Lord of Ultima

Lord of Ultima is a free on-line real time strategy (RTS) game produced by Electronic Arts.  It's remotely related to the Ultima RPG series which EA had produced through its sister company Origin back in the day but really only shares the logo and some references to places in the Ultima RPG universe.

By going through a quick sign-up and email confirmation  your are thrown into a quick and dirty tutorial to the resource management game most RTS's are known for.  You are given a kingdom fenced in by two enclosing walls and a governing building which provides basic resource production and storage facilities.  Your domain is randomly located on a vast world map also shared by other real players in various stages of their own domain's development.

As mentioned before the game is about resource management and resource development.  There are 4 raw materials you must manage: wood, stone, iron, and wheat.  Each resource has a use in the propagation of your kingdom.  Wood serves as a basic building material and fuel and is pretty much required in every development you do in the game.  Stone is merely a building resource for buildings and walls.  Iron is required for more advanced buildings but is mainly required for weaponry used by your armies.  Wheat is required to feed your armies and determine the size of the armies you can safely support.

When you start your "town hall" provides you a basic production of wood.  To progress from this state of noobness you will have to build more buildings that will enhance the productivity of your kingdom.  Some buildings process one of the main game resources from its surroundings.  The player can enhance the production of these buildings if they build them close to certain geographical entities that respectively represent the raw resources.  Other buildings increase your city's storage facilities so that surpluses aren't loss into the void.  Eventually the buildings you will want to build are the ones that produce armies which you can send to pillage and plunder randomly generated dungeons or other player owned cities.  Of course not all the building plans are available when you start and can only be unlocked by upgrading your town hall which usually comes at a high cost of resources.

The game as previously mentioned is on-line so you will have to deal with other players who may pose as an ally, or as a trading partner, or as a raiding enemy.  Players can make formal friendships called alliances which adds more direct lines of communication between players.  Alliances usually also means that any player moving in on your territories will have to deal with you and your friends.  Alternatively, once you build market places you can generate gold which then can be traded for resources from neighbouring kingdoms with surplus on the market.

EA offers regular play for free but of course they have other means of making money.  A shop of virtual goodies to enhance your kingdoms is available.  To purchase such enhancements you will have to trade cold hard credit for their virtual currency, diamonds.  With diamonds in hand you can either purchase artifacts that can be used to instantly replenish resources, speed up production, or enhance the probability of success that one of your armies will come back with returns and minimal losses.  Players can also buy 'advisors' who will look after your kingdom while you are indisposed of IRL.

I don't normally go out of my way to play RTS's but I will confess to an hour or so every night of Lord of Ultima for the past week.  You can check it out yourself at www.lordofultima.com, but be prepared to be somewhat distracted for a couple of upcoming nights.

Modx: Evolution

I have seen this CMS on the market for a couple of years now and was intrigued with its methods of providing users with a CMS that allowed people to designate different templates on different pages.  With previous CMS I have used most packages come with predefined sections designated where certain functionalities have to be accessed.  It can be quite frustrating when your clients want to be different than at least your other clients.

I have undertaken a new web project recently and decided to finally choose Modx as a back end platform.  Granted that I myself had to do a 10 part tutorial to understand what Modx has to offer and don't expect my clients to follow suite to manage their site.  Fortunately to simply add content I can break it down to my client in a 1 hour session.  As for designing web sites with a PHP backend Modx is a complete solution for developers looking for solutions for clients who want to do a periodical website with varying layouts.  Since Modx allows users to designate a template for a page that he is posting I can implement a selection of layouts for my client and allow my client to choose which lay out is appropriate for the particular content he wants to post.

Theme management is only the tip of the iceberg.  Modx is also into reusing code.  Users can create and store reused portions of HTML and PHP and easily designate an appropriate placeholder for them to be called from a template.  Modx furthers its flexibility by allowing designers to designate template specific variables so their clients can fill out fields when posting content to specify a parameter for a template.

Modx is also expandable.  The Modx support site posts a large selection of extension and plugins to add reusable code to implement everything from breadcrumb menus to gallery management to captcha form protecting.  People can find everything they need to get started from their site at http://modxcms.com/ .  They have a growing community with all kinds of helpful tutorials that can be found through their forums.  Oh, and yes, it is free.

Rotting Apples

Apple has just recently released it's new IOS 4.0 for their i-phone line to coincide the release of the new i-phone.  With all I have been hearing on the whole bumper fiasco and how the new IOS releases are slowing down the performance of the older i-phones I have been thinking on and off on whether I should support Apple as a company.

I have a few Apple devices myself.  I still maintain that the Macbook White has been the best computer I have ever owned.  As for my i-pod touch, I have no complaints on its capabilities as a personal media player though I find myself thinking about jail breaking it to expand upon its use beyond that.  I have used my i-touch to check email and browse some social web sites and I have tried using it as a personal note taker and event planner but the virtual keyboard has made interacting with it in this function not as convenient as it should be.  I find myself entering data on my laptop and using the i-touch to review items of reference. 

The Apple devices I own are overall quality devices and should be since I have spent quite a bit of money to own them.  I find it, however, quite disturbing when I hear that these devices have planned obsolescence in their design.  Apparently after 2-3 year of use Apple expects me to toss a perfectly functioning device over for their new line of devices with minimal improvement in enhancing my experience.

When I bought these devices I had no problems investing money in a quality product but some how this is all moot when the device is suppose to be outdated in a couple of years.  When I spend $500+ on a gadget I expect it to use it for a little more than 2-3 years.  Doing less in my opinion would be no different than the mentality which started the trend of disposable consumerism that produces the products that line all our dollar stores, the only difference being that Steve Jobs makes a butt load of money doing it.  How about Apple be true to its eco-friendly claim and start a recycle program for older phones.  And how about Mac fan boys stop supporting Apple and make good use of your money by keeping that i-phone for another couple of years.

OMG Finished Half-Life:2

The review I did a month ago on Half-Life:2 does not do it justice.  It's been a month of stress and personal difficulty but through out it all the few hours in the evening I could spend being the bearded messiah of a physicist donning the horn rimmed glasses, HEV, and gravity gun have made these days and nights tolerable.  Gordon Freeman is my newest hero and the sheer fun, scares, and laughs I have had with this game will have me talking about Half-Life:2 as pretty much one of the best games I have played for quite some time.  This game has everything and more that I have experienced in first person shooters, adventure games, and most RPGs.  Last night it all came to an epic end and it was all very satisfying sending the maniacal Dr. Breen to the great dark beyond.  Though I can not wait to continue with Half-Life : Episodes 1 & 2 (and, yes, Half-Life) I have already started another trek through Half-Life: 2 just to make sure I did not miss smelling any roses while taking out Combined, zombies, and head-crabs.

XBMC

I had recently been contracted to modify the interface of an XBMC installation.  For those who do not know what XBMC is, it is the open source media center that is based on the original Xbox online management software.  The original application allowed online users of the Xbox 360 to access on-line content in a pay per view context.  A community of hobbyist coders have reversed engineered the application and made it open source so anyone can slap together a media PC of choice parts (depending on their budget), hook up their rig to their entertainment center, and watch anything from DVDs, to Bluerays, to on-line media streams, to selections from their library of internet downloaded movies on their large screen LCD/Plasma TV.  They even coded routines to interpret PC remote controllers requests and configured much of their interface to accommodate the tactile nature of a push button remote control.

On top of playing a variety of formats on a PC through its built in player XBMC can also run scripts written in PYTHON to access and filter out links to media on your favorite streaming site and present the site's inventory of media on a stylized menu.  More scripts can also be added to associate backdrops, cover images of music albums and DVDs, and IMDB info of your presented media.

XBMC can also be skinned to your liking and the software provides the user with a system of XML files that can easily be edited to sport the graphics and layout of your choosing.  The system claims to even allow users to add functionality to XBMC; however, the reality is the displays that the user can add are either additional dialogues or overlays which support the main pages of the application.  The ability to add standalone new pages are somewhat limited and in practice stand out as jury rigged pages.  The skinning library is limited to image displays, lists, windows, and buttons but each component has a large inventory of customizable properties.  The interactive components can also be scripted to trigger a robust selection of predefined functions to control or display relevant information and content as well as flag states or conditions during the run time of the application.

XBMC has a community of contributors scripting everything from skin packages, plugins and scripts that target popular media source sites, to 3rd party application launchers for those who want to integrate some gaming into their media center.  XBMC is open source - anyone can download an install package for free or download the sources for modification.  All information can be found on http://xbmc.org/ .

I'd rather be blogging...

I decided to finally look into developing iphone apps.  It was the reason why I bought my Mac Book.  It's been a week and I don't think I have been this frustrated with a learning curve.  I think what is getting to me are the droves of Mac fan boys who claim anybody and their mom can learn how to make phone apps.  If that were true then why is every second tutorial I find not compiling.  Even more frustrating are the constant go to one of the many interface steps and type this code directives that's horribly out of date.  I find many of the tutorials them selves do not explain the mind set of performing the said steps and give me the impression that half these fan boys turned coder merely copy patterns of whole applications and don't have a true understanding of what really is going on.

Just the other day I was on the train and an intern I had just met who was really into iphone app development tried to show me how easy it was to throw together an app.  In 10 minutes he had his iphone simulator pop up on his Mac and pop a view of a bunch of thrown together components which really did not do anything useful.  I turned the question around to him and asked him if he could make a simple form to change the screen display to which he sat and looked around for an example he could base the app on.

I had recently learned Adobe's Flex platform in a stretch of 2 months and after working a total 6 months on the platform I know I can throw together a simple online web app with forms and views and have it store information onto a database in under an hour.  Now that to me would classify as intuitive since other than a a pattern of code I use to code database pulls and the local repository of variables everything is pretty much from the top of my head.

Now maybe I'm getting a little ahead of my self.  Maybe I'm just not of Steve Job's mind set of what easy should be.  But I am pretty sure my mom will never program her own iphone app in my lifetime.

The almost real sonic screwdriver.

I was looking around this morning for an electronics project with a little bit of cool and a little bit of mischief.  My recently draining endeavor/project has left me at least industrious and creative and on top of learning how to program iphone apps I all of the sudden wanted to make a real sonic screw driver.  I had an idea to take a Doctor Who sonic screwdriver toy and outfit it with some additional circuitry that would be obviously suited to a sonic device.

I came across some circuits to jam cellphones and another to turn remote controlled television sets.  The circuits seem relatively easy to put together onto a small board that I could fit into the cramped spaces in my toy other than the fact that I would have to hand wind a couple of inductors (coils) and somehow have to fit a 9 volt DC source (battery) into it as well.

I have not really given up on the affair.  I probably need to dig deep on this project though I impulsively clicked on someone's 60lbs stash of electronics with out inquiring first about the $50 delivery bill.  Luckily, I just got out bid (yay Ebay).  I also came across this little gem this morning when looking into prop replicas:



Now that is a work of craftsmanship -  a fully metal exact scale working replica of the 10th Doctor's screwdriver.  I really need to make more machining friends.