Semper Progressus

wanted: SimCity 5

2009-09-28T04:33:27Z

SimCity Societies was released less than two years ago. At the time, EA and even Will Wright himself made the claim that while SimCity still appealed to die-hard fans of the series, it had become too complicated for new players to pick up and play, so they had to take the series in a new direction.

I first got onto this train of thought when I saw an NY Times article about how Apple is "looming" over the gaming industry with its iPhone App Store. This is clearly absurd - they're not "looming" over the movie theater industry because watching a movie on your phone is a fundamentally different experience from watching on a big screen, as is gaming on a phone versus gaming on a PC or console. So their armada of $1 games isn't going to break the back of the guys selling $60 games. This got me wondering, if some games like SimCity did have a diehard but limited fanbase, could they make money by selling these for a higher price? Would I pay $100 for a really good SimCity sequel? I might.

This is still an interesting question in general, but I quickly realized it doesn't apply to SimCity. Societies came out two years ago, SimCity 4 came out six years ago. But in Amazon's PC Simulation Games category, Societies is #60 (with a bargain bin price of ~$5) and SC4 is #6 (and #4 in Strategy). The argument which basically distills to "gamers are too dumb for what SimCity has become" is bogus on more levels than I can count. Perhaps I should start with what may be most damning: it's awfully similar to what was said about the original SimCity when it came out 20 years ago, only now it's Will Wright himself saying it! I remember reading reviews back then that said SimCity was a great game and lots of fun but wouldn't sell well because gamers wouldn't "get it". But they got it big time and it was one of the best-selling games of all time. Now here's SC4 showing the same popularity even years after release. But even if the argument were valid, as it may be for some people, there's no reason why every layer of complexity must be always-on. Use difficulty settings or individual options to make them optional. Having "auto" options for a lot of this stuff would be simple to implement. If they truly feel they painted themselves into a corner, as Wright put it, then they should find a solution, not just drop the whole endeavor.

This series was one of the all-time greats, and although EA might have saved SimCity 3000 when their acquisition saved Maxis from bankruptcy, what everyone feared did eventually come to pass. I actually found SimCity 4 to be something of a disappointment when it was released - not that it was bad, just that it was a much smaller step forward than either of the previous sequels had been. With Maxis having been totally absorbed into EA by now, and even WW apparently drinking the company Kool-Aid (I haven't even bothered to purchase Sims 3, since it seems like more of the same) I don't know that I hold out much hope for a proper SimCity 5 ever coming along.

But you never know.... Tropico came out eight years ago, and was rapidly followed by Tropico 2 - again less a sequel and more a lame spin-off. Yet this all-but-forgotten gem gets a proper revision in Tropico 3 next month. So, until I'm sufficiently wealthy to found a software studio and buy the rights to one of the most popular series of all time, here's hoping....

prescience

2009-09-11T18:55:34Z

Rep. Wilson's outburst during Obama's address reminded me of a scene in Idiocracy:

President Camacho: Shit. I know shit's bad right now, with all that starving bullshit, and the dust storms, and we are running out of french fries and burrito coverings. But I got a solution.
South Carolina Representative # 1: That's what you said last time, dipshit!
South Carolina Representative # 2: Yeah, I got a solution, you're a dick! South Carolina, what's up!

Personally I found it remarkable that even the state was the same, although I know that doesn't surprise everyone. This NY Times article has more on the state's interesting mentality, and I think some of my friends even made, "of course it's South Carolina," comments upon seeing the film. Still....

My mouse-sense is tingling??

2009-08-31T20:09:40Z

So Disney is buying Marvel. Huh....

This may sound horrifying at first, but I will be looking forward to returning to Disney World in a few years to hang out with Spidey and Iron Man, alongside Donald and Aladdin.

Not to mention the crossover possibilities! The mind boggles! (Nay, you say? I say yea, if a Disney/SquareSoft crossover worked.)

BFG (geekery)

2009-08-11T22:41:04Z

A year or two after college, just for fun, I wrote a computer program to play Domain, which I'd picked up at GC and gotten pretty good at. I wrote the original in good ol' ANSI C, ugly text interface and all, and compiled it with GCC for DOS/Windows. The heuristics were really good - it beat me regularly, and creamed nearly everyone else who tried it - but it was kinda slow. Its first move (second of the game - it always let the player go first) took a minute or more on the 1GHz Athlon I had at the time. (Subsequent moves were faster, as the space of possible moves monotonically decreases in this game.)

After an abortive attempt to accelerate it using GPGPU programming (just as a way of dabbling in the latter), I decided to just look at modernizing it and maybe speeding it up enough to port to my Windows Mobile phone. The old version running on my (not-exactly-cutting-edge) 1.73GHz Pentium-M laptop makes its first move in 8-12 seconds, depending on what the player's first move is. I've gotten the guts of it rewritten from scratch (I didn't even look at the old code before starting, because I know it's riddled with inefficiencies) in VB.NET (yeah, don't laugh until you see the results), and it's now able to make the same moves in 0.4-0.6 seconds! The logic it uses is equivalent, but couldn't be more different operationally. The entire game state is stored in a 26-array (for the 26 pieces) of 4-byte structures (At first I had this as an array of 16-bit integers, with custom bit-packing, but since all modern platforms are at least 32-bit, performance was identical, and this is far easier to work with) although it does keep a couple of 9-arrays of 16-bit integers as support data (these are computed from the above, but used often enough that it's better to compute them once and keep them in memory). All the core operations (for example, determining how to update the game state for a given move) have been reduced to bitwise operations on 16-bit integers.

I still might need to optimize to get decent performance (and not sap the battery too much) on a low-power cellphone platform, but at this point, that's probably going to involve more heuristic adjustments like when to trim a branch off the minimax tree than low-level computational adjustments. But I look forward to porting it and testing it on there, as well as testing it on my Core i7 at work (at which point I'm certainly going to want to tack on basic multi-threading).

Work has actually been giving me interesting stuff to do lately (including mobile device development, which is part of what made me think to port this to mobile) but nothing like this!

That was weird...

2009-08-07T21:24:04Z

I just went into an empty conference room to use my cell phone, and there was a sudoku game hand-written up on the whiteboard.

So I went ahead and solved it.

But...like...wtf?? Why would someone put a sudoku game on a whiteboard in a conference room? And what will they think if they go back and find it solved?

O_o

I wanna dip my balls in it!

2009-07-28T23:13:17Z

The State: The Complete Series is finally out on DVD!! Thanks for the heads-up, week-old Time magazine at the eye doctor!

Chuck?

2009-05-04T19:20:28Z

NBC didn't decide Chuck's fate (they're sounding more like Fulcrum every day), or at least they didn't announce it, in their up-front presentation today. Based on what I've read, we can expect an official announcement at their "Night of Comedy" on May 19 (a.k.a. "Chucklefront", if you can believe that bit of irony). Variety speculates that they may be waiting to see what other networks do with their lineups, though personally I think they might also be trying to maintain the whole "will they or won't they?" buzz that they've got going. It's free publicity for the show, and I'm sure they recognize that the longer they let this maelstrom swirl, the worse they'll look if they cancel it, so I can only assume they've already decided to renew it. Though even if they didn't, Variety seems to think there's a chance the CW would grab it (it's a WB-produced show).

Maybe now is the time to grab season one on Blu-Ray. If they truly haven't decided yet, I'm sure every little bit helps.

Thank you, The Office...

2009-04-10T03:33:43Z

...for the Andy/Dwight duelling Country Road. Aside from the sheer awesomeness of it, it made me finally go look up the anime where I'd first heard that song. Yes, I first heard it in an anime; that's what happens when you're really not a country music guy - you miss out on even decent stuff like John Denver. I decided to look it up after heading upstairs for a shower, leaving my laptop, and my work laptop (working from home today), and my smartphone, and my work iPhone, and my work iPod Touch (maybe later...suffice to say, Xcode is no Visual Studio) in the living room. Fortunately for my laziness, I left my desktop on upstairs where I've been fiddling with GPGPU programming. A little Goolge/Wikipedia tag-team revealed that the little that I did remember ("I think it's that Miyazaki-ish one that's not Miyazaki") was right. Whisper of the Heart. Though I learned (re-learned? I only saw it once, over ten years ago) it was Studio Ghibli, and although Miyazaki didn't direct, he was heavily involved, including writing and producing. The worst part is, I may have that on DVD. I'm too lazy to check right now, though....

Well, I guess that turned into something of a "what's been up with me post". Excellent.

hmm

2009-03-30T14:08:52Z

Nice. And honestly, for the most part, those are basically the same thing.

BLAHAHA! Suckers!

2009-03-21T14:27:29Z

I just have to say to everyone who gave four years of their life to that show: I! TOLD! YOU! SO!

rise of the proletariat

2009-03-20T14:25:07Z

ABC News was covering the whole AIG bonus debacle last night (as, I imagine, was everyone), and afterwards turned to the massive swell of anger surrounding it as the next story. They asked the question of why there's so much anger over this, when there have been worse offenses (numerically worse, anyway, as the AIG bonuses are only 0.1% of what they received from the government).

Is it really not obvious? Concentration of wealth is out of control in America. And while the rich are probably also taking a big hit with the economy in the tank (short-sellers notwithstanding), it's proportionately nothing compared to the family that loses its sole source of income. While things were going well, people accepted the concentration of wealth thanks to the American dream that one day they, too, could be truly obscenely wealthy. But when things go bad and that dream seems hopeless, the unfairness of it really hits them.

Perhaps unfairness is the wrong word. That implies a certain objective morality on the matter which I'm unsure is there. Maybe it is - after all, I'm pretty strongly capitalist, generally speaking, and I find it pretty sick. But whether or not the morality is ambiguous, the facts are not. The last time the distribution of wealth was as lopsided as it is right now was - you guessed it - right before the Great Depression. I suspect that such strong concentration of wealth may be as damaging to a capitalist system as a monopoly is, and for many of the same reasons. And while the main problem with a democratic government is that it does what's popular, not necessarily what's smart, it seems like people are finally realizing the smart thing to do and calling for government to do it.

"Redistribution of wealth" is a major codeword for "communist", but it should be obvious that things like raising tax rates on the wealthy or means-testing social security or even just maintaining closer oversight and stricter regulations on financial markets are not things which will render our society no longer a meritocracy. If anything, it makes it moreso, since under the current system those with wealth and power can and do prevent others from grabbing a piece of that pie, regardless of merit (again, not unlike what a monopoly can do in the business world). This defines a broken system, in need of repair. Not the self-correction of conservatives who believe that free markets are a panacea, but a serious restructuring by an outside agent. Hopefully the new administration will be such an agent. Thinking about it all, I'm at least as interested in how the aftermath of the crisis will play out as I am in the crisis itself - it's going to be real interesting to see how quickly these lessons are forgotten once the economy has been stabilized.

Here's another take on the matter that I stumbled across, with a slightly more colorful tone.

edit: Wow, xkcd really misses the point today...or misses something, anyway...as many forum-posters note. Does he think people are angry because they mistakenly believe AIG gave away almost their entire last stimulus payment as bonuses? That seems to be what he's implying, which I don't believe, nor do I believe these sorts of news graphics are "dishonest" at all. "Without context"? How is it without context? The context is the money AIG came begging for versus the money they're now pissing away. Here's another comparison to counter the one he gives about a million versus a billion (which is even more in-context in regards to AIG): It's like if a friend came begging, pleading you for $1000 to help with their rent and food for the month, and told you if you didn't help they'd be homeless and starving within a week, so you loan them $1000...and they immediately pull out one of those dollars, wipe their ass with it, and throw it in the garbage. Granted, they didn't just do so with the whole grand, but it's still pretty a fucking outrageous thing to do, given the circumstances. Come on, Randall, you're usually more with-it than this....

3-movie weekend

2009-03-16T13:44:05Z

1. Netflix disc - Role Models
Finally, a movie about boobs and LARPing!! And it's really funny. Highly recommended.

2. theater - Watchmen (any spoilers behind cuts)
I realize it's based on a GN, which we've bought but haven't read yet, and it wants to be true to the source material, but damn that plot wandered all over the place! I didn't even know what was going on half the time, in spite of how ridiculously heavy-handed the director was with his themes (not to mention the music that everyone has complained about. Great soundtrack, poorly utilized.) The plot is also kind of dated, somehow. I don't think cold war/nuclear threat is automatically dated (Thirteen Days is very suspenseful, even though you know how it turns out, and I still love WarGames), but something about the way it treated it made it obvious that it was written before the last couple of decades happened. Michelle looked up how they'd changed the ending from the GN, and found that in the GN, it wasn't made to appear that Dr. Manhattan was responsible. Instead of a common enemy bringing nations together, it was just a terrible disaster. Unforunately, we now know that while that can work, it takes only a few years and one letter to undo it all, so the original ending certainly would've rung hollow.... I dunno, I guess it all rung kind of hollow. It was kind of an assault on the senses with little point. I imagine 300 was the same, and perhaps Sin City as well (this certainly hasn't made me any more interested in seeing them, so I may never do so). Is it possible this director is to graphic novels what Uwe Boll is to video games? Maybe it's a little early to go that far.... Anyway, I still look forward to reading the GN, to see how it worked in its original form.

3. Netflix instant - Dirty Dancing
Watch some old Knight Rider, then watch this. I swear Patrick Swayze looks just like David Hasselhoff.

Steal This Bandwidth

2009-03-10T04:38:00Z

Verizon finally released Windows Mobile 6.1 for my phone a little while back, and they bundled a few other updates with it, including EVDO rev A support for higher speed. Higher speed indeed! I finally got around to re-hacking it for free tethering and pulled up speedtest.net: 1174kbps downstream! Over a megabit on a cellular connection? Yes, please! 343kbps upstream isn't too shabby, either.

I strongly encourage all my highly mobile friends - especially those always questing for free hotspots (ecmyers!) - to Google how to hack your phone for free tethering and start really getting your money's worth. You don't even need a smartphone/Blackberry; I was doing the same thing with my old LG Chocolate and Verizon's $5/month wireless web service.

via ecmyers

2009-03-08T16:02:53Z

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit "random" or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random

The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select "random quotations" or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3

The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on "explore the last seven days" or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days

Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

peace offering

2009-02-20T19:13:36Z

There's been a lot of yelling around here, most of it over silliness, so I'm making the following peace offering to trinityvixen:

I wouldn't want to go down Lincoln-style tomorrow (assassinated at the theater, I mean - it's not a "hoo boy, Mary Todd Lincoln was homely!" reference).

Perhaps what's most bizarre is that this was done by the same guy who did that awesomely disturbing (and disturbingly awesome?) Lazytown/Lil Jon mashup that viridian posted a while back...(which is back online, as they've successfully appealed the takedown request).

good day, I guess

2009-02-12T14:43:40Z

Wow, apparently today is the 200th birthday of both Abraham Lincoln AND Charles Darwin.

They should totally hang out....

the boy who cried wolf - redux

2009-01-21T15:06:55Z

We all know that "the road to hell is paved with good intentions", but it occurred to me this morning just how important intent can be to the moral learned from parables. Take "the boy who cried wolf" for example.

Kid is assigned to watch some sheep, gets bored (and/or is an attention whore) and shouts that there's a wolf when there is none. Villagers come, kid weakly asserts, "Uh...it left or something," villagers leave. Repeat a few times until they get sick of him, wolf actually shows, kid yells, villagers ignore, wolf eats kid (and sheep, to get the moral through in case you, ah, prefer sheep, if you know what I mean).

Ostensibly, the moral is that if you lie (and get caught, as Garak pointed out when Bashir told him the parable in an episode of Deep Space 9) people won't believe you. Or, more succintly, don't lie.

Setting aside for the moment that the villagers should've taken him off the shepherding job as soon as their disbelief in his cries rendered him ineffectual at performing the task, what struck me was how a change in intent, or in circumstances beyond control, could've led to exactly the same beliefs and actions from the villagers, the same outcome, but with a wildly different moral.

For example, if the kid actually believes he sees a wolf in the brush and calls out, but it turns out there is none, the exact same sequence of events will follow, but the moral can't be one about lying. It sort of seems it'd be a communist-dictatorship-style "lesson" about the importance of doing your assigned job well...because otherwise the sheep die, depriving the people of a vital source of food and clothing material (oh, and you die, too).
If there was actually a wolf, and it fled before the villagers got there, the moral could be that wolves, as pack animals, understand human social structure, and can use it to manipulate us, much to our peril. We'd be learning the moral as villagers, not as the shepherd, presumably, to be extra-vigilant about those wily wolves.

I'm sure there are other possibilities, and probably for other parables as well. I guess these subtleties are why the audience for these moral lessons is usually restricted to children, who don't have the attention span to think too deeply on the subject matter. Because they just don't hold up to scrutiny when you do analyze them.

Jedi mind trick

2009-01-18T01:35:08Z

Me to other driver: "Good job, ass-grape."
Michelle: "What's a grape?"
...pause...
Me: "Ummmmm.... It's a small fruit usually sold in bunches?"
Michelle: "Oh my god, that was such a non-sequitur I honestly didn't know what a grape was!"

grah

2008-12-21T06:01:53Z

I'm not having a lot of tech luck lately. As if the low-tech meltdown of both cars and the furnace on Thanksgiving (now 2/3 fixed, and the other car should be back soon) wasn't enough, I'm now having a high-tech meltdown: my RAID-5 array with absolutely everything on it collapsed last weekend, and just this evening my Xbox 360 RROD'd. (I guess the rumors about NXE taxing the consoles is true, since mine's been running for two years without a snag.) I almost think I should be afraid, rather than excited, for work giving me a new computer, and letting me build it, too.

centenarian lolcat

2008-12-20T00:13:09Z

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2008/12/01/funny-pictures-oldest-ever-lolcat-found/

That is seriously awesome. In a really weird sort of way.

Stephen Colbert on Rock Band

2008-10-16T17:49:39Z

I know everyone's all into talking about last night's debate right now, but I thought people might want to be made aware of this. I know it passed under my radar last month, but I plan to check it out before going on vacation.

Sarah Palin, OR...

2008-10-01T14:08:16Z

Couric: So, what newspapers and magazines do you regularly read to stay informed and to understand the world?
Georg: I'VE READ MOST OF THEM!! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Again with GREAT APPRECIATION for your AMER'CAN PRESS, KATIE! HAHAHAHAHA!
Couric: Ok, right...Yortuk?
Yortuk: How about ALL OF THEM?!! HAHAHAHAHA! You know, any of them that have been in front of me all these years in Amer'ca.
Couric: Can you name a few?
Yortuk: We do not have such a vast variety of news sources in Chekoslovakia. It is a foreign country where news is tightly controlled by Communist party.
Georg: Believe me, Chekoslovakia is a microcosm compared to America!
Both: HAHAHAHAHA! That's why we are...TWO WILD AND CRAZY GUYS!!!
Couric: *facepalm*

All new toys should be subsidized

2008-09-28T20:58:28Z

My earlier post about there being no good software out there for mobile devices turned out to have been ill-informed. I'm just behind the times on these things, as it's not an area of tech that usually piques my interest...until now, since I have one. Handango seems to have descended in the last four years (when I got my PalmOS-based Garmin GPS/PDA) from the be-all end-all of mobile app stores to the dumping ground for any random guy who threw an app together in five minutes and thinks he can sell it. Real developers are selling their own apps direct.

But enough about stores - let's look for free software! I've already downloaded both Google Maps Mobile and Windows Live Search. It's interesting to compare the two - not surprisingly, Google Maps is really fast but lighter on features, while Live Search sort of chugs along but is laden with bells and whistles. The thing is, most of them are USEFUL bells and whistles, like nearby movie listings and low gas prices and traffic info on more roads. I've also read that if you're using them for GPS navigation, Live updates your position quicker and provides a better interface (Google's makes you manually step through the turns, for example, which is not great for driving). Still, I'll try them both for that myself....

No, my phone doesn't actually have GPS built-in, but my old Garmin hasn't really ever been the same since it got dropped in a toilet a few months ago, so I've been considering a replacement. Turns out GPS technology has made ridiculous advances in the last four years, as well. Most of the dash-mount nav systems in the stores look exactly the same, but I was also curious about getting a Bluetooth GPS receiver and using it with software on the phone, so I started nosing around for those. Imagine my surprise when I discovered this sick little bastard! It can continue to track GPS satellites while in your pocket?? Its battery lasts 9 hours?? I'm glad that, based on the two dozen or so glowing reviews of it I've read, I'm not the only one surprised by its abilities (yes, their claims are accurate) or I'd feel like I've been living under a rock.

So, at about a third the price of even a basic dash-mount GPS nav system, and with at least as many features when paired with FREE software on the phone, I'll probably be trying to get THAT a payday or two hence.

None of this means I'm giving up on writing my own apps for the phone, mind you. I've tried both the freeware "Yacht Game SP" and EA's official "Yahtzee Deluxe" and both have crappy UIs, so I might write my own Yahtzee game for it. Or something.

Now if only I could get Verizon to pay 90% of the cost of a new computer or home theater system, I'd be set!

yawn

2008-09-26T15:47:56Z

This article is for kent_allard_jr, and anyone else who's petrified by the current economic turmoil. Yeah, things are tough, and they'll remain tough for a while, but it's not going to be disastrous. So let's all knock off the sky-is-falling talk and get back to what's really important right now: Is the new Knight Rider series going to improve or what? Personally I feel like the second half of the pilot episode was already better than the first half, so hopefully that trend will continue...

REALLY random thought of the day

2008-09-24T19:12:21Z

Man...remember Deke?

Deke.

Oh, come on.

What, you need a reminder, or something? I'm talkin' 'bout Deke!

I really don't know where my brain keeps all this shit, or why it unearths it at random times.

ETA: I hope someone else remembers this. If not, it'll be worse than the Korgano reference I made a week or two ago. Right? Korgano? Anyone? Bueller? (Oh, sure, everyone gets "Bueller"...I haven't even seen it.)