Lady luck is using a loaded dice…
The one thing that I didn't backup was Outlook. My email is handled by GMail and since Outlook also syncs with my mobile phone, I already had a backup of my mail and my contacts.
So being the adventurous type I decided against wasting my time and do a proper backup. Well, today, when I wanted to call someone, I found out that all my contacts had been wiped from my mobile phone and as a result my backup was gone.
I suspect that it has been my own fault, but based on the bad luck I'm having lately I'm suspecting Lady Luck to uses loaded dice to decide my chances...
Wierd evening
Today went well, as far days go, that was until it hit 11 o'clock (I had been watching the football match between the Netherlands and Cameroon, which we won 
). I went up to my room to see if my laptop had completed some maintenance work and was surprised to find "The computer has been recovered"-message which is signal that something has gone horribly wrong. Clicking 'Ok' caused it to reboot and after swiping my finger (gotta love the fingerprint protection system) the computer logged in and Bang! Blue Screen followed by a reboot after which the computer tried to recover again.
I decided to let the computer have another try before I would try and find out what was wrong, but needless to say, this rant is not about how happy I am that it has been fixed but that I didn't complete it.
To make a long story short I decided that it was quicker to just reinstall everything so as I was busy back up, my mom asked me to pick up my brother who had gone party. It was already the next day (it's now almost two in the morning) and to my suprise I found out that my bike (who he borrowed) was suddenly a folding bike and I'm prety sure that was not possible when he left. Apperantly he had to evade something which caused him to ride in to a low wall. The result: Bike broken and my favorite brother had a few scratches.
So now I'm reinstalling my system for the first time I bought it (almost four years ago, which is a record) and I'm without a bike. If the sky would drop on my head right now I wouldn't even be suprised. 
How to write school papers
Everybody who knows me only a little bit now that I have a huge dislike for writing papers. Papers are too much theory and to little substance for me.
Because of school I'm finding myself on the other side and I have to write a paper instead which, as you might guess, I find even less enjoyable than having to read one.
The problem however is that if I don't write a good paper I won't graduate and frankly I do want to graduate.
So instead of focusing myself on the problem (me disliking papers) I try to focus on the solution (write a good paper to get my pass) and here are a few tips and ideas to write your school paper.
1. A thousand words each day
When I first started working on my paper the progress was slow. I know that my paper needs to have 4000 words at least and after a week I had only 1200 words. Since I only work a few days in the week on my school work I would come at an average of 400 words every day, which is about a page a day. So I decided that for every day in the week I would write at least 1 thousand new words and remove at most 1 thousand words. Because of that I will always add more words than I remove.
As soon as I have added a thousand new words I would allow myself to take the rest of the day free. If I would write 17 words each minute and keep it up for an hour I would be done with my work within an hour. If you have four weeks left and only work on your paper three days of the week you would have a total of 4*3*1000 = 12000, which would be 3 times the required minimum.
If you keep track of your word count from day to day it becomes something enjoyable (and rewarding since it takes only an hour a day) instead of tedious.
2. Learn how to use Word
The majority of the people don't know how to use Microsoft Word but if you want to write a lot (and you want to write quickly) try to not use custom formatting at all (don't touch bold, cursive, etc) but use the styles ("Header 1", "Header 2" and so on). Formatting the text is something you will do only when everything is finished and if you have used styles the formatting is easy as you only have to adjust the style.
Images are the one thing that only always cause me trouble. I know that they need to be there, but I don't want to waste time now on creating them. What I always do is reserve one style in which I describe what image should be placed there. Later I just look for that style and I know how to replace it.
Also using comments and "keep track of changes" can be an aid. And using the grammar checker is useful to ensure that you are writing normal sentences.
3. Ignore spelling and grammar
Normally I would strongly advise against the above but I learned from creative writing (stories) that there are times you don't want to know that you type a certain word wrong or that your grammar is a long way off, but if you are typing about some complex algorithm (which is the part I really hate, just give me the code instead) you just want to continue typing. Fixing can be done later.
That are a few of the things I use to write my school paper. I hope they provide some aid if you have also the same amount of trouble writing paper.
EULA of Visual Studio 2010 from dreamspark
EULA: End User License Agreement
You know that annoying check box you need to check when you install new software or games? The one that says "I have read and agree with the EULA"? Do you ever read what it says above it? No? Oh...
Seriously. The EULA is important and you should read it... in some cases.
One of those cases was when I was browsing DreamSpark (free Microsoft development tools) which after registering and confirming you are a student (one of the few times I happily admit I'm a student) you can download all kind of free development tools at no charge with all features.
In general there is no such thing as free stuff. "Buy one and get another free" is not free, it is 50% discount when you buy two. Still I decided to check it out and to my surprise (actually, the school forum had point it out). There was also the new Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Professional.
"Cool!!" was my first reaction, but after checking the site further out I noticed that Visual Studio 2008 and many others had a license that by downloading I agree to not use it for "commercial". Here is the section I refer to:
b. Restrictions. You may not use the Software:
• for commercial purposes (except as permitted under Section 3(d); or
• to develop or maintain Your own administrative or IT systems, or those of Your educational institution.
(Full Microsoft DreamSpark License)
However for some strange reason the above EULA was not on the screen of VS2010. So after downloading I checked if the installer had such a restriction and it did not. That means I now have a full and legal version of Visual Studio at no cost with no restrictions other than those you would have if you bought it.
For that I thank you Microsoft!
The programmer IDE
Everyone in the game industry knows the console wars (also because it is a recurring war ) but not many know about the editor war. The editor war was a war that played between two major editors (mostly available on Linux) which were vi and Emacs.
When I look at how code is written I always find myself a bit annoyed as the IDE (Integrated development environment) is basically nothing more than notepad with some extra features. Nothing wrong with notepad or the many IDE’s out there.
But I have always thought that code has one major weakness: Code is always written in a linear fashion. This is not inherent to only code, but a facet of how language works. In the majority of the languages we write from left to right and then from top to bottom. Some languages write in a different order, but always in one direction and then in the other.
I have always wondered why this has to be. Ok, I admit the fact that code is often a language (Like for example C++) but most languages have features like branching (if-else for example), and sub functions.
Recently I came across “Code Bubbles” and honestly I love it, it’s because I’m not a Java programmer pure sang (I did Java a long time ago), but this wants to me to make Java my primary language. Anyway here is a screenshot which demonstrates and I think any developer would applaud this.
Installing Ubuntu on my old laptop
After cleaning up my room. I found one of my old laptops (which have been passed to my mother and back again) and wondered what I should do with it. It was my first laptop and although I don't intend to use it, I don't want to throw away a good laptop (well, there is a line of pixels who always have red on but that is besides the point).
Before I decided to install Ubuntu I wanted to take one last look at what my old laptop had stored on the computer. A wise thing since I came across a few old applications and some documents that all had some kind of emotional value. But more important I found my old music collection.
Copying my music collection from one computer to another wouldn't be such a big problem except that the library was/is around 10 GB. To give you an idea my current library is 27 GB which means I can let the music being played for almost 12 days before I encounter the first song in the playlist again. Anyway, copying from one system could be done in a few ways. One would be using an USB stick (which means I would to do it many times before everything would have been copied). The second method would be using the windows file shares to copy things over the network. Besides the fact that both devices are on wireless, the way windows copies a lot of files is not really fast.
In the end I decided to try something new: Bittorrent. Ok, I admit I have used bittorrent before but never to copy files from one device to another. Simply create a decentralized torrent, copy that to the receiving computer and run it. Besides that it worked (I tried it once before) it was rather fast. Of course once I decided to give the seeder a wire it was a whole lot faster (2.5 Mb per second instead of 500 Mb per second)
Once I copied a few of the other files using dropbox I decided to install Ubuntu. First downloading the live cd and put it on an usb using UNetbootin. The live version worked nice, so all that is left is installing.
The reason I decided for Ubuntu is because Windows XP is rather old and I have missed around with it a bit too much (somethings have been broken) and since I don't want to pay money for something I'm rarely going to use I decided to put ubuntu on it.
Although the live version run perfectly, once I tried the installed version I got a flickering screen and couldn't do anything anymore. Thank god, I'm not a complete Linux noob so after half an hour I finally fixed usplash problem (reinstall the graphics driver did the trick), but it at least demonstrates one the reason why I prefer Windows over ubuntu. When I install Windows I expect it to work 99.999% of the time. Linux on the other hand doesn't get that amount of trust from me.
Long story short. Ubuntu has been installed and I'm thinking of using it as my backup and for word processing. My good laptop is slowly becoming an software development only laptop and the occasional game laptop. However on both occasion I see it as work and there are times I simply one play around. And for that reason I use my old laptop.
[DONE] Taking my time updating the website
Updating the site will take some time as I need to convert small parts of multiple posts to get it look correct. If you are using an RSS feed to keep track of the website, I'm sorry for any inconvenience it might cause.
If you find something missing or if your own links to my site, please send me a mail (or comment on this item) and I will try to fix it as soon as I can.
The good news is that wordpress is faster and easier to use than what I had before. The downside however is that all links need to be updated and some downloads won't be directly available until later.
UPDATE 2010-03-03 21:49: A quarter has now been done. It's going slower than expected as I need to correct quite a few pages and some of the links have changed so much that I lose at least a good 15 minutes to try and fix all of those. The good news is that I like wordpress, the interface is easy, although I miss the mugshot that I had on my old site
UPDATE 2010-03-06 12:47: Most of the important post have been transfered and I have decided to skip the rest. From this point on no new "old posts" will be added unless I notice that someone is going to an old link. If you do need a certain article you can use the contact form to send me a notice.
Procedural story
A little while ago I was meeting a good friend of mine and we had a lot of things to talk about. For one he had just returned from Kenya and he had a lot to show and tell and the things he told me where amazing. But as the day went one, we almost always seem to come back to one subject: Games and developing of games. Funny enough the two of us have almost had the same kind of ideas.
Both of us are developing games in our free time and both have the idea of trying to make as much as possible procedural generated. One of the things we are both interested in is creating the story. While I look for an infinite solution (where the player can play forever and has an interesting storyline) he has a more pragmatic approach.
As we discussed procedural generated stories he pointed out that a story teller needs to tell his audience what happens where and when (not to be confused with why). This triggered a thinking path I had not yet explored. Until then I had simply assumed events happen in a certain order. When a user is playing a computer game he will grow a certain emotional attachment to the player. Emotions in a story are important. For example Romeo and Juliet is a story about hate between families, love between two person and has a lot of betray. Romeo and Juliet is considered one of the classic romantic stories and by some it is considered one of the most romantic stories ever written.
So after the talk and some thinking a procedural story generator could be written as a system that tries to move from emotion to another emotion both for individuals as a culture. To give yet another example: The player gets betrayed by a general and while he was betrayed the general does end the war (and the country he fought for sees him as a hero), while at the other side (the defeating side) wants to see the general death. You now have four elements: The player, the general, the winning country and the losing country. The player is angry as he is betrayed. The general is content and pleased as he is being seen as hero. The winning country feels superior to the losing country and the losing country feels disgust towards all other elements. See the diagram.
At this point the computer needs to "write" the next part of the story. The computer could now plot a new scheme by just adding or removing some story elements. The player could for example become the leader of the rebellion or he could join the general as one of his right-hand leaving his feelings of betray or he could kill the general and become the new general. In this case I want to add another character say the princess of the winning country and make the player the leader of the rebellion. The princess finds out that the generals betray and for some reasons she encounters the player and they fall in love with each other. Yet they can't be with each other as one country hates the other ruler. The general at this point hates the player. The graph might be clearer.
Moving forward we arrive at a point in the story where the player and the princess are married and they rule both countries. The general is now hated by all. And here is another graph.
For the story generator the only thing is how the possible futures of all elements could be. Once he knows the possible futures all it has to do is create "story chapters" which move the story toward the possible features. If needed a chapter could have a branch which excludes one of the possible features, for example the player kills the general before the princess was able to find out about the betray of the player so she never finds out the wrong he did and therefore never encounters the player.
Of course a lot more thought needs to go in this, but it solved for the procedural "writers-block".
Gamer or developer?
Over the last few weeks I have constantly wondering one thing. Am I gamer or a developer? Today I have decided to find an answer.
My first encounter with games
Many years ago, when I was still a child I played a lot outside. I loved playing outside as I would climb trees, played hide & seek and got in to all kinds of petty fights. Your average kid. At a sunny day I went with a friend to her home and she showed something that would change my world. For the first time I played a game on a video console, I never remembered the name but for this entry I have looked it up. It was “Super Mario Bros. 2”. I looked at it and was stunned, she was not good at it and I refused to play as I was more interested in looking at it then actually playing. The only things I remember was the player select and the first level. I think I have only seen the game played once more after that until we got kicked out because it was such nice weather outside. I remember thinking it was such a stupid argument. But summer started and they went on vacation and just before they got back we left, then school started.
Becoming a gamer
But from that moment I was interested in computer games and I started nagging about it that some kids have a game console and we don’t. I threw the entire “it’s not fair” argument but my parents decided against it. Until 5 December and it was Saint Nicholas’ eve (he is something like Santa). To our surprise the good Saint had given me and my brother our very first game console. A Sega Mega Drive II and the game that was with it was a US version of Street Fighter 2. Now candy was competing with games for my allowance. Years later I was in a local shop and saw a game magazine, I didn’t know they existed (I dislike shopping, it takes so much time) and on the cover was an image of a young child holding a sword in front of a pedestal while blue energy was around him. It took me a few days, but then I decided to spend my money on that magazine. The kid on the cover was Link from the Zelda: The Ocarina of Time and it was about the Japanese preview. I remember that they showed a boss that was not in the actual release (although I think it was later modified and included in Majora’s Mask). We sold our Mega Drive and bought an Nintendo 64 with Lylat Wars (Star Fox 64).
Deciding my future
When I entered high school I told my parents I wanted to work in the video game industry and they shook their heads but later on changed that in “we shall see”.
So that is my history where I became a gamer. But now starts my history in becoming a developer. I sucked at a lot of high school subjects, but I had a lot of trouble fitting in and failed first year. I remember the huge contradiction on what level I should start. The previous school said I should started at the second lowest level, while an national independent organization said I should start at the second highest. As I struggled through high school there were a lot of strange events. In my first year I failed France but when I retook that year I was the only one as far as they can remember who had 10 on his pre-midterm report. Normally the range was between a 3 and an 8 but since I had done everything perfect they decided to give me a ten. I struggled through high school with a lot of help from my parents and teachers.Since there was no game education I decided to do IT. On the ICT course I made a lot of friends and had a lot of fun and me and a friend where “the best programmers”. I was surprised to see how little effort it took me to program.
Am I gamer or am I a developer?
Now I’m a student of the International Game Architecture and Design (IGAD) program. I’m having an internship at Codeglue, Rotterdam. And the internship has made some things really clear for me. I don’t think I’m a gamer in the same sense as others are at the IGAD course or at my internship. I like to play games from time to time and in my drawer I have two complete game design and an half dozen ideas that still need work.
But when I’m working I don’t think like a gamer especially when it’s programming that needs to be done. Oh yes, I know I’m working on a game, but a game is nothing more than an illusion. And because I know that I realize that I’m not a gamer but an illusionist. I let people thinkthat they are saving the world. I know that the a kid dressed in green is nothing more than a lot of different colored triangles. And it’s my job to uphold such illusions in new games. Because of the above conclusion, I should not be a gamer. A true illusionist is not bedazzled with his own illusions or those from others. And although as a programmer you don’t always design the tricks, you make certain that they work. You create parts of the machine, you help artists apply the paint and you listen and tell what is and what is not impossible to those who designed the illusion. Once the work is done and the illusion is complete you demonstrate it to the public and watch them enjoy (and pay) for something that is nothing more than a good illusion. So the only conclusion is that I’m a developer. I look in despair at near broken machines and I enjoy myself immensely when I see a proper created machine. I love to create superior machines that support the illusion and are often capable of much more than the one who designed it wants it to.
I’m not just a developer. I’m a developer who loves my job. I’m a developer who loves to see his creations being the cause of entertainment of thousands.
Final words
I know this has been a long rant but it has been something I want to get off my chest for a long time. Personally I find the game industry as it’s now young and naïve. It believes a little too much in its own illusion. But the cold hard truth is that in the end you are creating an illusion. Some people use poor quality machine parts, don’t give every detail or the painting thought or think that once a simple design is done you can work as it goes. Some companies require that the staff to go in crunch mode extended periods of consecutive overtime) with all it’s faults.
From a business perspective I think it should look and learn more from a young but more mature market, the IT sector. But at the ICT course I had one teacher who I understood after I started on the IGAD course. He said: “Always take in account the three P’s: Product, Project and process”. And many game developers are ignorant of the last one. The process is that what breaks or makes your illusion better than the rest.
Finishing my school project
This is an old post from my previous blog which might show up again in your feed
As some know I have talked a lot about procedural generation and since last summer one of my ideas has been accepted. And now two months later I have finished my research paper.
I never really liked research papers, in many cases there is too much data to work through and in generally I’m only interested in the solution. However when you have to write your very own research paper of 3000 words your glad to have much data except when it reaches 4500 words then it becomes a pain since you have to spell-check and grammar-check those extra 1500 words. And then to think that I’m still not glad with some explanations and think some part of the document needs to be improved. Currently I’m guessing it’s going to be around the 5250 words.
The cool thing is that I’m going to make the research paper freely available for everyone. I have been pleasantly surprised that some people have used the feedback form to either respond or ask me a question. Some of the feedback was really nice and has been a great help to me. Those people have my thanks. As for releasing the paper it will most likely be next week.