Posts tagged "Videogames"

As you might know, I'm an avid video game buyer - that is, I usually buy tons of games but hardly ever find the time to actually play them. I still have a huge stack of games to check out and I usually never finish any of them. Anyway, I'm also a huge fan of the Gothic saga by Piranha Bytes: a german action-RPG series.

Some of my time is always spentwasted moderating the boards and webmastering the website of the italian Gothic community. During the last year we also opened the official Risen fansite: the new RPG by Piranha Bytes which is about to be released in a week.

Fortunately, in managing the Risen community we have full support by the publisher of the game, Deep Silver. In fact, a couple of weeks ago I was invited in Milan with another founder of the site to attend a private preview of the game. We had some fun checking out Risen and shooting a short video (in italian):

In the previous post I wrote about the problems of adapting a genetic algorithm to work inside the constraints of a video game. In some cases it is possible, and quite easy, to reshape and reduce the "problem" at hand in order for the GA to be able to solve it and pretend to be an intelligent adversary.

During our tests at Urbino we built a couple of prototypes, one of which is Genetic RTS (yep, I know, not the most creative of titles ). It's essentially a simplified "Defense Grid" game where the player must build up the defense of his base while the computer attacks it and tries to overcome the defensive structures.

The game

Genetic RTS is limited to a little square terrain with the player's base at its center. At the start of the game, the player can place a certain number of defensive structures around the base (in the blue area):

There are two different defensive structures: cannons, which shoot quickly but cannot target airplanes, and anti-air rockets, which are slower but of course only target planes. Each defensive tower has a limited range and a limited rate of fire, but never misses the enemy.

The objective of the computer is to destroy the player's base (which has 20 "health" points) by trying to get its units to touch the base (each hit costs one health point). When the base reaches 0 points the player loses. The player's goal instead is to place his defenses correctly and resist to the attack waves as long as he can.

The computer can generate a certain number of units, that will start on the edge of the map and then move towards the base. A unit can be either a land unit (a tank) or a flying unit (an airplane): each unit will be shot at by the corresponding defense tower type and not by the other. Moreover, each single unit can choose its "toughness" (the number of hits required to destroy it). A tougher unit will also be slower, so there's a trade-off to find, based on the number of defensive towers and their rate of fire.

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The last days have been very interesting: first of all I went to Venice because of an exam (which I passed only in part), then attended La Biennale for a day and finally went to Milan in order to attend to an almost private presentation of "Risen".

First of all, the exam was about "System reliability and performance", i.e. stochastic processes and their modeling, queuing systems and finally about how to write a simulator and get statistically valid data out of it. Well, turns out that the simulator Silvio and I wrote wasn't too correct about the "statistically valid" part and we'll have to fix it in the next weeks.

Then, two days ago I was part of the film delegation of "It.Aliens" at La Biennale in Venice. Unfortunately, the showing was a technical Waterloo (audio and video were out of sync, the audio mix was completely wrong, etc.) but the audience laughed a couple of times so it wasn't a complete and utter failure, all in all. The festival was a great experience even if I stayed just for a couple of hours.

Finally, yesterday morning I woke up at 5 to catch a train to Milan - more exactly to Rho Fieramilano - where the Italian "Koch Media" headquarters are located. I met there with Leonardo "Sakkio", the leader of the Italian Gothic and Risen online community with whom I manage the official website Risen-Italia. Together we attended a nice preview of the new video game by Piranha Bytes, Risen, which is to be released in less than a month. We shot a couple of videos, which I'll start editing in the next days. The game looks pretty promising and we had fun testing it; the people at Koch Media also covered us in merchandising and stuff, which is always an easy way to make fan's heart happy!

Last week I finally had enough time to install Impulse, the digital delivery solution from Stardock, and buy their newest space RTS game: "Sins of a Solar Empire".

I had already tried the former digital delivery client by Stardock, Stardock Central, to get "Galactic Civilizations II" and knew about their wonderful no-DRM, no copy protection, constant updates and great quality policy.

Well, Impulse delivers the same experience. The old login I used with Stardock Central still worked and gave me access to the games I had already bought. In fact, a couple of minutes after installing Impulse, it was already updating my copy of GalCiv2. While the updating and installing interface is pretty nice, the actual shop browsing happens through a wrapped browser interface. Anyway, after placing the order via web interface, Impulse reloads your user stats and displays the newly bought game in the "My Games" tab.

Downloading the game is very fast and installing takes only a couple of minutes (remember to set Impulse's preferences to "ask for prompt" before installing, or it will put the game in the standard C:\Program Files folder).

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Just a couple of days after the public beta of Good Old Games (which will seriously jeopardize my ability to study anything this semester), I discovered the even more dangerous Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe! This officially declares war on all exam preparations I had in mind for the following months.

Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe (OpenTTD for short) is an open-source clone of the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe engine: all loving 8 bit graphics are accurately reproduced, along with the interface and the well thought-out gameplay. The clone does not include the graphics and the music (you'll have to copy them from your copy of the game). It works perfectly on Vista, supports much higher resolutions than the original game and is an exemplary well behaved application in "windowed" mode (it doesn't block the mouse, can be freely moved and minimized).

In order to install it you can get the latest stable release (0.6.3 at the time) from the project's online repository and copy the binaries somewhere on your computer (I hate installers). Then you need to copy the graphics from your original "Transport Tycoon Deluxe" disc (I bought my copy a couple of years ago, but it didn't work with my notebook's Radeon video adapter):

The selected files in the image can be found in the root folder on the disc. Simply copy them in the "data" subfolder of OpenTTD (or in one of the other suggested folders you'll find in the readme).

Then, in order to get the music working, you should be able to directly copy the "gm" folder on the disc to a newly created "gm" folder where you installed OpenTTD. Unfortunately, the DOS version of the game (and my version, for some unexplicable reason) includes the MIDI files as the packed archive "GM.CAT". Cirdan, an user of the OpenTTD forums, mercifully posted a simple C program that analyzes those CAT files and extracts the music files. I had to adapt the code to work on the Visual C++ compiler and to automatically generate the correct file names:

Download the source code (.C)

Put the file in some directory, along with the packed GM.CAT file. Compile it:

cl /MD gmext.c

and run the executable (you can also download the compiled utility directly if you don't want to compile it). This will (should) produce a lot of gm_ttXX.gm files (22 in total) that must be copied into the "OpenTTD/gm" folder.

Now go enjoy Transport Tycoon in all its glory!

The DRM-free digital delivery service Good Old Games has finally reached public beta status!

I subscribed as soon as the closed beta launched and explored their growing and very interesting catalogue of games: I already bought the two classics Fallout and Fallout 2, since they were missing from my collection (I'm ashamed, I know). I hope I will find the time to play them...

On the occasion of the launch event they are also releasing Disciples and... Gothic (my absolute RPG favorite!). It's a great occasion to get back to some of the really great games from the past, with assured compatibility with XP and Vista, super support and incredibly low prices.

I finally managed to play the first and original "Prince of Persia" game to its end (that is, more or less 20 years after it was first published). It's a simple, brilliant, very well made and very frustating old game.

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