1. Things are going to get a lot more Delgar-centric around here. I’ve given my brother an account so he can contribute.
2. Registration is now invite-only due to excessive spam. I really didn’t want to do that, but I guess it’s a classic example of the annoying kid ruining it for everyone.
3. I’m going to try to update more consistently and frequently.
4. We may be moving the Delgar stuff to a new domain entirely. Stay tuned.

That is all.

This is not a review of that game, though. This is an idea I had when I fell into the sea in the game and discovered, in a way that completely shattered suspension of disbelief, that this game had the strangest way of dealing with a character being underwater that I’ve ever seen: I fell to the ground beneath the water as though it weren’t even there and saw a timer indicating how much air I had left shortly before dying.

This is a problem hardly unique to this game, or even its genre. The handling of water in games has traditionally either been to simply prohibit entering the water or to kill the player when they do so. For games where entering water is neither impossible nor a death sentence, it is typically either pointless or simply an excuse to introduce time pressure via need for air.

Some games do great things with water; a few have even focused on the aquatic realm. But these games have often been prone to gimmicks (Ecco the Dolphin, anyone?), and even the gimmick-free ones have been very rare exceptions to the overwhelming trend of simply ignoring the environment that covers over two thirds of our planet.

Enter Undersea.

Undersea is a game concept for an online persistent world in which play takes place entirely in the ocean. In other words, it’s an aquatic MMORPG.

The crux of the conflict that motivates play in Undersea lies in the interrelationships among various species of merfolk. These merfolk races are all options for player characters. Currently, I’m planning a proud, predominantly lawful, cetacean-inspired race of mammalian merfolk who would have to surface for air, a diverse race of actinopterygian (ray-finned fish, don’t ya know?) mer with neutral tendencies, and a shark-based race of merfolk with a penchant for chaos.

The initial social concept is to have the cetacean-mer and the shark-mer dealing peacefully with the fish-mer while being at war with each other.

In addition to the playable races, the world of Undersea would be populated by numerous other fantastic aquatic flora and fauna, from poisonous urchins and alien corals to fierce crustacean beasts and schools of harmless fish, to water-beasts plucked from legend like hippocampi and sea serpents.

The most interesting possibilities of an underwater game are not the potential creatures, though: they are the gameplay elements that the environment itself offers. In a 3D underwater game, the player has complete freedom of motion in all directions (up to the water line, anyway). Play underwater could be impacted by pressure due to depth. Fast-moving ocean currents could provide a mechanism for fast travel. Areas of oxygen deprivation could fill the same need that water in general is usually used for.

I think Undersea has great potential. As played-out as the fantasy genre is above sea level, I think there is plenty of life below for a game that wants to explore a realm that is already nothing if not fantastic.

These are the parity fix algos I’ve been learning, on the off chance that anyone cares:

• opposite corner swap [UFR/UBL]: (Uu)2 (Ll)2 U2 l2 U2 (Ll)2 (Uu)2 R U’ L U2 R’ U R L’ U’ L U2 R’ U L’ U
• adjacent corner swap [UFR/UFL]: (Uu)2 (Ll)2 U2 l2 U2 (Ll)2 (Uu)2 F’ U’ F U F R’ F2 U F U F’ U’ F R
• single edge flip [UF]: r2 B2 U2 l U2 r’ U2 r U2 F2 r F2 l’ B2 r2
• opposite edge swap [UF/UB]: (Uu)2 (Ll)2 U2 l2 U2 (Ll)2 (Uu)2
• adjacent edge swap [UF/UL]: L2 D (Ff)2 (Ll)2 F2 l2 F2 (Ll)2 (Ff)2 D’ L2

Note: [UFR/UBL] and [UFR/UFL] both start with [UF/UB], meaning the two beastliest algos (the corner swaps) are really only 14 moves to memorize! Yay!

Think about that for a moment, though. What does it mean if the first third of algorithm A is equivalent to algorithm B? It means the last two thirds of algorithm B are equivalent to A+B! That’s right, if you skip the edge swap lead-in, you can use the remaining 2/3 of the algo to solve both problems simultaneously! This also means you can do that part first, then swap the edges if necessary. Techniques like this are quite handy in simplifying otherwise beastly parity corrections.

By the way, I remember UF/UB with a mnemonic: “Both, both, outer, inner, outer, both, both.” Then I just need to rememver that it starts with U and alternates between U and L, and that they’re all 180-degree rotations. so… (Uu)2 (Ll)2 U2 l2 U2 (Ll)2 (Uu)2!

Now how the hell am I going to remember R U’ L U2 R’ U R L’ U’ L U2 R’ U L’ U ?! I guess I’ll just have to do it over and over until it becomes muscle memory.

… now to make flash cards. *whimper*

—

Notation variations: X* = Xx, 2X = X2, Xi = X’

Parentheses are used to distribute ‘ and 2, so (Xx)2 = X2 x2 and (F’ r’ U) would be F r U’… but I’m not sure why anyone would ever need that.

You’d think, in the era of web apps, whose only common design choice seems to be a lack of common design choices, that people wouldn’t care so much about the native-nowhere feel of platforms like Adobe’s AIR or clunky ports of console games to Windows.

Now, I should stress that nobody seems to mind the general concept of cross-platform development. That is, few people genuinely care that TweetDeck can be found on just about every platform ever created. No, what bothers people is when cross-platform development comes at the cost of features and harmony. The war that is going on is not against cross-platform development itself, but against toolkits that automatically, but half-heartedly, facilitate it.

Now, I’m a developer, and as a developer I can attest to the extreme difficulty of developing an application natively in multiple platforms without making some pretty significant concessions… but I am also, as all developers are, a user of software, and so I recognize the value of that work, even if it is difficult.

I don’t think the problem lies in the developers choosing to use cross-platform development tools… I think it lies in the nature of those tools. Consider the three biggest options available to a Python developer who wants to make a cross-platform application with windows, buttons, and all the familiar widgetry of the desktop world: They can choose to support each OS separately, rendering their UI with cocoa on the Mac, WinForms on Windows, and Gtk or QT on Linux, let’s say; or they can use wxPython or Tkinter.

Tkinter is the old-school way of developing cross-platform windowed applications in Python. It wraps the Tk windowing toolkit of tcl fame which, although it gets the job done, is notorious for looking wrong on every OS it runs on. Most newer cross-platform Python apps with native GUIs use wxPython instead, which wraps wxWidgets, which in turn uses the native windowing systems on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux (well, Gtk+ under GNOME… you get the idea), depending on where it is run.

So, in the world of native GUI development in Python, we can see the issue in microcosm. There are different ways of doing cross-platform development efficiently, but for the most part, the tools that currently exist for it often just aren’t very good at providing that native-everywhere feel that wxWidgets does such a good job of delivering.

The key benefits of cross-platform development – interoperability across devices and access to a wider audience – are easily nullified by interfaces that nobody wants to use. In addition, the existence of platforms with universal penetration (like the web) makes the value of platform-native development even lower.

Personally, I think the future lies not in the forest of native applications that currently grows wildly on iPhone OS and Android, but in advancements in web technologies like HTML5.

In the world of ubiquitous broadband, WebGL, and Chrome OS, will this hyphenated veteran of the buzzword war survive?

Will there be any reason for cross-platform when there’s only one platform?

In case you aren’t familiar, Git is a distributed revision control system. This means each copy of the repository is committed to independently (no need for a central server) and anyone can pull from anyone who publishes their copy and merge using sophisticated tools for doing so.

Dropbox is a pretty simple cloud storage system that works by automatically synchronizing a folder on your machine with a 2GB space (free version). It’s very similar to Ubuntu One, except it’s cross-platform. This “magic folder” concept is by no means new, but Dropbox is the best of the ones I’ve tried. It’s fast, easy, and works on (most flavors of) Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows.

The magic, for me, happened when I came to a simple realization. A Git repo is just a folder tree. All the data is stored in that folder tree. There are no scary invisible hooks into other parts of the filesystem to be concerned about… so what if I just put my project (a Git repo) into my Dropbox folder?

Thus far, I haven’t encountered any problems. Sure, it’s not quite as powerful as pushing and pulling using Git’s native tools, but it’s braindead easy to set up, and plenty good enough for anyone who just wants their project to magically be in two places in the same state.

Git + Dropbox = Pretty awesome.

Let’s refresh everything.

Thunk.

Zaman started at the noise that rang in the silence. The sound seemed to stretch and slow, like a passing siren obeying Doppler’s namesake. In one fluid motion, he flung his legs off the side of the hospital-style bed, slid to the ground, and instinctively reached for a gun that wasn’t there. His momentum carried him to the wall, where he crouched, as startled at his own reaction as at the alien sound.

As quickly as it had begun, it ended. The thunk became a tick, then another, and another. Zaman uncoiled, knocking his head on the ground. It was a clock.

After a few minutes of listening to the steady tick of the wall clock, Zaman finally got up and, having little else to do, sat on the bed and stared at the clock. It was a quarter to ten. whether it was ten at night or ten in the morning, he had no idea. The small, cold room had no windows, just an ominous-looking solid metal door, a small ventilation grate on the ceiling, and the nondescript bed, side table, and floor he had already become acquainted with.

As unsure as Zaman was of the time of day, he was even less sure of the time of year, or of the year for that matter. As he stared at the slowly advancing clock, he grinned in a moment of self-schadenfreude. Maybe the clock’s not even set right.

Zaman inventoried his memories. There was the room, of course. That was brand new. so was Xavifaxilariquantin. Then there was his name, and the dimmest recollection that he had had a life before this place, but for that life, he couldn’t remember an instant of it. Above the door, he found a new memory: “VAULT 14.”

He knuckled his forehead. Zaman was alone in an antiseptic room with severe amnesia and a word that sounded like the name of a drug floating through his mind. Either he was being treated for the amnesia, or he was a test subject.

Inexplicably, he favored the latter.

It is my contention that operating system choice is another.

For much of my life, like most computer users, I took MS-DOS, and then Windows, for granted. I was aware of MacOS, of course, and even of GNU/Linux, but I never felt any need to change these things. I knew how to trick Windows into doing almost anything, so why did it matter what I used? As a gamer, I was somewhat reluctant to throw all that away over ideological concerns I didn’t even understand at the time. So I didn’t, for years.

Ubuntu couldn’t have come at a better time for me. I was working and going to school, leaving no time for games anyway, and I had largely lost interest in playing games at all — I wanted to make them. In the summer of 2007, with the April release of Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn well settled, I gave Ubuntu the old college try.

I liked Feisty, to a point, but it was alien to me. It’s amazing what a logical leap it was for me to stop thinking in terms of drive letters. Seriously. That was my biggest point of confusion. Why? Windows had trained me to think that way. The physical disk is the root of the filesystem. That’s just the way it is. Right? Well, sure it is. Windows grew out of a very simple DOS way of thinking. For all I knew at the time, files were all literally just data on a disk. I had not grown out of the UNIX way of thinking, where files are simply symbolic names for, well, anything and everything.

October rolled around and Gutsy came out, but I wasn’t paying attention any longer. It would be a while before I heard the call loudly enough to answer it.

Finally, it was April of 2008. My birthday came and went, and like a personal gift from Canonical, Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron was released. This, as it turns out, was a big deal. Stability had arrived for Linux on the desktop. I had stopped playing World of Warcraft. The time was right for me to switch. And I did. I had been running Ubuntu on my laptop all this time (still Feisty), but after upgrading that to Hardy and suffering a catastrophic meltdown of Vista due to faulty DRM, I finally took the plunge on my desktop.

Things were initially shaky there. I dual booted Ubuntu and Windows XP for a while, but as XP cobwebbed and the disk slowly accumulated enough bad sectors to mandate its abandonment, I made Ubuntu my sole OS. I switched from Photoshop to The GIMP, from Trillium to Pidgin, and from WinAmp to Rhythmbox, and every time I chose open source software, my life seemed to improve. As Ubuntu has grown, I have grown with it, embracing the UNIX way of thinking, and the Ubuntu way of life.

Today, I realized I have come full-circle. I don’t really think about my OS much anymore. My desktop runs Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala, and any day now, it will run 10.04 Lucid Lynx. My netbook, which came with XP, was immediately switched over to Ubuntu Netbook Remix, which is going to be rebranded as “Ubuntu Netbook Edition” soon. I take the Compiz Fusion desktop effects for granted (especially super-key zooming), and I wouldn’t last a day without my (Linux-based) Android phone (a Nexus One, preceded by a G1).

Whenever I find myself having to use Windows, even briefly, I find it genuinely jarring. Nothing works the way it should. ls is gone, with dir serving the closest analogous purpose, there’s no included compiler toolchain, and if I want to install software, I actually have to search the Web to find it! I have become addicted to the configure; make; make install dance, the sublime elegance of apt-cache search <blah> and sudo apt-get install <blah>, I have no problem with the notion that my disk somehow seems to contain a copy of itself in the raw reference at /dev/sda, I am totally at home on GNU/Linux, and I wouldn’t trade my terminal emulator for all the other software in the world.

At this point, the thought of having to switch to Windows is crazier than the thought of switching to GNU/Linux ever was… and the idea of my flash drive being at G: is now as absurd as once its being at /media/KINGSTON seemed.

Ubuntu is Linux for Human Beings Lightware.