Mir’s Fuselage

Hey guys, so recently the Irish held a referendum and rejected the Lisbon treaty. Now, so far 18 out of 27 EU member states have ratified this, whilst 8 haven’t decided and 1, Ireland has rejected it. Even at this stage, however, this means the treaty has been essentially vetoed, because it requires all member states to ratify it to become binding. This also now gives Czech room to reject the treaty, which its president implies it will do.

How do you feel about this? The treaty would have created an office of President of Europe, created a mutual defence pact, essentially vested more power in the EU, and has been dubbed a ‘European Constitution’. Do you think it would only increase bureaucracy and “start to erode the rich cultural uniqueness of member states”? Is Ireland being slack by ‘holding up the game’ for everyone else? Should more countries have held referendums instead of rushing it through parliament?

Please, comment. I’m especially interested in European sentiments towards the treaty.

Tags: Politics // Add Comment »

Hey guys! So I’ve re-initiated the Obsidian IRC channel. Now, as you probably know, IRC is the most popular style of real-time chat and has been around since before the fall of the Soviet Union. Many websites (especially forums) have an IRC channel, and indeed before Obsidian, Black Isle had it’s own channel. Especially in the wake of not just Aliens but Alpha Protocol and SoZ, it seems an appropriate time to establish an Obsidian IRC channel for such discussion. So here we go:

irc://irc.quakenet.org/obsid

Or download & install mIRC, select and join server Quakenet, then type /join #obsid, or type obsid into the popup box that appears.

And we’ll get a few developers joining, though I’d ask that if they do join, you don’t push them but respect their words if they say “I can’t talk about that.”

It’s only small at the moment, but should grow as more people learn about it, and I’ll promote it a but more once it’s got a few regulars in it (so get moving! :D)

As a treat, here are some scans from a magazine that did a section on Alpha Protocol (thanks to sharkz for pointing these out):
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2397/2538638426_2378459fd8_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3258/2537824093_e67e6b88ba_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3224/2537820737_16e86d15de_b.jpg

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2179/2537823347_96a158caea_b.jpg

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3227/2538639948_1140c6e057_b.jpg

Tags: Gaming // Add Comment »

Lately I have been fiddling around in Python with the PyGame package. It’s amazing. Couple Python’s clarity and speed of development with a basic game design package (including SDL) and you have PyGame; the best way for a person to enter game programming. When you combine it with Psyco and py2exe it’s just gravy. Oh, and did I mention inherently multiplatform?

I’m making a 2D sidescroller. It has enemies that roll around their platform. You can kill them be jumping on top of them, but if they hit you, you lose. The objective is to destroy all the crates in the level. I’m using tiles to construct the level. I’m most proud of my animation of the ball cretins as they roll around their platform. I’m thinking maybe I can use this as a project to develop over the next 4 years, as a sort of show-case of my talent once I graduate and seek employment. I’ll probably include C++ code elements later.

In other news, I might be working with some people on developing a professional open-source 2D sidescroller engine (unrelated). Should be interesting.

Tags: Computing, Gaming // Add Comment »

The GUI programming in wxPython guide I wrote is available here. There’s also a permanent link in the ‘My Stuff’ category on the right. Please leave comments, suggestions, and corrections here, thanks!

I also wrote up a big list of Python related material such as tutorials, build tools, and important packages (GUI, etc) here. There’s also a permanent link in the ‘Recommend’ category on the right. I suggest taking a look, because I cover Psyco, py2exe, PyGame, wxPython, and Numpy.

Also, sorry about the downtime. Baywords is still experiencing problems, so it may not work yet.

Tags: Computing, Gaming // 3 Comments »

I’ve coded a programme to help people with regular expressions. It’s the first GUI programme I’ve made. It’s excellent. Looks good, is simple to use, does exactly what you want, and has an extensive help file slash regular expressions tutorial. It’s also feature-packed (as far as programmes designed to help you with regexps go); should be useful to developers and students alike.

I coded it in wxPython, which is the best, simplest, most feature-packed Python GUI package around, though with somewhat abysmal documentation (partially because old tutorials no longer make sense with the many revisions wx has gone through). To that end, I am writing a simple, easy to understand, tutorial for it. When I finish it I’ll make it available here. Check back soon.

Tags: Computing // Add Comment »

Speaking of open source, score one for the good guys. Firefox internet browser cracks 20% global market share. That’s an insane number for any new browser, but what’s interesting is Firefox’s rate of growth. Up till about 2007, Firefox had remained at below 5% market share for the 3 years it had existed. However, since 2007, it has experienced explosive popularity, ringing in at over 20% just 1.5 years later. It’s extremely popular here in Australia, with one of the highest uptake rates world-wide (at about 40%, beaten by Finland’s roughly 50%). It’s also very popular among university students and the younger generations in general. It’s flexible, secure, and sleek.

So delete that awful IE shortcut and go download Firefox. You won’t be disappointed.

Tags: Computing // Add Comment »

A concept I am monitoring with some anticipation is the move for open source game engines. Two in particular which pique my interest are FIFE and GemRB, whose roots are in Fallout and Baldur’s Gate respectively. Upon my superficial examination, it appears both projects are open source and designed to fulfil the same function, but from different directions. FIFE appears to be inspired by Fallout, but designed as a standard OSS engine for future 2D isometric games, whilst GemRB seems to designed to recreate the IE engine and emulate it’s functionality, and then expand to a general multi-purpose 2D isometric game engine. Both also seem fairly well on the way to achieving their goals.

Additionally, FIFE has a progress update thread on Obsidian’s forum’s here.

To be honest, I wouldn’t mind working on a project like FIFE. Maybe once I finish my degree.

Tags: Computing, Gaming // Add Comment »

This week I’ve been learning how to programme in GUIs, regular expressions and sockets. For the most part, these things are all 100% new to me, so I’m pleased with the speed of my progress.

The language I am learning is Python, and I have to say it is one of the most intuitive and elegant languages I’ve used yet. Along with Haskell, it’s the type of language that does what you want the first time. One of those rare gems where things actually compile without error on the first attempt.

I am writing a programme to query a website for its source code, sift through all the X/HTML tags, ignoring everything but image tags, then ignore everything but the link to the image. It then extends any embedded links to be absolute links, and finally prints a log file with the date, the URL and a list of all the images found. It is surprisingly robust in how often it works (the only failure so far being google images, which encrypts the images in the page source code for some reason). The Python script version works fine, but I am now making a GUI for it using wxPython (where one can enter the URL in a text box, and view the images downloaded, and select which ones to keep).

I only decided to do some prgramming in a rare bout of productivity. It was going OK, but since I have a script for dextro-amphetamine again, I decided to take some and see what it was like coding on it. It was bliss. I could actually concentrate; when I had to look up a function definition on Google, I would do so without getting distracted for 30 minutes (damn ADHD), and my thoughts took shape swiftly whilst retaining the abstract thinking I’m good at. It’s refreshing to code again, too; life without maths or coding was making me die inside a little.

Tags: Computing // Add Comment »