Tuesday nights just are not meant for sci-fi. Repeat after me: Friday night. That’s when all of the hard workin’ geeks out there (like myself) just want to kick back with a cold beverage and let the TV watch them. Tuesday nights, that the most boring night of the week. Tuesday is just the graveyard that Monday gets buried in.

I’m not a fan of SGU, I stopped watching after the mid-season finale last season, but the show has some hope. I think they could do a lot to make it super exciting like SG-1 (and to a lesser extent SGA) used to be… But handicapping them by putting the show on Tuesday night. Wow, that is like a nail in the coffin.

I am not sure what the advertising for the show was like this season, I sure have not seen non-stop promos for it. Maybe SyFy wants the show to tank… That’s a bit of a shame, the franchise is a great concept. It seems like they tried too hard to make it into Battle-Stargate-Galactica with this incarnation, but hey, at least it wasn’t vampires. (Atlantis, I am looking sternly in your direction…)

At any rate, seeing this post has inspired me to compare the ratings for the various shows to see if this is an isolated thing, or is the series really sinking. My current hypothesis is that it is probably not doing real well.

Hopefully the next iteration (if there is one) will avenge the fallen.

It was so very cool to get a behind the scenes peek at what was going on with a group of people making a top notch game. Other developers began doing this also, and soon there was a nice little ecosystem of plan updates flying around. This was all pre-RSS.

Over time the .plan file fad kinda fizzled out and died. But now with the rise of twitter, it seems like it could see a come back. True, 140 characters is not a lot of room to explain certain technical issues, but John Carmack’s tweets are a step in the right direction. I’m glad he’s back.

I own all 10 seasons on DVD. Even the last one, which *really* wasn’t the greatest.

When Stargate Universe was announced I was skeptical. I wasn’t big on Stargate Atlantis, but I decided that the new series deserved a fair shake.

So I watched the first half of the season. It went from “Not bad” to “Ehhh” to “*sigh*” to “Why bother” pretty quickly for me. Since it was taking a 4 month break between the first and second half combined with me not really caring about the major characters, I never watched the second half.

Today on the most excellent Stargate site, Gateworld.net, they released some ratings numbers. It looks like I wasn’t alone in my decision to tune out. Check out this nifty plot I made of the ratings over time:

*sigh*…..

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5288759/flickr-founder-calls-nuked-user-a-dick

Overall I found myself agreeing with the various comments and evaluations of each game type (pacman, tetris, etc.). But when I got to the end of the “Advanced” topics section, I laughed out loud:

RPG – if you hate your life (and some apparently do), this obviously final year attempt at video game programming glory is likely to end badly.

That pretty much sums up my experience so far with my attempts to make a “simple” RPG. There’s a lot going on in a typical RPG, and it takes a lot of effort and attention to detail to pull it off and make it look good and play well. And even then, if you manage to get the mechanics of the game engine working semi-decently, then you have a tall order to fill by creating the contents (scripts, maps, graphics). Needless to say it can quickly become a huge time sink. Which isn’t to say it isn’t fun, because it is. But when you get overwhelmed on a project like this where you are working for yourself (i.e. not getting paid to work on it) it becomes very difficult to get your motivation back.

Personally, I’m hoping to get my motivation back to work on my little project some more. I think what I’ll probably wind up doing is working on it in-between other projects.

Easter Eggs are little hidden things in side of a bigger program. Some times it just the developer’s names, other times it can be something totally unexpected like a flight simulator hidden in a spreadsheet program. With the power of Javascript and nice tutorials like this one, there’s a lot of opportunity to have some real fun!

Just think, with all of the computing power a modern browser affords us developers, it should be very easy to recreate tons of games from the Atari 2600, early Nintendo systems. The imagination can very easily run wild….

One of the best parts of the show is when the developers are either talking about or pitching their new games. Just from hearing the titles of the games I wish some of them had been made! Cool titles like “Monkey vs. Cobra” or “Hobo Killer” or “Family Ties: The Video Game”. Plus some of the shots of the games looked pretty funny too. Check out the whole list here: Games featured on Code Monkeys

All of those wacky titles reminded me of all the times in other movies, TV shows, games, etc. I saw a “fake” video game and thought it was the coolest idea ever. Like “Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster” on the Simpsons. Or “Astro Chicken” in the Space Quest series. Classics!

And thanks to the wonders of the internet/web2.0/lazy web/wikipedia, there’s a massive list of all of these fictional games! Check out the list here: Fake Games

Seeing all of those games there got me thinking: Wouldn’t it be cool if someone made some of these games based on just the title? (Or in the case of shows like the Simpsons, take the clip of the game and expand it into a full fledged game!)  That would be so cool. So cool in fact, I think I’m going to start doing that, looking at a title and then trying to come up with a game. Cheesy, yes. Wacky, you bet. Fun? Lets find out.

1. It sounds like a game I would have really been interested in
2. Although it had been out for some time, I had never heard of it
3. I’m wanting to make a RPG that isn’t based in a dungeon
4. The world needs new games that aren’t just derivative sequels of the same-old-same-old

Its always sad when a product is retired, but this situation sounds bad. According to the comments on the Ramapant Coyote site, lot of people are feeling the same way I do. But at the end of the day, its the author’s call, and in this case the author decided to pack it in.

I stated in #4 above that the world is too full of games that aren’t anything special. That’s why indie games are so exciting. Many are of the games that are made on the indie seen are passion works on the part of their creators. As a result these games are different than what you normally find in a store. They try new things, they take chances.

But sadly, just as in real life, sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. I hope Mr. Moffat finds the success he is looking for in his future endeavors.

As a side note, if you try to install pyglet on a Mac, there is a small catch. I’m running 10.4 Tiger which uses Python 2.4. Pyglet.org does offer a dmg file to install itself, but it doesn’t work. The reason for this is that Pyglet does need ctypes, and ctypes did  not become a standard part of python until 2.5. So, to get pyglet to work on your Mac, you’ll need to get (and build) ctypes, or install Python 2.5. I installed ctypes and found it to be pretty painless.

Its still in an alpha state, but I thought it sounded interesting so I decided to take a look at it. Compared to pygame, it seems to be a little more streamlined. I’ve never really push pygame to the limits, so I can’t really compare the two as fully as I would like. One thing that I did like were the demo apps and the examples in the documentation. They were concise, yet demo’ed useful things that I would want to do in an app.

I started reading the documentation after lunch the other day and within a few minutes I found myself modifying the code as I read through the docs. Within 5 minutes I decided that I would try a sprint: Could I implement a quick and dirty game of pong within an hour using pyglet? Well, the answer is Yes!

After playing around for an hour I had everything except the computer’s paddle in place working. A few days later when I had some time I spent and additional 15-30 minutes (while watching the game on TV) and knocked out the “AI” for the computer player. This isn’t award-winning code or game play (the bounding box collision test is pretty crappy), but it did show me that I could get something done quickly using this framework.

So, check out pyglet. Here’s the code to my craptacular version of pong. (There are 3 files, two images for the paddles and the ball, and the source file pyglet_pong.py)

Now I know what you are thinking, but its not a crazy thing to do. In a situation where you can’t see the display or access the controls (for example with an iPod Shuffle, or when I have my iPod mini hooked up to my car stereo and I have to control it with the CD changer controls which only allow skipping and turning the shuffle on or off) this “random searching” is actually a pretty good strategy. Basically you randomly skip through songs until you get to the artist you are looking for. Once finding the artist, turn off the shuffle part and search one song at a time until you find the one you are looking for! Pretty straightforward and a fun way, well ok, a way to pass the time while sitting in traffic.

Norvig’s article talks about the math behind this type of search. Specifically he solves how long it would take to find a song (on average). He describes the problem as a Markov Decision Process that can be solved using a value iteration algorithm. Its amazing how something that sounds so complicated is actually pretty straightforward. The code that is used to implement the solution is in python and it is pretty short so it is doubly impressive, at least to me.