Sorta Nightly Open Thread
Long-time readers will know that I am something of an old-school Bungie fan. Not because of Halo, but because of their earlier, Mac-focused series, Marathon. Oh, and Myth too.
Regardless…they’re up to something, and will be revealing what their new project — codenamed Aerospace — is some time between June 23 and July 7, as they celebrate 20 years in the industry.
I’m genuinely curious!
iOS 5 boasts Twitter integration; iOS 4 was initially designed with Facebook integration!
TechCrunch has a video showing hints about Facebook integration in a test build of Apple’s iOS 4 mobile operating system. Why this feature was removed, and why Twitter is replacing it in iOS 5, is something of a mystery.
Speaking of Apple..iTunes costs $1.3 billion annually to run!
That is not a small number! That is a big number! Not that it probably bothers Apple; the company is purportedly worth only slightly less than Dell, Microsoft, and HP combined!
If it doesn’t find the Higgs boson…
…there might just be hope for the Large Hadron Collider as an Earth defense relativistic kill weapon.
Yes, apparently this is being researched…because hey, if you can get grant money for saying “because some people are just jerks”, why wouldn’t you?
Related: Why you can’t win on the Internet.
Also related: Don’t let the trolls get you down!
Somewhat related: The Internet is not egalitarian; popular users can get away with more crap. Shocking, I know.
It may be reporting your location information to the RSS feeds that its CARWINGS telematics system polls.
The only story on Anthony Weiner that I care to post.
A look at how Twitter’s early design decisions regarding the mechanics of following ultimately contributed to the Democratic representative’s downfall.
The Beeb must be falling on hard times!
The BBC Television Centre is up for sale, signaling the end of an era.
Microsoft Security Essentials is the most-used A/V solution in North America.
And to be fair, it’s a pretty solid product. I can’t fault the price, either.
Cross-platform: about half of iOS developers also code for Android.
And about a third of iOS developers also work in the BlackBerry space. Only about a third of iOS developers are iOS-only in focus.
iOS still has the largest app ecosystem, of course.
They’re still well on their way to the 700 million users mark, but it’ll take them a little longer to get there now.
Related: Which would mean the average Facebook user is worth…about $150.
Also related: Slowed growth aside, it’s still Facebook’s Internet.
Still related: Has Facebook peaked? It’s doubtful.
Tonight’s post brought to you by smartphones:
Surprisingly even-handed!
Did I miss something? There was all the rumors from Mythic, then your field trip, then the presumably unrelated GOG and Origin service announcements, then…. nothing.
So are we all waiting around for some kind of game announcement, or was it the combination of all that other stuff?
You’re waiting on my photo-editing backlog, Odkin.
Which I should really work on, admittedly.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that Bungie is sticking to the realm of sci-fi. Besides their success in that arena, I don’t think they own the rights to Myth anymore. Still, I would have liked to have sent the assorted body parts of my allies sailing through the air as a result of a poorly thrown dwarvin molotov just one more time.
A lot of people forget this, but Myth was a real game changer for its time. It was one of the earliest and best cases for hardware accelerated graphics, and it also offered a sort of social network for its multiplayer component when other games were still farming that stuff out to the likes of Gamespy and MPlayer.
Because this is the nightly thread where random things are allowable I’ll post here, but I fear too few will hear. I don’t know where else I might find real help answering this question.
I recently bought a Nintendo Wii. Great system. I’ve done some work on it and found that it can do some amazing things such as running a Debian-based distro with X and the ability to compile as you please.
This is extremely exciting, because it means I can run GAMBAS programs with little effort. However, I’m interesting in using this technology in an official capacity eventually. I want a game on a DVD for players that doesn’t require jailbreaking and with Nintendo’s full licencing and approval. Not sure if Nintendo’s “developer TOS” would allow this kind of flexibility in executing an application.
Could anyone give me any insight into how a company like Nintendo would regulate the execution of licensed code on their system? They’d have complete access to the final product and source code, but it’d have to run under Linux which might require extra approval. Fill me in if anyone knows anything about that.
I’ll put up a post about that, Sanctimonia.
Related to GAMBAS, I note Natty comes with version 2. So if I want 3 (to run this Littoral tool), I need to download and compile it. Huh. Still, if they’ve ported it to Mac OS X that means cross-platform capabilities are being worked on, good.
As for TC, sad but it’s been in the works for years now. And yeah, the BBC’s being forced to cut back by about 20% by the government.
@SSLAXX
Yeah, gb3 is still in alpha though it should be released this year. Despite that it’s still pretty stable and I haven’t had any problems with it.
I wrote an installation script that works on Maverick. Don’t know if any of the package dependencies need to be modified for it to work on Natty, but you could give it a try. Here’s the script:
# Install build dependencies.
sudo apt-get install build-essential autoconf libbz2-dev libfbclient2 libmysqlclient-dev unixodbc-dev libpq-dev libsqlite0-dev libsqlite3-dev libgtk2.0-dev libldap2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libgtkglext1-dev libpcre3-dev libsdl-sound1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2-dev libsdl-image1.2-dev libsage-dev libxml2-dev libxslt1-dev libbonobo2-dev libcos4-dev libomniorb4-dev librsvg2-dev libpoppler-dev libpoppler-glib-dev libasound2-dev libesd0-dev libdirectfb-dev libaa1-dev libxtst-dev libffi-dev kdelibs4-dev firebird2.1-dev libqt4-dev libglew1.5-dev libimlib2-dev libv4l-dev libsdl-ttf2.0-dev libgnome-keyring-dev libgdk-pixbuf2.0-dev
# Remove previously-created files.
sudo rm -fr trunk
# Download latest GAMBAS 3 revision.
svn checkout https://gambas.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/gambas/gambas/trunk/
# Compile, install and run.
cd trunk
./reconf-all
./configure
make
sudo make install
gambas3
I looked at the installation docs again and it looks like the only extra package that may be needed for Natty is linux-libc-dev.
I also made a “Public, Littoral” directory and put the files needed for Littoral to run on another system including a couple of documentation files for reference:
[usual stuff in here]eightvirtues.com/sanctimonia/software/
For the landscape data files, byte types are above sea level at 128 – 255, below at 0 – 127. For short types 0 – 32767 are above and -32768 – -1 are below.
The procedure for generating a landscape is:
1) Load elevation template (or use the default template.png).
2) Generate the elevation.
3) Generate the tiles on the tile pane.
4) Go back to the elvation pane and back the sand layer into the bedrock layer to fix the water level.
5) Delete object directory structure on the objects pane.
6) Create object directory structure.
7) Generate objects.
Look at the object “definitions” and “probabilities” text files to see how they interact. Also don’t use tabs in those files, only spaces to separate values.
Let me know if you need any help.
In step 4 I meant “bake”, not “back”, sorry.
News: Got the “horizon bar”, for lack of a better term, working. Time is still a bit off and I’ve contacted the mailing list about it. I think it’s a bug in my code or theirs, though I’ve looked at mine a bit.
If you ignore the time reported by the debugging information that’s in “plain English” and just look at the float to the right, you’ll see that the day/night cycle corresponds to a fraction of one for a 24-hour period of time. At least that’s working…
I’m encoding the video demo now. Will release tonight when it’s of sufficient quality.
Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vt6BKtAg56M
And another, to make up for the consolidation of last week and this week’s report:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wivuPFH_uoU
Sanctimonia: Thanks for all the updates; I’ll get them posted as soon as I can.
No prob, thanks. Tonight I’m going to try to get particle physics fixed and add light source capabilities. I’ll do a “shooting fireball” test which will hopefully illuminate the darkness wherever it goes. I’m also going to add moving clouds to the horizon bar, stars at some point at night, and of course Trammel and Felucca eventually.