Drakoner - Just like yesterday

Notch exposed

Find of the year (so early already!):
Notch was not the original creator of Minecraft… in a way.
Check this out: http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=17129
And now look up the version history of Minecraft…
http://www.minecraftwiki.net/wiki/Version_history_%28disambiguation%29
See?

Similar game in different programming languages: year 2005 in FreeBASIC and year 2009 in Java. Although Notch stated, he stole the idea from yet another game. Zachary Barth and his friend on the other hand, made Infiniminer, predecessor of Minecraft and was inspired by another array of games: “According to the author Barth, it was based on his earlier game Infinifrag, Team Fortress, and Motherload by XGen Studios” - quote from Wikipedia.

Hm… what the original creator will think about this?… PUNISH TIME. xD

Sources: FreeBASIC.net, en.Wikipedia.org, stalking Notch (as opposed to Minecraftwiki.net), internet.

Edit: Forget about it… the 2005 is actually 2011. Or wait: how about awaiting the arrival of that “real world conversion” type of thing mentioned in the forum? ;)

Your Minecraft-obsessed fan
Daichi

Weird Day #3827

Start of this day: Woke up from our cat puking it’s brain out again… was sick for some time now, just no one noticed, being occupied by themself completely.

Then: BRAINSTORM… the usual issue around this time of life, it’s like an issue where you can’t find the on switch of your light in a pitch black dark room after just woking up (and most likely falling out of bed).

And: Oh… after a felt 2 hour “moment” in whispering to myself… making plans, day-dreaming and the usual “want to have a better life”-thing, injected by ideas, prejudices and common sense of “my” people. Checking the time, my clock reads 0:00 … even think it was 0:03.

So? - After this typical waking up (for… an immeasurable amount of time *idea pops up* already being awake) the next thing was. *manly tears, after another session of day-dreaming*… it’s actually like the chain of day-dreaming pieces come forth simply by actually MINDING them so… by writing them down, it takes much longer to bring the one piece i was trying to get done, finished.

So? - Try #2: After this typical waking up, the next thing was… to CONCENTRATE damn it xD, it’s already 5:36 now just from writing down this thing [article] (+ opening leetspeak translator to check for a meaning in “3827”). Clock hit just 6:00 … what all this was about is simply: Charles Dickens most known story christmas eve, the included “mightiness” of his piece (only know one older movie) and my appearing on Dickens Museums Website about their 200th Birthday of Charles Dickens… with exactly 1 month of being late. shoosh *needs a doctor :P*

Idea of the day: Twin Dragon Day - Gift happiness

*Edit: “Website” was missing just now… ugh, made it look like i was there after all. :O (would have been even more epic)

ice cream, chocolate, milk shake

Ever made ice cream without an ice creme making machine?
Hell a lot of work i tell you. For someone unexperienced in kitchen like me at least.

After breaking one beater of our hand mixer there was another accident with burning silicon. Even messed up the whole cooking steps… and there were only three. xD

Now… the next day when the supposed “ice cream” was finished, it revealed to be… a block of hard chocolate instead. After a considerable amount of waiting it became softer again. Now the taste was…. like a 70% cacao chocolate without the “premium” quality. ~ in other words a pretty unexpected result.

Now the last thing coming up was: to make a milk shake!

You probably can guess what happened. The blender isn’t blending but broken already… yeah ~ that’s my luck.

Not to mention the accident that happened to my dad in between freezing this stuff… can’t see having any more bad luck except someone known dying at this point. *sigh*

That makes 28th December my worst day in my life. Followed up by the death date of our cat Max (April some years ago).

Wonder why?

If you wondered why and how and all the “heck!” questions after reading my blog…

Here is an answer:

Was always a fan of videogames and pretty much lived for them half my life so far. So it’s just natural to assume making a game of my own… with just a few (personal) problems left beside lack of knowledge (which COULD be fixed easily… you might say).

So far there are 6 textfiles describing various game ideas while the latest is a complex one combining several genres together. As i can only give a rough idea of what i made up there (idea theft etc.) let’s say… i’m starting with single-genre games named “Project A” and work towards making one of the multi-genres (main series) games named “Project Z”.

At it’s core Project Z will be an RPG with a crafting system that may either provide weapons alone…or even everything else encountered ingame, with +ing on each (battle) equipment to a supposed max of 100 and recasting equipment by (naturally occuring) metals to make stronger versions of the same wep. Controls will be Keyboard + Mouse and hopefully will allow me to integrate GamePad support. A long good look around similar set games reveals: many features ingame take too long or the whole game is made to last long (aka grinding/farming in/as MMO) which is one of the main points of this game: showing how it’s done else… making a game last long without fcking players off by letting them waste endless amounts of time doing the same things (in an ineffective manor i must say).

For the programming and graphics flash/2d or unity/2d & 3d will be used. Prefer starting with flash as it gives less problems not having any models or model making experience to work with… learning everything at once and doing it all alone doesn’t work so well with me, without making a finished project every once in a while. So yes… 2d graphic games along 3d graphic games will be possible options (in a none-cost production envoirment ~ named indie).

And how the hell would i make money from this? - 1st: Puplishing on Kongregate and probably other gaming sites, providing between 25 and 50% of the profit made. 2nd: A own site with minimal ads to provide the games without having all the gaming site clutter around it. 3rd: By selling premium versions of the game(s), which in essence are the same game but provide new content and enhance pre-exisiting content. Possible options here would be: german/english/japanese dubs of the game’s main story, more background music (and higher quality), new sidestories, more dungeons, more towers (another type of dungeons), more characters to fight/talk/recruit, providing the “whole” world, while gaming site versions would give roughly 50% (or “just” 25%? o-o) of the world. 4th: Merchandises! ~ Every good running series / game series / popular project needs these, in latest time every private person can also make them available without much (self) costs.

As said just now: 1 whole world… this refers to the background of the first game in main series: Each game features it’s own world. The first world will probably being set on Earth in year 1999 with a possible pre-story told when the hero of this story is born. The Calender ingame will probably be made easier than what we have Real Life so that it isn’t so confusing… and easier to use. As well established minigame there will be a (custom) TCG. As with every gameplay feature everything awards something valueable to the player, nothing is made useless… unless it’s part of a long trading quest where only the last item is worth something. Probably whipping up a background story for Year 1 - how the world began counting among other things.

Main difference between main series and spinoffs will be the option of traveling between worlds… which may only be available in small-scale spinoffs with actual content supporting this.

For the options: OpenWorld and Sandbox content… not sure if it fits the game unless making it. ^^’

Okay…have to stop here, never finding an end to this post if i talk on like that ehm… write.

The end of 100

Another great story found it’s end.

This one is special as it was the 100th Anime (cartoon from japan) i have seen in my life… at least if you ask my list.

Not to spoiler too much:

Was watching Z.O.E. Dolores, i. Which follows in line after the IDOLO movie and the first ps2 game story-wise. Personally found the ending heartbreaking (again xD) while it was lightened up after that.

[SPOILER: The story in itself was a huge hunt between Earth and Mars while this particular series took up one of the basic causes for war: differences between human beings found this to be very fitting in a real life sense and also in the sense of story that was told. SPOILER END]

All in all it was a very enjoyable series to watch. Can just recommend it (after seeing IDOLO not necessarily playing the first Z.O.E. game).

New Ideas coming up

Having a bunch of little textfiles on my computer that serve no other purpose than holding my game ideas. One of them got a huge number of new entries the last 2 days, just from playing DQM2C (Dragon Quest Monsters 2 Cobi’s Adventure, also known as Dragon Warrior of the same name).

Right now this one specific idea is amazingly complex and will probably require endless small games before it can be even made (due to the limitation of flash games inside browser… can’t put in huge amounts of data). From player view it’s probably interesting for most CRPG-fans… hopefully more (computer roleplaying games).

Probably keep playing DQM2C now until bestiary, story and all content were played through.

In case of Real Life: still nothing of importance is happening there.

Daichi out.

11.11.11

11.11.2011 - A Special day, so let’s see what games came out today!

Minecraft (can only recommend it, whatever state it’s in now)

L.A. Noire

The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim

Wargame: European Escalation

Nothing more as it seems.

Back to other news…

Studying healthy food (for humans) these days and surprisingly can tell you: Eat only fruits, vegetables and nuts/oil.

Meat and Milk are complete nonsense for human bodies. They also are pumped up with pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, hormones, an immeasurable amount of viruses, bacteria and more nasty stuff where that comes from, last but not least chemicals (due to animals getting all of this to eat). Have fun eating your daily dose of disease-ridden meat. ^^’

Also let me remind you of something easily forgotten: Salt and Sugar, the types found in supermarkets, are in neither way healthy. Natural salt crystals from himalaya and other locations however are. While a sweet rival of sugar is named “Stevia” (the actual plant… not the stuff made from it by industry).

Important Edit: Minecraft comes out on 18.11.2011 instead.

Thanks for reading and wish you a healthier life

Daichi K.

Improvement Idea for Kongregate

As i feel currently available game categories don’t fit everyones taste (or at least not mine… as that’s the only opinion available to me ^^’), here a rough idea for Kongregate Staff, they can work with.

As starting from scratch is a bit hard, taking some help from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_genres

My idea would be a good amount of Main Categories and Sub Categories. While Developers get free hand to put their games in all categories they see them fit (report function for games in the wrong category suggested along with this).

—-

Main Categories would be:

- Action, sub categories: Action-Adventure, Jump’n’Run.

- Multiplayer (MP), sub categories: basically all main & sub categories you see here, with a “-MP” suffix.

- Multi Massive Online Games (MMOGs), for many categories there are specific names like: MMORPGs, MMORTS, MMOFPS, which could be used as sub-categories.

- Roleplaying Games (RPGs), sub categories: Adventure, Hack’n’Slash.

- Shooter, sub categories: First Person Shooter (FPS), Third Person Shooter (TPS), Top-Down Shooter (TDS) and other types of views… Other Shooters (OSs).

- Simulation (SIM), sub categories: Life-Simulation (LifeSim), Music, Physic-Simulation (PhysicSim), Puzzles, Racing, Sports, Vehicle-Simulation (VehicleSim).

- Strategy, sub categories: Real Time Strategy (RTS), Trading Card Games (TCGs), Turn-Based Strategy (TBS).

- Special, this is a list of past categories, like the “pirate-games”* one. So they don’t get forgotten, but appreciated instead.

- Developer Tutorials (Dev Tuts), sub categories: Not much thought given to this category yet. Maybe all game categories, while they only show up, when there are entries inside? (afraid there aren’t many tutorials yet…) “-Tut” suffix for sub categories recommended.

- Event, no sub categories. Just a list of all those many pages that were made for special occasions and become forgotten soon after (from our player view at least). The currently running event could show up in the top of this category, with bold name and running date next to it. All past ones could have running date added as well.

—-

In the make-up of these categories i find it also important, they get always put in an alphabetical order. Reduces confusion, when searching something specific. Only exception from this rule are Dev Tuts and Event Categories, which have indirectly to do with actual games.

Categories should also show up under search (different looking than games recommended), so people who use search instead of the interface also find them.

Definitions (in detail) for each term used, can usually be found on en.wikipedia.org, if those are required.

Hope this article was in any way hopeful (and readable xD).

Thanks for a great site @Kongregate.

*”pirate category”: you can still access here: http://www.kongregate.com/pirate-games -> Change the url to find the others…not sure which names those have ^^’

Aha-Erlebnis

Aha-Erlebnis = german phrase for “Ah, now i understand!”-Events.

When reading the second latest news @Joymax/DMO (Global / Europe version of Digimon Masters Online), just had such an event.
Now i understand the difference between western words “CBT”, “OBT” and their asian equivalent. So here go my life teachings again!

CBT = Closed Beta Test
OBT = Open Beta Test

CBT in asian means to have an (open!) testing period with players for your game. While the “Closed” part implies the deletion of all player progress after this (like a closed cycle).

CBT in western countries means to reduce player numbers, by for example: giving out beta keys or “invite only”-access, therefore here the “Closed” refers to limited amount of players. While the deletion of all player progress is the same.

OBT in asia however refers to the beta test phase where most* or all player progress is kept, while the rest is the same as western: after this, there is only release or pre-release (pre-order). “Open” in this one must be some type of translation mistake, while it simply means “eligible to play on, after release”.

Western OBT again, can be named “public beta” or “beta” while fulfilling the same purpose, all types of western betas usually mean a wipe of player progress when done. Unlike western CBT, “Open” means “open for all”.

*wipes/resets to previous dates, due to huge bugs/glitches, therefore some player progress is lost, always happens even after release. ;)

2 days without computer

I know how dumb you can feel when there is no computer and/or internet for a longer time period. Had these problems several times in the past, but this one is the first i was able to solve on my own. ;)

Just returned from not being able to use my computer for 2 days. (private comp #3 actually).

While private comp #2 is … a defective ass, the “public” comp available to our household gets clawed by everyone just the same. So… yeah, was time to get back on this one. ^^’

Okay, what exactly happened? - AVG Antivirus Free Edition did. You could also call it “stupidity in it’s pure form”. AVG was showing me the windows drivers pciidex.sys and classpnp.sys as rootkit, checked these before (fail report, they are harmless, at least in the state there were on my pc). Now all i wanted to do was “remove their entry” in that program, so they don’t show for each scan report. Now… all i did was exactly the thing i should never do, remove them by accident. -_-*
The state when waking up and booting my pc was the following after this:
- Computer won’t boot.
- CDROM is ignored.
- HDD can’t be accessed.
all thanks to pciidex.sys missing…

My solution to this was pretty simple in the end. Used a lying around USB key (labeled “aromatic” with 512 MB space) ~ called USB Stick in my country. And put a random Linux distribution on it, to have a third way of accessing my files on computer rather than using windows build-in drivers (why the heck does it even use faulty windows drivers, when there are bios drivers?!).

The files required to actually fix my problem were found on the Windows XP Professional x86 SP2 Installation DVD, found as “PCIIDEX.SY_” and “CLASSPNP.SY_”. 7-Zip could easily “unzip” them to gain the actual files back, that were required.

Now some advertisement links as thanks for solving my problem:

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/universal-usb-installer-easy-as-1-2-3/
http://puppylinux.org

Heard rumours that Mac was the most userfriendly OS you can find out there… if my money ever suffices, i shall test that. ^^ (unless it’s game-unfriendly. >_>)

While Linux is nice in every way (free OS to tell the most important part), it lacks the support for most “common” standalone distributed games. And isn’t that super friendly to new users.

Windows however is found on approximately 90% of all computers (no idea where that numbers comes from, just remember having heard that) and usually gives everyone trouble and problems, unless having studied IT… which is a waste of your lifetime as it seems, 5 years of studying to become totally overqualified for every commonly available job.

Summary: The average computer user will keep to Windows, the poor people without windows will go for linux, some try macs…and i will keep this USB key with portable Liquid Puppy OS… if anything of this sort ever happens again. :P

Thanks for reading and taking interest in my life

Greetings
Daichi

Minecraft Armor Idea

Minecraft (minecraft.net) Armor gets reworked i just heard over twitter?!
Brainstorm begins…

My idea/opinion on this is the following… bit long of explanation, sorry for that. ^^’

How about each armor piece gives different points according to type & mass used. In the end it can however still be displayed as “10 pieces” (or 20 actual points, as each icon has 2 sides)
Type = wool, iron, gold, diamond, …maybe even wood and obsidian :P (last two aren’t part of current minecraft v1.7.3)

Mass = how many materials are used, footwear = 4, legwear = 7, chest armor = 8, headgear = 5. Totaling to 24 pieces of material required.

Now the point value would be like the following (making a quick list ^^):

Wool Footwear: 4 points
Wool Legwear: 7 points
Wool Chest Armor: 8 points
Wool Headgear: 5 points

Iron Footwear: 8 points
Iron Legwear: 14 points
Iron Chest Armor: 16 points
Iron Headgear: 10 points

Gold Footwear: 10 points
Gold Legwear: 17,5 points
Gold Chest Armor: 20 points
Gold Headgear: 12,5 points

Diamond Footwear: 20 points
Diamond Legwear: 35 points

Diamond Chest Armor: 40 points

Diamond Headgear: 25 points

and now to those suggested ones…
Wood Footwear: 2 points
Wood Legwear: 3,5 points
Wood Chest Armor: 4 points
Wood Headgear: 2,5 points

Obsidian Footwear: 6 points
Obsidian Legwear: 10,5 points
Obsidian Chest Armor: 12 points
Obsidian Headgear: 7,5 points

Total point values: Wood Set 12 (0.5x), Wool Set 24 (1x), Obsidian Set 36 (1.5x), Iron Set 48 (2x), Gold Set 60 (2,5), Diamond Set 120 (5x).

The aformentioned “points” could be each hit of a mob or something else Mojang wants to do with it, like a formula where each point becomes sec per mob contact… whatever.

Talk about this? @DrakonerDE on Twitter or comment/question on this blog (if it works… O_o).

Scrap my last question!

Always need that reminder under favorite saying “Don’t suit others, but yourself.”
Don’t expect anything the next few days (2 or more), but expect some new blogs/posts after that. Was writing some posts today… just have to figure out this queue thing and put each in motion after writing a pile of posts. ;)
Hopefully it works wonders…

If not fault lies deep within myself… actually buried below many many games and movies.
-> Gah… me talkmouth, me no talk anymore. Me now sleep! x_X

What do you want?

Just one follower who could answer this…

Note: The question is directed at “What you want to see on my blog”. Examples: “everyday shit” or “philosophical findings in every day life” or something like “how is your progress in certain things” or “about your general life, not the shit stuff…”, et cetera.
Also a note on “normal” life (however you define it) is boring from my point of view and won’t interest anyone… so taking the philosophical pick and/or progress are better choices (or anything you come up with and has nothing to do with everyday stuff).

Completely ignoring the subject of that question is also totally possible! … haven’t got the time and mind to add a “whisper” function at my blog after all. >_> (although people should be able to ask on each blog entry anyway…)

- too much thought again… just before bed time! ^^’