Entries Tagged 'Entertainment' ↓

Here’s a cool page that…. well, it shows…..ummmm….well, there’s sounds and graphics….uhhhh…. Well, its just plain cool. Motion and graphics making sounds. In a generated kind of way. Very cool.

Check this out, its got a cool sci-fi sound to it: Whitney Music Box

Like most amateur game developers, I’m inspired to try and create games that I think are cool. And like most game developers I’m influenced by games that I have played. So it follows that if a game really got me going, that I would like to make something like it in the hopes that other people will feel the same way about it that I do.
Now a problem occurs when that thin line that separates “inspired by” and “a carbon copy of” gets crossed. There’s a ton of games and mods out there that cross that line. Usually its just a quick little thing by the developers that gets left behind after a while. Other times it gets a lot of attention and then the lawyers get involved, and the project gets canned quickly. Inverted Castle had a great posting about this. The idea that Hunty posted was to make your own story. And I think he is 100% not just to avoid getting sued, but just to make a new and exciting thing.

It seems hard to come up with something new and original to base you game on, but if you think about it, it doesn’t have to be. Most movies, books, and games are based on a couple of ideas that have all been used before. They just take a couple of them and mix them together in a new way.

Think about this: How many movies and TV shows have you seen that centered around a stolen treasure? And how many books have you read that were set in outer space? And… how many featured a smart ass outsider as the hero of the story? See, combine those things together and you have “Trent and the missing Jewel of Titan”.

Need bad guys? Think of 5 typical bad guys (gangsters, thieves, corrupt politicians, etc.) and think of why they would be involved. Pick the two best and put them in the story.

Now think about how Trent would react to meeting these people (assume they aren’t going to kill him right away because he seems like he’s not worth the time of day). Imagine the weaknesses of the bad guys, how would this work in Trent’s favor? Where’s a place you’ve always wanted to see? What would Trent say if he wound up there?

Answer those questions and it should give you a lot of possible locations and situations for your game. Pick the best few out of the bunch, and use those as your starting points for your levels/adventures. Start with those. If they are working, go back and look at what you threw out. Can it be changed or salvaged? Did you come up with new materials or ideas?

Its not hard. You just gotta practice. Take a favorite story, and take the best elements out of it, and scramble it up a little bit. Then branch out and add new elements (the stuff you find yourself saying, ‘it would have been better if X had happened…), the next thing you know, you’ve got an original story!

There’s an old saying that ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until its gone’. The idea it is trying to convey is that sometimes we are experiencing something good constantly and we loose sight of the specialness of it. But when the good thing leaves we realize how much better we were when it was here.

That’s kind of the feeling I had when they announced the cancellation of Stargate. I enjoy the show immensely, its just about the only thing on TV worth watching (other than The Office) and having it leave made me think that there would be a void.

And to and extent that is true. Stargate Atlantis will still be there, and its actually been growing on me this season. Its true that some episodes of SG-1 have been rather… uhh… well, not really fan favorites. But ya know what? That’s ok.

You can’t win every battle. In fact I think just the fact that we the fans had 10 years of SG-1 is great. The show has really raised the bar for what a sci-fi show can be. Hopefully it will inspire the next generation of shows to be as good (or dare I say, better?) as SG-1 is and was.

Besides, thanks to DVD’s and syndication I think SG-1 will be around for a looooong time.

Awww yeah, here it comes! This Friday, Stargate will celebrate its 200th airing with a special episode. It looks like there will be a special code given out during the show so that the hard core fans can go on-line and see special behind-the-scenes footage.

Also, last week’s ratings were up for both SG-1 and Atlantis. Last week’s episode on Atlantis was pretty cool, and this weeks looks interesting. Richard Dean Anderson (aka MacGyver) will be guest starring in both SG-1 and Atlantis, so I’m sure that they will rock harder than usual.
Anyways, tell your friends, tell your family, tell anyone who will listen: Stargate is gonna rock this Friday!

I’m a big fan of Stargate SG:1. I just really started getting into it the last year or so, so I was really bummed the other day when I read that the ratings for the current season have been kinda low.

Why is that? SG:1 hasn’t been as strong as past season, but that’s ok, you can’t hit it out of the park every time you come to the plate. Plus there have been several good episodes this season. Stargate Atlantis has actually been really good this season so far. Before this season I found it hard to get into Atlantis, it just didn’t have the same spark. But this season, the stories have been really engaging and the character have really been clicking.

But, to despite that, the ratings are still on the low side (although they are rivaling SG:1). So what’s up with that?

My theory is that the SciFi channel hasn’t done a very good job of advertising this new season. As a nerd I do watch the SciFi channel on occasion *cough cough*, and I hardly ever see ads for it. This is the 10th season for SG:1, and the only time I see ads for either Stargate is during Stargate.

Dragoncon is coming soon, yet here in Atlanta I see no ads (billboards, buses, tv, newspaper, etc.) for Stargate anywhere. Seems to me that the SciFi channel is missing a prime opportunity to a)Target the primary audience, and b) Get cross-over exposure to a new audience.

Granted, there are some specials running (like next week’s “Watch it live to get an access code to the website” offer), but they only advertised that during the end-credits of Atlantis!!! What kind of insane advertising plan is that? Its almost like they are trying to make sure the campaign fails…

Ugh. I find a good show to get into just in time for it to auger in at the very end. Please watch the shows. And encourage your friends and family to watch them. For me? Please? Thanks.

Recently my Windows Media Player stopped working on my work machine. It was complaining about a DLL mismatch, so I figured this was its way of saying “Upgrade me now!!!”. So I obliged it and downloaded the latest and greatest from Microsoft and installed it.

And about 10 seconds later I regretted it. As it was scanning for my music library, it managed to find all of the music I ripped from various CDs (which is good, now I don’t have to re-rip them), then it managed to find the playlists I had made (which is great, because it was a pain making them), and then…..

It managed to not find *any* of the ratings I had entered for the 700+ songs in my library. Not that I had all 700+ rated, but I had over half done because that is part of how I was making my playlists.

Is it so hard to update the mp3 files and put the rating in there? Why does everyone (iTunes does this too) keep the ratings in a separate file? Ugh. What a pain in the ass. I’m debating if its even worth re-rating those files or ifI should try to whip up a program to take my iTunes ratings and try to have it update the mp3 files on my various machines.

Its been almost a year since I started using iTunes, and in that time I’ve adapted to its way of looking at my music library. It took me a while to get used to its mangling of my music directory (I’m picky like that), but all in all things are pretty good now. I do have a few observations:

I like that when I play a song the album artwork is displayed. I think that’s neat. I was however really surprised to find out that the image of the album cover is stored in the mp3/m4p file, thus increasing its size. That struck me as really odd since if you have an album’s worth of songs, the same picture could be used for each song/file. It seems that over your entire music library that if there was only one copy of the image floating around, you’d have more file space, which is to say you could fit more songs onto your iPod.

Then I discovered the most interesting thing: The ratings that you assign for a song are not stored in the music file! They are kept in a separate file! I’m pretty sure that the MP3 file standard has a field for the user’s rating, it seems to me that setting the field (which is already there and wouldn’t add anything to size of the file) would be the way to do it, instead of storing that info in a file that if it gets corrupted will effect every rating in the library. Plus if you go an move the music file to another machine, you loose the rating info. I’ve been relying heavily on rating information lately.

I’ve noticed lately that I’m getting really tired of my playlists, they seem to play the same songs over and over. Investigating further I found the problem is that the size of the playlists (which are mostly based off of the ratings of the song) is not as large as I thought they were. It turns out I have not rated a large portion of my music library. This means that the playlist is pulling selections from a rather limited pool. The smaller this pool, the more frequently you are going to hear a repeat.

Of course the way to get around this is to create an “unrated” playlist and force yourself to listen through it. As you listen to the songs, rate them. This will help enlarge the pool of possible songs the playlists can play from. Previous studies have shown the randomizer in iTunes does a pretty good job of picking songs randomly, so by increasing the playlist size you’ll find that you don’t have as many “I just heard that song!” moments.

Please note that the last item about the playlists applies to all music players, not just iTunes. I discovered this problem at work while using the Windows Media player. If you’ve got a small population of things to choose from, then there is a high probability that you are going to hear the same thing often.

Its been a while since I posted anything, but rather than just give the usual “Oh, I’m so busy, I’ll write more later” type of post, I thought I would just jot down some little things that I’ve given some thought to recently.

And in the immortal words of Forrest Gump: “That’s all I have to say about that.” Have a great day!

Tired of Sudoku? Looking for a new challenge? Boy have I got something for you then. Check out Planarity.

I really like this game. If you’ve ever sat through a discreet mathematics class and wondered where and when you’ll ever use graph theory, this is your answer. Basically the site presents you with a series of nodes/vertices and you have to rearrange them until the edges (i.e. the lines between the nodes) do not overlap. The result is called a planar graph.

The first couple of levels are pretty easy, but with every level more nodes and more edges are added. This makes each level more challenging in that it takes longer to solve than the one before it. Oh, that and stopping. Once you start playing its hard to stop. I closed my eyes once and I started to imagine moving the nodes around… That’s when I knew this was a cool game.
Its a great idea for a website and a really fun game. I’ve always liked graph theory, there’s just something cool about it. Now thanks to this site, we have a new way to play around with the graphs and learn more about them. Additionally this site serves as a good introduction to other ideas in graphing like cycles, bipartite graphs, and minimal spanning trees.

If you were asking yourself, “I wonder what Nick has been doing for the last 2 hours?”, I’ll tell you. I’m been playing Dumb: The Game.

Truthfully, I’ve only been playing the 5 sample puzzles. They are fun, but challenging. One or two Iwas able to figure out pretty quickly, but #9 and #12 have me stumped. Guess what I’m going to be thinking about for the rest of the day…

Mike is really on to something with this site, he’s got a good idea for a game (brain teasers), he’s got the perfect delivery medium (web pages so everyone can play), and he’s got the perfect hook (funy name, good samples, free registration). Rock on Hamumu!