When my friend Squared bought a new PC, I was intrigued that he called it a name. But it indeed made sense because, you could have so many computers that it’s kinda awkward to call it the Living Room PC or my personal PC. So jumping on the bandwagon, I also decided to name my computers and some of my present gadgets. So here goes my naming scheme:
That it’s for now.
At last a new blog post for me. Looking back, it was last June since I posted here. I’ve got a lot of excuses, but the main reason is that it got really hectic at work. I’m really glad that we got to finish the project that I led.
For those who don’t know, I’m working for a game company here at the Philippines, and was given the opportunity to become the lead programmer for this porting project. And it’s not easy . For the last two months of the project we’ve been dealing with a lot of bugs(mainly because this was porting project and majority of the code is still a blur), and it felt that it will never end. But now, I’m so glad it was all over and now we’re just waiting to be published to the last region (it was already published on US and Europe region).
Now I’m on vacation, so I will now resume my homebrewing quest. But before that, I need to reinstall Ubuntu. I replaced the older harddrive of Aya(my MSI GX600 laptop), so there was still no Ubuntu installation. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to upgrade my Ubuntu on the last harddrive so this will be my first experience on version 9.10 which is also known as Karmic Koala.
Every 6 months, or more accurately, every release of new Ubuntu version, I freshly install a new Ubuntu version. Unfortunately, last October, I wasn’t able to do this because the I just have enough time just to sleep and eat. Better late than never. Yesterday I was able to do that and I’ll be saving it for a later post.
Enough said for now. XD
Late last night, my friend Popo PM’ed me, saying “There will be no LAN multiplayer for Starcraft II.” I wouldn’t believe it myself. I mean, back in the days of the original Starcraft, the LAN play was the reason that it pulled me to play it. But after seeing this article and this article, I am still in disbelief.
What’s with Rob Pardo, VP of game design, saying “we don’t have any plans to support LAN,” and “we will not support it.” Isn’t the LAN play the core element of real time strategy game? I don’t see what’s the point in shipping it without LAN play. It’s like a hamburger without burger patties. For me, I always prefer on LAN because of it’s latency. Not all countries are like US or Japan or South Korea that has near perfects ISP’s, that can solely rely on Internet. I play Team Fortress II and the best that my line can handle for a US server is a latency of 200ms. Assuming that the Battle.Net server is in Irvine, California. My friend and I are playing Starcraft at the same room, are they saying that the data from my PC will need to travel approximate 11800km to their server and another 11800km back to my friends PC that can be easily connected by a 5 foot cable.
They say its an Anti-piracy measure,but there are many other methods. For me, I am better off with DRM than having no LAN. They could also use online authentication every startup, it’s way better that always online downloading/uploading game data. Pirates will be pirates, and no matter how much protection you put into a game, they will always eventually win and crack your game. Don’t mess up a game just because of them. This only adds up to the reason why someone won’t buy your game.
Right now I’m really pissed off with Blizzard, but I think it is really Activision’s doing. First, they split it three releases and now this whole no LAN play. But the good part is, Starcraft II isn’t out yet, there are still time to rethink this idea before the Koreans run amok on them. Maybe the South Koreans ally themselves with the North Koreans to just to nuke Activision. Just kidding.
To Activision, don’t mess up Blizzard, please. You may have published a thousand of titles but most of them are crap, only a handful can be considered good.
As for me, I’m still wishing that LAN will be included on the release version of Starcraft II and this no LAN thing only applies to the beta version. If not, just wake me up from this dreadful nightmare.
I’m so over with MyBrute, as a parting gift I’ll be giving out this nice secret, if you would still be able to call this a secret.
This is more of a educative guess, and may seem a shock to everyone that the the moment you hit the Validate button on the Brute creation page, the path of your brute is already determined. Your skills and items that you will be getting were already recorded and only waits for you to accumulate the experience points needed to level up before it appears on your cell(status page). How did I know? Through this nifty webpage I can see through the future of my brute, or more appropriately, the record of my brute as seen through the eyes of the database.
It’s very easy to use, just enter your existing brutes name on the first text box, then at what level you would like to see and from the drop down menu, what mybrute server it exists. Just a reminder, it won’t be able to lookup a non existent brute, because its future is still non-existent (duhh!!). I’m freaking serious with this because it was tried and tested.
Now this will be the sure fire way to get a bear. Create a brute, then check if it will gain a bear throught this, if no, then create again. Repeat if necessary. Just be patient and soon you will have bear or a wolf.
But if you still like to continue, even after you discovered that you’re brute’s future seems hopeless, might as well go to this great MyBrute site.
Ever since the announcement of Microsoft’s portable media player, the Zune HD, there’s a certain question that lingers in my mind, will be able to directly compete with Apple’s media player, iPod(for the rest of this post, I’ll be referring to the iPod Touch when I say iPod) and iPhone? Will it ever live up to the name the iPhone Killer?
And now I can perfectly answer it as YES.
Zune HD(© 2009 Microsoft Corporation)
I think that the technology behind the sleek looking Zune HD is quite mouth watering. First is the OLED display. It gives a significant power savings compared to standard LCD’s that came up with iPod/iPhone. More time to view movies, and it also provides a more crisp display. Multi-touch screen capability is not that innovative but is very welcome. What is truly amazing that it will be powered by Nvidia’s Tegra processors. This gives you the ability to render videos of up to 720p. And having the capability to hook it up with XBOX live, gives it a decent amount of videos to play. Another nice ability of this Tegra processors is its minimal power consumption. (Read more here “Why The Tegra Chip is so Powerful” )
And that brings me to what more the Zune HD is capable of, a gaming platform. At the early days of iPod/iPhone, I was skeptical of the possibilities of it as gaming platform. But as time passed by, more and more games were able to push the iPod to its limits. Though, hard core gaming is still questionable, it later grew as an casual game platform. But Apple is not Microsoft. Unlike Apple, Microsoft is more experienced in gaming industry that somehow successful with Xbox and Xbox360. But what if Microsoft was able to take advantage of its position as game company? The Zune HD might become a full blown gaming console. But what if everyone will be able to develop applications for the ZuneHD like what Microsoft did with XNA and somehow mimic what Apple did with the AppStore?
You know what did iPhone/iPod achieved that PSP and NDS didn’t? It’s the great community of developers. The playing field is quite different with the two consoles, only big shot game companies were able to make in those two. There were only a few that stood out and the rest was just plain crap. Unlike with the games with iPod/iPhone(though many were considered shovelware) many independent game developers were able to achieve success because they were given a chance to perform and somehow deliver what people want. No offense to Sony and Nintendo, because what people like also changes. More often than not, people like innovation. Innovation is less likely to happen in 100 than in a 10000 people.
Currently Sony and Nintendo are changing tactics, moving content distribution to online means, but the only thing that changed is how they deliver the content, not the content itself. Unlike the AppStore, that features an online content delivery but have more developers making the content. Sometime, those big companies forgot that it’s not the platform that brings in the cash but the mere game itself.
Knowing how sly Microsoft is, it will be no surprise that a SDK(maybe we’ll see something like XNA for ZuneHD) for the ZuneHD will be available to all. I for one, will the first to buy this device if it happens. And certainly be developing on it.
