Year: 2007

Android – open source mobile platform

Engadget covers Adroid – Google’s open source mobile platform.  With pictures and videos.  I was very impressed and interested after the first video.  By the second one I almost had a nervous breakdown – it’s so cool.

There were plenty of talks about gPhone lately.  People were speculating how cool the device would be, and how it will line up with Apple’s iPhone, and things like that.  Once again Google was above the expectations.  Instead of just another device with some nifty features, it delivered a whole new world.  Hardware, SDK, documentation, and application stack… They even appeal to developers to start playing with the platform (instead of jumping around like a crazy monkey they allocated $10,000,000 USD to reward developers of the most innovative applications).

The system seems to be sweet on every level.  There is plenty of hardware power.  Optional 3D acceleration.  Touch screens.  GPS.  And more.  The operating system is Linux based.  The core things are implemented in C and C++, which gives it this extra bit of robustness.  The upper level is very much Java oriented, which, if I want it or not, is a very popular and powerful programming language used by many developers.  With this, I suspect, the quantity and quality of applications will blossom.

The system is built with expansion in mind.  It’s pluggable on every level, and although complex and with many components, is pretty easy to understand conceptually.

With Android being released and hardware catching up, I believe we are entering a new age of computing.  Mobile devices and networks will be the primary commercial development focus for the next few years.  And, although being far from the mobile industry, I am very very exciting for these times to come.  Even if just a user…

… and the award for the original web site goes to …

Chiefy for the www.f0bia.org !!!

I’m browsing through hundreds of web sites every day, and it’s been a while since I saw something that struck me as original. f0bia did it for me. With dark background, blinking cursor, and keyboard navigation it closely resembles UNIX command line. Yet it’s not just a show off, but a real blog with posts, search, RSS feeds, links, pictures, etc.

Well done!

Update: for those of you interested in technical details, the blog seems to be running WordPress and WordPress CLI theme.

Movies, crying men

If you think men don’t cry, you’re out of touch with reality.  If you think men never cry in the movies, you are terrible wrong again.  Check out this article, and scroll through Digg comments to the original post.

When it comes to crying the cinema, I have to admit, I’m among the wettest people ever.  The list of movies that make me cry is long that it makes no sense in compiling it.  It’s probably easier to name movies that didn’t make me cry.  And even with those, it’s probably that I haven’t seen them enough times…

Another Quake 3 impression

As I mentioned earlier, I’m back to Quake 3 battle fields.  I am still trying to remember things, and adjust my brain to how it all works.  While major things are still there, and still important, there have been quite a few small changes.

Quake 3 is very much about mods (modifications).  There are many mods out there, and each of them takes Quake 3 into a different direction – different physics, different graphics, different gameplay.  When I used to play Quake 3 five years ago, the two most popular mods were OSP and RA3.   I never particularly liked RA3, despite its beautiful graphics.  All my time was spent in OSP.

That’s where I started now.  But what I quickly found out is that OSP isn’t as popular now as it used to be.  The mod of the new generation is CPMA, which stands for Challenge ProMode Arena.  It has OSP built-in as an option.  It is also based on the ProMode settings, which we also played sometimes.  But overall, it’s a different thing.

What is different?  Here is a quick overview as I saw it:

  • CPMA is much much much faster than OSP.  It’s unbelievably fast.  OSP was never slow by any means, but CPMA is so much faster that I’ll need a lot of time to adjust.
  • CPMA introduces more moves and enhances the old ones.  Double jumps are there.  Circle jumps.  Strafe jumps are there, but they are much faster now.  There is more in-flight control, as it was in ProMode.
  • CPMA brings in more maps with more tricks.  With all those increased speeds, a new set of maps was pretty much a requirement.  The well-known pro-q3dm6 used to good enough for TDM and 1v1.  With CPMA it feels very small, almost tiny, even for a duel.  CPMA maps are bigger, but not more complex.  They also provide features for all those tricky moves.
  • CPMA uses faster weapon-switching, like it was in ProMode.   Instantly switching between weapons in heated combat adds to intensity of the game.
  • CPMA handles timing differently.  First of all, the timer doesn’t show seconds.  Players are forced into doing timing in their own head.   Although this is not a big problem for a mildly experienced player, it still feels a bit weird.
  • CPMA handles health and armor stuff different.  I’m not sure yet how differently, but it seems that when hit, player loses more health even if he has armor, than he does in OSP.  Also, picking up armor is a bit different now.  Basically, you can’t pickup yellow armor after picking up red, without receiving some damage in between.  Oh, and there is a green armor there too now.  So it works out like this:   green armor is the weakest, then yellow, and then red.

There are probably a few other things that I haven’t noticed, but even these are make for a sufficient list.  How does it feels now?  Here is how I feel about it after playing a couple of times:

  • Extremely intense!  I still can’t believe how fast this thing is.  It’s painful to watch.  It’s even more so to play.  I can’t blink once over the course of a whole match.   Two main components of this intensity are greatly increased movement speeds and instant weapon switching.
  • Timing and movement is everything.  If you can’t move, you are dead.  Instantly.  If you can move, you are dead instantly anyway.  The only way to survive even a brief fight is to have you health, armor and weapons packed.  And for that you need timing.  Aim is a good addition to the list, but it’s not a requirement.
  • Respawn points are much more important in CPMA than in OSP.  Respawn points are well known (CPMA even highlights in the special way).  When a player enters a game, he is not moving.  For a split millisecond he’s stationary.  That’s an easy target.  And when a player enters a game, he has no armor or weapons (except for a tiny machine gun and a gauntlet).  It’s like shooting fish in the aquarium with a shotgun.   Oh, and there is a sound that notifies your enemies at which point you respawned.
  • Communications in TDM are less important now.  Things are changing too fast – items availability, players locations, etc, to notify team-players about them.  And there is  plenty of stuff going on on its own…

Stay tuned for more of these, as I get more practice…