Ryan
Chasing greatness

Since nobody reads this, I feel fine writing about it here.

I have nearly finished a little experiment on player immersion. I got the idea when I was listening to Robert Rice’s talk on video game immersion at TGC. He broke down elements of immersion and helped draw connections between technology and it’s impact on player’s experience.

Anyway, I still have 3 things to do. I’m going to be getting art from Ciara Livingston, someone I work with at the bookstore, whose style is perfect for this, edit all of the text for better style and impact, and finally get the final voice recording for the closing.

I can’t count. The fourth thing I need to so is create a Google form to collect information on the experiment so I can get an idea of how good it is or how much of a waste of time it is.

Anyway, here’s the link.

Well, here we go. I hope this isn’t horrible and doesn’t require too much editing, but essentially, I’m posting through TextMate. It’s a great editor, and the more I use it, the more I love it.

This is a new paragraph.

(more…)

So I’m making white chicken stock for the first time.  I guess it isn’t technically hard to do, but then again neither is boiling an egg, but most people can’t do that right either.  So we’ll see how this turns out.

After being inspired at the Triangle Game Conference, I decided to open up some projects.  First, I’m writing a simple little experiment that will hopefully prove some ideas I have on immersing players in a story.  I’ve already done the technical work, so I just have to create content.  Thankfully I made it a point to do this rather low tech, so it wont’ require much, but I have got an artist to help.  Her name is Ciara Livingston and I think her artwork will only make this better.  I’ve also convinced my wife to do a voice recording.  Exciting stuff!

In the job world, I’ve started a project that involves actual software development.  Web development specifically.  I’m creating a web tool that will modify apache configurations live.  I don’t think anyone has done this before, mostly because it isn’t something you want a lot of people to go around doing.  Either way, it’s an exciting change of pace from my normal system administration work.

On Sunday my wife and I will have been married two years.  Holy shit.

So I’m home after the Triangle Game Conference 2010.  I wasn’t sure if I was going to go considering it has a pretty steep entrance fee for non-students.  In the end though, I went and I am glad that I did.

First, I should say that this wasn’t really a gathering for hiring.  It was for people to come together to learn about various areas of game development, technologies, and general networking.  Looking at the conference in that light, it was really great.

The place was crawling with students though.  I’ve written plenty in the past of the wretchedness of engineers in social settings, and these past two days were like living in unwelcome drug flashbacks of poor hygiene and awkward social interaction.  Thankfully the hotel had their  AC cranked so body odor didn’t linger long.  I also noted that a lot of the merchandise involved breath mints.  Smart move on their part.

Despite the throngs of fail walking around, I did hear some really great talks by great people.  Insomniac was probably the single largest game developer there and led most of the bigger talks.  This was really good actually as they have earned the respect of a lot of developers over the years and do things differently enough to have very interesting takes on game development.

I don’t remember all of the people I talked to, but one gentleman gave a great talk on user testing and how important it is, how it is done poorly, and how it can be done well without a huge budget.  Another was a no-bullshit talk about making a game and why every excuse you can give is utter crap.  He was from Republic of Fun and was very good.  One of the few women whose talk I attended was based on educational and intergenerational interactions.  I really enjoyed her talk, because it reminded me a lot of the process I used to make games in Japan for teaching English.  One guy I talked to specializes in rapid game development.  By rapid I mean 48 hours.  He was really great to hear and eased the fear of, “Making a shitty game,” by saying, “Oh, you’ll make a shitty game, but at least it only wasted 48 hours of your life instead of more.”  There was a guy from Neogence games who talked about game immersion who said a lot of the things I’ve felt, and I spent a little time afterwards picking his brain about various immersion techniques.

I tried to talk to everyone who was interested in talking back to me and aside from the speakers who were easily cornered, the Spark Plug Games group were fantastic.  They came with everything they needed to develop a game within the two days at the conference.  They had an artist with an eisle and a programmer with a computer.  There was also a really great guy there who was in production that I talked to quite extensively about the game market, his past, my direction, and all of that.  The programmer was squirrelly and awkward, but very gifted.  The artist was very personable and also very gifted.  It was pretty eye-opening to see professionals kicking-ass at what they do right in front of you.

All in all it was a great experience, and even though I couldn’t give my resume out to anyone, I was really glad that I went.

So, after all that stuff I wrote a few minutes ago, I thought a real life example might be helpful.  So here is something I wrote with a brief explanation.

#!/usr/local/bin/bash
grep 12.129.157.67 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/w1.sites
grep 12.129.157.68 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/w2.sites
grep 12.129.157.69 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/w3.sites
grep 12.129.157.70 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/w4.sites
grep 12.129.157.71 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/w5.sites
grep 12.129.157.72 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/w6.sites

grep 12.129.157.75 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/loadbalanced.sites

What is all of this?  Well, say you own a lot of domain names and websites and they are spread across numerous servers?  What this does is checks the DNS entries and outputs the domain.com entry for each one based on IP address.  So lets break one of these down.

grep 12.129.157.67 namedb/* | awk '{print $1}' | awk -F / '{print $2}' | awk -F ":" '{print $1}' | uniq > sites/w1.sites

First is grep.  It searches all of the files in namedb/ for any lines matching 12.129.157.69 and outputs those lines to the console.  Except, that there is a pipe so all of the output is fed into awk which simply prints out the first column of data. Which would look like this:

namedb/domain.com:www

I don’t care about that namedb part, so that output is piped into another awk comand.  The -F says to basically separate columns of data on the / character that I specified.  So then $1 is namedb and $2 is domain.com:www.  So that awk command prints $2 and gives this:

domain.com:www

I don’t care about the www so the output is piped into a final awk command which uses -F : to say to split things up on the :.  So if I print $1 that will give me:

domain.com

Finally!  The output I’ve been looking for.  Now I know that domain.com resides on whichever IP address.  Since there are lots of domains and subdomains possible like www.domain.com or mail.domain.com, and I only want to know the base domain I pipe all of that input to uniq.  Which only displays unique entries.  So if before the uniq I had 30 domain.com’s listed, uniq will only give me one.

Then, I have > sites/w1.sites.  That says to direct the output to the sites/w1.sites file.  So I don’t get output, it is written to that file.  So all I have to do is run that script, and I suddenly know where all of my domains reside.