psyche

In light of this talk and obviously in reaction to WordPress’s recent adoption of tags, I really want to use them as more-specific categories. However, it’s simply unfeasible for me to go through every post. There must be some kind of software solution! While a computer may not know I’m talking about JavaScript when I mention my Tiberian Sun Tactical Calculator, it could at least scan my blog for commonly-occurring words or phrases that aren’t too common (not “and” or “not” or “the” or “I am feeling” etc.) and auto-tag?

To make that more effective, it could take into account the tags and categories I’ve specified - as well as those that others have specified across the blogosphere. It sounds useful and shouldn’t be that hard - should it? I suppose it’s again a question of practicality on a large scale… maybe Google or someone should do this.

How about a neat statistical thing of which words I use the most, and when I click on a word it shows the most common words that accompany it? That would be cool.

Pax

I have to admit, I didn’t feel very heroic. The last sleep-deprived, nervous smiles we all gave each other were so strange. The commander’s voice, of course, was never heard, but the small but significant pauses in between each digital command told us that his heart was also heavy.

Number Four was grinning although he knew that if he failed this mission, it’d be the last mission he’d ever fail. He’d messed up too many too many times. He had always been good at coming to terms with those simple, soul-crushing truths. I felt like he’d never quite been what he’d meant to be, but he was one of the best pilots I’ve ever seen and I have to say I was glad he had missed whatever his true calling was for this. I didn’t believe that things worked out for a reason but I did feel an overpowering feeling of linearity, exacerbated by the commander’s driving countdown. Actually, we all knew that if we failed, this would be the last mission we ever failed. The group would be disbanded. After a few minutes of Number 6’s characteristic tactical genius, punctuated by silly laughs and statements of unfunny black humour, we knew that if the Core wasn’t taken out, the AA would not go down and as we swept round to escape, we would be taken out. As we smiled sadly and shifted in our seats, waiting for the bleep that would signal the start of preliminary launch preparation, we realised one by one that even if we succeeded, it would be the last mission we would ever succeed.

[snip]

It has been sixteen minutes, and the time is now 0312UTC - now I am going; goodbye. There is no-one left to say “I love you” to - how terribly sad indeed.

Ed: The CABAL Core was indeed taken out and, of course, the strike was the last order they ever carried out. The only EVA unit recovered was that of Number 9 which has, of course, yielded the above log. I, of course, am now leaving. Number 9, of course, should, of course, have, of course, felt a hero because, of course, he was. Of course.

Pax

I’ve put in more data (specifically, armour types, rate of fire, damage per burst, bursts per shot and warheads [which basically specify what percentage of the damage they ideally do is removed when encountering different types of armour]) and have written a few new functions. Three in particular will save me a lot of time:

[SNIP!] - looks like the “less than” symbol is interpreted by browsers as a tag opening which totally destroys the formatting of the page and causes most of the code not to display… screenshots of the first and second (the database-looking-up-…in-functions. The third is long and… you get the idea.

The first two basically look up data in my mass of arrays (they basically constitute a fat database). This is harder than it sounds because I was reluctant to make an array with more than two dimensions (it gets fiddly) so I made separate ones for unitInfo, weaponInfo and warheadInfo so to look up, say, the warhead used by Light Infantry, I have to first look up which weapon it used (simple) and then look in a different array for a weapon which has the same name as the one that my Light Infantry says he has (…fairly simple) and then look up which Warhead that weapon says it has and then check all Warheads to see if they have the same name and then retrieve their number and return it ARGH so it gets a bit odd but these two functions will save me a lot of time.

The last function is a neat damage calculator which essentially means fewer lines of code. I’m not sure why I didn’t program a standalone damage calculating function before, but it might’ve been because of the bias toward being unhittable and being able to kill enemies in one shot instead of how much damage would actually be done - I had no concrete data in version 1.

This version is still far from perfect and I’ll need to incorporate aircraft being unhittable by most weapons while in flight and change the way in which suggestions are printed (the recommendation values are no longer integers, and you can’t have a two-point-seven-sixth row. A two-hundred-and-seventy-sixth row maybe, but that’d make the page looong… rounding would defeat the purpose of exact stats. I think I’ll just print them in order in a single paragraph… lol.

I think Elliot is working on putting in more accurate data into the version 1 database - but I think I forgot to tell him that the recommendation rating - which is affected by stats - has to be an integer or the unit simply won’t appear in the suggestions box…

Anyway, I have made progress and will keep making it. And then upload it.

Pax

Over the past few days I’ve been working obsessively on a JavaScript-powered tactical advisor for Tiberian Sun players. It’s been quite hard to get it working, but now it is and although the units’ stats are somewhat dodgy, overall the system just about works. However, it’ll require a LOT of tweaking. Perhaps I’ll ask the people at TiberiumWeb.com to give me details unit stats from the .ini files of Tiberian Sun and then I can produce some accurate way to compare them (one which takes into account armour, exact number of hitpoints, exact damage dealt per shot, rate of fire… maybe even buildtime if this becomes a lot more complex than I think I can handle…).

It’s been a good exercise - before this, I’d never touched switch statements or Arrays.

For now, here it is.

Pax

Before I begin, I’ll just clarify the situation: at some point in my youth my grandfather gave me some pirate copy of Tiberian Sun which I played with interest. It felt like quite an odd game and I didn’t really think of it as part of the mainstream gaming media. I saw Firestorm in some shop one day and made my uncle buy it. It had a manual! I began to suspect that this elusive “Westwood Studios” company was in fact well-funded and professional. Then I bought Red Alert and to top it all off, Red Alert 2 came out. I didn’t buy it but my friends did and then they bought Generals etc. and then after massive disc loss, I bought The First Decade and preordered Tiberium Wars. So here I am.

Right. Now, I think the reason I prefer Tiberian Sun to, say, Red Alert 2 (which is dementedly fun) is that it’s a bitch. No superweapon disabling! Retarded Harvester AI! Veins! It makes it hard to play. The Hunter-Seeker - so annoying BUT it kicks everyone out of apathy and says “Look, play well or die.” The EMP and Firestorm walls give enemy tank/plane rushes and missiles the finger. The tactical possibilities were just great. Conversely, Red Alert 2? Race to build superweapon. If superweapons are disabled, race to build 5 Prism Tanks or 5 Apocalypses. Assuming you’re not a dumbo, you can just go and win.

I wonder what Tiberium Wars is like. In a strange way, I don’t really want to find out.

Pax

I saw 300 yesterday; it was quite good although prone to excessive violence and random partial nudity but hey, that’s what Frank Miller comics are for, right? Elliot displayed some horror at notions of pine trees and the random tactical breakdown at the end of the film. However it was okay.

More importantly, Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars arrived today, albeit gift-wrapped and with a small label saying “Happy Birthday Farhan! From Mum”. Well. My birthday is the fifteenth of June. This is going to be retarded. I am at once frightened of change and willing to embrace it! This is the game I have waited for for so many years. Probably more than eight I think - I’ve been vaguely aware of the ill-fated pseudosequel “Tiberian Twilight” since my grandfather decided to buy me a pirate copy of Tiberian Sun from a market in Pakistan. *reminisces*

Our connection to the internet briefly failed and my family is missing. Well. Good.

Pax

So, the obligatory post-25th post. I hesitate to call it Christmas, as that was dubious from the start, what with its fusion into Pagan festivals and all. Anyway, I came out relatively unscathed, with a Logitech MX Revolution mouse, a 250GB HP external Hard Drive, a new Nokia 6131 and Command & Conquer: The First Decade - and yes, I preordered Tiberium Wars.

I updated Psyche - for the first time in a while - with some Tiberian Sun stuff and made some aesthetic changes to Science and some more significant (but still aesthetic) changes to About, so that’s all good. I’d like to pick up an Intel iMac and boot Vista in order to run Tiberium Wars, but I’ll see what rolls over at Macworld and check out Leopard before I finalise my choices. I need to get good at Yuri’s Revenge so I can challenge Elliot, damn it!

Anyway, you know the deal. Tiberian Sun is a beautiful game.

Logitech MX RevolutionFor the record, I’m on an old-ish 17″ PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X 10.4.8. The installation was … well, non-existent - in a good way. I put the mouse into its power cradle and left it charging for a couple of hours after unpacking it. I downloaded the Logitech Control Center (there was no Mac software in the box) and wandered off somewhere… and then sauntered back and checked it out. I plugged the RF dongle into my USB port, slid the slider on the underside of the mouse to the “on” position, and voilà, the mouse was working! I hastened to System Preferences, wherein I increased the sensitivity, configured some options etc. although I might add that my global settings are almost the same as the default ones as they were well thought out. Basically, the mouse is perfect apart from the absence of a left-handed version, which means nothing to me but everything to, say, my brother and my dad. Anyway, the only oddity I encountered was in Jedi Academy (don’t laugh) when I found that switching weapons with the primary scroll wheel always caused me to suddenly look upward. So far I have no explanation - it’s probably something to do with the way I’ve configured the controls in JKA - but until I can eliminate this I’ll use the left/right tilt function of the wheel. Phew. Once you configure the speed you’d like the SmartShift wheel function (the scroll wheel basically goes into a frictionless spin when you spin it at a certain speed) it pretty much becomes a better and more convenient (and fun) version of page up/page down. The mouse is great - works well, was easy to set up, is easy to configure. Unfortunately there’s no left-handed version… hmm… that’s economics for you.
Nokia 6131
Once again, no Mac software or USB cable out of the box - shame on you, Nokia! However the phone is good. It’s not Series 60 and therefore all my crap from my old 6260 is, well, non-transferable. It also takes a microSD card (which I haven’t got yet) - and I thought miniSD cards (which the 6260 took) were small! The font for the clock thing on the outside is really bad. Anyway, this is progress towards a really good Nokia clamshell, but until then, looks like Motorola have that market under control. How’s that KRZR thing doing?

Pax