Monday, August 25th, 2008
Game developer interviews, layoff edition
- 1up interviews Flagship Founder Bill Roper to get his side of the story of Flagship Studio’s closure.
- Travis Baldree and Max Schaefer formerly of Flagship, now of Runic Games, about their new venture. Both of these interviews suggest that the old Mythos team, though reformed as Runic Games, won’t be able to continue work on their property in all likelihood.
- Scott Jennings about Tabula Rasa, the state of the mmo space and the future of multiplayer online games.
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008
The Warhammer Online system requirements where revealed some time ago and while people all over the internet call them low and reasonable, I only noticed that it won’t run on my 18 month old Macbook. I guess when they said it would run on 3 year old hardware they only meant top-of-the-line-back-then gaming hardware, not your average PC and notebook with onboard graphics. I wanted to try this game, but I’m not going to buy a new PC just for that, so their “low” system requirements already lost them a customer. Judging by this hardware rundown of your average casual gamer (via Raph Koster) W:O is severely limiting its potential customer base, which is ok I guess, as long as you’re not gunning for WoW numbers. Just skimming over these graphics card numbers makes it obvious that W:O won’t run on about 80% of the PCs out there.
Incidentally I would like to point out that in the past I ran WoW on a now 6 year old laptop - now that’s what I call low system requirements.
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
QRMidlet v1.0 released
A new version of the QRMidlet application is now available at the QR Demo site:
QRMidlet is a J2ME application for your cellphone which enables you to take photos of QR Codes and decode them. If the decoded QR Code contains a URL, it allows you to access that URL directly on your phone.
I’m very pleased with how this release turned out and it feels worthy of a 1.0 version number. Here’s the changelog:
- New QR Code decoder library: This version of the midlet now uses Open Source QR Code library v0.9 available from http://qrcode.sourceforge.jp/ (the current version as of this writing). Preliminary tests indicate that this new version of the library improves decoding reliability and accuracy.
- Improved image capturing process: The videocontrol initialization and image capturing process have been improved to support a wider range of devices. Most notably, Nokia Series 40 devices should now hopefully be compatible with this midlet, however i haven’t had a chance to test this extensively. I’m rather confident that this midlet should now work on at least some, if not all, Nokia Series 40 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 and newer devices.
- Improved midlet performance: The previous version of this midlet did several things (such as player/videocontrol initialization and the capturing/snapshot process) in inefficient ways. Changes to these parts should significantly improve overall midlet performance and responsiveness.
- Improved midlet lifecycle handling: The midlet should now behave properly when paused (e.g. by an incoming call) and later resumed.
- Improved UI: The user interface of the midlet has been streamlined and slightly improved.
- Support for sms sending: The midlet now supports URLs following the sms scheme (e.g. sms:+1234567890). If an encoded URL is a sms-URL, the QRMidlet application allows the user to create an sms message with the encoded number as the recipient directly. This feature might not be supported universally on all phones.
Saturday, July 19th, 2008
WordPress Heat Map v2.6 released
I just released v2.6 of the WordPress Heat Map plugin. This update finally adds the functionality to create a heat map of tags. For more details head over to the project page.
Making this change and putting it online drove home the point that there are no easy fixes and changes with software. Adding the tag cloud functionality took me about one minute, however setting up a test environment, propagating it with necessary meta data, testing the plugin, uploading it to the site and updating the project page took about three hours. Even though three hours might not be particularly long, this shows how even the most trivial change can spiral into a lot more work than anticipated.
Brent Simmons’ progress reports on NetNewsWire iPhone (#1, #2, #3) indicate that pretty much all my complaints about version 1.0 have already been amended (except for widescreen support I think). I’m very much looking forward to using NNW on my brand new iPhone in the future. Now if only Apple was a little faster on updating applications in their store - there’s still only version 1.0 available.
Saturday, July 12th, 2008
NNW iPhone vs. Newsgator mobile - a side-by-side comparison
I’m a huge fan of Netnewswire - it’s the only software by an indie-developer I’ve ever bought, back when it wasn’t available for free. Therefore I was thrilled when I heard that Brent Simmons, creator of Netnewswire, would bring Netnewswire to the iPhone and iPod touch.
My favorite newsreader of late hasn’t been Netnewswire, however. Instead I’ve been very pleasently surprised by Newsgator mobile for iPhone, a web-based feedreader optimized for your iPhone. Both Netnewswire iPhone and Newsgator mobile for iPhone are provided by Newsgator, and I had hoped that Netnewswire iPhone would borrow heavily from its sibling. Now that I’ve tried both I can say that they’re very similar, however that’s not necessarily as good as I had expected.
Both of them rely on the Newsgator online service for administrative tasks such as subscription management, and therefore concentrate exclusively on providing a reading interface for iPhone users. Their interfaces are relatively simple and straight-forward, following the same basic interaction model and therefore lend themselves to comparisons. So without further ado, a quick side-by-side comparison of Netnewswire iPhone (NNW, on the left) and Newsgator mobile for iPhone (NGm, on the right):
Feed list
The feed lists for both are pretty similar: a simple listing of subscribed feeds with unread count, grouped into auto-expanded, non-collapsible “folders”. The subscriptions are synced with your Newsgator account and so far, I haven’t found a way to add new subscriptions, unsubscribe or otherwise organize them in NNW or NGm. The only difference I’ve noticed between NNW and NGm is that NGm hides feeds with no unread items, while NNW keeps them in its list. I personally prefer NGm’s behavior, however that one’s entirely up to personal preference I suppose. Both show about the same number of feeds in their listing and aesthetically they’re quite similar - a tie between the two in round one.
News item list
Once you’ve selected a feed from the feed list, both apps present you with a list of news items. NNW only displays titles in this view, while NGm also shows a short excerpt, some metadata and options to mark a news item as read or add it to your clippings. Both NNW and NGm allow you to mark all news items as read. Selecting a news item in NNW shows that news item in NNW. To read more of a news item inside NGm you have to click the more link, to head straight to the website you just click the title. Once again, NGm only shows unread items while NNW keeps read items around a little longer. While NNW’s view fits more news items on the screen, NGm facilitates quick scanning and skimming a lot better thanks to its excerpts and gives you more control right in the news item list. In NNW you can do hardly anything in the news item list directly. Therefore I’d say the winner in this area is NGm.
Full news item view
NNW launches a new window/screen/pane/whatever-it’s-called for a news item upon selection. The title takes a lot of space in this view, followed by a (typically large) block of rather irrelevant metadata - not the most efficient use of screenspace I dare say. You can go straight to a news item on its original website by clicking on its title - this opens the website directly inside NNW. There’s also a button to open the news item in Safari. There are also buttons for adding a clipping and skipping straight to the next unread item.
NGm doesn’t open news items in a new, distinct view, but rather expands them directly inside the news item list. I feel this behavior further benefits scanning and skimming in NGm. The big advantage of NGm being a web-app living directly in your web-browser is that opening a news item on its webpage in Safari is seamless and instantaneous.
While NNW tries to offer a similar experience with its integrated web-browsing capabilities, it just lacks certain crucial features for browsing, such as a back button or widescreen support. I’ve never been a fan of integrated web-browsers because of their inevitably lacking features, neither on the desktop nor on a mobile, so I might be overly sensitive here. However in this particular case the lack of a simple back-button in NNW’s integrated browser makes it practically useless for me. Opening news items in Safari from within NNW on the other hand isn’t as quick and seamless as one might hope due to the multitasking limitations of the iPhone and iPod touch: only one application may run at a time, and therefore opening a webpage in Safari automatically quits NNW before launching the browser.
One feature missing in both NNW and NGm is the possibility to mark news items as unread. This is somewhat understandable in NGm, where any read news item effectively vanishes from the system. NNW on the other hand keeps read news items around and accessible for a little longer (though I haven’t found out for how long exactly) and missing the ability to mark a news item as unread seems like a bit of an oversight to me.
Because of the wasteful layout in NNW’s news item view, its lackluster integrated browser, missing widescreen support and no other differentiating features, I declare NGm the winner in this area as well.
My verdict
In their current state, Newsgator mobile remains my iPhone/iPod touch feedreader of choice for the moment. However when comparing the two I have this feeling that NGm is at its height with little room for improvement. It offers the most streamlined, bare-bones feedreading interface I can think of, which isn’t a bad thing for a mobile web-app. Netnewswire on the other hand feels like there’s ample room to grow and improve and I have little doubt that it will eventually surpass NGm in capabilities and usefulness in future versions. Once they improve the layout of the news item view and add some (rather obvious) features such as widescreen support or rudimentary subscription/feed management capabilities (even if it’s only a simple “Mark unread”-button) I’ll likely switch to NNW.
Another important difference between NNW and NGm is that NNW doesn’t rely as heavily on an active internet connection as NGm. Because NGm is a web-app, it’s only usable when you have internet access. With NNW you can just sync your feeds before heading out and keep reading them without being online. This difference might not be very important for iPhone users, but iPod touch users might find NNWs independence of online connectivity advantageous.
Overall it’s certainly a close call between the two and if you’re looking for a feedreader for your iPhone or iPod touch I’d advise you to try both and form your own opinion.
So maybe it’s time to play some Mythos while it lasts
Apparently Flagship Studios is going down, with layoffs and asian distribution partner HanbitSoft attempting to take control over Flagship’s IPs Hellgate: London and Mythos. I’ve been playing the Mythos beta a couple months back and found it quite enjoyable - i guess now would be the right time to play some more while the beta servers are still up and running.
In recent weeks Mythos made a few headlines with its proposed overworld changes, a rather drastic change in game design which adds a persistent overworld instead of randomly generated, instanced outdoor areas in order to make the game more like a typical MMORPG. Frankly, i don’t particularly like this change. In the past, only towns and quest hubs were persistent, shared meeting points for players (like in Guild Wars and Hellgate: London). Travel was quick and painless with instant travel between waypoints on a world map. Additionally, you could loot dungeon maps from monsters or purchase them from cartographers in towns. These maps gave access to randomly generated, instanced dungeons on your world map for one-time use. You could just pick up a solo-dungeon for your level range for a quick dungeon romp during lunch break or a group dungeon for you and your friends. The combination of instant overworld travel and an infinite supply of randomly generated dungeons made Mythos perfect for quick and spontaneous gaming and i’m afraid the proposed changes toward a more traditional persistent overworld put this in danger - more running, less funning. I actually meant to write a rant about these changes one of these days, but now i’ll just have to play some more Mythos while it’s still up. At least the old, non-mmog-y version is still available on the beta server with the overworld patch relegated to the test server.
Update 19 July 08: Mythos beta servers are shutting down (were shut down? damn time difference) at July 18th, 2008 at 11:59 CST.
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
Some thoughts on the Diablo 3 announcement
The big news in gaming today is of course Blizzard’s Diablo 3 announcement at WWI. You can find a very comprehensive gameplay trailer, a cinematic trailer, some screenshots and general information at the official Diablo 3 website.
My first impression after watching the gameplay trailer was that Diablo 3 stays true to the successful formula of its predecessors. At first this left me rather underwhelmed, as I had hoped for something more along the lines of an MMO, but thinking about it, it kinda makes sense for a number of reasons to stear clear of the MMO route.
First, introducing a new Blizzard MMO-type game would undoubtedly compete with its own big cash cow WoW, which obviously can’t be in the company’s best interest. Second of all, in my mind Blizzard has always taken more of an evolutionary approach towards game design. When looking at Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Starcraft and Warcraft 3 hardly anyone would deny that each of them was an enormous milestone for the whole genre of RTS games, but each of these games also built on the foundation of its predecessors. The same holds true of Diablo and Diablo 2. Judging from the past, Blizzard is one (if not the) biggest master of evolutionary refinement.
Besides, nobody knows what Blizzard has in store for their vaguely proclaimed new Battle.net features. It could be that these changes turn out to be more along the lines of a persistent, shared environment as quest and social hubs with instanced outdoor and dungeon areas, not unlike Guild Wars, Hellgate: London and Mythos, which have all been inspired by the Diablo series.
Nonetheless, after getting the impression that so far Diablo 3 rather distances itself from the MMO-genre, I couldn’t help but think of a statement made by Rob Pardo, Blizzard SVP of game design, at this years GDC just a few days ago:
But how did the firm power forward into the MMO genre? Pardo quipped: “Very naively, or else we might not have done it.”
In light of this I couldn’t help but wonder if now that they’re no longer so naive about MMO-development, they’re afraid of doing it again - which would be ironic, considering that half of the gaming industry is desperately trying to emulate Blizzard’s success in the MMO-genre. The idea is quite ridiculous of course, nevertheless it crossed my mind.
Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008
Gauging Openness with iPhone as Measure:
I’ve been trying for months now to explain the bottom-to-top nature of what an open cell platform running on an open network would look like. Thanks to Apple, I can now use the iPhone location feature, which triangulates on both cell towers and Wi-Fi access points to produce geographical coordinates, to break out the chain of physical hardware up to applications and services that could be opened up under Android or other open phones and networks.
(via boingboing, happy birthday btw)
Sunday, January 20th, 2008
I’m in the process of going through my “toread” del.icio.us bookmarks. I started with the oldest ones and after i had finished reading Some notes on the building of codezoo i found that the site described in the article is no more. Makes you wonder about the significance of the article - i mean, even if they did everything right, it didn’t make their project last a mere 3 years, no?