"Nonnormal
data, like nonnormal people, not only are common but are sometimes more
interesting than their normal counterparts"
25/09/2008
17:42
++ A little while ago I develop some interest on stock trading and some topics in economics in general. Just as a curiosity really, I've always been curious about science and explanations to natural phenomena, but I never really understood much about economics and once I started learning a bit more about it, I found out how deeply complex it is. I was actually talking to someone I know about the economy on World of Warcraft, and basically the discussion involved him trying to tell me how much the WoW economy mimics a real economy, and me trying to express how I disagree. After thinking a bit more, I came up with a general rationale about how the WoW economy is not like a real economy.
++ In WoW the basic currency is simply called "gold", while "copper" is the actual unit of currency, the term gold is more commonly used (1 gold = 100 silver = 10000 copper). In the game, money comes mainly from killing humanoids that carry money, from selling junk you gather to NPCs for money, or from doing quests. Those are basically the ways how gold is introduced in the economy. There are also gold sinks, where the game tries to take away gold from the economy. This is done through transportation costs, mail service costs, Auction House fees and item purchases from NPCs.
++ Gold is however introduced at a much higher rate than it is removed from the economy. Also as the population increases, so does the rate in which gold is introduced. Therefore, unlike a real economy, currency is basically introduced to the game in an unlimited fashion. Of course the implications of that is the presence of high levels of inflation, which are controlled through third party addons, which are distributed to players in order to maintain a stable price on goods sold between players. That is basically what keeps inflation from skyrocketing in the game, however with recent increases in the gold injection to the economy, inflation has been getting a bit more aggressive. I believe this was intentionally done by blizzard in order to attempt to ruin gold-selling (selling in game gold to players in exchange of real currency) in the game, which is illegal. I am very interested to see what will happend to the economy of the game once the next expansion comes out. I bet items that are highly sought after will have outrageous prices at first, but hopefully this insane inlfation will stabilize a bit more depending on how easy it is to get gold after the expansion. Unlike a real economy, it is fairly easy for Blizzard to affect the economy by introducing ways of making players "destroy" currency, by spending gold in things that have no trading value. In real life, it is very difficult to make people spend money on nothing.
++ Another major difference between the game economy and a real economy is also the fact that while inflation affects goods sold between players it has no direct effect on services provided by NPCs. This would be equivalent to having inflation on groceries but not on public transportation, basically it wouldn't happen in the real world.
"Collapsy"
16/09/2008
12:16
++ After saying so many good things about Spore, I found out that there has been quite a bit of controversy over EA's decision to include a form of SecuRom DRM software in the game. For those who don't know what that is, it is basically a form of piracy prevention system which tries to prevent people from making media duplicates. In the case of Spore they also added a feature which only allows players to install the game up to three times. Not only that but SecuRom also works in some ways similarly to a malware which is very annoying. Well you can see how all this is a bit of a controversy. The thing that bothers me the most, is the fact that despite all these restrictions and ways to avoid piracy, a cracked version of spore was released online even days before the game came out. This means people that buy the game not only get it after the people downloading illegally, but also they are the ones most affected by these anti-piracy protocols. Obviously someone downloading the game will have a cracked version, which he/she can install as many times as they want without any real repercussion. People that purchased the game have only three chances to install it, and not only that, apparently they need to log onto the game once every few weeks to maintain an active account. Quite a bit of BS if you ask me. Unfortunately, it seems like this is the way EA is moving, they have already announced that forms of SecuRom will be included in pretty much every title in the near future. Just seems like a very inefficient system to me and it really bothers me when companies do something that really just punishes those that actually paid for the game.
"I
feel the need to cleanse my very eyeball after having soiled my retina
with the ghastly vision that is your form."
14/09/2008
13:57
++ I've picked up a new game this week. After almost 3 years waiting for this game, SPORE came out last Sunday. After playing the game quite a bit this week I think I have a fairly good opinion of it. I remember watching the first trailers and demos of this game in the summer of my second year in university, and honestly the graphics haven't changed at all from then to now. But the idea of making a game like this was always what made me want to play this so badly. Anyway, to start I think I need to describe what SPORE is. Basically the game is about evolving, it is one of the few unique games I've ever played. I don't know what its genre is, but I have seen this game been called a single player MMO, strategy, adventure or even "massive sandbox", I think it is a bit of all of these. The game is divided into 5 stages, starting with the collision of a piece of rock from space into a planet. From this piece of rock you start as a single celled creature. During this stage, the main goal is to survive and procreate. The options are fairly limited, where basically your little creature can either be carnivorous, eating other smaller single celled things or herbivorous, eating algae. During this stage you can even switch several times between diets in order to optimize your growth rate. It does seems like at different parts it is easier to have one diet and other parts it is easier to have the other.
++ As your creature evolves, the decision you make in terms of how you do so will effect every subsequent stage of your creature. So having your ameba be carnivorous matters even when you are building tanks and destroying cities. The second stage is the creature stage, where you finally come out of your puddle and start to walk around on land. The creature creation process is much more fun in this stage as you actually get quite a few options to make your critter the way you want it. While the cell stage is very simple, it also doesn't take very long to complete, its almost like a mini game. Actually almost all first four stages are like mini games, getting bigger and more complex as you go. The creature stage in a way is similar to the cell stage, in the sense that all you do is evolve, survive and procreate. After that you reach the tribal stage, where your creature develops a more complex brain and now you control a little group of creatures that are able to use simple tools and have relationships with other tribes around the planet. These can be good relationships or bad relationships. I loved the 2001: A space odyssey reference in the beginning of this stage, very funny. Once that's done, you reach the civilization stage, which makes the game into a RTS game. It is a very simple RTS but it has its qualities as well. I particularly enjoy making different cars, tanks, planes and boats. It's really fun to build all of these as well as the buildings in your cities. This stage can be fairly quick as well once you get the hang of it. After 2-3 campaigns I can pretty much get through all the first four stages in a matter of a few hours. During all these stages, your choices in terms of how you play them will ultimately affect what type of space civilization you are. The space stage, in my opinion is where the gameplay aspect of spore actually begins to shine. First of all, the universe in the game is incredibly big. I estimated there to be around 5 thousand star systems in total, I could be off by a lot but there are definitely more than 2 thousand stars and around 15000 planets/moons. Basically you will never see everything.
++ The first four stages are very easy and simple. They are fun due to the creation aspect of it and the fact that you can see all the stuff you created in your previous games, as well as things other players created, in your game as you play. This makes spore a game for EVERYONE. Easy but fun. However, the space stage is different, while it is not nearly as complex as other games such as X3 or any other space trade game, it is still immense in size and complex enough that in my first game I kind of got killed. I didn't really know what to do and I didn't know what most things were for. There is so much I can say about the space stage, but I'll just leave it at "It's a lot of fun, and there is a lot to do". Again, on this stage you can play using different strategies, but it is likely that you will use more than one strategy since it can make the game very difficult to master using just one plan.
++ Overall, the game was awesome, it is fresh and a very ambitious project. While it is a compilation of simplified stages, making it easy, it is still fun. Even those who get bored playing easy games, can enjoy Spore. In my opinion the game does not rely on gameplay elements to be enjoyable, it is the amount of creativity that you can express in the game that makes it a great game. It is sort of like a lego, where you build things and play with them.
"Have
you gnome insane?"
30/08/2008
01:55
++ Hey all, I've been in Barrie spending some quality time with the parents for the past week or so. My math course already ended (not as well as i'd like but hey) so I'm having some time to relax. Over here I haven't actually done much besides play some video games, watch movies and a lot of the US Open. Today I saw a match between Federer and Alves, who is a Brazilian player. Despite him being seed 130 or something, he did extremely well and made Federer really work for his points. It was actually a great game to watch. Besides that I've just picked up Football Manager 2008 and I'm experimenting with it a bit. I played FIFA Manager 08 which was quite a bit of fun. I haven't played enough of this new one to compare, but not having the live simulation does seem to make a big difference. I am hoping that the difficulty in learning the game will make up for it, afterall this is supposed to be the more popular manager type game.
++ While im here in Barrie, Carlin is with her mom up in Newfoundland. She went there to visit that province for the first time and I'm sure she will very much enjoy it. She should be back Sunday, hopefully with some good stories to tell. Well I'm going to go to bed now, I'll try to post again before school starts.
"All
will see that so dear to me was my country that I was content to die not
only in it but with it"
00/08/2008
02:09
++ I'm finally done with my summer course. It ended last wednesday with an exam, which I'm not sure I did very well on. But I guess it doesn't matter all that much, I just have to wait and see what I get in it. Overall the course was actually quite challenging, I do think taking that much material in during the course of 3 months is not a great idea really. Well outside that not much has happened. I just saw Pineaple Express with Carlin this week as well. I didn't have very high expectations for it, but it turned out to be a great movie, much better than I thought it would be. A lot of funny stuff, and it's not really just a stoner movie unlike what it may look like. I've also been downloading a few other movies, but nothing too too interesting. This past Friday I also picked out my courses for next semester, and I am probably going to be taking algebra and statistics, hopefully with such a light schedule I'll be able to get some decent grades and have some extra time to do some extra curricular stuff. Well, I'm going to go to bed now.
++ Below is a picture of the amazing graphics of Dwarf Fortress, which is that amazing game I've been talking about. This is a section of my latest fortress. Notice the high level of detail on my dwarves, if you don't know what to look for, the dwarves are the smiley faces running around.
"Swiss
disappointment "
25/07/2008
01:57
++ After so much frustration trying to get Allegro to work for me, I think I'm going to move away from it and try a completely different library, in this case SDL. Seems to be pretty equivalent, and in some cases people say it is better for beginners. Anyway, tomorrow I'm going to watch the Roger's cup right here in Toronto. Carlin was pretty upset over not getting to see either Nadal or Federer, the bastard just lost his game yesterday so he dropped from the tournament. Well, I think it's just cool that we're going to get to see some cool matches, should be a fun. Also a great way to enjoy myself after my term test today. Term test went fairly smoothly, despite me feeling so unprepared yesterday. Oh, I also just watched the "Dark Knight" this week, which was a really good movie. Probably my favorite Batman movie ever, and I especially enjoyed the Joker. I actually think the Joker was more of a main character on this movie than Batman, plus Ledger did an amazing job. I never really pay much attention to acting, but on this movie, half the reason I liked it so much was due to his ability to transform the Joker into a much more sinister version of the character. His timing is amazing, and his humor very effective despite making me feel bad for laughing half the time. Carlin also really enjoyed it, so much that we've seen it twice already. I have to say this month was particularly good with movies, both Batman and Wall-E were some of the best movies I've seen in a LOOONG time.
++ I have also lately been attempting a little harder to learn how to play Dwarf Fortress. I have mentioned it before, but I have to say this game ipresses me more every time I spend some time with it. Despite looking such primitive graphics, to the point it is funny even, I can't believe how amazingly complex it is. It is definately the steepest learning curve I've experience in a game. If you are into games, especially strategy games such as civilization, sim city or other strategy/building/simulation games, you should try this one. It is certainly not for everyone, and if you have no patience to deal with a interfaceless (not a word) game it is definately not for you. On the other hand it is an extremely rewarding game once you try hard enough to understand the mechanics of it. Once you set up your world, which I described before, you begin with a caravan full of items (which you have the option to chose) and 7 dwarfs at your disposal. Dwarfs can also be customized to have different skills. For example you can start with a few miners, a carpenter, a cook, a farmer, a leader (who has charisma among other things), which is basically what I do, or you can pick anything really from blacksmith to butcher. All this is so that you get to your new land and start building a fortress which can prosper if you play it right. Basically you dig your fortress underground, while producing food needed and other items for dwarfs to use such as beds, doors, cabinets, tables and more abstract things such as statues and many goods that you can sell. Your trades happen between your people and caravans that arrive during different times of the year. It's hard to really describe this game, even as I am writing this I am just describing a sliver of all there is to it. It's an amazing title, very challenging, which is suggested by their motto "Losing is fun". It's an indie game, and it's free at Bay12.
++ Well to finish this post, I wanted to congratulate my sister on getting a new job over in BC. Logo logo voce tambem acaba a escola.
"Little
progress at the cost of much frustration"
18/07/2008
15:09
++ Hey guys, I apologize if this particular post makes no sense to you. If you have no interest in trying to program something more complex than what you learn in high school, I would just go ahead and not continue reading this post. Basically today I have spend around 6 hours trying to figure out how to install a programming library on my computer so that I can program a little game. After going after many websites and guides full of information, I realized that this is a very frustrating task for someone with little background like me. So the main point of this post is to put together a few things I have learned so far, and try to unite a few concepts that I found were just way too confusing and scattered all over the internet. Ideally I would make a short little guide, but I'm too lazy right now. So I'm just going to post what I have learned.
++ To begin with, my problem was that I was trying to install a programming library called Allegro (Atari Low-Level Game Routines). I am currently trying to program in C++ using the newest version of Microsoft Visual Studio (aka. MSVC). In order to install this library on my Windows XP machine you first have to decide how you want to compile it to your machine. I decided to go with one of the more popular options "MinGW" (aka. mingw32), which is a native software port of the GNU compiler collection to the Microsoft Windows OS, in my case Windows XP Professional (SP2).
++ So the first step is to install MinGW and also set up a MinGW environment on your machine.I basically just downloaded the easy installation from sourceforge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/mingw/). There are options to install more compact versions, or even to manually do all this. As I'm a complete noob with all this of course I chose the easy/default way. Install the "current" MinGW package, next you need to chose which components you would like to be installed, if you dont know exactly what you need (ie. make, g++, gcc), just install the whole thing, it's not that large of a program. Chose the destination folder, to keep it all consistent just install on c:\MinGW. I am under the impression that it is not mandatory to uses MSYS in order to do what I want to do, however it does seem like a lot of people working with MinGW also install MSYS. From this point now you need to find your environment variables. I believe WinXP and Win2000 are fairly similar in how you can do that. On WinXP, you need to access your control panel -> System -> Advanced (tab) -> Environment Variables. Once you get to the environment variables box, you need to find the variable "PATH" on your system variables. Click Edit and add your new MinGW variable after whatever is already there. For example "...C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQLServer\90\Tools\binn\" is what you see, and this is what you want to add "...C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQLServer\90\Tools\binn\;C:\MinGW\bin". Basically just add the path to your MinGW\bin folder. Once that is done now you have to add a new variable MINGDIR. I am not entirely positive if you have to add to both user and system, however I did that. Anyway, add the MINGDIR variable, which should have Variable Value C:\MinGW (assuming you are using the path c:\MinGW). Once you have done all this, I would recommend rebooting your PC, just to avoid any confusions later. At this point go ahead and download/unzip Allegro for Windows/MinGW. I unzipped it to just c:\allegro to make things easier. Once that's done open up a command prompt. If you have never done that just go to "run" and type "cmd". On the prompt clear up the directories down to c:\ (you can do that by typing cd\ or 2x cd..). Now just to see if the MinGW environment is set up, type "gcc -v" and you should get a bunch of information on your screen if it's all set up correctly. The last line will read something like "gcc version 3.4.5 <mingw-vista special r3>. Now open the allegro directory (cd allegro), then type "fix.bat mingw". Once you have done that type "mingw32-make" or simply "make" if you are running an older version. Well this is the point I got so far and I'm kind of stuck with a "makefile.mgw:258: *** target pattern contains no %. Stop." error.
++ Oh my, the mistake I made was so stupid. I had a typo on my MINGDIR variable path. I corrected that and now I'm compiling allegro, finally ! Anyway, after you have successfully done "mingw32-make" type "mingw32-make install". These should only take a few minutes. Since I'm trying to use allegro with my Visual Studio 2008 I also have to change the environment variables so that it find the file vcvars32.bat which in my case is located at C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio 9.0\VC\bin. After that I ran the command prompt and typed "fix.bat msvc9", since MSVC 2008 is the 9th edition of MSVC. If you have an older version this command will be different, and so will be the \bin folder you need to set up as the environment variable.
++ Another thing I just picked up, in order to set up an environment to run MSVC 2008, you must run "c:\program files\microsoft visual studio 9.0\common7\tools\vsvars32.bat" in my case since that's where the exe is found.
"E-Vah"
16/07/2008
15:34
++ I just watched the new Disney/Pixar animated movie "Wall-E", and I have to say that was probably the best animated movie I've ever seen. It was not only very appealing visually, but it also had a very good love story as well as some pessimistic, probably unintended, views on people and the environmental situation. The movie is simply awesome, filled with great funny scenes as well, which really made me laugh a lot. Even the short movie prior to the actual movies was amazingly funny. I don't think I have laughed that hard on a movie for a good while.
"The
slaves of Armok await you"
08/07/2008
02:04
++ It's been a while since the last post, and just for continuity's sake I want to say that the CoCa concert was very very good, they put up a sweet show and some of the songs that may sound iffy on the radio make much more sense live, as they are clearly meant for a live performance. Anyway, if you haven't tried their music yet you should like it if you don't mind his voice, which I grew to actually really like. Favor House Atlantic and Blood Red Summer are so kick ass with his vocals. I think even Carlin was able to enjoy the show despite her not liking his voice all that much. For a few days now I've also developed a better appreciation for another band I've know for several years, but not until now I actually enjoy most of their songs. I'm talking about Avenged Sevenfold, they sound to me more of a traditional metal band in the way they can get very technical and his vocals are kind of like that in some ways. If you wanna give it a try I can certainly recommend "Unholy confessions" and "Chapter Four". If you pay attention to the lyrics, chapter four is about the story of Abel and Cain, and a lot of their lyrics use stories from the bible but they are not identified as a Christian band. Great music !
++ So what else is new? I went on a vacation with Carlin and her parents two weekends ago. We went to a lovely little village on the north shore of Georgian Bay. The place is called Killarney, and we stayed at a lovely little lodge and ate some amazing fish and ships among other delicious meals. We also went kayaking which was a lot of fun and quite a bit of a workout too. Hopefully I'll be able to upload some pictures at some point. I was dumb enough to not recharge my batteries so I didn't bring my camera, however, Carlin's dad did and hopefully I'll get my hands on some of those.
++ Besides that I've been trying out a few new PC games, Age of Conan is one of them, which I don't think I've mentioned earlier. It is another MMORPG, and as I've played plenty of WoW I can draw a pretty good comparison. Right now I don't see AoC taking WoW's place on the market, I know a lot of people moved from WoW to AoC but the core players won't I dont think. Warhammer is coming out soon too so WoW might lose another bunch of players to that game. I personally didn't think warhammer looked all that great but that's me. AoC has a particular improvement I really appreciate, the combat system which is much better, and keeps you paying attention at all times. No more grinding to level while making dinner :P you actually have to play this time.
++ The last game I've tried recently is Patricians 3, which is a 2003 (I think) English version of an originally German game+expansion. The game is basically a trading/economic simulation that takes place in the Hansean region. For those not familiar with the geography of this area, it basically takes place on the Baltic and North Sea, including towns from Northern Germany up to Sweden and even England to the west. This is a very strong game, and I really appreciate how each game you start is different. Basically the economy of the game grows with events and actions generated from the AI. Of course what you do matters a lot as well. It has tons of content and looks like a game you can come back and play for a good while. I recommend anyone interested in trading simulators to pick this title up. Lastly, I have another game that I'm going to try out sometime soon, it is called "Dwarf Fortress" and it seems to be the most unique games I have heard of in a long time. The concept is not all that unique, which seems to be just a city-building game, but it has no GUI, it is all using ASCII. You can see how that would be very unappealing to people, however this computer with graphics that look ancient is actually very heavy on the CPU. Apparently creating a map in this game is somewhat of a big deal. The game generates the terrain using fractals and simulating erosion and wildlife so that randomly created maps are well balanced. This process is supposed to take about 15 minutes on a current high end PC. It's crazy considering we're talking about a map that is made up of just characters. The generation of a map also involves generating different background stories for characters and this can be seen through conversations with NPCs and artwork. As you can imagine this is not a game for everyone, but it's highly peculiar fan base is very strong, and I am even under the impression that there is pressure on developers to never develop a GUI, simply to keep the "charm" of the game, if you will.