The Brig

Obligatory birthday post

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 09:52:24 GMT

mob/person
  var/age=0
  proc/birthday()
    world << "[src] is now [age++] years old!"
world/New()
  var/mob/person/ryan = new
  ryan.age = 18
  ryan.birthday()

Cyclists: for crying out loud, RIDE FAST.

Mon, 23 Apr 2007 13:27:40 GMT

It's that time of the year again. Time to break out the grease and the new handle grips and the saddle bags. Time to start riding again, after a long cold winter.

Here's a good way to start the year off well: bike fast. Really fast. You think you're somebody special who doesn't need to bike fast? Here's a comprehensive list - where do you fit in?

Bike geeks: if you're wearing tight pants, you better not only be biking fast; you had better be biking faster than I am. A lot faster. I don't want to see you for more than 5 seconds.

The elderly: I understand that you have probably been riding your bike for decades now. I have no doubt that you are skilled and competent; but if you are not strong enough to bike fast, please for everyone's sake find another means of transportation. This does not need to be permanent. If you can build your strength up and bike at the speed of traffic, you will not only have less chance of being injured on your bike, but you will live a healthier life with reduced danger from the risks of old age on account of your improved fitness. If you wish for a leisurely ride, pick a street that is not frequented by commuters. You will pose less threat to yourself and to others.

Sunday drivers: It's not okay to make me dart out into traffic to pass you. The worst possible thing you can do is to ride far enough from the edge of the street that I cannot safely pass you on the left, but close enough that I cannot safely pass you on the right. Choose one: ride in the lane of traffic, or ride on the side.

Hot chicks: I don't want to have to slow down to check you out. Seriously, don't make me follow you at 8kph just to watch you slowly shift your weight from one beautiful thigh to the next. Hustle.

Urban creative types with earbuds on while riding: get a clue. I just about ran you over because you didn't hear me shouting at you to move your ass. Five seconds later, you almost got hit by a car. But gee golly shit, you didn't miss a second of Fallout Boy's latest hit!

Ghetto bangers with 4 people riding 1 bike: if you can't ride at 20kph, don't ride at all. It's as simple as that. Even if your excuse constitutes your three little illegitimate brothers who don't get bikes of their own because daddy hasn't had a job in 4 years and mommy spends all the money she earns at the strip club on cocaine. Mommy's going to be awfully sad when you lose your balance and turn out into the street, then can't turn back fast enough at your leisurely pace of 4kph. If you can find a way to be a competent rider even with the extra passengers, power to you. Otherwise, stay the hell off of the road.

Shoppers: don't slow down when you're signaling to turn. Keep riding, and signal a few seconds before you get to your next store. Every day I see shoppers using turning signals - this is great, but it completely defeats the purpose if you signal 50 meters before your turn, and exacerbate the problem by slowing down to 10kph. People don't know whether it's safe to pass and you create a big accident waiting to happen right behind you. The rule of thumb is this: ride swiftly, and seconds before you turn, put your hand out. It's just like driving a car - you wouldn't signal 3 blocks before your turn, would you?

Kids: if you're riding together, and can't ride as fast as slow bicycle traffic much less car traffic, that's understandable - so don't do it on commuter streets! Parents: don't let your kids ride on commuter streets! It's dangerous for them and the people around them! I have seen quite a few kids narrowly miss getting hit by cars or other cycles as they meander and halfway lose their balance amongst busy traffic. Find a safe place to ride, like a dedicated bicycle road or the path around your favorite park, and telly our kids to ride there. When kids are old enough to bike fast, then they can pick where they ride.

Stay tuned for my next installment, entitled "Pedestrians: for the sake of cyclists, get the fuck out of the way."

Creative Commons cred for picture Chinese gentleman on bicycle with middle finger on the brake: Jarkkos at Flickr, photo here.

Zombies: Undeath and Destruction

Fri, 20 Apr 2007 13:30:48 GMT

The first question that comes to mind when I start thinking about building a zombie game is this: how hard is it to kill a zombie, and how effective are various household objects as implements of zombie destruction?

A zombie was once a human, and so it has the properties of the human body: hard bones, thick flesh, joint cartilage, etc. So, the bodily toughness of the players and their undead assailants ought to be about the same. The primary question to be answered is what it takes to stop a zombie from being dangerous.

I ask these questions of myself: How much damage can a zombie really do to a person? At what point should a zombie stop being a threat? Should blowing a zombie's head off make the zombie stop attacking?

A zombie bites through the back of a victim's neck in order to sever their spinal cord.

I think zombies should be strong. They should not be able to move quite as fast or as agilely as the living, but they should move in a motivated fashion and desperately grab onto their victims once they are within distance. Once latched on, they should throw punches, bite, scratch, gouge eyes, and otherwise employ the worst of deadly fighting tactics to bring their opponent down. When zombies have beaten and surrounded a victim, they bash the living victim's head wide open so that they can gorge on brains and blood.

This is in contrast to the view of zombies that I have seen in some movies: slow-moving, unmotivated, launching ineffective attacks at opponents.

The next area I'm interested in deals with zombie destruction. It is a well-known fact that a shotgun is a good way to deal with zombies. However, some others seem questionable.

If you have a pistol, what is it going to do to a zombie? Against living foes, it's great - putting a hole in somebody is sure to mess up the bloodstream, and possibly cause an affected organ to fail. However, what if anything should it do to a zombie? Zombies don't need blood or a beating heart or a working brain, do they?

It seems to me that the ideal way to stop a zombie is to make him less dangerous, and less mobile. This starts Holy Grail-style by chopping off arms and legs. Removal or heavy damage to the zombie's head should disorient the zombie, either causing it to stall in action or causing it to charge and flail wildly in random directions.

A shotgun can blow off an arm or leg or head. This makes it a good zombie-killing tool. A big knife can remove limbs as well. I hate to ask, but does anybody have any idea how hard it is to remove a limb from a body? Can it be done in a hurry? A sword would be better yet. I personally believe that the ultimate zombie-killing weapon would be a katana, allowing its wielder to quickly remove limbs from attacking zombies. An automatic rifle might also be quite effective, allowing you to essentially rip a zombie in two.

So, where does that leave household items? Each house generally has a few big knives. A baseball bat could break bones or smash heads, doing a fair job at disabling zombies. Chairs and table legs can act as similar bludgeoning weapons. Many households have chainsaws, which while not being very easy to wield, can presumably dismember a zombie pretty well.

Reader, tell me what you would use to kill zombies if you were put in the situation. Tell me what you think it ought to take in terms of physical strength, time, and skill. Could you personally take on two zombies at once? How about five? Could your sister take on a zombie? How about your mom, or your grandpa? Do you think that each zombie after the first would get progressively easier to kill, given the practical experience that you would gain?

For martial artists in the audience: do you think that you could actually dismember a person if it came right down to it? Could you break so many bones that an assailant wouldn't be able to grasp you? Can you effectively break the legs of others using kicks that do not harm your own legs?

These things I want to know. Help me out here -- I want to make the most mechanically realistic damn zombie game BYOND (and the world!) has ever seen.

Creative Commons credit for zombie pic: j.lee43's Flickr photostream - picture here

Inspired by XKCD

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 11:08:39 GMT

Today, as I was biking back to town, I passed by a girl waiting at a street light. She was really cute, and had a bicycle leaning against her. I smiled at her as I went past, then crossed the street a little further down.

Just then, the light turned and she started walking across the street. I noticed that she did not have a bicycle at all -- she had a unicycle! As I was biking away, I suddenly remembered this XKCD strip and decided to turn back. I met up with her on the sidewalk, and said, "So, you like to ride your unicycle around town?" -- ten minutes later, she gave me her number. Who knows - maybe the cute German girl with the unicycle is the one for me? At least I might get to see her again before I leave town.

Two games that came to me in dreams

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 07:06:11 GMT

The last two nights, I have had vivid dreams about games. Neither was necessarily a BYOND game, but I might be able to implement them in BYOND nonetheless. As a side note, both of the games seemed very intense and interesting in my dreams, but I can't remember all the details that made them so awesome. Maybe I can improvise?

The first game was essentially a TCG, but it was played very differently. There was a central area called The World, where cards were stacked in seven columns. At the top of each column was a special card, and one way to win the game was to have 4 of those cards in your possession. The other way to win was to kill your opponent with damage.

The game was played sort of like the solitaire game Free Cell -- each player had 4 free cells that they could move card freely to and from. Each player also had a private area with four columns of cards that, at the beginning of each turn, was added to from the deck. There were specific rules about how cards could be moved around, and cards could be removed from the piles if certain requirements were met. For example, you could cast a spell by moving it onto a power card of the right specifications and then discarding both cards. In this way, it was difficult to get to the top of a column in the World without filling your free cells up -- and once there's a goal card in your free cells, you have one less free cell to use the rest of the game. Remember that you could win by filling all 4 free cells with goal cards, found at the tops of the 7 World columns.

Another detail that I remember was related to creatures. You could send a creature to protect a single World column, and as long as your creature protected it only you could take cards from that column or put cards on it. Your opponent could kill the creature with a spell or with one of his own creatures, and then the column would be free for all players to use again.

The game seemed really interesting, and because the gameplay is so different from other TCGs I've played, I am very tempted to start putting formal rules together to make a playable game.

The other game was a cooperative "escape the zombies" game, where players start in a somewhat fortified house and must make it to a distant evacuation point by improvising weapons, finding or stealing better weapons along the way, and always fighting off lots of zombies. This could definitely be done in BYOND, but it was an FPS-style game in my dream. It's interesting that I perceived it distinctly as a game that I was playing, rather than as a reality that I was living. It was interesting in that teamwork was needed to fend off the zombie hordes, collect supplies, etc. One player would not have been able to complete a scenario alone, and in my dream I was part of a clan that was racing another clan to the evacuation point. At one point, we saw them in the distance and threw our only grenade at them.

When you live games, you dream games, eh?

70 kilometres, 7 midgets. Coincidence?

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:17:40 GMT

You decide!!!

First, let me note that I have never seen a midget "in the wild" before. That is, whenever I have seen midgets, they were advertised; midget car racing, midget pony riding, midget boxing, a midget in a movie or TV show, whatever. But today, on a long bike ride, I observed 7 midgets completely in-context, which I perceived as very strange since I have never really seen a midget acting like a normal, everyday person. First was a pair of midgets, a man and a woman, walking down the street. All of the other 5 were alone, just wandering through crowds in the city or walking alongside the road.

Oh, and riding 30 kilometers in the dark is not that fun. It's really hard to read signs, avoid cars and potholes, etc. My body hurts.

Peace. (of cake.)

Web trends: BYOND

Tue, 16 May 2006 17:42:29 GMT

Check out this link:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=BYOND

BYOND must mean something totally different in Hebrew. Can any Hebrew-speaking BYONDers help me out? Or does somebody feel like trying to get some answers out of Ye Olde Babelfish?

Dungeons and Dragons

Tue, 16 May 2006 13:09:00 GMT

I just thought I'd put a post in here about my fairly new Dungeons and Dragons project. It's a nice break from my other things, and it's got me really excited about some of the things BYOND can do these days. I expect that my excitement will explode when I get the chance to implement the BYOND 4 features into this project!

The aim of the project is to allow groups of friends to connect via the internet in order to play Dungeons and Dragons. There is no attempt to eliminate the DM -- everything is under his control, as it should be. Rather, the attempt is to give the players and the DM the best tools possible in order to facilitate the game with as few restrictions as possible.

I've chosen a little motto/slogan/reminder of what I'm trying to do: more roleplaying, less rollplaying. If I can give players that, I will be happy with my creation! I intend to deliver it by taking advantage of the computer's ability to look up stats, perform rolls, and report the right information to the right people in order to integrate the rules tightly with the flow of gameplay so that there are no awkward pauses to roll dozens of dice, look up stats, or examine rulebooks.

I am doing alright programming the interface, but I could use a lot of help with graphics and artwork. If anybody with a Dungeons and Dragons-ish artwork style is willing to do some artwork for me, I'm willing to pay a decent amount (upwards of $50 sounds reasonable to me) for the service. I would also appreciate some help with documentation, XML-ization of some abstract data, and testing of the program. If anyone is intersted in helping with the project, drop me a line via email (piratehead c/o gmail dot com).

The hub entry for the project can be found here:
http://www.byond.com/hub/PirateHead/DnD

Updates come pretty quickly when I have time to work, and once the game is ready for its "beta" testing stage, I will start soliciting and responding to advice from DnD players and DMs in order to improve the quality of the program. Until then, Praise Cthulhu the Great and Terrible!

Opiate for the Masses and Il Ni�o open for Static X!

Sat, 03 Dec 2005 11:48:08 GMT

I went to see these three bands and I got a picture for everybody. If you get a chance to see any of them, take it. They put on great shows! I've had the songs stuck in my head for a week now.

Il Ni�o rocking out

Important Announcement

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 10:59:32 GMT

An important announcement follows.

An important announcement follows.

An important announcement follows.

An important announcement follows.

An important announcement follows.

I have two cows.