Veeyar - Space Ranger

Got into the mood for another AAR and decided to try it as a blog again. Veeyar - Space Ranger is my latest epic adventure into the world of Space Rangers 2.

One thing I've been struggling with in Andy Preece: Retired is that I'm not sure whether it's better in reverse chronological order like a blog, or chronological order like a book. The Andy Preece one made more sense as a blog because that was part of the aesthetic I wanted. This new one though has more of a story feel to it, so it probably would be better as a book.

Problem is though that it's really hard to set up a blog back in chronological order. A couple of hours googling and experimenting didn't reveal a proper solution. Ideally I'd like the blog to be in chronological order and the blog archive to read like an index of chapters. In the end I found a little trick with modifying the posting dates allowed it to appear as if it was posted on the 1st January 3300. This made the archive behave a bit better too, but every time yo touch the post you need to keep aligning the year as it drops the millenium and century for more realistic values (read: it re-interprets the date as a 6 character string rather than keeping the value as a date or long. Sloppy, sloppy. That's what caused the millenium bug problems.)

GameLog 72 & 73

Spent a fair while away from the PC over the Christmas break here and up in Mackay. Another fortnightly log is the result.

Space Rangers 2 (20h) - Once we arrived in Mackey, Matt's computer room already had 4 PCs set up and no real room for mine or Sandy's. I hopped on Scott's to see what else he had other than WoW and found an old version of Space rangers 2. Great, there goes the holidays of playing games together. Just .. one ... more .... mission.

Recently found a new expansion for it which co-incided with my pang to write another AAR; hence Veeyar - Space Ranger is born. I also reminisced about AARs for Living Epic, so maybe this AAR will be shaped by what I learn in that course.


Mount & Blade (17h) - Greig had bought the beta version about a year ago, but it's fleshed out a lot since then. He was telling me about the changes and it was enough for me to grab the demo for a run around myself. Almost picked up the full version a couple of times, but ~$60 for digital content is basically a full priced game. I'd have been happy with $40. Plays well.

Little Big Planet (4h) - Cameron's go-to game when he wants to spend time with me. He's happy to play a little then give me the controller, and I'm happy to play while he watches.

WoW:WotLK (3h) - BundyBear, 72 Warrior.
Tried to organize a run on Nexus while we were up in Mackay, but it never happened.

King's Bounty (3h) - Digging around for SR2:reboot I found that the Russians had also moved on to develop a remake of King's Bounty, an awesome game from the 90's. Demo seemed a bit sluggish, even on my GTX 260. Not sure why. Definitely something I'd get if I can find it locally or cheap online. For now SR2 will suffice...

Lego Indiana Jones (2h) - Played this up at Matt's on his new 360. I'm firmly of the belief now that LBP has ruined all other platformers for me. The physics and touch applied to the 'lil sackboy is just another level of intuitiveness higher than previous titles.

TrackMania Nations Forever (2h) - Quick fix for boredom.

Dungeon Crawl (1h) - Another quick fix while I download the next demo.

Club Penguin (1h) - One of the recommended games for Living Epic short course.

Runescape (1h) - Another recommended game for Living Epic short course.

Christmas 08

At 5am the party awoke,
except for dad, who needed a poke.
Santa had come and presents abound!
The gleeful joy a wonderful sound.

Having 3 kids in the house for Christmas changed the feel of it again this year. We had decided to donate to a charity instead of the usual present giving among the family, but somehow Mum disappeared a couple of days before Christmas and there were presents for everyone under the tree again. That started the floodgates as Dad and Matt headed out Christmas eve to match the effort. Cameron, Rachael and Rebecca had the lions share of the presents, but after all the paper ended up in Rebecca's clamshell pool, the pile was enormous.

We'll still be donating to Fred Hollows Foundation. On a mowing trip earlier in the month with Cameron I was idly thinking about how he looked in front of me with his gumboots, miner's hat and safety goggles. Safety goggles. Sandy's insistence he wore them as the dirt can swirl up a bit against the shed. What would you do if you lost your eyesight? Of all the senses, eyesight would be the most vital, followed closely by hearing & speech (too bad I've destroyed my eardrums frontlining speakers on many techno nights). My thoughts turned to the Fred hollows foundation and the ability to restore sight to someone for a mere $25. That's got to be one of the best investments ...

Card Chess.04

Card Chess.04 - Still more experiments into Flash. Hooked up some animation scripts to be called programatically to move the cards from one location to another. Currently only on the terrain cards, but I'll need it there too for a shuffle on game restart. Animation is currently triggered off mouse click and makes all of them go to the bottom right corner because they all belong to the same base class.

Flash Tests

Finally sorted out how to load up the Flash apps I've been tinkering with:
Hello World
Card chess.03

They'll live on googlepages until I've got Card Chess into a finished state to upload to Kongregate and link in here.

GameLog 71

Couple of extra days down at Andrew's and I got to jump on some of the 360 games I've been reading about. Even managed to make up a proper gamer card for XBox Live since Fallout 3 uses it on PC:


(Edit: Hah, gamer cards don't seem to be visible on Chrome, but Ok on IE & FF. That's 2 things I've found that don't work on Chrome, Hotmail and gamer cards, both Microsoft products ...)


Kongai (10h) - Been digging into the developer side of Kongregate to experiment with making a flash game based on Card Chess. It been taking longer than I thought, but at least I now have bouncing "Hello World"s and a pretty good grasp of the asset to ActionScript interface.

AS3 is turning out to be very much like C++, so it should definitely be achievable getting the game up and running, but it's going to be more plod than RAD. So far I have the 6x6 layout and the middle terrain area set up, but issues with VMs not writing consistently to local HDDs has caused a couple of hard resets and a rewrite of the code :(.


Gears of war (8h) - Played Co-op with Andrew to see what it's like. I still can't get my head around FPS on consoles. I'm constantly frustrated with aiming sluggishness when I need to change targets rapidly and aiming precision to track moving targets. I know it would be a skill learned eventually, but I've seen Zyos play in person and I still think he'd get raped by an average Joe with a mouse + keyboard.

Little Big Planet (6h) - Finally finished the campaign! I'd like to redo the levels again as 2 player as it's impossible to get 100% without multiplayer on the levels. With the new patch it's also a lot easier to search for new levels. Found a cool present delivery level that plays a bit like diner dash.

WoW:WotLK (4h) - BundyBear, 72 Warrior.
Sandy is forging ahead. I'm skipping sections so that I only have to do the areas where we need the 2 of us to get through when I finally get in there.

TrackMania Nations Forever (3h) - More circuit racing.

Atlantica (3h) - Got swayed by a kongregate ad spruking a free to play tactical MMO. Think Heroes of Might and Magic fights. It's got a great mentoring system that had a level 79 come and help me out once I'd been through the initial stages. Can't find any decent shops yet so I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do with the junk I'm collecting, but at least enchanting gobbles up dupes into something useful.

Dungeon Crawl (3h) - Was leading the favourite roguelike of the year on Ascii Dreams, so I tried it out. The Win version with tiles and mouse control played a little differently, but I miss a shop or a form of information discovery.

Braid (1h) - Andrew had this on his XBox so I got to play a couple of levels. Feels very wierd coming from LBP back to a platformer with no physics, but I enjoyed the rewind ability and it did fit in well with the leadup story. Would have played it a bit more if given the chance.

Drumkit Warranty

Need to send away my GH:WT drumkit because one of the wires connecting the cymbals isn't working. Finally found the Warranty website for Australia

Peter Moleneux at Living Epic

OMG!

Catching up on the backlog of reading since the trip down to Brissie disrupted the schedule somewhat and I missed the biggest news to hit the VGHVI group; Peter Moleneux has done an interview for the Living Epic short course starting after Christmas.

I missed my chance to get some questions in for the interview, but it sounds like it's going to be filled with interesting Fable II inner workings from a storytelling perspective.

Packing VMs

Today was a complex chain of events. I went to bed last night with the hope of implementing my card chess game in flash for Kongregate in the morning. First up was a refresher on the exact type of flash required for Kongregate, and another hunt around for an open source alternative. Although ExplodingFerret wrote up a free tool version of the Shootorials, I was hoping for at least an IDE to work in. Flash CS4 wasn't available for trial the last time I looked, but it's now up so I grabbed it and started prepping a VM test box.

I had noticed on the Office 2007 VM that there were critical updates coming in thick and fast, so I thought I may as well update the base XP SP2 image. 50 updates and 3 hours later and it's ready to go, apart from the image now being 6Gb instead of the starting 1.7Gb.

After gutting the $ntuninstall directories and generally cleaning the image up the VHD was still at the 6Gb mark! A quick google revealed that I needed to zero out the VM before compacting. Still only reduced it to 2.8Gb. ~1Gb just for SP3 and windows updates? Ouch.

So now it's 7pm and I still haven't got Flash up and running yet. Not looking good for finishing something today ...

ScrumButt

Been delving into Scrum as a project development technique and this seemed an interesting analysis:

Usually, team members update the burn-down chart daily to reflect adjustments to the amount of remaining work. Such updates reflect a desire to have as good knowledge as is possible about the effort remaining. These estimates are made in mid-stream and reflect increases that arise from emergent requirements. However, given that one emergent requirement has been discovered in a task doesn’t imply that no others remain. While the confidence in an estimate usually improves with each revision and with continued work on the task, unusually wicked problems seem never to converge.

On the other hand the Product Owner is not centrally interested in partially completed work, only in items that are done and potentially shippable. Since the goal of Scrum is to achieve the Sprint target agreed with the Product Owner, and to reduce risk, the focus should be on done. Emergent requirements increase risk, and the Product Owner is certainly interested if estimates expand. Because there may always be emergent requirements, any estimate of remaining time based on work mid-stream in a task has a higher degree of uncertainty than the relatively risk-free estimate of zero remaining time for done items. In theory, it is possible for the remaining time on a burn-down chart to be quite near zero, yet to have few (or perhaps zero!) tasks in the done state.

Therefore:
Update the Product Backlog in only two cases: reducing the amount of remaining known work if the task is done; and increasing the amount of known work if the task grows in size due to emergent requirements or other insights gained during the Sprint. Do not reduce the amount of remaining work that arises from progress on partially completed tasks.

I'm guessing the size of the tasks need to be small (1 day?) and at most 1/2 the size of the sprint so that you don't have a velocity heading northward for a significant part of the sprint.