A foolproof backup plan?

My hard drives like to scare me.

While I have never had a drive that’s irreversibly crashed, I’ve had a number of incidences where I suddenly couldn’t access data. That sort of stuff has probably made me over-paranoid, but I’ve been looking around and designing a “perfect” backup plan in my head for some time now.

So what does it look like?

At the moment I’ve got two 250 GB hard drives in my computer. These will be setup to mirror each other’s data in case one crashes. I’m also looking for an external hard drive to backup files onto, but this is more for portability than secure backup. I’ll most likely use the Pandora for this once it is released.

However, none of this protects my data from fire, flooding, etc. For this reason an online backup service seems like a good idea. Here again I’m still looking around. A quick Ask.com search revealed iBackup, which supports Linux through rsync. I’d like to look around a bit more, though.

One year blogging!

How time flies!

Last Thursday marked my first full year of running this blog. I still haven’t figured out where this blog is going, having been inspired by a number of different sources, such as the Brainy Gamer, Japanmanship, Lost Garden, GameProducer.net, and more. In dramatic contrast to their wonderful work, the things I write seem quite short. In the next year, I hope to explore and define the direction I’m going with this blog more, but I believe that the trend of short posts will continue.

In the interest of remaining brief and to the point, I also decided to try out Twitter. Again, nothing fancy there yet, but as I continue to learn nuggets of game design wisdom you may see them appear there.

I had another thing I wanted to talk about, but as it’s somewhat unrelated and I’d like to start posting more often, I’ll write that up seperately and post it later…

CC-Licensed Pixel-Art for Your Games

I’ve been trying my hand at coding SDL recently, and needed some pretty pixel graphics to use for test programs. Considering the hours put into making these, it doesn’t do much good for them to just sit on my hard drive so here they are for you to use!

They are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution & Share-Alike license, which I hope should let you use them for most programs.

Download Link (14.6 KB)

Depending on what I need for future SDL tests and the sort of interest there is in this art, there may future additions.

Setting build options in Geany

For a while now I’ve been using Geany for code-editing and then compiling at the command-line with g++. This was because I didn’t care to setup a “build environment” or whatever you call it within Geany so the right dependencies would be included.

Well, a little looking around just revealed a menu item under Build called “Set Includes and Arguments”. Yeah, I know: Why didn’t I see this before?

A couple minutes of work, and I can now code and compile all within Geany. Quite convenient.

Open-Source funding survey

This might be a very good survey to check out. The questionnaire, created by Andrew Fenn, is designed to find out about your opinions on open-source software and how it gets funded. All that’s asked of you personally is your age.

I heard about it from here, and Andrew Fenn’s blog (where the results will be published) is here.

Testing, testing, never resting.

Hello, everyone. I’m just testing a little Ubuntu application for posting to wordpress blogs called (appropriately) Blog Entry Poster.

Just to make this post somewhat useful, here’s the conclusion I came to about something I was thinking about today:

The extent to which games will have a rigid method of creation is inversely proportionate to the amount that games are an art form.

Let me explain that a little bit. I’ve been working hard on a personal programming project, so I’ve been thinking a lot about how much to plan ahead and how much to leave until I have to deal with it. Being mostly an artist, the obvious analogy appeared between games as an art form and drawing/painting. Again, let me explain a little…

When you set out to create a drawing, you have a general idea of where you’re going, but often once your idea gets on paper you have to make alterations and adjustments so that it can be the best drawing possible. Initial ideas don’t always account for certain aspects that can negate them.

In terms of game design, this means that while we may know approximately what sort of game we want to make (and may even make plans on that assumption), we need to be open to things changing throughout the course of production.

Anyway, places to go and things to do. Hope this little blurb has sparked some thought (and will post to wordpress correctly).

Later!

Excited about Celetania? I am!

First of all, go check out World of Goo, which was just released for Linux. Alright, now on to the rest of this post…

I recently quit playing Travian, a persistent-world web game where you created your own medieval empire. I won’t go into all the reasons, but suffice it to say that there were balance issues with larger player swallowing up newbies and ruining their play experience (not that I was one of these newbies, of course).

As I understand it, there are a number of persistent-world games out there (games in which the world continues evolving while you are not present and playing). I haven’t spent enough time looking into other titles, so Celetania was able to completely capture and hold my attention.

http://celetania.com/

So why am I so excited about Celetania? It has quests! If the way I assume they work is right, they have the potential to eliminate the balance problems between players of different skill levels. I don’t like picking on Travian exactly, but it’s the only game I’ve played like this, so I’ll use it for comparison. In Travian, there are no quests, and no “safe zones” for newbies. It is a common strategy for larger players to attack and “farm” smaller players for their own benefit. How to quests help?

If done properly, quests may give greater rewards for larger players than attacking small players, thus making it a better use of your time to pick on people your own size. I assume quests are adaptive to a player’s size, so they also give small players a chance to expand safely.

Anyway, that’s all for now!

Common alpha-blending problem

So a while ago I tried to convince myself that I’d start blogging more. I told myself that I’d stop caring about post quality and just write because I want to write. Obviously, I care more about quality than I had thought…

Now on to something useful. I’ve been wanting to write this post for a little while…

A number of open-source games I’ve played put emphasis on various lighting effects. For whatever reason, quite a few of these games don’t use an additive blending mode for these effects, choosing instead to blend the image based on opacity. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, just take a look at the image below.

As you can see, additive blending takes the values and adds them together, whereas normal blending based on opacity averages the two (as a side note, I have no idea whether these are official terms or not). So how does this matter in games?

The problem arises when textures intended to be overlayed with the additive effect are blended according to an alpha channel that is generally created by creating a grayscale version of the original texture. The alpha channel for an explosion looks something like this, then:

As you can see, the in-game image lacks vibrancy and doesn’t feel “hot”. This is mostly because the alpha channel is blending the center of the explosion with the background. Most games don’t settle for these results, and brighten the alpha channel to look like this:

This explosion looks a lot better, but now there is a dark ring around it. This is caused by the fact that the outer pixels of the image are not being blended as 10% red/orange, but 10% dark red/orange. Here is the solution I’ve found so far:

Making the background red has eliminated the dark band, and bumping up the brightness in the alpha channel prevents the explosion from being dimmed by the background.

Now, you might say that “it looks just fine without the red background! The dark ring adds contrast and hints at ash or smoke.” If that’s what you’re going for great, but the red-background version fits into the game better without popping out of the scene, and ash/smoke should fold around the form of the explosion and not remain simply around the edges. An explosion against blue sky only emphasize this problem.

Besides, this problem doesn’t apply only to explosions. Laser blasts, lens flares, etc are all vulnerable to having dark-alpha edges. With a little work, however, your opacity-blended effects can look almost as good as additive ones!

One rumor true, lets start another!

If I remember correctly, a while back there was speculation that Amazon.com might open a gaming platform to compliment their other services. Now it seems these rumors were correct. Joystiq and Shacknews report that Amazon has opened a game store with prices ranging from $6.99 to $9.99.

I’ve wanted someone to open a Steam-esque Linux game store for a while. While their downloader software “currently supports Windows only“, we may remember that their MP3 downloader utility is available for many of the popular Linux distributions. Time for crossed fingers?

Maybe. From what I gather, this service is the result of Amazon’s purchase of Reflexive. While I’m not giving up hope yet, it does seem that Reflexive’s previous efforts involved (predictably) only Windows and Mac OSX.

Still, we can dream can’t we?

Then again, perhaps a service like this already exists?

Possibly the most useful blogpost I’ve read

Gameproducer.net is just a pretty useful blog/website all around, but one post in particular has proved itself true time and time again.

Best medicine for lack of motivation

Specifically, the first sentence in bold where he states that the best way to get motivated is to start working is very true. Many of the times I actually complete something, it’s because of a similar situation.

Maybe I should make myself a sign?