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EricBall

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Blog Entries posted by EricBall

  1. EricBall
    The lack of interest in creating levels for Slide Tilt Roll has put a serious black cloud over my plans to release it. Seeking some inspiration, I started watching the
    But after watching the first two I started to think - what was my first game?

    Yes, I created Skeleton / Skeleton+, but I'm talking about before that - 'way before that.

    I know I did a few games for the Color Computer back in the 80s - I distinctly remember a simple racing game. (Probably done in Basic - it used text mode graphics for easy scrolling.)

    But before that I was programming on the Apple ][ series. I remember doing a simple hi-res graphics editor (in Applesoft Basic). But I can't think of creating any games. (Played lots, of course...) I suspect it's because I didn't have an A2 at home (the CoCo was my first real home computer) - I only got to use the school A2s at lunch time. So while I had Applesoft Basic memorized, I just didn't have the time to experiment. (I created the graphic editor to clean up game screen captures.)
  2. EricBall

    Swift 3 catch 22

    By EricBall,

    Last night I told myself to stop playing Minecraft and get back to work on my iOS game. At least start to put together the level editor. Once I have something partially working I'm much more likely to spend time working on it.

    But XCode had other ideas as it had updated. So when I opened the project, it asked me (twice) whether I wanted to convert it to the current version of Swift. I said no, but then it said it wouldn't be able to compile it. That wasn't a good option either. So I made a backup of the project and told it to convert it to Swift 3.

    For the most part the change from Swift 2.2 to Swift 3 is cosmetic - more consistent method naming (like fixing stdio.h so fputs parameters are stream then string order). But I found one Catch-22.

    In my game I'm using an OpenGL fragment (pixel) shader. To pass a variable from the main program to the shader it's put in a "uniform" - a special kind of variable. Uniforms have special types to match OpenGL types, vectors in particular. The commands to create these these vector uniforms is different in Swift 3. That wouldn't be a problem except the commands aren't supported by iOS 9 for some reason. So while I'd like to use Swift 3 in case I need to make code changes in the future, I also want to support iOS 9.

    So for the moment I've gone with Swift 2.3, which XCode will compile.

    And I still haven't started coding the level editor.

  3. EricBall

    3D TV is dead

    By EricBall,

    https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/17/01/19/2218238/3d-tv-is-dead

    I don't dispute that 3D TV never took off, what I find interesting is the TV manufacturers decided to drop a feature - no matter how unused.

    What's interesting is 3D is still popular enough to make 3D films. (Although my preference is for 2D editions I saw Rogue One in 3D because there wasn't a non-3D showing on a big screen.)

    Personally my 55" LG TV is passive 3D capable - so the glasses don't require batteries. I've used it to watch 3D Blu-Rays (e.g. TRON Legacy), but in most cases it doesn't add anything to the movie. But at least I have the capability.

  4. EricBall

    Nintendo Switch musings

    By EricBall,

    Poor Nintendo, their idea for a home video game console which can also be used as a portable video game console became a portable console with removable controllers which can be plugged into the TV.

    From my perspective, Nintendo has two overwhelming challenges when creating a new console:
    1. Not understanding their historical successes.
    2. Competition

    First, I don't think anyone at Nintendo understands the reason the Wii succeeded was because it was often purchased as a fitness accessory. People got suckered into thinking Wii Sports (and later Wii Fit) would provide some kind of health benefit. As per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_Wii_video_games four of the top ten games (five if you include Wii Sports, which was a pack-in outside of Japan and South Korea) are movement games. And the number of copies sold drops of pretty quickly - only 1 in 8 Wii owners bought Super Mario Galaxy - the 8th top selling title.

    Success of the DS line has more to do with continued dominance of the GameBoy line and lack of significant competition than anything inherent to the design.

    IMHO success of a console depends upon the following:
    1. There has to be a reason for someone to buy the console in the first place - i.e. a must-have system exclusive game.
    2. Once people have purchased the console, there has to be a library of games they want to buy.
    3. There has to be enough people owning the console and buying games for publishers and developers to justify spending money to make games for the console.

    When a console is successful, #3 drives enough games for more people to buy the console and buy new games, forming a positive feedback loop. Not enough "system sellers" or a large enough library and there's no reason for people to buy the console in the first place. Similarly, if not enough people own the console or owners aren't buying new games then publishers and developers aren't going to risk the money to develop more games.

    So in order to start that positive feedback loop, a console either needs an overwhelming must-have game (e.g. Wii Sports) or a deep launch lineup. (Having more titles in the pipeline also helps maintain the initial surge.) The DS succeeded partially because it could play GBA games (which could play GameBoy games). So people could justify buying a DS (or 3DS) because it had a huge library of games when it was introduced.

    But even with a decent launch lineup the Switch would need to overcome challenge #2 - competition. And the Switch is facing more competition than almost any prior Nintendo console because it has competition on two fronts, which I'll term "high fidelity" and "low fidelity".

    The High Fidelity competition are the other home consoles - Xbox One / PS4 and gaming PCs. This is where a lot of traditional AAA games land. However, Nintendo hasn't competed in this space in years, other than a few ports of multi-platform games. So it isn't like Nintendo can call up Tim Willits at id Software and get him excited about creating an exclusive title for them based on prior success. And while there was some suggestion the Switch would be on par with the XB1/PS4, this clearly isn't the case. So there's really no hope for Nintendo to win this battle unless it can get enough people to buy the Switch on it's merits as a portable - which is where the Low Fidelity competition comes in.

    The Low Fidelity competition is with smartphones, tablets, and browser-based gaming. These competitors didn't exist when the NDS came out and they have three main advantages over a traditional portable console:
    1. Platform independence - it doesn't matter whether you have a Samsung Galaxy tables, an HTC phone, or an iOS device - you can play a giant library of games on it and what games isn't dependent upon the device you have.
    2. Everyone has one - people don't buy smartphones, tablets and computers just to play games - they have other purposes which means people can justify the cost of the device. Then once they have the device they have access to the library of games.
    3. Low cost games - Even without the "free to play" model, even the purchased premium titles are priced below all but the cheapest bargain bin games for traditional consoles. And the "free to play" model lowers the barrier to entry even farther.

    This competition is really hard to overcome as it puts a lot of economic pressure on the consumer and makes it hard to justify investing in the Switch - paying $200-300 for the console to be able to play the few top quality exclusive games at $50 a pop.

    So what's the alternative? I think Nintendo needs to focus on making great games, not on making unique hardware. They can bring that kid & family friendly gameplay to other platforms. Start with the XB1 and PS4 instead of trying to figure out the "free to play" model. Focus on great gameplay, although I'm sure the development teams will be overjoyed not to be constrained by underpowered hardware.

    Another possibility is to become a publisher. Use some of that war chest to fund development teams and bring their games to market.
  5. EricBall
    So my iOS game is coming along smartly. User created levels are now stored in an SQLite database on the device, which can then be selected from a list (complete with icon showing the level). It's actually getting to the point where I might want to make it available as an ad-hoc download.

    For testing, Apple provides three methods to get your code onto someone's device:

    1. Connect the device to your development environment and deploy directly. This is what I've been doing so far. The good thing is this method doesn't require a paid developer account. But it requires physical connectivity and the app stops working after a short time (days, weeks?) and needs to be reloaded.

    2. Ad-Hoc deployment. Requires a paid developer account and the device ID. But then the tester can download the app from a website.

    3. Testflight. This is basically a pre-release of the final app. Not suitable for beta code (which is where I'm at).

    My current problem is I set up an iCloud.com AppleID for my free developer account, but I have no idea what the password is. I've tried a couple of probable passwords without success. Unfortunately, I didn't change the password recovery email, so it's pointing to itself, and the authentication questions keep failing even though I'm fairly certain I have them right. (Maybe just the wrong case or something else stupid.)

    What I need to do is work from home one day so I can find a way to talk to a real person with the MacBook in front of me and convince them to reset the password.

    The alternative is to make another AppleID and use that instead.

  6. EricBall
    One of the features of my iOS game is a level editor, so users can create their own levels. The plan is for users to create levels then submit them to me (via email). I will then take those levels and add them to the application bundle and update the app so everyone gets to play them.

    The hard part turned out to be easy and the easy part turned out to be hard. Creating the email itself was easy - only a few lines of code. I could even easily create attachments, including the PNG of the level which my app already creates for the user created levels. The hard part turned out to be sending the level data as an attachment.

    After much fussing around with various serialization standards (e.g. JSON, XML), I decided to KISS and use a simple key value format. Originally I used key=value<eol>, but I later changed it to key<tab>value<eol> in case someone put an = into their level title. The idea is to make the attachment transparent to avoid any concerns about collecting user data. The problem with this is the user could potentially change the file before sending it to me - making it unsolvable. (The game won't let you submit a level until you've successfully completed it.) So I needed to add some kind of checksum to the file to detect and discourage changes.

    I decided to kill two birds with one program and code up a MacOS app (in Swift) which would read the file, verify the checksum, and update the SQLite database which would get included into the iOS app.

    My first attempt was to use the hashValue property built into Swift. I figured even if it wasn't a full-blown cryptographic hash, it would be "good enough". Unfortunately, it turns out the hashValue isn't a true hash of the value, but instead is just the address of the object. (Which might be good enough for some purposes, but is far from being an actual hash.) So I went looking for a real hash function and learned Apple provides a library of crypto functions (including hashes). They are C functions, but so is SQLite.

    Of course, that didn't work the first time. The function produced output, but the output didn't match - although the input looked the same. So I changed the iOS app to send a Bas64 version of the input as the checksum and had the MacOS app do the same thing. Bingo - the start of the input was the same, but it deviated along the way.

    After more debug printing, I managed to identify the problem - somewhere, somehow, the end of lines in the KVP file were being changed from LF to CR+LF and the CRs weren't being stripped out of the input to the hash. Once I modified the MacOS app to remove the extra CRs the "checksum" matched and so did the hash value.


  7. EricBall
    My iOS game has reached a major milestone - I've linked the level creator to the play level so it's now possible to create a level and play it. In theory a lot of the remaining coding should be relatively standard and therefore easier.

    Hopefully I can get my son and a few other friends / coworkers to use it to start creating levels

    First I need to update it to Swift 2.3 so I can load it onto iOS 10 devices. (This is one part of the process I dislike, there's a lot of forced obsolescence in iOS development. In order to test on the current iOS you need the current version of Xcode, which needs the current version of macOS and you need to use the current version of Swift.)

  8. EricBall
    In my game I want a level builder. Users will be able to create their own levels and send them to me for inclusion in a future release. The UI is fairly simple - a level grid in the top of the screen and the level tiles in the bottom of the screen. Select a tile then where you want it in the grid. The tiles are in a scrolling view like a photo gallery. The iOS UIKit SDk even provides an out-of-the box solution - the UICollectionView (+UICollectionViewFlowLayout). It's suppose to be easy; not quite drag & drop, but fairly close.

    The problem is the size of the tiles. An iPhone 4s is 640x960 pixels (320x480 "points") while an iPad is 768x1024 or 1536x2048 pixels (both 768x1024 "points"). So if I make the tiles 64x64 "points" the tiles end up much smaller relative to the level grid (which is resized to the screen size). There's no option in Interface Builder to make the size of the cell (which stores the tile) relative to the screen size.

    And 'cause I'm just learning, I don't 100% understand what I'm doing. So it's a lot of trial and error. Google searches have given me some info, and I think I can set the cell size for the layout, but I haven't found anything which says how to properly resize the cell contents (and my attempts so far have failed).

    I'm thinking there are two probable causes - first is execution order. The collection view does some buffering and preloading and I think that may be occurring before I'm calculating the size of the cells. Second is Interface Builder creates some implicit code in my application which might be blocking my efforts. My current focus is on the execution order to see how early I can determine the size of the cells so I can use that value elsewhere in the code.

    Or maybe I need to find some sample code for fully dynamically sized collection views and reuse that.

  9. EricBall
    Reading https://www.buzzfeed.com/johnpaczkowski/inside-iphone-7-why-apple-killed-the-headphone-jackgave me an idea. What if you combined the Apple W1 wireless chip with something like a Chu Moy pocket amplifier. So you plug your $tupidly expen$ive headphones into the pocket amp which is wirelessly connected to your phone.

    On the actual removal of the headphone jack, I think Apple is ahead of the curve. Bluetooth based headphones are becoming more common and there are definite advantages to not having a cable between the your head and where you stuff your upgraded Walkman. I suspect not having a headphone jack will be common in the next generation of smartphones.

  10. EricBall

    more Apple ][ musings

    By EricBall,

    My latest distraction is the Apple ][ disk. I'm sure some of you, like me, remember the golden age of copy protection & cracking which happened around the Apple ][. Much of that was because the A2 was largely software driven. (Another Woz brilliant lunancy cost-cutting effort like A2 graphics.)
     
    Unfortunately, because the A2 was pre-Internet, there isn't a lot of surviving detailed documentation on the web. The one piece I'm missing is a detailed description of how the bits get written onto the disc. I'm just interested in how fiendish copy protection could have been, since it was certainly possible for someone to basically create their own disk format. Sync bytes? We don't need any stinkin' sync bytes? No sectors either, just read in all 50K bits per track straight into RAM. Have your own 6 data bit to 8 disk byte translation process. Use those half and quarter tracks.
     
    Of course the problem with any of these complex non-standard disk format schemes is the game still ends up executing in RAM. So many crackers simply worked out ways to save RAM to disk and then patch the code to skip over any disk accesses. Another method was to rip the boot loader code off the disk and reverse engineer the routines.
  11. EricBall

    4K why?

    By EricBall,

    The other day I was browsing a warehouse sale which had a few 4K TVs (but no 3D, which I found interesting), and it got me to thinking about them. Not because I want one, but strictly on a why? basis.

    The local cable company is hyping their 4K TV offering, starting with local baseball and hockey games. But when I'm watching my 55" HDTV, I'm not thinking "boy, I'd pay big bucks to have more picture detail".

    Maybe if my TV filled the entire wall so HDTV looked like 320x200 VGA on a 21" monitor. But then I wonder whether compression wouldn't make the extra resolution moot.
  13. EricBall
    I saw SW VII last weekend so I could stop worrying about spoilers.

    While the Force Awakens is a great movie and a worthy and logical successor to Return of the Jedi, it is not without it's flaws.

    First is the Death Star Mark III, complete with last minute destruction (IV & VI) following an attack on the shield generator (VI), a short trench sequence (IV), and flying into the structure (VI). Even Han points this out when planning the attack; almost, but not quite, breaking the fourth wall in the process. And unlike the previous movies, this time the activation of "the Weapon" is far too coincidental. In both prior movies the Rebel Alliance is fully aware of the construction of the Death Star and it's activation is better integrated into the storyline.

    Second are the "new" characters which seem to be simply copies of previous characters. Ben / Kylo Ren is Ankin Skywalker / Darth Vader, Rey is Luke Skywalker, and Supreme Commander Snoke is Emperor Palpatine. Even BB-8 is R2-D2 carrying around the stolen plans, I mean map. The one truely new character is Finn. OTOH I also have to say Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford did an excellent job communicating the relationship between Leia and Han. Mark Hamill also looks appropriately world weary.

    Third are the abilities of the characters. Kylo Ren has force powers far beyond those shown by the Jedi during the clone wars (e.g. stopping a blaster bolt in midair, mind reading). Rey is an absolute savant with the Millenium Falcon, even though she has never been off the desert wasteland of Jakku. Then there is the underused (and over-marketed) Captain Phasma, who could be a Resistance sympathizer given how quickly she disables the shield.

    Finally, there's the abilities of the Millenium Falcon: carving the dunes of Jakku and smashing through the forests Starkiller Base with no ill effects, jumping to lightspeed from a standing start and dropping out of lightspeed deep in a planet's gravity well. Whatever happened to getting the coordinates from the navi-computer?

    (Is anyone else jazzed about Captain America: Civil War? I was disappointed by Age of Ultron, but Civil War looks more like Winter Soldier, which I enjoyed.)

  14. EricBall
    I am going to start a YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxuqdYak8Q81EUkUeSDoUVg of my 2b2t experience. My plan is to kill myself so I start back at spawn, then work out from there. Hopefully passing along a few bits of wisdom for new players and a few laughs.

    I'm bringing home a headset from work tonight to see how that works out. QuickTime does a great job of recording the actual gameplay at 4K then converting it down to 720p for YouTube.

  15. EricBall

    Apple TV 4 games - fail

    By EricBall,

    Why do I say fail? Simple: no standardized controller except for the small touchpad on the remote.

    Why not announce a standard controller app (similar to the Remote app) or declare the PS3 or PS4 controller a de-facto standard Bluetooth controller? (Although then they'd need to provide a USB input for pairing.) This would then allow developers to port games much more easily.

    Heck, with a controller app Apple could provide a way for the Apple TV game to push the controller layout down to the iDevice! You could even have multiple controllers by using multiple iDevices.


  16. EricBall
    A while ago my son asked when I was going to fix the Tempest cabinet. The fire cleanup crew removed the PC I was using to the Tempest cabinet and insurance wrote it off (although I did get the hard drive back). So the first step is to obtain a PC. MAME is still primarily a single threaded app, so I used https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.htmlto judge different processors. I figured a Core 2 Duo was probably what I wanted. I started looking at the lists of refurbished computers at local stores online and quickly realized I wanted an E7xxx or E8xxx processor rather than the E5xxx and E6xxx versions. I found a couple E8400s (3GHz) with DDR3 RAM for less than C$200. Not a bad price, but high enough for me to control my impulsiveness.

    But then I decided to check Kijiji. And someone had posted a E8400 w/ DDR3 for C$100 just an hour before. A few emails and an extended lunch hour later I now have a PC.

    The first thing I did was make an image backup (using a Linux USB boot) in case I screw things up or want to use the Office 2010 install (corporate license) he put on. And unfortunately it seems there's an issue with Windows Update. Sigh. Windows Update Repair isn't able to fix it. Maybe do a repair from the Win7 install CD, and if that doesn't work try a restore or a full reinstall.

    I did have one idea for the cabinet. Rather than use a doorbell as a power button for the PC, wire it into one of the coin slots. So you have to insert a coin to power on the PC.

  17. EricBall
    The Acer Aspire One netbook we bought after the fire has turned out to be a decent computer (especially with a RAM & SSD upgrade). It came loaded with Windows 7 Starter Edition and (bonus) MS Office Starter Edition.

    The free upgrade to Windows 10 sounded like a good idea. Not only would I get all of the ongoing security updates etc., but it wouldn't have the 2GB limit of Win7SE.

    Unfortunately, I just ran the Win10 upgrade check and learned the Intel GMA 3600 graphics adapter isn't supported. (Apparently Intel never made a 64 bit driver and is not likely to either.)
  18. EricBall
    The other day I decided I needed to set myself a goal to work on in Unity. A game project to help focus my self education.
     
    What I settled on is a Battlezone style game. (Not a port - just the basic ideas.)
     
    So one of the things I need is a tank to shoot at. Which means I need to create a model which Unity will then display. While I could download Blender (also free), that seems like overkill for something as simple as a Battlezone tank. What I wanted was something dead simple - an ASCII file format which Unity could use to create simple objects.
     
    With some Googling I learned the "OBJ file" supported by Unity was just that - a simple ASCII file format. So I sketched out my tank (which is even simpler than the supertank in Battlezone), figured out the coordinates for the vertices and mapped those to faces. All nice & neat - and I even commented stuff.
     
    And Unity refused to load it.
     
    At first I didn't even see the error message - putting it in the scene just created an empty object. But then I happened to look at the console and saw the ImportFBX error (which confused me even more as FBX is a completely different file format).
     
    I bashed my head against the keyboard trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. Was it because my OBJ file was too simple? (I didn't specify normals or a texture.) I selected different options to no avail. Was I missing something in the file which was causing Unity to misidentify it? I copied the sample file I used as a template and it failed too.
     
    Then I grabbed another OBJ file off the web and that one worked. Huh? I looked at the file closely. It didn't include normals or textures either. The basic format was the same. Then I saw it - this file didn't have comments after the vertices and faces. So I removed them from mine and Unity was happy - and so was I.
     
     
  19. EricBall

    learning Unity

    By EricBall,

    For those who've never heard of it, Unity is a cross-platform game creation system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unity_(game_engine)
    You can use it to develop games for current systems including Windows, OSX, web, IOS and Android. Free to download & use and practically free if you ever decide to sell your creations.
     
    Lurking on gamasutra, I've known about Unity for a while. But I'd never considered actually using it until they announced Unity 5 and I realized there was zero reason for me not to.
     
    First, let me say that Unity is f'ng amazing. Out of the box it does amazing 3-D graphics, lighting & collision detection. For someone used to coding close to the metal it's like going from crawling to flying.
     
    Now, there is a pretty steep learning curve starting out. While the UI is fairly intuitive, there's no "beginner mode". And there's the whole "how do I do what I wanna do"? But there are tutorial videos out there (which are also free). Unfortunately, they often are using earlier releases (so some UI differences) or show features only available out-of-the-box with the paid Pro version. (Not to say these can't be done with the Free version, but the content isn't included in the install.)
     
    Currently my hope is to actually get my 14yo son interested enough to start crawling up the learning curve himself.
     
     
  20. EricBall

    Clash of Clans

    By EricBall,

    My son managed to convince mom to install CoC on his iPhone. After watching a little bit, I put it on my HTC. It's pretty cool, although I wonder how Supercell is making any money given lack of IAP pressure and the TV advertising.
     
    IAP - in app purchases, or the way "free-to-play" games make money. In the case of CoC, $$ buys you gems which can be used to:
    Instantly complete anything which would otherwise take time to complete. (More time requires more gems.) But if you're willing to wait then there's no requirement to spend $$.
    Buy gold or elixir which can then be spent to build & upgrade stuff. But again, if you're willing to wait then your gold mines & elixir collectors can give you the same.
    Certain cosmetic items.
    Builder huts, which impacts the number of things you can build or upgrade simultaneously. Again, this is primarily a time saver as after the tutorial you have two.

    So unlike a lot of other FTP games, it is feasible to play CoC without spending any real $$. (Although #2 might be more useful as other players can steal your resources.)
     
    The basic gameplay is you collect gold and elixir to build up your defenses & your attacking army. You then use that army to attempt to raid other player's villages and steal their resources - unless their defenses defeat your army. Other players try to do the same to you. Successful raids & defenses give you trophies; unsuccessful raids & defense lose trophies. However, an unsuccessful defense also gives you a shield which prevents other players from attacking you for a period of time, unless you attack, which can then be used to replenish resources you lost.
     
    This brings up the one problem with CoC (IMHO). Who you get to attack (and who attacks you) is based on the number of trophies each player has. So a common strategy for high level players is to purposely lose raids to reduce the number of trophies they have, then to smash some poor low level player with the full power of their army to steal resources. The game does try to limit this by restricting the percentage of resources the higher level player can steal, but . . .
     
    One of the challenges is defense design. You have limited resources (weapons & walls) and layout challenges (as each building takes up space, but weapons have finite range and there are insufficient walls to surround all available buildings). Then there are various attacking tactics.
     
     
     
  22. EricBall
    Additionally, creator Markus "Notch" Persson, partner Jakob Porser and CEO Carl Manneh will also be leaving Mojang. Even before the sale Markus has tried to move away from Minecraft, but felt that selling out was they only way to continue to be himself.
     
    I do wonder how MS plans on recovering it's 2.5 billion dollar investment. (Especially since MS believes it will happen before June 2015!)
     
     
  23. EricBall
    Back in late September when Apple announced the Haswell iMacs I thought it wouldn't be long before Apple would announce a Haswell update for the Mac Mini. But in spite of much forum speculation and rumor no update has occurred. I'm done waiting, so I will probably buy an iMac in the near future.
     
    Which is funny, because when the Haswell iMacs were announced that was what I was going to do. But then a coworker pointed out the wisdom of keeping the screen & CPU separate (so the screen could be used with a different CPU) and the waiting began.
     
    Last night I discussed our options with my CFO:
    1. Continue waiting. However, there's no guarantee a new Mac Mini will be forthcoming in the near future. There's also the risk Apple will make unacceptable changes (e.g. SSD only - not good for my video editing plans). And I'm already kicking myself for how long I've already waited.
    2. Get the current Mac Mini & 27" display.
    3. Get the 27" iMac - which not only has a better CPU & GPU than the current Mac Mini but costs a little less (depending upon configuration).
     
    We concluded the better CPU / GPU is worth more to us than a separate display. And while a separate display could be used with a different CPU, we don't upgrade that often.
     
    Now I'm just trying to convince myself that I really should go big and get the i7 & 780M instead of the cheapest 27".
     
  24. EricBall

    Next project

    By EricBall,

    While working at IBM (1993-2008) I acquired several classic Model M keyboards. Unfortunately, they have PS/2 connectors which isn't supported even by many current desktops. I have bought one of the "blue cube" adapters so I can use one at work, but I'm thinking I'd rather "roll my own" - open up the keyboard and replace the 6805 based controller with something that will output USB.
     
    This has been done before by others, so I'm not breaking new ground. I even have a keyboard which is missing the SDL cable - so is ripe for modification. The question is what microcontroller to use. The popular hobbyist solution appears to be either the ATMega16 or 32. However, I also found a TI whitepaper which uses the MSP430. The advantage of the MSP430 is it should be more "according to spec" versus something which works "well enough".
     
  25. EricBall

    "free to play"

    By EricBall,

    Although I don't program games for a living, I visit gamasutra.com daily. A common topic in many articles is "free-to-play", from philosophical treatises to in-depth tutorials on how to best convince players to pay-up. Personally I think "free to play" is killing the industry (Nintendo being the current whipping boy) because it disrupts the most direct feedback loop between the creators and the players.
     
    You see, IMHO players should be paying for content, because this is what the programmers (and other artists) are creating. Subscription based games are the best example of this as part of the monthly fee can be used to fund content creation - which makes the players want to continue paying the subscription. Sequels are a more drawn out form of the same thing. If enough people bought the first game, then a sequel gets made for people to spend more money on.
     
    But FTP doesn't work like that. It uses "free" to entice as many people as possible to play the game. But then it turns around and tries to find ways to get players to pay as much money as possible. But the players don't want to pay - they are in the "why pay when you can have it for free" mindset.
     
    Furthermore, because the players often aren't paying for content, the creator's effort goes into finding ways to improve & optimize squeezing money out of players. And in some cases all players (whether they are paying or not) are costing the creators money in server rentals & bandwidth.
     
    Meanwhile, traditional payment games and companies (e.g. Nintendo) are suffering because buyers have access to large amounts of free content.
     
     
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