One thing I can’t stop thinking about though is how long it’ll take before a third party case manufacturer slaps a wrist band on the thing and Christens the iWatch. The size is about right if people like a decent sized face on their watches (I do, as it happens). Here’s a quick size comparison with my current Fossil:

Update (9/1/10):
Engadget has a nice initial impressions write-up. They mention the potential for using it as a watch at the end as well.

I finished the campaign last week having played most of the missions on hard difficulty. I decided to go back and pick up any achievements I had skipped and beat any remaining missions on hard. I had decided to go with Nova instead of Tosh during the campaign, so I hadn’t played “Breakout” yet.

The mission started out easy enough, but after I broke through the first set of bunkers with the marines I made one huge mistake. I kept going and left the marines behind. By the time I reached the first set of prisoners and freed them I thought the mission was just a royal pain in the ass for no apparent reason. A lot of micro with very precise movements and timing all with a 25 minute clock ticking away…which was the reason I was in a hurry in the first place. I should probably point out that I was trying to keep Tosh above 100 life as well. I thought I could get all the achievements at once if I just pushed through.

After an hour of trying and several saves, I managed to make it the second set of prisoners and free them. I couldn’t figure out why only one prisoner would hop in a vehicle and help me out while the rest sat there banging on the other vehicles like idiots afterward. I also noticed after several tries that half the time the prisoner seemed to drive the vehicle “backwards” through the level towards places I had already been. It took some time before I could keep the prisoner driving the siege tank alive long enough to help me break through the last door.

At that point I probably thought Blizzard was just trying to piss people off with this one or it was severely bugged. Surely I wasn’t doing anything wrong…Horner and Raynor were encouraging me the entire time! There was even a big fat green marker on the map in the middle of the last room. Just a bit longer. I did take notice of the seemingly never-ending battle that was taking place back at Raynor’s base and the steady stream of baddies I had to avoid along the way (two Hellions and a squad of marines every single time). Oh well. All part of the challenge, right?

When I finally got through the last door, my jaw dropped. Two Thors? A couple dozen troops and other ships? Siege tanks? They had to be f’in kidding! I managed to sneak up both of the side ramps and take out all the Reapers. Then I was completely stuck. I even tried a hero/suicide run at the command center using a shield with my last bit of energy. I think I made it three steps. So impressive.

On the verge of tearing my hair out and Tosh down to 77 health, I messaged a buddy of mine and asked him for help. This is a condensed/paraphrased version of that conversation.

Me: Yo…dude…wtf is up with “Breakout”. It’s like crazy hard.
Buddy: Eh?
Me: I got Tosh into the final room and I can’t figure out how to kill all this crap.
Buddy: You didn’t use all the nukes, right?
Me: Nukes?
Buddy: Yea, you know, the nukes Raynor gives you after you’ve helped the army reach the door…
Me: Ballz…

That was enough to send me over the edge. I shutdown my machine, cried, and left the house. Thirty minutes and one medium Oreo Blizzard later, I felt better and tried it again (you know…the way you’re supposed to). I beat the mission in 25 minutes 16 seconds on the next try. More crying and laughing. One more try, and I had it complete in just over 20 mins. Achievements unlocked. It was about 10 pm….I had started playing around 3:30 pm.
I’d like to thank anyone who actually made it through this rant and finish this up with a link to a simple image. If you’ve followed me this far, it’ll make sense…

Oh well, onward.

I ran into an article on Tom’s Hardware and have been hammering Google ever since with some pretty colorful queries like “thermally conductive dielectric fluid” and “oil cooled pc”. It’s served as an inspiration to start a new (very long) project. To summarize, here’s an email I just fired off to my old man:

Yo!

Ok, this is way too cool.

In late 2008 I came across an article in MaxPC about a company called Hardcore PC. They basically make a high end workstation that is completely submerged in a non-conductive mineral oil.

Yesterday I was reading some tech news and I came across this YouTube video about another company called Puget that had basically done the same thing with a custom acrylic motherboard tray and a fish tank. I started checking the forums of a few PC modding and overclocking sites and came across a few people who have been messing with this concept (submersion cooling) for at least a decade.

Mineral oil may be better than air when it comes to heat dissipation, but I got to wondering if a fluid solution existed that was even better. Then I ran into all kinds of info about a synthetic fluid that 3M makes called Fluorinert. Apparently Cray uses this stuff in their supercomputers. It’s completely inert, less viscous than water, much more dense, and has incredible heat transfer properties.

That’s the good news. The bad news is it’s expensive as hell and has to be used in a closed pump system because it evaporates over time at room temperature. The first problem can be partially solved if you use “reclaimed” (recycled) fluid, which is basically used fluid that is treated and re-sold. I’ve read a couple places that the recycled fluid is about $20/gallon. I think we’d need about 10-12 gallons.

The other hard part is that Fluorinert doesn’t play well with a lot of plastic/silicon based materials. They can corrode or become brittle over time if submersed. The containment tanks have to be made out of metal.

So here’s the idea. We design and build the ultimate fluid submersed steampunk machine. We could make a tank out of copper or brass and use some type of strong acrylic as a window on the front. LED lighting on the inside. I thought maybe the lights could be programmed to change color based on the ambient temperature of the fluid. Copper pipe all throughout. Maybe some fixtures like a brass knob that changes the pump speed or opens a valve and bubbles start rising to the top of the case.

Let me know what you think. I’m still trying to find some kind of clear glass/acrylic/plastic that can hold up to the fluid.

-Kid

Update (8/8/2010)
Ouch! It turns out the Fluorinert is more way more expensive than I thought. The recycled price is about $16/lbs, not $20/gallon. This stuff is much more dense than water (about 14 lbs/gallon). That’s about $225 a gallon. I’ve heard from other sources it can be had from TMC  for $200/gallon. But filling a 10 gallon tank with this stuff is not gonna happen at that price.

I tend to think that, even in 2007, Apple had bigger ambitions for iPhone OS than just the iPhone. The iPad may have only been a concept sketch or IRAD project at that point (if it existed at all). But still, the idea of an embedded version of OSX has a lot of potential, and I’m pretty sure they knew that.

The name has already created some confusion in the development world with the release of the iPad. OGRE, for example, was ported to the iPhone recently, so naturally all the configuration flags and other variables reference the iPhone specifically (‘OGRE_BUILD_PLATFORM_IPHONE’, for example). But the same port works perfectly fine on the iPad because the OS (and indeed, even the hardware architecture) is identical.

This may seem like a small gripe. “What’s in a name?”, one might say. I consider it a big deal only because platforms are a difficult thing to re-brand once a name takes root. Linux is still Linux. Windows is still Windows. OSX is a strong plaform, and the name itself is easy enough to spin off. Would ‘OSX Embedded’ have been so bad? Apple already has two device classes using iPhone OS, who knows how many more are to come. It seems odd to chain an entire software platform to the name of the original product it was launched with.

After awhile, managing the in game inventory became an arduous task that led me to realize three things:

1. I had (and still have, actually) a pretty severe case of OCD and simply couldn’t leave anything on the damn ground.
2. Ultima’s inventory system allowed for nesting containers (basically putting bags inside bags). This led me to stumble on a bug in the game that caused it to crash while attempting to nest containers greater than 8 levels deep. I know…I need help.
3. Some items had absolutely no useful purpose.

I’d like to stay on that last one for a bit because it begs an important question. Why deliberately design game objects (including their artwork, models, stats, and other assets) that don’t do anything? Ultima’s developers say they intended the game to be a “realistic and interactive dungeon simulation“, rather than a straightforward role-playing game. Of course, as we all know…realistic dungeons are full of useless crap.

Sarcasm aside, I do have issues with this reasoning. For one, the game is simulating a fantasy world, so the notion of it being a realistic simulation strikes me as odd. Some in game characters and creatures do have real world counterparts that are exaggerated to great effect (giant spiders give me the creeps), but ultimately the designer is crafting their own reality. That being said, I don’t see the problem with crafting a reality where every item (and I mean every item) is useful in some context.

In the case of Ultima, this is really a minor issue that doesn’t take much away from what is otherwise a classic RPG. I only mention it because of the lineage it shares with a ridiculous and growing trend that has crept into more recent games, vendor trash (VT). Simply put, VT is anything in game that, upon discovery, is immediately stuffed into a bag and sold for pennies to a willing merchant. It defies any logical explanation, and the sooner it dies a quick death, the better off all gamers will be. VT seriously bugs me because I consider each useless item a squandered opportunity to increase the endogenous (en·dog·e·nous) value (EV) of a game. I also consider EV to be the cornerstone of what makes games addictive and compelling…so…what the hell is it anyway?

In 2002, Greg Costikyan swiped the term ‘endogenous’ from the biology world and used it to describe the internal value that a game structure (including its rules, mechanics, and objects) can generate:

Suppose you’re walking down the street, and someone gives you a $100 in Monopoly money. This means nothing to you; Monopoly money has no meaning in the real world. The guy who gave you the bill is probably some kind of lunatic.

Yet when you’re playing Monopoly, Monopoly money has value; Monopoly is played until all players are bankrupt but one, who is the winner. In Monopoly, the gaily colored little bills that come with the game are the determinant of success or failure. Monopoly money has meaning endogenous to the game of Monopoly – meaning that is vitally important to its players, so much so that you have to watch your little sister like a hawk to make sure she doesn’t swipe bills from the bank when you aren’t looking.

In most RPGs, much of the EV is generated by the game inventory. The treasure. The drops. The loot. The schwag. Call it what you like, the pursuit of shinier and more powerful gear is one of the primary driving forces in any RPG. Traditionally, the quest for epic loot has started with slaying massive amounts of baddies. Players either kept what they received or sold it to non-player, or computer controlled, characters (NPCs). Trading with NPCs was also possible in some games. Ultima is one example.

With the rise of online gaming, items that players craft themselves have become a mainstay in most massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPG). Crafting can be an incredible source of EV because it creates new goals for players and enables them to have a more meaningful and direct impact on the game economy. I use the word ‘meaningful’ here to describe the satisfaction a player gets from taking raw material and creating something useful to other players in various contexts. All this is very dependent, of course, on the actual implementation.

Around 2000, I had my first experience with crafting while playing Everquest. It was pretty painful. Raw materials weren’t readily available and reagents were relatively expensive, which resulted in crafted items that were worth less than the materials used in making them. For newcomers, most attempts at making anything resulted in failure and a loss of all the materials involved. In the end, players who became proficient in a certain trade skill couldn’t create much that was unique or useful to the other players. The entire system was an incredible waste.

Four years later, even though a few of these problems persisted, I had a much different experience with World of Warcraft (WoW). WoW has two general types of professions, gathering and production. Each production profession is supported by a gathering profession. Blacksmithing is supported by mining, for example. Mining alone isn’t that glamorous: you see a mineral vein, you stroll up to it, and click. It either works or it doesn’t. If it fails, you can try again. If it works, a loot window appears just as if you had killed a creature. Despite this, mineral veins don’t stick around very long after they pop…players tend to snatch them up immediately. Anyone who’s ever been on a dungeon run and watched a miner make a sudden b-line for the nearest vein can attest to this.

The raw materials gathered in WoW create an incredible amount of EV because they are useful to production professions. Those professions, in turn, can actually churn out useful gear. As an example, take a look at this list of all the recipes (blueprints for items that can be crafted) that require Copper Bars. As of this writing, there are over 30 items that can be crafted using copper as one of the ingredients. Each one of these items is useful to different characters in different contexts (level 15-20 Hunters are quite fond of Crafted Heavy Shot, for example). Every time a useful recipe is added to this mix (assuming it doesn’t throw off the game balance), copper becomes more of a commodity and creates even more EV for the game as whole.

This system is far from perfect (I never saw many Warriors carrying Copper Axe’s), but it does illustrate the positive effect a crafting system can have on a MMORPG when implemented correctly. Blizzard’s success with the crafting system in WoW, however, makes it all the more insane that the game still has so much VT. Again, every item dropped in-game should be useful in some context: whether it be important for a quest, a reagent for a trade skill, or just something that allows the character’s aesthetic to be customized. Who says necklaces made from crisp Basilisk urethra aren’t sexy?

As a final example, EvE Online takes crafting to one extreme (some would say too extreme). Most (if not all) of the ships and various gear sold in EvE are created by the players themselves. The game simply sells the blueprints. Actually, the players can research and sell them as well. EvE also has various trade skills that players can train, like Salvaging. I can recall one instance when a close friend and I had an opportunity to clean up a trail of destroyed enemy ships a fellow corp member had left behind after a mission. While the prospect of collecting garbage wouldn’t exactly be appealing in most games, we salivated. There was several million worth of ISK (EvE’s in-game currency) to be made from that salvage, and we were all too happy to oblige. This is a perfect example of a game creating EV where there otherwise would be none…and it’s a trend that I hope continues in all games.

My friend Eric Zimmerman likes to say, “Games are structures of desire.” I don’t like the phrase, for two reasons. Firstly, it’s pretty obscure; it needs to be explained before you ‘get’ it. Second, it makes games sound like a whorehouse.

- Greg Costikyan (I Have No Words & I Must Design)

I would post before pictures (if I had any), but honestly…you really don’t want to see them anyway. I took a second picture of the strangest thing I found while cleaning out the space where the new shelves are…

]]> http://www.crypticrage.com/?feed=rss2&p=339 0 http://www.crypticrage.com/?p=327 http://www.crypticrage.com/?p=327#comments Sun, 06 Dec 2009 05:42:37 +0000 admin http://www.crypticrage.com/?p=327 Over two years ago, after some intensive therapy (read: I got up and went outside), I managed to kick my Warcrack addiction. I had a minor relapse today…

Blizzard sent out an email offering up 7 free days to returning players as part of a 5-year anniversary promotion…and a free in game pet (which seems to come with everything nowadays). I was curious to see how the game had evolved in the last two years and some change, so I re-activated my account. Everything in game seems a bit easier to manage. Pets and mounts have a quick select screen. More bags are available to specific trade skills, etc. I was also pleasantly surprised to see more 10-man raid content and a new achievement system. Though, to be fair, the latter seems a little late and already feels like old hat on arrival.

To prepare for the launch of Diablo III and Starcraft II, Battle.net also got a serious makeover and all WoW accounts have to be merged with Battle.net accounts. This brings all the online account management under one umbrella. In addition, Blizz included the ability to add serial keys for older games to Battle.net accounts. This lets users download full versions of games they’ve previously bought in-store (very much like Steam). In short…many good things are happening around Blizz these days.

As a funny side note, I took a quick screenshot while I was downloading/updating WoW. I’m not sure who approved the font and background colors for the status bar…but they have much better eyes than I.

Border’s is one of three places I normally buy books. The second is Amazon. The third is directly from Oreilly’s website. I’ve bought six e-books from Oreilly in the last 15 months and they were all 40% off (using the same coupon). This is either an extremely long running promotion…or one of their web developers needs to update whatever db table the coupons live in.

I haven’t been able to sleep the last few nights (tonight now included), so I decided to grab a new book to read in the hopes it would either knock me out cold or actually teach me something. I picked up iPhone Game Development for about $17 after discount.

I’m barely into the second chapter and the authors are discussing an OOP approach to designing a state machine. After the initial explanation and some sample code there’s a boxed series of paragraphs with the title “The Next Level: Concurrent Access” on page 41, which basically tries to make an argument against developing multi-threaded state managers on a single processor platform like the iPhone. This little nugget from the third paragraph gave me a bit of pause:

Furthermore, there is less to be gained from multithreaded processes on the iPhone because filesystem access is much faster due to the hard drive being much smaller in capacity and responding to only one application at a time.

A couple quick questions off the top of my head:

1. Where is the “hard drive” kept in the iPhone? Perhaps it’s a fancy new addon I don’t know about.
2. WTF does the capacity of this mystical drive have to do with its access time?

I realize that writing an entire post about this seems…well…strange to say the least, but I was really looking forward to reading the rest of this book. Now I’m a bit skeptical.

I don’t know why that’s so fascinating…I guess its just never happened when I’ve installed a new OS before.