Poverty, Coding, and Politics

Exploder update possibly coming soon

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:38:38 GMT

Exploder may be due an update earlier than I thought. I'm working on the Elo ratings now, and don't really perceive many problems (although I have to reread it to understand why certain figures are used! Otherwise I might make a mistake).

If you look at the hub:

http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/Exploder

You'll see in standings I have also setup 2 other fields, games (which should be pretty obvious: the # of games you have played) and Nationality. In many games across the world, a persons nationality is stated, so I've copied this with a rather large list of nationalities. It also includes various non-recognised nations and Islands that are traditionally tied to other countries but are actually their own political bodies. United Kingdom is listed, but so is English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Ireland as is traditional; reflecting the nature of the UK.

I never really understood, other than for juicy statistics why a players nationality is that important. Most high level players are pretty a-political and have little care for their country in terms of winning games. It is not, such as the Olympics a "team" event usually, and is based entirely on individual success. On top of this, the nationality of the current leaders hardly lead it to prestige. Does anyone care that the current world chess #1 is a Bulgarian? Despite this, I am including it because I do feel it is interesting. The current rankings for Exploder, the result of one tournament and a couple of individual games will go across, purely to fill up the table a bit although I hope it'll convince people to try it out.

It also turns out that last month was Exploder's 5 year anniversary, so I will be keen to setup a tournament to celebrate it before the end of the year. Please vote if you wish to take part so I can get an idea of numbers (posting a comment with intention will also help).

I have yet to change that ugly HUD yet, sorry.

al-Shabaab's version of spelling bee

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:56:01 GMT

I keep meaning to do a post about Arabs, but found that I've been working on enough games to talk about that rather than boring politics. But something has got my attention, and I find it hard not to take a whack at it at every corner. This is not new, it actually happened awhile back, but was brought to my attention through an internet forum.

Al-Shabaab is one of the latest militant groups in Somalia, that country that you probably hear about in the news a lot, but usually about pirates. Further down south of the country is where most of the hotbed politics goes on, and the coalition of Al-Shabaab and Hizbul Islam has seemingly been disbanded since this event was recorded and just as I predicted these former allies are now fighting each other because in reality the moment they were forced to work together on something they couldn't; a town that they were controlling together became the first battleground in yet another episode of the 18 year civil war.

Al-Shabaab has been keen to keep the population, which is relatively moderate religiously under their control. Regular stoning have seemingly been the prime focus, including a 13 year old rape victim, and a couple of which the pregnant woman has been allowed to give birth before she herself is stoned as her partner has already been. One of the less violent acts has to be their interpretation of the ever so popular "Spelling Bee", in the form of Quran recitation. Under an armed (and masked) guard, children were promoted to show off their knowledge. The prize? Food, ammo clips and grenades. You can see the footage here (I don't believe there is anything particularly disturbing in this footage so it should be safe for all ages):

http://blip.tv/file/2867534/

As a Muslim, a Briton, I have to ask myself: Why oh why, now that Southern Somalia is being dominated by an actual Al-Qaeda affiliated organisation, are we not doing anything about it? The United States happily bombed the Islamic Courts Union when it tried to make up for the lack of Government, when it didn't even support things such as stoning (which is Unislamic anyway, but that is another post for another time), and these cases of whipping that is becoming so common; and even publicly stated they weren't affiliated with Al-Qaeda... hunted down murderers (including those that murdered a Nun), started building local government filling up pot holes, stopping people from carrying guns and tolling people for use of the few roads that were still in a workable condition.

This organisation that was so bad that the US had to intervene, ended up being integrated with the Transitional Government (that's the people we the West are backing btw) within months after its collapse, and one of its leaders is now the recognised President of the country. Now an actual, serious threat to human life appears, and the best we have done is the US sent a few crates of weapons and left the Transitional Government to it. The African Union troops, like usual have done nothing because its too tied up in legal disputes over its mandate to actually take part in anything. They can't even fire their weapons unless directly attacked, so have to sit and watch while people are beaten in the street and rival rebel forces have shoot-outs. In Sudan, the most useful thing they have managed to do was change their green berries to blue UN ones when that became a UN mission. Back in Somalia, they control individual streets in the capital, not even the entire city.

But it keeps on going, not only have al-Shabaab been stoning children to death, they've been checking Women's breasts and beating men for not having beards as recorded by this news piece:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1220864/ Whipped-wearing-deceptive-bra-Hardline-Islamists-Somalia-pub licly-flog-women-sharia-crackdown.html

So when are we going to sort Somalia out? When a more moderate militant group has taken charge again? I question whether the gutless people who are against the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are the kind of people who prevent us intervening in other countries too. We have adapted, wrongly to a form of Isolationism in which people are left to die when we could quite easily improve things. Our politicians have twisted their opinions to suit the ignorant public who don't understand how war works in order to protect their seats, which has in effect caused the anti-war movement to grow. How many more children will be stoned to death before we stop it?

Two Towers updated!

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:03:29 GMT

Two Towers has been updated, its first since the GiaD event for 2007, my first BYOND contest that I took part in. Its taken me a long time but today I did manage to sit down and bring it back into the present day; although a lot of my time spent was on recoding my poor and terrible code.

I haven't managed to do everything I had hoped for, this is largely down to the fact I was expecting to work on it a bit more than I did, but there you go that's life you don't always get the time :p

So what is there is this:

* Fixed up interface.
* When someone wins, I purposely left out the losers colour before, but I think it looks better with it.
* Saved nearly 100 kb simply by switching .wav files to .ogg.
* Successful shield blocking now has a sound.
* Bolt and Plant alternatives to Flame and Frost.
* Streamlined the code a bit better to conpensate with varience of tower choice.
* 2 Medals to play for, with scoring on the scoreboard.

So I've ended up with a cleaner, smaller sized game with a bit of open endedness. I had intended to get a Single player done, but I've run out of time for tonight. I do still wish to do it soon, perhaps tomorrow night, and also some sort of one time use "special power" in order to give each element something unique and give it that extra flavour. Because of the lack of Single player, obviously the 2 medals listed on the hub can't be reached yet (although the 2 relating to multiplayer can).

I also updated AceMedalTable, for both Zetris 2 and Two Towers games. The 2 inaccessible medals are already built in, so if I do update Two Towers, I won't need to update that too.

Other than the additional medals, the following updates have been included:

Tried to make it look a little more exciting.
Top players button lists the top 10 players by points.

So I've changed the layout round, and made a cheap lookup if you couldn't be bothered to goto the hub page in the first place to see whos on top.

My next update for AceMedalTable would be a lookup of medals you DONT have, which will appear randomly, as suggestions to what you might wish to get next. Game wise, I don't know what is on my list other than finishing off Two Towers. I guess Quest2 might be one, SET UP is due an update since I've started recoding my GiaD projects and Communism2 needs to have a breath of scoreboard fresh air, seeing as I removed my own online scoreboard because it was crap before BYOND started doing it.

Links to the games mentioned in this post:

http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/Zetris2
http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/TwoTowers
http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/AceMedalTable

Zetris 2 update!

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 18:44:10 GMT

Zetris 2 has received an update. Somehow, I managed to fix my bug that has been bothering me and preventing me from submitting to Casual, and including it in AceMedalTable. The updates are:

* Fixed moving parts bug.
* More difficult shapes do not come until after 5 points.
* New shape, S reversed.
* New shapes, T shape in two different rotations.
* Altered help guide as necessary.
* Players, although unlikely to, have their say in colour.
* People playing have their player # listed on players online, and if they are waiting for someone else to join, it will say so.

The 10 points in single player is seemingly a bit too hard, so I've made it easier with that delay of annoying shapes until you get over 5 points, which makes it easier. Despite that, I've decided to still give the 10 points Medal a Medium rating for AceMedalTable, and the 25 points will remain on hard, which I believe is do-able.

The game is not yet included in AceMedalTable, as I'm working on Two Towers too (my very first GiaD piece, I have some slight graphical bugs to fix and then that is free to be released too) and some new AceMedalTable features. Medals you get in Zetris 2 will still count when it gets updated, so there is no need to wait.

I aim to get AceMedalTable and Two Towers updated by tomorrow, Insha'Allah*

* Bearing in mind that its nearly 3am, and I'd like it updated before 3am tomorrow morning ;p

Micro Defence updated into AceMedalTable

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:39:31 GMT

Micro Defence is the latest addition to the AceMedalTable, which is half way through its first listed scorings. At the end of each Month, I plan to have a list of all leaders at that time. Depending on how many players who get medals use AceMedalTable, depends on how many people get on this list. At the moment, the top 3 will definitely be on it. Those top 3 (I exclude myself :p) right now are:

Tetsuya: 16 Easy, 10 Medium medals for 46 points (38% of total)
Nadrew: 11 Easy, 8 Medium medals for 35 points (29% of total)
NachoX123: 12 Easy, 5 Medium and 1 Hard medals for 32 points (26% of total)

If you are a Wargames heavyweight and you are in the top two pages for medals, then there is a good chance you'll be near the top of the AceMedalTable, and perhaps beat the scores above so why wait, take advantage of your already existing medals today and just take this simple program for a spin:

http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/AceMedalTable

After the November results, the December results double up as a 2009 results list. The figures do not get erased so unless someone competes to beat the current leaders they'll remain at the top. I might even offer a prize for the winner of 2009 if enough people make use of it. The programs changes, including the new game is:

* In-game links based on points weight.
* Each Medal which you have earned that is mentioned gets its difficulty listed beside it.
* Your list of medals by difficulty is listed at the top, followed by the points version, and then the totals.

Today's addition is Micro Defence, it has received one Easy and one Medium Medal, and now includes a scoreboard too. Other than an updated help guide, its only addition is a enemy icon change to a smaller version of itself if it goes under 50% health, to show its near death.

You can play it here:

http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/MicroDefence

Micro Defence update list is:

* 2 Medals (50 and 500 kills).
* Scoreboard.
* Enemies shrink when they get to half health.
* Updated help file accordingly.

-----
Finally, games that MAY get included in AceMedalTable soon:

Geekdash3
Communism2
Zetris2 (This game has medals already, but still dealing with 1 bug fix, then it'll be added)
RetroSpaceBattle
Quest2
Space Commander
Two Towers
SETUP

Wargames 2 and Gaoithe is also in my list to include medals, but won't be for awhile.

Recent Developments

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 02:45:51 GMT

I've recently been working on Wargames 2, sorry but that takes my fancy more than the original right now, but I will get back to it. I'm afraid I'm going away again, so I won't be able to host for about a month.

With Wargames 2, I've been working on the scenario editor, now that the Map editor is working fine. In preparation I've made additional changes to the Map section (the ability to do 3x3 boxes, etc to save clicking, showing your co-ordinates, adding borders to the icons so you can judge spacing things like that) and started making some blank world maps which I'll need to fill in with terrain. In my current files, I have it so that you can change the game options as part of the Scenario (ie, what you see after map generation/loading in Wargames 2) so that could effectively be used to speed up the process if you always pick the same options and get fed up with clicking it all the time.

I haven't released this yet, because I need to update Wargames2 in order for the Scenarios to work, but now you know what is coming up. My intention is to hopefully get a few more basics into the Scenario editor (like number of players, starting towns, border colour and names) so that I can design a few levels and you can try it out. Because I'm up to the "Romanic Age" (basically Roman technology 500 BC to 500 AD) there is plenty of wars and time periods to base scenarios on. I'd like to do a Roman Conquest of Britain scenario for an example using my 19x19 map, and perhaps another involving the European map.

I might upload the blank world maps to the wiki in a minute, these range from 19x19 to 130x60 (which is where it starts to actually look like the world!) but as I said, I still need to terrain it.

I'm open to requests for test scenarios (which I admit I'm looking forward to :p) so if you want to suggest something then these links might help.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-age_system
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_history

and probably more interesting:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_before_1000

Zetris joins AceMedalTable!

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 10:18:52 GMT

The original Zetris, a very minor tetris game has been updated into 4.0, been given medals and a scoreboard. It has been added to the AceMedalTable which assigns points to medals awarded in games I've done and total them together. You can see Zetris here:

http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/Zetris

And AceMedalTable here:

http://www.byond.com/games/Acebloke/AceMedalTable

AceMedalTable has also received an update in the form of image links to each individual game in the program. The list of games of your medals is also now based on the combined total of points that game has available, so Geekdash2 is now before Pinky, even though Pinky has 2 medals and Geekdash2 only has 1. Every time I update it I wish to add a new feature, so eventually it might list medals you don't have yet and perhaps suggest a random medal/game.

I had to update both again because I realised I compiled in the beta accidentally and not the old version, but say if you get any problems.

Game idea

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 19:28:12 GMT

A few days ago I was wondering how I would use the new Isometric feature first, and I considered the idea of a Frogger type game.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frogger)

It turns out that the idea I did have planned, of using the Berlin wall as a theme must have come to me subconsciously as we're nearing the 20th Anniversary of its downfall. So, sometime between today and Monday I should have yet another new game out. We'll see how it goes.

A little post for myself

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 16:50:47 GMT

I keep meaning to post things, but sometimes I don't get round to it. Today, I just wanted to post for myself. I use my blog for a range of things, sometimes its politics, sometimes its my games.

I've been on BYOND for well over 7 (probably 8 including my time using a guest key in Dragon Warrior Online) years, so I was about 13-14 when I came on here. I'm now 21 hitting 22, and I'm still here. I just posted on a topic on the main forum relating to what we want and what we think might happen to byond in 10 years time.

I'm happy to admit that I'd like to still be here, whatever I do with my life, in 10 years time. This is my hobby, I spend time when I can on it and I largely enjoy it even if I complain. Heck, I've made a Civilisation clone! There is only a handful of games like that on the entire planet, I'm pretty impressed with myself. I've also produced an entire (albeit ugly) RPG in 24 hours development! Awesome! Unlike other peoples hobbies, mine doesn't cost anything other than the electric and technically the internet things I'd have anyway, I'm happy doing this.

I honestly wish I could spend more time on it, and if my games grows in success and earn me a bit more money than it is at the moment, I probably would.

Democracy Live

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 09:43:32 GMT

The BBC has released a new section onto their website called Democracy Live. It is an extension of BBC Parliament, which is the main body for showing the political institutions of the UK to the public. Democracy Live also covers the European Parliament, something that is available on their own website, but arguably this is the first time that you can find proceedings for that alongside national bodies in the same place.

It covers the House of Commons, House of Lords, Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and the Northern Ireland Assembly, as well as some committee meetings. You can read about it here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/guides/ newsid_8226000/8226983.stm