tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-26862178951074443922009-10-12T23:29:36.629-07:00A small blog to talk about games, game design, OddCo, programming, and other random stuff.Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.comBlogger17125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-7965152471869610172007-11-28T21:55:00.001-08:002007-11-28T21:58:13.195-08:00

I've moved my blog to a wordpress hosted location. You can find it here at:Zeroth Code.

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-49248384556973688152007-11-26T18:06:00.000-08:002008-12-11T00:26:34.529-08:00

I've never seen funny graffiti before (except on the internet), and I had to take a picture of this, and show how it compares to regular bathroom stall graffiti.Yes, that is a mini-debate on Karl Marx. Complete with slashdot style moderation. In a bathroom stall.Now, contrast that to the normal bathroom stall graffiti... which I cannot show you here. I'd probably get in trouble for posting hate

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-68564140357826225092007-11-22T19:24:00.000-08:002008-12-11T00:26:34.681-08:00

The secret to making good girl's games is this: make good games.Pretty simple. Thats the conclusion I've come to after talking with a few female gamers I know. I will paraphrase a bit of an interview I did with a close personal friend, whom goes by the pseudonym Ruby.Ruby is an artist, in almost any medium. She wants to convey emotion, meaning, and depth in her work, and from what I've seen, she

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-4055529840988839392007-11-20T19:15:00.000-08:002007-11-20T22:15:52.962-08:00

Storytelling is a difficult business, particularly in games. And good storytelling is the last great avenue of game design to be focused on, in this age ever-improving graphics and AI.The reason why it has been largely ignored is mainly because it is hard. Faster processors, better algorithms will not ever improve stories in games. We are used to thinking primarily of one-way storytelling, of a

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-15458900453774331402007-11-18T07:07:00.000-08:002007-11-19T13:40:05.435-08:00

And now for the promised RPG AI part II, a follow up of part I. The second arena of AI in an rpg, are the npcs, non-player characters.That has been most of the focus for AI work in most rpg games. Consequently, the state of the art is much more advanced. The reasoning behind this, is to tell a story. To tell a good story. And people standing around repeating the same thing ruins the effect of

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-32905957306027823372007-11-16T10:08:00.000-08:002007-11-16T10:37:53.715-08:00

My fellow blogger, The Recursion King, has made an interesting post over here, talking about an initial brainstorm for a model of AI.I say initial, because its nowhere near complete. In fact, what he proposes has been done before.Its not the data access and storage that makes consciousness, its what happens with that information that we do not yet understand. I'll use the example of a friend of

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-5592245195463447952007-11-15T09:29:00.001-08:002007-11-16T07:23:20.114-08:00

Design is a very big thing, for a lot of people. But I find its often misunderstood, or incorrectly applied. To start with, design does not mean the same thing to Interior decorators as it does to architects. But most people see design as more of the interior decorator kind, than the architect kind.Interior decorators do what I call appearance level design. And the benefits of appearance level

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-33352286944250664472007-11-09T20:53:00.000-08:002007-11-09T21:09:07.034-08:00

As some of you may know, I am currently working on an rpg.(Who isn't it seems like).However, I was thinking about different AI ideas that could be implemented in an RPG. For this post, I will focus only on monster/enemy AI.Now, the first thing that can make rpg battles/dungeons a bit more interesting is a context outside of battle, where what happens in battle does affect the overall dynamic of

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-61680808242603965952007-11-09T10:59:00.000-08:002007-11-09T11:11:00.585-08:00

And what I mean specifically, is donating money to small, open-source, or even shareware programs.They do not make you pay up front, and I do agree with what Jeff has to say on this issue. But for me, the best project that deserves my money, is Notepad++. It is a simple, immensely powerful text editor. It starts in less than a second, even on slower systems, makes as much of the screen available

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-10740233846626974632007-11-07T09:51:00.000-08:002007-11-07T09:52:37.500-08:00

.mcrmeebo { display: block; background:url("http://widget.meebo.com/r.gif") no-repeat top right; } .mcrmeebo:hover { background:url("http://widget.meebo.com/ro.gif") no-repeat top right; }

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-25914441191541323002007-11-04T18:10:00.000-08:002007-11-04T18:20:35.647-08:00

Imagine my surprise, when I go to open up for my job this morning, and there's a police car waiting for me. Seems a bunch of laptop boxes were found nearby, and they wanted to know what was going on. I go in, start opening, and find a frickin' gaping hole in the ceiling.It turns out they had used an axe, and cut a hole to get into the storeroom, and not the sales floor which has security. Then,

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-2742518199171038482007-11-03T21:49:00.000-07:002007-11-04T06:29:06.208-08:00

Songbird is awesome. It has a huge amount of potential, especially in the current culture. Songbird is an open-source web-based music player. First, let me detail why I think Songbird is so awesome.It is based on MozillaI'm a big fan of open-source, for many reasons, but I'll also be one of the first to admit its failures. (That shall come in another blog) Now, having Songbird based on Mozilla

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-42441044810450835542007-11-02T21:43:00.000-07:002007-11-02T22:16:57.180-07:00

Today I interviewed for a job as webmaster for the UBCO Phoenix. Its an university newspaper, published bi-weekly.They're an interesting group, pretty fun. All macs in the office, something else to note. It seems like creative groups always use macs, but thats aside from the point.They want a webmaster, because, to put it plainly, their website is boring. Also, their was a bit of work involved in

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-44591635536904873522007-11-02T21:08:00.000-07:002007-11-02T21:30:26.054-07:00

A current project of mine, aside from pesky schoolwork, is an rpg, with my best friend, Ruby. The first tool we need is a map making tool, which is in the progress. See, with our own map making tool, we could add the features /we/ wanted to it.This brings an interesting problem to the table, however. How do you deal with asset management on a large scale? Particularly, for people that may not be

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-84735094106951615632007-10-30T15:10:00.000-07:002007-10-30T15:15:13.863-07:00

I had posted recently about my issues with the programs deluge and azureus. Deluge, I managed to fix by following the instructions in their faq. Oddly enough, despite how helpful that it was, I felt that it was misplaced.Why should I, the user, have to go to the faq to find out why the free program has stopped working? Even a simple dialog, "Configuration files corrupted, please see our faq for

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-37727699384174944452007-10-30T08:13:00.000-07:002007-10-30T08:20:53.786-07:00

So, one of my favourite websites, Meebo, has launched an application api. What this means is that you can now piggyback on Meebo's massive userbase, to launch your application for multiple people to interact.When facebook released their api, I wasn't much interested. There have been some interesting apps, but I don't see the use, the... benefit of all that work. We can't harvest data, we can't

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2686217895107444392.post-92200778263844500262007-10-28T18:06:00.000-07:002007-10-28T18:25:03.517-07:00

I've been having some issues(again) with bittorrent programs. I only have these issues on Linux it seems(Ubuntu specifically). However, its the way they blow up that illustrates one of the key sources of bugs in code: error handling.In the first place, there is Deluge, primarily a python bittorrent client. A very nice one... but it fails in a pretty mundane way. Right now, it will not add nor

Zerothhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/18030818603671269701noreply@blogger.com2