NYC + Pixels + 3D GFX = Hell yeah!

Everyone go straight here and watch this video. Now.

href=”http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2010/02/24/this-hunger-for-reality/

Just found a great piece of software : yEd.

It’s the best graph editor I’ve found after about an hour of searching the web. It’s free, it looks amazing, exports to different formats ( some XML-based) and most importantly the usage is straightforward and fun.

I’m trying to create a network of waypoints for NPCs in a 2d game. A pretty basic AI: Lil guys walking around, following paths and doing stuff. There’s a ton of graph editors out there but most of them are very very academic, hard to use and overly complex – I’ve tried a bunch. yEd really sticks out – It feels like a program that should cost a lof ot money but .. it’s free!

Last Saturday I went to the Atlantic Theatre Company to see the play Offices, written by Ethan Coen – without his brother. I’m still not sure if I liked it. I thoroughly enjoyed Burn after reading by both Coen Brothers, which was wonderfully ridiculous and the 2nd part of the play was pretty close to that. I have no idea what the point of the play was besides 120 minutes of sheer fun of watching amazing actors rendering witty dialogues. So I walked out there rather satisfied, without being able to see a meaning and with no clear idea about the message of the play. It took me a while to understand: The medium meaninglessness is the message!

Then, a bit later I realized something else: When comparing the play to American TV shows or movies, I realized that one thing was different. The entire cast of the theare play was white. The boss was white, the homeland security officers were white, the secretary: white, the wife: white – the ones who hired, those who got fired: all white. The bum was white. Every single person was white! What a contrast to something like LOST, which is more diverse than Noah’s ark… They even have an Iraqi, even better, an Ex-Republican Guard – and the 1st season is from 2004! Now that’s diversity!

In case you also have to code ASP pages ( I really don’t like VB but what can you do…)…:

My favorite editor is Notepad++ because its fast, and has some cool features, like the styler. It also comes with a Auto-Completion feature. See this blog post on how to switch it on.It doesn’t work for *.asp files with the standard settings. But there’s a quick way to fix this:

All you need to do is go to C:\\Program Files\\Notepad++\\plugins\\APIs and copy vb.xml to asp.xml and restart Notepad++.

Another thing that I did : I deleted all functions except the ones that I use a lot from the list in asp.xml because I never use 80% of the functions in that list anyways. In addition you can add brackets after functions where you definately need them, e.g. for Replace(). I also added these “XXXXXXXX”s, because this way I can easily double-click-select them and replace these blocks with variables.

So the “R”-part of my asp.xml looks like this:

…

<KeyWord name=”Public Sub” />
<KeyWord name=”Public” />
<KeyWord name=”QUERY_STRING” />
<KeyWord name=”Response.Write XXXXXXXXXXX & br” />
<KeyWord name=”Response.Redirect” />
<KeyWord name=”Response.ContentType” />
<KeyWord name=”Replace(XXXXXXXX,XXXXXX,XXXXXXXX)” />
<KeyWord name=”Randomize” />
<KeyWord name=”Rnd” />
<KeyWord name=”Round(XXXXXXXX)” />
<KeyWord name=”RTrim” />
<KeyWord name=”ScriptEngine” />

….

These little tricks make writing VBScript code so much more pleasant…

A while ago I was invited by Jackie of area/code to participate in New York’s first Budgetball tournament.

I gotta say I really enjoyed being part of the event. It was the first time I played a sport where you had to plan and make strategic decisions spanning not only over the current match: Instead you had to manage a budget of points over the course of the whole tournament.

Would you like to know more ?

I was on the purple team and we made the 2nd place due to our superior strategizing…

It was a great example of how you can take elements that have turned out to work really well in computer games and apply them to a physical sport. I’d like to see more of that. I could imagine some kind of sport where the computer would generate situations for the game and players could then influence the game world by actions on the field or the like.

I really think that computer games doesn’t mean that we have to sit in a chair or a couch. I suspect that soon enough a new wave of mobile games using location in an innovative way has the potential of creating a new genre of games….

Das jüngste Kindle von Amazon sieht man hier in New York immer öfters in der U-Bahn.

Häusle, Mädle, Weckle, Bierle, Kätzle, Päckle.

Das sind meine Assoziationen als Baden-Württemberger zu dem Wort “Kindle”.

Kindle? Kindle!

Bin ja schonmal gespannt unter welchem Namen das Gerät in Deutschland auf den Markt kommen wird.

Auch wenn ich mirs nicht unbedingt jetzt schon kaufen würde, hat das kleine weisse Gerät doch einige interessante Features, auf die ich dank XKCD aufmerksam geworden bin. Wikipedia immer dabei zu haben wäre ja durchaus ganz nett. Auch Blogs soll man damit abbonieren können, wobei ich der Meinung bin, dass die meisten Blogs nur in Verbindung mit dem Zugriff auf das gesamte Internet wirklich Sinn machen. What about Trackbacks? Comments?

Über Amazons Kindle-Produktseite bin ich dann auf das folgende Video gekommen:

Die ersten 30 Minuten sind grösstenteils PR für Amazons jüngstes Kind, was halbwegs interessant ist. Danach wirds etwas allgemeiner und interessanter wenn die beiden Themen wie User Experience, Internet, Entwicklung von Medientechnologien etc. behandeln. Schauts euch an, der Kerl hat was zu sagen, auch wenn er für meinen Geschmack etwas zu oft lauthals lacht…

Die Sendung “Charlie Rose” hab ich erst kürzlich “entdeckt”. Das Format ist sehr einfach gestaltet, eine einfache Interview-Show. Viele der Interviews sind mit Hollywood-Stars und Teil von den gewöhnlichen PR-Kampagnen, etwa für Filme, die interessanteren mit Politikern oder anderen hellen Köpfen. Die Videos gibts alle zum Onlines-Anschauen. Hier mal ein paar weitere ausführliche Gespräche zur Wirtschaftskrise mit Wirtschaftsnobelpreisträger Paul Krugman oder Martin Wolf.

Du verstehtst kein English? Nicht schlimm, dann hör Dir wenigstens an was Dirk Baecker zur Krise zu sagen hat, und zwar als mp3 von www.dradio.de.

For some reason I missed this:
I haven’t even installed Chrome on my computer, so I’m not exactly a Chrome fan. I have seen it in action on my colleague’s computer and it looked interesting, but I didn’t post this link to promote Chrome, but simply because I like Scott McClouds stuff. What stuff?

Understanding Comics e.g. …

Or just read the Chrome Comic. The first comic about classes and virtual machines

Hmm a proposito Google, I guess resistance is futile. I’ve been working with Google’s Android platform for a couple of weeks now and it is awesome

…is German for Rock Paper Shotgun which is a great blog about games which I recently discovered and started to read on a daily basis. I just added it to my blogroll.

RPS is also where I learned about Gravitron 2, a great old-schoolish game. It is kinda hardware-hungry, though. While it runs fine on my laptop, but is really not playable on my work PC, but I guess that’s how it should be

The full version is only $5 ( that’s probably about 1€ at this point *grrr* ) , so head over there and buy it.

Come on guys, a beer will maybe give you about 1 hour of fun – this game a lot more!

Da kommt mir doch gerade so ein Gedanke… Es müsste eigentlich Stein, Papier, Schere heissen. Und dann müsste der Titel dieses Blogposts “Stein, Papier, Schrotflinte” heissen.

Aber: Johannes 19:20

… or do you?

I stumbled across the online version of YDKJ before and it brought be back about 10 years and from English back to German. I remember the German speaker having a slightly higher pitch and being a LOT more annoying than his American counterpart. I really really like this game and I think its remarkable that the Flash version is still very similar to the CD-ROM version.

The presentation of YDKJ is a great example of the beauty of simplicity and how contstaints are a lot of the time beneficial for a work of art. I still like the animated typography in the game. Works great in Flash, too.