I seem to be at one of those stages where I keep on meaning to write things in here but other things (like work!) have got in the way. What I did in most of my spare time last week was polishing the Crystal Towers 2 demo for Clickteam's disc next month - after releasing the first test of the demo to testers, I've made some slight changes such as ripping out and replacing the entire sound and online communication objects and changing the way that the whole save system works.

Briefly, then - the sound change was from ModFusion to Onu, something that I'd tried before but abandoned when I found that Onu couldn't play music over separate frames. But it had been updated a lot since then, and with ModFusion's reputation for crashing a lot on computers that weren't mine, it was worth a try replacing it. That process went fairly quickly and gave me the chance to neaten up how music is loaded as well, with all the incidental music put on to separate tracks when the game is started up, rather than loaded on demand - now only the level music has to be loaded when one is entered. Curiously I found that like ModFusion, Onu can't change MOD orders correctly, but it just ignores the action and does nothing rather than crashing, which is a vast improvement as you can imagine. There was a brief panic when I realized that it wasn't looping music correctly, but it turned out that you just needed to turn MOD looping on specifically when you start playing one.

The online object is now the Get object instead of the Live Receiver - it's a sign that I've been taking too long that the earlier object has gone through its entire birth and death during the course of the development of the game, and I'd previously used it to replace the Moosock object that I used in Special Agent. I hadn't noticed any instability with the Live Receiver, but the author said that the Get object was a lot less prone to crashes, and it brings the file size down an insignificant amount, as well.

I've also succumbed to the will of Microsoft and changed the save system so that all of the game data that needs to be changed is now stored in the Application Data folder. It's ironic - for many years we tried to beat the idea into independent game makers that you should never touch the Windows directories and everything should be provided as a self-contained folder for ease of installation and deletion, but now we're all having to do the opposite and treat the user's Application Data folder as a sort of giant memory card. This has to be done because under certain circumstances, Vista and above won't let applications write to folders in Program Files, so players might be stuffed if they usually put games in there - this is the reason why you see some games putting a "My Games" folder into your My Documents, too.

Looking at it now, I can't imagine why I thought this diagram would be helpful

While doing up the site for the game, I ran into some issues caused by how I'd set up the online accounts in the game at first. The idea of the online feature is that you can submit your save to the site through the game, and have your progress displayed among other players. To do this, when you create your player you provide an online key that's meant to keep your account unique, and when you update, the game sends the information off to a script on the site and creates or updates the account (sending back a message saying whether it succeeded or not). There's even a dynamically generated image near the bottom of the page that you can display on a forum signature and so on.

Because I was just about feeling my way as I went, there were a number of problems with the way I did all this at first - one of the biggest was that accounts were identified by name. I did this deliberately at first because I didn't want two players to have the same name, but it made things more inconvenient than anything else, needing a whole extra process to check for existing names and then informing the player that someone was already called that, then providing a chance to change it. The other was the separation between creating and updating an account - if somehow something went wrong (like me fiddling with the database, which I frequently did during testing) then trying to update a player record that didn't exist would produce a cryptic error. Once you'd taken a name, you were stuck with it, too - you couldn't delete your save and start again with the same name, because that name would already be taken.

Shows about as much as you would expect.

I changed this to work in much the same way that I remember Unreal Tournament handling it. You can use any name you want, but the combination of the name and the online key has to be unique. As long as nobody chooses a painfully obvious online key and also has a really common name, this prevents collisions (and if two accounts do collide, then they just save over each other, with no need for an error message). It does leave a few menus I did up completely unused, but it works a lot more smoothly than the old idea. Because there can now be two players with the same name, the update script (which now creates an account if it isn't there already, rather than just throwing up an error) now passes back an ID to the game, so that it can use it to directly open the player's scorecard from the game itself.

What also happens now, when an account is updated, is that the differences between that account and the last time it was updated are also recorded in a separate "events" table - a new row is added for every update. Having a record of the differences recorded recently in these little 64-byte rows means that the site can parse those lists of numbers into something resembling English (which is more difficult than you'd might think) and display a news feed of what players have been doing recently in the game. It really is quite fantastic staying on the page and watching updates go past when people are playing it.

I think all the best online features are written because of people's love for spying on others.

No it isn't, Winston Payne! I know it's not the most easily Venn-diagrammable set of islands in history, but for the flag at least, the clue is in the name. Where's my opportunity to raise an Objection to that, then, Capcom?

My parents-in-law got me the third Phoenix Wright game for my birthday, allowing me to finally get around to completing the trilogy after about two years. I'm on the second act after defending a client wearing a jumper that would make Gyles Brandreth throw up - I've already been told that it escalates into being even more stressful than the second one was, so I'll write more about it when I've finished it.

What's everyone talking about? The Waters of Mars isn't a Blink-beater by any stretch of the imagination - I know I really don't get to say this often, but you're all a bunch of pansies. An unknown water parasite that makes people look like Timo Tolkki is good for an episode as far as ideas go, but somehow I felt that it was never really explored as much as it should have been.

The last bit was interesting, to see what's happening to the Doctor as a character in the run-up to his replacement, and it was nowhere near as bad as the Easter special - but I can't help but feel that if Steven Moffat had handled it, he would probably have made people scared of drinking water for weeks.

My aunt sent me this. I appreciate the gesture, but I last visited her about twenty years ago and I think she's forgotten that I age.

Today, after what feels like distressingly little time, I'm a quarter of a century old. Most of my year at school had birthdays this week, so it's probably easier to say "Happy birthday" to everyone I know on Facebook and the number of hits will be higher than the misses.

What's happened in the last year? Importantly, I didn't die at 24 like I'd seen in a dream, although I made a pretty decent attempt at it halfway through. And in an example of words coming back to bite you, I've said for a while that I was fine to not have to watch my calories or what I ate as long as I didn't reach 25, the year when everything you've been feeding yourself suddenly starts to matter and you instantly inflate like a rubber dinghy until you start hauling your giant wobbling rear end down to the gym.

Whitney and I held a dessert party yesterday with a couple of people from her work and college, and I made a sticky toffee pudding for it, still the only good thing to come out of Home Economics from the academy. I felt the first sure signs that I was aging then - every time before when I've made it, I've tended to put in a couple of extra scoops of sugar just to make sure it's deadly enough, but this time I was reading through the recipe and saying "Three sticks of butter, are you insane?" There was definitely alarm when we plotted it in Whitney's recipe application and it came out to 34,000 calories, but that was for a double recipe - as it is it's still about 500 to 700 calories per slice, which is about as healthy as diving under a steamroller. And even though she thought we wouldn't have enough, about two thirds of it is still lurking in the fridge - she's going to take it to work tomorrow and hopefully distribute the fat and sugar content among as many people as she possibly can.

Thanks to everyone who's already given me birthday wishes - my own wish is to get better at remembering other people's. I also got a lot of emails at midnight reading "Hello DavidN, We at [forum name here] would like to wish you a happy birthday today!" - including from places I haven't been to in years and can't remember why I even have an account there, like BemaniStyle. It made me realize that I might be online altogether too much.

(Yes, it's a bit of a stretch, I'm sorry)

On-street canvassers and I have never had the best of relationships, but in the middle of the week I had the most surreal experience with one ever.

I was waiting for the bus across the river in an (ultimately futile) attempt to get home quickly from work, and though the epidemic of clipboard-wielding grinning maniacs isn't nearly as bad in Kendall Square as it was in Davis Square, there are sometimes a few of them around telling people about some issue or other. This one was preying on the people who were waiting at the bus stop and trying to get them to sign up to donate to the ACLU, and asked me just before I sat down if I had a moment to talk about gay marriage.

And even though previous experience has made me always prepared with some convincing excuse that puts them off talking to me instantly, you can't say no to that, can you? Even though the Americans had a good start in this regard, for a long time now they've been slowly voting to reverse all their shreds of cultural evolution, and pretty soon their only contribution to Western civilization will be the invention of the pancake-wrapped sausage on a stick.

So I went over to him, planning to use my other tactic of talking back to him and hopefully keeping the discussion up until my bus came. He was very nice about it and even asked what bus I was waiting for so he could watch out for it. He handed me the clipboard so that I was unable to defend myself and talked for a while brightly about what I've just mentioned above while I nodded along, ready to talk about the recent vote in Maine at any moment but unable to really get a word in edgeways.

Eventually he paused in the middle of a sentence and looked confused, which I thought was my cue to start my side of the conversation while he'd forgotten this part of his routine, but once again he got in first.

"Do you know a girl called Whitney?"

"Yes," I answered after a moment, all my thoughts of return conversation having vanished at the sudden question.

"And you're married to her, aren't you?"

This was terrible. After honing my ability to avoid the regular variety, I had been caught off guard by a psychic canvasser. He could no doubt read my every move to escape before I got the chance to try it, and I didn't even have a second controller port to fall back on. The only thing left was to admit it.

But he then revealed that he was the husband of one of Whitney's friends, who I'd met once at a game night and hadn't recognized because his mass of hair was concealed under a wooly cap. So he then switched to talking about his rubbish job for a while and let me get off free back to waiting for the bus.

About twenty minutes later I was still there, so I phoned the MBTA and asked them where the bus was, and after I convined the woman on the other end to check she told me that the one I was waiting for had never left the depot for reasons best known to itself. But by now it was nearly the next one's arrival time, so after asking her if that one was likely to ever get there, I continued to wait.

He had been listening to me talking on the phone and came over again to cosmiserate about the state of Boston's public transport. "But do you know what would really make your day?" he asked, holding out the clipboard. After our shared friends had released me not half an hour earlier, he was going to use them to his advantage instead!

But at that precise moment, the bus came, so I apologized and leapt on, getting home in not much more time than it takes to walk. I set up my work laptop there instead, immediately went on to the T site and performed my monthly application to get my money back - everyone's happy. Except the MBTA, I imagine, but if you lived here you wouldn't have any sympathy for them either.

Game-based films have never exactly been the pinnacle of culture, perhaps because the two formats are so deceptively different from each other. Most of the ones that have come out in the past have suffered from trying to cram in too many very disparate ideas for the sake of the fans, being too far removed from the original game and almost unrecognizable apart from name-dropping, or being made by Uwe Boll.

But Whitney showed me the trailer for the 2010 Prince of Persia film yesterday and even though I wasn't really daring to hope for anything I've got to say it's looking... surprisingly good. (I have to make the concession that I also said this about the Silent Hill film before I saw it.) The 1991 Prince of Persia was a cinematic game before anyone even knew what "cinematic" meant, so it's nice to see that after nearly twenty years it's finally getting a film of its own. This one is, of course, based on the only loosely thematically related Sands of Time trilogy, but both the game this is based on and the film itself have had Jordan Mechner on board as the writer, and based on previous experience he seems to be one of the people with the increasingly rare talent of being able to make things that aren't crap.

From watching the trailer, it actually looks like it has a good try at staying close to the look and feel of the game without trying to stuff the whole thing as-is into a film format, and without even Matrixing it up as much as might be tempting for something so based on time manipulation. Some of the supposed Persians are suspiciously pale and/or English, but that's not really anything new compared to the original.

Yes, it's not going to have a vast impact on the cultural film landscape, but it looks like fun in a Pirates of the Carribean kind of way - I'm going to be looking forward to seeing this.

Now watch me be as wrong about the film as I was about the game.

For people who grew up on DOS games and don't want to try to forget about them, I've just posted an attempted overview turned running commentary on the EGA adventure Hugo 2: Whodunit over on videogame_tales.

I don't usually announce them, but on this occasion my relentless droning managed to break Livejournal's post character limit, an achievement of which I'm unnaturally proud.

Unlikely as it might seem for me to be saying this, I'm now at the stage where I'm putting the finishing touches on to a demo version of Crystal Towers 2, after being spurred on by a suggestion that it should go on to Clickteam's monthly disc. Previously I've been able to release things to testers with provisions that "this doesn't work right yet" or that things will be finished later, but I don't have those excuses now, so I've spent the last couple of weeks polishing up things so that they're presentable. And the results are looking pretty encouraging so far.

The only thing that's getting to me now is the storyline section - there's a visual joke that I quite like and want people to see, but it's really a direct choice between taking the time to do an entire intro or just putting a quick slide in to explain the story for the demo, and I'm not sure I have the drive (or graphical ability) at the moment to do the whole thing up. We'll have to see about that.

Otherwise, I'm at the stage where I'm comfortable putting little finishing touches in. This is something I like that I wasn't sure I would be able to do, but it turned out to only need a couple of hours' work thanks to PHP's versatility - signature images for player accounts. So you can put an img tag on to a page and link to your account's URL, and have it update as you play through the game - it's all very dynamic and Web 2.0 and... all that. With any luck, you should be able to see it happening here as I test it now.

It's been a continual source of bafflement to me that whenever I try to act like one of the real human beings, the world just refuses to work in the same way for me as it does for everyone else. Take the example of scraping together some lunch - feeling slightly stingier than normal today I decided to go up to the big kitchen on the sixteenth floor at work and get something edible from there rather than spending any money or interacting with the outside world. Given previous experience it might have been better to abandon this idea at its inception, but I pressed on nonetheless.

The sixteenth floor kitchen had been entirely changed round since the last time I was there, so it took me a while to find anything, but from what I could tell it still manages to provide a selection of items that are mostly entirely separate, cheap and/or calorific, and can't really be combined to form anything resembling lunch. The closest I got was some English muffins (which aren't English and don't resemble muffins) sliced in half with blocks of cheese spread around on the top, which I intended to transform into cheese on toast with the nearby toaster oven. Putting it all in on a paper plate, I set the timer and waited. If I had kept things at this sort of level then there would have been no trouble and I would have escaped in the five minutes that they would take to toast.

But while I was wandering around waiting for those five minutes to pass, I read some of the posters on the wall, one of which was the instruction sheet for what the CIC calls the "soda fountain" - a collection of giant alchemical-looking flasks on a rack full of luminous liquids. I don't like carbonated drinks so it was probably a mistake to try it out at all, but something drove me to investigate anyway with the vague intention of finding out if Fanta with normal water was all right. Now, what you do with these things is simple and was written in a set of easy steps up on the wall - you put a cup under the spout coming off the bottle of syrup, you unscrew the handle a few turns, wait for a modest amount of the stuff to pour out, then spin the handle in the other direction to completely close it, after which you go off and fill the cup the rest of the way with carbonated water. It's simple and works fine for any normal person.

Not for me. I confidently pulled a cup off the pile, held it under the nozzle and gently turned the handle, which promptly fell off, clattering into the bottom of the cup followed by a mercifully slow but steady and relentless syrup torrent spewing forth from both the remainder of the spout and the hole in it where the handle had been stopping it from getting out.

I picked the orange-covered screw-like tube out of the bottom of the cup with my fingers and tried to re-insert it into the handle, but without any success - screwing it in in either direction didn't help, because it required more pressure than it was really possible to give it with one hand occupied holding a cup that was creeping closer to full by the second. In a smooth Indiana Jones-like manoeuvre I pulled another cup off the pile with my increasingly sticky hand, put the first cup down on the counter while simultaneously shoving the second one under the nozzle, and continued the effort, looking round at the deserted kitchen for any sort of stopper or wad of Blu-Tak or anything that might help.

Eventually a man with a beard arrived, and I mentioned the slight soda fountain related problem to him as he walked past. Helpfully he immediately ran out to get a technician before I could say that all I needed was a hand on the back of the flask to screw the handle back in, leaving me still stuck there with a growing assembly line of cups filled with bright orange glutinous stuff. By this time the level in the bottle was almost below the handle, which would have released me from syrup-catching duty and allowed me to sort the problem easily.

But just before it ran out due to the natural force of gravity, which my family have had a talent for since the 17th century so it's something even I can't mess up, I finally managed to get the screw to catch and spun the handle back in at the same moment that the man from before came back apologetically saying he couldn't find anyone. I thanked him for his help anyway, poured the luminous contents of the cups back into the bottle, recorked it, washed my hands and then went back to the oven to get my lunch, which the toaster oven had baked almost solid to the plate during the time I was distracted by the soda fountain at the opposite end of the room, and was now on a uniformly brown plate that had been white when it went in. I got some yoghurt to go with it.

This is why Whitney cooks in our house.

I don't think I'm very good at Halloween. I could blame this on coming from a country where it isn't really a big thing at all - it seems to be getting a little more Americanized each year, but for the most part I remember that you just noticed it was the end of October and then spent the evening pulling your teeth out while trying to eat biscuits off the washing line or pushing your friends' heads under a basin of water (and increasingly, presumably, dribble) until they grabbed one of the submerged apples in their jaws.

Most of that doesn't seem to happen here, and instead you're meant to hand out gallons of sweets to marauding children dressed up as various horrors as they come round to your house. Except that doesn't happen here either - even though we live in a block of about sixty flats with plenty of children around, the place is always almost completely silent.

It doesn't stop us from making a small effort just in case, though - we carved a face out of a pumpkin a week ago (which whinknee gave a recessed eyepatch and then expected people not to think it was a pirate pumpkin, but everyone who saw it did, so that's what it was) and it sat on my desk for a week decaying slightly more by the day. By the 29th it was entirely full of cotton wool, so I scraped it all out with a rubber glove and then used hairspray on it in the hope it would preserve it and not instead cause it to spontaneously combust. And in an attempt to invite wandering three year olds to take some of the sweets that we have that neither of us like, I put the smelly artifact outside our door (though as we don't have a doorstep I had to create one out of a leftover flat-pack lamp box), where it glowed a bit and probably drove more people away than it attracted.

We did get two groups at the door, though, which is double the number from the last two years. Last year, I answered the door to a three year old while I was dressed in a hockey mask and a knife finger glove, which only served to scare the hell out of her. So I tried to tone it down this year and instead got an outrageously gigantic 80s metal wig that I'd got for $6 at the pharmacy, and answered the door with that and a Guitar Hero controller. This also scared the hell out of everyone, only more so. So after they'd gone I concluded the evening by taking a bag out and smashing the pumpkin into a small pile of putrid debris (as you do) to fit it into the bin. That was the most satisfying part of the whole day.

Over the last couple of weeks I've finally been updating my personal page - it was something that it had needed since it was made, really, mostly because it used to be just a big table of stuff that I threw together at random and tried to arrange so that people could find the actual worthwhile bits. I've now replaced it with a list of games I've made (probably the most worthwhile section), music and writing (mostly taken from this journal), categorized to make it easier to pick through.

The new, shorter, still cheap-as-free redirect URL is:
http://www.davidn.co.nr
All comments are welcome.

Some of the other things that were on the old page might make it up eventually, but I've tried to keep to the things that are actually presentable for now. For example, I'm not sure if the older mini-games like Kommon Room Kombat will ever go up - mostly in that case because that one would now probably be counted as personality theft to add to the photo theft that made the game possible. And image sharing sites were invented just after I put together the wedding photo album, so that'll probably be entirely replaced as well.

Indeed, most of the content comes from RSS feeds - the journal on the front page and entire music section are both CSS shells around content made up from feeds from elsewhere. Therefore, the entire Internet is now my database and I am truly one with the Matrix.

With my birthday and therefore an excuse to get over my aversion to buying things for myself coming up at a frankly terrifying rate, I've been thinking of replacing my current second-hand Strat copy with something new. After some searching around on the Guitar Center site, I think I've picked out the one I'm most likely to choose:


This is an Ibanez RG350DX, and seems to come very highly recommended by everyone for whom white guitars don't immediately spark terrible flashbacks to Dieter Bohlen.

The important question is: is this any good? The vast majority of reviews for it say that it's the best guitar they've ever owned and that it's good both physically and... sonically for metal, but on every site that invites comments there is always one review that is about 200% as long and 2000% as pompous as the others saying that everyone else doesn't know what they're talking about and that it's actually terrible unless you replace the pickups with new ones that cost just about as much as the entire guitar. So I'd appreciate any first-hand information, or just advice from anyone who can tell at a glance.

With a remarkable sense of timing I noticed yesterday that my Stealthplug has now reached that stage that audio hardware gets to where it only works if it's sitting at exactly the right angle, the sockets aligned to the nanometre and you hold your head on one side, so I'll be replacing that as well - I have my eye on the Pod XT at the moment, although I'm honestly not entirely sure of the practical difference between any of the bubbly pieces of hardware that you can see along the top row of the site. Again, any recommendations would be very welcome.

I'm going to see if I can try them both out along at the Guitar Center this weekend.

I know you were eagerly awaiting being bored to death by these and everything, but somehow I never got around to posting the photos from our cruise to Mexico at the beginning of the month. There were three Mac users' cameras present, resulting in a large number of pictures distributed among all of them:

Parents-in-law's(?) camera - 422 photos
Brother-in-law's camera - 500 photos
More brother-in-law's camera - 60 photos that wouldn't fit in the gallery above
Our camera - 309 photos

For obvious reasons I wanted to pick out some highlights rather than just giving those out and expecting people to trawl through them, so here are some of the best ones in a rather lazy presentation.

( Selected photos, height/width forced in HTML, just View Image to expand )

Even though I technically have the means to, I don't really keep up with the news from home very much. The most I know are general things about the rest of Britain - I think the three major news stories of the last couple of months are that the BNP are ruining the country by gaining inexplicable legitimacy, that the current Prime Minister is driving the vote more and more certainly back to conservative again at the next election, and that Psycho Mantis over here surprised everyone by correctly predicting the results of the lottery.

The most I hear about the local things around Inverurie - a town name which nobody here can say, but at least I didn't grow up a few miles away in Balquhain with a silent Q - is during the Skype calls with my parents during the weekend, where I'm told what's closed down, who's moved away and who's died. Sometimes there's more interesting news, like this photo I was sent yesterday:



That is not, as it might seem, a picture of a mile-wide lake - it is, as far as I can recognize, part of the golf club that I used to work on, with the road leading around it now transformed into a slipway. It seems there's been a small amount of rain, causing the river to burst its banks over an enormous area (most of that water should be under the bridge that you can see at the back left corner of the top picture of this article). I only saw it anything approaching as bad as that once - and when that happened there were still people out there playing golf.

Brighter and sunnier holiday photos will be up eventually - they're already online, I just have to go through the thousand or so that exist and pick out the highlights.

Wonderful and unusual news - I had a dream that wasn't terrible last night. If you can discount the way that I was apparently working with the Nazis for a minute, but still.

The dream opened in an empty high street shop with two sofas forming a seating area at the front - think of a strangely comfortable dentist's reception. I was in a group of three people who were quietly sneaking inside, led by Herr Flick (I imagine that like a lot of British series, the description will make no sense unless you already know where he's from anyway). The other one besides me might have been Von Smallhausen, I'm not sure. Quickly, we moved to the back of the room behind the counter, where there was a safe set into the wall.

Herr Flick opened the safe, which apparently contained secret documents important to the French resistance, and attached a bomb and timer device to the inside of the door, then closed it again and we retreated. (Yes, I know - quite why we needed to blow open a safe that we already had access to was never made clear in the dream). For some reason the timer was displayed on an LED counter on the front of the safe - it had been set to explode at 1 o'clock, so we waited until then, but nothing seemed to happen.

As the others went back to the bomb to check it, I went outside and wandered up and down the street - I noticed that there was a lot of interference on all the televisions in the window of an electronics shop on the corner, and realized that we must have been using a silent electomagnetic pulse bomb by mistake. (They must have been the secret Gestapo variety.) Before I could go to tell the others, a couple arrived - the only other people on the high street - and looked around confusedly.

"Are you here about the interference with the... Rhondium crystals?" I asked. Somehow they understood what I meant, and offered to help them look for the source of the disturbance, leading them to anywhere that looked likely and wasn't the place we were hiding, in order to stall them from discovering our nefarious scheme. Eventually, the abandoned dentist place was the only shop that we hadn't been into, and I walked the couple up to the whitewashed door with me at the front of the group. Carefully, I opened it, hoping that the others had seen us wandering around outside, realized what I was doing, and that I'd given them enough time to hide the evidence that we were up to no good.

I walked a few steps into the room as the others came in behind me. Inside was a picture of artificial innocence - the two of them were sitting nonchalantly opposite each other on the sofas, feet up on the table and reading magazines that they'd found on its bottom shelf. I began to wonder where they'd managed to hide the bomb, when my eyes were drawn to what else was on the coffee table.

They had hidden the bomb inside a potato, with a smiley face drawn on the front with a Biro in what I can only assume was an attempt to make it look more friendly and innocent. After a quick look around the room from the entrance, my two companions decided there was nothing suspicious at all in the room and that they had better leave.

"Nice potato," one of them commented on his way out. And they both walked off down the street, leaving us to continue in our attempts to obtain whatever secrets we were stealing from the French resistance - except by this time I was laughing so much in my sleep that I'd woken myself and Whitney up.

A lot of the work day yesterday was spent installing a new fan assembly for my laptop, which my boss had ordered online to preserve his own sanity and everyone else's in the office - the computer had been making noises like an annoyed zombie with stomachache for some months. The process of getting into the computer was rather more involved than I had thought, involving the use of a screwdriver, a pen magnet to extract loose screws, a second screwdriver to use in conjunction with the first for unplugging tiny little fragile components, thermal paste, compressed air to blow away the dust because it was like Raiders of the Lost Ark in there, and old-fashioned brute force. Unsurprisingly my mind didn't stop when the operation was eventually successful, and on the new and improved quiet laptop this was soon produced:



(Don't use the magnet anywhere near the hard drives or you'll get up to 10 points of... data loss.)

To explain the middle item on the right, this came from an easier procedure that was performed a few months ago, following a recommended fix for getting around a design flaw of IBM's laptops. Some of the fan assembly went over the graphics chip and I could probably have left the now-baked-solid stack of paper out if the fan provided the necessary pressure itself, but it's still in there to be on the safe side.

Now it's much quieter, and seems to be running cooler as well - I keep on having to check that the fan is still actually spinning as I'm not used to it working with any degree of subtlety.

A couple of links that I found as a result of posting that gameplay video yesterday led me to discover that I was on this list of independent game makers, and I'm rather proud to be even mentioned on the same page as names like Ben Croshaw, Joakim Sandberg, Nifflas and a whole lot of other people even though you haven't heard of them.

David K Newton
Primarily a game developer in Multimedia Fusion, David is most famously responsible for Treasure Tower.

I didn't know that I was famously responsible for anything at all, but the web in general seems to have decided that Treasure Tower is my magnificent octopus out of the three main releases I've made so far. I'm not sure if it's for being particularly good, or more an infamy gained through its frantically irritating nature and my decision to score the game entirely with Scott Joplin ragtime pieces (which some people enjoyed but probably led to a greater number of keyboards through monitors than was strictly necessary - the choice of words "responsible for" is quite appropriate). Maybe it's because it feels like a game that's quicker to play than the other two, even though it took about a year to think up two hundred different screens for it.

So maybe I need to work on a follow-up to that next after the follow-up to Crystal Towers, trapping myself in a loop of sequelitis from which there is no escape.

I really need to update my site.

Boss monsters are usually a bit of a headache to write. You have to think up a cocktail of attacks, weak points and strategies that are balanced to be difficult to cope with at first but possible to learn through experience, and then write the whole thing's behaviour, which can often get quite complex. As evidence that I'm still working on the game, this is the seventh of the bosses I've made, and at the moment it's called Beam Stack.



The general approach that I'm using for bosses in this game is treating them as loose sort of state machines, with one string called State which is the main thing that decides how the boss should behave at any time, along with a heap of other variables on the object that describe more of the details of those behaviours. By making at least one of the possible actions in each state being to change the contents of State to something else (and having what it changes to possibly dependent on other conditions), the boss can move between behaviours in sequence.

( A more in-depth explanation of how it all works, for the benefit of those interested, coders, ZZTers, and the insane )

And all of that goes together to form the thing that you see in the video. After I first set it up it took me ages to get past it the first time, but now I can do it fairly reliably - if other people find the same thing, then that's just the right difficulty of boss I'm aiming for.

In all the talking about the excursions into Mexico that I was doing last week, somehow I forgot to describe the ship that we were living on as we went down to Mexico and back. We were on the Silver Shadow, one of the ships run by Silversea Cruises, on a nine-day sail down the coast of Mexico and back paid for by Whitney's grandmother that we'll probably not be able to afford again until retirement. I took a heap of photos of it while wandering around on the last day we were there, with the plan to stitch them together into a Myst-style slideshow exploration, but after I got to the 150-photo mark I realized the complete impossibility of it. Listing them offhand, it included a pool, about five places to eat, several lounges of various degrees of pretentiousness, a fitness centre, spa, casino, golf cage, library, and probably a lot of other things that I'm forgetting.

Our room was fairly near the top of the ship on deck 8 of 10, right next to the door to the outdoor pool (complete with bar and grill in the corners) which was where we spent most of our time, and not just to stave off seasickness as I've described the physics of before. The other place that I spent a lot of time was in the observation room at the very top, which was a quiet library atmosphere with a view out towards the rolling sea (and I spent time there at first because I could sit roughly in the horizontal centre of the ship and experience less wobbling). In our own room we had a veranda to ourselves where we could watch the sun rise and the ship docking, and when we were away from it, it seemed that at least one of the staff always sneaked in to refill the mini-fridge with drinks or to rearrange the bedclothes - I don't know how they managed to always stay unseen, but it was slightly like having elves.

I think that we were the youngest couple on the entire ship - it's worth highlighting that the review that I linked to above considers the "youngish passengers" to be those in their mid-40s - but we weren't short of things to do. Most activities and meals are included in the cost of the cruise, and for those that aren't, you have $500 of starting shipboard account to yourself, which you'll never realistically run out of unless you buy any of the particularly customs-dodging stuff from the shops boutiques dotted around. As I mentioned I quickly got classified as one of the golfers, and was at the putting competition most evenings where I was consistently mediocre, apart from the second-last time when I got nothing and going out with a good run at forty-four. The points accumulated from activities like this over the course of the cruise could be redeemed at the end for prizes of various degrees of tattiness, and our collection netted us a small silver money clip that I think they just put their logo on after getting it from a Marks and Spencers Christmas cracker.

There are a number of choices of places to eat - three full restaurants, one sensibly called The Restaurant, and two next to each other further up the ship called La Terraza and Le Champagne (both requiring reservations and Le Champagne being exclusive enough to be the only non-free one). In addition to that there was the grill bar next to the pool, and also a 24-hour in-suite menu detailed in the leather-bound room booklet (and masterfully translated on the German pages simply as IN-SUITE MENÜ) where you could call the room service with your order and soon afterwards one of the waiters would appear with a tray that he then laid out on your coffee table. All of those options featured the choices you would expect of soup in a tower, various arrangements of seafood and several species of vaguely posh animals. Most meals were made up of at least four courses and it was unusual to leave any of the restaurants feeling completely able to walk unaided.

Towards the end I went to one Spanish lesson where everyone else was rather above my level - I had no idea about even the basic sentence structure, and whenever I attempt to speak in any foreign language that I don't know, my brain ends up defaulting back to German, which gives me possibly the most international dialect in the world. There's nothing like beginner language lessons to make you feel completely non-absurd talking complete gibberish to strangers - during the course of the lesson the most complete sentence I learned how to say was "My castle is yellow and in the centre of England", just in case the need ever arises.

And in an attempt to remove some of my permanent high level of stress, Whitney suggested I book an appointment at the ship's spa while she was out doing a tour of wineries with her mother. This took place in the afternoon of the last day we were on the ship, and while waiting for the time to come I made the mistake of thinking "I'll just have a couple more goes at Aletheia first". Fifteen minutes later, twitching all over, I arrived in the waiting room and had to fill out a questionnaire about my current stresses (on which I rated myself a 9 out of 10 and ran out of room for the recent medications). Throughout the procedure, she kept saying she was finding colossal knots in my back and upper arms, and had to compensate for my incredible ticklishness by using her lower arms instead of hands in some places, but there are definitely worse ways to spend an afternoon than lying blindfolded naked on a table and being oiled by a woman from Brazil - and all this without having to keep it from your wife, either.

We came back to our flat to find that fruit flies had moved in in our absence - not a Biblical infestation of them, but just little swarms hovering around the bins and sink area. This happens to a lot of homes in Boston at the end of the warm months, and I think our being away for a whole week added to the problem. So fly spray was among my list of things to get from the supermarket the day after we arrived.

I haven't dealt with the need to get rid of more than one insect at a time before, and I had been expecting to just get a little sort of can of it, like the things that you bring with you to repel them when something possesses you to go camping in the middle of a jungle. But what the supermarket actually had was an entire section full of gigantic canisters festooned with various warning signs, showing the product being left in water to detonate in a little mushroom cloud or to spray a ton of white gas around while everyone else in a five mile radius evacuated the area. It took me a while to find one that didn't promise to obliterate with the force of a nuclear warhead, and even it shows a fly corpse in an upside down warning triangle being shot with a lightning bolt.

As I looked at the back, reading over the substantial list of warnings to wash your hands before, after and during use, to never get the stuff on your skin or come anywhere close to breathing it, it dawned on me that what I was buying was an instrument of genocide. I don't consider myself a colossal hippy or anything, but traumatic as it is, I use the glass and paper method to get rid of spiders and various other nasty things rather than outright killing them (besides, you'd never be able to do that after watching the spider episode of Mio Mao) because I don't think I have the right to just drop a coffee table on small things with loads of legs that have accidentally wandered into my field of vision while looking for other smaller things with slightly fewer legs.

It is absolutely necessary to get rid of pests for our own survival, and we're not a virus like Agent Smith says for doing so because killing is very much part of nature's great inexplicable chain anyway, but we're the only species who have the ability to be quite so proud of it - if you think about it for too long, the way that the sheer efficiency of mass death is promised by these things is a disturbing notion indeed.

Then I thought "Sod it, they're only flies" and went home and massacred them.