Chaos + logic = net

The Dawn of War 2 multiplayer beta started a week ago, and I've been playing the hell out of it. I like what they did with the gameplay; it's just "action" now. No pesky peons / ore collectors you have to worry about wandering into the enemy base. No trying to fit eight extra-large Imperial Guard buildings into your small base so you can make a damn tank. Just non-stop hectic fighting- what a war should be. For those of you who have yet to play DoW2 and are planning on downloading it tomorrow when it goes public, take a piece of advice from me: forget anything you learned about DoW1. Any experience playing Company of Heroes would serve you better.

The game encourages retreating and severely discourages sending your units in to die. You just plain don't make enough resources in the game to support replacing your entire army constantly. The game also really encourages helping your teammates. In the past, the most help you could give your teammates were sending resources and sending units for a joint attack / defense. While you can't send resources (although you do share them), you can reinforce your teammate's points, load units in transports, and more importantly, use abilities on your allies' units.

Games for Windows Live is what the game uses for its online service and this marks the first time I've ever used it. I used to laugh at the very idea of charging for multiplayer support in computer games. (No, scratch that, I still laugh at the idea.) Thankfully Microsoft has come to their senses and realized nobody is going to pay for the "convenience" of playing computer games online... maybe they didn't realize that we had been doing it for free since 1990. Anyway, I think they totally fucked themselves, as they could have stole Steam's (ahem) steam and delivered a decent matchmaking / community service before Valve could. Don't get me wrong, the GFWL service seems fairly decent. The matchmaking is good, and I really like the idea of making a party on-the-fly and joining up as a group after a game if you liked your teammates. I've met some good players that way. I also like the idea of sharing friends across platforms, since I play games with the same people regardless of platform.

However, I'm totally flabbergasted when it comes to their policy of only allowing you be online on one device at a time. The first night I was playing DoW2, Allison was watching something on the Netflix streaming service via the xbox 360. When I first started multiplayer, it signed me into my GFWL account, which is of course linked to my XBL account. This, for some reason, signed me out of XBL. I was at first afraid that it would ruin the already playing movie for my girlfriend, but to Netflix's credit it kept playing. Thinking all was alright, I started my multiplayer game and started kicking ass. Fast forward about 10 minutes later, Allison's movie ends and Netflix freaks the fuck out because it's no longer signed into a XBL Gold account. It re-acquires the connection, re-signing itself back in, thus kicking me off GFWL on the computer. You can imagine my frustration when, right in the climax of the game, I'm suddenly returned to the title screen with a messagebox saying "You have been signed out of Games For Windows Live." I was pissed. My poor teammates who suddenly found themselves without a 3rd and maybe lost because of it were probably pissed as well. That is totally ridiculous. In most games, if you lose connection to the server, you just lose the recording of any stats about the outcome of the game- no big deal in most circumstances.

I know it's fairly common practice to only allow a username/password to sign into a service once and kick any previous connections off. It makes sense for a lot of services, but not for a service trying to set itself up as an end-all community service / media center for your friends and family. They should be encouraging people to use their service on as many supporting devices that they can get their hands on. They're fighting a losing battle right now, and they're not going to make headway by doing anything but. I understand that Penny Arcade recently had a rant about this very same topic, and they contacted Microsoft about it (how nice to have those kind of connections!). It sounds like nothing came of it, and I'm not that surprised. Maybe their misguided masters want us to buy a Gold XBL account for everybody in the house; it's the kind of thinking that can only come from a corporation stupid enough to think they could charge money for the service on the computer in the first place.

I sincerely hope that Relic changes their mind and uses Steam for everything and not just content distribution in the near future. In the meantime, I've had to make a brand new GFWL account just so I can play with people and not get kicked off if somebody turns on the Xbox. Too bad I can't link them somehow so I can share friends.

My normal Tuesday night is usually spent shotgunning thousands of zombies in Left 4 Dead. However, yesterday was special as I had tickets to go see Streetlight Manifesto and Reel Big Fish, both of which were totally awesome, rad, tubluar, and lacking zombies. It was also awesome seeing my old friend Kristen again, who I have not seen in years. She lived really close to the venue that the concert was at so we just parked next to her apartment and all walked down there together. Sadly, Michigan decided to assault us with sub-zero temperatures that night, so it was a very cold, coatless walk.

The bathroom in this place was hilarious. Dirty in the way that only small venue that hosts numerous rock, punk, and ska bands can be, the rug squished when you walked on it. It also had a dude sitting in the corner selling various products like candy bars, condoms, baby wipes, and all kinds of other shit. It was like a slightly smellier version of 7-11, right in the venue bathroom. I bet that guy loves his job.

Anyway, it was a great time had by all, and I need to find me some Streetlight Manifesto CDs to listen to, as I sadly have none and that is a damn shame.

I've added a section on the left that constantly updates with any changes occurring on the wiki. I mostly added this for my own benefit, as I know if people are looking at it, I'll be more apt to keep working on it like I have been. Also, later on when (if) more people start making updates in it, I'll be able to keep tabs on what is going on easier.

Anyway, that's pretty much it. Work is ongoing.

Most of the work being done on the game are happening in the wiki, which is coming along quite nice, I think. I still have a lot more to add to it, but the simple act of writing it all down and linking everything together has really been helping me cement how everything will flow and just exactly what kind of strategy game I want to make. Also, I seem to be the type of person that is most creative when writing. I can't even imagine doing all this in XML from scratch.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I'm still working on this and if you're actually curious enough, you can see the progress in the wiki.

With the help of some friends, I've been thinking about a name for this game. I decided it should have a fairly non-serious name, since I'm purposely including no story (a decision I've kind of regretted, since I love to write and it would give me an opportunity to make something neat) and might have some strange humor. Also. picking a name has gotten even tougher since I decided that whatever name I use should have a corresponding hilarious acronym. Here are some ideas I've written down over the last few weeks; if one strikes your fancy, let me know. Or if you have an idea, tell me. There has to be something better than this:

Well, nearly another year has passed us by. Hopefully everyone had a good Winter Solstice Day or whatever you celebrate.

Aside from doing the exchanging of gifts with my family, I also flew to Colorado and spent some time with Jrr. We spent the vast majority of our time playing video games and board games while our poor girlfriends whittled away the days by watching what sounded like nearly every Sex and the City episode ever made. (As an aside, I never really liked that show. The characters portray just about every trait I hate in various people, which makes it really hard to watch.) In other words, it was glorious.

Our mutual friend Turing brought over a bunch of board games for everyone to try out. Since there were so many new ones for me there, I figured I would give a quick review for the hell of it.

Arkham Horror: Not new to me or probably any of you, but an excellent, if hard, board game. I think it was one of the first board games to encourage cooperation instead of just trying to kill each other. If you have not played it, do it. You scramble around fighting various sanity-stealing horrors while trying to prevent the Lovecraftian elder god from waking and eating you. Usually ends badly, but is still fun.

Red November: A bunch of gnomes on board a sinking submarine trying to keep it from exploding or imploding or anything else disastrous until the rescue party can arrive. Plays like a simpler version of Arkham Horror, although I think something was lost in the translation. Was not as fun to me, although I won't guarantee we were playing the game right.

Mwahaha!: A board game about being an evil villain. It parodies the hell out of James Bond / Austin Powers type stories. It's mainly about you amassing materials to get your doomsday weapon powerful enough to threaten the world. Along the way you can threaten cities, states, or countries to collect ransom monies. Lots of (sometimes crude) humor and puns and I loved it.

Infernal Contraption: A fun little card / board game about some gremlin-type things making a crazy machine to destroy their enemies. You have a big pile of various parts that acts as both your "deck" and your health. You build your machine by drawing cards from this parts pile and placing them in your contraption where they fit. After you add parts to your machine each turn, you run it in a computer-program type way going from left to right. Since your parts pile is also your health, pretty much all cards involve swapping or stealing cards. Things can get out of hand pretty quick once machines get huge. Can be pretty fun.

I think we played more, but those were the ones that stand out in memory the most. For now, I'm just going to relax and enjoy my time off from work. I might even get some work done on the game if I can find a large enough crowbar to pry my girlfriend away from Dwarf Fortress. Why it requires my computer when she has a computer in the next room is beyond me.

I toyed with the idea of linking authentication between my bog and the Wiki but I think I'll keep them separate for now, at least until I get most of game information in to prevent asses from screwing with the data. For now, if anybody wants to help add stuff, let me know and I'll create an account for you.

Currently, I'm focusing on fleshing out the technology tree and other game mechanics. Since I'm looking to have 10 metric shitloads of techs to research, help in that area would be especially welcome.

I've been spending most of my time lately with creating the huge technology tree a game like this will require. For awhile, I've been writing down ideas that come to me for technologies in text files, notebooks (mostly during classes or boring meetings), and the occasional napkin. I figured since I had already decided that I wanted a massive wiki to contain all this someday, I might as well start now and actually just write directly in the wiki while designing it instead of transferring the forgotten information off disintegrated napkins.

I'm sure I could be doing something much better with my time (like, say, programming the server), but it's what I feel like doing at the moment, and frankly this is the kind of shit I should have done before even starting on the code. Whatever. It's only a little bit more overhead (OK that's a lie), it's something I was going to do anyway, and I won't have a billion ideas floating around on multiple notebooks now.

The link is currently http://www.chaoslogic.net/TBSWiki although I plan on putting a link up top soon as I figure out an easy way. The Wiki is currently locked from editing, but I plan on linking the users from this here blog to the wiki. I figure I can worry about that later when/if I have a lot of people that want to edit it. Currently, there's not a ton in there since I'm still fucking around with the general design of the wiki (how the categories will flow, namespaces, shit like that). Chalk up another on the list of "things that are not the best use of my time."

Whatever. At least it's progress.

EDIT: The link is now at the top of the page for future access.

As I was uploading the newest build of the server code to my code repository last week, I decided that "TBS Game" was not a suitable name for this project. However, I'm having a difficult time coming up with a name since it will have no plot (on purpose) and very little else that can be considered remarkable given the 4X pedigree of the games it's roughly based on. The huge tech tree and detailed espionage (leftovers from the RTS game) are the only areas that are driving my design of the game, but those are fairly expected in 4X games, although possibly not to the degree for which I have planned. Still, probably not remarkable enough to warrant a name based on either of those qualities... at least nothing that comes to mind.

I'm entertaining suggestions for the name if anybody has any ideas to give.

I put some anti-spam measures on my site, so user registration has returned to normal. Hopefully this will curb the fake users.

As an aside, programming has been slow of late due to the "holidaze" and school deciding to fuck me in the ass with a bunch of projects all due at the same time. Oh, and ripping out my shower and putting it back in a slightly less usable state. Fun stuff that is not programming.