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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

• The new parts:

Only the motherboard and the Trendnet switch were bought from Newegg, the rest I had already bought from NCIX.

The gigabit switch (TEG-S50G) combined with the gigabit integrated NICs in the server’s new motherboard and desktop will finally give me a gigabit connection. I have also used the switch to segregate the three  hubs on the network, although this is not a big deal since the vast majority of traffic is between the desktop and server.  I do hope to change this and setup a backup system for the house’s laptops as well.

While I have no clue as to the electrical merits of this power supply, a Antec Earthwatts 500W, it is from a brand name I trust and what reviews I read gave it great praise. One thing I do know is that it has a ton of connectors, I can only wish I had as many SATA drives as this thing has SATA power cables.  Its also a 80+ rated power supply which is nice since this server is on twenty four seven.

The mother board is a  ECS A740GM-M, I choose this one because it was the cheapest shipped with a gigabit nic and has plenty of SATA ports.  One down side is that I had to go down to two gigabytes of RAM since it only had two DIMM sockets.  This hopefully will not be an issue since the server never went over 1.4 gigabytes before.

• The disasembly:

Before shot:

Half way shot:

Before wiring:

Completed:

Over all everything was really uneventful. The only program I ran into was that the motherboard maker, ECS Elitegroup, in an attept to make the motherboard as multilingual as possible did not mark the power on, restart and LED plugs on the board itself. Instead they provided a large cheat sheet in Korean, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese and a few others including English if you can find it. All this and they still only call the plugs by their abbreviated English names like “PWR” plus a translated introduction to what it actually is. Basically why they did not simply print it on the motherboard is beyond me.

• Trouble shooting:

Now onto the fun part, its not as if something would ever work just the way you want it to right out of the box eh? This time though the configuration issues were minor which may just be that I’m getting better at this.  I opted to reuse the Windows installation from before the rebuild since even though I have read posts otherwise I have never had an issuse running windows with changed hardware.  Once I booted the computer up Windows started searching for drivers. It found what it needed for everything except the integrated Ethernet. Luckily for me I had installed the wireless drivers for my wireless dongle a while ago.  So I check the NIC’s id from the device manager and feed it to google. The first search result was some find-all-drivers program, with a free trial, I skiped that.  Next result had the drivers with a direct download link. I grabed that and tried to install it, the installer ran but nothing came up. I moved on but then I notice something, there were two Windows security icons.  I already knew that this was a tactic of scareware, my suspicion is confirmed soon when one of the icons informs me that I have been infected with a “virus” no less.  First thing I did was of course pull out the wireless dongle, without internet access I have plenty of time.  Next I killed the proces, a 123643.exe, seriously why would someone use such a unique name, no other process ever uses a random string of numbers.  Then I go into msconfig and untick the autostartup, I also take a look in program files but in this case the programmer was not as obvious. I then rebooted the system. All that is left now besides some never to be executed binaries is the server’s new desktop wall paper. It looks kind of cool I must say although I will never see it since I always RDP into the headless server with wallpapers turned off: After that I got back to looking for the driver and fianlly found it on ECS’s website.  For some reason only the audio drivers and new bios show up when you search the downloads section for this motherboard, you have to go to the motherboard’s product page to find the other drivers. All this and later I find that there was a driver CD hidden inside the manual.

The next problem to fix is the fans. For some reason the case fan and the cpu fan which both plug directly into the motherboard are always on high. Turns out even though the BIOs lists fan settings none of them do anything, the fans always get max voltage. I also tried speedfan, while the fans may have been loud they were doing a great job, the cpu was running at 29 Celsius. Although I do suspect the motherboards heat sensors to be a little, off, temp sensor three was apparently at negative one hundred and thirty two.  My solution to this annoying bug was to replace the heatsinks fan with a larger one that would run much quieter at the same voltage and to unplug the case fan.

Now all that is left is to hook up the TV Tuner but I’ll leave that. So here is the finished product my “server” room in all its techy glory:

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.