Dak’s journey into oblivion…

Just busy, sorry.

I figured I’d just get this out as I have been meaning to say something for a while now, I am currently in a state of limbo with all projects & exploration. Most of the last month and a half has been spent prep’ing for this week in which I’ll be moving and on the 7th I start a new job… And with the new job, I have been trying to cram and learn a new language(s) and platform that I haven’t used professionally before.

Now the bad parts of this, I’m moving from doing cross-platform java development to doing .NET programming on Windows. Yea, the collective groan can be heard, but I need to do this for professional growth  as well as a challenge to myself. If I could land a job working on something outside of Java App Development or .NET I would jump at it, but the choices around my area are slim to nil on that. I would die to get a chance to professionally develop something like the JVM or the CLR, or even better to just work in the research field would just be astounding. But I don’t have those type options jumping at me, yet! (Always have to be optimistic!

The good parts, well, honestly, I need to do this as it will be a new challenge for me, which I really need. It does help me move forward with my goal of game development as I will get a better understanding of .NET and the Window’s API more as my C/C++ win32 knowledge has been falling to the wayside of late.  This will hopefully show me where I can best exploit the Window’s platform across the board for development and at the same time it open’s up even another platform to learn, mainly the XBOX360 via Microsoft’s XNA framework. Does that mean I’m doing only Windows development from now on? No.

Anyways, I just thought I’d post something so peopel don’t think I fell off the earth and died. More to come when  I have time.

I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know when and then I saw this post on one of Sun’s blogs… Well, it looks like today, June 26th, 2007, is the Save Net Radio day of silence. I have a personal vested interest in this as I used to help with an web station that played mainly oversea’s (read as mostly non-US based music) industrial/ebm stuff and while I don’t know how this will effect Simon and the station, I imagine out of principal he will be standing with this crowd today. For a list of all the stations standing up for this, check out this site.

I would suggest checking out Sword of the Stars and even more so it’s expansion: Sword of the Stars: Born of Blood. It’s a space based strat. game that is just awesome. My weekend got kissed good bye after my brother & friends got me to play to try it and play it with them during this weekend. Freaking awesome game. And the expansion intro video is just killer.

Well, drdoug from the OpenSolaris Games community gave me a tip to try from the last time I tried this, and he was right! The problem turned out to be that my in my home directory for the user the .profile file was given ownership to someone else… Possible a side effect of the 50 different ways I tried to get the user to work! As he mentioned, I did a “chown -R username .profile” to fix the problem. As a side note though, when I did “chown -R username *” it didn’t work, I would have thought that would have tagged every file in the directory? I’ll have to read up on it. Still no idea why a .profile file would block logging in via gnome/X… Someday I’ll figure that out!

Oh and just because I can, here’s a really blank screenshot of my desktop showing I’m on as my user!

Next up, finishing getting Wine to work correctly and then I might need to look at how to upgrade as I hear Build_66 is out now and well, I hear it has a lot of cool new stuff I should have!

Thanks again drdoug for the help!

Update:
I just wanted to add that I can finally choose a screensaver! So I went through all of them and found one called Fireworkx, it’s pretty awesome looking in the window and all that jazz… Try to run it, and, well, to put this very bluntly, it freaking CRAWLS on my machine!!!! The only thing I can guess is that happens because it can’t deal with the resolution I’m running at very effectively? (2560×1024 on a GeForce 8800) I tried changing the Visual selection up and down the list and nothing really helped, not even GL.  Talk about sad, I seriously hope that this isn’t a thing to come where I get really horrid graphics performance from this, I even have Nvidia’s drivers installed! :o(

Oh well, at least it runs!

These are rambling/notes for me to use later on to think about how I want to implement music in my game… Any advice or thoughts would be welcome!

Ambient music for normal interactions, such as exploring, can cause the player to be drawn into the story. It helps facilitate an emersion of the player into the experience. An example of this technique would be when your exploring a game world the music could portray various musical clues to how the game is going. For example, when you are exploring a new area, the mood of the music could be more dramatic/mysterious to give a feeling of uncertainty causing the player to have a “what’s around this corner” type moment, immersing them into the game even further.

The converse of this would be wandering around an already explored area, something where a friendly environment where the player has a lot of familiarity of the place. In a friendly area, the player, for instance, could be walking around a well guarded kingdom and know that they are, for the most part, relatively safe from harm as a guard, or something protecting the area, is always around to hear a cry for help. In such a case, a more lively/less suspenseful melody could be played creating an aural clue of the supposedly inherit safety of the environment.

Yet, when something bad happens, in that safe haven, the music could/should turn shocking and be dramatically intense to signify something seriously odd is happening, something that defies what you consider the normal for that area. An example of such a thing would be to say your characters walking through a field in a friendly kingdom, and some hooligans jump you and start beating on you. Now, that might happen often in other places, but in this patrolled well guarded kingdom, it’s unheard off! So possible you would be startled and the music should reflect that emotion.

Now another problem is how to deal with music in fights in a game. One thing I personally believe in is that game music should represent the situation at hand. As such, if you’re fighting a trivial thing, perhaps an easy going fight melody could be used without much dramatic flair to the music. But imagine if it was an epic fight, where your chances of winning are slim, especially if you have never fought something like this before? Being that your chances are slim, then the epic encounter should have unique music reflecting the severity of the fight! But what if you’ve done something like this before, such as maybe you’ve raided a bunch of pirate ships in the past, but “what the hell, let’s do it again” would draw out music to show that yes, the encounter is serious, but hey, your a swashbuckling hero who has done this many times already… So in that case, perhaps the music would retain its intrigue and perhaps less intense to signify you’ve been there done that. (As my brother would say, BTDT…)

But what of fights in general or tasks you have to do? Shouldn’t there be some sort of music system to show the importance of those as well? “Oh, I just have to fly from Gamma-9 to GFR-1123 to drop off this load of Ore I got while mining a moon…” would rate on the *yawn* low key music that would signify it’s nothing big, but hey, it’s still telling you something is going on! Yet, if your picking a fight in a bar with 3 guys you seem to drunkenly recall they called you names, well, that situation, while not epic, would call for some intense music to give the player a “ah man I might be screwed here” type feeling…

Another thing worth doing is specific music related to certain area’s in a game. A prime example of this is from World of Warcraft (registered TM of Blizzard Entertainment…). In that game, whenever you enter a major key city, you get music for that city to help tell the story of what is. A proud trumpet playing tune to signify the glory and power of a city… Or a somber drum beat signifying a war setting where the culture of the city thrives on war and things related to it. And then tack on to that when you go exploring these cities, different sections of them could have music for that area as well… Walk into the Cathedral district in Stormwind and you get religious monk chanting music, but walk out among the rest of the city and it goes back to the music representing Stormwind.

These subtle little things help appeal to the player’s immersive side and draw them into the environment. I’ve seen people just sit in a game to listen to the music because they like it, they love the music. People humming music because it’s something that sticks with them has drawn them into your game world, and as such you retain them there and immerse them further into what your trying to present to them. A good music system can seriously help foster the growth of a game, and a bad one, well, it gets turned off… And eventually, the game gets turned of as well.

Well, I went to research the

X_mkdir: Not owner

Issue I’ve been having lately, and I came across this bug listing on the OpenSolaris bug system… Currently, there is nothing posted about it, but it looks like it is truly a bug. So the question becomes, what now? I’m going to think on that a bit.

Onto the next issue:

** (gnome-session:726): WARNING **: Unable to lock ICE authority file: /.ICEauthority

And on the other issue, I found this link, but it seems rather worthless, but I’ll research and try it this weekend. Hopefully I can find something out on it!

Update: I also found this, which I’ll look into as well.

If anyone knows what the deal is with either of these, please let me know!!

For the moment I’m going to rant about this common Agile “mantra”. First, I don’t have anything against Agile, nor have I done a lot of Agile Development enough to truly judge what it’s really like. From the limited experience I’ve had with Agile Development there are a lot of things I don’t particularly like… But ignoring that, I seriously want to rant about the abusive use of the term refactoring.
Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I know it’s taking me a while, and at that i was only just able to sneak a few minutes of time, but I wanted to figure out my user problems on Solaris. Doug (drdoug from OpenSolaris Games) sent me a few hints to look for and try. I didn’t ask if I could paste what he suggested in here, so I’ll paraphrase as I work through this really quick.

First thing I needed to do was to check that the user was created directly. He sent me some information on how to go about creating a user by hand and I haven’t gone that far yet. But I ran through and made sure everything else looked correct with what he sent me. He also suggested I drop into failsafe and try to load gnome-session there to see what was blocking it, and that there could be something under /tmp and /var/tmp. Well, I dropped to failsafe and tried to run gnome-session just to see what happened. I got a message stating that:

** (gnome-session:694): WARNING **: Owner of /var/tmp/orbit-dak is not the current user

(gnome-session:694): libgnomevfs-WARNING **: Unable to create ~/.gnome2 directory: Permission denied
Could not create pre-user gnome configuration directory `/export/home/dak/.gnome2/’: Permission denied

Well, first things first, I su’d and took care of the /var/tmp file. I have NO idea what an orbit al file is, but I might regret toasting it, but I figured it had to go. (Mental note: Google what Orbital files are… Guessing not related to the Band, which is spiff!)

After doing that, I tried gnome-session again and I get the last two errors left. First thought is to just delete them! But, that isn’t always a good idea. So instead I’m not sure what the proper way to do this is but it looks like from just trying to do anything that the user isn’t even allowed in that directory. So I su’d again and did a chown on the directory and its contents, maybe that will fix it?

Trying to run it again I gt

X_mkdir: Not owner
X_mkdir: Not owner

** (gnome-session:726): WARNING **: Unable to lock ICE authority file: /.ICEauthority

Well at this point I’m about out of time for this current run, but I definitely need to solve this one pretty badly. If I get anymore spare time tonight I’ll try to get it again.

I have been loving the way the desktop looks in OpenSolaris lately, it just feels very clean and smooth. But I didn’t make the connection about the Nimbus theme and the Java Nimbus L&F… It just hit me today I was sitting here at work thinking about it and was wondering “wow, I wonder how OpenSolaris already has it if it’s not out yet for Java! Those OpenSolaris folks move fast!!” … and then THUMP it hit me after reading the Nimbus SPEC on java.net… The Java L&F is based upon the OpenSolaris theme!! Dear god I’m slow at times!!! Actually, in my defense I just didn’t connect the two together as I just never even thought about it before today. I will say I am seriously excited to get Nimbus in Java! I love the theme in OpenSolaris and I think others outside of it will find it great and refreshing to use! Seriously cool stuff!

Anyways, break times over and I feel like a good laugh was just had at my expense… Fun times!