ダニエルの冒険

I started playing the new Call of Juarez game today: a first-person shooter set in the wild west. You can play as one of two confederate-soldiers-turned-gunslinger brothers Ray and Thomas. Ray seems to have more health and is really a DPS (damage per second) character: he can throw dynamite and dual-wield pistols. Thomas, on the other hand, feels a bit quicker, can climb around more easily (with the use of a lasso) and is better with ranged weapons than pistols.

This presents a nice choice to the player. I play as Ray, but this is just because his set of abilities best matches my style of playing. I have friends who would feel much more comfortable playing as Thomas. It’s quite easy to associate with either and put yourself into the game. At least it’s immersive once you’re running around on horseback through the desert of Arizona shooting other outlaws. Here’s the problem: there is another brother.

This third brother, William, is not a gunslinger; he’s a priest. He’s younger than Ray and Thomas and disagrees with everything they do. He follows them around the game complaining about their actions. The problem is, the player is going to be playing as either Ray or Thomas and doing exactly what the game tells them to do: in order to actually enjoy the game and see the plot unfold. However, while the user is playing the game there’s this whiny character appearing all the time, nagging the player for actually playing the game!

Now that’s not affecting the immersion right away; it’s just an unpleasant character to have in the game. (Or rather, a character that’s too pleasant and therefore conflicts with every other character in the gritty unpleasant world of Call of Juarez.) The immersion immediately disappears at regular intervals (at least for me) due to one design decision: William is narrating the story. I don’t like all the cut-scenes in general and would prefer if the plot would unfold entirely through gameplay. However, I can live with them if it’s my own character (or at least his brother) narrating it. But when William is narrating it, he is always complaining about how his brothers are behaving (or rather, how the player is playing the game).

After playing a level from the point-of-view of a hardened gunslinger, then suddenly to have narration from an observer who a totally opposite (and predictable and repetitive, rather than thought-provoking) view of the events of the game, I immediately want to hammer the escape key until we get to the next level. I have been avoiding that very thing so far though, as I don’t want to miss any plot elements.

When Medal of Honor: Allied Assault came out with a D-Day scene exactly like Saving Private Ryan, I was delighted! I really loved that scene and it was so exciting to play it. Bringing in Eli Sunday from There Will Be Blood into Call of Juarez isn’t something I’m so excited about (even though I really loved Eli Sunday!) I just can’t get used to William narrating the story.

Still, it’s a great game and I’m looking forward to trying out the multiplayer part of it next time some friends are having a game!

That’s all the ranting for tonight.

I saw this on Boing Boing today and downloaded it. The video is the PC version but there’s an iPhone one now too. It’s one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever had the fortune to play and actually a really fun game too! The only problem is that it seems to crash half way through “Year 2″.

I love the badgers that fall into your car and start savaging you and eating your food, and the other cars which can be seen to be driven by angry bears when you get close enough.

I’ve been working with Terran on setting up a Call of Duty 4 server ever since he got a loan of a dedicated Linux box somewhere in Europe (I can’t remember if it was France or Germany).

I started uploading the 6GB of files from my installation necessary to run the server, but the rsync kept failing. Even without this trouble it was still going to take ages to upload 6GB, so Terran downloaded an ncurses (command-line) BitTorrent client and started downloading a CoD4 ISO. This finished last night so I went about getting those precious install files out of it.

1. First I dropped in my SSH public key with SCP

   locomoco:~ scp ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub root@123.123.123.123:.

2. I made sure that I had an up-to-date X11 install.
3. I opened X11 to get an xterm up and SSH’d into the server with X-forwarding on (and xauth junk turned off by using -Y instead of -X).

   locomoco:~ ssh -Y root@123.123.123.123

4. Adding my public key to authorised_keys so I won’t be asked for passwords anymore when SSH’ing in as root.

   remote:~ cat id_rsa.pub >> .ssh/authorised_keys
   remote:~ rm id_rsa.pub

5. Installing wine:

   remote:~ apt-get install wine

6. Mounted the ISO:

   remote:~ mkdir /mnt/cod4
   remote:~ mount -o loop ~/cod4.iso /mnt/cod4

7. The server has a small partition (/dev/sda1) for / and a large one (/dev/sda2) for /home, so I moved ~root’s .wine folder out of /root to have some more room for the virtual C: drive:

   remote:~ mkdir /home/cod4/
   remote:~ mv ~root/.wine /home/cod4/
   remote:~ ln -s /home/cod4/.wine .wine

8. Then it’s ready to be installed! (I hope your X server is set up right!)

   remote:~ wine /mnt/cod4/setup.exe

9. Once it’s installed I pulled extra files from home into the install directory (/home/cod4/install/):

   remote:~ rsync --progress -avz daniel@locomoco:/cygdrive/c/Games/CoD4/Main /home/cod4/install/

10. I repeated this for the zone and Mods folders
11. Unmount the ISO:

    umount /mnt/cod4
    rmdir /mnt/cod4

12. Now I just need Terran to set up the server!

When two computers were in this house I wanted to give meaningful names to them, in anticipation for when there would be a lot on the network and they would all need unique names.

Obligatory Cliché

First I started off with Lord of the Rings. This was about a year before the first movie came out and I had just read all the books, so that was pretty much all I thought about for a few months. If it wasn’t for LotR lore, I would have ended up using ancient Greek gods or some other cliché popular with young teenage geeks. Gandalf was the more powerful one (1.2GHz P4 I think), and Frodo the 350MHz thing.

Breaking the pattern (Does 2 even make a pattern?)

The first machine I made I called Frank. This was short for “Frankenstein’s Monster”, since I had put it together myself from parts bought from places all over the net and all over Limerick. That meant that the LotR naming scheme had gone out the window (or off the Bridge of Khazad Dum, rather).

Japanese, of course

When I started getting Macs I wanted to start using Japanese names. I named the iMac G5 Nozomi, after a female character from a favourite game of mine: Shenmue. However, I couldn’t think of name appropriate for a machine when I got the white MacBook, so I just called it “Nanashi”, which means “no-name”.

Another scheme breakdown

Last year I built a PC and named it Honeybee, just because I really liked the name. It’s a far too cute for a big black powerful Windows box, and I thought it was funny to give it a name like that.

Revisiting Japanese

Quickly I came up with a new scheme for the next machine: Japanese onomatopoeic vocabulary. After just about getting a PC to work after many failed install attempts, I called it “girigiri” which means “just about”. In this case, the install had worked, but just about.

Slightly adjusting this, I decided to use Japanese “bikkuri” words. These are a set of words (mostly adverbs but plenty of verbs) which all rhyme. I called one PC “gakkari”, meaning disappointment. Next one was “yukkuri”, meaning slowly.

Delicious naming

And most recently? My MacBook Pro is called Loco Moco. This is a Hawaiian dish that’s popular in Japan. It’s rice, a burger patty, and a friend egg, in that order, from bottom up, in a bowl. The virtual machines are named Tamago (Windows XP.. “egg”) and Burger (Ubunutu). My iPhone is named Shoyu (“soy-sauce”), a popular Japanese condiment. I figured it didn’t really deserve another full dish name or ingredient, but being a portable device can be given a condiment name. Just waiting for a pair of devices to call Salt and Pepper

What’s in a name?

I don’t ever anticipate having a meaningful scheme across all my machines. The problem is that I keep getting machines a year or two apart, and I always have a different set of interests by the time I need to think of a new name. I also get bored of my great ideas very quickly. What seems like the best idea I’ve ever had one day will seem really stupid in a week’s time, once I’ve had time to think about it enough. Where’s the fun if you can remember the names of all the machines in the house anyway? To be honest I usually just end up finding which machine is which with nmap -v -sP.

Update (30 Jun): Talks are not being swapped—it@cork and Compu b talks will both be delivered by yours truly. Update (29 Jun): I had the old Compu b location on the map below. It’s updated to the right place now.

Due to some scheduling conflicts, I have ended up swapping talks with Patrick. He will present at it@cork and I will be presenting this Tuesday (30th June) at Compu b in Limerick, from 8.00pm. (Beside Brown Thomas. Map below.)

The original title of the talk was “iPhone SDK” but after talking with a few people in Compu b about it, I have decided to change the topic to “What is an iPhone App?” I will introduce Apps, explain why they’re different and exciting, and give an overview of the life of an App, from an idea in someone’s head to an icon on iPhone screens around the world.

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