I’ve just come back from a trip to Lofoten, and I’ll have to write something big about it. In one word, though: Amazing. Only got to climb in one place, though, which is one of the few grudges I have about the trip, but the climb itself was really, really nice (and scary for someone with a fear of heights as extreme as mine. The picture below is of someone doing the same route that we did.
Important:
Save the Rhino
Games:
Asheron’s Call Consolidation
I’m having vacation, and the weather turned beautiful just in time. It’s been the best days of summer so far, and there are more to come. Starting a little sunburn.
So far, vacation has been all about going to the islands, to Huk beach, and enjoying life. I started a week earlier by working half days, working off overtime that had accumulated. So by the time vacation started, I was already pretty relaxed and low on stress 🙂
If there aren’t many updates in the next days, it’s because I’m not on the net. Had to catch up on more than 200 mails today.
Weil Doppelspieler zwar nicht lustig sind, aber ich irgendwo meinen Frust über sie auslassen will, habe ich ein blog nur für sie gemacht – eine Gallerie des Grauens. Da kommen natürlich nur die besten rein, der stille Rest interessiert ja nicht.
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman is definitely among the top 3 books I’ve read this year.
Just as in American Gods, Gaiman invents a whole society that’s right before our eyes but that we cannot see any more. This time they are not forgotten gods, but an underground “London Below”, a society living under London, in abandoned subway stations, WW2 tunnels and abandoned places. I’m two thirds through the book, and I want to savour every page of it. Next on the reading list: Stardust.
It looks like Shadowlands is going to sell well. The pre-orders at least look promising, and the game has been in the top 5 at Electronics Boutique for four weeks straight.
Based on an idea I had early this year, players that pre-order the game will get a special appartment in Jobe. Those are really cool party places with a view over the floating city, bathtub, a lounge, bedroom and kitchen – a real appartment, unlike the shoeboxes that players in Omni 1 or Tir call home.
Although my involvement in Shadowlands has been pretty small (since I work on new products now), there’s still some code of mine in there, and I’m emotionally involved with Anarchy Online – I really want to see Shadowlands get off to a good start. It’s got a lot of great potential, and the new locations are awe-inspiring, and when they’re done, they’ll hopefully be packed with action.
Went to see ZZ Top in concert at Rockefeller last night. We were standing 3 meters from the stage, I had a great view, and Morten says his ears are still ringing today. It is probably the most intimate concert on the tour, since Rockefeller is a really small place to begin with, and it looks like they had lots of fun playing in front of such a small audience. The crowd was wild, they didn’t need any warming up at all, and ZZ Top played a nice mix of tunes mostly from Deguello and Tres Hombres, both rock and blues.
If you ever get a chance to see them in concert, do. Definitely worth seeing. And check out the Mescalero album when it comes out. Review from oslopuls.no is here.
I’ve always wanted to have a scripting language in Eressea, for all kinds of reasons. The GM tool could really do with a console, for example. And monsters could be scripted without having to change the C code every time. Eressea is really pretty backwards in terms of technology.
So today, I made the old C code C++-clean (added a lot of extern “C” around them), and made lua bindings with luabind and I’m exposing a subset of the region and unit classes to lua. First script (apart from Hello world) listed all the regions by name and coordinates, it’s not much, but it’s a start.
It was actually easier to write small C++ wrapper functions (especially a wrapper template for the Eressea linked lists) and then use luabind (which is a C++ library) than to export the C structures directly though lua’s API. I really like luabind. I found 2 small bugs while I was working on this, but if they haven’t been fixed already, I’m sure they will be soon. The iterator support is rather fresh, after all.
I’m re-reading Good Omens right now. I was actually looking for Neverwhere, but our local bookstore did not have it i stock. So I got the only Neil Gaiman book they had, even though I already knew it. It’s hilarious.
Short plot summary: Armageddon is coming about, and the world will end. Aziraphale (an angel) and Crowley (a fallen angel), have lived among humans so long that alll that free will stuff has rubbed off on them, and they kinda like humans and earth, so they decide to interfere with the ineffable plan and stop Armageddon…
If you like Terry Pratchett, you will like this book. But it’s not one of his usual Discworld books or something like Johnny and the dead – the dark humour and great storytelling of Neil Gaiman add a very new twist, making this one of the best books either author has written. My first Gaiman book, this left me hungry for more.