Tag Archive: post mortem


Adventures in flash, a post mortem

Filed Under: About Warll, Video Games
Dec.06, 2009

A few months ago I started on a new project, learning to program in flash. The important point being the fact that at the time I couldn’t program in any language. Thus leaning to program in flash as really more about learning to program in general. The adventure lasted for about two and a half months, of which time little was actually spent programming, which is really my fault, silly internet forums. In the end I did learn to do a whole lot with code than I could before but it also opened my eyes, learning to truly program is a very deep field. As such I will defiantly have to attend some CS courses in university.

I ended up making three point one games. Of which the point one game was the most successful.

icon100#1: outintherainwithabucket

Note that it actually works! Oh sure, “works” is a bit realitive, but the flash player does not crash, so it works.  It got ~300 plays. It got some complements about the art style.

warningred#1.1: boring

My justification for this was it is “art”, a psychological test if you will. But you of course say, “Wait, didn’t you say this was the most successful one?” Well it turns out I wasn’t the only one who thought that it was interesting, a large Finnish flash site homepaged the game, and soon one of its competitors also hosted it. In total it got 25K plays, pretty good for half a mornings work.  Sadly I think this gave me an inaccurate impression of what people will play, after all if a really bad game gets 300 plays and a slightly better bad game gets 25K then imagine a slightly good game?

kuroinonakalogo#2: kuroiNoNaka

By the end of making this one I was really enjoying playing it. Sadly it was either not a slightly good game or I had miss estimated. ~500 plays, although it was fun to learn blitting.

shiroisora100#3: whitesky

This one was actually developed at the same time as Kuroi, it too meet the same result ~1000 plays. Many commented that it was too short, which does leave me the option of expanding it in the future, I don’t think I will.

Anyway I had fun and I learned a lot, with that said I likely would have been better off learning the traditional method.  It was also nice to experiment with design, something that classes or books would not have taught me.

On a final note I did “earn” about 12 dollars, spread across about 3 sites, which means I’ll never actually get the money due to being far below payout. But eh, that’s more than I’ve ever earned on the internet before, of course if I did this to earn money, I would have been disappointed.

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Sumer is over, what have I done?

Filed Under: About Warll, Japanese
Sep.02, 2009

Today is my last day before my school starts up full time. Its always a balancing act to keep up with school work while still enjoying my hobbies, this is what is so awesome about summer break, I can work on my projects as much as I want. Most of what I worked on this year, like my fallout 3 mods and smrsimple, have already been mentioned here. Those were only my earlier projects though and during the later half of summer I got quite a bit done as well.

In websites I got two more done, Cameroncreekmining.ca and Japanesesimple.com. Cameroncreekmining is my father’s hobby company’s website and was a fun project. Not only did I get to impress my father but I also got to try out a new CMS, Concrete5, all while getting him away from his old website which had been built using some shovelware website builder. The neat thing about concrete5 is that it uses a in browser editor so that he can now edit the site anywhere he is without touching any html. Hopefully this will acutally get him to do so every so often. Japanesesimple.com is my personal project, I’m learning japanese and finding interesting things along the way so I thought I might as well share with others. In truth though I just really wanted to make another website and do so in a field I am interested in.My thought is to keep the subject matter simple and basic, allowing me an actual finish date.

Another area I have spent some time playing in is adwords, since my father has products to sell it would be silly for him not to advertise them. Another excellent excuse to do something fun and interesting.

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Server rebuild

Filed Under: Computing
Jul.09, 2009

Ok so the parts arrived finally.  While I love Newegg’s competitive prices the shipping factor usually dampens my enthusiasm, not only is shipping a bit more expensive but it is also slower since everything comes from the states even when ordering from the Canadian site.

  • The new parts:

DSCF8538 View Full Article »

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Cities XL crack, hack, torrent or leak, just not possible.

Filed Under: Cities XL, Video Games
Jun.23, 2009

Big news! A crack is out and  it works!  Thanks to Nob Ody for alerting me to it. You can get it on isohunt here are the instructions:

  1. Install game.
  2. Edit the Updater.bat file so that each line points towards your game’s installation directory
  3. Launch Updater.bat
  4. Close the launcher once updates complete
  5. Your game is now up to date to the latest version
  6. Copy the crack to the game’s install folder
  7. Launch game using CitiesXL.exe, select language, and enter any random login credential
  8. Enjoy

I can tested it and it is virus free and works perfectly, the author has even included all the current patches.[Older update]

JDMans over at the Pirate Bay posted instructions on how to use the torrent with the Cities XL trial

There is like no way anyone is going to crack this because the security is just to hard, but if you downloaded this already you can make a 7 day trial account for it and play online for the time.

1. Go to citiesxl.com and click on the sign up button in the menu. it should bring you to a registration screen.

Ignore the cd key button and just fill in all the information for your online account and click the send registration button.

On the next screen it will ask for a cd key but just scroll down and there is something that says activate 7 day trial.

There, now you have a user name to log in with for the next 7 days and you have access to all the multiplayer stuff. Until someone gets a better idea il be playing for the next 7 days :D
[/update]

[Older update:] Forget it. There will not be a crack for Cities XL. There simply is no reason for crackers to go to the effort. The protection used effectively turns even the single player version of the game into an MMO as far as crackablity is concerned.  If you have a Cities XL torrent running at the moment, cancel it. You can either buy a legal copy or move on, yes yes I know “civil piracy is not illegal”, what else would you have me call it? I would suggest moving on, there is not much in regards to re-playability to Cities Xl as it is now, maybe they’ll revamp much of it, doubt it. Right now Monte Cristo has let their dreams of MMOhood get in the way of making what they should have, a fun and challenging city builder. Instead you get a giant ad for the “planet offer” also known as Xbox live style “online services”, really all it is good for is the global chat and trading “goods” . Oh I guess you also get a pretty map which is a bit exciting, until you realize that it is no more than a picture and has no effect on game play. Weep a bit and then move on and do something more productive, like say learning Japanese, or exploring the other side of the world. [/update]

I know that when I had troubles finding a key I check out the The Pirate Bay and Google to see if Cities XL had been cracked and released, that did me no good since there is no Cities XL crack even still I really wanted to play it.  Well looking at the web searches that lead people to this site I can see that there are some other unfortunate souls willing to hit the torrents just to play Cities XL.  Well I have some news for you, its not going to happen until a street release at least and liekly never for the planet offer. The current Cities XL requires not only net access to login but also a constant internet connection to play online. There is no offline so no hope of getting past the beta key requirement.  If you do want to play the game I would suggest downloading the client while you are searching for beta keys. That way you are ready to go when you do get a beta key and you can also check out the in-game music which is stored in “Monte Cristo\Cities XL\Data\Sound\Music\XL”, I know this because before I got my key I searched the game’s files and found the music.  So yeah stop searching for a cities xl crack, hack or leak and get back to looking for a beta key.  Oh and any Cities XL Torrent you happen to run across will either be a repost of the same client you can already get from Monte Cristo or it will contain spyware/malware.

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Spoilers for A Reasoned Argument

Filed Under: Video Games
May.23, 2009

Mega spoilers can be found at the end of this document.

Known bugs:

So far I only know of two bugs. One is that the second “hinged” door opens into the wood of the stairs, I would have added a hallway peice but the basement set does not have a hallway piece, in fact it is missing quite a few types of pieces.  Second the “locked” doors “shift” when you open them. This is because of my limited scripting knowledge, what is happening is that there are two doors, one that is set to require a key and one that is open. What happens when you “unlock” the door is that the locked door is disabled, leaving only the open door.  Sadly for some reason stop combat was only working %25 of the time so I had to use a hack to stop the turrets. This means that if you kill the two console room turrets and then “deactivate” them from the terminal they will re-spawn.

References:
I have added a number of references to the story.  The largest one being Hiaso’s name, the silo’s number and the rocket’s target, all of which are references to the nanking massacre. Next is Lennie, his name is a refrence to “Of Mice and Men”, his father “Frank G” is the Frank G from Puce Moose’s series of mods.  The model in Hiaso’s room is reference to Gundam Seed Destinay’s Freedom gundam.

Change log:

1.11

* Fixed typos

* Fixed missing texture

1.10

* Fixed end quest trigger so that it no longer shows the end quest message everytime the player uses the escape hatch

* Fixed three minor mapping errors

* Cluttered the kitchen

* Added fridge and hunting rifles to safe house and added description to the air purifier

1.02

* Adjusted XP reward

1.01

* Fixed missing assets due to BSA not working

1.0

* Initial release

MEGA SPOILERS

So is everyone dead?
Of all the characters mentioned in A Reasoned Argument only two were not killed, one of them being the second chinese soldier. I left the second soldier alive so that if I ever felt like it I could write a sequal. The other is Frank G (Lennie’s father), Frank is really Puce Moose’s character so you will be able to learn more about him by playing Puce Moose’s current and future mods.

So what happened?
I realize that I am really not the best story teller, I’m novice at best. As such there might have been parts of the story in my head that never made it into the story. Just for clarity here is a quick rundown on what happened on the day the world ended.

The silo receives commands to launch.

Hisao decides not to launch the nuke on Nanking and instead causes the silo’s defense system to kill everyone in the room.

The first chinese soldier comes to inspect the silo, he acts rashly and would have been killed if it was not for Hisao’s turning off the upper defense system. When he enters the silo room though(The doors had not been locked) he is taken by surpize by the defense system and hides behind the computer console. From the computer he learns what Hisao did and figures out that Hisao is the dead body right next to him. He then heads to the safe house along with Hisao’s body but since he is wounded he is struggling(The blood you see on the ground in the stairs is Hisaos, if you were paying attention you might have noticed that there is a blood handprint, that is the soldier’s). He is then confronted with the three locked doors to which he does not have the passwords, at this point he goes a little insane and writes the note(in blood on the wall, of course. The ntoe is later rewriten and translated by the second soldier.) and proceds to try and dig a grave right then and there.

The second soldier hears the alarms and heads to camp and finds that the alarm is not a false call(He had been shopping in Paradise falls). From there he enters the silo but by this time the locks have timed out and he has to go find the passwords just like the player. Since he has the passwords he can get into the safehouse. He then buries both Hisao and the first chinese soldier. I had also intended to make he some wiseowl sort of charecter, partly by having a bunch of books in the safehouse from which he learned perfect english and generaly became really wise. I never did end up adding the books. This sort of effects the story between the war and when the player is introduced since I meant for the second soldier to at some point have been goulified and to have done quite a bit of travelling with the story he learned in the silo having affected his outlook on life and others.

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