A couple of my websites were begun on my Alienware PC (running Windows, of course). Later I moved development to my Mac. But tonight I started using Phusion Passenger to deploy my Rails web applications in Apache 2. An elegant and revolutionary solution for the Rails community, no doubt! But there was a problem when I finished the migration and started up the websites under the new Passenger setup. A lot of files failed to load. All HTML loaded fine, as did many images. But some images failed to load, and the stylesheets too. Hmm... Why would some images load and some not, if they're in the same directory?

It turns out that the images added when I was developing on Windows were not loading, but the images added from my Mac loaded fine. Why? Permissions! When you copy Windows files to a Linux server or to a Mac, the permissions look like this:

-rw------- 1 geek geek 781 2009-01-31 01:23 accept.png

-rw------- 1 geek geek 789 2009-01-31 01:23 bell.png

-rw------- 1 geek geek 882 2009-01-31 01:23 clock.png

Not good enough for Apache to serve them to site visitors. Mac and Linux copy the files with more friendly permissions, like this:

-rw-r--r-- 1 geek geek   652 2009-05-03 14:13 feed-icon.gif

-rwxr-xr-x 1 geek geek 18173 2009-05-03 14:13 GeekSkillz_logo1.png

-rwxr-xr-x 1 geek geek  3214 2009-05-03 14:13 IK_guy_footer.jpg

So, a simple chmod on the files fixed the problem and all files started getting served again.

To me, this is a testament to how well Mac and Linux work together, since Mac OS X is really a highly customized distro of Linux. Develop on Mac, deploy on Linux, and win! Or just develop on Linux and deploy on Linux, I guess.

Why does Windows set the permissions like that? Another way that Windows tries to babysit its users? Assume users have the worst intentions and implement strict restrictions?

Anyway, what am I rambling about? Rails development on Mac for a Ubuntu server with Apache and Passenger are awesome? Abandoning Windows has made me fitter, happier and more productive? Yeah, I guess those are good conclusions.

Blah blah blah. I'm going to bed. Good night, blog.

Cell Stage

This phase is a gorgeous re-interpretation of Pac-Man. It is elegant, fluid, and calming. I suspect that this is where the game's inspiration started and ended. "Wouldn't it be neat if you could play a multi-cellular organism and play through it's evolution?" Yes it would be neat, and it is! Huzzah! As I played this stage, I marveled at how my creature gradually grew in size and shape with each generation, and the fuzzy gigantic organisms in the depths of the primordial ooze gradually focused and joined my creature's food chain. Then a few minutes later, my creature was the gigantic organism and they were the nuggets I was snacking on, soon to be too small to even see. Checking my creature's history at the end of the stage, I saw that almost 7 billion years had passed. This stage truly captures the essence of evolution, and more importantly, it's a fun game. Still, it's Pac-Man and the novelty wears off after half an hour.

Creature Stage

Still grinning from the cell stage, I enjoyed the creature stage. I got the most enjoyment after having my creatures "mate" so that I could change my species. With each generation, I improved the look of my species so that I liked it more as I played. In a sense, my satisfaction with my species increased a bit with each generation. This stage didn't feel so much like evolution as it did intelligent design. *shudder* My choices while playing had little impact on the evolution of my species. Playing the creature stage means doing only a few things: picking up species customizations from the ground, killing other species, and making friends with other species. That's it. Killing and befriending are really the same action with different animations. As for the evolution, couldn't the developers have thought of something more creative than picking up parts to evolve your species? I don't think Darwin suggested that birds got their wings by finding them on a beach, or that reptiles scooped up their brains from a pond.

Still, I enjoyed this stage well enough. It plays like a prototype of World of Warcraft, except without any cool features. Hmm... did I really enjoy it? Maybe I was just excited to be playing Spore, with the promise of the space stage still to come. *sigh*

Tribal Stage

Having reached the tribal stage, the hours spent customizing my species were made irrelevant and my highly evolved brain began to tell me that Spore might suck. Still, the space stage will be great! Right?

In the tribal stage, my creatures were too small to make out any of the details that made my species so cool! (If I do say so myself.) It plays like a real-time strategy game, like the original Warcraft games. But I played the first Warcraft RTS, and it had a lot more going for it than Spore's tribal stage. Spore has stripped down the RTS formula to its most basic elements, so that you end up with a stage that isn't fun, isn't challenging, and abandons everything you've done in the game so far. This stage is where the train wreck that is Spore begins. Spore has officially gone off the rails here.

On the bright side, I unlocked the achievement for beating the tribal stage in less than an hour. I hated it almost immediately, so I got through it as fast as possible. It's so simple, I can't see how anyone could spend more than an hour, or why they would want to.

Civilization Stage

The civilization stage is awful, awful, awful. And I had to spend more than an hour on it. I don't even want to write about it.

What's worse is that elements of this stage carry forward into the space stage. Arranging buildings in your little cities is a chore you will need to perform repeatedly in the space stage after every attack (see later). There's nothing fun about designing and arranging the idiotic cities in Spore. Even on the highest graphic settings, they are a blurry, blobby mess. And I still can't see my wonderful species, as they're being blocked by blurry buildings! Bah! Frustration rises!

Space Stage

And here's where the train wreck appears in all its horrifying glory. I played the space stage for three evenings (about 10 hours), because I just couldn't look away. "Is it really this terrible?" Yes, I've concluded that it is. Here's are some of my problems with it:

1. Endless Attacks: My colonies are always under attack, and I have never had more than 2 colonies at a time! Every 5 minutes a popup message tells me I need to save a colony. I decided to just ignore the attacks, which turned out to be a bad strategy. There's no time to explore space between all the attacks. While I investigate a planet to see if I want to colonize it, it's a sure thing that I'll be called away to deal with yet another attack. How is that supposed to be fun?

2. I want to explore! Following on number 1, I don't know how I'm supposed to explore space if I am kept busy with unprovoked wars and pirates. Can't I just have time to explore space and colonize planets for a while?

3. My ship won't defend itself outside of planets. My allies' ships will defend me, but there's no way to use my own ship's weapons in space. Why? Will I need to buy an expansion pack for this feature? Will I care?

4. Micromanagement of colonies: Each city on each planet needs to have its buildings plopped down inside a circle with connected lines that I guess is supposed to be a mini-game... It's annoying. Whenever a colony is invaded (every 5 minutes), buildings get destroyed. But I don't know which ones, so I need to check each city and replace what I think is missing. There's no shortcut for doing this, so I need to drag and drop each building again and again and again. While I'm doing this, it's possible that another attack will start somewhere else.

5. Space is crowded. It seems that the developers assume that space is filled with intelligent life. All the systems around me were quickly colonized by alien species, so I need to travel far away to find uninhabited systems. While searching, attacks are happening back home. Are you getting the picture yet?

6. Where's the sandbox? In marketing for the game, the space stage was promoted as a huge sandbox for you to play in. But this sandbox is the kind that throws sand in your eyes and kicks you in the groin repeatedly! It hurts! The sandbox hurts! Make it stop! I don't have any freedom to do anything creative or interesting in the space stage. It hates me, and I hate it.

The space stage, more than any other part of the game, is so disappointing it's maddening. How could Maxis have made it so irritating? Did the playtesters actually enjoy it, or were they simply ignored?

I'm not sure that I can play Spore anymore. If there's a patch that somehow fixes the space stage, then I'll give it another try. Or maybe some talented modders make some changes. I want to play it because the idea of Spore is alluring. I want the game that was supposed to be Spore!

If I find out how to make the space stage fun, I'll be sure to write a post about it. If you know what I'm doing wrong, please leave a comment! I would like to give Spore a second chance and start enjoying it. But for now, I'm completely disappointed.

The Good:

The Marksman: Playing the marksman class is great fun. Marksmen get to use many types of guns that are truly unique and can change the feel of gameplay a great deal. Using the Firefox (yes, Firefox) launcher is nothing like using a machine gun, and the option of using one small gun in each hand lets you have two different gun effects going off at the same time. I often chose to use two guns just because it was fun, even if it might have done less damage (which is hard to say... see later). The marksman doesn't suffer from the annoyances, bugs, and quirks of the other classes because you're just firing guns and shooting grenades. That's basically all there is to the class.

Weapon Sets: Hellgate lets you create three weapon sets that you can switch between using F1, F2, and F3. So, you can equip your machine gun on F1, equip two one-handed weapons on F2, and equip a sniper rifle on F3. This makes it feasible to switch between different weapons effortlessly so that you can use fire damage on monsters weak to fire, then switch to electrical damage for another monster, go into sniper mode with your sniper rifle, and so on. Setting up my arsenal of weapon slots was definitely fun, I'll give Hellgate that.


The Bad:

The Story: Wow, the story in this game is a stinker. I can hear some people protesting, claiming that Diablo's story wasn't very impressive either, and that no one plays an action-RPG for its story. But Hellgate's story is so bad it can't be ignored. I just can't bear the thought of playing through the last act again because it is so unbelievably stupid and painful to experience. The story is complete nonsense. I would say that the story was written while someone was on drugs, but I don't want to insult drugs like that. None of it made sense. None of it. The ending consists of fighting a demon who appears on the front of the game box, with very little explanation. Most disappointing villain ever. Diablo at least set up Diablo as this terrible demon who needed to be stopped. But the demon at the end of Hellgate has no history or story at all. Is it really so hard to foreshadow the end boss as a big bad guy?

The Writing: Ok, "writing" and "story" are basically the same thing, but I really hated this aspect of the game, so I'm including it in two sections. It's my blog and I can do what I want to! The writing is terrible. NPC dialog tries to be funny, but falls flat, and it gives very little information. Every NPC is a clown, cracking jokes or talking nonsense in a sad, sad effort to get a chuckle. Even worse is that some of the jokes are voice-acted so that you have to listen to them every time you want to sell your loot. It's ok for games to have humour, but it should be suitable in some way. Hellgate does a good job of creating a dark, post-apocalyptic atmosphere, but it is often ruined because all the NPCs are total buffoons. For the benefit of the Hellgate writers, here's the definition of "Toon" from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America website:

Toon. A comic relief character generally intended to be recognized as such -- Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are toons (most of Shakespeare's comic relief characters are toons). Toons have a limited place in fiction; an excess of them can render an otherwise serious work trivial. (CSFW: David Smith)

Cinematics: The cinematics in between each act are nonsense, much like the rest of the story. Without spoiling anything, they show a floating book. To accompany the floating book is a narrator who makes no sense at all. He just babbles some cliches and random words. Why even bother with cinematics if the writers have no content for them? Awful.

Skill Descriptions: Hellgate has skill trees like in Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft. Want to know what each skill does? You can try reading the skill descriptions, but they often won't help. To understand what most of the skills do, you need to spend precious skill points and try them. Since there's no way to get those skill points back, you'll end up wasting points on skills you don't like. The fix for this problem? Hire better technical writers. But you already know how I feel about the writing in this game... Unhelpful skill descriptions is just another symptom of a bigger problem with Hellgate. Alternatively, they could allow characters to "re-spec" (re-assign skill points any way you like), but I can understand why the game designers don't want to allow that.

Weapon Damage: Similar to the poor skill descriptions, it is very difficult to know whether one weapon is more powerful than another. All weapons have a number on them, but the meaning of that number is a mystery. It doesn't tell you how much damage you do, although that's what I assumed until finding a weapon with a much lower number that did a lot more damage than my current weapon. Most games now use the "damage per second" metric to tell you how much damage weapons will do, but Hellgate doesn't. Just like skills, the only way to tell the power of a weapon is to try it. Even then, it's hard to tell which weapons are more powerful most of the time.

Guide the Fist to Victory!: The quest "The Wall", where you must "Guide the Fist to Victory!" is a vomit-inducing stench of awful. It's unbelievable that someone at Flagship had played the quest, thought it was good, and decided to leave it in the game. This quest forces you to play a real-time strategy mission where you must control four useless soldiers from a top-down perspective and kill a boss somehow. The quest doesn't work well, and is completely broken in multi-player. If you do the quest in a party, every party member shares the same camera but controls different units. So, if you move north and your friend moves west, the camera can only show one person at a time, often oscillating between different viewpoints so that no one can see anything. Have no doubt, you and your friends will be yelling and screaming at each other in frustration. If you want your friendship to survive, you'd better start laughing about how bad the quest is. It's actually pretty funny. Flagship, what the hell? This quest is deplorable. And what's worse is that there is another quest like it closer to the end of the game. You will again need to control a unit in the same way (The Lightning), and it's just as bad.

Dismantle: The game has what I thought was a good feature at first. Instead of dropping items or carrying them back to town to sell, you have the option of dismantling loot to get small, stackable scraps that can later be used for crafting, upgrades, or selling. In theory, it's a great feature that improves on the Diablo formula. But soon you'll find that you're spending a good chunk of your time using the game's awkward interface to dismantle the hundreds of useless items that you picked up, one at a time. If you see your party members standing still instead of helping you in a fight, you can be sure that they are busy dismantling their items. In other games, you would suspect that they lost their internet connection or their computer crashed. But in Hellgate, they are dismantling items. This problem can be easily fixed with a "dismantle all" button or "dismantle all non-magic items". Titan Quest fixed this problem by giving you the option to ignore all non-magic and/or inferior items that drop. You won't even see them, so they'll never find their way into your inventory. Hellgate could easily add the same feature and it would go a long way to make the game more fun.

Levels: By themselves, I rather like most of the tile sets in the game. I especially like fighting in the London streets, the ruins of pubs, flats, and cars all around. The problem is that after you have been playing for a few hours, you have seen nearly all the level designs. After a few more hours, you will be dying to see some colours besides brown and grey. Set pieces like the British Museum and Piccadilly Circus are a welcome relief, and are very well done. Also, the game claims to be randomizing the levels, but I don't see it. Every street level looks the same to me. Every sewer, the same. Every basement, the same. Every hell citadel, the same. I'm sure there are slight variations, but the randomization is far too subtle to provide any variety. Also, since the game has the word "hell" in the title, you would think that hell would be an impressive place. Nope. Hellgate features the most boring, unimpressive rendition of hell I've ever seen. As for the hellgate itself, it provided the funniest moment in the game for me. When I first saw it, I thought I was looking at a rainbow. "Oh, isn't that pretty! Oh wait... that's the hellgate!? Mwahahaha!" If only the NPCs were that funny.



Conclusion

Ok, I think I've pummeled Hellgate: London for long enough now. It's bruised and bleeding, and I almost feel bad about it. The game can be pretty fun to play, although I didn't enjoy most of the classes. As a marksman, I had some good times. Hellgate is not beyond hope, given another year or two of development.

I tried to play it a couple of times lately, but couldn't get back into it. I don't want to dismantle any more items! I don't want to guide the Fist to victory ever again! The final level with the guy on the cover of the box is torture and I don't want to do it! There are too many things in the game that aren't fun.

If you're looking for a good action-RPG released in the past few years, I highly recommend Titan Quest. I can't recommend Hellgate: London to anyone for any reason.

This problem isn't limited to programming language files. It could affect anyone who doesn't use Microsoft software, or file types that Microsoft doesn't care about.

Well, I found a Microsoft Support article that tells you how to fix this problem. You can tell Windows to look in every file, even the ones that Windows would rather ignore. You are warned that this will slow down Windows Search, because it means that Windows Search will actually be doing what you asked it to do! Wouldn't you rather that the search finish immediately and give you no results? I mean, why would you want to wait 30 seconds only to find what you're looking for?

Windows XP instructions:

1. Click Start, and then click Search.
2. Click Change preferences above the dog's ugly face, and then click With Indexing Service (for faster local searches).
3. Click Change Indexing Service Settings (Advanced).
4. In the "Indexing Service" window that pops up, click the third icon from the left with the tooltip that says Show/Hide Console Tree.
5. In the left pane, right-click Indexing Service on Local Machine, and then click Properties.
6. Yet another window will pop up. On the Generation tab, put a check mark in the Index files with unknown extensions check box.
7. Click OK. It is now done.
8. Close the "Indexing Service" window.

Here's an optional set of instructions, which is preferable for web programming:

1. Go buy a Mac.
2. Use your Windows PC for playing games.

I’m not alone here. Plenty of discussion on digg.com reveals similar stories and pissed off customers. This is a broken game on Windows. Similar stories aren’t heard from XBOX 360 customers. So we can see where the game developer’s priorities were.


Bioshock on Windows is Not Finished!

Quality assurance in the gaming industry is garbage. I’m sure that the QA folks know how to test and are finding bugs. However, the game companies don’t care. Once they get to a release date, most companies will ship the game and patch it later. Or not patch it. They must know that the bugs exist, but they’re more interested in making their quarterly results than making customers happy. Ship the game, expect complaints, publish happy financial numbers, and release a patch sometime later.

There’s no incentive to wait until a game is finished. You can’t return a game to the store after you find out it doesn’t work. As soon as you break that precious plastic wrap, you’re on your own.


Bioshock Gameplay Tips

Here are some tips for surviving in Bioshock:

1. If you don’t have a second monitor, buy one.
2. Keep Windows Task Manager open on your second monitor so you can Alt-Tab to it and kill Bioshock.exe.
3. Keep the reset button of your computer within easy reach.
4. Update your device drivers to pass the time. It probably won’t help, but at least you’ll accomplish something.
5. Have a game that works installed on your system, like Oblivion or anything by Blizzard. These games are made by companies who actually delay their game release dates when they are not finished their games. That’s right, instead of getting instant cash and pissing off their customers, some companies choose to finish their games enough so that they run for more than a few minutes at a time.

Rumors say that a patch for Windows customers is on the way. Isn’t that nice. What will they do to make me forget that I got screwed by buying this game? I should have downloaded an illegal copy.

In the meantime, the company says that you need some beta video card drivers. But the install for those drivers say they can’t find any updates... And besides, I’m not installing unfinished drivers for an unfinished game. That’s an unacceptable policy. Did I pay for the Bioshock Beta, or what?

Most games take some effort to get running on Windows. It’s rare that you can install a game, load it, and enjoy. You usually have to adjust the screen resolution, choose which type of shadows your computer can handle, adjust the draw distance, tweak the grass density, choose the water reflection mode, adjust the texture quality, adjust actor detail, enable or disable specular highlighting, choose the appropriate anti-aliasing mode, see how much high-dynamic range lighting affects performance, and so on and so on until you can find the right mix of visual quality and frame rate. And that assumes that the game doesn’t crash when you load the game, start a new game, enter a new zone, load a game, jump into a tree, stand on the blue brick, swing a dagger while wearing the gauntlets of ogre power, dance and cast magic missile without any pants, or whatever might turn the game against you.

I think it’s time I bought a console and give up gaming on Windows forever. That would mean that I wouldn’t need a Windows PC at all! Is it time to buy a Mac desktop now? Hmm... I can see that day coming.


Some Happy Thoughts

To Bioshock’s credit, I still want to play it. I will wait patiently for a patch and see how things turn out. It seems like it could be a beautiful game. It is clearly inspired by Fallout. Just look at the men and women washroom signs. There are countless other allusions to Fallout in the game, like the black and white film vignettes and rusty retro architecture. It’s great! The art deco architecture, underwater urban environment, and retro 1950’s music make for a cool steampunk-ish world.

It will be a great game when it’s finished, I’m sure.

This was clearly a botched police operation. Soon after the dirty cops were identified and called out by the protesters, they approached the line of riot cops seeking help. They were taken to the other side of the riot cops' shields, and gently arrested. They remained masked the entire time. As if it wasn't clear enough that they were cops, the riot cops made the mistake of putting them on the ground, which allowed all the digital cameras to get high resolution images of the pigs' boots and the riot cops boots. All the boots had identical Vibram soles. The failed instigators clumsily put duct tape on their boots to try to disguise them, but didn't cover the bottoms where the boots can be identified.

Thanks to social news sites like digg, the story is not just causing a stir in Canada. (Can Canadians be stirred by anything?) The story, pictures, and video are being viewed worldwide. This certainly isn't the first time that police have been accused of inciting violence to defame protesters, but the evidence here is incontrovertible, in my opinion: The way the dirty cops fled from the protesters, practically begging the riot cops to rescue them. There were no arrests made or charges laid. The identities of the three men has not been released. Their masks were never removed. The standard issue Vibram police boots. The dissemination of information across the internet was swift. It's too late for a government cover-up this time.

It's disgusting and outrageous. Where did the orders come from for this repulsive mission? To know for certain that our police are using violent tactics against peaceful civilians is hard to accept. It's the worst kind of abuse of power.

Sadly, I think this event will be forgotten by next week.

Update Aug. 24, 2007

Looks like the issue got enough attention that it got a response from the federal government. Time to see some legislation to keep the police in check.

Time to "police the police"

I’ll try to piece his argument together since he’s not capable. What he seems to be saying is that Oblivion’s combat was bad because it wasn’t comparable to fighting games. By fighting games, I think he means games like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat. I guess it’s hard to argue with him on this idiotic comparison. Oblivion sure was a terrible fighting game. And I’m glad it was! Imagine buying an RPG only to find that it’s a fighting game!

Ok, that’s probably a straw man argument. I don’t know what Molyneux was trying to say. The only clear message he sends is this: “most role-playing games are shit.”

I read the article further to find out more about his vision for the future of RPGs. He describes the target audience for Fable 2 like this:

"I am certainly suggesting that a good proportion of those people can't even control a character, and get stuck, and we're spending a lot of time getting that right. I could say draw your sword and they wouldn't even have a clue what we're talking about."

What the...?!

His target audience for this fantasy-themed RPG are people who don’t know what a sword is? They don’t know what a sword is? Or they don’t know what it means to “draw a sword”? Are there a lot of people who have never heard of a sword who are buying video games? Weren’t the Lord of the Rings movies extremely popular? Didn’t they involve a lot of swords, and drawing of swords? Even if you didn’t see the movie, you must have seen posters of the movies. And there were these shiny, metal, pointy things. If you had never seen them before, maybe you would ask someone, “Hey, what are those shiny, pointy, sharp-looking things in that picture?” “Oh, that’s a sword, you moron.”

Ok, maybe that’s another straw man argument. I don’t think so, but it’s inconceivable that Molyneux is targeting such a rare type of person for Fable 2. Let’s look at the first statement about the target audience. How many people who play video games don’t know what it means to control a character? Ever since Pong, Pac-Man, and Space Invaders, you have had to control a character on the screen. If the Pong paddles had to sit still, unmoving, completely locked in place, I don’t think it would have been quite as popular. If you couldn’t understand the concept of controlling the paddles, your interest in video games was probably nil.

Moving a character in games these days now includes more than one dimension. Now you must move your character forward, backward, left, and right. Molyneux must have an extremely low opinion of people if he doesn’t think we understand the concept of moving in two dimensions.

Molyneux is not God’s gift to games. In my opinion, he hasn’t produced a single decent game since the disappointing Dungeon Keeper games (1997). Black & White was an atrocious, infuriating game. Controlling the giant animals was a pointless exercise in frustration, adding nothing strategic to the gameplay. I remember showing Black & White to a friend, and he asked me why I played the game if it made me so angry. That was the last time I played it.

Here’s another quote that proves Molyneux has gone off the deep end:

”If I am using the attack button it means I want to do something aggressive to the nearest target!”

Innovation! The RPG Fighting Game Action Arcade Button Masher genre will never be the same!

Just one more quote because it’s fun:

”Remember, this is a role playing game: all the different weapons have different music sounds and give a very individual feel to the combat.”

That is a completely insane statement! Why do all weapons have different music sounds (whatever that means) and what does that have to do with role-playing games?? Does a dagger sound like a kazoo playing Yankee Doodle Dandy? Does a bow sound like bagpipes? What do I need to do to unlock the 1812 Overture music sound weapon?

This interview is almost as infuriating as Black & White!

My only hope is that other role-playing game designers have read Molyneux’s damning opinion of their work, that Molyneux alienates himself from his own industry, and that Fable 2 has no impact at all on my favorite game genre, because I don’t see RPGs evolving into fighting game musical weapon adventures. Go talk crazy about some other genre.