Wow, I made it! The next development snapshot of Solid is here! I can't believe that the last snapshot was over two months ago. I will try to release snapshots more often.

This release focused primarily on developing a scene editor, but also saw a significant overhaul of the engine architecture. And a few things did not make it into the release that where in InDev1; especially the actual game play.

You can download and try out the InDev2 version of Solid.

So Notch is launching a new game called 0x10c and it is a space exploration game. It would be an understatement that I am totally thrilled about that development. A classical game along the lines of elite with a modern cote of paint, is just what we need. Especially from the financially independent developer Mojang.

One of the twist about it all is that the game features a freely programmable 16 Bit CPU. Since I had not dabbled in compiler and interpreter development for a while, I was thrilled to take up the challenge and develop a assembler and simulator. As an added challenge I decided to only a plain text editor and vanilla C.

Remember Glow Cubes, probably not since I don't have that many recuring visitors. (Maybe we can change that...)

Since around October 2011 I started developing on project "solid". The idea is to develop a physic based puzzle game within a spaced out environment. With my relative bad track record, where I wandered into the realm of engine development and never came back, I set some clear goals:

• develop engine code only within the game project
• develop only what is needed for the next feature
• don't get distracted with nice but usless features
• dedicate a fixed amount of time to the project to guarantee progress

The Escapist recently reported on the Torrent Freak's latest numbers on piracy. I hate when things get reported in this form. They are not wrong, but things like that are taken with a very strong bias.

I will just take the PC number stated in the report, since they are by far the biggest:

For starters I doubt on the correctness of the numbers. How did they collect the data? I will assume they mean downloads via torrent, the numbers come from Torrent Freak anyway. To get accurate data they need to track the users of all torrent trackers, that is including all private trackers. It is impossible that they have access to every private tracker, especially since many are invite only. Also many users follow multiple trackers, so there is a source of duplicate entries. Finally some versions are incomplete, broken or malware infected, so people tend to download multiple versions of one game to get a running install. At very best they give a roughs estimate of actual pirated copies.

This website is generated with jekyll and hosted on Amazon S3 but how does this all work together?

First off there is jekyll, a blog aware static site generator. What jekyll does is it takes input files written in HTML, Markdown or Textile and applies a HTML template with liquid. The result of this is a fully static website.

Since the input to jekyll is mostly text files, it applies itself to put the files into source control. In my case I used git. As backup and for posterity I push the changes to a public repository hosted by github. If a team would maintain the website, this would be the main means how changes to the website are shared.

I recently looked into Ruby on Rails to see what the hype is or rather was about. I even found a nifty introduction to the subject and found along the way the nifty little language ruby. I probably will not use it for any serious projects, but it is nice to know I have a new tool in my tool belt.

I wanted to show a coworker my new found knowledge about this nifty language, but when trying to use gem I was locked out. I was quite acquainted with installing gems directly by downloading them and invoking gem locally, because of my previous jekyll experience, but there should be a better way.

Nice tech demo, where is the game?

Having completed some significant work, I treated myself to a game that I wanted to try out for a long time, From Dust. It basically all sttlarted with the first "Dev Diary" video. A beautiful landscape molded in real time with realtime simulation of water, fire and vegetation. A real technology gem.

With a big bang, the news hit home Microsoft killed the start menu. Ok the title of that slashdot post was a bit infalatory, but it is true, the start menu is being replaced by a start screen in Windows 8. The reason is? No one uses the start menu...

Maybe, just maybe it has to do smething with the fact that the Windows Vista and Windows 7 start menus are a convoluted mess? Maybe, just maybe, it has to do some thing with the standard way for applications to add links to the start menu? Let's look into the subject a bit deeper...

Dead Island had a lot going for it. The cinematic announce trailer is one of the best trailers for a video games ever. It is brilliant because it tells a very personal story, the tragic events that befall a young family at the brink of a zombie virus outbreak.

Many trailers for games are violent, but most are meaningless. But in the Dead Island trailer it has sense; a father frees his daughter from zombies. Tragically, the rescue was futile since the daughter turned zombie attacks her own father ending in all terribly dying. This trailer has the quality of a classic Greek tragedy.

I bought the humble frozen synapse bundle. The main reason I bought it was for Frozen Synapse. I had heard a lot about that game and what can you do wrong with pay what you want? But what I think of Frozen Synapse is a different story; what really surprised me was Trauma.

Trauma is an award winning game and really merits these awards. (In contrast to blueberry garden.) Normally I do not give much for awards in general and the game completely passed me by and is a real gem.