The only game I wish I coulda tried at our LAN Party last weekend was Tribes: Vengeance. I gave the original Tribes a chance (in fact too many chances, probably, considering the weight I put on Freshman year), and I tried to give Tribes 2 a chance (although my computer wasn’t quite up to it). I will track down the source of the problems, I swear it.
Reminds me of this classic.
Boggle is arguably one of the best candidates for a simple online multiplayer game. All of the interaction between players is at a single moment, and the scoring can be easily automated. JavaScript with DOM allows you to do a lot of really neat things, so as a test of my skills, I decided to try to make a massively multiplayer online Boggle game. It worked, but my backend code was pretty inefficient. When I brought it down, Evan offered to mirror it. He’s not only done that, but he’s improved the game beyond even my plans. Check out the game.
Around the the end of January, I was doing some reading for work on the Document Object Model (DOM). The DOM (ideally) allows JavaScript to access and modify any element in an HTML document in a heirarchical Object-Oriented fashion (well, as OO as Javascript can ever be). The more I read about what was possible, the more I realized that I could create a totally interactive application written in merely HTML and JavaScript.
Then I remembered what I think is the most useful JavaScript feature in existance: asyncronous HTTP requests using the XMLHTTP object for Internet Explorer or the XMLHttpRequest object in Mozilla-based browsers. Using this object and a little server-side scripting, I could not only keep important logic and large files like dictionaries on the server, but I could also create multiplayer (potentially massively multiplayer) interactive online games that required nothing but a modern browser.
Think about PopCap, Pogo, Yahoo Games, and MSN Games. Every single one of the games on these sites could be done without requiring a single plugin. I thought about it, and I decided to set about demonstrating it. (It was only after this game was mostly completed that I noticed SSCrabble. While it uses similar client-side scripting techniques, it lacks the multiplayer functionality entirely, which is too bad.)
WEBoggle is primarily HTML and JavaScript. There’s fewer than 100 server-side lines of Perl, and a 90,000 word dictionary.
All WEBoggle requires is either Internet Explorer 5 or newer, or a Mozilla-based browser like Mozilla, Firebird or Galeon. (Internet Explorer 4 should work, but I’ve never tried it.). There are a few caveats, and good reasons why other common browsers like Opera do not work, but those are all listed in the Bugs section below. Also, your browser must accept cookies. Sorry.
Cheating in an online game is an inherent problem. I’ve worked as hard as I could in order to keep important scoring logic server-side in WEBoggle. I’m only human, and it’s possible that I’ve missed something and it’s possible to modify the JavaScript source code so that it submits invalid words and they get erroneously scored.
A much easier way to cheat, however, is to write a script to give you all of the words that can be found on the board. I could have made it more difficult to do this, but as long as the letters are legible to the player, you could simply type them into a command line script that would then give you a list of words to type back into the game. There was simply no way to prevent this. (I wrote such a script in about 60 seconds, so if you’re considering it, your effort won’t make you “the first”. I was able to get more than 50 points consistantly.)
I just hope that everyone who plays this game remembers that cheating is no fun, not for you, and not for anyone with whom you’re playing..
Once WEBoggle started generating several thousand player-games per day, it started interfering with the operation of the sites on my webhost. I took it down until I could make it more efficient, and a guy named Evan Simpson came forward with an offer to mirror it for the time being.
As anyone who’s seen my Projects listing will agree, I have a short attention span. Updating WEBoggle kind of fell off my radar, and I told Evan that he was in charge. He’s done far more than I ever planned or expected: “missing words” submissions, two simultaneous games (one of which is Big Boggle), the ability to rotate the board, and a list of “words that nobody found” with each round.
I’d like to thank everyone who helped me test WEBoggle and suggested stupid improvements: BrainiACK, Nomad, Splatta, Kazy, and especially M. Also, all the people who donated money through Paypal and posted links to WEBoggle on their blogs. At its height, more than 6000 person-games were being played every day. And a thousand thanks to Evan Simpson for mirroring and then improving the game.
I was thinking of protesting at the RNC this week, since how often do you get a chance to protest something so big and so close? I was trying to come up with something vaguely nerdy but also political. This protester outdid any hypothetical alternate-universe me.
Liberated Games aren’t abandonware, but they’re just as Free (as in Beer in some cases, as in Speech in others). I was just thinking the other day how my new rig would handle Homeworld.
Woman’s skin grows over wedding ring. Massive kidneys. Note: Neither of these links are for the weak.
Despite the fact that God closed the book on the View Askewniverse at the end of “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” (ignoring the inconvenient and short-lived existence of the Clerks cartoon series for the moment), it is being reported that Kevin Smith is working on a Clerks sequel (ignoring the inconvenient existence of Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma, and JaSBSB). Filming is set to start in January, and it looks like the important core cast is all set to return. Based on this quote from Smith, I have hopes that it’ll be Clerks or Mallrats quality, not JaSBSB quality: “The whole process [of making the Clerks DVD] reminded me why I got into the film biz in the first place: to make talky, low-budget comedies.”
This is a test of the new method for photo entries. Please ignore it for a while if it goes wonky. Looks like it’s working. Hooray for MT. (A sample post with the new photos-in-blog method.)
Not to insult M or anything, but the “Things My Girlfriend And I Have Argued About” seemed a lot less hilarious and insightful three or four years ago, before we got married.
Another massive construction project: Chubu International Airport (more on Wikipedia)
I now have one new gmail invitation available. If you want it, or know someone who knows someone who wants one still, first come, first served.
OMFG. The Half-Life 2 preload begins. “Purchase options will be released soon.”
Be sure to keep an eye on the Steam Network Status page (specifically the yellow line on the bottom graph). Will Steam be slashdotted?
Just some quick comparisons of benchmarks of my old machine (Athlon 800) and my new one:
| Benchmark | Increase |
|---|---|
| CPU int (dhrystone) | 2.83x |
| CPU float (whetstone) | 3.38x |
| CPU MMX/SSE | 2.59x |
| CPU 3DNow! | 2.49x |
| RAM int bandwidth | 3.95x |
| RAM float bandwidth | 4.05x |
| Cache and RAM "combined index" | 3.77x |
| 3DMark 2001 | ~4.75x |
I certainly don't think I have the most beastly machine in the world (Nomad has more memory and a pair of RAIDed SATA drives, for instance, and at least one person I know at work has a Radeon X800), but I'm amazed with how much faster this machine is than my old one. I guess that's what happens when you wait 5 years between upgrades.
Update 08-28: 3DMark 2003 benchmark for the new machine: 3811 3DMarks.
Update 08-30: Doom3 High Quality timedemo: 30.4 fps (I couldn't run Ultra Quality because I only have a half-gig of memory)
Long, but fantastic trailer for a movie that won’t exist: Grayson. Years after Batman’s death, Dick Grayson returns to his role as Robin to find the killer. Fanfilm at its finest, and it only cost Untamed Cinema $18,000 to make.
Movies that take place in an alternate timeline are dangerous, especially when DC Comics is trying to jumpstart a new series in their Universe.
I wish I had had the balls (and the legal argument) to respond this way when I was served a Cease and Desist.
Heh, I just noticed that it's the same law firm as my C&D. I should find it and scan that thing in.
“I found a digital camera in the woods”, Blair Witch for the Internet. Keep reading a few pages.
Science and Industry is a teamplay based modification for the game Half-Life. I was an active part of the community for a couple years, running a server, working on some applications, helping with testing alpha versions, etc. Eventually, I became a full-fledged member of the development team, helping PapasNewBag out with the coding for the mod. Many of the visual enhancements included in version 1.0 were my contributions.
Working on S&I was a fantastic experience that I will treasure forever. </corny> Honestly, the entire team is friendly and brilliant, and their hard work is evident in the quality of the maps, models, and replayability of Science and Industry.
Here are some of the behind-the-scenes screenshots I took and sent to the other dev team members, showing what I was working on and what problems I was having. These images were all taken between January and April 2002. Also included is my history of S&I — A Mod’s Life — written February 2002.
For those of you having problems with VPU Recover errors with a brand new Radeon 9600XT (and the future me, the next time I reinstall), this page has the solution to all your problems. Turning off AGP Fast Writes and flashing my BIOS worked for me.
Update 20 Feb 2006: After getting a new motherboard and updating all of my firmware and drivers, I started having problems again. I found this page and tried some of the things on it. Setting AGP to 4x, in particular, seemed to help a lot.
I don’t miss this car one bit. Okay, maybe one bit, but it’s a 0.
I was doing research into hard drives for my new computer, since I’ve determined that my ancient Deathstar is really holding back everything. I saw good reviews about the new Hitachi Deskstar, and I happened upon this great deal. Check out the option dropdowns at the bottom though. Since “No” or “None” is the bottom choice on all of them, they’re all set to a non-free option by default. Click “order” without changing them all, and you end up with $346.90 on your bill, not $63!
I discovered Crux Linux exactly when I needed to. I was getting sick of Redhat’s big-endian-ness. Upgrading was always a challenge, and the complexity of the boot scripts made things really confusing. Based on a BSD-like “ports” system, Crux is a built-from-source Linux in the tradition of Gentoo. But it’s far simpler, and for the first time I really feel like I understand how Linux works, from one end to the other. There’s only very weak dependency support (an advantage, in my mind, over having to run rpm with –nodeps three-quarters of the time), and it’s not for newbies (you need to partition your disk by hand, and compile your own kernel), but I’m in love. I was a ports maintainer for several months.
Yeah, it’s twelve years old, but it’s an Olympic story that still moves me: Derek Redmond and the 400-meter. (Aside: Which is worse, reading something at work that makes you cry, or something that makes you laugh out loud continuously?)
“[W]hen an American mouths off about French military history, he’s not just being ignorant, he’s being ungrateful.” A war buff defends French military history against Internet jerks.
Update 08-23: Since I was just about on my way out the door, I didn't look too carefully at these pictures when I made the post. Looking at them now, they're phenomenal. I love the style, and they're obviously framed and developed by someone with a great eye and a lot of patience. These pictures are part of Rosi's thesis at The University of the Arts. Congrats to Rosi.
Alton Brown’s sorta-blog, updated every couple weeks or so. See his March 5 post in particular.
