chanson

PWNED.

Or do other people read "pownce" as "pwns" too?

Ever since the HD-DVD peripheral came out, I've been predicting that an updated Xbox 360 would be following soon after, one that fully embraced HD.

Unfortunately, the Xbox 360 Elite isn't it. Oh, sure, it has a ton more storage than its predecessor, and sure it has an HDMI output, but it doesn't include HD-DVD!

I'm sure the reason for that was to keep the cost under $500, but really, I was hoping to get an Xbox 360 HD and a PlayStation 3 so I could have not just both game systems, but also be able to watch movies in both major HD disc formats. Especially since, as awkward as the Xbox 360 unit is to fit into a home theater, it's still not nearly as awkward as the Xbox 360 HD DVD Player.

Seriously, Microsoft — Apple can get away with an innovative form factor for the AppleTV, and Nintendo can get away with an innovative form factor for the Wii; you can't. Make something that physically fits into a home theater and I bet more people will want it. Even given everything Sony got wrong with the PlayStation 3 launch, at least they sort of got that right.

Now that I have this great HDTV, and an HD DVR from Comcast, and a great audio system, a whole bunch of great stuff has been coming out that makes me want to upgrade.

In particular, my receiver only has two component inputs and one component output. No HDMI at all. In the meantime, all of the new stuff I want to get except the Wii — such as an Xbox 360 Elite, a PlayStation 3, and of course an AppleTV — has HDMI output. Even worse, there doesn't seem to be a high-end receiver on the market that has more than three HDMI inputs! I've also run out of optical and coax digital audio inputs on my receiver, though in theory audio can also be sent over HDMI.

There may be a workaround though, at least for video. Octava has some relatively inexpensive multi-port HDMI switches that even support infrared remote control. I may be able to use one of those with all of the HDMI gear to route the video signals straight to my TV, and come up with some other solution for surround audio...

I'm not sure when it happened, but OpenCroquet.org is now a fancy MediaWiki for the Croquet Consortium.

In case you haven't seen it, Croquet is a bit like Second Life, but instead of being a client that connects to a server, it's a node that can talk to other nodes and that provides an immersive 3D environment for building Interesting Stuff. The difference is that, unlike Second Life, it's tools for building Interesting Stuff aren't stone knives and bearskins primitive. Why? Because it's built on top of Squeak Smalltalk!

Don't worry, though — it's plenty fast, too, though certainly rougher around the edges at the moment than Second Life. The Croquet environment leverages native platform technologies for things like 3D and audio, and Squeak Smalltalk is also getting some extensive performance work done lately — check out the Exupery dynamic optimizing compiler for an example of the kind of work Croquet will be able to leverage.

Really, Croquet seems likely to be the first step in bringing about some of the good parts of Snow Crash like the distributed, immersive Metaverse. After all, we're already well along in bringing about the bad parts of Snow Crash — see the classic essay Grim Meathook Future by Joshua Ellis for some details.

Reading through the current Croquet FAQ, one thing Croquet definitely needs soon is NAT traversal. Otherwise, how are people going to be able to collaborate on improving Croquet from their home wireless networks? I bet someone who knows their way around the common traversal protocols could put together some classes for handling it fairly easily...

It's a PlayStation 3 SIXAXIS™ Wireless Controller! Why did I get it, when I don't have a PlayStation 3 yet?

For the most part, to see if it was a conforming Human Interface Device that I could use with, say, a Mac. And sure enough it is! At least when connected via USB. I can't see it at all over Bluetooth. According to the PS3 online manual, the controller pairs over USB, presumably so it doesn't require manual pairing via Bluetooth. (This makes sense, as the controller has interrupt-driven input and output endpoints in addition to its HID page.)

Unfortunately I haven't yet been able to see any state changes from the device using any of the USB developer tools included in Mac OS X or any of the HID sample code. I guess I'll need to write my own code to see what's going on. Maybe it needs to be paired first...

Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works [via Raph Koster, Library of Congress likes retro games]:

1. Audiovisual works included in the educational library of a college or university’s film or media studies department, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of making compilations of portions of those works for educational use in the classroom by media studies or film professors.


2. Computer programs and video games distributed in formats that have become obsolete and that require the original media or hardware as a condition of access, when circumvention is accomplished for the purpose of preservation or archival reproduction of published digital works by a library or archive. A format shall be considered obsolete if the machine or system necessary to render perceptible a work stored in that format is no longer manufactured or is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.


3. Computer programs protected by dongles that prevent access due to malfunction or damage and which are obsolete. A dongle shall be considered obsolete if it is no longer manufactured or if a replacement or repair is no longer reasonably available in the commercial marketplace.


4. Literary works distributed in ebook format when all existing ebook editions of the work (including digital text editions made available by authorized entities) contain access controls that prevent the enabling either of the book’s read-aloud function or of screen readers that render the text into a specialized format.


5. Computer programs in the form of firmware that enable wireless telephone handsets to connect to a wireless telephone communication network, when circumvention is accomplished for the sole purpose of lawfully connecting to a wireless telephone communication network.


6. Sound recordings, and audiovisual works associated with those sound recordings, distributed in compact disc format and protected by technological protection measures that control access to lawfully purchased works and create or exploit security flaws or vulnerabilities that compromise the security of personal computers, when circumvention is accomplished solely for the purpose of good faith testing, investigating, or correcting such security flaws or vulnerabilities.

These exemptions go into effect next Monday, November 27, 2006.

For a long time, I've resisted putting in any sort of "fan name" in convention badges. I'll just put in Chris, or leave the line on the registration form blank so my first name is used. I've also assiduously avoided using any sort of nicks other than my initials or name in chat systems. The one primary exception has been on Yahoo! chat, where I created a semi-anonymous handle to use in the Chicago-area chat rooms. About the only place where I've used various handles has been in online gaming.

I've realized, though that I do have a succinct, single-word name that I've gone by off and on that can use as a fan name at cons, as a nick on IRC, and as a handle in gaming. Unfortunately, someone has already made it well-known: Eschaton.

A lot of people now know the term eschaton — the theological "end of the divine plan," i.e. the "end of the world" — as the name of a blog by some guy calling himself Atrios. I don't actually read Atrios' blog. I know the term from The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert A. Wilson and Robert Shea, which I read in the early 1990s. In fact, I even used it as a handle in Quake 3 Arena and Unreal Tournament back in 1999-2000.

So I was using it a little bit before Atrios used it as the title of his blog, and shouldn't be that uncomfortable using it. But most people probably think Eschaton is written by someone going by "Eschaton," not someone going by "Atrios." If I use it now, I'm basically screwed: People will either think I'm someone else, or they'll think I'm being totally derivative.

I suppose could use Eschatologist but that can be a bit of a mouthful at cons and when gaming and such.

What to do, what to do... Naming is a hard thing. If I do want to pick a distinct name to go by at cons, and online in games and IRC and so on, I should probably try to be as unique as I can. On the other hand, it's really freaking hard to come up with a good name; a good name is really something that sneaks up on you rather than something you set out to create, and Eschaton did sneak up on me...

Tea Leaves, The Design of Everyday Games

I've been playing a lot of Advance Wars lately. It is a perfect little gem of a game, and I'd like to use it to make some points about good game design.

Good game design increase richness, but eliminates complexity. Good game design emphasizes content over form. And, all things being equal, good game design favors mainstream technology over the cutting edge.

Read this. Peter's advice isn't just for game designers — everyone designing software can benefit from it.

Noel Llopis (Games from Within) and Sean Houghton, Backwards Is Forward: Making Better Games with Test-Driven Development:

One of the questions we had when we jumped into TDD is whether it was going to hold for high-level code. We had seen in practice from previous projects that we can certainly do TDD to create low-level and intermediate-level libraries (math, collision, messaging, etc). But would it really work for high-level code that would build on low-level code?

The answer is an unconditional yes. We have developed a full codebase doing TDD from the start, and we had no difficulty writing high-level code with TDD. Things like character state machines, game flow, or specific game entities were done through TDD without any problems, and greatly benefited from the TDD approach.

Noel's blog is great, and this paper is being presented at the 2006 Game Developers Conference.

Noel and High Moon Studios have been a lot of pioneering work using Extreme Programming in the game development space. Game development can definitely make good use of Extreme Programming to manage the development process, dramatically improve the quality of code, and do wonders for scheduling accuracy and schedule predictability.

Extreme Programming in game development also presents special challenges due to the exploratory nature of a lot of the work, as well as the highly-interactive nature of the software itself. As Noel points out, you wind up writing much more finely-factored code when doing TDD, which will be alien to a lot of game developers but will help greatly with maintenance, debugging, and the ever-more-important portability. (Not just between Windows and Mac OS X, but also between Xbox and PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube and Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Revolution...)

When I read about this Social Puppet technology on Slashdot, my first thought was "Wow, that would be really useful in a dating sim!"

And in fact, I think it really would be useful for learning the social behavior around flirtation and attraction. Particularly for people like me who have more than a bit of difficulty interpreting some aspects of it, and who have an extremely hard time practicing it in the real world.

At least learning to recognize and respond appropriately to signs of interest compared to signs of friendliness would be a huge step forward...

Jim Roepcke, wsj warns xbox live is too risky for msft?:

At the end of the day, I doubt Michael Pachter plays games, or if he does, he hasn't made new friends on Xbox Live. I, on the other hand, think the social aspect is just as important, if not more important, than the escapism of playing the games.

Jim's right on target here. Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Morgan Securities, is dissing Microsoft's strategy with Xbox Live due to his belief that games are mainly escapist, and that online gaming and its social aspects just aren't very important.

I've made some friends playing online games myself, though mainly through introductions while playing with friends and their friends. But the cooperative aspect of large-scale multiplayer games can't be understated. When you have a solid group working together towards a common goal, the experience transcends anything the hardware or the software can deliver.

Just check out Tycho's latest news post on Penny Arcade about an experience he had playing Battlefield 2 for an example:

Now, when you're in an artillery zone, there's a huge icon like a headstone on the map - a powerful image that means death, death, death in any language. Death undiluted, black robe, sharp scythe. But you're busy, you know? You're doing stuff. That commander gave us the heads up, something he didn't have to do, and with it earned our absolute trust - we spent the rest of our time on that server making sure that our squad was first on the scene. That's a conflux of game and social mechanics you will see described in no manual.

Experiences like the above are why I play online multiplayer games. Whether it's a great capture in Halo (like the time a few months ago I apparently used the Force to just will myself out of the enemy base, in front of their entire team) or badgering a couple dozen other people into using some strategy and tactics for a change in Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, working together is much more of a high than simple escapism.

By the way, if you see Eschaton online in a first-person shooter, it could be me.

With the release of the Xbox 360, Microsoft has provided yet another good and easily-visible illustration of the power of abstraction in software development.

What am I talking about? This:

Xbox.com: Will there be any benefits to playing original Xbox games on my Xbox 360 console?

Todd: Absolutely. One of the great things about gaming on Xbox 360 is the satisfaction of knowing that every game will be playable in high definition. We are now proud to reveal that this extends to the original Xbox games as well. Every [compatible] original Xbox game will be upscaled to 720p and 1080i, and will take advantage of Xbox 360’s anti-aliasing capabilities, delivering a picture that is clearer and crisper than anything available on Xbox.

In other words, the Xbox 360 includes an emulator. The interview goes on to describe that both the CPU and GPU hardware from the original Xbox is emulated.

If that was all there was to it, I wouldn't bother posting this. CPU emulation and virtual machines are incredibly common. However, I think there's more to the story. I think that, since Xbox games are built to a DirectX-like API, that the API itself isn't emulated on the Xbox 360. In other words, everything that actually matters is still running natively on the 360, which means that instead of getting perfectly-accurate emulation, the emulated software gets new and better capabilities — such as the ability to run at higher resolutions and look better.

This is identical in scope to what Apple did with the release of the original PowerMac in 1994. A 68000 emulator was included so old software could be run, but the old hardware and old operating system weren't emulated. (More on that in a minute.) Instead, 68000-based software wound up calling the native operating system, meaning that things which were fast on PowerPC wound up fast for emulated applications as well.

In fact, plenty of the old operating system was actually run via the emulator as well. 68000 code could transparently call PowerPC code and vice versa using the Mixed Mode Manager, so things that didn't need to be rewritten for the PowerPC were kept as 68000 code. (And obviously this mix changed over the years as well.)

What's my point? My point is that if you're developing software and you have the choice of either writing to an abstraction layer or coupling your code to a lower-level subsystem, over the long term you'll be better off going with the abstraction layer. This is true even if you have to write the abstraction layer yourself.

Last night, I went out and got a new toy: The redesigned PlayStation 2. It's been 7 years since I bought a dedicated video game system, and I know I'm more than a bit behind the curve in buying a PlayStation now, but I have to say that it's pretty damn nice.

And it's tiny! It's the size of a hardcover business book. (Which, if you don't read them, are generally about one half to one third the thickness of, say, a harcover Neal Stephenson novel.)

I picked up two games with it: The game I bought it to play, Robotech: Battlecry, and the game that made me decide to take the plunge, Robotech: Invasion. Both are pretty good, but Robotech: Battlecry is the better. Veritechs! Cel shading! Lisa Hayes! I just wish it had real network play. Full-on cel-shaded Macross-style dogfights with communicating teammates — could it get any better?

I'll try to post reviews of those at some point. I'm also planning on picking up the Grand Theft Auto games, Katamari Damacy, DDR Extreme, and of course Ico.

Oh, and maybe I'll try some of that Final Fantasy crack at some point. But not the online version — thankfully, I won't be able to play that since the new PS2 doesn't have room for an internal hard drive.

The Curragh Pub
Thursday, April 8, 2004
8:00 PM or later

You are hereby ordered to report to the above-named location in Schaumburg, IL for hanging out and drinking and having a good time.

What's the occasion? I'm leaving Chicago! No, I'm not saying why. But this is my last week in town, so come out and celebrate six good years with me over drinks.

Maybe if we're in the mood, we'll also go to Gameworks!

This friday, October 17, is my birthday. Woot!

I'm planning a get-together. If you want to join us, reply to this post on LiveJournal. (If you have no LJ account, just reply anonymously and include your name or something that'll let me know who you are.) Or just go ahead and email me, whatever. I just need to know how many people to expect so I can let the restaurant know ahead of time.

Here's my initial plan. Let's meet at The Curragh in Schaumburg for dinner and drinks between 7:30 and 8:00. Then, we can go see Kill Bill at Loews in Streets of Woodfield. Then if we want we can go to Gameworks next door for gaming and more drinks.

Please, no gifts. I really mean it, I have no room for anything. All I want is company and someone else to drive me around for the night. After all, I'm going to be drinking, it's my damn birthday!

So if you can make it, reply. If you have other ideas, reply. I'm flexible. I just want to have fun and see a whole bunch of my friends!

No running yet for me! My apartment complex needed to remodel their fitness center, and install all new electrical equipment so they could run treadmills without tripping a circuit breaker. They said it would reopen on the 23rd, but it's been pushed back to Monday (the 27th). And they're having their "grand opening" from 4-7PM that day, which means I won't be able to actually start running again until Tuesday.

Ah well. At least I'll always have DDR thanks to my soft pad, PlayStation and Konamix!

Oh yeah, anyone have any recommendations for a good PlayStation to USB adaptor? I'd like to try hooking my pad up to my Mac for something. But I need an adaptor that reports the arrows as a proper DPAD or as buttons rather than as an analog stick; I've heard some of the PlayStation to USB adaptors do that.

So, I got up late today. Like, really late. Like, 3PM late. Around 6, I had just put in some laundry, and I launched Adium. I started talking with asperityq a little bit, and then renaki logged in. We started talking, so dcardani logged in too and the four of us started a fun chat.

The three of us in Illinois decided to go out for dinner. (Actually, I was just going to go for a drink and dessert since I had just eaten breakfast.) We tried to go to Timpano, an Italian steakhouse by Woodfield, but they were all dark and closed. That was a bummer since the last time we went it was really good and not at all unreasonable.

So we wound up Pizzeria Uno just a couple restaurants over. It was just a short wait for our table, and on the way there, who did we run into but jgs and rsbdeadman! I and then Darrin went over to their table and chatted a bit, and then we left them to eat their dinner and order ours. I wound up getting a large Cæsar salad (with anchovies!) and a big glass of Bass, since I figured that was going to be my second and final meal of the day. We also got an order of Tuscany bread as an appetizer.

I decided to practice a little of what chrismaverick and Halley have been preaching, and when our waitress Beth presented the opportunity by mildly insulting me I took the chance to flirt. When I had asked for anchovies she made a comment about "hairy cat tongues." I didn't think anything of it, but then she came over and apologized and we laughed. I think she had a ring, but hey, it was still plenty fun to flirt!

After their dinner was over and ours mostly over, Jen & Rob came over and sat with us. Once we were done and all the leftovers were packaged up, we decided to all go across the street to Borders for coffee. Lots of fun was had! Jen & Rob are right, we all absolutely need to get out together more often.

So once we said our goodbyes and Borders was closing up and I was on my way home, I had a sudden realization: It was only 11PM, and Gameworks would be open another two or three hours! So I turned around and went over there, intending only to play a couple games of DDR and head home. Instead, I played a ton and had a whole lot more fun!

Again, I put into practice what chrismaverick and Halley preach, and things went really well. I met several very nice women just by hanging out near the DDR machines and chatting with them, a couple while they watched amazed as other people played and a couple as we played together. I've discovered I'm good enough to impress people who haven't played much yet, but I'm not so good that I'm intimidating - which puts me in a perfect spot to ask people if they'd like to play a game and teach them.

Overall, confidence, a cheerful smile, and some vigorous physical activity that we all could laugh at carried the night. It was a great, great evening!

PS - jgs, rsbdeadman, and renaki really need to write in their journals more often. Even if they friend-lock what they write! Write! :)

If I'm going to celebrate a winter holiday, I figure I should pick an astronomical event.

For my winter solstice present to myself, I treated myself to a night of DDR at Gameworks in Schaumburg. I played almost continuously — only taking breaks when others wanted to play — for three hours. I have blisters on my feet now, and there are arrows continuously scrolling in front of my vision.

But! I can do pretty well on DDR USA in Easy! And I can even do OK on DDR Max 2 7th Mix in Light! I can even make it all the way through Living in America and Candy Heart!

I think I have a new Thursday night hangout now. I was asked a couple times tonight by women if they could join in while I was playing (possible on DDR USA, not possible on the other machine). So I think I'm going to start spending Thursday nights at Gameworks in Schaumburg. I'll be there after 9 PM (when it's 21 & up), and Thursday night is ladies' night (women play free until midnight) so there will be many cool women there playing.

I wish I could afford a PlayStation 2 and a nice metal dance pad now. Who cares about either of the Grand Theft Auto games or Robotech: Battlecry — I need my DDR!

Robotech (PS2/Xbox/GCN) at E3 2002

I want.