Buy Games New

Purchasing used games from EB really rips off developers. EB get's all the money and they keep it for themselves. You should really buy new games as that supports the people who made it and then they can make more.

Essentially when you buy a new game, you're sort of paying for that one, but mostly you're paying for them to make the next one.

To the developer, when you buy a used game, it's like piracy, but you gave your to money to EB games instead of keeping it. Literally they see just as much money from someone who bought a used game as from someone who stole it.

Spend the extra 5 bucks, so great companies like Bioware can keep making the games we love to play.

-Liam

The Decipher Machine

Awhile back I posted my Dspeech Cipher Machine created originally to make a fake language (though not really a language) to vex my D&D players.

I realize that working through a word for word cipher on your own is somewhat brutal, so I made an online tool to help make the process a bit better:

http://web.uvic.ca/~liamk/decipher/

It lets you input a bunch of ciphered text and then takes you to a page where you can guess at its meaning. It can also save you a dictionary for use later and you can type in a dictionary if you'd like. This should allow people to build up a common known set of words and rock it out.

I thought it was kind of neat and it shows off what you can do with php and html.

-Liam

Starting Making Some Chainmail

I've wanted to do this for awhile now, but didn't have the time, tools, or know how. Having read up quite a bit on armor in the last few days and even more on how to make chainmail, I pretty much figured it out and bought the only required material: 150ft of 16 gauge galvanized steel wire.

It's not the fastest process, but I'm already much better at it than when I started. The weave is a bit more complicated than I thought and can get a little tricky, but it's coming together. I'm running with a 4 in 1 european weave which was apparently very popular back in the day. I think my rings might be a little too big, but it'll save some time if they're larger than standard.

Anyway, What I really wanted to do was post on my setup:

I think it's slightly more interesting than my finely weaved mail.

You can see I build a new row seperately and then attach them to the previous. I got a long piece of plywood, which you can see at the bottom, and hammered nails onto each side. This helps me keep the chain straight while I'm working on each row and then combining the rows together.

I also got a slightly wider, but shorter, piece of plywood and hammered some larger spikes into it. They keep my rings nicely stacked up, so I grab them easily. The big piece also can fit everything on it, so I'm pretty mobile.

I use the pipe to wind the wire into a spring and the aviation snips to cut it into rings. I've found them to be the best so far. They make a good cut and I've recently discovered you can cut about 13 rings at a time.The needlenose pliers are there to expand and close rings if need be, but generally I just twist them open and close by hand.

Anyway, so far so good. It's actually been a really fun experience. I've learned a fair bit; I'm sure all of it's useless. (unless the Knights who say "Ni" show up)

New Build Soon

Why not? I've done a fair bit. I'll probably post an ubuntu version in a couple of days. It should run on most linux out there.

Email from Penny Arcade's Greenhouse!

Say What!?

I fired them off an email awhile back asking what it takes to get on Greenhouse. They got back to me with the answer of a "quality game".

I'm most definitely a ways off from that, but it's awesome motivation. Some day I'll have the game they're looking for... some day.

Likewise, I don't suppose anyone out there wants to crank out some cool music for this project? I suck at cranking out music, but you could and then you'd be on the ground floor of this enterprise.

-Liam

Dspeech - On the Fly Cypher Machine

A few years back, I had drank a lot of coffee and envisioned a way to make a "language" using a pretty simple find and replace machine.

Basically it would have a dictionary of English words and their translation and go through a text document and replace all the words with their new equivalent.

Ok, I know some of my friends know multiple languages and may be sort of passionate about this sort of thing. We both know this isn't an actual language. Hence language in quotes at the very start.

The coolest thing was that when it stumbled across an undefined word, you made it up on the spot and added it in to the language. Slowly a vocabulary would build and you'd have something.

At the time, I couldn't quite get it to work. A few months ago, I wrote the entire thing from scratch in about 15-20 minutes.

The source code can be downloaded here

Now, I don't know what use you'll have for this.

I personally use it to make a fake language to throw at the people in my D&D game. Basically they find script written in what I call "Dark Speech". This provides a solid way to write stuff in English, and make it impossible to read, yet possible to decode.

You could use it to send secret messages to your friends, but you'd both need a current copy of the dictionary for that to work. Then you'll hit issues with concurrency.

Anyway, maybe someone in the whole of the Internet can put it to use.

Also my second piece of beer-ware - still no beer, but maybe one day.

-Liam

Added sound!

Well mostly just a song which plays while you go through the text level. We've got a long, long way to go to get sound for everything, but this isn't half bad.

There isn't really a screen shot for this, so you'll have to take my word on it.

Anyway, all the songs are going to be in the format known as "ogg". This means you should be able to replace any of them with songs you like.

It turns out the entire development team is composed of sub par musicians, so we will never make you listen to what you don't want to.

Regardless, when it comes out, you might as well just go ahead and replace the songs with something like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXRUTuq_pvo

or

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8rZWw9HE7o

-Liam out!

Slightly Nicer Hud

Check it:

I sometimes wonder why I post these to facebook too. It's automatic, so no real work. I do get the feeling most of my friends are much cooler than me and don't really care for this kind of thing.

Anyway, I really like how this looks.

It's almost, almost, atmos, starting to look like a game.

Did I just say Atmos? Yeah I did. Those be scary.

Next stop sound, but that'll be sometime after july 10th.

Currently my big project is building a small water management system for remote first nations communities. It's more just a proof of concept, but it's been a lot of fun. It's also not very often I get to say my work might - just might- help someone out.

P.S. Kylan should write me a riveting plot.

Control Change + HUD

I decided the original control scheme was a bit too difficult, so I revamped it.

No it plays kind of like an fps on rails. You use wasd to move around and the mouse to aim. I like it a lot more than it used to be. The big reason for the switch was:

1. The game was difficult to play
2. I wanted to take advantage of platform known as the PC. The mouse is an awesome. I think people who play lots of game's on console have either forgotten or don't know how slick a mouse is.

I also added a bit of a hud. This was pretty easy to do, I just hadn't figured out the quite how to keep it in the correct place all the time. This has been fixed. I also implemented a simple scoring system (SSS)

There is a little wire sphere which is acting as a cross hair in there too. I'll have to make a real one soon.

OpenGL hates text

It's almost as if it was designed for something else!

Anyway, rendering a standard room, I can get about 3-6 fps. It has to work pretty hard to do it too. I'll probably try and do some profiling and figure out where the performance is being lost.

This is actually crazy cool. Usually your tools to do a specific task are really rock solid.

How many times have you ever had to optimize something: pretty much never.

So basically OpenGL sucks at text, and this means I can break out things like loop unrolling, macros and whatever else to try and get it working faster.

Should be fun!