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Quitting Facebook *Draft*

TODO: Write about quitting Facebook, and why I envision a dystopian future for the social network.

Pickford Bros Feedback

Got my feedback from the Pickford Bros for my game Waka – a Pacman RPG.

Choosing to ignore certain pieces of feedback (our suggestion to change the floaty movement), while accepting others, is a very good skill for a designer to have. In the commercial world any game designer is going to be bombarded by knumbskull suggestions all the way through development, often from the client who is funding the development. It’s easy to knuckle under and follow every suggestion that’s given, but usually that results in terrible games (the people giving the suggestions aren’t usually game designers). On the other hand stubbornly refusing to change anything, and being really precious about your design, can be a handicap. So, selectively choosing the feedback that you think improves the game and implementing it, but sticking to your guns when you disagree with other feedback, shows maturity, and is the best way to behave in the commercial world. It’s always a balancing act, but sometimes other people have ideas that improve your game, other times they are rubbish ideas that will spoil the game, and other times you just have to keep the client happy one way or another.

I can’t say much more about the game than I did last time. I think it’s great, and there was clear progress and improvement from the last version. It satisfies the brief perfectly, and is fun to play. My only criticism is that the combat mini-game could maybe do with a bit more variety, and was a little easy, although I did fail on Boxxy a couple of times – the exp penalty for failing battles was perfect!

Great work, and we look forward to seeing your games in the future.

Windows API

I finally started some progress on CloudEngineDX today; by progress, I mean attempting to decypher the good, bad, and the ugly that is the Windows API.

I hate the fully capitalized type names; HWND, HINSTANCE, and so forth. That is all.

Joe Bloggs

And so do I. Sitting amidst the chilling strokes of dubstep, content, typing away how I’m feeling when I turn my head to the side; the window misted with a few drops of rain, and the  shady hues of green and brown reflect an odd occurance in temperature. Ahh, England.

I’m becoming slightly concerned with the time I spend browsing Reddit and Facebook; I mean, I was always concerned, but now I’m concerned. For those that don’t know what Reddit is, good, stay away. For those that are, I know you share my pain. Some say that when they sleep, in the darkness, as they drift off into sub-concious territory; they dream of narwhals and bacon, amidst a moonlight feast.

I want to cut down on Reddit-ing, but what is the most efficient way of achieving this? I can’t just quit all together, for I have an undying thirst for knowledge; an infinite inquisition. There are steps involved, and I’ve planned them as such:

  • Spend less time on Reddit.
  • ?????
  • Profit.

It would just appear than the first one on that list is the hardest step.

A Rambling of Humanity

Money single handedly prevents progress. Do you care more about money, or do you care more about global warming? You care about money, because money affects how you live in the here and now, where as global warming is unlikely to affect you, but it could mean the end of humanity.

What alternatives are there to money? Trade? Tickets? Must there always be some intermediary, can humans never truly learn to share? The irony of being taught to share as a child, and as you grow up you begin to see how much of the world is a lie, false pretences; money.

An asteroid of 10km^2 would have the impact of 1000 Little Boy explosions, which is the power to damage 1000 cities, and burn Earth to the ground; blocking sunlight to this planet for millennia, and we’re 65 million years overdue for it. But knowing this simple truth, humanity cannot pull together to stride for human colonization of other planets; terraforming and atmosphere implantation. And why? Because money, that’s why.

This Title Is So Mainstream

So I made a documentation generator for Clockwork. I already looked into existing ones, but they just weren’t practical for what I’m after, so I wrote my own. It scans the entire Clockwork project for specific tags within comment blocks, and then generates a JSON array of documented functions, hooks, libraries and classes.

I’m currently working on a website which uses the generated JSON array to provide a neat interface for viewing the Clockwork documentation. Users will be able to post both comments and examples for each object, and other users can upvote the best ones to the top of the page.

Here’s a quick example of how it works.

Linus the Git

Me and Alex Grist have been using Git as version control for Clockwork. I’ve never really collaborated with somebody else on a project before; I’ve always been a rather independent programmer, but Git has made development a breeze.

For those of you living under a rock, and are unfamiliar with it; Git is a fast, powerful, and easy to use distributed revision control system. It was created by the face behind the open-source Linux initiative, Linus Torvalds.

Once you’ve set up a Git repository for your project, the basic principle of Git is this:

  1. Programmer A edits a file from a local clone of the repository on his/her system.
  2. When Programmer A has finished implementing Feature A or fixing Bug A, they “Commit” to their changes; a note can be added describing what they’ve changed, added, or removed.
  3. It would be wise at this point for Programmer A to “Pull” any changes to the remote repository; any alterations made will be cleverly merged.
  4. When Programmer A so desires, he or she can then “Push” the changes to the remote repository.
  5. Programmer B will receive these changes when he or she makes a “Pull”.

There’s way more to it than that, but that’s the basic idea; Git is awesome and I much prefer it to Apache Subversion (SVN).

Linus Torvalds
Intelligence is the ability to avoid doing work, yet getting the work done.

Many Hands, Light Work

Cloud Sixteen is currently looking to hire and pay an experienced Lua scripter, to aid with the development of Clockwork schemas. The role will require good knowledge of utilizing frameworks; a good ability to follow a coding standard, and last but not least, any experience in OpenAura modification (this is a big plus!).

The hired coder would receive a 7.5% cut on any sale of a schema they have worked on, as well as a staff discount of 50%. You will be interviewed by Alex Grist and I, as this is a serious position.

If you think you have what it takes to be a part of our tight-knit team, drop me an e-mail.

Hot Robot

So Valve released a closed-beta of Steam for Android and iOS this week, which I think everybody has been waiting for since forever. I always dreamed of being bugged 24/7 by idiots on Steam who think that I spend every waking minute of my life infront of a computer screen; which contrary to popular belief, I don’t.

In all seriousness though, I can’t wait until the open-beta. Once I remove about 80% of my Steam friends list, I will finally be able to chat with the Cloud Sixteen anywhere I go; this is handy because I’m always coming up with new ideas and inspiration when I’m out doing things.

I don’t have much else to say about it really, here’s a chunk of random code so I can test this CodeColorer I installed:

#include <iostream>

void main()
{
std::cout << "CodeColor rocks!" << std::endl;
return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

Pool’s Closed

As you may or may not know, Alex Grist is now an active participant in the development of Clockwork. He has been working on CloudAuth, which is our system used to protect Cloud Sixteen’s schemas from unauthorised use.

I made a proposal for a packaging system for schemas, so that developers have the option of making them closed-source. We would have a website set up for authorised Clockwork developers, where they could upload their gamemode in a ZIP archive. The archive would then be converted to a “schema package”, which they can then re-download and distribute.

The schema package would be named with the .csp extension (Clockwork Schema Package) by the packaging site, and the end-user would place it in gamemodes/Clockwork/schemas/.