Using TorqueX and Windows Forms

I’ve frequently wanted to take advantage of the richer UI capabilities of .NET WinForms while developing with TorqueX, to be able to quickly create a UI for setting in-game parameters for things like Sky, Terrain, etc, etc. Nothing beats being able to quickly iterate through several settings in-game in order to view their effects, without having to edit/compile/run each time.

I had assumed that because ‘official’ WinForms support didn’t make it into XNA 2.0, and previous methods I’ve used to embed XNA applications in a WinForm were cumbersome and fragile, that I wouldn’t be able to easily do this with TorqueX.

Turns out I was wrong:

It was as easy as could be, and took less than five minutes to get running by following these directions on CodeProject.

As you can see from the above snapshot, it works great, and I’ve yet to notice any real problems other than the fact that other WinForms controls in the application with focus can react to arrow keys. That’s easily solved, though, so I’m quite pleased so far and wanted to share

Ashley Todd – The worst of the worst Part II

I simply haven’t got the words to describe this.  From yesterday’s Associated Press:

A campaign volunteer for John McCain told police she was robbed at knifepoint at an ATM and knocked down by a man who then carved a “B” in her face after noticing a sticker for the presidential candidate on her car.

Police said the woman, 20-year-old Ashley Todd of College Station, Texas, refused medical attention. An officer saw the injury, but the police report did not describe its size or severity, a police spokeswoman said.

Todd reported the attack late Wednesday. She was to be re-interviewed by investigators late Thursday.

Sounds horrible, right?  I would never wish such a thing on anyone.  Thing is, it’s pure weapons-grade bullshit.

Today’s follow-up story from KDKA:

Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.  Authorities, however, declined to release the results of that test.

Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and “the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction.”

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.

I do hope that she does end up facing charges, and that said charges are stiff, but I also feel enough anger to want to participate in the public ‘name and shame’ for this woman’s deplorable actions.

The very worst America has to offer

A bunch of ignorant racists at a McCain rally in Bethlehem, PA on October 8, 2008.

McCain – "When all you have is attack ads"

McCain originally went to great lengths to convince people that he was going to run “an honorable campaign”, because “that’s what the American people want.”

Now that there’s every indication that he’s going to lose (and rightfully so) due at least in part to his (and his campaign’s) seemingly never-ending series of lies, he’s decided to spend the remaining advertising budget on a newly-invigorated smear campaign.

Which makes this video all the more amusing:

Albertsons.com – Took my money, ‘lost’ my order

A few years ago, I discovered that Albertsons had entered into the home grocery delivery business, and took orders online. Perfect for a super-busy and super-geeky guy like me who truly hates shopping, right?

Not just Albertsons, either; Safeway also does home-delivery, and at the time a few others did too, like HomeGrocer.com and a few others that are long since out of business.

So, I’ve been relatively spoiled until now. Sure, there were a few problems here and there, a few items not delivered or of lower quality than I would choose were I to do my shopping in person, or a substitution made that I would never have approved of, but overall it was just so convenient to order online that I’d always emphatically recommend it to friends and family.

But quite frankly it’s been going downhill a LOT lately. Safeway kept delivering moldy bread, so I switched to Albertsons exclusively, despite the fact that the Albertsons is excruciating to use – I’m a web dev in RL, so I hate that website all the more knowing that almost any team I’ve worked with in the last decade could do better.

But today just takes the cake (haha, see what I did there? I’m so funny. Okay, maybe not).

After waiting 5 hours longer than the delivery window I selected, I phoned the Albertsons customer support number, where I was gruffly told that they’d lost thousands of customer orders today and was just “one of many” with this complaint.

I guess I believe them, since I went to the site to gather information to file a formal complaint, and this is what I was presented with:

What happened is, apparently, that I made my order, received the confirmation email, had my MasterCard charged, and… Didn’t get my order because it was “Lost”. Customer service tells me that my card “will not be charged”, even though I’m looking at the statement right this minute on my other window and I can see that it has been charged.

Whether my debit card provider is waiting for the charge to be “finalized”, or it already has been, is at this point in time not simply not relevant to me. The money (nearly $700 dollars) is not available to me, meaning that I cannot feed my family until the issue is resolved. I’m told it can take 7-10 business days to get my money back, so as you might imagine I’m pretty FUCKING PISSED OFF!!!

Yes, I do understand that bad things happen on the technical side that can’t reasonably be anticipated, but that doesn’t justify the extremely poor customer service I received while trying to resolve this issue, nor does it explain the resolution process Albertsons employs (wait until the money is refunded, then resubmit your order via the “Shop my Past Purchases” page).

This is unacceptable, and is the final straw. Not only will I never shop with Albertsons online, but fortunately for me there are 6 major grocers in the nearby area that are as close or closer than the local Albertsons physical location, so I can safely say that they have lost me as a customer for all time, and it’s not in any way inconvenient to me to express my displeasure with them by going to the competition.

/rant off

Technorati Tags: albertsons.com,fail,online grocery,home grocery delivery,issues,technical problems,customer review

Philip Rosedale stepping down as LL CEO

Note: this entry was originally posted on Daikon Forge.

I’ve been so busy this morning chasing down every bit of info on programming a Go game (inspired by Colin’s Goban announcement) that I only now am discovering perhaps the biggest SL news item of the week : Philip Rosedale is stepping down as Linden Lab’s CEO:

As to title, I will become chairman of the board. I will be 100% involved and fulltime at Linden Lab. Second Life is my life’s work, and I am not going anywhere! I will focus on product strategy and vision, continuing to design the right kind of company, and being an effective communicator and evangelist about Second Life. As a community member, you will probably see more of me in-world.

In fact, I’ve been so oblivious that it’s already been covered three times by Reuters, as well as being mentioned by Nobody Fugazi, Massively, Dusan Writer, and practically every other Second Life related blog that I subscribe to (and several that I don’t).

One very interesting comment by Benjamin Duranske of Virtually Blind (as quoted by Reuters) :

“It is standard procedure when a company is eyeing public funding to move from “visionary” management to someone with a strong day-to-day background. I would not be surprised to see an IPO in a few months.”

I’m not sure how I feel about that idea yet. On one hand, I’d certainly buy Second Life stock, as I’ve always felt that Second Life has a great deal of (as yet unrealized) potential, and will only get better and more successful over time.

On the other hand, I’m reminded of the many recent blog posts I’ve seen regarding building a startup, and in particular this comment by Cory Ondrejka (formerly of Linden Labs) :

Rule #0: Have a Vision Driving Both Product and Company

Know what you are trying to do and why it’s worth doing. Make sure the user experience flows from this vision. Duh.

But, remember Conway’s Law.

Your organization’s structure and culture will be reflected in your products. More than that, how your company operates will shape the possibility space for products you can create, will determine what you can create. So it is critical that Conway be extended. Vision must drive organizational structures capable of realizing the vision.

With Cory now gone, and Philip no longer being CEO, I have to wonder a little at how the company’s vision is going to change. It’s a near certainty that if there is in fact an IPO, the vision will change dramatically. While that may be for the best, and may in fact result in a better platform for content creators, I have some doubts that all will be rosy.

I’ve been through the process of building up a startup company based on a vision, and have seen what happens when that vision was completely and spectacularly destroyed once the “money people” got involved. That singular shift in priorities (money was always a priority before that, just not the #1 priority) caused the very quick and utterly complete destruction of that company.

Of course, I am generalizing from a single experience, but everyone does that. At least, I do. (Apologies to Steven Brust).

Especially chilling (though very well-put) is this comment by Robert Bloomfield:

“Linden Lab’s unique business vision allows them to break plenty of rules, but they can’t ignore the basic economic forces governing corporate growth and ultimately access to capital markets. The search for a successor is going to lead to some real soul-searching about two key trade-offs in Linden Lab’s strategy. First is the tradeoff between stability of the software platform and feature-heavy construction that allows creators with tremendous freedom. Second is the tradeoff between catering to individual residents who want a new world full of fantastic possibilities for their personal lives, and enterprises who see virtual worlds (but perhaps not Second Life) as the future of electronic commerce and the virtual office. Without a tremendous influx of capital that would allow them to become all things to all people, Linden Lab’s new management will need to make some big decisions on which way to turn.”

I wonder what those tradeoffs will be, and how they will affect us “little guy” businesses in Second Life.

Weapons

Below is the list of all C:SI weapons currently listed on SL Exchange, the premier Second Life-integrated commerce website. You can purchase these items via the SL Exchange website using either Linden Dollars or in real-world currency via PayPal.

If you wish to purchase a C:SI weapon for a friend, SL Exchange provides the easiest method of purchase for gifts, and automatically delivers the items to the appropriate person.

Click on any of the pictures below to be redirected to the product listing for that weapon.

Daikon Forge

ArchaTek

Ashes

Musashi

Gary Gygax – Rest In Peace

Note: this entry is a cross-post.

Dungeons & Dragons co-creator Gary Gygax passed from our world yesterday, and while initially I had no intention of posting about it, I find that it keeps coming into my mind repeatedly.  I am saddened by this news, more than I would ever have thought, and I am not at all sure I understand why.

I never met Gary Gygax, I don’t know much about him as a person, and rarely (if ever) have I spent any time thinking about him, yet Dungeons & Dragons has had a profound impact on my life.  Maybe that’s it.

When I was a child, my family moved a lot.  As anyone who has grown up in a military family knows, this makes it insanely hard to form lasting friendships or a sense of stability.  By the time I had reached my early teens, I had lived in so many places that I cannot recall them all.  It is such a blur to me that I cannot, in fact, even remember my early childhood.  All that I can recall is a sense of frustration and the feeling that we always had to “start over again”.

At one point, however, we moved to the state where I now reside, and I have (mostly) remained here since.  When I was newly come into this area, I remember sitting on my porch watching some of the neighbor kids play.  They were having a great time playing some sort of “army” game, and I was far too shy to introduce myself, and making new friends was a very difficult thing for me to do.  I was so painfully shy, in fact, that I got my toy rifle from the toybox and just sat on the porch pretending to shoot the neighbor kids as if I was playing with them – only from three houses down.

One of them eventually noticed me, and much to my surprise he stood up and walked straight over with a very big grin on his face.  He introduced himself and asked if he could see my gun.  We started talking, and it turned out that he was extremely likeable and friendly, and even invited me to come over to his house in the mornings before school to play some games on his Commodore 64.  I was ecstatic.

Turns out that this fellow had many friends in the area, more than I had ever imagined any one person could ever have, and among the things that they liked to do was to play Dungeons & Dragons (surprise!).

They introduced me to the game, and while at first I thought it was kind of silly, it turned out that my new friend was a masterful storyteller with an amazing flair for really pulling people into the game.  Suddenly I had a whole bunch of friends and something fun to do with them, and we spent countless nights over the years bonding over what I originally thought was a “silly little pretend game”.

That period of my life was the brightest and happiest I can recall, and while I no longer play D&D, I still call some of those friends my brothers.  We’ve all moved apart by now, and only communicate long distance and get together a few times a year at most, but never could I imagine a better bunch of guys, and I love them dearly.

God, how I miss sitting hunched over a character sheet in my friend’s basement with a map in front of me and a Crown Royal bag full of dice and books everywhere, sipping on a giant Mountain Dew and chattering excitedly about whatever epic adventure we were on that night.  It truly was the very best time of my life.

Rest in peace, Gary Gygax.  And thank you so very much.

Why do people cheat?

Note: this entry has moved.

That’s a question I’m sure I’ll never understand the answer to, but it’s also one that comes to my mind frequently.

Specifically, I don’t understand why people attempt to cheat at C:SI combat. There have been quite a number of people who’ve done so, and most of the time it’s the most naive, blatantly obvious, pitiful kind of cheating that just makes me shake my head in disgust.

Take, for instance, this guy I was fighting several months ago in Samurai Edo. He had on an attachment that, when he pressed an attack key, would just hammer me with invisible physical spheres. Of course, he wasn’t even sly enough to make these prims silent, so my first clue was the massive collision noises I heard every time he slashed. Secondly, the collision of these prims with an avatar creates a pretty noticeable impact effect, and only someone relatively new to Second Life would fail to notice. I could quite clearly see them in View Transparent mode, so I asked him what the heck he was doing it for (since it simply would never work), and… He denied having any such device. I mean, seriously, that’s an insult to anyone’s intelligence.

Recently, Shindo mentioned to me that he’d seen someone that was using another extremely obvious cheat that allowed him to remain blocking at all times. Um, like nobody is going to notice that, right? Esprite mentioned a similar cheater to me the other day, but I’m not sure whether it’s the same person or someone else.

There have been countless other examples, but the point is that I can’t understand the confusion of thinking and absence of character that drives people to do this stuff.

So, what gets done about it? Well, here’s what I think is likely to happen to someone that is caught cheating at C:SI, though every situation is different :

• Their win/loss record could get permanently wiped, depending on the severity of the cheat. This might take some of the motivation away from cheating, though I don’t understand the cheater’s mindset enough to know for sure if that’s actually effective. This is extremely rare, but we do reserve the right to do so.
• Banning from C:SI regions, both official and otherwise. Again, this depends on the cheat as well as the region. The criteria is likely different for me banning someone from Samurai Edo, for instance, than someone else banning them from Meiji. Every region administrator has their own tolerance for cheaters, but it’s not at all uncommon to see the ban-stick come out no matter where the cheating happens. By and large, the C:SI community is made up of honorable and skillful warriors with utter disdain for and little tolerance of cheaters.
• Abuse Report : This is uncommon, but I have personally met people who claim to be using Second Life exploits on C:SI scripts and objects in order to cheat (or worse). In every case I’ve doubted that the person was telling the truth, but as they say, “tell it to the judge”. Linden Labs has the capability to verify or disprove that claim, and I believe that it is appropriate to report them.
• Public “name and shame”. If someone is caught cheating, it’s likely that the people that catch them are going to tell others they know, with the likely result that the person will no longer be welcome in many places, and will have a hard time finding good sparring partners. This probably wouldn’t bother many noob-farmers, but that’s a subject for a different day.

Okay, sorry for the long and pointless rant, I just get really irked when I see this kind of stuff. I know so many people that are dedicated, work hard, and train regularly, and I respect them for it. Cheaters, on the other hand, are just slime, and I felt like griping about it this morning

Technorati Tags: Second Life,Combat: Samurai Island

Testing Tools : Duel Data Monitor

Note: this entry is Cross-Posted.

I’ve mentioned many times on this blog that I’m a huge fan of the idea of gathering usage statistics, and I do my best to display them in a way that makes sense for others.

I recently read an article on Coding Horror that reinforced my belief that gathering actual “real-world” usage statistics is invaluable. To attempt to boil it down to what’s relevant for this blog, Jeff Atwood describes important lessons learned by Valve’s gathering of hardware and gameplay metrics to discover things about their users and their game that likely could not have been gathered or understood in any other way.

Take, for instance, this (unattributed) quote from Valve about the use of Steam to collect information about Team Fortress II:

We’ve traditionally relied on things like written feedback from players to help decide which improvements to focus on. More recently, Steam has allowed us to collect more information than was previously possible. TF2 includes a reporting mechanism which tells us details about how people are playing the game. We’re sharing the data we collect because we think people will find it interesting, and because we expect to spot emergent problems earlier, and ultimately build better products and experiences as a result.

While less relevant to my point here, even last September GameProducer.net had an article on Steam’s statistics and how some surprises and quite useful information could be found there.

While Second Life doesn’t really provide any clean way to gather those kinds of statistics, and C:SI doesn’t really require quite that level of detail, I still believe that gathering some data is not only good for the system as a whole but could be very interesting for the community members.