Posts filed under 'Software'
If you haven’t been living under a rock, you’ve certainly noticed the growing number of prototypes of casual games implemented in browsers using their latest canvas and related technologies.
Actually, this is the kind of start of revolution you’ve been seeing in every computer generation at the beginning, this is just a repeating pattern. Just remember how the PC started around 1992/1993 with their first 3D games and mobile phones started a few years ago, too.
How long will it take until we’ve something like ScummVM ported to a browser? Or Another World? Or think about the Sierra Classics.
May 24th, 2008
Now this is what I really call retro: a side hosting classic Amiga games reviews.
They’re having articles from the following magazines: Amiga Computer, Amiga Power, Amiga Format, CU, Amiga Joker, Zero and Zzap! Currently they host more than 3000 reviews of nearly 2000 games. Awesome!
January 21st, 2007
It’s one of those days. Yes, exactly. I was installing software for evaluation on Windows when it happened at least three times to me that I didn’t see the last screen during the installation of this software because right in the second the screen came up I was writing text in another application and pressing either Return or Escape. They keystroke got received by the installers last screen and disappeared; right before I could read anything.
I really hate this.
This also happened to me the other day with a web-based newsletter application I was using. The application had opened a popup with a textarea which got updated every time there was something to report, like invalid email addresses. Every time the textarea got updated, the popup window received focus.
Guess what? I was happily surfing in FF the other time and closing some tabs with CTRL-W when out of a sudden the newsletter application grabbed the focus and, you guessed it, I was closing the popup which sends the newsletter out. Oh, did I mention that having this popup open was vital for sending the newsletter, i.e. closing the popup would stop sending the newsletter?
I complained immediately to the software company which admitted the problem but was unable to fix this because “that’s the way internet explorer works, try FF”. Ok, so I’m stupid, right, because I didn’t use FF? Learned another lesson, man.
Application developers should taken away the right to grab focus and bring out a window to the front which automatically grabs keyboard actions. It’s ridiculous.
Btw, I updated my blogs’ theme. Why is it so … spare? a) because most people today use some kind of RSS reader software anywhere and since I publish my articles as a whole there’s no need to visit the page and b) because I’m no designer, I don’t like the existing designs and don’t want to be just another copy of a theme. It’s basically a rip-off of Asa Dotzlers blog at the moment; sorry for that :-)
January 5th, 2007
I received my copy of Gothic 3 yesterday and because I’m currently moving to another flat I could only test it on my company IBM Z60 laptop. Unfortunately there’s a very annoying behaviour of Gothic 3: it forces the numlock to always be on! It completely ignores the user choice. On my laptop this is a problem because I don’t have a separate numeric block but they get maped over the regular alpha keyboards, which means that now in gothic I don’t have the keys m, j, k, etc. but they are numbers 0, 1, …
Which means that for example I can’t press the M key, because it is actually 0, which means jumping on the numeric one.
I crawled the ini files but didn’t find anything hinting that this behaviour can be disabled. I don’t understand what developers sometimes have at their mind. I sincerly hope that they issue a patch either removing this horrible thing or at least provide an ini setting for it.
October 14th, 2006
It seems that the dawn of fan made games is finally there. We’ve observed AGD Interactive releasing remakes of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II and currently working on a remake of Quest for Glory II, now Infamous Adevntures releases a remake of King’s Quest III. On the other hand we’ve also Screen 7 Entertainment working on a Indiana Jones based fan game called The Fountain of Youth.
This seems to become a very promising future about fan made games.
Download King’s Quest III
June 25th, 2006
Today I stumbled over the Quake2 AbSIRD project. It modifies the software renderer so that it renders the 3D environment of the game as a stereogramm.
If you think the hard part is to see the world, think again. It’s quite hard to follow the rapid 3D movement and even playing just a few minutes can give quite a headache. Anyway, quite interesting experience.
February 2nd, 2006
Ok, this is not another stab at a Microsoft product. To be honest, this time it does apply to many products, M$ is this case is really just an example.
I’m currently running the MS Visio 2003 Trial version, limited to 60 days. Visio is really great at visualizing things quickly. I haven’t yet found anything else which can be used with that ease. If anyone has some suggestions about alternatives, let me know.
To really get to know to a product you need to be able to utilize it and learning using keyboard shortcuts is a part of it.
For Visio, the first thing I wanted to is: how can I switch to the Pointer Tool? This is essential, whenever you use the Connector Tool at some point you need to go back to the Pointer Tool. I was hovering over the Pointer Tool in the toolbar. Nice, it was telling me it’s name. But it doesn’t give a hint about its keyboard shortcut. Maybe it has none?
So I searching through all the menus. I couldn’t find the Pointer Tool there. Why did I search the menus? Usually in the menus the name and the keyboard shortcut is written.
Asking the Help Assistant for keyboard shortcut luckily revealed the page for the first hit. The help page started out to be small but this is just because it has quite some categories which can be expanded/collapsed which are all collapsed initially. From this state I was searching for Pointer Tool but didn’t find anything because all categories where collapes. I had to expand all and then search again. Finally I found it. It’s CTRL+1.
I’m wondering why the keyboard shortcut can’t be next to it’s hover popup?
February 2nd, 2006
Now with the move in of the canvas element in browsers and the first prototypes of even 3D FPS games popping up, how long will it take until someone ports the classic games/engines like ScummVM to a browser near you? Will we see a new generation of web games which don’t require any browser-plugin?
Flash in terms of graphical capabilities is lightyears away from what browsers can do in certain places, but why is it still that I hate flash and would love direct support in the browser instead? Maybe it’s the infection of ads coming from flash. Or that it is a closed binary format (maybe this is not true anymore, someone correct me). Or is it that it’s development environment is not open source and you basically depend on it?
On the other hand, wouldn’t it make much more sense to use SVG for games? The canvas element is bitmapped, thus it has a fixed size in pixels which isn’t very adequat for multi-resolution clients like the users desktop. SVG would fit better because it can scale.
It’s very exciting to whatch the current evolution of browsers, not only in terms of game capability, but also Ajax and stuff. The paradigm is shifting, and it’s shifting fast.
November 28th, 2005
Now that Civilization 4 is out of the door I tried to fill the time gap until I have it with playing the classic Civ1 from 1991. Since my knowledge ist already a bit rusty I rustled up two good resources:
One funny note from the CIV FAQ:
… Build lots of phalanxes, chariots, legions, catapults, ships, settlers, and
diplomats. Let me clarify that: by “lots of …”, I mean “infinite numbers
of them”. A dozen ships might be enough, but you can never have too many
chariots…
October 30th, 2005
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