Roguelike revival

I played my first roguelike JAMoria on a Mac Classic II somewhere around 1993. It's a classic black and white ASCII game where you run around with a @ using the numpad on the keyboard. In JAMoria you start in a small city, just like the classic Moria. But instead of just having one dungeon, it has multiple dungeons to descend into, both in the town and in the wilderness that surrounds it.

Like all roguelikes, if you died you had to start over again and create a completely new character to play with. Already being familiar with regular table top role playing games, rolling new stats and trying out new race and class combinations was a major part of the fun.

In early 1996, using a blazingly fast 28.8 baud modem I managed to download ADOM 8.1 and install it on my first non Macintosh pc, a Pentium 75Mhz. At first I found the game really hard, and all new characters died after just a few minutes, but I kept trying. After some newsgroup searching I found help in rec.games.roguelike.misc, and later rec.games.roguelike.adom. And I've been playing ADOM ever since. It's a very very difficult game to "win", but just trying to is fun enough. Not much has happened to ADOM since version 1.1.1 in 2002, and by that time the development of all the other rougelikes I knew had gone into maintenance mode or ceased completely.

Adom: Terinyo

One reason might be that graphical games were making it impossible to compete. One of my favourites, Dungeon Hack, was early and most roguelike of them all. The much more popular Diablo came later and was not turn based, even if the game mechanics was kind of the same. Of course people tried making graphical front ends to the classic roguelikes with varying success. Falcon's Eye was probably the most known. A fork of that project called Vulture's is still under development and it's a game I have yet to try. (The demo video looks good though!)

To get back to the title of this post; It feel there is a huge revival going on in the roguelike scene. There's new blogs, columns, news pages and games showing up everywhere and older newsgroups and pages like RogueBasin seem to have a surge in activity and popularity. Even the ADOM homepage has gotten a face lift with a new blog about Thomas Biskups new roguelike JADE, and a brand new forum.

I guess that the main reason people enjoy making roguelikes is that the games are full of tricky algorithms like dungeon generation, field of vision, monster AI and more, but still small enough for a single developer to make by themselves. The main reason is of course that there's no graphics and no sound (well, DoomRL has sound), so all the programming effort and processing power can be spent on actual game play instead of bells and whistles. If you know what to do, creating a new game from scratch can be pretty quick. 7 Day Roguelike competitions seems to be more and more popular.

Some are more ambitious than others. The crazy guys behind Dwarf Fortress have quit their jobs to work full time on their ASCII dwarf game simulator. It's not really a classic roguelike, but the features are impressive. Julian Mensch has been working on his Incursion since 1999 and the planned release is in 2011!

All in all, it's a genre of games worth trying, and I guess it's a nice way to learn a new language trying to implement a 7DRL in it. (My attempt in J2ME was never completed though. Take a look at Dweller instead.)

Also, I wonder what's the best way to control a roguelike when you only have a touchscreen. Would be nice to have one for the OpenMoko phone.

Schwartz and gllin

For some reason Andrzej "balrog-kun" Zaborowski is still missing from PlanetOpenMoko, so I'll just link to some of his recent posts instead.

Andrzej have written an ELF-loader called Schwartz that can translate OABI to EABI and his latest post shows how to use it with gllin instead of a chroot.

Very impressive! I haven't tried it myself yet, but I definitely will soon.

Memory and learning

I've been thinking a lot about learning and memory lately and there's been no shortage of interesting articles to read or videos to watch.

Over at wondr.net Jamin has started his Memory Month. He posts a new article every day, teaching you useful tricks for remembering everything from shopping lists and numbers to names of people you've just met. These methods will probably work great, but I'm to lazy to really sit down and do it since there's so many other things distracting me right now.

I don't believe in the old myth that humans only use 10% of the brain, but I do believe that there's a lot about the brain we don't understand at all yet, and maybe we never will. At Google Video they have some very interesting documentaries regarding the brain, for instance this documentary from Channel 5 in 2005 about Daniel Tammet or this one about Kim Peek. These savants have enormous counting skills huge memory capacities, but the brain power comes at a price. From mild autistic tendencies like Asperger's to completely anti-social autistic behavior.

It's been noted that these types of disorders are getting more and more common, especially in academic families and it's even been called The Geek Syndrome by Wired. The latest studies says that something between 3 and 20 genes are involved in causing these disorders. Incidentally this also seems to affect maths and science skills in a positive way. Abnormalities in the cerebellum, the "little brain" responsible for motor control and filtering sensory input and passing it on to the right part of the brain, is common in autistic persons. Kim Peek for instance, has a damaged cerebellum and no corpus callosum, the connection between the two halves of the brain, at all.

The brain is a pattern matching machine and it seems to me like it's automatically filtering the continuous flow of information washing over us, but if it's not filtered enough the person might be classified as slightly autistic. If the brain filters too much, parts of it just doesn't get used enough and will dwindle away. Of course this is an overly simple way of looking at it, but I'm certain it's a part of the puzzle.

I'm also convinced that the brain is a lot more flexible than people used to believe, even in grown ups. New born babies have twice the number of nerve cells they need, but the ones that aren't used just dies off. Usually this happens in two periods, first at a young age, then again around puberty. But the brain is not "frozen" after that at all. A recent study on mice shows that the nerve cells move around and stretch "in a highly dynamic fashion".

It's never too late to learn something new, but I think it's harder to really focus on learning just one thing when you're grown up compared to when you're still a kid. There's just too many things to think about and too many distractions, and so much interesting to learn.

Wish I didn't have to sleep so much, but a completely unscientific experiment on myself made me notice that when I sleep less then 6 hours per night, my memory isn't as good as it usually is. Things just don't stick. Also, I've noticed that I remember things I read in the evening better than the things I read in the morning. I imagine that my brain is working through the input from the day while sleeping, trying to keep only the seemingly important memories.

It's getting late, I'll go read a book.

Update: Great article about memory in National Geographic

Good programmers and getting things done

Now I'm back from vacation and have been catching up on my blog feeds. I'm sharing all the posts and articles I feel are truly interesting in my Google Reader feed (and page), but the following two deserves a special mention:

Jeff Atwood's "Yes, But What Have You *Done*?" makes me want to "Do it f***ing now"!

The blog post at RevSys called "A Guide to Hiring Programmers: The High Cost of Low Quality" talks about expert programmers and really makes me want to be one.

Both touch on the subject of getting things done and being able to show some finished work. I feel like I'm doing too little at too many places, only touching the surface of the projects and communities I'm involved in and spending too much time reading and talking. Guess it's time to start getting things done!

P.S If anyone cares, I've given in and can now be found on the infamous Facebook.

Geotagging

GPS tagging photos on Flickr has been done for a long time, but I had not seen it on regular blogs yet. Why not? You could do a lot of fun with that! At least I hadn't heard any noise about it so I thought it hadn't really taken off. But of course some clever people had started working on this long ago and things are well on the way.

The first thoughts around this I got from reading an article on O'Reilly radar about Google supporting GeoRSS. That led me to the GeoRSS homepage which links straight to geotagthings.com. In geotagthings (still in beta) you can subscribe to a feed that's an aggregation of many geotagged feeds that are limited to be within a certain area of your choice. I think it would be really fun to see what other bloggers in the block are saying and what pictures they are posting.

Then of course there's the question of how to easily add geotags to all blog posts. It should of course happen automatically if possible, but good support for adding it manually should be built into all blogging software. There should be the possibility to save some default locations where you do most posts from and a row with free editing, just to enter latitude and longitude.

There's a newly started GNOME project called GeoClue, which is about making a DBus service for geographic information. They have a great list on the homepage with suggestions of how this information could be used and I really hope this to takes off. The more this is integrated into the desktop the better.

One of many cool things mentioned on the GeoClue page is Placeopedia. Placeopedia is an effort to connect Wikipedia articles with the location they are talking about. This is exactly what I want to have in my Neo1973 when I'm out traveling somewhere. "Is there something interesting around here?" - One look on the map and I can click and read the article about it.

Of course some clever minds at Google have also been looking at this stuff. There's been some rumors that maybe Google was making a phone, but of course they were not going build any hardware. The proof for this is this patent for quicker search results when using a mobile device was dug up by Mad4MobilePhones. It shows that Google was, as usually, looking for a way to get better and faster search results. Jacqui Cheng at Ars Technica took a closer look on this new mobile search and really liked it. The last piece of the puzzle is how to add the positioning automatically. (Google's mobile search currently needs you to enter your current Zip code to tell where you are.)

GPS receivers are getting built into more and more things and now we have to make it possible to get the geographic information to all programs that can make use of it.

Google Analytics

Just did a test and added Google Analytics to the template for the blog main page. It's supposed to show some information in about 24 hours. Would be fun to see if it shows any other views than my own.

Google Reader

Google Reader is just too easy to use. Hours disappear browsing through all interesting news and blog feeds. The key shortcuts works great, it's easy to star or share links and all embedded media just works.

The only difficulty is to sort the flow of news and just get the best most interesting things. To avoid information that you don't really need. I'm guessing this problem will just continue to grow just as quickly as the flow of detailed information does.

If someone missed the flash movie called Epic 2014, released in November 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson you owe it to yourself to watch it. These guys were way ahead of their time doing this. Impressive!

Blogs

I read quite a few blogs and I think it's clear that all good ones have a theme. For a blog to be interesting to more than your closest friends and family, it has to be either insanely funny and well written, or it has to be focused around a specific subject.

A great example of someone who does both is Steve Yegge. He has a witty and entertaining style, and his posts usually have something to do with programming languages. It's a blog every programmer should read.

Same goes for Kathy Sierras posts on Creating Passionate Users is also an absolute must to read. She is also great at using informative diagrams and nice pictures. That's generally something most blogs are missing. Humans like pictures.

Another thing with blogs is how often people post. Steve Yegge used to post rarely, maybe one post per month, but instead it would be a huge 15 page post. Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed is an example of the opposite. His posts are usually brief, but it can be as many as 20 posts per day. Point is though, they both stick to a few selected topics and don't waste time writing about things that aren't interesting.

There are many more blogs I should mention, but I'll link to them in posts on topics that concern them instead of just dumping a link here. Or, maybe that's what I should do?