I just finished BC2. I have to say, it’s single player was a lot longer and is a lot prettier than Modern Warfare… maybe not as exciting though. What took me 4′ish hours on MW2 took me around 12 with BC2. I did take a short break to be disappointed with it’s multiplayer, and of course to shower.

BC2 is beautiful. More so than MW2 even. The level of detail and colors are amazing.

The plot is pretty good, and stays interesting enough. It was nice to play out a whole story that didn’t leave you with all sorts of crazy subplots and loose ends as MW2 did. I wasn’t real impressed with the AI, but I think this only bothered me because I saw a guy firing in the wrong direction. It’s worth mentioning that stabbing in BC2 isn’t as enjoyable.

BC2 doesn’t really have a finished feel to it. It tries to give you tips during the load screen, but they black out, and you don’t have enough time to read them. I’m not sure how a bug like that gets out the door. There were a few other annoyances, but most of them are unnoticeable.

There’s a decent variety of weapons.

So, here’s the deal… If you’re looking for a good single player FPS, buy BC2. It’s long enough, and overall pretty well done. If you’re looking to frag kids online, MW2 is a must. You can completely ignore MW2’s single player shortcomings by playing online.

Let me know what you think (And give me a caption for that GIMP’ed together image I made ;)

UPDATE

I had planned on trading BC2 in yesterday, but decided I would give it another try [online]. I fired it up when I got home, and wasn’t able to connect to a single game. There was a notice to check twitter for updates, but the last thing mentioned was 10 hours prior saying everything should be back to normal within 90 minutes.

We’ll see. I’ll give it another shot tonight. Of course, Brendan hasn’t experienced any of these problems… maybe it’s just me.

Assuming you have a MySQL Master/Slave setup, and replication, this is pretty easy to accomplish.

The documentation is a bit lacking, so it took me longer than it probably should have. Once I did get it working, I realized I was pointing the reads to the write server, and vise versa. That created a bit of a mess.

To get this done, grab the two files from here

Drop db.php into your wp-content directory (Not in the plugins folder), and db-settings.php into your WP root (where wp-config.php lives).

Add ‘require(‘db-settings.php’);’ to wp-config.php near the top. At this point, WP will stop working until you’ve configured db-settings.php

Around line 32 of db-settings.php, there’s this bit “Next line populates ‘global’ dataset from wp-config.php for instant compatibility. Remove it when you put your settings here.” This didn’t seem to work. I commented it out right away.

Below is what makes the magic happen, leave it commented out, I had best luck rewriting

/*
add_db_server( 'misc', 0, 'lax', 1, 1, 'misc.db.example.com:3722', 'misc.db.example.lan:3722', 'wp-misc', 'miscuser', 'miscpassword');
add_db_server('global', 0, 'nyc', 1, 1,'global.mysql.example.com:3509','global.mysql.example.lan:3509','global-db','globaluser','globalpassword');
*/


Below is what worked for me. I found leaving things blank wasn’t a good idea.


//dataset, partition, datacenter, R, W, internet host:port, internal network host:port, database, user, password

//write db server
add_db_server('global', 0, 'lan', 0, 1,'192.168.1.12:3306','192.168.1.12:3306','dbname','dbuser','passwd');


That’s all there is to it. Once the file is saved, you’ll be spreading the load. I haven’t found a decent way to benchmark performance of this setup yet.

We went to Keystone Homebrew to get the ingredients for a Stout recipe he found on the tubes. The store was pretty overwhelming… I learned that brewing can be as complex as you can make it. I was really glad to see that most of the equipment you can buy, can easily be made for a fraction of the cost. DIY just adds to fun I’m sure. I’d like to build an Immersion Chiller, just because. These things sell for $50-$125 easily. All they are is some copper and a couple of fittings. I bet I could build one for $20 or less.

Brendan’s methods are pretty straight forward, and not complex at all. There was a lot of ‘ok, now we wait X minutes, then do Y’. It was fun though. Something I’m ready to do again for sure.

I might be more excited to make beer with zombie labels on them than the brewing process.

More on this topic in the future, I’m sure.

Brendan’s toolbox sporting Free Spirit.

More stickers are on the way, I’ll post details when they arrive.

I tried to figure out how to remove it, but It’s not obvious… If who ever added me to it, I kindly ask that it be removed.

Unless, of course, you all enjoy reading about video games and other random crap I post about now and then.

That said, I took a break from making my Mendel print. It was just something I needed to do. All that’s left really to finish is the extruder. I plan on working on it more this week, so naturally, I’ll keep you all posted.

“On Friday we held our Darwinia+ launch party at BAFTA in London, and it was awesome. It was one of the first stage talks i’ve actually looked forward to giving – we had a great audience including lots of friends, we said goodbye to Darwinia publicly once and for all, and the time was right to unveil Subversion in more detail than we’ve ever done before. Despite being a long way off a finished and polished game, we showed Subversion being played live on stage. The whole event was a cathartic experience for us – very deliberately moving on from the previous game to the next.

So what exactly is Subversion? We’ve been evading this core question for a long time, mostly out of fear that we’ll end up promising things that we can’t deliver. Up until now we’ve preferred to keep the core gameplay pretty secret, and just blog around the process of making a new game from scratch.

For a very long time we’ve been working on procedurally generating cities – that much we’ve been open about. We eventually hit the point where we couldn’t generate the insides of buildings in any further meaningful detail – because we didn’t know what we were aiming for. You can’t really write an algorithm to generate (say) a Bank, if you don’t first study what a bank looks like, and understand why a bank is that way. We’d been generating Subversion "Top-Down" – starting with 10Km of empty space, filling it with a city, going further and further into details, but never getting that close to the core gameplay.

So around September last year Myself, Gary and Leander held a meeting, and decided to turn the whole thing on its head. Instead of "Top Down" we’d work "Bottom up" – start with an actual location with people and equipment in it, simulate those things, let the player interact with them. Work on core gameplay mechanics, rather than world building. This give us probably the biggest leap forwards in the project so far, and in just five months led directly to the mission I demonstrated at our BAFTA launch event.

Subversion is going to be set in a modern High Tech environment, with you taking "mission control" over a team of skilled operatives in a hostile High Security building. You will be using Sabotage, Social Engineering and Grifting, custom Electrical and Mechanical devices, Distractions, Hacking, Stealth, Acrobatics, Precision demolitions, Trickery, whatever gets the job done. In the best case scenarios your enemies will never know you were even there. When things go wrong, a well prepared escape plan and well timed precision violence will get you out of a tight spot – or maybe not.

Anyone who’s a fan of Introversion will know we love our movies, and many of our games are inspired by some truly great ones. Subversion’s key movie influences would be high tech Heist movies like Oceans 11, Mission Impossible (the TV series – another old favourite from childhood to sit alongside Wargames and Tron as massively influential on us), Entrapment, Sneakers. You may also see a lot of Uplink in this game – which is no accident, as we’ve always considered Subversion to be the "Spiritual Sequel" to our debut game.

The combination of your guys physically on site using their own special skills and equipment, mixed with you taking control of building systems via computer hacking, opening locked doors, disabling cameras, exploiting weaknesses in security systems, is something of a holy grail of game design for us.

The demo I showed on stage during BATFA showed how a team of two agents could infiltrate a high security office. They used a variety of gadgets like wall scanners and motion trackers to gradually unveil the office layout, which begins invisible and requires various Recon tactics until you have revealed the layout. One of the agents was caught and tazered by a security guard, but not before I’d hacked in and taken control of the cctv cameras dotted around the office. This massively expands your view of the location, and uncovered the primary target – a secure server room with some data we needed to destroy.

Visually i’ve always been drawn to the schematic style of graphics, with crisp vector lines and moody blue tones. What you see in these screenshots is far from finished – we’ve lots of plans for the look, but broadly speaking you are going to be looking at 3d blueprints. The visual brief has always been quite simple – what would Uplink look like if it was set in real building rather than inside a computer? The people are the biggest challenge, one which we haven’t nailed yet – the Pacmen in these shots are definitely placeholder material.

We are also aware that we are not alone thematically anymore. Unlike Defcon and Darwinia and Uplink which largely stood thematically on their own, there are other games that have similar core themes of espionage and infiltration – from big commercial offerings like Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid, through currently in-development projects like Frozen Synapse and the recently revealed Monaco. We’re watching those games closely, and we’re fairly sure they’re watching us too – but each of those named games is actually very different in several core ways to our plans, and we’ve long since stopped second-guessing ourselves just because someone else has a similar idea. The central theme is so exciting – so awesome in potential, and so universally understood, that it’s no suprise to us that other games are treading in similar directions. As Introversion, we obviously believe we are uniquely placed to make a game of this type truly incredible.”

I’ll be adding this one to my collection.

Over thousands of generations the peaceful Darwinians have been evolving in a beautiful digital world, but now their whole way of life is under threat from a devastating computer virus that has infected their world and decimated their numbers. Without your protection they don’t stand a chance and it’s up to you to lead them into battle to recapture their lost world! Once you’ve proven your command ability, take your Darwinian army online and challenge your friends to strategic combat, as tribes of Darwinians slaughter one another in a desperate struggle for supremecy.

I really like the way they did the controls with the Xbox. They’re almost better than on the PC. My only complaint with this port is the graphics and audio aren’t as high quality as they are on the PC, and only in 720p. Not sure why… it’s a gorgeous  game on any platform. That aside, it’s been more than a lot of fun saving the Darwinians a second time around. It’s also worth noting that you can unlock Avatar Awards.

Introversion also just unveiled Subversion, which I cannot wait to play.

I didn’t place, as expected, but I wasn’t last! Brendan tied for 2nd, and ended up with 3rd after the tiebreaker round. 1st place went home with a new Wireless controller, 2nd and 3rd left with 1600 MS Points. Not to mention all the free RebBull we could drink. Pretty awesome for a free event.

@mikeyil took some really good photos (above), it was nice to not be behind the camera for once. Check out the full set on Flickr

I did pretty well for having beer in me!

Last last few moves before the Martian winter will be to get Spirit’s solar panels at better angle, hopefully, so Spirit will have enough power to keep it’s electronics operable, and continue to collect data from the rut it’s stuck in.

It’s been six years. I wont be surprised if we are still talking about Spirit, still, six years from now.

I will still slap this image on everything I can… If any of you have photos of a Free Spirit sticker in the wild, I would really, really like to see them, and post them here.

If you don’t have any, let me know (fynflood @ tentacle5.com) and I’ll see what I can do. If there’s enough interest I’ll see about getting more.

xkcd… Spirit isn’t emo. You comic sucks.

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