Kuroko Project

I’m flattered that the previous article has been showing up in a few blogs and forums. Interestingly, it’s being used as an insight for newbies into VO:OT’s movement schema, and in one case an entertaining dismissal of the non-explanatory bits as “hardcore religious twinstick nonsense”

I’m still planning on adapting my Saturn sticks, as an opportunity to improve my hardware-hacking skills by building a Universal PCB adapter. Progress and pics on this to follow as things are developed.

As can be seen in the sidebar, I’ve acquired both an Xbox 360 and a Live account, and have been well pleased by the VO:OT 5.66 port. While using the 360 pad has crippled my quick-step reflexes(for now), it’s forced me to use more long-range characters that I haven’t made a habit of playing. This in turn has exposed some longstanding bad habits in my play style: repeated side-to-forward Watari dashing and constant rushdown attempts. It helps that there’s a lot of good Japanese players hanging around, and willing to school you without trash-talking or ragequitting.

So in spite of my noting of VOOT’s design dependency on sticks, don’t let that stop you from joining in! If you’ve ever played any Virtual On game and come away pleased, or if you’re looking for a grueling-yet-rewarding learning curve, this is an excellent time to start. The VO community is breathing again and it’s always a good day to SELECT YOUR VIRTUAROID and GET READY.

The upcoming re-release of Cyber Troopers: Virtual On Oratorio Tangram(lovingly abbreviated as “VOOT”) has begun a revitalizing of a long-dormant community.
However, the unique control system for Oratorio Tangram(or OraTan for the short-short abbreviation) may not be ported over and I wanted to explain exactly how two digital sticks are the very heart and soul of Virtual On.
Continue reading…

As Charlie Stross has noted Stanislav Petrov bent the rules and prevented a nuclear exchange at the nadir of the Cold War 25 years ago today. He ended up losing his job and pension over it, and still doesn’t consider himself a hero.


Two years ago, I was eagerly awaiting DEFCON to have fun destroying the world with other people online. After viewing a gameplay sample on YouTube, I idly clicked on a related-video, which happened to be the attack scene from Threads. I followed that up with a chaser of a music video using a Yo La Tengo cover of Sun Ra’s “Nuclear War”.
I got maybe three hours of sleep that night, and had shivering nightmares during all three of them. I haven’t played DEFCON or even looked at it since.


I’ve never been sure if it was revulsion over what it would actually be like, or repressed childhood memories from listening to adults in the early eighties. But along with Charlie and the rest, I’m raising a glass to Comrade Petrov. How about you?

I don’t care if you’re a small-time European publisher. It is the year 2008, I hereby decree the following trends of Windows PC games(specifically, demos and installers)to be idiotic:

1. Requiring an Administrator to install. I’m in no hurry to upgrade to Vista, but it rightly points out that There Is No Excuse for requiring root privileges to create a new folder and stick a few settings into the registry. I don’t care if the “amazing” installer software cost you a pretty penny, or if you absolutely need DRM somehow on a demo package. It took me maybe a night or two to learn how to use WiX. Now you have a Microsoft-approved installer that will absolutely do the right thing if you can manage to enter a few XML values correctly.

2. Not publishing CRCs or MD5s of the complete file. Considering all the hoops to jump through, “custom download managers”, and lack of BitTorrent on the big sites, it’s really really easy to get a corrupted file, and the only way to confirm is..download it again from somewhere else.

3. Repackaging installers — I’m looking at you, Manifesto and GamersHell, specifically. Relating to #2, now I don’t even know if you repackaged the developer-provided installer correctly if your funky add-on throws out “MainGame.lib corrupted. Abort/Retry/Ignore?” (and I’m not kidding, have we traveled back to DOS days?).

Someone is probably thinking “just use a torrent hub”. Unfortunately, I’ve had a hankering for checking out obscure space-sims like Starshatter or Space Interceptor, and no torrent sites(in Space Interceptor’s case, not even the original publisher) are keeping the files around.

Not that I complain too much about a corrupted download from Gamershell keeping me from enjoying the majesty of Tarr Chronicles. But I still haven’t found a working demo for Sector 13, and I’ve actually been looking forward to that one.

I’m going to have to come out and say that I fully approve of being able to use a GTA game for this. If only because I slightly preferred PS! over the Naked Gun movies.

So the public version of Audio Surf has just been released as a Steam app. As you can see, it’s already becoming addictive for replays in addition to beating other people’s high scores(someone’s already beat my score on Deltron 3030′s “Battlesong”).

Of course, there’s potentially one problem for some people: the default distribution is not compatible with Windows 2000. Rather than being the use of an XP-exclusive technology, it’s because of the XBox360 pad support, the DLL of which is compiled against a slightly higher DirectX version than Microsoft allows for Win2k. Fortunately, there’s a quick way to fix it if you don’t mind doing some hex-hacking.

Standard disclaimers: do this at your own risk, not my fault if your computer bursts into flames while the “Psycho” shower-scene music plays, etc.

0. If you don’t have a hex-editor, I recommend HxD.
1. From the root of your Steam directory, find this file: SteamApps\common\audiosurf\engine\xinput1_3.dll
(it’s probably wise to copy it somewhere as a backup, just in case). Open the file with your hex-editor.
2. Find the string “TraceMessage”. There should be exactly one occurence.
3. Replace it with “GetUserNameA” (case is important). Save the file.
4. Start Audiosurf, and you should be good to go!

Now, to start working through my JAM Project songs..

_why had a neat post on Io today, showing off a cool introspection+meta trick that I wasn’t aware of. And since it’s _why, the Io mailing list has shown another flurry of activity, which I’m hoping will snowball into another group of fresh users, to eventually reach that goal of “1.0″..

Interestingly enough, Io was the language I learned right after Ruby, for much the same reason: trying to get a good grip on concurrency in simulation environments, after too much exposure to UnrealScript.
 (And along those lines, Thunder and Lightning still stands as the only major game project using Io as a scripting language).

One of the ideas that hasn’t left my head in the past few months is the concept of a generic Super Robot Wars engine. That is, a tactical RPG coating with a beautifully-animated chewy center. Much of SRW’s appeal to me(outside of big smashy robots) are the attack animations, which are 2D cel- and vector-animation at its finest. And there’s no lack of fans wanting to get in on the action with Photoshop, or even building it.

Contemplating how to do the attack animations naturally leads me to Flash, but trying to layer something on top of GameSWF screams of nothing but pain. I got to thinking about SVG today, long billed a more standardized way of animating. A few research papers later it turns out that along with SMIL, SVG Tiny 1.2 is reported as being great for this kind of work. There’s even a handy Java library for it.

But then comes the frustration: barely any usable native tools. Beatware Mobile Designer looked great, but apparently it’s been bought out by a generic “solutions” company. Ikivo Animator has potential, but no OSX port of their latest version. Synfig has an OSX port, but it’s just been withdrawn due to packaging problems. Inkscape has animation on their “indefinite TODO list” (although to be fair, they’ve got a good deal of discussion about it). And Moho and Plastic Animation Paper just don’t export to SVG(nor do a lot of other packages, really). Vexing.

One thing I’ve been playing with in the past week has been the Slick library, a smallish library for easier game development and 2D rendering(via LWJGL) in Java. One of the things I’ve been getting back up to speed on is Java Web Start, which Slick has some tools to help with.

Unfortunately, re-learning how to do collision-detection took most of my night, so for right now, a screenshot is all you get for now..