2005-08-01 10:18 UTC Holiday
I will now be gone for two weeks. I can't remember the last time I was off-line for such an extended period of time.
I'll miss you.
Pingbacks: 1
I will now be gone for two weeks. I can't remember the last time I was off-line for such an extended period of time.
I'll miss you.
Pingbacks: 1
A couple of days ago I was about to go to bed when I smelt the acrid smell of a melting electromagnet. After some sniffing around I determined the source to be my Thinkpad's power supply.
This is the second time that a laptop power supply has burnt out on me. When I went to the system admininistration team at the office for a replacement part, they told me to not work so hard...
What worries me is that when I noticed that my power supply was melting inside, my reaction wasn't "Quick! Turn off the power and shut down the laptop!", it was "Hm, I wonder if it would last the night. Maybe it might catch fire, I'd better put it in something fire-proof so that it doesn't light my clothes or the floor on fire. If it does catch fire the smoke alarm will go off anyway so I'll have time to douse it, no problem." and it was only after about 30 minutes that I realised that if it did burn up it would take the wire with it and thus light my bed on fire. Only then did I actually reluctantly turn off the laptop and unplug the power supply.
I think I may be a little too addicted to this Internet thing.
Xiven visited Kamakaze and I this week.
What we've done so far, in no particular order: played Twilight Imperium III, played Robo Rally, played Ricochet Robots, played with my trains, saw the naked statue park, visited Aker Brygge, went to a hardware store, ate at Gio's and Taj Mahal, watched Monarch of the Glen, played Super Smash Brothers Melee, updated the firmware on my router (though that didn't reduce the random dropouts), went to a decent superstore (two bus rides away from my flat), and various other things.
The link is strong, it's disturbing. However it wasn't strong enough to overcome communication problems at the start of the week and so Xiven and I failed to meet at the airport.
Next week I'll be visiting family and friends in Geneva and other parts of Switzerland. Offline. For 15 days. Finally.
Allan and I were talking and we came up with an interesting idea for a game. (If someone wants to implement this, go ahead.)
The game would be an ordinary first-person shooter or first-person adventure game. The twist is that after playing it for a while, the plot involves time travel back to the point in time where the game started (or close to it): and you can see your character going through the start of the game, doing exactly what you did. That is, the game would record every move, every action that the player did for the first part of the game, and then replay those actions in real time when you travel back in time.
The cool bit is that to keep the story consistent, under no circumstances can the "original you" ever see "time-travelling you", since you didn't see yourself when you first played through the level. Thus, the game would have to keep track of whether the "time-travelling you" is ever in the field of vision of the "original you", and if it is, the game is over: Time Paradox.
Twists on this could be that you also have to make sure that the environment is in the state that you originally found it; for instance if a bridge is broken when you first play, it has to be broken when the "original you" gets to it when the "time-travelling you" is playing, even if that means bringing it down yourself.
And you can take this further. Time travel again, this time with two "original you"s and you have to keep out of the field of vision of both of them.
And you could, once you know you have a time machine, say "ok I'll go back in a minute and set it up so that this happens"...
Technically this is quite feasible. Field of view is a solved problem (lots of computer games involve having to sneak around unseen near patrolling monsters, e.g.); as is recording everything you do and then replying it when you next visit the level (racing games often have "ghost cars" so you can train against yourself).
The hard part is coming up with a decent plot.
I've been playing with Gtk# and Glade recently.
When trying to explain to Allan why I was using C# rather than other languages, I said that for the project I was working on I had been looking for a language that had good OOP support, and that had strong typing.
His response?
You don't need types, types are for girls.