Caution: Singularity Ahead [DEFUNCT]

Another project that sat dormant for a while - almost 20 years in this case. This is the basic core of an Apple II game based on Mechwarrior (giant fighting robot suits). It was probably inspired, more than anything, by the box art for a PC version of this game . I'm rather proud of the sprites! I started when I was a teenager and got the basic image blitting and background rendering working and drew up lots of lovely sprites. But the whole thing was tied together with Applesoft BASIC code and was dog slow (like 0.1Hz). When I first (re) moved to San Francisco I spent some time rewriting the core of it in C using CC65  and making the blt engine a lot more flexible and speeding it up too. It's still pretty slow (2Hz or so) but there are plenty of optimizations that can be made: all sprites are 10 bytes wide, for example, and sprites are cached in aux memory which means a double copy when rendering. This is way, way down on the priority list to finish. ...

We have all the cousins and only need to find one more present, but Su and I hit a new milestone in We (Heart) Katamari last night - I successfully rolled up the King of the Cosmos. If you haven't played Katamari Damacy, this doesn't make any sense. If you have played Katamari but not the sequel, you're probably saying "Whaaaa?" And if you've played We (Heart) Katamari, you probably got there long before we did. But boy was it nice to hit 3200m, bump into him and see him bouncing away before we rolled him up. Yay! Anticlimactic, though. I was hoping we'd get to put dad in his place and start giving him an inferiority complex. "There is no 'why' in Katamari." - Susan to Caspian

It would be fairly accurate to describe my years in High School and University as a balance between sleeping through class, writing code ( Apple II projects, MUSH code , and so on), and haunting used bookstores. As an example, for High School english classes I typically wrote computer games - for Dune , a thumper-placement/avoid the worm action game. For King Lear , a "choose your own adventure" game. I picked up a tattered, second-hand copy of Destination: Void as a teenager while on a Frank Herbert binge. It was only years later that I learned that there was a sequel (by Herbert and Bill Ransom ), The Jesus Incident . As a rather religion-averse person I had never picked it up and flipped through it - the name put me off. Flash forward to 2004. I'm a little bit obsessed with Halo - not playing the game, mind you, just the beautiful game world. See previous entries about Iain M. Banks - they cribbed massively from his writing. The Halo itself is an Orbital (mini-ringw...

I finally tracked down an aphorism that's been stuck in my brain for a while: "All problems in computer science can be solved by another level of indirection." (I was having a hard time tracking it down as I'd heard the version with "abstraction" substitutued for "indirection".) It was stated by some guy I hadn't heard of named Butler Lampson , who it turns out (1) is wickedly smart, (2) was amazingly influential (e.g. the Xerox Alto) and (3) also works at Microsoft now (over in MSR). I recall that when I first heard it I was taken aback, possibly having worked on one too many projects that got horribly bogged down in trying to be too abstract and failing to deliver anything concrete. Now, however, I'm seeing it as part of the innovation race. The more levels of abstraction you have the more nimble you are and the more you enable that you hadn't thought of. If you're not adding levels of abstraction and flexibility to a project,...

So... On my way to work this morning, I had an unprovoked flashback to a paper and pencil space combat game that I played with some of my classmates when I was in Grade 6 (circa 1982-83). It played like Space War or Asteroids!, but let two players simulate space combat on a piece of paper with pencils - just the technology available to us during classes at the time. I did some preliminary Google searches, but I'm probably missing the right search terms. So I wrote up the rules as I remembered them (plus some gaming formalisms I've picked up over the years). You can find them here: Paper and Pencil Space Combat Game I think I'll have to wait about 6 months before I teach Caspian how to play. But then again, he picked up the concept of Pac Man enough to play it "live action" in a store a few months ago - we took turns being Pac Man and the Monster.