silverbrain fun

A short video of silverbrain in action. Exploring socialist philosophers was never this much fun.

Clicking on stuff reveals surprising connections between people and things.

Take a look.

Sounds interesting!

Hey there!

I'm Olli, one of the three founding members of Osuuskunta Hastur. I'm also one of the two designers for our coming CCG. On my own I'll be doing the sound design and music for the game.

Sami sent me a message about a month ago: "I started to write a blog about our game". I checked the first and only post and went on my merry way, happily forgetting about it until today.

As it happened, I was doing some research work for our game - which mainly means reading about and playing different CCG's - and stumbled upon a developer diary of Card Hunter. They had posts dating to July 2011 and I thought "Wow! This game has history, and I can follow that history through the thoughts of its makers. Should we have something similar?".

Then I remembered that message from Sami, came here and read six new posts by him. I realized that we've already started to build our own history and I can be part of it!

Lately I've spent quite some time researching a CCG called Legacy of Heroes. I play in Kongregate, but LoH can be also accessed through Facebook or other gaming sites like Armorgames. Kongregate and Armorgames are sites for Flash games and most Facebook games are made with Flash. Could Flash be a viable option for us too? It would probably net us more players, but as I don't know anything about programming, I don't know how much time it would take or if it's even possible. Luckily Sami knows.

Some iOS research material I'll be tackling next:
Penny Arcade The Game: Gamers vs. Evil
SolForge
DDay Dice (might be pulled)

take care,
Olli
the sound/design guy

Hap Hazardo was a miner

This week on the Dead of the Dead: more thinking and planning nice incentives to keep playing and getting your friends involved. Sometimes it's good to stop coding for a while and actually think what kind of experience are you trying to offer.

I've been grinding Left 4 Dead 2 quite a lot last week, it was on steam sale and I picked it up as my friend recommended it. Heaps of fun, got quite a few ideas for good collective interaction between many players. All that stuff is crystallizing now to see a light of day on Dedd later. It's amazing how the brain works..

I did a bit of bot coding again, our game has bots that tutor new players and bots with ai that you can play against. I've been toying with bots for years and years now, my first bots were and excercise of entities that played out the entire script of the Big Lebowski. I think I could easily win a Big Lebowski dialogue trivia competition now after seeing the text flow a gazillion times on the debugger console. Not to mention my 10+ viewings of the actual Cohen 'masterpiece'. =)

Last weeks bot I called Silverbrain. It was born out from a piece of code a few years back that tried to be the universal catalogue of Everything, also called Silverbrain. Silverbrain was based on an idea that came thru with this crazy Italian guy Alberto who had the most horrible looking website about script programming with pictures of sexy ladies and essays of medieval art, politics and all kinds of subject matter that one would not associate with programming at all. Actually I think a lot of people were totally put off by the site layout and the bizarre whirlwind of information that swirled around : A mad psychedelia of Everything.

Alberto's programming shit was really tight though, one of his articles about creating artificial neurons struck my eye and I wrote my own implementation that became Silverbrain, an information pulling, linking, endlessly recursing and browser crashing beast that threw interesting things on the screen.

Of course I just had to ditch that one and from time and time, rebuild it as Silverbrain mkII or something. This weekends iteration turned out quite nicely and I might throw it in the game as a fun little extra. Silverbrain groks many different kinds of -isms and tracks people and things that had something to do with the social and artistic movements of the past century. You want to know who was  involved with the 60's counterculture? Silverbrain 'knows'. What was the relation of French surrealist painters to autonomism and dadaists? Silverbrain produces output for you.

I think there's nothing quite like Silverbrain on the net unless Alberto has made one already and is keeping it a secret. Might even put it online as a separate entity.

Inside Silverbrains mind is like a conspiracy theorist's living room with newspaper clippings, half eaten pizza, old photographs and pieces of red string going from one point to another in an endless recursion. Too bad I've got some real life stuff to work on instead of just wasting my life building this personal Merzbau. Data can be media too, people.

Under my umbrella

If it rhymes with a Rihanna tune from like 200 years ago, it must be good.

Some time ago Parallella got their funding goal on kickstarter and that is just great news for all us FOSS people. Adaptiva is producing a open source 16 risc core computer for 99 dollars! It runs Ubuntu! Go and get one!

Parallella runs on a a9 cortex arm core with an epiphany chip for paraller processing. Unlike the current raspberryPI's and Arduinos, parallella is fully open source and that means people can actually develop display drivers and mpeg-accelerators for it. I've followed the haiku-version of raspPi quite closely and discovered how much trouble there is with the really cool and interesting things that rely on broadcom chips that have closed source drivers on linux. What this means is that all the promising cheap hardware is at the mercy of chip manufacturers to write drivers. And when such a driver is written, it's a binary blob that runs on Linux and does only the things broadcom want them to do. Thats a great loss for all the other open source os's which are not based on 1970's ideology for os design.

The parallella board reminds me of the late Atari Falcon in the way that Falcon had a DSP chip when no other piece of hardware had it. If you look at the falcon demos on youtube, you'll see they cranked out quite impressive stuff from the machine way back in 1993 where you had to hand code dsp-assembly to do basically anything.

The falcon however came in too late, the 16-bit era was dawning and people were buying big metal boxes that could churn out ega-graphics and make irritating sounds with the inbuilt beeper. At the time I gave up personal computing altogether and discovered that trying to master James Jamersons grooves on a Peavey bass was much more inspiring than staring at lego-brick graphics on a computer that cost 3 times as much as the more advanced Atari falcon. The whole thing didn't make any sense to me anymore.

So here we are at the end of 2012 and parallella is on it's way. I'd very much like to see the epiphany chip being put on a good use on open source os's. Offloading mpeg encryption/decryption to epiphany would mean we no longer have to care about broadcom specs anymore. You could do some pretty wicked real time audio / video mixing with it. Even write your universal openGL implementation to run on epiphany instead of relying on software renderers that run on arm or whatnot. Sure, it would't be the latest nvidia X but accelerated 3d on your favourite os, hey,what's not to love?

The board is here soon, please take a look and code the most mindblowing plasma or liquid projection screensaver with it. Or mine bitcoins or something. I think Adaptiva would be happy to have their chip to receive a proper trashing from us programmers. Yip!

deckbuilding

Here's a bit of history from the early stages of game development..

Building a card game does not require flash. Instead, you can begin with plain paper, a bunch of dice and a stack of bagged leftover Mythos cards. In our case, the game rules came together on one of the designers private forum, all kinds of stuff and ideas accumulated over the years and things were thought over, organized and massaged in many ways.

In the summer of 2011 all these ideas became tactile when the cards were printed out and slipped on top of the mythos cards. That version had many things that required all manner of counters like 10 penni coins from the Hastur stash. Stuff like Warhammer 40k figurine bases and some other stuff from a 4e Texas Hold-em poker kit. Makes sense as the development budget being exactly 4e plus anything we could find around the house.

Printing out the cards and playing the thing for realz was very revealing. Lots of gameplay niggles and flow problems reared their ugly heads as we tried to play and memorize the rules. It was _very_ slow.
We would stop a lot, talk and make notes of things, rework the gameplay and item prices and on the next meeting do the same again. Re-editing the cards and printing them was no fun at all, in the end most of the cards looked like rugs that are stitched together from various scraps of paper.

Testing on 'real-hardware' is very good. You can estimate how long it takes for a beginner to learn how to play, how many rounds of the game it takes to win and what cards get dropped into the discard pile no questions asked. Analyzing the discard pile is very revealing, our feeling is that if the card went straight away into the discard pile, there must be something wrong with it. Tweak the card, glue some new stuff on it and play the next iteration.

After 1.5 years of iterating and playing we are where we are now. Dead.. plays quite well and I coded the pre-alpha browser version for internal testing. Playing the game on paper cards and on the net is very different, the pacing is much faster when you do it from the ui and especially with a bot when there's only one player thats struggling to memorize the rules =)

So plan and test carefully and don't be afraid to kill your darlings if they get in the way of smooth gave flow. Easy!

cool visualisation

Nice visualisation about how haiku-os has evolved. If you're interested in nice visualisations of data please check out David McCandless' site Information Is Beautiful. Recommended!

This time it's gotta be.. concurrent

I don't know to whom will the following rant have appeal to but i'll rant on anyway.

MMO's are said the be the most complex pieces of software today. Big money is spent in programming them and the smartest boys are spending countless of hours at their cubicles, hammering away and deciding it really doesn't matter if you don't check for variable overflows.

Anything that has to do with multiple players playing the same game simultaneously is bound to get hairy to say the least. For your IOS developers you got game center to make things smoother.

When I got into programming my first multiplayer game 4 years ago, no libraries I could use existed. I had to build everything from scratch and explore myself. With multiplayer games you get all kinds of funny errors with timeouts, lags and crashes depending on the players internet connection and browser. I adapted a card game called 'tuppi' with php&javascript and after a few months got something that worked on a good day.

Nettituppi (as I called it) might still float around somewhere in a zombie state. It didn't turn into a fully playable game but many lessons were learned by trying to build one. the main lesson probably is 'expect a timeout'. The next best thing to a timeout is to expect a piece of old game data that comes in again and again and again. After that you can start dealing with corrupted / injected data packets and things. The .php file that took care of the game matching and things became a modern example of bloat and bugginess. Don't try to do it with php, kids.

A few years back I thought of rewriting tuppi with javascript and push the messaging thru XMPP. Ejabberd was easy to install but the js libraries for xmpp were just too immature. Maybe even the browsers were too immature. The debug tools most certainly were too immature. =)

So I had to drop XMPP tuppi as I ran out of time to tinker about plus the js XMPP world was just waay too frustrating. This year, things changed. The Strophe library actually worked and there were even a few examples on how to use it. Tinkering on I got the base communications class ready and my primitive bots were Doing Stuff. Brilliant, now we are saved!

There are still a few things to take into account when you communicate over XMPP but nothing too hard. Expect a lot of sitting in front of your computer debugging and trying to find out what happened. But that's the name of the game yeah.

If you, dear reader, want to try and build a js proto of a over-the-net card game, the news is that the javascript libs are there and are not too hard to learn and use. Even complete noobs can get stuff done so Get coding!