Month: April 2010

DC Direct Superman vs. Muhammad Ali Statue

OMG, this brings back memories. It was 1978 and I was ten years old when DC came out with this huge over-sized comic book depicting Superman vs. Muhammad Ali in the ring, all at the behest of aliens who wanted to determine Earth’s champion as part of an intergalactic match by an alien invading force.

I read the crap out of that comic over the next couple years. I would do anything to have this statute on my bookshelf…well, anything except pay the $250 asking price. What we really need is a Superman vs. Ali double pack of DC Universe Classics.

Pocket Legends – An MMO for the iPod/iPhone/iPad

Space Time Studios’ Pocket Legends is a scaled-down free to play MMO for the iPod/iPhone/iPad.

It offers three basic classes, along with typical MMO feature such as leveling, upgradeable stats and skills, etc.

It has been getting very good initial reviews. Space Time’s free to play model seems to be selling additional content/areas beyond the initial area for a fee, though at the moment there isn’t much available at all for purchase for the game.

Nice, and clearly just the beginning of the transition of MMOs to mobile devices (along with the increasingly prevalent mobile enhancement of traditional PC-based MMOs).


Out of the Park Baseball 11’s Storyline Engine

Somewhere in one of my basement filing cabinets, I have fairly extensive notes for a steampunk universe centered around a fictional baseball league. If I ever bother to take that any further, one of the things I plan to do is simulate that fictional baseball league using the amazingly deep Out of This Park Baseball, which has gradually become not only the pre-eminent baseball text sim but simply an amazing example of what a game/toy/simulator should be.

In OOTP 11 a storyline engine has been added which one of the developers describes this way,

Of course, just like in past versions, certain events will only happen after a specific year. However, unlike before, events may also stop after a certain year. So you won’t have stories about players falling off their horse on the way to a game in 2010. Plus, events may now be era-specific. So if you’re playing during the early 40’s, you’ll likely see stories about players going off to fight in the war, or if you’re playing in the 20’s, you might read about a player being arrested for bootlegging!

Still other storylines may be determined by a player’s age or even their physical condition. (Older or more out-of-shape players will be more likely to suffer certain illnesses.) Other stories may pertain to a player’s nationality. (A player takes personal leave to help with relief efforts after his homeland is struck by a hurricane.)

I’ve already explained that players’ morale may rise and fall as a consequence of certain events. But it may also be a cause for certain events, as well. So a player with extremely high morale might decide to go out for a night on the town, but his excessive partying might result in him missing the next day’s game with a bad hangover.

Furthermore, a team’s success on the field (or lack thereof) may determine whether specific storylines occur. So if a team is in the midst of a prolonged losing streak, the manager might go ballistic during a post-game press conference or a player might injure his hand from punching his locker in the clubhouse.

Additionally, storylines may only involve players who are in a contract year, are currently free agents, are on the active roster, or are in the minors. Don’t wanna read about Joe Nobody in the low minors missing a game because he overslept? You can even eliminate storylines regarding insignificant players altogether by attaching at-bat or innings-pitched conditions.

And these examples are based on what’s already been coded. There will be even more triggers, conditions, and results, not to mention a multitude of new complete storylines, added over the coming months! But remember, what’s truly great about storylines is that you have the power to customize them to your liking. Yes, there will be a finite number of triggers, conditions, and results, but as many as there are and will be soon, I seriously doubt many people will feel limited by what’s available.

Given the active community involved in OOTP, this means there will eventually be plenty of story engine-related files available, and of course the custom-story lines make it possible to add anything you want. Want a series of storylines set around a late 19th century invasion from Mars (as I do) — not a problem.

Man, I love OOTP.

Tribble Replica Three Pack

I mentioned Diamond Select’s tribble replica back in September 2008, but not only are these finally out but Entertainment Earth has a nice three-pack of different colors (so you can match your tribble with your Star Trek uniform replica?)

Each has a switch so you can select either the soothing tribble coo or the Klingon detecting agitated mode.

Preview of WordPress 3.0

WordPress 3.0 should be out Real Soon Now(TM), and will include some very exciting changes (I feel like such a nerd, but this is like Christmas — the 3.0 release can’t come soon enough.)

A couple weeks ago, Dougal Campbell posted an overview of his experiencing running the WordPress 3.0 beta, Running on WordPress 3.0-beta. The key feature for me will be the multisite/network/WordPress MU integration, which Campbell doesn’t really talk about.

One of the things I don’t think many people appreciate is the value of running the multisite version of WordPress on what is essentially a single site. For example, once 3.0 is released I plan on enabling the multisite feature on this site so that I can logically separate the different functions I want to do.

For example, along with the main blog, I plan to added a photoblog, transition the Life Stream feature over to WordPress, and add a couple of other related projects. With multisite enabled, I can have each of those logically separated while still appearing on the same site with the same theme and searchable across blogs.

I was also intrigued by Campbell’s description of custom post types in WordPress 3.0 which weren’t quite what I expected them to be,

It’s a whole new layer of content categorization. I can see building an e-commerce site around them to organize products based on manufacturer, brand, features, type, etc. A nice feature of custom post types is that you can customize which pieces of the editor appear for them. Don’t need excerpts? Turn them off. Don’t need post thumbnails (I mean “featured images”) or custom fields? Turn them off. Want to just use the excerpt field, and eliminate the WYSIWYG editor? You can do that. One thing to keep in mind is that they are more like custom page types — custom post types will not appear in your normal post “flow”. They behave a little more like stand-alone pages. If you had the idea that you could use custom post types for creating something like Tumblr, where you have specific post formatting depending on whether you’re posting a link, a photo, or an article (which I’ve seen referred to as “post flavors“), you might have to wait a bit longer. Or figure out how to do it yourself.There’s also been some activity around “custom URL endpoint masks”. I didn’t quite grok the full implications of the patches I saw, but it sure sounds darned exciting. I gather that this will give developers more control over how URLs are built, including the ability to create custom URL structures based on post type. I’d love to see a good write-up on this from somebody who is more familiar with the WP_Rewrite functions.

Now that could be very helpful, especially given how useless pages are in WordPress (well, at least they were useless the last time I tried to use them for more than creating a handful of basic pages like an ‘About’ page).