It’s an early level from the game but it’s so disappointing. Your player rolls around the level with arms outstretched holding a handgun. I hope the final game is better than the impression this gameplay teaser gives.
Monthly Archives: October 2011
Oh look! There’s Jupiter!
My wife called me out to the back garden tonight to see the bright object in the sky near the moon. She thought I might know what it was you see. I, uh, didn’t. I thought it might be Mars because of the colour but I knew how to find out! Google Sky Map to the rescue!
I quickly installed the app on my phone, pointed the device at the moon and hey presto! Instant astronomer! Ok, maybe not but it’s still a very cool app. The last time I tried it I found the map was a few degrees off which might have been something to do with the GPS on the original SGS. On the SGS II however it was accurate and a pleasure to use.
Thanks Google!
L4D2: Help them up!
Lord of Angry mmmmmar person was a bit of a douche when we played L4D2 gibfest tonight. It was great fun until that guy joined. He was fairly useless, charging ahead and shooting us all the time.
We got our revenge when he got knocked down. Duck watched as his health slowly drained away. He wasn’t happy! 🙂
BF3: Bombing and Dogfighting in the jet
Impressive video showing off the bombing capabilities of the jet in Battlefield 3. Nice number of points earned!
Here’s to you!
BF3: Grand Bazaar and Operation Firestorm Footage
Two new Battlefield 3 videos for you today! They’ll probably get uploaded to Youtube but they’re on IGN right now and I can’t embed them here.
- Operation Firestorm is a huge conquest map.
- Grand Bazaar is an urban map with lots of close fighting.
Thanks Arnaud for tweeting those. Can.not.wait!
Edit: Here they are:
How open is Android?
The Android Wikipedia page is quite a read. I’m particularly taken with the research into how “open” it is (not really, compared to other projects) as I’ve never seen a commit log or discussion of patches for it.
Moreover, our findings suggest that Android would be successful regardless of whether it is an open source project or not, to the extent that the vast majority of developers working on the project (the platform itself) are actually Google employees.
The section on Linux is intriguing too. Linus Torvalds says that Android and Linux would come back to a common kernel but that presumes Google will open it’s development and “innovate” in the open. I’ll just leave this here to check back on in 5 years time..
Meanwhile, there’s the Replicant project, an effort to make a completely Free Software version of Android. They want to remove proprietary device drivers and discourage the use of Google Market. Their list of supported phones is limited but I was surprised to see the iPhone listed there!
I did wonder what the difference was between Replicant and CyanogenMod. Various posts I’ve read on the XDA forums have stated over and over again that the project was more interested in open source solutions rather than using proprietary software but this thread on LWN shines some light on the issue.
Found the official line:
“CyanogenMod does still include various hardware-specific code, which is also slowly being open-sourced anyway.”
So, they’re being realistic about their efforts. They’ll use proprietary software when necessary but they’ll work towards replacing that software. At the rate that handset hardware changes I applaud them for taking this pragmatic route. The only phone the Replicant project fully supports is the relatively ancient HTC Dream. Yes, open source drivers should be released by manufacturers but that won’t happen.
Android isn’t really that open in terms that an Open Source advocate would understand. The traditional public CSV or SVN repository and a daily changelog is nowhere to be seen. It’s definitely developed in a cathedral rather than a bazaar. Does it matter to the vast majority of its users? Probably not, but I for one am happy it is Open Source and the code is out there. Without the (admittedly late) release of source code it would be much more difficult to use other after-market firmwares on Android phones.
Move Steam Games to another drive?
I have two partitions on my machines and the first one is always full so I’ve had to move games to the second partition from time to time. That means moving files and directories and opening a cmd prompt as an administrator to run mklink.
Well, it just got easier with Steam Mover. Nice GUI that uses xcopy, rd and mklink to copy Steam games to another drive.
It worked a treat moving 5GB of files over this evening!
Hires map of Minecraft
Last night I updated the version of Dynmap on my Minecraft server. It’s the plugin that generates a realtime map of the world. I chose to render the hires tiles and it’s already created 2.2GB of data where the previous map was only 20MB! And it’s still going!
I think it’s worth it however. Check out the screenshots below and decide for yourself.
