Monthly Archives: December 2008

Buying a 1.5TB Hard Drive

Posted by Jacob Santos on December 31, 2008 5 comments

I’m going to go for it. I’m going to spend $130 on a 1.5TB hard drive. I’m also going to use it to install Windows. Create an partition on it around 150 GB for Windows and another for other files. I think the problem will be eventually that I’ll have to reinstall Windows Vista and lose all my installed applications. However, I might have to activate Windows again and hopefully I’m not at the limit where I have to call Microsoft. It might be better to keep it as it is and just repartition the drive it is on now and add the remaining 20 GB to the existing primary hard drive.

The goal was to always buy a new hard drive to replace the current ones. The current ones are fairly old and I’m afraid they might die any moment now. I should have a slot open for plugging the new hard drive in, but it will require that I move vast qualities of the other hard drives to make room. It will also be cool to get rid of several hard drives.

So basically, with 1.5TB after formatting, I should still have around 1.2TB and 1.4TB. I’ll be able to move all of my existing hard drives over to it and then recycle them. I think I will install Vista on it after all. It will allow me to rid myself of all of the extra hard drives that are nearing their end of life. Also with one hard drive, the system won’t be as cramped and the air flow should be improved. Also I have one hard drive right up on a memory module and I’m afraid that the wires are damaging the memory module.

So with the new hard drive, I’m going to have three parititions.

  1. 160 GB – OS and Programs
  2. 120 GB – Documents and Development and Misc
  3. 1000-1220 GB – Videos and existing files (eventually, I’m going to have the PVR recorded on here).

I don’t like the idea of losing my music, so it would be nice to back it up to a DVD, but DVDs only last so long, and I’ll probably forget to create another one. I think also that the backup of my iTunes music and other files should last along with the new hard drive until I can build the File Server.

The good news is that I’m expecting that the total space on that will be 6 TB to 9 TB. That should be well enough space to last for upwards to 5 to 10 years. Well, the awesome news is that I won’t need to mirror the hard drives either, because I can allow Windows to manage the files for me. Depending on the total capacity, I might go for mirroring just to be sure that I have redundancy in place for my files.

It will be difficult to buy a hard drive less than 500 to 750 GB in the future. Or at least, it would make a really good PC with a lot of capacity for cheap. I still need to revisit what it would cost, if I built my gaming PC and File Server today.

I’ll most likely be buying the hard drive next week, because I’ll be moving soon, and if I don’t send off for it next week, I’ll probably won’t receive it in time. It might be a good idea to hold off for another month because the new place is going to require a deposit and I’m just basically hoping to get the deposit from my current apartment. I should, but I also don’t know what the deposit is going to be at the new place. I also have to pay a lot of bills next week, so if I have the $130 dollars next week, then I’m going for it, if I don’t, then I’ll be buying it in February.

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Mecha Asylum Design Document

Posted by Jacob Santos on December 30, 2008 Comments Off

The current game is a little convoluted and broken, which means it is unplayable until I rewrite it. I’m going to focus on a minimal feature set for the next version to get the game playable and improve the quality of the features. By keeping a small feature set, I can know ahead what features I should complete and how long each feature will take. Also I’ll know when I’m finished with the project.

This time I’m not going to open the game until I’m completely finished and the game works after testing and acceptance test cases are completed. In order to improve the quality, a lot more testing is going to be done for this game and all of the games I make in the future. It will take longer, but focusing on improving the quality before players bring it up should improve the reputation of the games.

Story

The main setting and story line will change. The game will take place on an alien planet, the soldiers from different fractions crash landed and need to rebuild their fleet to get home. The other fractions aren’t going to make it easy for the others. The players will need to regroup, rebuild, and fight off the enemy to escape the planet and head back home.

Focus Points

The focus points will be territory, soldiers, research, and buildings. These will be tied together and balanced, so that the meek aren’t completely overrun by the strong. There will also be time limits and the success condition will happen over several months.

I want the game to last long enough to where new players that joined late can learn the game, group with people and appreciate the game long enough to where when the next game comes along they can just jump in and start as soon as possible. They might not win, but they’ll have the opportunity soon. I also don’t want the game to be over soon enough to where none of the players had enough time to accomplish the objectives and enjoy the game.

Territory

Research items used to escape the planet will appear at different locations. Only when the fraction has captured the research item can the item eventually be used to escape. This will mean that a grid based system will need to be used in order to coordinate where the research items and what land the fractions hold.

LandThe Grid structure of the game will limit the amount of land the players will be able to fight over and hopefully should limit the amount of players are in the game. I believe I’m going to have a main grid that covers the planet, sort of like latitude and longitude. Then sub grid coordinates with those and so on. The containers will be big enough to hold the player and a number of buildings.

This will mean that one piece of land is actually an square acre or larger depending on the amount of buildings I finally allow. Actually, I think I’m going to do it in sq. miles and sq. kilometers.

This should allow for quick access to where players are currently and I won’t actually have to populate the entire planet with coordinates. By calculating the distance, I can figure out how long it will take for one player to attack another. At the most, since the database table could grow to be very large, or at least the coordinate table with many rows. It won’t take that much space since the most the table will have is numeric values with one of those pointing to the player which holds that piece of territory.

There will also be mining to harvest precious materials in order to pay for mecha suits, buildings, and research. The amount of mines will only be preset for the initial land of each player. Captured land will be randomly generated and will remain until the game cycle is complete.

When the land is destroyed only the buildings on that land will be destroyed or captured.

Soldiers

The mecha suits from the previous game will be used in this game as well. The mecha suits will gain attributes that will be able to be extended, so that balancing can happen quickly. Since there are only going to be five mecha types, the base attributes might be hard coded with the modifiers held in the database.

The mecha suits will be built from buildings, and require men that will also grow depending on the amount of food, research, and housing. Housing is another type of building that can be constructed.

The different suits have different capabilities that allow for different maneuvering, strengths and weaknesses. Some of the land types will not be able to bring down the flying types, no land to air missiles. The strength and weakness ratio will be dealt with the Rock-Paper-Scissors usage. This will improve the balance and prevent one player from building one type to rule all. That said, there is still one type that is all powerful, but will be extremely expensive.

The attributes will be about four or five to start out, but I can envision that future versions having more. The difficulty is that the more attributes the harder it is to balance the game. I don’t think more than 10 will ever be used, but that will decide upon later and depending on the game play.

There will also be a mechanical device that will spy, thief, and capture land/buildings. This device, called a probe, will not have any attack capabilities, but will have other purpose during the game to help find the main research items.

Research

Research will be very important and I will build a tree much like the grid idea. The Research will have dependencies, amount of time to complete, and materials. I’ll create the tree after the component is completed and think of what will go into the tree after it is complete.

The feature seems to be easy to create, but it will be difficult and time consuming thinking of all of the research items.

Buildings

There will be different types of buildings for different purposes. The list below has them all:

  1. Housing

    Used for the amount of men will be available. Housing will be needed and when these are destroyed, then the available mecha suits can not be used beyond the amount of men available. Will also double as food suppliers, because there won’t be a food building type.

  2. Mecha Manufacturing

    Builds the mecha suits. I’m undecided, if one building will build one mecha suit, or if the building can be queued to build all suits for one type at at time. I’m going with the former, but the latter will allow for greater flexibility.

  3. Research

    These types of buildings will be required for research, there will be different research buildings. There will also be one main building for improving the research speed and level.

There will not be much macro-managing with the buildings, so besides the research buildings, there won’t be many buildings to develop items.

New Player Protection

The game will employ “New Player Protection” to keep stronger players from attacking new players. This will be based on the strength of the player and as long as the player doesn’t attack anyone else. This should allow for new players to grow and learn the game without being harassed by other stronger players.

When the player has graduated from this status, there will be ranges for attacking. This is only in the event that the game reaches enough players that each range has enough players within it. I’m going to try to develop the ranges to where it is dynamic and allows for recalculating the ranges based on growth and the amount of players.

Game Cycles

The game cycles will continue until all of the research items are collected and a single fraction has collected all of the pieces needed. The research items will not exist all at the start of the game. I want to allow the game to continue for at least two or three months before all of the needed items are available.

There will be more than one research item available of the most basic items, which will be available at the start of the game. Other ones will become increasingly rare as the game goes on. The first couple of cycles will probably require that the research items be “dropped” near the territories of the players, so that they can be found within the five or six month hard limit, where the game will automatically recycle whether or not anyone “won.”

Collecting all of the research items is the win condition and required of the players to track the components down. This will force players to try to collect as much territory as possible.

Possible Modules

Modules are game components, which can hopefully be used on other games. If developed correctly, these modules below can be used in future and past projects. They will be developed separated and updated on all of the games, since they aren’t tied to any single game code.

The games will be developed around modular components to reuse as much code as possible. Each game will have separate components that won’t or can’t be used elsewhere, but as much code as possible will be transferred to the Quantum Game Library as possible.

There will be the code that will exist in QGL and the plugin code for the game engine that will use the QGL code. The code that isn’t dependent on a database will be committed to QGL and the code that does rely on the database will not be part of the QGL.

  1. Territory Grid
  2. New Player Protection
  3. Research Tree

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1TB Hard Drive Under 100 USD

Posted by Jacob Santos on December 28, 2008 Comments Off

Seems kind of like a dream, a dream come true that there would be a 1TB hard drive for under 100 USD. At the very least, I’m thinking my file server is going to have close to about 6 to 7 TBs of storage, easily. It also allows me to buy a motherboard with less SATA slots, as I won’t need them to have a lot of storage.

The nice part is that Windows Home Server already has RAID capabilities in it, so I won’t need to have a motherboard with RAID 5. I do think that by the time I pay off enough of my debt to afford it, Windows Home Server 2 or one that uses the Windows 2008 code base will be available. Well, actually, Windows 7 Server might be out by then too, so I’ll have to see what the personal server edition has.

I’m looking at 2010 or 2011 before I’ll be able to afford to build another machine and I plan on it being a file server. I figure that I won’t need to upgrade it as often, since all it will be doing is storing and serving files. I won’t actually be using it day to day, so unless a hard drive fails on it, I probably won’t notice it.

It does slightly change my direction on my current machines. It will soon become almost impossible to find a hard drive that doesn’t have a lot of space. That is good I think or it will be good in the case of a PVR. I will have to assess the whole developer machine and gaming machine. It might be better to just use a quality laptop, but I also want to build a PVR or two, and file server.

Technology is constantly improving, so the media servers that are okay today, should be kick ass in another year or two. So waiting isn’t such a bad thing. I do however have to hold off until my debt is manageable again.

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Heroes Has Destructive Time Travel?

Posted by Jacob Santos on December 26, 2008 Comments Off

There are many different theories on how paradoxes are prevented when you time travel and do something that you shouldn’t. I’ll go into two, because they are easier to explain and talk about and it appears that fantasy and sci-fi usually falls into one or the other, even if they don’t specifically mention it. These only apply when you go back in time and change something. If you just observe, then these rules don’t apply.

  1. A new time line is created in which the original time line exists along with the new one, usually side by side. So if you went back to the future after changing the past, you would go to the future of the new timeline and the original would be locked from you. There are several exceptions, but if this was real, then they would be impractical in reality.
  2. The old time line is destroyed and the new one is only time line that exist from that point on.

There are some television shows, movies, and books, where traveling back is not possible. So you can either go in the past or the future but not both. Usually, when this is in affect, you can only go into the past, since the future is undetermined and therefore there is no set point of reference to send the traveler to. It is kind of strange in which case, if you could travel the future, then that means that whatever was meant to happen would happen regardless of whether or not you went to the future.

I think that is the premise of this article about Heroes, the TV show appears to use #2. However, given the circumstances I could be wrong. It is unlikely that the original time lines exist after the past or present is changed. That said, recently, there is evidence of present events affecting the past, like when Hiro rips up the formula after going to the past.

Best way to do this is to set up a timeline.

Season 1

Original Timeline

  1. Sylar kills the cheerleader and becomes invincible.
  2. Explosion goes off in New York, killing almost everyone.

For number two, the candidates can be Sylar, the original guy with the powers, or Peter, which is who ends up doing it at the end of the season. Most likely, the way the events were going, it would had been the original guy, if Sylar hadn’t killed him or Sylar if he had. Sylar was already looking for him and with healing powers, it wouldn’t have killed him to go all out and explode.

What happens is that they save the cheerleader, thus Sylar doesn’t become invincible, but they ultimately save the light, which is the source of power. Therefore by saving the cheerleader, it starts a string of events which ultimately again leads to world destruction in Season 3.

That said, even if Sylar killed the cheerleader, if you go off the events in Season 3, then it still wouldn’t have killed her. It might have looked like she was dead, but Sylar himself said he couldn’t kill her.

Changed Timeline

  1. Peter saves cheerleader, preventing Sylar from gaining the cheerleaders power.
  2. Peter causes the explosion, but Nathan flies him off over the ocean preventing the explosion from destroying New York.

However, in knowing that the cheerleader was in trouble and trying to save her, Peter met a lot more heroes with powers that he could absorb and gain. Therefore, it couldn’t have been Peter that went off in the original timeline, because he wouldn’t have been involved. That said, there is no way he couldn’t have been involved, since the seers would had told him. This sort of creates a paradox, because the future that they’ve seen was never destined to be or it was one probably future that occurs on failure.

Therefore, I would have to be wrong, in order for them to foresee the future that would not be, there would have to of been several paths for which the future could go. A success condition and a failure one. The precedent for what future they would go is set in the present. If everything continued without any involvement from the characters, then the future they will go to will be the condition that they had left off. So the future that is possible has not happened, but could happen unless events were set in motion to prevent that future from happening.

Kind of makes you wonder what would then happen to the lady that Peter sent to the future and left her there. If he changed the future, then that future would not have happened, so when that timeline is destroyed, then she would be destroyed or is it so that he trapped her in a timeline for which he can no longer go back to. She is either no longer in existence or in an existence in a future that no longer will be in the current timeline. It is enough to make ones head hurt, which is why I think some fans are no overjoy with this whole time travel thing.

It would also explain why the characters in the future are trying so hard to find the pattern for which they can successfully change. However, they only know of their timeline and not of the other timeline, so if they make a change they have no idea what would come of it. They also couldn’t, because they’ll never have all of the facts or be at all of the places they need to be to solve the problem.

To ultimately solve their problem, they would have to spend their lifetime redoing every major change until they’ve found the right one and then stepping forward to the next event and finding the correct path for that. However, they have missing pieces. Peter doesn’t know what Hiro knows or what Sylar knows, Peter’s mom would be helpful also. The problem of course, is while Hiro and Peter might ultimately work together, it appears that their pride and what seems like conflicts in the future separate them. Something happens to both of them to where they become darker and change their personalities.

It might also be that the writers are introducing inconsistencies and paradoxes without knowing or planning well enough. A time travel show has to be done well and that is ultimately what Heroes is becoming. A time travel show. The element of time travel in a show can easily resolve past wrongs, but the key is that it can be easily done. The writers have made it to where the characters with the power to time travel do not do so often and without facing the consequences.

It is difficult to understand that in Season 3, Hiro witnessed his death from his friend’s hand with the power to throw lightning bolts. However, in a separate timeline to save Hiro, his friend instead had the power to enhance the ability of his friend. For that to happen, that timeline would of had to of had the cheerleader be captured by the thugs. It did not change the fact that the cheerleader still seeks to kill Peter. Her reasons must then be another event in the future that causes her to reject Peter. It also doesn’t make much sense because the main characters in that group die or unaccounted for. At the end of Season 3, the future that Peter was in, must still come to pass. The present cheerleader then becomes part of the company that seeks to kill Peter.

For the rest of Season 3, it appears that the focus will be the timeline that leads the government to hunt down humans with super powers. Sort of like the company, but they won’t make the distinction between the “good” guys and the bad guys, they will just round up everyone.

I think it would get really old if they kept revisiting the same events all of the time. I look forward to the next arc and whatever new information can be given of this new timeline.

I also think that you can’t really say, that if they went back and killed Sylar, that it would prevent everything, because it wouldn’t prevent Peter’s dad from doing his deeds. So you would have to kill both Sylar, and Peter’s dad and make sure they were really dead. The problem is that without the Heroes being properly motivated, it is unknown what will happen or what other event will result in the inaction on the part of the Heroes. There is also the dilemma with killing someone just, because their future has them doing terrible things. If properly controlled, Sylar wouldn’t have become a killer and I think that is what the show is alluding to. You don’t really need to kill Sylar, just help him control his impulses.

It is difficult to figure out for sure whether or not Heroes destroys the alternative time lines or if they exist beside the current one. I hope someone has the answer or they reveal it on the TV show. I suppose if Peter does go back into the future and save his girl that he left there, that would mean that alternative time lines do exist.

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