticipation. The biggest miracle ever was close at hand! Yet they cowered.

Ascension
In contrast, the disciples approach the Ascension and following days in a totally different manner. We read from the end of Luke:

Luke 24:50-53
When he had led them out to the vicinity of Bethany, he lifted up his hands and blessed them. While he was blessing them, he left them and was taken up into heaven. Then they worshiped him and returned to Jerusalem with great joy. And they stayed continually at the temple, praising God.

What a change. What a way to wait, praising God. The difference? 40 days. A long time. Jesus had spent 40 days proving himself to be the resurrected Christ. He appeared to the disciples, to Thomas, to the men on the road to Emmaus. He ate with them and talked with them. Still, we hear their faith was lacking:

Mark 16:14
Later Jesus appeared to the Eleven as they were eating; he rebuked them for their lack of faith and their stubborn refusal to believe those who had seen him after he had risen.

Disciples had lacking faith? Didn’t they gave up everything to follow Jesus? Martin Luther, in a sermon on ascension, explains the difference:

Martin Luther [1]
But let no one think that the apostles were altogether unbelieving; they believed what was written in the Law and the prophets, although their faith was not yet perfect. They believed that God created heaven and earth, and was the Maker of every creature. The Lord, however, shows what they lacked; they did not believe the resurrection of Christ from the dead. Although they believed the other things, they were still lacking in this. I hold that they believed that they had a gracious God. Yet this was not enough; they must believe also the resurrection of Christ. Christ’s words to them at the Last Supper: "You believe in God, believe also in me." John 14, 1.

What does it mean, then, to believe the resurrection of Christ? This thing which is so important that without it the disciples were called unbelieving and faithless? To believe the resurrection of Christ, is nothing else than to believe that we have a Mediator before God. Who is Christ, who makes us holy and acceptable to God the Father. For man's possessions, by birth and nature, are but sin and corruption, by which he brings down upon himself the wrath of God. But God is eternal righteousness and purity, and therefore, from his very nature, hates sin. Hence there is always enmity between God and the natural man. They cannot be harmony with one another.
For this cause, Christ became man and took upon himself our sins and also the wrath of the Father, and drowned them both in himself, thus reconciling us to God the Father. Without this faith, we are children of wrath, able to do no good work that is pleasing to God.

The disciples had faith in the God of Law, the God that talked to Moses calling the people of Israel corrupt. Jesus rebukes their lack of faith, but opens their minds to the Scriptures:

Luke 24:44
He said to them, "This is what I told you while I was still with you: Everything must be fulfilled that is written about me in the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms."
Then he opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures. He told them, "This is what is written: The Christ will suffer and rise from the dead on the third day, and repentance and forgiveness of sins will be preached in his name to all nations, beginning at Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.”

The disciples, finally seeing the jigsaw puzzle complete before their eyes, are filled with joy! As Jesus ascends, they praise him. As they wait for Pentecost, they praise him!

So here we are today; in the lull between Ascension and Pentecost. We can look back at the past and learn from the disciples. And with the disciples, let us also praise the Lord for Christ has risen for you, for me, for everyone.
Amen.

[1] Sermon for the Day of Christ’s Ascension; Mark 16:14-20 (2nd sermon) by Martin Luther; taken from his Church Postil, 1522.

It's missing an X

2010-05-20T10:05:00.003+10:00

Over the past couple of weeks, Sandy and I have been looking for an online free web game for both of us to play. After dabbling with a couple of capitalism types, we finally settled on Heroes of Gaia, a Hreroes of Might and Magic lookalike put into the MMO mould.

After playing for a couple of weeks, the game started to become a bit repetitive. Even though there was lots of different missions to do, they generally devolved into 'search for target, attack'. Tehre were other things that seemed amiss, but I couldn't really put my finger on it.

One morning I asked Sandy what she thought of the game. "Yeah, it's all right, but it's missing an X". I thought about it and laughed. "It's missing an X". What a unique sentence. I'm not sure how many other wives out there would have been able to say that. Firstly because it requires a deep understanding of 4X games, but also because it was a very efficient sentence to convey the exact problem with the game. She knew I'd understand what it meant. There is no longer any eXploration.

I don't think we played it after that. The problem was now exposed and the search restarted to find an interesting web game for the both of us. Currently our hopes lie in Neptune's Pride, a Masters of Orion type game with world time elements of play. It has a pretty clean interface and simple combat mechanics and tech tree, with an interesting mix of public and hidden information. The design would seem to be more like a board game than a computer game.

Yes, It has the eXplore. Time will tell if the other X's are there too, but it's looking good.

GameLog 143 - 146

2010-05-20T09:08:00.004+10:00

Been a real busy set of weeks, especially last Thursday when I was hoping to write these up ...

Grepolis (45h) - Epsilon game has faded away somewhat. I'd more or less gone incative by the time NoE started their big push. I'm glad i haven't lost any cities to them in the past 2 weeks, but they are being divested to worthy players now.

Started in Zeta, but got the worst island and position ever. Cancelled the start in the hope of rejoining over NE with previous Royal Regimant players, but it's past that and it's still not offering me a choice to rejoin :/.

In the lull of Zeta kicking back in I started on Delta and have a moderate starting location. I've overtaken eveeyone on the closest islands, but am now debating whether to go with an alliance or stick it out on my own.

Heroes of Gaia (35h) - Started this MMO with Sandy as a Grepolis we can play together. It looks and plays like Heroes of Might and Magic, but started to get very samey. Sandy nailed it when She said "It's missing an X". It was a very time intensive game too compared to Grepolis and Neptune's pride.

League of Legends (20h) - Mainly a late night game with Scott, Carina and Greig. The skill matching is working pretty well and it's usually an intense 30 minutes per game. Currently playing Ashe and Heimerdinger. Heimer is less useful when playing agaist a team intent on ganking, but can easily hold his own in a standup battle.

Neptune's Pride (10h) - Another online game with Sandy to find the missing X. It's playing pretty good now, but certainly a game that should be played among friends for that extra diplomacy kick. So far it's like a lightweight Masters of Orion.

Final Fantasy XIII (4h) - After dinner game with Cameron. Must be getting close to the world exploration part. The linearity of the game is starting to piss me off. The massive cutscenes make it more of a movie with random pressing of X to continue. The story does make it reasonable for Cameron to watch, as the combat is now starting to surpass his skill level.
Borderlands (2h) - LAN games at my place.

TrackMania Nations (1h) - Summer season of CCG finished up with Ted taking out the finals

Civ5 pricing woes

2010-05-11T16:56:00.000+10:00

Mars bar cake

2010-05-10T23:56:00.003+10:00

Happy Birthday to me!

Sandy whipped up this "Mars bar" cake for the Saturday dinner with Mark and Amanda. Chocolate coating was pretty thick, with marshmallows as nougat and caramel layered inbetween. A biscuit secured the bottom, but faded into the background with all the sugar on offer.

Yep, it was sweet. Probably on par with a certain marsbar & whipped cream from a previous birthday. You wanted another piece, but something (heart?) let you know that one was enough and put down the knife please.

Who you know who knows what you know

2010-05-06T10:22:00.005+10:00

This first article for Thursday Theory was inspired by Peter Sawyer's talk at the graduation ceremony for my Post Grad teaching. Peter emphasized "networking" though joining organisations such as the Bundaberg Chamber of Commerce to not only swap business cards, but help them out in the hope that they would also help you out some day. This led to the adage "It's not what you know, but who you know"

After getting my first job through Andrew, I came up with an adaptation to the adage (as well as an awesome tongue twister):

It's not "It's not what you know, but who you know", but "It's not what you know, but who you know who knows what you know"

The key change is the emphasis on capability is conferred to the person referring you rather than being left out altogether. In practical terms this means that people will only refer others that they believe will be capable for the job. This is because if the other person fails at the job, that reflects poorly on them as a referrer.

Since my first job, I have only had one of around 30 that I have needed to go through an interview process. The rest have been through referrals by people who "know what I know". Now they don't know all the things I know, but they know capability. They know that I have succeeded in the past with a similar task and should also be able to succeed in the prospective task, or that I have as much chance as any of completing the task, and the level of security in a known quantity is enough to make the appointment over other potentially more qualified applicants who are unknown.

So what of University then? Why bother going to uni or learning anything for that matter if it's all about who you know? Well, completing university demonstrates a couple of things to your peers, rellies and friends:
- You are interested in a specific field of work / study more than other areas
- You are skilled enough to complete a degree
- You can persevere enough to complete a degree
- You now have a skillset in that field to complete most tasks.

University also offers a fantastic place to establish a network of people doing other disciplines that now "know what you know". They know what it was like to go through Uni and what the end skillset is likely to be. They know what YOU were like going through Uni.

By the time you realise this it's probably too late. The networking gained at Uni comes into play after you leave, and is more or less irreversible. If you were a slacker through Uni, most of your peers would be hesitant to recommend you for fear of you not fulfilling the task when there's money on the line.

Thursday Theory

2010-05-06T10:02:00.003+10:00

After completing the Post Grad teaching last year, my 1 day a week off this year was to refocus back on the PhD on procedural world generation. That was, as it happened, until I moved the free day to Thursday so that I can concentrate on delivering the Head to the Heart youth group sessions for St John's. I still need more motivation to do something more productive with my time though, as the more recent Thursdays off have been procrastinated away playing Grepolis or League of Legends.

After last week's graduation triggered my memory about "who you know who knows what you know", I thought I'd try something different. On Thursday I'll try to write an article about a concept that I've previously discussed with people, but isn't written down anywhere. Hopefully these articles are going to take a couple of hours each, and give me some focus for kaizen.

All I need is a catchy tagline: Thursday Theory.

Gamelog 142 & 143

2010-04-28T13:27:00.004+10:00

Grepolis (80h) - Was seriously going to give it away after I got my 4th city as it was going to eat up all my time, but after looking around the net there wasn't really any games that had the same feel that both Sandy and I could play. I found a different, more relaxed groove to play in and currently sitting 5th overall. Alliances make the game though, and I'm in a good one.

Borderlands (4h) - Slowly plugging away through the storyline at Ben's LANs. Well, I think we're following the storyline. It seems to be just running around headshotting for 1 damage.

League of Legends (15h) - Played the beta and thought it would be too hardcore for the masses, but once Greig and Scott got into a groove on it, I redownloaded the client and got into it again.

Final Fantasy XIII (3h) - After dinner game with Cameron.

GameLog 141 & 142

2010-04-12T06:43:00.003+10:00

Grepolis (80h) - Pretty hard to put a time on it, but it's certainly sucked every bit of time I've had free into either farming or maintaining the alliance.

Final Fantasy XIII (5h) - After dinner game with Cameron. The plot is pretty good once you get into it, and the combat is even easy enough fo Cameron to take over every now & then.

TF2 (1h) - Saw Andrew playing this one time and jumped in for a little bit of rocket action.

GameLog 139 & 140

2010-03-28T23:03:00.004+10:00

Grepolis (55h) - Had this little timesink under control until I joined a decent alliance, then it REALLY got out of hand. War has been declared with Nightmares of Elysium, a group of veterans toward the core of the ocean. I'm still way out in front out on my region, but the war might come out this way soon.

Gyromancer (10h) - Picked up the pace a little in the 2nd section, but it's given way to Grepolis now.

Final Fantasy XIII (8h) - Picked this up for the PS3 to host a different sort of LAN. Worked pretty well sitting around trashing the plot and making Sam run Vanelle around. Playing through with Cameron too.

Trackmania (4h) - StLukes CCG & some "race car" time.

Football Manager 2010 (2h) - T.Bowes - FM 2010. Smallest contribution to the game yet with over 300 hours logged in total. Still midtable with 1/2 the season gone. There's a bug in the way you copy out text from the game, so the blog is going to suffer from it. Maybe 3-4 posts a season.

Torchlight (1h) - Little dabble when looking for something to play. Trine would have been better, but it's completed now.