Games

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You should be listening to video game soundtracks at work.

Actually this reminds me: I wanted to check out if Google Play Music includes any of the Final Fantasy sound tracks.

I find it curious and appropriate on so many levels that the road trip music in FFXV is pretty much video game music. Usually at work I don’t listen to the kind of tunes you’d find in an RPG. Country, rock, classic, folk, jazz, all sorts of stuff. But I will admit that Dragon Age and Mirror’s Edge sound tracks do show up in my playlists every now and then.

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I would like to think that I’m not the only one whose first, humorous thought was:

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS – EXCEPT EUROPA. 

ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE.

Come to think of it more than a few years have passed since I red the Space Odyssey books. I do wonder though what we may find out there, even if it’s likely to be far less dangerous than 2061 or The Turing Test depicts. Instead I imagine we’ll just have a lot of scientists and scholars having a decade long think-orgy and that’s probably for the best.

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Number one thing I like about auto saves: not shouting profanities when the game crashes.

Number two thing I like about auto saves: when they’re frequent enough that I don’t shout profanities after the game crashes.
Because even if your name has Final Fantasy in it: you’re probably going to crash on some players.
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Steam Summer Sale – VN Titles and Markdowns

More than a few entries on this sale list warrant a gander for anyone interested in Visual Novels, or you may already own half of them :P.

A few lesser known ones worth mentioning:

  • One Small Fire At A Time
    • Short but well worth it.
    • This is currently the only entry on my VN list that ranked a 10/10.
  • The Letter
    • If you ever read a Choose Your Own Adventure book than this is for you.
    • The post credits scene may disturb you far more than the horror story :P.
  • An Octave Higher
    • Set in the same world as One Small Fire At A Time.
    • Players of the former will appreciate a certain side character ;).
  • Ladykiller In A Bind
    • Highly abnormal and twisted sense.
    • Come for the story not the adult content 8-).
  • ACE Academy

Thoughts on Android Game architecture

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Games for Android are a little different than writing for PC or console, really seems to be less of the dull grundge as well. But at the price, for more advanced efforts there are less resources sitting right there on Fresh Meat or Source Forge for the hunting up. Me being me, of course, I aways have an interest in cross platform portability (as well as a general disdain for Oracle Java).

One thought that occured to me, is why not do it the same as I would on a PC?

What is the activity to a game? What the user sees. All it really needs to know is processing input, rendering output, and talking to the big cheese. That’s it. Hell, before we talk communication methods, step back and think there: an Android activiy and a Windows executable could both function as clients, talk to the same server, and have a cross platform multiplayer game. Or even a screen like detach/reattach feature where you could begin playing on your mobile phone, then switch to a PC with way better graphics. Threating the user side of the app as a “Client”, it would be possible to have a low-end client for basic phones and a high definition client for sexy tablets.

To make it work, we need a service program to communicate with. On a PC, I would probably use shared memory for offline play and sockets for network play. In favour of shared memory, would be the ease at which C++ code would likely be tweakable to use a shared memory allocator to store command objects, rather than having to do as much extra leg work to serialize the information within across a process boundry. Android land makes most issues a moot point. Network wise, I’d probably just use JSON.

Something that interests me, is how much of the core game design be implemented in such a way, that it could be used off Android by reusing the same library. C code, whatever C++ code the NDK can compile, or Java code should all work, as long as long as one watchs what non-portable bits are stuffed in there.

Putting this much thought into it, can probably be blamed on poking around the FreeBSD and Q3A source trees over the years, and finding the possibilities fascinating lol.

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In cleaning out a hard drive, I stumbled across a personal DokuWiki I was running. It has various stuff in it, ranging from stuff such as a guide to making Live Operations and tryout info. For momento’s sake I guess, since [SAS] was such a big part of my life, I’ve adapted the Service History part of my own wiki entry.

It can be found here.

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Another sign that I spent way to many years on training/teaching CQB concepts over at [SAS], is when in the event of congestion at the hatch, my instinct is still ride the door for threats and clear the fatal funnel ASAP!

Sadly, that portion of my brain gets better exercise at Airsoft than at Work, lol. Hmm…