disruption.ca

Last Monday Steve and I wrote a game.

Steve wanted a randomized version of the Escapa! game. So we made Evil Boxes.

evilboxesWin32.zip Windows version.
evilboxes_src.zip Source.

I got Mario Kart for Christmas, and it has been a bit of an obsession for the last month. It’s probably a good thing that it doesn’t log the number of hours that I’ve played. I would be afraid to see the results.

I’ve spent some time fighting with the WFC online play service, and these are my notes.

The problem is with finding opponents. Some people claim that they can always find 3 opponents with a minute of connecting to the service. Others never find opponents. I have found my experience to be between the two. I can always find a race, but sometimes it involves long waits, and is usually against only one other person. Many times I’ve had the system indicate that it has found one or two opponents for me, but then they disappear while the system tries to find a third.

My home network isn’t typical. I have my DS connecting to my D-Link Dl-614+ wireless router. I had to drop the router to 2mb for the connection to work, but I am able to use WEP with it. The D-Link only serves as a wireless bridge, and I have an OpenBSD machine running firewall and NAT. Under this setup it would take ages to connect to an opponent, and I would almost never race against more than one person.

Nintendo’s support site is very short on information. One thing that I tried was to follow their dubious firewall advice, and forward tcp ports 8910, 29900, 29901 and 29920 plus all udp ports to a static IP for the DS. I think this helped a little bit, as now I can sometimes get three player races. It’s very strange though. I’ve used tcpdump on the router, and I can see normal udp traffic from my opponents going to and from the DS. But if I do a port scan via nmap, I can’t find any open ports on it. So what is going on? I think that Nintendo WFC tries to do some sort of NAT traversal, allowing inbound connections by using outbound traffic to create openings in the NAT state table. In theory, it’s a great idea. Peer to peer online gaming, without having to mess with port forwarding and firewall rules. Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well through my OpenBSD router. I can connect to some players, but not many. I’ve had some luck getting 4 player races by searching for Rivals, which only attempts to connect to people you have raced before.

Jay let me test some of my theories using his Linksys WRT54G. Once I dropped it from WPA to WEP, I was able to connect the DS. The Linksys NAT seems a little more WFC friendly, as I consistently found two or three opponents to race against, in reasonable amounts of time.

So to get the most from playing online I might have to hook my D-Link directly to the net and move my OpenBSD box behind it. Or I might buy a Nintendo USB WiFi adapter, which lets a Windows computer serve as a DS WFC specific access point. Maybe finding opponents would be more successful with that setup. Plus there are Linux drivers to use the Nintendo adapter as a regular WiFi card, as well as some interesting homebrew possibilities for the chipset. I’m not sure if I want to spend $40 on something that might not make any difference at all though, and google seems to know very little about the topic.

Last weekend I participated in another ld48. I’ll set up a page for my new game at some point, but by popular demand, I’m posting a link.

It’s kind of like Katamari Damacy in 2d. Use the mouse like you are rolling the ball with your hand. Collect small stuff to get bigger before you run out of time. If you run out of time, the game exits.

Windows version:
datacamWin32.zip

Also, you can play Jay’s game online here:
http://gaiaswrath.wardtek.ca/

I’ve added Rejeweled to the games.

I’ve uploaded some pics from halloween. The Mario Bros costumes worked out surprisingly well, although they weren’t as popular as the previous year’s Jay and Silent Bob.

At the time of this writing, Jette also has some halloween pictures online. Her photos don’t tend to stick around though, so don’t blame me if the link is broken.

I’ve added gTowers to the games. It’s not much of a game, but it’s kind of neat.

Edit: Here are my PAX photos.

I’ve had a few requests (ok, one) to write about PAX ‘05, and I have finally overcome procrastination to deliver.

Scott, Todd and I rented a blue PT Cruiser, left Edmonton at 6:30 Wednesday morning and made it to Bellevue at 8:00 that night. ~15 hours in the car was much less painful than expected. Scott and I even won a co-op game of Starcraft on the laptops during the drive.

Thursday was spent exploring Seattle. We hit the Sci. Fi. museum, which was pretty cool. They have a full size Alien queen and the powerloader suit from the Aliens movie, which alone makes the museum worth the visit in my mind. We also hit the Experience the Music Project, which was ok, but was much more museum and much less “Experience” than expected.

The expo opened Friday, and unfortunately started as an exercise in waiting in line. We got to spend some time on the consoles and PCs, but we had a lot less game time than I expected. The crowd of 7000+ people was too big for the space they had available. Saturday was better though. We brought Scott’s gameboys and his DS, which made the lines less painful. Also, the exhibition hall was open, where Nintendo was dominating the show. They had a playable demo of the new Zelda. Mariokart DS was playable, along with a pile of other DS games. But the most eye catching demo was Mario Strikers, a new soccer game. Other highlights from Saturday include Scott and Todd advancing to the second round in the Mario Kart tournament, and the three of us being interviewed by Attack Of the Show. They didn’t end up using our interviews on tv, but you can briefly see us on camera at the beginning of part 2 of their PAX coverage.

Saturday night we got into the theatre for the musical acts, which were surprisingly awesome. It started with the Karaoke Revolution Omegathon round. All of the Omeganaughts sucked, but Tycho and Kara showed the crowd how it was done by singing “My Immortal.” Even though they weren’t very good, you have to give the Omeganaughts credit for singing on stage in front of 2000 people. Seeing Karaoke Revolution in action made it seem like loads of fun, and was enough to sell me on the game. I might pick it up when it comes out on the Gamecube in November. Next we had Final Fantasy music on a concert piano, then MC Frontalot followed by MC Chris. Unfortunately the audio system wasn’t really working for the rappers, and you couldn’t hear their vocals while they were signing. But when MC Chris was talking between songs he was amazingly funny. He knows his geek material, and he worked the crowd perfectly. The night closed with the Minibosses, and they were excellent. Much to Todd’s delight they played Megaman 2 as their opening song.

Sunday was more of the same, with the highlight being the final round of the Omegathon. It was revealed as the best of three rounds of Combat for the Atari 2600. It was so epic I can’t even begin to describe it. I didn’t know that game could be so intense. I guess a crowd of 2000 people screaming with every point can have that effect.

When the convention ended we went to Fatburger for dinner where Scott and I took the triple king challenge. The idea is to see if you can eat a loaded triple king burger faster than the 13 minute 32 second time posted by a local radio celebrity. The burgers were huge, featuring 3 half-pound burger patties, cheese, bacon, egg, chilli, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, mustard, ketchup and relish. I finished mine in 9 minutes flat, and Scott ate his in 8:15. Pretty impressive for a man who was a vegetarian a few months before.

Here are some random PAX related links:

Loads of PAX photos on flickr:

• http://www.flickr.com/photos/tags/pax05/

Attack Of the Show’s coverage:

• Part 1
• Part 2 (Watch for us on camera at the beginning.)

A million other blog postings about PAX:

• http://technorati.com/search/Penny+Arcade+Expo

IGN has a trailer of the upcoming Doom movie. It’s pretty much what you would expect, but one thing caught my attention. The final sound effect is a very familiar roaring scream. The same sound effect occurs in Starcraft when you click on the terran academy.

Intrigued, I checked google for more information. I didn’t find much. Apparently this same sound is used in the game Dark Forces when a storm trooper gets knocked off a ledge. I have also read that this is the same sound that tie fighters make in the original Star Wars, and that an orc makes the sound when falling off a cliff in one of the Lord Of the Rings movies.

The frequency that this clip occurs makes me think it is some sort of Wilhelm scream, but it doesn’t match the Wilhelm samples I’ve heard online. Does anyone know anything about the story behind this sound?

If anyone wants to read more about this, I have found a couple of uninformative, but interesting discussions.
The first is in a discussion of the doom trailer. Search in page for scream. This page isn’t really safe for work.
The second is this thread in a slashdot story about the Wilhem scream. Again, not much real info.

Update: The story of the screen has been found, read the new post.