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Yeah, I know, long time no post.

I've begun to write a movie diary. Well, actually, I've written a movie diary for more than 2 1/2 years now, but I just recently started writing one in English, too. The concept is simple: I write a short comment on every movie I watch, and I also rate it on the scale of 1 to 5. In the original Finnish version, I've written 2-3 paragraphs about each movie, in the English version I try to be a tad more brief, meaning that I'll write 1-4 sentences per movie.

Here's a sample, this year's diary so far:

Week 01/2008

Manderlay (2005, Denmark/Sweden/Netherlands/France/Germany/UK) - 3 / 5
A film by Lars von Trier, sequel to Dogville. Artistic, preachy and anti-American, but nevertheless enjoyable.

Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan (1982, USA) - 3,5 / 5
A solid Star Trek film that makes good use of the familiar characters. I watched the German-dubbed version - the dubbing quality was surprisingly alright.

Malarek (1989, USA) - 2,5 / 5
I bought the DVD for €1 way back in November. Not a bad price for a film as average as this one. Forgettable but acceptable entertainment.

The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957, Sweden) - 3,5 / 5
This film has nothing to do with pinnipeds or Navy SEALs. Still, it is rather a good film.

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001, USA) - 3 / 5
Gene Hackman rocks, again. The ending of this quirky deadpan comedy is brilliant, but some of the cast members are not up to their task.

Week 02/2008

Bridget Jones's Diary (2001, UK/France) - 3 / 5
Not quite as good as some other films written by Richard Curtis. Well, this one wasn't actually written by Curtis - it is based on a bestselling novel by Helen Fielding, but Curtis's touch is easy to pick out.

The Silent Star (Der schweigende Stern, 1960, East Germany/Poland) - 3,5 / 5
I bought this along with two other East German scifi films. Those socialists sure knew how to make great science fiction films! The film was released theatrically in the USA under the name "First Spaceship on Venus".

The Family Man (2000, USA) - 3 / 5
A poor man's It's a Wonderful Life starring Nicolas Cage and Téa Leoni.

Men in Black (1997, USA) - 3 / 5
Men in Black is a funny science fiction comedy that draws its humor from pop-culture conspiracy theories.

The Bench (Bænken, 2000, Denmark/Sweden) - 2,5 / 5
The Bench is a socio-realistic drama by Danish director Per Fly. I suppose it is a good film in its genre, but I didn't like it much. Yeah, I've been corrupted by Hollywood.

In the Dust of the Stars (Im Staub der Sterne, 1976, East Germany) - 4 / 5
A psychedelic, colorful space adventure featuring bearded East German spacemen, dancers in bikinis, and some serious partying. Trust me, you don't want to miss this one.

To see the actual diary, visit the new International section of my home site: http://www.vaihtoehto.org/english/?id=diary08&cat=movies

And to see a summary of my movie ratings, see the list at http://www.vaihtoehto.org/english/?id=ratings&cat=movies

I watched the movie Antitrust yesterday. Suddenly I realized that I have an urge to program now. So I looked up Ferment.

I actually accomplished very little, one more building and a feature that allows using the appropriate preposition when referring to enemies (an anarchist instead of a anarchist in a certain game screen). I'm also considering adding some kind of "dungeons" to the game to give the player more fun. But it was enjoyable to do some programming again. I've been quite busy, but maybe I'll now once again find some more time to further develop Ferment.

Too bad I've forgotten a couple of city names that I had previously picked. Apparently, I didn't bother to write them anywhere in the source code. All I've got at the moment are the abbreviations in my in-game map screen. One of the cities is marked as "PI" and the other as "LE", but I don't remember the whole names. But I do remember that those were good names, and I want them in the game, so I'll need to find the notes that I wrote when I was creating the Ferment world.

Yep. Just letting you know. I just haven't had the inspiration to write much.

At the moment I'm testing Mandriva. I have to admit, the only reason I installed it was XGL/Compiz. And well, even though I have to say that Mandriva hasn't particularly impressed me, XGL/Compiz is cool. Very cool.

About programming. Still remember Ferment? Didn't think so. Anyway, haven't been doing much with Ferment, but I've been studying GUI programming, using Qt. At the moment I'm working on a simple app called VCINP. I love Qt, but handling datatypes is quite stupid. Why do I have to convert floats to strings in order to print them to a QTextBrowser? C'mon, simple cout command can print floats, ints etc. just nicely, why isn't Qt's .append able to do the same?

Well, maybe it is, or maybe there's some other command I should use. Maybe I'm just doing something really stupid. If so, let me know.

Bye.

A couple of days ago I emptied my 40 GB Windows partition D:\ and split it to two 20 GB ext3 partitions. I intend to use those two partitions for testing purposes. The first distro I chose for testing was Vector Linux, a fast and simple Slackware-based distribution. I installed it to one of the two partitions, everything went smoothly. No problems in the installation process. The login screen with falling penguins and water effects following the cursor was very neat and made me smile. Yay. I happily used the Xfce desktop for a while, upgraded the machine with slapt-get, shut down the computer and went to sleep.

The following day I ran into some problems. I had installed a previous kernel and headers because I couldn't find headers for the kernel that was installed by default. Well, the previous kernel didn't work, it paniced. To make things worse, the default kernel stopped working, too - I can't remember exactly where it got stuck. I used kernel 2.4.29 (of course, X didn't work with that kernel) to boot and reinstalled one package, I don't remember which (hmm, I find it very hard to concentrate today). I'll check that tomorrow. Well, anyway, now the default kernel worked. Yay.

When I rebooted, now using the default kernel (2.6.12 - yeah, old'd, I know), I noticed that I couldn't log into Xfce or start any GUI applications. Well, Fluxbox, IceWM, XMMS and Dillo worked. Obviously, something was wrong with GTK. I reinstalled GTK+2 package and things started working. But c'mon, upgrading system breaks GTK?

So, my first impression of Vector Linux wasn't very great. But I have to say, it's quite fast. It even beats Zenwalk by a second or so in booting time. And xpenguins app rocks. Every distro should come with xpenguins installed by default. I love miniature penguins flying and parachuting around my desktop and walking on my windows.

Hmm, yeah, like I said, it's very hard for me to concentrate on anything today. I'll continue sharing my Vector Linux experiments/whining tomorrow or the day after tomorrow.

The Ferment project hasn't advanced much. I can blame two things: Galactic Civilizations and my own laziness. Today, however, I actually did something. It's not operational yet, but I started creating something that I like to call 'The Alien Encounter scene', an early story event. I'm too lazy to continue it now, but I'll probably get it finished tomorrow. Oh, version number is now 0.0.0.10 and line count is 2 893.

I decided to give Debian another try. When I first tried it, I thought it was just like Kubuntu but with more flaws. When I got the X server really messed up, I gave up. Then I upgraded my Etch installation to Sid (Unstable). Now I got X working again. After using Zenwalk, which is super fast, Debian seems really slow. But apt-get is nice and there are a lot of packages available. I'm writing this from Zenwalk, but I intend to use Debian more in future.

Btw, I tested booting speeds from Grub to Login screen, here are the results:

Kubuntu Dapper: 70 seconds
Debian Sid: 62 seconds
Zenwalk 2.8: 36 seconds

Zenwalk is the fastest one of those three, no surprise there. Just as a reference, Windows takes some 50-65 seconds from Grub to desktop.

Hmm, what else... I tried to learn to use Inkscape, a vector illustrator program. It's quite a cool tool. My wallpapers probably aren't the greatest in the world, but I sure had fun making them. Here you can see one of my attempts. That's actually my KDE desktop in Zenwalk (I use mostly Xfce in Zen).

Hope I'll get the Alien Encounter scene finished tomorrow.

Well, yeah, I've added some neat new features during the past two days, but most importantly, I've made code better. Instead of calling a new city function every single time you exit a shop or a hospital, the program should now use the same one 'till you exit the city. This was just an example, I've done many other improvements, too.

Also, I've done some balancing, so that the game is actually playable. Level-ups are defined up to level 10. I just finished writing the function that loads a saved game - saving game had been operational for a while already. I unexpectedly ran into some problems while writing the very simple loadgame() function, but it's perfectly working now. The saving/loading system is based on the global variables (yes, I use global variables). savegame() saves all the global variables in a file called savefile.fer, and loadgame() reads the values with >> operator and getline function. Here's the function, if you're a good programmer and you think this is a very stupid solution, drop a comment.

int loadgame()
{
  ifstream loadfile;
  loadfile.open ("savegame.fer", ios::in);
  if (!loadfile)
  {
    cout << "No savegame found!\n";
    return 1;
  }
  else
  {
    loadfile >> attack;
    loadfile >> defense;
    loadfile >> hp;
    loadfile >> hpmax;
    loadfile >> lvl;
    loadfile >> kills;
    loadfile >> deaths;
    loadfile >> medkit;
    loadfile >> exp;
    loadfile >> food;
    loadfile >> cityid;
    loadfile >> kingssituation;
    loadfile >> selkirksituation;
    loadfile >> esperancesituation;
    loadfile >> napiersituation;
    loadfile >> krasnodarsituation;
    getline(loadfile,nimi);                /*This is really needed.*/
    getline(loadfile,nimi);
    getline(loadfile,classname);
    getline(loadfile,classnamecap);
    getline(loadfile,armor);
    getline(loadfile,weapon);
    loadfile.close();
    return 0;
  }
}

By the end of this day I expect to have 2 700 - 2 800 lines of code (at this very moment, 2632).

And btw, now I'm calling this game 'Ferment'. I'm still considering the possibility of using a subtitle, too. Would 'Ferment - Revenge of the Post-Apocalyptic Communist Ninjas' sound cool?

In my last post, I said this is easier than I thought. So, I decided to make it a bit more difficult. I added character classes: they have different starting attributes and skills, and in future, they should all be able to receive special class-specific bonuses at level-ups and have their own special skills. I programmed one special skill already, for hunter class. Because they are hunters that can find food everywhere, they need only 1 unit of food per two clicks (distances between towns are measured in clicks) whereas the other character classes need 1 food/1 click. The other classes are warrior monk, ranger and knight. Yeah, what a collection of clichés, but hey, it's just a programming exercise. And at least I don't have goblins and elves.

Another thing that might give me some more challenge is implementing a graphical user interface. Not some fancy 3D stuff, or even fancy 2D graphics, but make it run in a window and instead of pressing keyboard buttons, make the player click buttons with his/her mouse.

Here's a sketch of what it could look like. It doesn't really work, it's just a dummy .ui file. The buttons do nothing. Qt Designer makes designing a GUI easier than it should be, but I'd still need to make it work and have it co-operate with my code. I'll probably finish my program as a text-based RPG first, and maybe later try to implement some sort of a GUI system. But anyway, take a look at the sketch.



At the moment my program contains almost 1 300 lines of code (not including comments and blank lines). Not bad considering that I started just a couple of days ago. But there's still lots of work to do.

And I really need to decide a real name for this game. In my humble opinion, calling it "The Unnamed RPG Project" is inconvenient.

Well, yeah, I decided to program a game. I know some C/C++/Perl but I know that I'm not a great programmer. I'm not much of an artist, either. That is why I decided to program a text-based role-playing game using C++! Clever, huh?

So, basically, what I'm trying to do is something very simple. The player has values for attack and defense and health. You go to one of the places and probably meet some people to kill. When you kill random enemies, you get EXP and when you've enough EXP, you get a level-up, and you get more attack, defense and health points. (Not the greatest innovation in the history of game programming, I know, but I might just be able to code this.) You also get money from killing people, and with that money, you can buy attack or defense points. When you die, you'll be resurrected but you'll lose half of your money. When you are on certain level and go to a certain place, you get a storyline event. There's some dialog, and you can choose what you say, but you can't choose to be good or bad. The player is a hero, and his job is to save the world.

So, basically a very simple text-based RPG. I know I shouldn't use global variables, but they just seem to be the easiest way to manage those player attributes.

So far I've created the opening scene (where the hero talks to an unknown creature) and the base of the attributes system. The actual gameplay is yet to be done.

Hmm, the plot and the setting? Heh, if I had to describe the plot in 24 words, I'd use these words:

Year 5174, Nuclear War, Middle Ages, King of the World, Masters of the Universe, Ultimate Evil, Communism, Hippies, Anarchists, Activists, Sword, Hero, Warrior Monk.

Ehm, I haven't yet come up with a name for this game/programming exercise, but if you really want to have a temporary name, call it "Masters of the Universe Chronicles: The Ultimate Quest For Excellence". I'm pretty sure there is some manga or something like that that goes by that name and I'm violating some copyrights, if you think that is a problem, sue me. Or just ask me politely to change that temporary name that I invented in 2 seconds.

Still interested? Stay tuned!

Today I've been experimenting with Wine. Surprisinly, some of the games I tried actually worked! Can you believe that?

I'm running Zenwalk Linux 2.6, and I use Wine version 0.9.16. The first game I tried was Official Formula 1 Racing by Lankhor. It's quite an old game, from 1999, I think. Decent Formula 1 simulator, not the greatest game I've ever played but I remember having some good time playing it back in 2000 or so. I found no mention of it in the Wine application database, so I thought it wouldn't work. I gave it a try nevertheless, and to my surprise, it worked. It worked quite well, actually. Well, of course, 3Dfx accelarated version didn't work, but Software and Direct3D versions ran nicely. D3D had some graphics bugs, Software accelaration was almost bug-free. The game crashed only when I tried to go to the System configuration section which isn't really needed. I drove some laps and had a good time, and I didn't notice any other problems. Neat.

The next one I tried was X-Wing Alliance, a Star Wars space simulator. I could get it run, but it was very slow and laggy because it didn't recognize my DirectX drivers. I ended up unistalling it. But since I got it almost working, I had high hopes of TIE Fighter, an older game of the same series and one of my absolute favourites. It installed fine and everything looked good, but again, the game didn't recognize DirectX. Everytime I tried to launch the game it asked me to install DirectX 5.2, and when it didn't install it even though I clicked 'Install'. Uninstalled TIE Fighter too, a shame it didn't work.

The next one was quite an unrealistic attempt, I admit. Soldier - Heroes of World War II, a very good-looking DirectX 9 strategy/shooter game. There was nothing about the game in appdb, but I wanted to be sure because the game is actually really good. Well, it didn't work. But it installed, and could print me a nice-looking error message! Uninstall from launcher menu didn't work, but running setup.exe again did the trick.

Okay, the last one. Far Cry. I had tried that one before, with Kubuntu and Wine 0.9.10 or *.12, if I recall. With that Wine version, I got it up & running but it was unplayable: laggy, had mouse problems and always crashed, taking the whole X down with it. Appdb comments looked promising, rating silver with Wine 0.9.15, so I decided to give it another try. I used the installer from liflg.org - and unfortunately installed it as root. At first it didn't work at all, because I didn't have permission to the files. The error messages looked quite confusing so I didn't figure that out right away. Then I decided to run it as root, and to my great suprise, it worked, looked good and wasn't even laggy! I chowned the files to my user account so I could get it running without root privileges, started the game again and played for a little while. Water was sometimes buggy and in action, framerates weren't as good as it first seemed. The game also crashed many times at one specific checkpoint when I was driving a car when passing the point. I tried to walk past the checkpoint, it saved the game and didn't crash. The I fetched the car and drove forward. I only played the only first map just for a while, but it seems that Far Cry is playable with Wine 0.9.16.

So, 2 out of 5 games worked, and one of them almost worked. Not bad, eh?

Edit; Far Cry constantly crashes at some checkpoints with a "Critical Exception" message. So, don't know if it is playable or "playable".