Geir Ove Alnes

Hello blog – been a while

Hello blog, old friend. It has been a while; fourteen months, to be exact. I planned to write – no really, I did! I even almost finished writing the drafts for several interesting and exciting posts I was going to send your way, only to scrap them when I realized they weren’t really all that interesting and exciting. You didn’t miss much.

Hm. I guess I should give you a status update, since it’s been so long since I last communicated with you. Let’s see; I just returned to Canada yesterday after having spent two and a half weeks celebrating Xmas and New Year with friends and family back in Norway. Saw a movie about Sherlock Holmes. Good times.

I still work for FC, and I am now in fact just three months shy of having spent four years working for these guys, during which I have no doubt become more experienced as a data-entry monkey, exporter of GFX-assets, amateur 3D animator and/or fixer of minor skinning/3D modeling issues, particle-effects designer and jack-of-a-thousand-more-trades. In fact, when people ask me what my job is, I just shrug and try to change the topic, because it is not easily explained in less than four paragraphs worth of words. Oh well, at least it will fill out my otherwise meager CV until I can land a proper game design gig. I never wanted to be an animation/particle-effects guru. I always wanted… to be a ~~lumberjack~~game designer! *fingers crossed*

Other than that, I guess I’ve been playing the same games everyone else have been playing recently. Skyrim, SWTOR, Jungle Hunt on C64, etc. I’m sure you’ve been flooded with enough thoughts and opinions about these games to last you a lifetime, so I won’t say more than this: I’m enjoying Skyrim immensely for its immersion, open-world and non-linear gameplay. I’m enjoying SWTOR despite the whole “single-player in a multi-player environment”-thing it’s going for. Dialogue system, companions and group-conversations rock, other parts not so much. Jungle Hunt I think speaks for itself.

Well, I guess that’s it for now, I’ll let you get back to fending off spam-bots. I noticed they had clogged up the tubes to the comment-section since I last visited (thankfully your filter seems to be still intact), so I cleared them out for you. Don’t mention it. Anyway, I’m off. See you around, blog!

Do Android-phones dream of electric (angry) birds?

After much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the fact that mobile frequency bands in Montreal are not compatible with the old, trusty workhorse of a cellphone (HTC Diamond) I brought along from Norway and would only allow me to use it in 2G mode, I finally bit the proverbial bullet and shelled out for a new cellphone (in fact, I ended up shelling out for two, since the service provider refused to sell me a SIM-card and subscription without also selling me a phone, and the phone I wanted wasn’t in stock, and they would not let me order one…*shakes head in a mixture of wonder and disgust at the way business is being done in Montreal, and at stupidity of self*)

Anyway, the phone I was after eventually came back into stock, and the Google Nexus One (N1, for short), is a pretty darn decent smart-phone. Large, nice touchscreen (mine has the SLCD one), excellent camera with LED flash, extra mic for noise-cancellation, fancy Android operating system, access to more than 160 000 downloadable applications from the Android Market, etc and so forth. All that jazz. It’s even possible to call people with it, and send messages and stuff. Pretty cool.

One of the main reasons why I bought this particular phone – even though it’s not the newest of the new, not the fastest of the fast, not the slickest of the sli…actually it is pretty slick – is because this phone (and its kin) is amongst the first phones to receive updates and fixes to the Android operating system directly from Google whenever those updates become available.

Imagine my frustration, then, at discovering that my cellphone provider actually blocks the official Android updates from being pushed (fancy buzzword, wooh!) to N1 phones bought through them and operated on their mobile network. Apparently they want to make sure that the updates don’t “break” anything for their customers or their network before making the updates available. I guess that might be seen as admirable by some, but it also makes one of the reasons for why I bought the phone redundant. Android updates are in general being pushed out by the phone producers only after extensive testing, in many cases causing the customers to be stuck with old versions of the operation system (1.6) and potentially not receiving updates at all when the phones go “out of date”, as the producers want to focus on newer, flashier phones. I had hopes to avoid those situations by buying a Nexus One, but apparently my hopes were naive and unrealistic.

So far I’ve only missed two Android updates – one (3 1/2 weeks ago) which fixes a WiFi-connection issue that affects me both at home and at work, and another (yesterday) with updates to various system applications. A larger Android update – version 2.3 aka “Gingerbread” – is also on its way, and will probably be here before Christmas. Normally, as a Nexus One user, I should expect to have access to this Android-update shortly after it’s been officially released – but at the rate of updates I’m receiving through my service provider it does not bode well.

However! All is not yet lost. The phone comes unlocked, root access is available by the snap of a couple of fingers, ROMs and kernels can be flashed, and I can basically circumvent my service-provider and install the Android updates myself. Additionally I can install user-developed mods, hacks and feature-additions (hidden hardware features such as FM radio, 720p video recording, even CPU overclocking).

Still, it is a pain in the ass to be forced to jump through such hoops to get hold of updates that many other Nexus One owners have already gotten with no hassles, when all that is stopping me from getting them sent to my phone and installed automagically is the “helpful” attitude of my Canadian mobile service provider.

Oh, and I also gave in and added an authenticator to my WoW account. A version of it that runs on my Android-phone, of course!

My new addiction – Minecraft

It’s a oft repeated mantra that the days are gone when single-person development teams could succeed in the game development market. These days you’re not going to get anywhere unless you have a budget that numbers in the millions, and enough manpower to build a life-sized replica of the Great Pyramid of Giza, with some additional manpower to manage your workforce and prioritize which stones should be put where in the pyramid, and in which order they should be put in (and which stones should be cut altogether, for budget reasons). That is not always the case, though.

Markus Persson has since May 2009 worked on Minecraft all by himself, and the game has almost half a million registered users, with nearly 30 000 players playing at any given time. What is more impressive though, is that the game – which is still an Alpha-version – has actually sold almost a hundred thousand copies (99147 as I type this). Let me repeat that: The Alpha-version of his game has sold almost 100 000 copies.

I can understand why, since I’ve been playing it almost non-stop since I purchased a copy a couple of days ago. It’s dangerously addictive, there’s always another block of stone to mine (the game-world is basically of infinite size, since it generates more world-data on the fly as you move towards the edges of the map), always another tree to chop, always another fantastic structure to build, always another mine-shaft to light up with torches. Maybe there’s a rich vein of iron ore just behind the next block of stone. Must. Keep. Mining…

(Check out my Minecraft-progress in the screenshots below)

[Show as slideshow]

The game’s success even while still in early development goes to show that if you have a good idea for a game and possess the necessary skill-sets to implement said idea, only the sky is the limit.