I recently noted that I hooked up my mac mini to my TV.

I then started watching hulu on my TV.

Two of the things I’ve been watching are The Time Tunnel (done by the same guy who did Lost in Space, and it shows), and Robotech, which I watched as a child. I’m starting with the Macross stuff, and planning to go in order of the three wars.

I find that I like the Time Tunnel, even though it is absurd and campy.

I find rewatching Robotech at this age a bit difficult.

For a comparison, I watch Batman (the Adam West/Burt Ward series) on a classic TV station, and still like it, and I have attempted to watch Greatest American Hero, and didn’t like it the second time around.

I also have the V miniseries, as well as V: the Final Battle. I like both. I also have V: the TV series, which I also still like.

So, I’m trying to come up with what it is, exactly, that I like or don’t like about things.

I always liked Lost in Space as a kid, which is I think why I wind up liking the Time Tunnel so much. I also like Land of the Giants.  In a similar vein, I like both Wild Wild West and Batman from that era, and have liked both since childhood. I also have always liked the Planet of the Apes movies, which I lump into the same genre.

So, in my “I like” column, I have to put “Campy Sci-Fi Made in the 60s”.  But I also like the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk series, which isn’t as campy.

I really wanted to still like the Greatest American Hero. I really did. I just couldn’t. If you actually find someone with whom you can chat about this show with, you will invariably get a glint of reckognition when you say “The show where they guy was always flying into stuff.”  In the end, that’s all the show amounted to.  I think of this series in much the same visual style of somewhere between Incredible Hulk and V.  I suppose a stronger actor than William Katt would have been better. There might also have been the “you can’t do camp on purpose” factor in this, because I think they were trying to be campy here, but failed because they were trying.

I was also really pumped to watch Robotech again. I knew for a long time that it had been edited together from a different series, but the storytelling is just so poor that, even though I like the story, the presentation within the cartoon is itself unpallatable to me. Sadness. The animation seems almost but not quite as bad as filmation style stuff, which I actually like (Heman and Flash Gordon).

When I was a kid, there was Star Wars. Actually, while I remember getting my first two Star Wars dolls (which I am now refusing to term “action figures”), one of which was R2D2, and the other being a rebel soldier with the goofy salad bowl helmet, I was not quite 3 in May of 1977, I do not actually remember seeing Star Wars.

Empire is a completely different story. I was about to turn 6 in 1980.

And I knew a lot about Star Wars. I knew all of the names of all of the characters, even the minor ones. Lobot. IG-88. Zuckuss.

I never got into sports as a child or an adult, but I’ve seen them do the same sort of thing with players and their statistics.  It really is no different than becoming a Star Wars, Star Trek, Comic Book, Anime nerd.  Wrestling, NASCAR, Football, etc. Memorizing a bunch of useless facts about stuff that doesn’t really matter, in any of the cases.

In the case of comics or other things like them, eventually there becomes established a “canon” of the literature, when the entire concept of a continuity within a fictional universe is at best silly.  Football has a continuity because it exists in the real world. Expecting something that isn’t real to follow the rules of real life is goofy.  But it is invariably demanded by the people who read the comics or watch whatever show.

This speaks of a basic human need for the things that they care about to be continuous in this manner. Things need to make sense. People have a need to have things that make sense. They require having the answers as to why thing are the way they are.

I became a Christian several years ago, which caused a severe paradigm shift from my old belief structure. I basically needed to change all of my perspectives on how the world made sense. Some of these changes were easier than others. Now I bridge two worlds, or at least that is what it feels like. I often find myself in the minority view when talking to other technical people, who have a tendency towards humanism, atheism, and other secular ideas. I know of plenty of tech people who do have a variety of faiths, but most of them are hindu, and a small minority of folks are Christian (and they turned out more numerous than I originally anticipated).

In the technical world, my beliefs are considered nonsense by many. I get asked lots of questions. Some I have the answer to. Some I do not, or at least not yet. I do not get into apologetic stuff, as I know that if a non-believer comes up to me with a stack of questions bent on tearing apart my position, he is not coming to have an open minded discussion on faith, to get me on the defensive as quickly as he can so that he can feel good about how much smarter he is than me. I know this because I used to do this. In these sorts of discussions, my tactic is to ask seemingly simple questions that have a much greater scope than what is originally asked.  For an example: “What happens to a leaf if you pluck it from a tree and throw it over your shoulder onto the ground?” My aim is not to convert people who are obviously dead set against my position. I might as well be shouting at a stone. If my questions and discussion can cause little cracks in the assumptions that the person has, then he will start to come to his own answers by himself.

In the church world, there is a complete lack of understanding as to how a person could not believe in God. Actually, even in those who are atheists that I personally have known, I have seen evidence in each person that betrays the fact that they do, indeed, believe in something and have their own ideas on how things “really” work. Many church folks I know will ask the question “How can you not believe in God?” of a non-believer in the same tone in which a football fan asks me “How can you not like football?” The fact of the matter is that the non-believer has bought in to the secular continuity of the universe, whereas the believer has bought in to the biblical continuity.

People need a continuity in life, apparently. Take great care in picking yours.

Yesterday, I hooked up my mac mini to my Vizio 46″ TV.

Since then, I’ve been watching hulu and cult of the uhf podcast (as well as some of the Archive TV podcast with old serials).

I even watched a couple of episodes of The Time Tunnel.

This rules.

From time to time, I have attempted to make myself a local environment that would allow me to do some PHP/MySQL coding without having the intermediate step of having to upload the stuff.  I go with the Apache/PHP/MySQL configuration, and I naturally attempt to download, install, and configure them myself. This takes hours, and sometimes doesn’t quite get done before I give up completely and just go back to uploading stuff in order to test it.

Today, I discovered WAMP Server. I should have been looking for them all along. They have figured out my problem for me, which means I don’t have to worry about it. I like not worrying about it.

Yay, WAMP!

For the past week or so, we’ve had various “colored shirt” days.’

I wrote a quick javascript/html page to randomly generate colors.

Yesterday, I got tired of generating colors, and decided to declare today “moot shirt day”.

It is quite funny to watch engineers try to reason out what makes a shirt “moot”.

Today, I wore my mootest shirt: my GameDev.net Hockey Jersey. It is moot for several reasons. One, I am no longer a member of GameDev.net. Two, I don’t play hockey. Three, GameDev.net never actually had a team.  Ergo, the shirt is about a moot as… the mootest thing I can compare it to.

… inkscape is neat!

Not new, just neat!

That is all!

http://playdeezgames.wordpress.com/makedeez-games/

I don’t think the normal RSS feeds pick up on the “pages” added to a wordpress blog, just the blog posts themselves, so I have to call this one out.

The desire to write has struck me again, and my old “MakeDeez Games” project has been on my mind lately, as well.

As well as a number of things, I guess. You’ll probably see something about facebook development at some point.

Today, I was mulling over the statistics behind “Guess My Number”.  For those few who are not familiar with the game, a random number between 1 and 100 (inclusively) is chosen, and the player guesses what the number is.  He is told if his guess is too high or too low. The idea is to have the smallest number of guesses.

Now, granted, this is not much of a game, but it does have all of the elements of a game, and so is good for studying games.

So, I was thinking about the statistics of it.  The “best” strategy for playing is to divide the current possibility space into two sections in order to eliminate the most numbers from subsequent guesses. So, the first guess would be 50, followed by 25 or 75 (depending on the status of 50), and so on, subdividing the remaining possibilities into two until the final number is guessed.

This can be trivially formulized with logarithms…. the average number of guesses should be around log 100/log 2, or about 6.6.  Empirical evidence seems to support this idea, as most number are guessed in either 6 or 7 guesses, unless the player “gets lucky” with the number being 50, 25, 75, or the other early on numbers.

I realized today that I cannot discount those “lucky” numbers, and so I figured out the following:

There is 1 number that will always be guessed in 1 move (the number 50).

There are 2 numberst that will always be guessed in 2 moves (25 and 75).

Similarly there are 4 numbers guessed in 3, 8 numbers guessed in 4, 16 numbers guessed in 5, 32 numbers guessed in 6, and the remaining 37 numbers (to make 100 total) are guessed in 7.

Add these probabilities up in an excel spreadsheet:

1 x 1 guess = 1 guess

2 x 2 guesses = 4 guesses

4 x 3 guesses = 12 guesses

8 x 4 guesses = 32 guesses

16 x 5 guesses = 80 guesses

32 x 6 guesses = 192 guesses

37  x 7 guesses = 259 guesses

Total guesses = 580 guesses.

Divide by 100 numbers = 5.8 guesses/number.

So, we find that the actual average score is 5.8, which is 0.8 guesses less than the prediction from the logarithm approximation.

This analysis has also shed light on an important aspect of this game: why it isn’t fun.

Basically, your score at Guess My Number is wholly dependent on the number chosen randomly, provided that the player is using a deterministic strategy. The player has a 1% chance of winning on the first move. The second move he has a 1 divided by whatever numbers are left, and so on.

So, this makes the game a complete game of chance.  You might as well take a die and roll it, and whatever you roll is the score.  Beyond picking a binary search deterministic strategy, there is no method of improving score due to skill/technique development.

There have been some fixes and new development on HamQuest. Still nothing really new to show as of yet. I imagine there should be something by the end of the month, though.

I’ve also made up a quick console based prototype of yet another game, and at this point, I can say that the prototype works and the game will be fun, but I’m going to have to think about the platform on which it should be delivered.

The game is Island Interloper, and the point of the game is to amass wealth by buying and selling commodities in an ocean world dotted with islands. Actually it is something of a rehash of Pieter Spronck’s Space Trader for PalmOS circa 2002.

Currently the prototype allows the player to travel the ocean, dock at an island, and buy and sell cargo. It also requires one provision per day be eaten or the game is over, so it would technically be a completely playable game at this point if the console interface weren’t so clunky.

In creating the prototype, I decided to do a couple of interesting things.  One, the player “knows” about one and only one island… the island on which he is docked.  He knows nothing of the world at large. When travelling the ocean, he can detect an island when it is 10 days away.

Considering the world is 1000 units by 1000 units, and only 1000 islands are present, finding another island heading a random direction from the first one before food runs out can be a bit of a problem. It is just this very presence of danger and exploration of the unknown that makes for a fun aspect of a game.

Each island has a particular level of supply and demand for each of the various commodities, which generates a multiplication factor for the base price of the commodity on that island, so the normal way to go about things is to buy low, sell high, and go back and forth between two islands in this manner and become wealthy.

Except that I introduced a volatility factor that modifies supply and demand after a certain volume of items are moved. So island A may have cotton at 10 gold pieces per ton, and island B has cotton at 20 gold pieces per ton, but dragging enough cotton from A to B will close the gap in the prices after a while.  This feature works pretty well, actually, and since the player’s journeys are constantly bleeding provisions, it means that the player will be able to exploit a particular dichotomy between a couple of neighboring islands for a while, but will soon find himself in need of a new market.

So it would appear that I have the seed of a good new game forming.

But now it needs a venue. A console based game in C# is great for a prototype, but not for an actual game.  I would classify it as a primarily text based game, but it could be just at home on a web page as on a windows form.

One of my thoughts is that it would make a decent MMORPG on facebook, with a persistent world (with some manner of causing the supply and demand to reset itself over time). Unfortunately, such a game has a lot of moving parts to it: fbml, php, mysql, ajax.

But that’s what appeals, I guess.  Dunno where I’ll go with Island Interloper yet.  I think I’ll shelve it for a bit, and see what happens.