I'd be good with January 1, simply because I'd might actually get it done then.

EDIT: Bah, who I am kidding, knowing me, I still won't manage to get anything other than the HUD up.

Only used about 2.5 TB/month, but every week you are with Dreamhost, they increase your disk quota and bandwidth. And I've been with them for a very long time, so I had a pretty good allocation though I really stopped paying attention at the 6 TB point.

As for how I use the 2.5 TB, well, I host sites for friends and family. I have a few Debian repositories, and I mirror various random things. Plus, I have my own sites and forums, my wife's photography and movie sites, the family sites, my brother's image collection, and the like. Somewhere in there, I managed to fill it up. Which means I'll offer to mirror the Commonplace compilation when someone creates it, just like I did for the last one.

Lately, I've been having the same problem. I do get rather precise set of ideas, mechanics, plots, sketches, but when it comes down to actually programming the damn thing... nothing. Of course, much of this is because of the chaos going on in my life right now (starting with Iowa flooding and going right into this weekend), but there is still some blockage that simply is preventing me from finishing relatively simple projects (Baby Squid God, for example).

I do much better if I take one little thing and focus on it. Just write it enough to get the unit test through, then work on the next. Breaking things down into their smallest component (such as calculating damage from a hit) and working on it sometimes helps with moving forward. The same thing for writing, I noticed. When I find myself not writing, I just write a  scene, then another. Instead of focusing on an entire chapter.

I use Dreamhost, but I was up to 6 TB/month before they switched me to the "unlimited" plan. Dreamhost also has the Files For Life thing which is a pay once for unlimited downloads of any one file. It might appeal to some people. Yeah, they sometimes get overloaded, but for what I pay (250/2 years), its pretty good deal for me.

http://2dboy.com/2008/11/13/90/#comments

Some of the other comments 2D Boy has on the topic is pretty interesting. They aren't really surprised about the 90% (though its an informal number) and they also said that stopping thousands of pirates only results really in one additional sale. I think they have a sane and reasonable view of things, but I'm also VERY glad they still went forward to not adding DRM, even guessing at what would happen.

That's the one problem with fighting games. You can play the game for years and then get beat by some button mashing little kid punk who never played the game before.

Or a wife who randomly slams the buttons until she figures out a special I can't defend against, then spams it.

Well, right now I'm using it with a bitmap in between it. Mainly because ShivaVG isn't really up to playing with C# as far as I know. So, I do SVG -> Bitmap -> OpenGL Texture.

For the SVG rendering, I found a really nice C# SVG library (http://codeplex.com/svg). That gets me a System.Drawing.Bitmap object which is pretty trivial to throw into an OpenGL texture.

If I was working with C/C++, I would use rsvg + gdk to get the data and throw that into a texture. Now, it has a few flaws, I still can't rotate the sprites very well, but for this entry's purpose, it will do. Plus, I abstracted it enough that I could drop in a better one if I happen to find it.

Eh, when giving a "please enter your Paypal email address to finish the fight", I'll just go to games that don't do that. Say, World of Goo or Crayon Physics Deluxe. Making someone pay for something just means you lose a percentage of the people simply because it you just put up a barrier for their enjoyment. And most of the players will take the path of least resistance and either give up the game saying "I would have won that fight, good enough" or go on a forum "I need a end boss crack, ASAP!".

Hypercard was a great program to screw around with. I lost track of the number of point and click adventures I made with that while waiting for the teacher to explain a for loop to the rest of the class for the tenth time.

Been slowly working on this, but lots of things have gotten in the way. *sigh* Mainly that entire "work" thing since I work on time critical projects (tax software is one of those fields that cannot be late), so I haven't had much time to work on this. But, I've been slowly working on the first sector of the first stage, the cavemen area. It has a basic interaction layer done in SVG, which is then parsed by the computer so I can use Inkscape for everything.



Most of the stage is going to be grayscale, except for things directly related to the other realms. So, the magenta things are going to be power ups for the stage. The BSG can't climb up things (until much later, so that big ladder is actually an advanced thing), but he'll get teleports that let him go through doors and pop to the top of larger cliffs. He can climb up single square heights (slowly) until he gets the teleport, then he'll just appear at the top.

The door in the lower left is another advanced thing. He won't be able to open that until he can figure out how to actually open doors instead of teleporting through them. I thought it was an interesting approach and (just as hopefully) will point out, he really isn't from reality.

As for actual programming. SVG loads into OpenGL very nicely, automatically scales as you change resolution (F12 to full screen, F11 to cycle through the resolutions clear up to 1680x1050). Having a little bit of trouble with the animation for the figures. Mainly because while I can do one, I have a bit of trouble figuring out the coordinates of all the pieces without an editor. So, I'm making a quick pose editor to help me get the BSG at least moving.

Most of the times when I lose CD's, it is because they fell off the desk and cracked. And take "fell" and replace with "sadistic cat who likes to shove things off desks". There were a couple times when I found no CD cracks simply because I didn't want to buy another copy of the game just to keep playing it.

As for slowing down cracking, I remember reading an article about cracking Mario 64. Apparently the developers put a couple, slightly different versions of the game on the CD, then bounced around the versions. It also didn't crash right away, but later in the game, so you would have to play for a few hours to see if you succeeded. I thought that was cool, just as the thank you to the developers from the crackers for making a fun challenge.

After looking at my coworkers code, it doesn't really enforce coding style that much. There is a preferred style (camel and pascal case), but we have variable_names, variableNames, _variableNames, m_iVariableNames, and m_VariableNames all scattered in our code and you can tell which one of the developers came from the Java world, which ones came from C/C++, and which ones don't read our style guide. Same thing with function names.

Yeah, if you use the System.* libraries, you have to conform to their style conventions, but that is the same if you use SDL, OpenGL, or ALUT also. Or if you use Microsoft's C++ libraries (where everything starts with "C" it seems). Its harder to write a classless application in C# than C/C++, obviously, but you can do it.

I will admit, the things that I like the most of C# is its relatively ascetics (I started with C), the garbage collecting, and the threading.

Much of my childhood was me and my brother playing games together. Usually the RPG or puzzles games. I would type and we would solve it together (Agile/XP game playing?). It was actually a rather nice bonding experience that we both enjoyed.

My wife in general doesn't care for games. Most of the time, she does her thing (TV, quilting, martial arts) and I do mine (games and programming). However, there are exceptions. Shining Force Exa brought her into the room every time, if anything because of the centaur who would cry out "Behold my mighty blows" but we both kept hearing "Behold my mighty balls!" and would crack up. Occasionally, she would just come into my office and sprawl out on the guest bed to be near me, but other times, she would request (we have the "Interrupt Protocol" in our house to prevent obsession) that I come visit for 1, 5, 30, 60 minutes depending on her mood (i.e. a kiss, a snuggle, a short TV show, or a long one respectively).

But, we had a few struggles to getting at that happy medium. And a few relevations. I don't do WoW or anyone game like that, mainly because it would stress our relationship too much. And there are a few games she's requested I not have in the house again (God of War for example or any where dogs die in a whining noise).

One way of doing intoxication is to change the display messages as you are drunk. So, have the "You see a plain-looking woman". Then, while slightly drunk, change "plain-looking" to "good-looking". Then to "amazingly beautiful".

Another approach is to take the MS Paint Adventures approach and random change the verbs or nouns based on drunkeness. So, if you say "get keys", you can have "You don't see the pumpkin anywhere."

Probably the biggest advantage is flexible animation with skeletal systems, and procedural objects. (try making a fractal tree with bitmap graphics...)

I'm doing that for my competition entry, but the graphic style which I'm using is pretty good for it.

I'm in the process of creating a tool chain for retro vector graphics (i.e. vector graphics that resemble pixel art) for my games.

That would be cool to see.

I wouldn't go as far to say it will break every six months. It seems to take forever to get your user base to move major revisions and since you can install most of the different versions side-by-side, it really doesn't break. Most of my original stuff from years ago still runs rather smoothly on C# today.

There are advantages of C#. Memory collecting, classes are a bit easier to understand (mainly by the virtue of single inheritance), and Visual Studio is pretty nice for coding in it. There are advantages of C++, mainly more established and larger library selection.

But, it comes down to preferences. I prefer C# over C++, but I use both on a relatively daily basis (two products at work).

I also like that Mono runs pretty well on Linux for C#, so I get the cross-platform stuff I happen to enjoy.

Slightly dated topic, but browsing the web this weekend, I found another SVG renderer (in C#). It has a decent license and seems to work pretty well (gradients aren't working though, neither is clipping).

http://www.codeplex.com/svg

Still messing with it for my CPB competition entry, but seems to work nicely.

Bah, did a search and didn't find it.  Apparently my search fu blows.

http://lostgarden.com/2008/11/fishing-girl-game-prototyping-challenge.html

Not sure if anyone reads the same blogs, but I saw that Danc has a new prototyping challenge over on his site. I like doing Danc's stuff, I had a lot of fun writing CuteGod, but for those who like to write games but not care for graphics, its really nice that he provides the artwork for you. And this time, for his wife, which I thought was really sweet.

Naturally, he started giving out awards AFTER the CuteGod challenge. *pout*

Sadly, I'm struggling with my CPB competition entry, so I don't think I'll make it, but I thought someone might be interested in it.

Sadly, trying to get Ratchet: Deadlock isn't worth the rest of the PS2. But, very cool and I hope you make lots of money; I just gave six systems to the neighbors who didn't have any games.