A segment from the other hand.

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Just a little bit ago, the original The Lion in Winter went off, and for as many times as I’ve seen it over the years, I have got to admit, tonight is the first time I didn’t sleep through half of it! Given the timing, it hits oh so richer a cord than normal. How much similarity to it, have I not seen? Even down to the knives, it is not such an alien thing, as I honetly wish it was.  I have often wondered, if someday I’ll look back upon things, and chant just something else to burn… to cast memories into the flames of some fireplace.

I sat and watched, enjoying the film for a change, and listening to my mother mock me with almost every comment to the screen; both of us morons in many cases.  Should I say,that I’m no stranger to hatred, even if I’ve never learned how to hate. She’ll obviously be in finer form tomorrow,  and the only alternative to causing greater damage, will be to pipe down and take whatever is thrown out there. The most that I can hope for, is that tomorrow passes by quickly. Take a few hours to pick out a Mother’s Day card, that will likely be thrown back in my face, sooner or later. My brothers supposed to make a rare appearance at some point, so I know that by night fall, I will likely be regretting staying sober. If I’m lucky, I’ll be permitted to make due with being insulted in the third person, from within ear shot; rather than having a big red bulls eye painted on me for target practice o/.

For the past few days, I’ve neen in a particularly black mood: or as I would have described Friday, a day within sunshine. Living in onslaughtist territory just serves to pick open scabs; I doubt anyonean understand that section of me, but my family always knows how to stab until they find it,without fail. Mother’s Day is a day that I’ve almost come to dread, *sigh*. Why? Because it’s impossible to avoid the things that tend to come with it. This is a segment in that larger side of my ‘black mood’.

Time to get stuff done, and try and find an hours sleep or two….

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This was drafted a couple days ago (~2), I’ve decided to just edit and annotate it rather than rewrite it.

After giving about a day to see whether or not progress would be made with GCHQs server plans, I formally gave Operation Charlie the green light: extending “An Offer from an Ex-Patriot” to the leadership of [SAS].

This consisted of a short brief with supplemental material to coincide with [SAS]_Maj_WIZ’s obvious two pence worth in accusations. Attached was the offer itself: essentially that I would provide a share in my personal hardware/network resources, to furnish [SAS] with a temporary game server. According to the brief, starting off with one RvS server, and if up to the load, a SWAT 4: TSS server0; but however due to timing issues (See prev-reference to the major) beyond my control, [SAS] would either have to make do as guests on my TS3 or make other arrangements for VoIP. I also noted that depending on when the accept/reject/fu reply was received, my system could be deployed within 15 minutes to 24 hours.

The agreement in the PDF attachment was fairly simple, mostly serving to shield me from any legal liabilities: namely that GCHQ would have to yield any right to kick at yours truly hosting an `[SAS] Interm Server`, delegating adminlogin to [SAS], and like wise making GCHQ responsible should the affair incur any unexpected / freak costs of operation associated with the long term use of it. The ability to print, sign, and therefore scan the document was also provided. All things being what they are, I will only provide the machine under the specified terms being taken into agreement. I reckon that only the OIC or 2IC in absence of the OIC, can appropriately accept the offer without a consensus of some sort among GCHQ. My reasons for enforcing this, has to do with the actions of the Major and Lt. Colonel leading to my resignation: that I while I’ll still put my back into such a breach, I will not do so with a potential noose around my neck for doing so; and their actions would leave a noose there without such an agreement in place. Nothing personal, purely business.

My offer was delivered May 6th, to the four members of [SAS] GCHQ, to the fullest extent of my ability, and the Major has been both personally and professionally aware of my (this) emergency action plan for a couple of years, should it ever be needed in time of trouble. So far, only [SAS]_Capt_JB has shown any regard for this, [SAS]_Maj_WIZ generally expressing indifference and retreat into non-SAS games (What is the old saying, that Nero fiddled whilst Rome burnt? I’d almost call recent affairs treason), [SAS]_CO_Random and [SAS]_Capt_En4cer demonstrating utter uselessness or a shameless level of absenteeism.1

I am more aware of [SAS]’s long term server plans than most, in fact, generally pre-dating NTFs silly Memorandum of Understanding. The purpose of my interm host being offered, being meant to serve as a stop gap until the more permanent solution can be deployed by GCHQ, or if necessary some other arrangement being made if it doesn’t pan out. I find it some what ironic, that quite probably if the ex slackers had dealt from the top of the deck, [SAS] may have been perfectly set financially for another ten years at costs far lower than NTFs with only the cost of a few problem-children to shuffle out to clean the deck for the long haul. Instead the present huddle must be crossed first. Ahh, the bitter sweet retrospect of I told you so ages ago, coming to pass:  it usually tracks my minds for-thought even if I oft’ choose not to say it.

Having been placed into a position, where no other choice remained under my code of conduct but to turn in my warrant, has not changed my feelings towards [SAS], not the part of it that means something. My loyalty was always given to a vision, never to any single or group of members. That why, even from outside the [SAS], I would still extend my hand.

So far, I have received no formal acceptance or rejection of my offer, and if things continue as they are headed, I expect that [SAS] will be totally server-less until GCHQs aims are achieved, or some hurting member pulls a Noer2.

The honest question, is accept, reject, or ignore: whether to take this do-nothing response lying down or take it with axe and sword in hand. As a friend inadvertently reminded me, as I once used to say: when the boat springs a leak, my way is not to jump overboard but to fetch a bucket and help the engineer. That never really has changed about me… lol. Thus, it poses to me the problem: do I watch something that I gave a quarter of my life to in loyal and selfless service to, risk perishing into the abyss, or do I lock, cock, and rock in hopes of bringing order to chaos?

In thinking about this problem, I began trying to evaluate whether or not [SAS]_Maj_WIZ’s recent actions are on par with high treason against the [SAS] 22nd Elite Virtual Regiment, and [SAS]_CO_Random in strong dereliction of duty as good as constituting such, or if they are actively attempting to rip the walls down upon members heads. Random and En4cer may be two of the best officers in [SAS] history, and on a sadly short list of decent ones, but at present are totally useless beyond Randoms financial backing. If the equation evaluates true to treason in the end, and I play that card full force, arguably I could even choose to do so as a senior [SAS] member: as the retention of my data publicly indicates that the resignation of my warrant has not (as of yet) been accepted by the Officer In Charge. That thought, than leads to a pair of sub equatables: can [SAS] survive without them any better than it can with, and what would charging them with treason, make of me? Perhaps I just have good sense enough to do things the proper way, rather than turning underhanded or petty about it. In my opinion these (in)actions have come to warrant expulsion or demotion of a few officers, either now or in the future.

Edit: Since this entry was originally drafted, as if fortune would smile upon a loyal sons troubles, through association with a certain development project3 that I’m involved with, it is possible that [SAS] may be able obtain access to an extremely sexy4 server at such a low cost that would make NTFs heads spin around in circles until it flies off into the stratosphere from the shock. I’ve taken the liberty of informing the Major of this possibility. I’m also willing to make the necessary communication and logistical arrangements to make things happen.

I’ve received no pertinent response from [SAS] on that offer either, but it’s been less than 24 hours on that.

footnotes:
0: Since this was drafted, I’ve heard Walker runs a temp SWAT 4 server whenever he’s gaming.
1: First CO sign I’ve had since well before throwing in my warrant, was seeing the forum index last indicating that Random had posted in the Officers Mess.

2: Noer once came to the rescue, putting his wallet where his heart was after Bronco resigned, taking [SAS]’s only SWAT 4 server with him.
3: Encapsulated Package Installer, EPI ftw!
4: As in such a sexy beast, that you would sell your grandmother and your left nut just for a tenth of that boxes computing power and network pipe!

gfire+freebsd

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A week or so ago, after updating my machines to a newer GFire plugin, I had the problem with it breaking xfire support on my laptop. Making me have to roll back to 0.8.3 :-(. Today I’ve just sent a message to the `gfire team`, in the hopes they might have a clue to to solving the issues.

Really, since my laptop isn’t for gaming, I don’t care as long as I can sign in / chat. Being able to do file transfers (finally!) and have the right status message displayed however, are worth the upgrade. I just recently noticed that status messages weren’t being updated from my laptop lol.

I guess, on my laptop I’ll just have to change my nickname on xfire to match status, e.g. ‘Spidey01 = AFK’ or something like that. No wonder people keep messaging me when I’m marked AFK, or ignoring the big I’m not here signs. No matter how bad a mood I am, generally I won’t take it out on someone unless they’re at the root cause of it; but when I’m marked away or busy, it means don’t expect a reply within the next 5-15 minutes: unless I happen to notice the message and have time to answer it. Assuming I’m even seated in front of the computer!

Conceptual: Stargellas Revenge

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Premise

You take on the role of Stargella, a lonely star fighter pilot just returning home to the beautiful world of Freyja0 after a long patrol in deep space aboard the carrier ship Hofvarpnir1. Sadly in your absence, the evil Viekasiekian Empire has begun laying waste to your luscious planet! Deploying all fighters, as a group of imperial Triremes2 begin encircling the carrier,  the tides turn in the enemies favour. Soon you find yourself the sole survivor to reach Freyja alive, as all remaining hands go down with the Hofvarpnir.

Far from fearing a single star fighter in their midst, you must exploit that Viekasiek pride in order  to liberate your planet from the clutches of Emperor Zurick. Battling across the polar ice caps, over the sea, and into the forests of Freyja, you must push the Viekasiekian forces back into space: facing hordes of enemy fighters along the way. Among these include the heavy Ballista and Scuta, as well as lighter Velites3 and scout pods that make up the invasion force. Finally punching through the fleet in orbit, for a final show down against the emperor.

Game Play

The game is meant to be played in a 2D-esque top down point of view, utilising the mouse to manoeuvre across the screen. At it’s heart, is the intention to keep the action alive, blending an array of attachable/ejectable weapons and combat styles with a large amount of adversaries. My idea for a game, you can play additively as an arcade classic but with a pace that better befits the modern style. It’s aimed at folks like myself, who can still sit down and play Centipede or Tetris all day long with a grin, but would like a bit more spice.

It is meant to be more or less, ‘traditional’, in the sense that power ups drift across screen to be collected, and fairly simple on the graphical spectrum.

Current specs call for about 11 enemy craft and 3 more usable by the player5. The players ship is basically given a capacitance based on its size: larger equals more guns and harder to kill. Depending on the class of ship5, will also limit its ability to bring that heavier ordinance to bear upon the Viekasiekian slime.

  • The light fighter given at the start, being designed as a simple but agile craft, is meant to reflect an association with nature. It is obviously limited to only a few weapons because of its small size, but has a regenerative armour skin around a highly effective power plant, that makes for a long lasting craft with some serious skill. It gives extra advantage to players focused on not getting hit all the time, and favouring a few lasers backed by a heavier weapon for dispatched more powerful foes.
  • Medium class, being a more conventional ship of the line gained after a a certain amount of game play. Trading the lighter vessels regenerative skin, for a deflector shield and larger weapons bays, every hit on the shields will reduce the power available to laser weapons; thus off setting the greater capability to carry heavier missile and cannon than smaller craft. It’s meant to be a middle of the line way of playing, that rewards those who can balance its abilities during furious combat and still come out on top of the scrap heap.
  • Where as the heavy class, is basically the big bruiser of the bunch. It’s meant to be an unlock for scoring a good bit of points during the course of play, yet still balanced enough so that even the light fighter from the start can still stand a chance at winning the same fights as the heavy. Combing a large weapons payload with enough armour to last a while, it makes up for needing ‘armour patches’ during a long engagement, by being able to smash through anything that can’t kill it. Think about a dump truck turned into a war marchine lol.

 Weapons can be equipped when found, or jettisoned to make room for others. The hit list includes various strength of laser, that balance energy use to power consumption<6, as well as several class of heavier particle beam and ballistic cannon style weapons. My favourite being the missile types, hehe.

Each ship can only carry X slots in weapons with so much ammo, so one has to balance out what you have collected, when it’s fired, when it’s dropped, and do it all tactically during the regular course of game play. Weapons come in several principal varieties based on the kind of ammunition they utilise, making it simpler for the player to calculate a weapons value in the present situation.

  • Energy
    • Drains part of your energy gauge with every shot, but other wise never runs out of ammunition.
    • Types:
      • Blue Laser
        • Low output for short range combat, aimed to minimise energy drain whilst dealing with cannon fodder.
      • Green Laser
        • Typical energy weapon offering moderate damage to energy consumption. It’s a staple weapon but lacks serious punch.
      • Red Laser
        • Packs a hard punch but requires plenty of energy for each shot. Best suited for destroying targets that you can actually hit.
      • Particle Cannon
        • Fires a stream of charged paricles, consuming a large portion of energy in exchange for a solid knock down punch. It’s the plasma cannons younger brother ;).
      • Plasma Cannon
        • Very powerful but sucks up energy like a thirsty vampire. Ideal for quickly dispatching Viekasekian scum.
      • Overcharger
        • Drains all available energy and unleashes a devastating shock wave, dealing a proportionate level of damage to anything caught within the waves radius. A weapon of last resort!
  • Missiles
    • Uses up so much missile ammo per shot, but only a nominal amount of energy drain per firing. Some offer a form of lock, fire, and forget capability.
    • Types:
      • Micro Missiles
        • A small cluster of homing missiles, that gives chase to any craft in their line of fire. Not very powerful but amazingly handy in a brawl.
      • Heavy Missiles
        • Less intelligent than micro missiles, but capable of dealing strong damage to watever it manages to hit.
      • Spread Bombs
        • The tactical nuke of your arsenal. It fires straight ahead and explodes, dealing massive damage to anything within its corona. Best used as a weapon of last resort or against a tight group of enemies.
      • Zip Mines
        • Explodes a small zero point charge whenever a craft comes within a short radius of the “Zip” mine. They gradually float off screen, making it hazardous to player and enemy alike. This is your only rear firing weapon.
    • Shells
    • Requires “Shells” for ammunition and packs a strong wallop with low energy drain.
    • Types:
      • Auto Cannon (AC)
        • a
      • Rotary Cannon (RC)
        • A multi-barreled, large bore Gatling gun. Fires less powerful shells than the AC, but offers a more rapid rate of fire. Can quickly burn through smaller craft and shells alike, but it also jams with frequent use. Fire it in short bursts.
      • Cluster Cannon (CC)
        • In effect, a giant shotgun. Deals massive damage to anything up close but is practically useless for more distant targets.

Technical

Stargellas Revenge in it’s own right, is only the equal of about 6-12 months worth of coding, leaving most of the effort to graphics creation. An early prototype was built in C++, around SDL for graphics and Xerces for data serialisation tasks. Soon however, I realised that it would be worth my while to make it more general, so that much of the games insides could be redeployed for other game projects7.

This makes the game much more time consuming, particularly when you consider its a ‘side’ project, but the advantages are worth the delay. One reason I like it, is it allows me to flesh out the systems resource, multiplayer, AI, and various other infrastructure tasks without having to do it while coding around a much more complex game.

Most likely, it’ll be the test bed for a custom rendering system8 focused on stressing the API. The overall design of the games internal, is designed to be pluggable9 enough to allow easy access to some very professional strength rendering technologies, as well as being able to hot swap as much of the componentry as needed. Thus allowing the graphical quality to be reduced on systems where the better tools, are sadly, unavailable… without having to give up on them where so available10. The main reason for this being, I want to be able to play Stargella on my laptop11, as well as the 3D games on my desktop!

Footnotes:
0 Freyja is a goddess in Norse mythology, associated with attributes appropriate for describing Stargellas home world.
1 Hófvarpnir another reference to Norse mythology.
2 The triremis being a type of Roman warship.
3 These are all references to Roman military weapons and armour. In particular watch out for the Celeres defending Zurick.
4 It’s a fairly consistent theme, that names of Viekasiekian fighters stem from the Roman military, where as those assoicated with Stargella, have roots in Norse and Germanic mythologies.

5 Will probably be named after Valkyries.
6 Blue = low drain / damage; Green = medium; Red = kick ass and slurp power.
8 Think W3D level of complexity rather than COD6 graphics, but than again, this is a game inspired by games built during the 1970s.
9 I only intend to do OpenGL for most things, doing an equalivulent in DirectX 9/11 is left as an exercise to another geek, or a bored weekend.
10 You can have very high quality graphics under Windows NT, GNU/Linux, and Apple stuff: but FreeBSD is rather lacking in ease of deployment for games :-(.
11 FreeBSD.

Open Loops, that are Fun.

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I still wish there was a suitable working title to slip into this table for TacFPSGame 8=).

Development Projects
Code Working Title  Description 
StarFighterGame Stargellas Revenge Galaga inspired game designed for maximum action: take the stars, and push the enemy off your planet!
TacFPSGame N/A Near future
MechCombatGame Mech Force 21 The tale of a young grunt serving in the 21st MF, during a war that would change the new world order forever….
Terries Make Tool tmk Something less painful than the usual build tools, and that would make the cores easier to build

At least, when it’s time to branch off each games trunk from the master, it will make finishing the code much easier!
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In a little bit of  battletesting, Ghost Recon works almost flawlessly under Linux. All that I have to do, is set it to emulate a virtual desktop of my screen size (with the game to match), hide my panels, and leave anything I want to access within alt+tab range.

There’s some rendering bugs or performance optimizations with WINEs desktop emulation window, that are apparent because of (sigh) the game changing resolutions when it comes to menus. This is something that pisses me off about game developers (particularly from RSE), don’t hard code shit !

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Nothing quite like McLintock! to make me laugh until it hurts, even on such a sour day. While arguably it twinges but troubles,  the one to the left and to the right, it’s just such a great western :-D. I do enjoy, a well crafted application of humour. Combine John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara, and you have a good recipe on it’s own lol.

RvS+Linux !

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Installed and patched it easily, I’ve got 1.0-1.60 uber patches saved for every language I could find. Only hitch was the DX setup flunked, but it wouldn’t matter much anyway (there is no real DirectX on Linux).

As far as I can tell, the client works properly, but I can’t actually use it. My desktop panels overlap the window, and being as RvS forcefully sets the resolution down to 640×480 whenever it hits the menus, thus creating about 1″ blocks where the mouse leaves the games focus. Luckly fixing that after a ‘quit’ in the console, is a simple xrandr invocation. Odds are, I could just setup a quick bare bones fvwm session. GR has similar issues but is actually playable, not surprising as it was a much more professional quality bit of handy work than Raven Shield.

The second test however, was using the Dedicated Server setup — which worked perfectly! How much the performance is impacted by WINE and how much by the heavy network utilisation I’ve got going, is beyond my calculation though, lol.

First date with that red headed Linux, and dropping the ’64

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After so many years of dodging RHL and company, I finally opted to give Fedora fair chance. Since it’s a big disk set and I lack the spare DVD medium, I opted to d/l the net install and live cds. For the sake of wanting to try it, I also opted to download the x86_64 version, since the machines processor is an Intel 64.

Round one: a very nice setup using the netinstall disk, only to find out, as anticipated it was cram packed full of network drivers (as any sane distributor would do), even had the necessary crypto support! Just not a driver for my fairly common wireless card. Even more irksome, whether by virtue of bad design in GRUB, BIOS, or a foup up in Anaconda, on rebooting the system, I was greated with a load of gibberish in the terminal, where in pressing enter goes to the Intel Boot Agent for PXE based booting 8=). Odds are my knoppix disk can nuke the MBR back to a stock without trouble, or I could just reach for my FreeBSD disk and correct the MBR.

Round two: go scp myself the the live cd ISO, and burncd it. Only to find it increadably slow and not very agreeable. However the blasted thing was able to auto load the necessary crap for my wireless, connecting after I supplied the nearly 500bit code for the system. While I don’t care much for yielding the package selection (or screwing with the running image in slow mo), it shouldn’t be hard to adjust things post boot and tune Fedora to my tastes. That’s kind of one plus of the distribution, it’s more of a screw with it until you break something sort ;). However the installer wouldn’t function off the disk, so back to the drawing board….

Round three A: cart the entire freaking kit to my room, and hook it into the router with a spare Ethernet cable. No thanks, there are distros that ‘like’ my hardare.

Round three B: Download and burn five disks of Fedora 12…. and shout loudly if the driver isn’t included.

Of course, I could likely have show horned the driver from the live disk into working with the net install disk, pardoning kernel panics, if I hadn’t chucked the disk already >_>. That is also assuming that the installers demands could be appeased!

In the end I took round three B, finding that Fedora x86_64 and for sake of testing, Ubuntu x86_64 really do not like my hardware! So much for having suitable kit >_>. Rather than trouble myself further to fetch a set of Fedora i386, I dug out a two year old (8.04) Ubuntu 32-bit disk and installed that. Did a quick set of updates to bring her to the new 10.04 LTS.

After installing about 900 extra software packages… I think I’m done, lol.