Nakor’s Rucksack

Fred's Capital

Starting capital for Fred of the Germans (which I appropriated for my own use).

I recently bought Left 4 Dead of off Steam.

Read more »

I finally finished my latest civ4 game.

Read more »

Just to give you an idea of how cold it’s been here the past couple of days.

Ice stalactite forming from steam freezing

Yet another 3rd person shooter with deformable terrain. The “hook” with this game seems to be that deforming the terrain is actually required to keep moving forward; an entry way will be partially buried, a ledge too high, or something of the sort. This aspect was kind of neat, except that, at least in the demo, the game holds your hand and tells you where to dig or build up. It’s possible that this level was meant as a tutorial, though, so it may not actually be a flaw.

No, the real flaw is with the AI. At one point in the demo, you are required to hold a position with a few squad mates for a certain amount of time against waves and waves of bad guys. Okay, first of all, I hate these kinds of setups; they’re trite, and usually there is some “trick” to surviving. This time, the trick is a new weapon they’re introducing to you that, if the controls for it didn’t suck, would probably waste waves and waves of these guys. I, however, was less than successful in using it, and a few enemies entered our cover area. My squad mates were utterly incapable of dealing with this threat. Here are two or three enemies, firing at me and them at point blank range, and my team does nothing but shoot and miss. One squad mate seemed utterly ignorant of the fact that he was being shot in the back. I decided that Fracture was not the game for me.

Note to developers: We’ve had good team AI available since Unreal Tournament, way back in 1999. Look it up.

I have written a small python script to selectively backup critical work files to a network drive. To reduce disk speed and backup times, I exclude many superfluous files based on their extension, including .svn directories. Recently, I discovered that the excellent 7-zip program now only reads UTF-8 text as an input list file. This causes as problem as text in Windows is by default encoded as CP1252. Fortunately, python can parse CP1252 into Unicode and generate UTF-8. Here is a small Python snippet to convert CP1252 to UTF-8:

# cp1252_strings is a list of "normal" strings
utf-8_strings = []
for s in cp1252_strings:
   u = unicode(s, "cp1252")
   utf-8_strings.append(u.encode("utf-8"))

or if you prefer the one-liner:

utf8_strings = [unicode(x, "cp1252").encode("utf-8") for x in cp1252_strings]

We left St. Louis on Thursday morning, September 25th. Thursday night was spent in the hot tub, easily the best feature of our rented cabin. It’s debatable what the worst feature of he cabin was; the extremely small shower, the complete lack of window coverings in the bedroom, or the Worst Bed Evar ™.

Read more »

I’ve added photos from our recent trip to the Smokies. I’ll be posting a full write up about it very shortly.

FATE is an action RPG with many traits in common with the Diablo series. Single character with lots of defining numbers, lots of items to find with random traits, and randomly generated dungeons and monsters. FATE also adds some new features; a pet which can fight, carry loot and ferry it back to town to sell, fishing (to obtain food for your pet, which transforms it into more powerful forms), totally random quests, and finally “heirlooming”, a concept where you retire a character and pass down one item to a new character. The item in question gets a major boost in power through this process. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

Unfortunately, FATE has no soul. Although the graphics are functional, they are very basic and have a cartoon quality about them. Although not compelling, I didn’t find them to be a big drawback; clearly the game was designed to run on very low-end machines. The biggest problem I had was with the core game itself. All of the randomness makes FATE a game of almost purely of numbers. There is no plot. The quests are of the type “kill X foozles” or “go get a item”. There is no sense of exploration or discovery; dungeon levels have no coherent themes, just random passageways and monsters. I suppose this type of game could appeal to some power gamers; there are plenty of ways to tweak and power-up your characters and items, and there are almost always more powerful monsters to fight and better loot to find. Unfortunately, that’s the only reason to keep playing. I found it very underwhelming and after playing the demo a few times, I found no desire to play any more.

Added pictures of Niki at the Gardens.