Monday, December 24, 2018

My journey through Paradox Games

It’s funny to think about how I got into Paradox Interactive Games by pure accident, I had seen the original Europa Universalis game at a Circuit City, guess how old I am, and as I kid I was always thrilled to find more games like Civilization and this game looked like it, but something told me that this was not for me, at least not yet, and I ended up buying Half-Life Blue Shift that day, a game which I enjoyed for a short time and then I stashed away until I sold it at a discount price because Steam keys and all being digital nowadays.

Fast forward many years later and I was going through a neighbors collection of items he has for sale on a weekly basis, there I found it, Europa Universalis III -Wow, the franchise has gone out this far out? Gotta give this a try- and after paying a dollar for the game I went home and installed it, I found it to be very plain of a game, an interesting concept but the game felt dated as hell, something was telling me there had to be more and while looking I noticed that screenshots for the game looked oddly different than mine and they all referenced versions that were way ahead than mine, turns out Steam had it and I came to find the wonderful world of DLC galore that Paradox brings to the table with every game they release.

But lets go step by step on this, I put the key in, install the game and wow does the world and engine feel completely different, the mechanics were so complicated and then I saw that the DLCs would bring in a lot of flavor to the game, eventually I did buy all the DLCs for EUIII and started to enjoy the game but then I found out that there was a game called Europa Universalis: Rome and Vae Victis, the grandfather of the upcoming Imperator game, I was thrilled to play something related to the Roman Empire as I was just starting my long journey, eight years now, to get my degree in History.
Rome and Vae Victis felt oddly dated but I found something satisfying managing to survive as any nation, thrive and eventually colonize half of the world while crushing the rest of it, harder than it would seem seeing that civil wars seem to be cyclical in this game and some of the mechanics were broken to the point where it was a bit pointless sometimes to play through the campaign.

If I’m not mistaken at the time Paradox had announced that they were releasing a new game called Crusader Kings II, the thought of this being the second iteration made me wonder how good the game could be that it had to get a sequel, I tried the demo out when it came out and I could, for the life of me, not grasp all of the mechanics but they felt oddly familiar from the world of Rome and Vae Victis and not so much from EUIII, I was thrilled to know more, when the game came out I got myself a copy, I must admit here that I did not own a legal one but I redeemed myself and bought the game later on with all the DLCs up to Holy Fury and I have done so with almost all of Paradox games to date.

There was a slight problem with Crusader Kings II though, when I played the game back then on its first iteration it was good but it lacked something, I suspected that DLCs would come out throughout the months or years and I was right on this, not that I was proud of this or anything since this is a considerable cost when you sum all of this up and yet I still bought all of the DLCs. The interesting part of Crusader Kings II is that I have managed to understand, with time, all of the mechanics and some of the dirtier secrets on how to play real evil, so evil that I did notice that the AI would sometimes offer you matrilineal marriages and you would not notice this with all the things going on at the same time, clever girl!

I also got a friend to play Crusader Kings II with me, we did it locally and managed to form an enormous Russian Empire that spanned up to where the Holy Roman Empire was and then some, parts of France belonged to my family because of clever marriages and some plots, plots which were heavily abused also, and were fragmenting Europe to the point the Muslims were on the south of France and in Italy, the Tsarina, a character that started her reign at five years of age, would be one of the most memorable characters I have used to lead a dynasty, she managed to double the size of the Empire, crush rebellions, all enemies, was loved by everyone, had equally distributed land between vassals to avoid huge power struggles which had almost tore the Empire apart during its early formation, no sinful traits, the epitome of catholic religion, yes, Russia became catholic because we could not wait to become Christians and push forward technologically, building and troop wise, staying as pagans had some benefits but none that we would consider that useful on the long run; I have also created Empires from the island of Ireland that made Britannia rule as early as the Norse invasions to the islands, unified Italy under Italian rule, managed to expand the Byzantine Empire as a loyal vassal who in turn would become the de facto Imperial Family of the Empire for centuries to come, all of this and more stories I have from Crusader Kings II, a great game that is a bit hard to get into with all the mechanics going around but nonetheless highly addictive and recommended for anyone really interested in understanding Medieval history. While I suspect that CK2 is coming at the end of its lifetime I am unsure if we will be seeing another sequel to Crusader Kings, CK2 has some flaws but in general you can enjoy and completely make or break the game at will.

Europa Universalis IV has never been my thing, since it never was it has become a very strange game for me that while I have a grasp on I cannot get through with most of the things that are going on, I need to basically read and re-read a ton of mechanics that I missed out on, I find this strange because CK2 was not like this, with CK2 I stopped for a long while and when I came back the game, while changed, still made sense and the mechanics became obvious to me, with EUIV I still struggle to this day and the fact that the game requires a considerable amount of resources from my computer has not allowed me to get on with trying the game out the way I want it to, also I am missing a lot of the DLCs because, again, this is not a game that I was really into and only one person that I know personally has ever played the game to the point where he had some understanding of the game but was in the same place I find myself.

Victoria II, Vicky 2, whichever way you want to call it is a game that I consider personally was left wanting after only two DLCs were released for it, the game is excellent and the mechanics used in the game are very peculiar, at first I would have thought that war was the key element but after being reminded that this is the age of Imperialism and Industrialization I quickly understood why the market was a key component of having the right resources, the right territory and why scrambling for Africa and Asia was such a huge deal, we managed to play this with four people and got very far before the game continuously crashed on us, the highest moment for me was making Mexico a Great Power and keep it at number one, annexing Texas, not having the US hand me my ass in open warfare, expanding the country to half of South America, parts of Egypt and Abu Dhabi, conquering Dai Nam and parts of China and having a 100% literacy all around the country while owning the Panama and Suez canals, surviving a Great War and seeing how Europe tore itself completely apart.
Hearts of Iron III and IV are games that I tried but ultimately never really picked up hard upon, while I enjoy the whole idea of playing through World War II and have managed to survive the red tide of the Soviet Union as many countries, also China becoming a massive crazy super power, I do not feel like there is much there to talk about, there are some really interesting challenges that include playing as Luxemburg but after HoI3 it was not of much interest to me, I got HoI4 because I expected something completely different and well here is where we are.

I am taking note that for all of the previously mentioned games there are several Mods that can improve or completely change the way the game is played or the story in general, while I get this I am concentrating purely on what Paradox offers natively, I have also not mentioned the free updates which include some very interesting changes to the base game, if you do not own DLCs you can still enjoy a good portion of the game and years later Paradox will eventually start unlocking some of the aspects of other DLCs into the game, like with Crusader Kings II, but this is many years down into the game and DLC have been on the market.

Making a slight stop here at one of the lesser known games of Paradox, Sengoku, which while a good concept I felt that it was a bit hard to get into and while it intrigued me I left it be for a while, just right now I found out that it was on sale at about a dollar and had to snatch it, will probably play the hell out of it to find out if maybe I was too fast to dismiss the game and Paradox should revisit a game that had a lot of potential or if this was indeed better left alone, it intrigues me though because Rome/Vae Victis took a while to have a sequel done, which is still being worked upon, so I’m wondering if either Victoria or Sengoku will ever get a sequel pushed through.

The last game on the list is Stellaris, this is a strange one because having played it from the beginning I always felt that the game was heavily lacking on all fronts, a very good concept and one that Paradox was willing to throw itself behind of, with the latest 2.2 “Le Guin” update the game was completely revamped to the point it is a completely different game, I will actually have to write an entire review about it because I feel that the changes done to the way resources are handled, the new market, planetary distribution, districts and buildings, some of the technologies and the fact that you are now only stuck with hyperlane technology, which makes sense in a way but this is debatable, and considering I went all in with the DLCs, including the new MegaCorp DLC, I can say that changes are good but finding a balance in this new game has been complicated due to the way I used to play the game, also Corporations are absolutely broken by the way they work in general and the Criminal Heritage civic gives some insane energy bonuses, having 250+ energy before the end of the first century was something I was not expecting but it is part of finding ways of breaking some of the mechanics.

Did I mention I like breaking the mechanics of these games as much as possible?

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

The History of why I shouldn't buy things I don't know too much about or how I learned to configure a Sun Server SunFire v100


Introduction:

This paper contains information regarding the initial opening, setup and deployment of a Sun Server SunFire v100. The paper may or will contain technical terminology including detailed information regarding every step taken on how everything was performed.

Opening:
The server came wrapped in bubble wrap, packing peanuts, air bags and was inside a cardboard box, the item is as described and as shown in the pictures provided by the eBay seller, it is a SunFire v100 Server, no rails included, has mounting ears, one of them has some oxide, on the back there is a Sun card which is used for configurations, the inside is in great shape and clean, seems as if it had been recently pulled out of production. Inside there are two IDE hard drives, 40 GB each, with 2GB of PC133 RAM split up in 4 modules of 512MB each one. The processor seems to be mounted with the heatsink but to avoid moving or messing with anything at this point, no cable has been included or any other accessories are available with this item. Final cost of item was 35 USD on July 2018 of which 12.50 USD was the cost of the item itself, the rest was for shipping and handling. This item was opened on July 14th, Saturday, 2018.

Setup:
Connecting the server to a light source did not turn it on as it is with most servers nowadays, there is a switch but it was not flipped, to connect to the console a Toshiba Satellite machine with Windows 98 and serial port was used, a DB9 to RJ45 cable was used to connect to A/LOM on the back of the server, as it turns out LOM indicates that the server is on stand by mode through most of the commands and can power on through this method, doing so does power on the server and a full boot up took the server onto Solaris 5.10 which was configured with an AT&T business IP address, there was no information available or anything critical leftover on the server two hard drives.

Rebooting the server did not bring the system back to its original mode, it would seem as if the server has fallen back into net mode for no apparent reason and wants to forcibly boot into a PXE Server or some other server that will provide it a kernel so that it can work (this seems to be normal from back in the day on what Sun was doing). Going through the options it seemed logical to install another OS into the Server since Solaris was not working properly and the version, while still supported, was of no use to me and I would rather have anything else than this, such as Debian or Gentoo.

One of the initial issues found with the system, aside from the problem of not booting up, was making the Sunfire v100 stop trying to boot through net and go into anything else, on the LOM prompt this can be done first typing on the LOM prompt bootmode forth, this will stop the current boot process and take us to the OpenBoot prompt, in order to get to this prompt the Sunfire v100 has to be powered on (LOM>poweron).

Once the server has been halted it is easy to boot from the CD (or DVD, depending on what you may have on your machine, by the looks of it this has been somewhat rigged to use a slim CD-ROM but it could easily use a CD/DVD Burner from the looks of it, while I do have some slim readers/burners I have no intention of burning any CD/DVDs from this machine at this point), type the command boot cdrom and it should go into the CD, in my case it would not read the CD or would give me the error Fast Data Access MMU miss with, by all means, could mean that anything is not working properly inside the server and thus this is why it is not booting up.

Following some instructions I first disabled the auto-booting, this can be done (as indicated in this link: https://it.toolbox.com/question/fast-data-access-mmu-miss-in-sunfire-v120-061010) by doing setenv diag-level? max, then, setenv auto-boot? False, then, reset-all. If all commands are followed correctly the server will throw up all the things that it is currently doing and will not boot towards anything, it will simply reach the OpenBoot prompt and stay there (I have yet to find a way for ALOM to forward logs to a SIEM or any other log storage method so that these can be read elsewhere).

While doing so I got a warning about a possible issue with RAM, DIMM0 was the probable culprit per the initial boot-up so after shutting it down I removed it and booted back, the error still came up but I ignored it, at this point I wish I had not lost a whole day figuring out what to do when the error was in front of me the whole time.

Booting to a CD worked, I had issues probing for the drives but I decided to ignore it (later this issue would be resolved through a different method as provided by Oracle on some documentation they still have on their website). It took about a whole day for Debian to run the installation and in the end crashed, OpenBSD and NetBSD did the same, I had looked at a YouTube channel, Backyard Tech, in which he explains to another user the possible issues he could be facing with a Sunfire v120 (originally I had only intended to buy the Sunfire v120 but I found the Sunfire v100 at about the same price so I also went for it, the Sunfire v120 is another story that required a whole different document to explain the ordeal it will be to get it to work). One of the things he had mentioned was to burn the CD as slow as possible to have the least amount of errors, one of the steps I took to make sure that the system would load, but had mixed results. Having the Sunfire v120 at hand I changed the CD-ROM but found the same results with the CD which made me suspicious of the internal controller.

Since I had no way to change the controller or do anything else at this point I went back to square one and removed all the RAM, in the end the problem with the server was indeed the RAM, it would seem that either some of the sticks or ports were not working properly, leaving only one stick of RAM, on DIMM 3 (remember that RAM is inserted from back to front not the other way around, this is important and is notated on the documentation and the images provided on the cover plate of the Sunfire v100). At the moment 512.

A link with assistance on configuration of OpenBoot can be found here, the website contains all the necessary information to properly configure OpenBoot to boot to the correct disk once formatting has been performed and also to troubleshoot properly since I was originally not able to probe for SCSI or IDE drives, once the procedure was followed everything was showing up and working fine, boot up now takes me directly to Debian when turning it on so there is no real necessity at this point to go through the Windows 98 machine to work on LOM, this is being used only to monitor resources consumption at the moment: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2731/gkkvd.html.

With Debian installed there is another issue, installing it was no issue, interestingly it would not pickup the repository for sparc64 from the ports repository, could not add it manually either at that point so running with whatever the netinst CD had was what needed to be done at this point, the site for the sparc64 port indicates that some commands need to be run in order to get the proper software installed once the source.list file is corrected (all the information can be found here: https://wiki.debian.org/Sparc64). The problem in the end is that the security repository for sid is not working, not sure why this is, and there is a considerable lack of packages available for the platform. While I could install apache2 and the compilers through build-essential, python3 and pip3, the packages for MariaDB Server 10.1, MongoDB or any other database aside from PostgreSQL are missing, as a matter of fact most of the libraries required to build MariaDB are missing from the Debian repository, for the last two days (Thursday 19th and Friday 20th) I have been compiling libraries to get MariaDB to run on the Sunfire v100. I know I could use SQLite or PostgreSQL but I would like to have MySQL/MariaDB available in my current Debian build

Wednesday, July 4, 2018

Why do I keep buying and using obsolete hardware?


Friends and co-workers have brought this up many times in the past, why would I ever buy used and obsolete hardware when you can find reasonably priced modern hardware on the market?

While this is fine, and I have nothing against it I have a predilection for old hardware that can be put back to effective use for two very specific reasons, one is Linux and the other one is a man by the name of K. Mandla.

Back when I started getting into Linux, some 10 years ago, I was struggling yet was always fascinated by the level of control you had over your operating system, want to install some software? It’s probably in a repository, don’t need a GUI? That’s fine, run it through the command line, and on the command line is where I found myself more intrigued, this all mighty black screen held so much control over everything, an esoteric world in front of me that I could not wait to tamper with, every mistake was a lesson well learned, every success was a thrill, but to learn that you could run video and audio directly from the console was something that completely changed the way I saw computers coming from a purely Windows environment.

When looking for more things to do I hit a blog of someone named K. Mandla and there my love for the console grew but furthermore my appreciation for old hardware and the possibilities of what I could do with it, repurposing it to do very specific tasks, I got into it so much that I went to flea markets and PC stores to pick up old hardware, in most cases I could get it for free because the owners just wanted to get rid of all the trash they had because they could not push it into the market, I was rebuilding old PCs and selling them for 10 or 20 dollars back then, whatever happened to those computers I would not know but at least I managed to rescue them from the garbage dump and gave the opportunity to a lot of people of finally having a computer back when having a smart phone was either having an iPhone or a Blackberry, either option was expensive so a cheap computer, no matter how slow or short lived, was a viable exit.

While I am conscious that also using old hardware may mean higher electrical bills and this is in no way helping the planet or my wallet there is a very important issue with e-waste being dropped on Africa and Asia, the link contains a very informative overview on what is going in Ghana and e-waste literally killing the country: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mleQVO1Vd1I

There is another point aside from repurposing or saving the planet, one way or the other as this is again very debatable, and that is collecting some old hardware that I had worked with, that was very reliable and apparently very long lasting, an example of this being the IBM T60, T61 and T400 laptops I have at home which I continue to use even to this day with Debian as they are more than enough for what I need to do, the T60 and T61 are stored but these I have used for 8 and 7 years respectively and the only reason why I stopped using them was because I could not put 4GB of RAM in them yet I could see some tasks that I could use these laptops for, then there’s the Pentium III Laptop that I use to write and play old videogames, because emulation is fine but sometimes I just doesn’t work and writing without any interruptions can be golden when trying to put every ounce of effort into it.

Also there’s trying out old hardware that I had never worked with in the past such as SCSI drives, this was more of an accident actually as I did not read on the specs of the PowerEdge 1850 on what type of hard drives it used but at the price of 30 dollars with shipping included I could not pass it up and the hard drives, two 136GB and one 73GB, ended up costing 20 dollars with shipping, or DAT Tapes, which I actually worked for some time with but I never got the chance to do it myself and while backing up something on another hard drive or the cloud is fine I could always have a spare backup for emergencies on a tape.

And to add to the inventory I have recently purchased a SunFire v100 and SunFire v120, one of them is IDE and the other one is SCSI so I do not have a problem with getting them to work, they already have RAM and everything on them it’s just a matter of connecting through a DB9 to Ethernet type cable to the console of these servers to get them to boot onto a CD, which I still have plenty laying around surprisingly, and install an operating system so I can fiddle around with them, probably to make a small web server or even a firewall/proxy, we’ll see about that one but this was all because I wanted to play around with these old machines as I’ve read about them and have been intrigued about how good they are.

Now the only problem that I have left is buying a server rack and start building up a room to put the servers and all the retro-hardware that is just piling up.

Saturday, June 9, 2018

Why do I watch playthroughs of videogames?

"Why do you watch a playthrough of a game? Just play the game!" I have heard that plenty of times, here are some of the reasons why I do not play the game that I am watching:

1) Lack of time: This is an oxymoron, I know, but the case here is that I work, do other stuff, I sometimes do not have the time to directly dedicate to a game as much as I would like, the whole nine yards, while it sounds stupid to say that I could have dedicated the 20+ hours watching the game to actually playing the game this takes me to the next point;

2) It's just background noise: Yes, sometimes I am not even watching the thing, I just have it as background noise and from time to time turn to it, while this sounds weird to some people I rather have this as background noise than music (yeah, sue me on that). I only alt-tab or turn to another monitor when I hear some commentary on something that could be potentially important (or stupid, maybe something cringe worthy).

3) Do not have the resources to play it: While I have several computers in the house none of them, well maybe one of them, are built on the last decade (2000-2009) which leaves me out of playing most of the games I could potentially be interested in, I could surely invest on a new machine but I also have to pay rent, utilities, a car, food, etc. So a new computer is at the moment out of the question until I can either find a good enough discount or manage to scrape enough money to build something out of parts I get from flea markets (of which I already have half to build a decent computer).

4) Do not want to mess with emulators or old hardware: Now looking at the other way, I have enough old hardware to mess with and play some really old games straight from the CD or Floppy, even from 5 1/4, but going full retrogaming means I need a CRT (which I actually have stashed and needs to be checked by someone who knows how to fix a CRT because it shorted out) and an old keyboard and trackball mouse (of which I have all), did I mention you need an old PC for the whole experience to be as close as possible to how it was back in the day? Most will not try to figure this out, no matter how cheap the parts could be, and sometimes figuring out an emulator can be a pain to some (and Linux doesn't make this any easier apparently).

5) No demo available for the game, not willing to spend money on something I can't try out: This is probably the main reason I watch most new games on YouTube first before buying them, while I could make a risky decision of paying 50+ dollars for the latest whatever game or 20/30+ for the latest indie game I do not feel this is not a sane choice, this hits harder in a time in which demos are no longer available, developers barely give a hint of the game through their available material, piracy becoming a more viable option before making the final choice, there are so many more reasons that require demos to be back on the table, urgently, so that we as players can either dismiss the game or build a more appropriate hype around the thing that we are looking forward for (perfect example, Alien: Colonial Marines was an obscene kick in the ass to everyone who was looking towards the full experience of reliving those very tense moments only to find this carcass of a game).

6) Kickstarter/Indiegogo campaigns banish into thin air: Not so much as a playthrough but I mostly end up finding out about games that become vaporware from YouTube, testers and the like, sometimes I wonder what could have been of a game had the developers not dropped the issue for whatever reason they decided to do so or not scammed players (remember that game in which you would become an Ant, another perfect example of what happens when you have the wrong people in your team and then get robbed of everything).

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Why I decided to relearn HTML after programming for so many years

Lately I joined the #100daysofCode to pump myself while reading stories from others who are learning new technologies, I jumped the gun and tried out static pages and PyGame but noticed a common mention of freeCodeCamp, being curious about it I jumped the gun and found it’s a website to learn how to code HTML but it does not stop there (more on that later once I go through the whole thing) so I decided to take it and see what it was all about.

To say that I have lived in the past these last years regarding how to code would not put the whole experience on the table, I am shocked to learn how many things HTML5 brought to Web Programming, so much that I noticed that some of the things I kept using from HTML4 are no longer in use while some others changed (for the better, because HTML4 could be weird at times).

This took me back when I started learning about how HTML worked (this was more than 10 years ago) when building a table and making it look right was so complicated in my mind it took me two days to actually figure out what every part of the table did, how to nest them properly and then I would still mess it up (I admit it, I was trying to make some funky stuff with the tables but it worked out in the end, trust me).

When I took some programming jobs early on during my learning days I was baffled by the amount of code that was used back in the day for the front-end, most of the websites I got to see had been built with some type of software which eased the soul of the designer but not the soul of the programmer, I am talking about software like Dreamweaver. Then there was Javascript (and in some weird instances I remember seeing .asp and .vbs somewhere in the code, yes, this was a time of trying to figure out how to make it work and leave it as it was).

At one point a company (not giving out the name) wanted me to make a website which automatically marked some of their items as sold when doing a live presentation for potential customers, this would in turn make people think about making a quick purchase and dumping tons (and I mean tons) of money into something that was worth 20% of the shown price, I am pretty sure some of this stuff continues to happen nowadays and this is why I keep a clean policy when building websites and working with computers belonging to my customers, their privacy is my number one concern but if I see that they are doing something that is completely immoral or against the law I will distance myself from them.

Back onto 2018, what has freeBootCamp taught me about HTML? A lot, it does bring me back to the days when I was learning for the first time but I also see that I now understand most of the logic behind of what I am doing (back then it was hard to grasp something so… esoteric), there is YouTube, GitHub and Stack Overflow in case I do not fully understand it (imagine, back then most of this did not exist, I think none of it did so it was either finding some reference lost in a forum or reading a book!).

To others trying to learn HTML, take this chance and go through the whole tutorial, HTML, CSS, JS, move further and continue pushing through, ask all the questions that come to mind, keep moving forward and when you look back do it with pride because the road ahead can be very long but also very satisfying.

Saturday, June 2, 2018

Why I took the path of Python 10 years ago and continue to walk it

10 years ago I found myself looking for a programming language to learn., I had tried HTML back then and had learned some CSS and JS which I had put to practice, then I tried C, C++, VB6, Java, but all these languages turned out to be too complicated for me to learn easily and without any formal education on the subject I had an issue figuring out most of the things and what to do with all of it, in the end this did not take me anywhere and I dropped the case for a while until I decided to put my heart into one particular language and it all started with a google search:
really simple programming language for beginners
The above returned some obscure languages and web programming but one of the first ten options was Python, I had never heard of it but going through the whole thing made me see they were not joking when referring to a simple programming language, it was easy to learn but could be very powerful when there was purpose and intention behind it, I tried some tutorials but found that while I had learned the basics I still had no real purpose on using it as I was not working in anything related to IT.
One idea that eventually came to mind was to make a text game in Python, my endeavor did not go far but I did learn a lot which in turn would help me a couple of months later when I started working Desktop Support, inside a very large environment I could test some of my theories on how far I could push Python and I did get a lot of stuff done back then by double clicking one of my Python scripts (most of which I still have with me to this day but have little use in the company I currently work with).
It didn't take me long either to figure out Python was a really big thing, so big it was part of Debian (figured this out when I was trying something out and noted I could run Python scripts from the get go) and most if not all Linux distros, the ease of use and power it holds really turn many wheels, what also surprised me and made me understand that I was looking at the right language to learn and practice was finding out that Civilization III and IV have Python in them which moves many of the things in the background.
Recently I decided to retake Python in full strength by figuring out how to use PyGame and make a platformer game, looking around in YouTube I found a very comprehensive tutorial by Tech with Tim which has really put the library into such an easy perspective that I have already figured out how to hack through some of the code he provides and add some stuff. I also noticed that it was important that I already knew Python otherwise I would be a bit lost in the whole deal as he goes by fast to `economize time to provide the most related material on this subject.
Why do this though? A while back, talking to a friend, we decided to work something out in RPG Maker, but the engine is limited, most of those engines are from what we have seen, and we really wanted to do something great but neither of us was intent on learning Unity for this matter (probably too much to learn for such a simple thing, uneducated opinion though). I also remember trying RenPy a while back and may retake the idea of either mixing ideas from visual novels and a platformer/RPG or something else, who knows, this time it is taking more of a solid form than the last times I have tried to do something like this.

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Why I decided to replay the old Fallout series and loved it

Recently Bethesda teased the gamer community with the possibility of a new Fallout game, they simply showed a "Please stand by" image and apparently left it there, still unsure if a confirmation was given or not about what was it but I dismissed the game, I simply don't like the new series and I tried all of the recent ones, it just isn't Fallout and even if heretical to some I think the last true game on the series was Fallout: Tactics.

So for the purpose of proving myself either right or wrong about how good was the series back in the day I took the task of installing the original Fallout and here I found myself in an ordeal I had not dealt with in many years. I spinned a virtual machine for Windows XP SP3 (I got legitimate licenses, leave me alone) and was successful on installing the game there, to my surprise the mouse was going all over the place with the slightest move so this was not the way to go, no matter how much I fixed and tweaked I could not get the thing to do what I wanted.

Next step was to use Wine and here is where I re-learned what a pain it was to setup, Wine is a Windows emulator for Linux, you can install programs and interact with them as you would in Windows, but you’re on Linux, and the thing does not get any less complicated from there. Turns out that every time I want to give Wine a chance it’s always a hassle to setup, installing is simple as the repositories for Debian contain the packages, but doing the whole thing, getting the setup right, making sure everything worked, it was trial and error until I managed to get the thing right and for this I took around some three hours to figure out what I was doing wrong. (Turns out I just had to leave the latest version of Wine as the default for the program to run, silly me eh?)

Once Fallout was installed I found another peculiar issue, I could run it windowed but I could not switch to other windows or things on my desktop while this window was running and I did not want to go through another hassle to figure out why this was the case, the whole reason behind this was that I wanted to record a play-through of the original game and eventually Fallout 2 and Tactics, but I could not even do something as simple as ALT+TAB to press record, eventually I figured that if I ran the thing full screen and setup the right coordinates on the recording program I would get the whole thing and this is how it will work from now on.

After this I finally met this jewel again and I have so many fond memories, everything came back to me (even things that I know I have missed so far), exiting Vault 13, finding Shady Sands, doing the radscorpion quest, figuring out that Vault 15 is a pile of rubble and your quest is going to take you a very long while to figure out and you got less than 140~ days to get to it before everyone dies on the vault, the first armor and new weapon you get (that Mad Max leather suit, because that’s not a jacket that’s the whole thing, and the SMG that has the lamest sound ever, the handgun sounds far more brutal than the poor thing and they do the same damage as far as I recall, unless of course you do burst).

Tweaking my character was also a personal no-brainer, I found that in the world of Fallout, a world that was blown to pieces by a nuclear war many years before you were even born (if memory does not fail me), you can find a ton of ammunition, way too much, so I never really bothered with melee as I could always find the ammo I needed for my weapon, I can’t wait to get the power armor and harden it, the .223 handgun (which is a nod to Blade Runner), fighting some of the weirdest and toughest bosses of the series, getting the random encounters that are very random indeed, finding meatdog (eventually, hope Ian doesn’t kill him as usual or me for that matter).

This is why I know this game is a jewel, it’s been more than fifteen years since I first found the dual-case that contained Fallout 1 and 2 for the bargain price of two dollars at a Wal-Mart, I remember installing them humongous version and my dad being furious at me for filling up the hard drive on the computer (we had a 3GB hard drive back then, imagine that!) but managing to run the game so smooth and fast it didn’t matter, so much I played both games that they skip from time to time and I think they are at the end of their life, so sad as it will be hard to find such a bargain again (unless GOG or Humble Bundle gives them away for super cheap again but I highly doubt it).

With all that being said, give it a try, enjoy it, take the time to learn probably one of the best and easiest systems for a role-playing game (because AD&D sucked in Baldurs Gate although it was an awesome game nevertheless).

Learning Ansible and Vagrant or why I really need to put myself to date

For some time, I have heard Ansible this, Vagrant that, Docker and Kubernetes, Cassandra, and a bunch of other names of applications, services (or micro-services, whatever that is), APIs and whatnot, these are all foreign to me and come surprisingly fast to me in a time when I'm trying to pick up coding again because I want to try my hand again at doing something interesting.
I have learned first that I keep doing things the wrong way as I go through the Ansible from Beginner to Pro by Michael Heap (which by the way needs some revisioning as I find some of the wording confusing as hell) when doing development and provisioning of my environment.
So let me backtrack here and explain what I’m talking about, some years ago I used to work at a company that handled auto parts for the entire country and our plans of expansion were putting a real strain on our current inventory system (something built in Access 2010) so the company needed something different, enter me as a Junior Programmer to figure things out together with my boss, we handled it the best we could but in the end we did not manage to push the project through and parted ways with the company.
From my tenure there I learned a lot about PHP, jQuery and MySQL together with Linux, but I was still lacking in many ways the knowledge I needed to do what the company needed (I was Junior anyway, but you get my drift, you want to eat the entire world). As time has gone by I have kept up with programming through different methods, either building Bash or Python scripts, a small website to keep track of something very specific or some random requirement from a friend.
About a year ago I decided to get back into the whole thing now that I have figured out how to really handle my free time and through the magic of Humble Bundle I have acquired about forty to fifty or so books (of which I have used maybe one or two, I am behind on reading but I’m doing my best to keep up) which lately include Web Development (I mentioned previously this as I was interested in the whole Static Sites thing).
For this whole purpose I wanted a server, a real rack-mounted server, which now sits on my desk (and works as a nice extension of it) that I got for cheap (thanks eBay!). At this point in time the PowerEdge 1850 has been partially upgraded (still waiting for other parts), has the highest version of ESXi it can handle (which is 4.1 update 4) and has been tested out to see how it performs and for the price I spent I can’t complain, it does a very good job and frees my laptop from the hassle of having a test environment on the same machine I use for other stuff. My problem was that I needed to handle the deployment and installation of the machines and I did not want to go through the whole damn hassle of replicating everything item by item, so I went and looked through the books I see the Ansible thing and I think, well, better give it a shot (I know I could try Docker and containers but bear with me as I struggle to figure out most of the stuff I have to get up to date with!).
So far trying Ansible and Vagrant have been as usual a very mixed bag of results, Ansible was easy to install, Vagrant not so much and it was throwing a fit due to the version of VirtualBox I had installed so I had to download everything from the respective websites and install it on my laptop, after figuring that out I got to work on some playbooks and provisioning, when I saw how it worked and what it did I was shocked, I had thought about this same idea a couple of years ago and even thought about how to do it, I knew there had to be an easy way to deploy virtual machines and then push a script or something to install all the stuff it needed before it could get to work, little did I know that such a thing existed in the form of Ansible (not dissing or ignoring Chef or Puppet, Ansible is what I have at hand and that’s what I’ll work with).
My other problem with Ansible is the way playbooks are coded, at first it felt a bit esoteric but once I understood the logic I figured out that it was more of a be very careful of how you write stuff otherwise it won’t work approach than anything else, frustrating at first but once you get the hang of it the thing seems pretty obvious what you have to do and how to do it. Also, there seems to be a considerable number of playbooks available to go through, so I’ll have to give them a check once I am done with this book and get everything setup the way I want it.

Monday, May 28, 2018

The perceived purpose of an open world and gameplay

It sometimes impresses me how far we have come in video games in regards to world building, I always assumed it was a pain and a hassle to build everything from the ground up (I remember seeing some documentary about how Doom was made and was shocked at the amount of paper they had on their desks and how everything looked like back in the day, but I always wanted to know more about it).
As games continue to grow in quality and size so does the tools that help this purpose, some worlds are huge and beautiful, filled with so many things you must spend a considerable number of hours to explore all of it, but is this the right thing to do, do we really need a world so big it takes us forever to look and some random thing in the middle of nowhere?
To mind comes Elite Dangerous, a game where the space in which the player can move is absolutely huge, some new features were added with time but the game (cost rather) never hooked me enough and I tried it with the official stick and thruster which made for an even more realistic experience, I was not hooked because I felt there was nothing to do in the world aside from going around all over the place fulfilling some demand in order to get money and upgrade your ship, sure, the space battles were very good but that was it for me.
Same thing for other games that seem to be trying to share this idea of a procedural generated world that can give the player an immersive experience, No Mans' Sky was a huge example of this and so was Sea of Thieves, sure you have these massive worlds or lands to explore but for what purpose if what you find in them is one of the following scenarios:
  • Generic mob or scenario which becomes repetitive way too fast, there is a pattern to find here and it soon shows that there is little inspiration behind it
  • Empty scenario with some “great landscape”, sure it’s cool to see some cool eye candy from time to time but if you are paying 50/60+ USD for the game you better get more than some nice background, some commentary by the characters, a random event (I keep thinking about those very odd events you would get in Fallout and Fallout 2), something to fill up that void you suddenly feel when reaching that point
  • Unfinished idea/area which was to be worked before/during/after release and never got pushed past an idea, sure, sometimes you can make something out of whatever was lacking and build a nice placeholder (which may never go away) but at least it’s not so obvious to the eye
  • It so happens that time or resources run out to finish all these great ideas that could have been an awesome game, therefore keeping the scope of development into a realistic arena is the best way to finish the product and then keep building over it (just like Paradox Interactive does with Europa Universalis 4 or Crusaders Kings II, just look at all the DLCs available for each game!).
  • On the above, a DLC can be a great way to bring something that was too far on the original development cycle to the player at a “reasonable” cost, but a DLC is in no way compensating for whatever is lacking from what was originally planned, if the game was sold as having a specific feature and then it’s being sold to the player because of X/Y reason this is just bad, plain and simple, there are hundreds of examples available nowadays regarding this situation.
Also to add another very valid point here, you don’t need to have the best graphics or eye candy for your game to work, just look at Mount and Blade, it still supported DirectX 7 when it came out and was nothing too impressive graphically but the gameplay was incredible, same thing for Hotline Miami, it was not the greatest thing to look at but once you got hooked you were set and done, I have dropped countless hours on Hotline Miami 1 and 2 to get better times, Banished was a game that while not very fascinating graphics wise had a very challenging gameplay with some interesting procedural generation, not always the map was the fairest but if you knew how to squeeze every inch you could make it work (specially in the smallest mountain scenario that could earn you an achievement if you survived more than 20 years), Depraved, a city building game during the Old West, is a game I would have never expected to see and I really want to play the game even in its crude alpha state because it's something I never thought would look so interesting, Factorio is another game that is very weird, I discovered it by accident while watching Arumba in one of his playthroughs and became fascinated by the game, soon after I got friends hooked up and we were doing LAN parties (yes, we still do these in 2018) in which four or five of us will work our way through some very hard scenarios, but both of my personal favorites and challenges (which one of my friends was so shocked to see that he called me an absolute nerd when he is already one of the biggest nerds I know) Dwarf Fortress (no mods, no nothing, just the pure raw game as it is) and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.
Figure this out, the last two games I mentioned have no real graphics but letters which symbolize something (that something you may need to “examine” to figure out what it is) while in other instances it is a bit obvious what it is, there’s a lot of reading, some very hard learning curves that will see you die almost immediately for the first twenty times and then, then you will figure something out, then you will get to understand the mad world surrounding you, when you can make those very first steps without reading a guide you know you’re done for, you have gone too far down the rabbit hole.

Sunday, May 27, 2018

Figuring out Node.JS with Debian, a never ending journey

Many years ago I decided to switch over to Linux as my personal OS, in particular because I did not feel like buying a computer every so often and also because I did not have the money to upgrade to a considerably new machine (nowadays I still don't have the spare money to do that but from time to time I find parts that I either use to upgrade what I have or store them to build something better).
I played around with many Linux Distros (ranging from Fedora and Ubuntu to Debian and Mandriva) but ended up landing on Debian 5, to my luck Debian 6 was released a few days after I switched over to Linux and I could finally get some of the issues out of the way for some basic stuff that I needed back then (namely Dropbox), from there on I have worked with Linux at home for what would now be 7 years but I had played with the idea of working around with Linux since 2004 during which I found it quite complicated (I believe it was Mandrake that I was trying back then and eventually Slackware but neither seemed compelling to me).
From time to time I keep finding the odd Linux error which has a solution somewhere on the internet, in other instances I am confused and must work on compiling something to make either an old package work or some obscure program run on my machine.
Another thing I have learned during my tenure with Linux has been web programming (PHP and MySQL) and some scripting with Python mostly but also some Bash, these have helped me a lot on previous jobs and I have come to notice that knowing these I could put them into more practical use than whatever my work is requiring of me, such as getting a small website up and running to have presence on the internet aside from the blogs and YouTube account I currently handle, by chance I found some Web Programming books on Humble Bundle and a book caught my attention immediately, Working with Static Sites by Raymond Camden and Brian Rinaldi. If memory does not fail me static sites are a thing of the past, but I was very intrigued on trying this out and I have not been disappointed so far as my curiosity with Node.JS, ReactJS and other modern languages continues to intrigue and elude me (as I do not currently hold a position which requires me coding all the time I am not up to date with much of the things web related).
I found a problem when starting some of the tests, I decided to install Node directly from a repository and when updating or installing new packages through npm it would not work, intrigued as to why I would need sudo all the time I started looking around and found that this was an issue in how npm was handling everything and that nvm was the solution for my problem.
After downloading the latest version of nvm and easily installing it I proceeded to update npm to the latest version (npm install -g npm <-- This intrigues me, the fact that there is no command to directly update npm amuses me), finally installed harp (which was throwing a fit about a bunch of stuff not working and node-sass not installing because using sudo would break it and not using sudo would tell me there was an error during the process).
After I had done this I noticed it would not work, intrigued I checked one of my virtual machines, repeated the latest steps and got it to work without an issue, went back to my machine and remembered that I had installed through a repository so I removed it manually from the sources.list file and removed the package, with this I could finally get harp to work and show me the initial website from the default template.

Saturday, May 26, 2018

The clash of reality and gaming, the never ending controversy

A common issue that has been debated for years and will probably continue to be debated for many more is the thin line that separates our reality and what video games present to us, the issue has been brought up many times during the 90s and 2000s, to this day it is still something that hits the news every once in a while but not as frequent as those years. The controversy brought us the ESRB in the United States and other methods of rating to prevent younger audiences from experience a reality they are not ready to handle (although this is debatable, thinking back I can see Americas Army and other games as a good recruitment tool).

One of the earliest memories I have about the controversy would be Doom itself, an ultra-violent game which was corrupting a generation, it was the existence of Doom what brought the ESRB to existence in the first place yet it was not the first of its kind, Wolfenstein 3D was there before Doom and was around the same level of nasty than Doom, the difference was that in one you were fighting Nazis after being captured during World War II (or infiltrated the stronghold, at this point I can't really remember and I'm not googling that) and Hitler in the end (who melts into a gelatinous blob after you kill him) and in the other one you are fighting all kinds of demons straight from Hell in order to stop an invasion on a giant multi-corporate military base on one of the moons of Mars.

If we read in between the lines there is a triggering effect due to a religious involvement more than Americans doing the right thing and killing Nazis (thinking about this, metal was struck continuously by people who believed they were the tool of the devil and so was Dungeons and Dragons, these people really need to find something better to do with their free time than trying to use these as scapegoats of their boring life).

While one of the biggest controversies surrounding video games could be related to Doom and the Columbine High School Massacre and the incident in Brazil when a man went into a movie theater and started shooting people a la Duke Nukem (I remember both from back in the day in the news) other causes could be found as to why things were happening, even today the Columbine incident continues to be studied and new points of view brought into this matter, video games do not necessarily make people break, it can help them in their fantasies and even put some of their behavior to rest inside isolated halls of madness, but can a video game really turn someone into a murdered, a serial killer or something even worst?

I can think of the whole controversy surrounding Grand Theft Auto, back in the day it was so frequent to see Jack Thompson fuming about the series and other video games that there was a rumor going around (maybe it was confirmed, I can't find the note) that Rockstar had paid Thompson to keep making an issue about the thing for even bigger promotion of the series, even bad publicity can turn out to be good publicity. Did it win anything to Jack Thompson? Not sure, maybe there was a satisfaction of making an issue about the whole thing but it surely did not affect the video games he put pressure on. Which makes me wonder, why didn't he raise an issue with the video game Hatred?

Hatred on its own became highly polemic, it was a video game that got a ton of hype (again from bad publicity) about controlling a person who was going on a genocidal rampage to destroy the world (which I think you can somehow achieve), there were mentions of national socialism, racism, that there was a hidden agenda with the developer team, in the end Valve did not flinch on saying they would not remove the game because they were all in with freedom of speech, this was a controversial move as Gabe Newell had previously removed other video games/mods on Steam for maybe similar reasons (again, this depends on perspective).

What happened in the end? Not much apparently, Hatred came out, the game was not what it had been made to be and the whole issue died considerably fast, the game still stands in the Steam store for a discount price (because after the initial craze for the game I can imagine sales would not get any higher than that).

All in all, gaming will be surrounded in controversy for many reasons like the ones mentioned above or the issue in China where gaming is being treated nowadays as an addiction and people are being sent to rehab camps so they can stop playing until they die, not sure about the numbers but world wide there have been plenty of cases which have happened for several reasons, there is a reason why there is a warning about not moving for more than a specific amount of time, to stop playing so long and to start moving, this is for the players safety and not just because it has to be added to the game/console warnings.

Friday, May 25, 2018

Overhyping and other things that can kill video games


Making something look greater than it is seems to be a common human thing, we want it to be greater than what it looks like, the video game industry has gone through some very interesting PR disasters but making X, Y, Z video game look like the greatest ever (it may well be a great video game) but in the long run there is something either moving into the wrong direction or simply not working as it was promoted, this goes beyond Kickstarter Campaigns that got funded and the final item was not delivered or if it was the product is not to par (Mighty No. 9), this is about video games being killed through bad publishing just because the company wants to make a profit on it, video games can look crude and have a great story/mechanics (and possibly vice versa or mix and match any way you can imagine) that will make it work out (Hotline Miami) to the point a fanatical player base will come out of it, probably the most dangerous type of fan base available, with a fanatical player base comes the risk of high expectations and a potential disaster when what they want is not delivered. We are also not including into this matter the toxicity of a player base (thinking about the Battlefield and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare X franchises but not being reserved only to FPS).

The problem with delivering something that is not what the players want is not always related to the developers, in most cases it has nothing to do with them, there is money involved, there are people with little to no understanding on the matter that wish to capitalize, there are sales, PR, investors, management, people outside of the direct development cycle that can make some really bad decisions as there is a speculation on what is potentially “best for players” or “this is what they really want”. This line of thought can kill a games, franchises and companies.

Spore was a highly hyped game that ended up not living to expectations, it was something alright but not what we had been sold on; Fable was a game that through word of mouth I got to try out and people overexaggerated the whole thing (but thinking about it this is also the fault of Peter Molineux who is known for doing this more often than not); SimCity (the last one to come out through Maxis) pretty much crashed and burned since day one with players being unable to join the game (some time later between a couple of friends we tried the game and found it so lacking that we dropped the case in maybe a month or two at the most); Star Wars Battlefront 2 died because of micro-transactions, period, greed will not get you far when you make it too obvious; Age of Conan did not accomplish what it was set to do (kill World of Warcraft); John Romero was going to make us his bitch with Daikatana and look where that went, good night sweet prince; Duke Nukem Forever took fifteen years to finally show up in a time where it was no longer relevant after going through so many hands and losing total focus on whatever it should have delivered.

Thursday, May 24, 2018

Are games entertainment, technology or art?


This is derived from a work we read in class once about History, is History Art or Science? While this is highly debatable, and we never truly reached an agreement on what exactly History in the 21st century is it inspired me to write about the current state of video games, what are they, entertainment and a time drainer, a great experiment on pushing and testing technology to the breaking point (and there are plenty of examples here) or is it art, a new field in which we can express ourselves without limit?

Games as Entertainment for Generations:
It is true that games are entertainment but they can be informative and educational while keeping us hooked, the earliest memory I have of such a game would be Super Solvers Math Adventure in which I had to learn how to do proper math in order to progress through the game, truth be told I learned and enjoyed the game, Oregon Trail is another good example but I only found it later during my adult life and I can understand why those who played have fond memories of it (also why the dysentery part). On the other hand we can find games that will suck us in for days, weeks or months, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D and Commander Keen where some of the earliest examples I can think of which I would play at computer lab back in 1994, our professor was a hell of a cool guy to have those games installed but on the other hand putting us through such an experience during 2nd grade really made an impact on me, even today when I play the original Doom or Doom II back I still feel anxious when opening doors or going through dark areas, this effect has lasted for more than 24 years!

I could keep dropping names here, everything from the original NES, SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, PlayStation, XBOX and PC throughout the 90s and 2000s, some I am not as fond of and I could care less about such as most Nintendo games, my nostalgia has not driven me back that hard so that I want to play those games, I would probably enjoy them no doubt as Nintendo had some quality stuff back in the day but not enough to drive me back to either find the console and the original games or get an emulator to play them again. Entertainment, in my opinion, is something that sucks your time, gives you fond memories, makes you return for more and even years later you find yourself sitting back on your favorite chair and giving it a try, even passing it on to future generations,

Games as the Technology pusher:
Some games have really pushed technology to evolve rapidly to keep up with demand, hardware can hardly cope with the ever-growing needs of software, while this could be blamed on bad programming practices or bloated code this can also be blamed on ambition to provide a better product (and this is valid). Notable examples that come to mind would be Doom III (the specs back in the day shocked us, the video and RAM requirements demanded a monster of a machine which if curiosity strikes the mind was a single core Pentium 4 1.5GHz processor, between 256 to 512MB of RAM and a video card with 64MB of RAM). The next big jump came in the form of Crysis, even today it's still a joke between gamers to say, "but can it run Crysis?" to which most modern systems should say yes, yes I can run it, but, back in the day the question on everyone's head was "who has 2GB of RAM on their machine, a dual-core? Wow, you need a video card with 512MB of RAM, what?". These specs required you not only to upgrade your hardware but, in most cases, it was also demanding that you upgraded your operating system (when Crysis era the migration to Windows Vista had started after having Windows XP in the wild for some 6 or 7 years, this was a weird time thinking about it). Personally, I have never changed computers to play games of the current generation, I wait a couple of years to get some cheap hardware and pump it up as high as I can to get the most out of it, be it desktop or laptop, as I don't feel the need to change computers or upgrade every year, better do it every three to five years.

Games as a method of expression and possibly the ultimate type of Art:
Video games have pushed technology so that they can push something new (or at least that's what I would like to think) to us, better storytelling, quality cutscenes, from linear to multiple endings/options (which have shown great results such as Chrono Trigger and horrendous backlash such as Mass Effect 3), presenting worlds that at one point could have only been shown in a table-top environment (Dungeons and Dragons or Shadowrun), but reality also tells us that great visuals and music that brings us deep down into this world through the avatar designated by the developers will not always result in a great experience, throwing more money at it does not always fix the issue, sometimes it's a matter of taste, a strong player base and reaching expectations (which is not always the case, you can't satisfy everyone but checking the opinion/commentary of your player base through social media could, potentially, maybe, save your product from falling through the cracks and end up unnoticed).

Video games have been part of my life since my very early years, for whatever reason my dad had an Atari with a printer, I remember this because I at one point remember bringing some type of homework or piece to school when I was in elementary, this was way back in 1993 probably. 

Installing OSSEC 3.7.0 on Debian 11 (Bullseye) How-To

Now that version 3.7.0 has been released I took another deep dive into how this is compiled from Source, as usual I brought this onto me bec...