Blrg

As you may know, I have Steam. These days a lot of the games I own I've either purchased through Steam, or redeemed through Steam (e.g. buying an indie bundle and adding it on Steam) - sometimes I forget how I even got games, which happens sometimes with the indie bundles or Steam package sales. One such game that I've had sitting around for a while is a game called The Scourge Project - developed by Tragnarion Studios and published by Bit Box S.L.

Now and then I play co-op games with a friend of mine, and recently we'd been looking for some to play since we thought we had completed our last set of games. Rather than try to find new games, however, I decided it was time to trawl through the Steam games I already had and categorize them - with one specific category being one I'd mention to my friend to look into and decide if he was interested in; One of the games was The Scourge Project. It hasn't had good reviews, so I'm not entirely certain why he picked that one in particular, but then we've enjoyed some games that didn't get good reviews so we're well aware that reviews are not end-all be-all articles.

Sadly, in this case, they turned out to be an accurate warning - while there's a fair amount of detail to the game, it is incomplete in a number of ways:

1. The most galling is it has some severe and easily reproducible bugs:
   1. Hosting and joining seems to be partly broken. For one, we couldn't switch from LAN games to Internet games - the option was there but it didn't seem to take effect. When trying to join a LAN game, the game insists that "The character filter does not apply to LAN games" and is locked to the first character, Stonewall. However, this is false: Whenever I created a game and picked any other character, my friend could not see my game. Thus, I resigned to creating the game by picking stonewall, then .. switching to another character. I don't understand why it is necessary to pick a character first when players can freely switch in the game lobby! I played as Mass, and he could play as Stonewall - not a game breaking bug if you figure it out, but otherwise odd and a sign of bad design.
   2. At least in multiplayer, when a partner is revived there's a chance they are revived in a "half dead" state: They're alive in the sense they can revive downed party members, can activate switches and the like, and are fired at by enemies... but they're still dead in the sense that they cannot attack (shooting or mélée) and cannot use any abilities - they're basically walking decoys. If such a half-dead party member uses a mounted gun, they might as well stay with it - the moment they let go, they collapse as though downed, but cannot be revived. They can resume use of the gun, however. Go figure. This bug patches itself when a cutscene occurs (and some other event I didn't bother tracing - maybe on pause?), so it isn't entirely game breaking - but enough to be quite frustrating.
   3. One particular mission - I don't remember a name or anything, other than having to extract DNA from an already dead scientist - has a game breaking bug that broke the camel's back for us - the door doesn't open. Well, it opens visually, but physically it still bars access.. which had not only us confused, but the bots as well: They would attempt to walk through for a moment, realize it wasn't working for some reason and back off, wait a moment, then try again. Clearly, something broke there.
2. Repetition. Most of the game is a plethora of "shoot these guys, hack this console, open this door - oh wait you need to pretend to be some other guy, kill said guy and extract DNA, open door, rinse, repeat". There's a few bits that were a bit different and were kind of refreshing, but even then they were a bit lacking - the bomber, for example, always seemed to hit the exact same area the exact same way at each pass. While I understand it would have made the game frustrating if it were to hit the player trying to use the mounted gun, you could at least make the rest of the party squirm in fear while they pressure said player to figure out how to destroy the bomber. ;)
3. Another issue demonstrated some bad game design: In an earlier mission, one of the objectives was to activate some emergency exit of some sort. If you listened carefully to the computer voice (which is hard to hear, particularly when you are being shot at), I believe it states something to the effect of having to remain near the console while the emergency exit is being opened. However, if you don't notice or understand this, you'll (understandably) charge towards where you saw said exit and try to leave... only to find the objective is marked as failed for some reason, and you have to retry the procedure. There is no other hint that you are required to remain in the central area where the panel to activate the exit is.

So why do I think it could have been good? Well, for one, we didn't find it too unenjoyable despite the flaws above; Overall it worked decently and had features - like cover-based firing - that didn't get in the way and were relatively well executed. Another reason is that I've noticed a number of neat features that other games don't seem to have, which would have given it an upper hand if only the game had been properly completed:

1. You can pause. No, seriously - you're playing a LAN game, the pizza (let's say) arrives, bam - you hit pause, the game freezes for everyone and you don't have to worry about silly things like the master server booting you off for inactivity in a LAN game (I'm looking at you, Valve). It seems there's no sort of indication that the game is paused, but as long as the game host makes it fairly clear they're about to pause the game, it's not exactly a big issue. I don't see it being quite as useful in over-the-'net games, but it's still a decent and rare feature.
2. Resume from any checkpoint, any time - if your character got there. Simple enough: Host creates a game, picks not only the mission but the checkpoint as well. Resume your game almost right where you left off, no save necessary. The only downside was that, well, since there's no save (which seems to be a recent craze) you may not have the weapon load-out you had before.. The fact that your characters are tracked is kind of neat, and while I understand it may be irritating to some people (and in some cases), it makes you have to play rather than just skip through and see the ending... I guess.
3. While it was unrefined and the bots weren't exactly obedient, there was a nice ability to give the bots orders - without fiddling with some vague voice command menu. Point, hit the key, bot goes off on its way - context sensitive (i.e., you aren't necessarily saying "move here" - point at a console, and you're saying "go use this", for example). One bug I noticed was that the selection, being either sequential or random, included players - whom of course didn't have to obey and usually didn't have to be ordered this way. It would work better if either I still had to pick someone, or players weren't included since there are better ways to give orders.

So, it could have been good... but as it is, it kind of deserves to be at the lowered price point it is at now - if not lower. Oh, and I forgot to mention - playing it now means we've played it after the company had released a few patches and no more updates were coming out... I don't want to think of how much worse it could have been beforehand.

So this is hardly news at this point, but I figured I'd comment on it now that things have progressed a little and I've exported my projects.

For those of you who don't know AppInventor: It is a web application created by Google to facilitate the creation of Android apps. The premise was that you wouldn't need to know how to code: It was a drag-and-drop creation environment, and sadly it didn't get terribly far.

It's not that it was terrible, mind you, it's just that.. well, there weren't many employees behind the creation of this tool and it wasn't open source, so development and bug fixing was slow, and there were two glaring flaws: Apps that were created were large (one of mine, which was essentially a predefined phone book, was 1.3MB), and these apps could not be uploaded to the Market: they weren't actual apps yet (they do not "compile" to bytecode) and required a helper to run.

I'm sure this can be fixed and AI can become a great tool, but I believe the main issue is one that has been a thorn in Google side for a while now: They're spread too thin and are trying to do too many things at once. Google may have the money for it, but they don't have the manpower. Thankfully, they seemed to have realized this and have not only open-sourced the code instead (or will) and have funded a new MIT Centre for Mobile Learning; This, to me, is a great idea as it gives Google a certain amount of control while not requiring them to directly manage it.

(Oh, and it being open source means others can contribute, but I don't see too much of that happening soon. Call me sceptic but those who can develop will probably not notice the tool at all and be directly trying to create their own apps. Then again, beginners could still be stuck in that middle zone, and perhaps advanced developers will still see it as a useful RAD tool ... if and once you can create actual source with it, I'd imagine!)

tl;dr: Remove "Indicator applets" from your panel.

I've been using Ubuntu on my netbook for a while. With things getting crazy with recent versions of Ubuntu and GNOME, however, I find myself not wanting to stay with Canonical's Unity and rather keep a classic desktop-like interface to my netbook.

The easiest way to do this, I figured, was to simply use another version of Ubuntu. KUbuntu was already out; I'd tried a live CD of it on another system and it didn't seem ready to me, nor did I like the direction they were going. It's not that it's bad, it's just not my style. Okay, so that leaves a few other editions to try out, like XUbuntu and LUbuntu.

Since I was already familiar with XFCE (XUbuntu), I decided to try out LXDE (LUbuntu) first to see if I'd like it. It's pretty nice, but at some point I noticed something was off - I don't know if it was always like this and I hadn't noticed, or it happened after an update - and that is that my menubars were gone!

Continue reading "LUbuntu and the case of the disappearing menubars"

I recently ran into an obscure issue with PHP's preg functions:
Exception: preg_match(): Compilation failed: unknown option bit(s) set at offset 0
This error message would show up whenever a PCRE function was used with the u (unicode/UTF-8) flag set. This is apparently triggered by using a new version of PHP (>5.3?) and an old version of libpcre (<8.1?).

Continue reading "Gentoo, PCRE, and PHP"

So I've gotten myself a Nexus One, an Android-powered cell phone, hoping to have a good platform to test Android apps on (Only to learn that months ago, Google was giving away phones to developers).

Anyway, so far it's been great. The only gripes I have is that the touchscreen seems to be a little off and the wifi has issues remaining connected now (it used to work fine), but the Wifi Fixer app works as a work-around for the latter.

Furthermore, I've gotten the phone connected to WIND Mobile, and so far my experience with WIND has been OK. Even ignoring the issues getting started (the people signing me up were kinda new, so I forgive them), every now and then I seem to drop out of their towers' reach and be considered roaming! Also, in some situations where other providers would manage to get *some* signal, I get none at all - but I shouldn't be too surprised, I guess. These situations are the usual suspects - elevators, bus network basements, etc..

On the bright side, though, the cost is fairly small (~30$ for voice+voicemail+data) and I have unlimited texts for a year.