Settlers of Catan

I think game makers need to play and analyze more games.

On this path, I downloaded the iPhone version of Settlers of Catan so I could play lots of iterations without having to spend the 90+ minutes required to play in real-life (and gather 2-3 friends). If you are thinking of an iPhone game or a board game, this game is as fun as the reviews. http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13/the-settlers-of-catan

A good technical summary of the game can be found here: http://www.skotos.net/articles/TTnT_107.shtml

Much of the game is decided in the setup phase. And I think someone that has played before has an unfair advantage over guests playing for the first or 10th time. I'm working on an app to help. But I'm still working on my 10 game plays to fully understand. Lots of strategy guides exist for this game. Go read some. And play!

Pandemic and co-op gameplay

Playing around with these games:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/30549/pandemic
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/57139/infection-express

Bracket: Another $25

I posted another bracket (2009) onto Kongregate. 250+ players this time. The changes I made after last season to get the scoring data from the results xml file has made the management side of things much easier. Essentially setup requires that I have to update the teams, copy the database table, and turn it on. Then add games to the results xml with a date/time (add as you go or all at once). And then once the tournament begins, lock out new players with a switch. After each game (block of games) I update the score/winner/loser values and run a script that updates the scores.

Fixes I made this year:

• Don't accept Kongregate guests
  
• NoCache code for the results and score data
  
• show date of the game until current day - then show time. Or score if it exists
  

The next big change will be to automate the results; I imagine I can find a sports page someplace that I can get the scores/winners.

And if I run it again, I need to figure out a way to get 100x the users. That will reveal another set of bugs to fix.

I'll likely want to rewrite the client too. I no realize the value of some fancy tweens to make the app seem cool. People love effects.

And now the bad news: $5. That's the current total I made. spider solitaire is starting to bring in that much per week (with I think mostly spider traffic and not real players). The source for all of this is still out there so if you are interested, search for it.

Remembering

Test first. Automated builds. Regression tests. Load tests. Release procedures. Bug tracking. Simplest solution. No crunch... remembering.

Fuppes take 2

Well, the ipkg version of fuppes for unslung doesn't have virtual foldes (so I can put songs/artists/albums into subfolders -- say ABC,DEF,etc). And it crashes processing my images. And so, the adventure began to upgrade to the latest from SVN.

It installs and runs...but a lot of the secondary elements were not enabled. Translation, no music (m4a files) on the PS3. So I had to install another 10+ packages and figure out how to use ./configure. I think I finally have LAME and FAAD2 enabled. Rebuilding one last time.

If that does not work, I'm going to convert the files to mp3s.

And there is a crash in nanosleep. Caused by the console loop but most likely caused by running out of memory. In the meantime, I now have firefly (itunes server), ushare, mediatomb, nethack, gdb, and more installed on the little machine that could. It is empowering to be able to build your own applications. But the promise of "ipkg install fuppes" and a few configuration changes is not the case.

The downside is that it really was that easy on the Windows box.

Slug to Unslung

Trying to do this with a 2GB thumb drive. But it in the end, decided the existing drive was going to work. Backed it up for safe keeping first.

My box is slow (133MIPS) so I'll need to Turbo it soon.

Went to unslung 6.10-beta. No issues.

Installed openssh and fuppes (media server).
Installed python and perl.

PS3 Media Server

Day 2 with the PS3 was all about setting up a media server. It started with a test on my desktop before going to the planned production location: the NSLU2 NAS. But no luck tonight. Ends up my router is pre-universal plug-n-play. Had to update the firmware. Then things acted a lot better -- just not just from the laptop. I should have rebooted the wireless router but time for sleep.

Bad luck of the night besides spending two hours to discover the router firmware issue = changing the router admin password to something I no longer know. Very likely I'll have to reset to defaults and reconfigure. Writing stuff like that down is extremely useful.

This weekend, turning my SLUG into something it wasn't meant to be. unslung me baby! Very likely, fuppes is the media server of choice. SimpleServer was a great test bed because it was simple to configure under windows.

Day 1 was all about PAIN. And most of Day 2 too. I'm downloading lots of other demos which will be Day 3-N.