Slashdot Mirror

Runt is a great library, I'm surprised it doesn't get more support. I wrote a short how-to for getting Runt up and running with Ruby on Rails: http://suttree.com/2006/08/14/runt-on-ruby-on-rail s/

Me too!

http://suttree.com/2006/06/29/the-item-model/

Play for perks is a nice name, too. I've been using the Item Model to describe it.

"Easy to learn, difficult to master".

That's the official Casual Games definition. It's not applicable to gaming casually, to blowing off steam on the Xbox360 or to playing old-school classics using MAME. Casual Gamers are a very tighly defined bunch and Casual Games are almost exclusively aimed at Windows downloaded, try-before-you-buy, 2D pick-up-and-go style games.

Personally, I find actually 'looking at' what consititues a Casual Gamer makes it easier to define them as a bunch.

"Easy to learn, difficult to master".

That's the official Casual Games definition. It's not applicable to gaming casually, to blowing off steam on the Xbox360 or to playing old-school classics using MAME. Casual Gamers are a very tighly defined bunch and Casual Games are almost exclusively aimed at Windows downloaded, try-before-you-buy, 2D pick-up-and-go style games.

Personally, I find actually 'looking at' what consititues a Casual Gamer makes it easier to define them as a bunch.

EVE is casual in the sense that it's addictive, but other than that it's probably even more immersive and even more of a time sink that most other MMOs. Casual MMOs, MCOs can still work, but in much more of a pick-up-and-go manner. Persistent worlds aren't the ideal place for MCOs, but they can work. Puzzle Pirates is probably the best example of that.

Or there's Passive Gaming, where Casual Games could really excel. I don't know of anyone who's created a true hybrid MMO, MCO, Passive Game but I'm pretty sure it won't be long before they start to turn. The whole Korean Gaming scene has been exposed over here and those MMOs that were ported over to Western audiences haven't really taken off. The business model of free to play, pay for items, is going to work, so that's another string to the bow.

EVE is casual in the sense that it's addictive, but other than that it's probably even more immersive and even more of a time sink that most other MMOs. Casual MMOs, MCOs can still work, but in much more of a pick-up-and-go manner. Persistent worlds aren't the ideal place for MCOs, but they can work. Puzzle Pirates is probably the best example of that.

Or there's Passive Gaming, where Casual Games could really excel. I don't know of anyone who's created a true hybrid MMO, MCO, Passive Game but I'm pretty sure it won't be long before they start to turn. The whole Korean Gaming scene has been exposed over here and those MMOs that were ported over to Western audiences haven't really taken off. The business model of free to play, pay for items, is going to work, so that's another string to the bow.

It's going to get much worse, I'm afraid. That's right, they're removing Solitaire too.

Pygame is well worth a look, especially since the site got revamped and activity has picked up again.

I wrote two games using Pygame, Slider and WordSlider which were pretty painless to do, going from a standing start of knowing nothing about Pygame to knowing enough to finish a game.

Sure, SDL might not be fast enough for any kind of 3D FPS but if you wanted to write one of those you'd be learning C++ or picking up some middleware like the Torque engine. Honestly, though, everyone in here should stop whining about how scripting languages aren't 'fast enough' for games - they're easily fast enough for puzzle and adventure games, just not *every* game.

The right tool for the job? Of course!

Want to know the worst thing about this? The Casual Game of the Year award. It's full of match-three puzzles and very little else. I'm pretty sure that there were more exciting casual games than that out there last year, starting with Jewel Thief, for example.

If you like Python, then there's LuPy from divmod, which is a python port of Lucene.

And if you've ever wanted to create a personal proxy server that gives you a searchable database of your history and bookmarks, then you can do that too, just like I did: http://www.suttree.com/code/pps/

Yes, spot on. If you're a Java programmer already then hopping over to Python isn't going to be huge jump. I'm surprised at the number of people suggesting SDL in here but I guess I shouldn't be- it's well documented and performs fast enough for anything you'll want to do.

Plus, if I can do it, then you should have no problem :)

My 'frist post' to Slashdot. I've submitted a few things before but this is the only one that got posted.

Shame it's a dupe though :(
Ah well, best go play some pool then.

You'll be wanting Googlesh then:

http://www.suttree.com/code/googlesh/

-- http://www.playaholics.com/play/wolfnswine/

All this Cell based/3 CPU business is just the console equivalent of 'Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades!'

Check out PyAIML as I think the sourceforge project has a few AIML sets you can download.

Of course, you can always try out GrokItBot - it massively cuts down on the amount of AIML you need to write by introducing a Bayesian parser before the data gets sent to ALICE, so you get a bit of machine-based learning happening before ALICE gets her hands on things. It works quite well and adds a few more smarts to your bot. Or at least, the impression of more smarts ;-)

GrokItbot - A PyAIML and Bayesian chat bot

Playaholics: Lightning Pool

Check out PyAIML as I think the sourceforge project has a few AIML sets you can download.

Of course, you can always try out GrokItBot - it massively cuts down on the amount of AIML you need to write by introducing a Bayesian parser before the data gets sent to ALICE, so you get a bit of machine-based learning happening before ALICE gets her hands on things. It works quite well and adds a few more smarts to your bot. Or at least, the impression of more smarts ;-)

GrokItbot - A PyAIML and Bayesian chat bot

Playaholics: Lightning Pool

Install your own proxy server and let that do the searching and indexing.

Like this: Python proxy server - a proxy server, written in Python, that uses Lucene/Lupy to do the indexing and searching.

It's in danger of becoming a bit like the Emperor's new clothers. Tagging has been around for a long time, it's just that we all got bored of doing it - meta tags that is.

For evey page on your website you'd create a bunch of meta tags and then cross yourself three times in the hope that a decent search engine would make sense of it all.

Of course, then Google came along and made the content of the page much more important than the author's chosen keywords, which is right, in my opinion.

No, I understand the difference between an author's chosen tags and these folksonomies and I'm for the folksonomy but it's hard work - I don't see a future in user-defined tags. I do, however, see a future in scripting all this - be it by a personal proxy server or a branch of Google.

A personal proxy server written in Python

The problem with tagging

Playaholics : Great online games

It's in danger of becoming a bit like the Emperor's new clothers. Tagging has been around for a long time, it's just that we all got bored of doing it - meta tags that is.

For evey page on your website you'd create a bunch of meta tags and then cross yourself three times in the hope that a decent search engine would make sense of it all.

Of course, then Google came along and made the content of the page much more important than the author's chosen keywords, which is right, in my opinion.

No, I understand the difference between an author's chosen tags and these folksonomies and I'm for the folksonomy but it's hard work - I don't see a future in user-defined tags. I do, however, see a future in scripting all this - be it by a personal proxy server or a branch of Google.

A personal proxy server written in Python

The problem with tagging

Playaholics : Great online games

I love Bayes stuff - and there's a very nice Python module written by divmod.

I was playing around with AIML to cobble together a basic chat bot when I realised that I could use a Bayesian parser to radically cut down the amount of AIML that I needed to write. AIML is an XML style of chat bot repsonses, it's clever in that it's highly recursive but the downside is that you need to create a rule for every eventuality.

By adding in a bit of Bayesian guessing before the AIML parser got it hands on the conversation, I'm able to keep the AIML files very focused and give the chat bot a bit more sparkle - you don't have to train him about everything. After a while he realised that 'yo', 'hi' and 'hello' are all the same thing, so he just guesses that you're saying hello and pulls out the correct response from the AIML file (rather than creating an AIML rule to deal with all the variations on 'hello').

If you're interested I'd strongly recommend installing GrokitBot. You can get the source and a bit more explanation at my site, Suttree.com

Playaholics : Free Online Games

I'm biased, but everytime I see IM bots like this I cringe at the interface.

I plugged a bayesian guesser into a trimmed down ALICE bot and the interface is much more tolerant of speeling mistokes and the way different people phrase questions and answers.

GrokItBot is a bare bones version of this. If you're interested I'd strongly encourage you to download the code :)