Random Ramblings

Music From Next to Nothing

Philip — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 00:53:00 +0000

Now you (and I) have lost the excuse of not producing music because we don't have source material:

Music from Windows Sounds

Link via The Old New Thing, an excellent inside-Microsoft blog. That's ModPlug Tracker in the video, by the way.

Borderline Insanity or Creative Marketing?

Philip — Sat, 23 Feb 2008 22:40:00 +0000

Four years to the day after Uru shut down the first time, Cyan Worlds announced that GameTap is pulling the plug on Myst Online. It's a strange feeling to be a part of this, because I didn't even hear about the first run until it had already ended. This time I got in on the ground floor, testing the game in private beta, open beta, rehearsal (content beta), . . . and here we are at the end. I don't love Uru. Not as some do, at least. I'm not social enough. I can't be satisfied with a glorified chat room.

For me, this is proof that you can't build an MMO in the traditional sense around puzzle-solving and exploration, even if there's a story to it. Myst encourages group puzzle solving, yes, but the size of groups it attracts is down around 10 or maybe 20, tops. That's nowhere near the scale of social interaction you need to cultivate an MMO. Cyan has come full circle now, and it's time to break away from the past. Last time they stayed in the circle, developing Uru, and look where it got them: right back where they started. I believe onine puzzle-solving and exploration games are viable, but it can't be done this way. Cyan has proven that painfully and definitively. Twice.

So how can online multiplayer adventure games break out without straying too far into RPG territory? Well, many Uru players kept the dream alive from 2004 to 2007 by running licensed private Uru servers. Many of them even managed to add content and story to the game. What if we took that idea and put it on crack? What if we built a game that ran on licensed servers to which server admins could add licensed or user-made "content modules" or "story modules" that extended the game world? What if we ran many storylines at once and let people choose which story they wanted to follow?

Why go to all the trouble and expense of writing and producing content ourselves if the players can do it? What if we let the players make the game? Good question. The answer is, "because it doesn't work." The vast majority of gamers play games to be entertained, not to create art. The creative ones will take initiative, and the'll shine if you give them the right tools, but they're not as plentiful as all those executives drooling about "user-generated content" seem to believe.

But here's the thing: pricing. Want to play alone? Just buy the content packs. Want to play with others? Join a server that's following the story you like and pay a monthly fee, or join a UGC-only server for free. Want to try it out without buying anything? The first content pack is free.

Other considerations: 1. Game engine design needs to accomodate this style from the get-go. 2. Stick to the release schedule or watch customers leave. 3. Encourage user-generated content, and don't gripe about the UGC-only servers that aren't generating revenue. They're generating eyeballs and goodwill. That's enough.

To D'ni and Back Again

Philip — Mon, 11 Feb 2008 22:29:00 +0000

It's funny that I found out about Uru (the online game of Myst) after the servers had already been shut down. It's funny because I was in the thick of it when the game relaunched through GameTap, and now it's about to go away. In a sense, we've come full circle.

My opinion - not that anyone cares, but I might as well state it - is that Cyan should take this opportunity to break free. That's hard to do, but look what happened last time: they stayed in the circle, and it brought them right back here. Either you leave the circle or you keep bottoming out.

Myst Online was a great concept: a nonviolent, social puzzle-solving game in a beautiful and immersive environment. No one had ever done that before Cyan. Now that we've reached the second end for Uru, it's clear why no one can. The kind of social puzzle-solving Myst encourages thrives in small groups, and an MMO needs extremely large groups. We need MMOs that encourage deep, cerebral gameplay, but so far it seems like those two terms (massively multiplayer and cerebral) are opposed to each other.

So now the members of the Myst community and all like-minded gamers have two options. We could just sit around and wait for something like Portal Online, which I just made up but actually sounds pretty rad, or we could form lots of small groups of content creators working within an MMO framework developed by a technical team (there's some related work going on at WPI, vaguely related to Garry's Mod). These teams would work to create their own individualized mini-MMOs on privately hosted servers. By letting the community create its own content, we would eliminate the main expense and delays associated with MMOs.

I know this sounds a lot like Second Life, but I'm talking about a much smaller system here. A system by the people, for the people, etc. so that the death knell of servers might never draw such spikes through the hearts of gamers again.

Tell me how wrong I am in the comments.

Windows Media Player 11 Gets FLAC

Philip — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:38:00 +0000

And you thought I'd run out of bad puns, didn't you? For shame. Since I've started ripping CDs to FLAC (this started when I discovered FLAC about a year ago), I obviously need a media player that handles the format. Unfortunately, Windows Media Player does not fit that description. Winamp has built-in support, but it's getting a little long in the tooth. I'd prefer to use WMP11, if only it would actually play my music.

Enter illiminable. Simply install the DirectShow filters from that site, and your copy of WMP11 (or any other player that uses DirectShow) will be able to play FLAC and Ogg Vorbis files. There is a slightly annoying part: the 'Open File' dialog still does not recognize .flac files as playable music files, so you will need to switch to 'All Files' and visually detect the format of each file. It's a tradeoff - and there's probably an inverse relationship between your level of annoyance at this and the level of organization in your music collection. (Both of my levels are somewhere around 'medium'.)

And, We're Back.

Philip — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:37:00 +0000

It appears that, after resolving some technical difficulties which prevented me from continuing this blog, everything works again. Sorry for the interruption - it was caused by yet another "upgrade" which broke critical system parts.

(Those are the best, aren't they?)

A Good Example

Philip — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 22:12:00 +0000

I got a great email today:

Hi Phil,

From the diagnostic information that was included in your email it looks like your computer uses the Intel Integrated Graphics chipset of the 810, 845, 855, or 865 series. Unfortunately, these graphics accelerators do not implement the 3D texture mapping features needed by Photosynth.

Regards
Aditya Mandlekar
Microsoft Live Labs – Photosynth Group
http://labs.live.com/photosynth

This email is great for two reasons: first, now I know that someone is actually reading email I send to the Photosynth team. Second, Aditya took the time to write about why my graphics card is incompatible. I'm still kind of bummed that I can't try it out (at least on this computer), but now I know why it doesn't work and what to do about it.

Eventually I'll try Photosynth again, both because I know what went wrong and because I know it wasn't a result of the developers being lazy. (I've run into similar problems in my own projects, and when you have specific product specifications to meet, there's not much you can do.) Good job, guys.

Essays and Copywriting

Philip — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 17:35:00 +0000

Why do I do this? A friend of mine just sent me a question about copywriting (not to be confused with a copyright, which is very different). I did a little research of my own, mainly confirming what I already thought, and wrote a reply. Well, no, not just a reply. An essay-length reply.

Again, why do I do this? Some days I don't answer any email at all, and other days I send out novellas. Thankfully, I've started checking my email less frequently on the days I don't feel like answering mail. That means that I probably won't forget to answer people as much as I used to, although they might still feel ignored.

P.S. Seeking a copywriter? I just happen to know a potential candidate! (No, not myself.) Email me and I'll put you in contact with them.

Media Player 11

Philip — Sat, 04 Nov 2006 22:38:00 +0000

If you want a glimpse of Windows Vista's graphical style without installing a beta operating system, one really good way to do that is by installing Windows Media Player 11.

I really like the new look of the Media Player interface. By default, the window looks like it's made out of polished black plastic. It's trendy, but for good reason: it looks great. Hopefully the Vista style will translate as well for other programs. I couldn't find an option to change the color of the window like is possible in Office 2007, but I image that will be a system-wide option in Vista anyway.

Version 11 is basically just an upgrade of version 10, but it's a quality upgrade. Several people have commented that they'd like netcast support included, but since I just run Juice on my sever system and stream the files from there, I wouldn't use the feature anyway.

The main reorg here is the song library. Album art plays a big role, and it's fairly easy to add album art with the "Paste album art" feature. Double-clicking an album or song just adds that element to the end of the current playlist, rather than replacing it.
Also, the "Burn" and "Sync" tabs now show the media library on the left side of the window and allow you to build a "burn list" inside the Burn tab instead of having to create a saved playlist somewhere else and opening it inside the Burn tab. That's good, because now it feels like the Burn and Sync tabs are actually part of Media Player.

Overall, I think it's great. Nothing has been lost and lots of cool or useful things have been gained.

Word Association: IE7, Bad

Philip — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 23:54:00 +0000

This is not a good sign: I installed Internet Explorer 7 on a company laptop, and all networking functions of that laptop immediately stopped. After performing a system restore to before the installation of IE7 - which uninstalls the program since it can be obtained through Windows Update - everything worked fine.

I thought it might just be a glitch and not actually IE7, but no, after reinstalling the updates, the problem returned. Luckily, I had a recent working system restore point. One other update could also be the culprit, but it's not network-related, so I find that hard to believe.

Even if IE7 isn't the problem, I don't like it. The installation includes a mandatory system reboot, which is not cool. Firefox, Opera, and every other browser out there installs without a reboot, so I don't appreciate the inconvenience no matter how necessary.

But hey, at least I wasn't on a Mac. I hear they won't be getting System Restore until OS X Leopard.

And the Results are In

Philip — Thu, 19 Oct 2006 18:15:00 +0000

. . . It turns out that I was a straight-A student last term.

That is all.

Mourning in the Evening

Philip — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:23:00 +0000

Over the past few years, I've realized that mornings are actually the most productive time of day for me. If only I liked mornings, that would be a good thing. Not only do I not really like mornings, but there are so many distractions in the morning. In the tech world, things can happen overnight - and often do. Coders may pull an all-nighter to finish an application and call it ApplPi because the release was at 3:14 am. Now, who can pass that up as a news item?

Speaking of late nights, last weekend I attended a programming competition that started at 9:00 am. I had to wake up at 6:30 am just to make it there in time. What's up with that? Programming competitions should be held at midnight, not midmorning. No cookie for you.

Day of the Video

Philip — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 14:04:00 +0000

Looks like the big news today is that Google bought YouTube . . . as usual, I found out about it by reading other blogs rather than the Google press releases I signed up for. However, there were a couple other press releases that I haven't seen mentioned yet. Google has also made arrangements with Sony and Warner to license music videos. They'll be available to watch for free, and revenue will come from advertising. From the article:

WMG will be able to monetize its music video content online by
leveraging Google's extensive advertiser network of hundreds of
thousands of advertisers. WMG's music video catalog will be
sponsored by Google advertisers, making it free to all users. The
resulting generated advertising revenue will be shared by WMG and
Google. Besides providing ad-supported content on Google Video, select
WMG's music videos will immediately be available for purchase as
downloads on Google Video for $1.99.

This doesn't affect me much since I don't watch music videos, but I found it interesting that three major business deals concerning Google's internet video business were announced today. Note again that all of these deals have to do with Google's "real" business, advertising.

Plasma Pong

Philip — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 01:46:00 +0000

While searching for other things today, I came across the rather awesome game Plasma Pong. Lots and lots of eye candy, but none that interferes with gameplay. Stable frame rate and some cool twists on the standard Pong setup. I could play around in sandbox mode for hours! (Try the Jello setting!)

If you're looking for any kind of mindless but addicting PC gameplay, download this game. Now.

Another Recommendation

Philip — Sat, 07 Oct 2006 23:36:00 +0000

Since I mentioned WAMP5 the other day in conjunction with my MediaWiki installation, I should put in a few words for HFS Webserver.

It's simply an excellent piece of software. I've used it on my fileserver for at least half a year now, and it's remained fast and very stable. Not a single program (or system) crash, and I haven't noticed any memory leaks or slowdown issues.
And I do mean fast - with WAMP5 and HFS running simultaneously, HFS runs as fast as ever while Apache2 plods along like the server is made of molasses - the server might as well be made of molasses, but still . . . HFS puts it to shame.

Stand Out or Sit Down!

Philip — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 20:57:00 +0000

Seth Godin made a very good point today with his post 50:1: It can be risky to innovate, but it can be downright hazardous to your health to keep doing the same thing.

Wiki Server

Philip — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 14:48:00 +0000

Last weekend, I set up a personal wiki server on our home network. It was necessary to try a few different approaches before I found one that worked well, but I settled on using WAMP5 and MediaWiki.

Now, I've set up WAMP installs before by hand - install MySQL, install Apache, install PHP, pull out hair - but often they didn't quite work right because I didn't know the correct way to configure it. Poring through config files for hours looking for the one magic option that will fix everything is not my idea of a good time, so I wanted something with less hassle. WAMP5 delivered on that front, as all I had to do was click "next" a few times and everything was ready to go. Nicely done.

MediaWiki was nearly as easy. I did need to create a new MySQL user using PhpMyAdmin (included with WAMP5), but other than that it seemed fairly easy to install. Overall, I think it's a great (almost-) turnkey solution. In fact, unless you want to do extreme server customization with Apache and PHP, I would recommend WAMP5 as a default.

Right now, the wiki is kind of novel, so I'll wait a little while before writing about it. I do like the "edit" links on every section, though.

Supreme Nerd

Philip — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 20:02:00 +0000

Finally, I have achieved greatness:

Yep, Supreme Nerd. It's like that age-old question: is it better to be famous or infamous? After all, the Three Amigos said that infamous is when you're more than famous . . .

Pragmatic Thinking

Philip — Sat, 30 Sep 2006 20:43:00 +0000

Andy Hunt was on campus yesterday with an abridged version of his talk "Refactoring Your Wetware". He talked about the dual-sided nature of our brains and how to make them more useful.

Specifically, technical people spend most of their time in what he calls L-Mode (a.k.a. left-brain functionality), which is the analytical, logical side. However, the logical side is slow and can't really multitask. R-Mode (right brain) is parallelized and efficient at pattern-matching, and this makes it very efficient at solving problems using previously learned information. Since R-Mode is nonverbal and artistic, though, the main challenge is to figure out what that part of the brain is coming up with - and using L-Mode at any time will interrupt what R-Mode is doing.

Altogether it was a very interesting and useful talk. I heard several new ideas for recording and organizing ideas, as well as reminders of what I knew or suspected before (namely: you can't hold on to ideas in your head, and if you try to do so, you'll stop getting new ideas). On that note, I'll probably be starting a personal wiki soon. If so, I'll keep you posted.

Any Hunt's Weblog

Semicolons?

Philip — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:33:00 +0000

Trivia learned for the day: Raymond over at the Old New Thing mentioned that quotation marks are unneccesary in the PATH variable. Save some typing - not that manually altering the PATH variable is a common task, but useful information nonetheless.

That Was Unexpected

Philip — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 16:39:00 +0000

I'm a couple days late with the news, but I'm still really psyched about Halo Wars! Ensemble Studios, makers of the excellent Age of Empires series, is making a precursor game to Halo as an RTS. Needless to say, the combination of my two favorite video game series is tremendously exciting.

This brings the lineup of games next year for the Xbox 360 to critical mass for me. Halo 3, Assassin's Creed, and Halo Wars would (will?) sell me a console. The first two games are practically guaranteed to be quality titles, and as for Halo Wars . . . well, if anyone can pull off RTS gameplay on a console, it's Ensemble.

Too Many Se7ens

Philip — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 18:35:00 +0000

This really shows me up as a hardcore geek, but I just can't help myself. An update to the Halo Story Page over at Halo.Bungie.Org today caught my attention. Knight Premier claims that the original Halo logo contains a top-down diagram of the relic from the Halo 3 trailer.

However, the diagram has 8 pairs of open-ended rectangles arranged symmetrically around the perimeter of the circle. The relic has only 7 pairs of ramps (or antennas, or pillars, or reflectors, or whatever they are). Thus the diagram most likely depicts the arrangement of structures on Installation 04 (Halo). Not only were they often found in pairs, but we never saw more than 8 of them in the game. (I think the actual count was more like 5, but I'm not certain.)

Given Bungie's long-standing preoccupation with the number 7, I doubt that the diagram has that extra pair by coincidence. Then again, the last pair is kind of hard to see . . .

Google!

Philip — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 21:34:00 +0000

Google was on campus today, handing out free stuff! I got a t-shirt that says "I'm feeling lucky!" on the back (with the Google logo on the front, natch), a Google pen, and a Google whitepad. I don't know what that last item has to do with search, but hey - it was free, and that makes me happy. Actually, it reminds me of the Google lightbulb gag over at OK/Cancel.

It looks like a pretty cool place to work. I don't think they have any centers close enough for a decent commute, though. Actually, the most interesting thing I learned (or possibly re-learned) this week about Google is that you can use your Google account to log in to Writely, the collaborative online word processor.
One of the engineers I talked with mentioned that the backend for Writely has been completely rewritten since the acquisition. That sounds like we could be seeing a "documents" link appear in the top-left hand corner of Gmail soon. Maybe once Writely gets out of beta . . . then again, when has that ever stopped someone from releasing software?

During the meeting today, I also learned that there's a special email alias for free food around campus. As someone present stated, "college kids are unparalleled scavengers." (And proud of it.)

RC1

Philip — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 21:08:00 +0000

Windows Vista Release Candidate 1 is available for download. Now if I just had a spare computer to test it on!

As Promised

Philip — Fri, 01 Sep 2006 02:35:00 +0000

Here's a little diversion: download the anagram generator I was talking about yesterday and try it out. You'll need to be running a Unix-like operating system for this to work (Mac OSX might work, too) with the GNU C++ compiler and a working version of the spell command.

Compile the C++ program file with a line like g++ unlayce.cpp -o unlayce and set both the executable and the script file to at least owner-executable. (Just use chmod 0755 unlayce anagram.sh if you don't know what I'm talking about.)

It's just a fun little program to mess around with. I guess it's open-source now; don't charge for it, or I break your head, okay? Okay.

XNAGSE (rename please)

Philip — Thu, 31 Aug 2006 15:52:00 +0000

I nearly missed it - Microsoft has started the XNA Game Studio Beta, so the software is now available for download. You will need Visual C# Express 2005 beta (who names this stuff?) installed first, but I would actually consider that a plus. We don't need another IDE, just a more efficient pipeline for making games.

This looks like a good move for Microsoft, if the promise of homebrew games on the Xbox Live Marketplace hold true. That could spur sales of consoles like triple-A titles can't, not because they're higher quality, but because fun, simple games can be brought to market quickly using a small team and a small budget. In other words, it will become popular for the same reason PC gaming flourishes: there are lots and lots of PC games.
Yes, games written with XNAGSE probably won't push the console to its limits, graphically or otherwise, but that's not why they'll sell. They'll sell because there is an excellent content distribution mechanism already in place. As a book I read once said, just look at Deer Hunter. No TV commercials, no magazine ads, no fan sites, but there it was on every Wal-Mart shelf with a $20 price tag. And it sold.