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To use the HTML 5 <video> tag in Firefox 3.5, you need video files encoded in the Ogg Theora format. Apple doesn’t support this format at all, so you can’t just export Ogg files from QuickTime like you can with H.264/MPEG-4. I spent some time trying to find the best easy way to create Ogg Theora files on Mac OS X, and I think ffmpeg2theora is it.

In his “Video for Everybody” article I linked to yesterday, Kroc Camen suggests using HandBrake to create Ogg Theora files, but I couldn’t get it to work in HandBrake 0.9.3 (the current release version) without crashing. (Well, one time it created a file without crashing, but the file was corrupt.) It ends up that HandBrake’s broken Ogg support is a known issue with no easy solution, and so Ogg support has been removed from the current branch of HandBrake, and there are no plans to bring it back.

Camen also linked to Xiph, an open-source QuickTime component that adds Ogg Theora playback and export to QuickTime. I don’t want to install this, however. For one thing, the only open-source QuickTime component I’ve ever had a good experience with is Perian. For another, I don’t want Ogg playback support in QuickTime. The fork in supported codecs for the <video> tag — Safari won’t support Ogg Theora and Firefox and Opera won’t support H.264 — doesn’t mean you can’t support all three browsers. It just means that to support all three, you need to include at least two <source> elements within the <video> tag, one pointing to an H.264-encoded file, the other to an Ogg Theora file, like this:

<video>
    <source src="example-video.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
    <source src="example-video.ogv" type="video/ogg" />
</video>

This serves the H.264 to Safari, the Ogg Theora to Firefox. And for Chrome 3.0, which supports both formats, this should serve the H.264 version because it’s specified first.

ffmpeg2theora is the one tool I found that simply just works for transcoding to Ogg Theora. The downside to ffmpeg2theora is that it’s only available as a command-line tool. But:

1. It has a nice Mac OS X .pkg installer. Launch it, authorize it with admin credentials, and it’ll install the ffmpeg2theora tool in /usr/local/bin/.

2. The command-line syntax could not be simpler. You just type:

   ffmpeg2theora example.m4v
   

   and it gets to work, outputting a file named example.ogv right next to the .m4v file. It shows an updating progress message in Terminal while it’s working. There are more options (and it comes with a man page that documents them), but in my testing you can just use the defaults.

ffmpeg2theora’s output looks good. I gave it a 3.9 MB H.264 file as input, and it created a 3.5 MB .ogv file that looked pretty good — way better than typical web video in a Flash player — when I played it back in VLC and Firefox 3.5.

Scribblenauts looks amazing. 10,000 in-game items? Can't. Wait. And yet...something tugs at the subconscious. Just like it did with LittleBigPlanet. We love creativity, yes, but we also love existing characters.

The game won't, of course, let you conjure the intellectual property of other characters. So if you're in a pickle, you can't just write "TRAVIS TOUCHDOWN" and have him arrive to awesome all your problems away. But if, by some miracle, you could, he'd probably look like this.

These adorable little guys are the work of some GAF members, mostly turk128 & SpacePirateRidley, and show what it'd look like if all your favourite gaming (and some non-gaming) characters made it into the finished product.

Scribblenauts Preview/Impressions Thread - You will say "wow." (see post #217) [NeoGAF, via Tiny Cartridge]

Have you heard about Scribblenauts? If you haven’t, I highly recommend checking this out. Is that not friggin’ awesome? Seriously, the potential for this game’s replay value is so drastically high… 280 levels, plus you can create your own levels and send them to friends. Nonetheless, I’m really looking forward to this. I want to see how long it takes before I come up with something that’s not in the game… well, in reason anyway.

About a year ago, you may recall, my brother and I attempted to derive the product of Pac-Man's metabolic functions. In that spirit, Kotaku has now created its own Bureau of Weights & Measures.

The Bureau's mission: To needlessly expose the wide gulf between video game physics and the laws of the real world; to pursue, to a pointless degree if necessary possible, the logical extremes of any mathematical given; to ask the questions that do not really deserve to be answered; and as an ultimate, Quixotic pursuit, to finally define the real world value of one hit point. We do this in the name of science for all mankind.

Our first journal of study is hereby submitted, dealing with three metrics - weight, speed and momentum.

Dr. Owen S. Good
Director, Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures

WEIGHT
Game: Fallout 3
Test Subject: Vault Dweller

In an RPG, you'd expect to have some distorted encumbrance measurements. Players have been hauling around a full cabinet of arms, plus full plate armor, plus a spare set of armor, plus dual-wield crossbows, plus 500 bolts, plus turkey dinner, since this kind of game was played on paper. It's why D&D invented the Portable Hole.

Fallout 3 measures weight in vague units of "WG." Of any RPG that caps carrying weight, it seems to let you carry a lot. Like a U-Haul's worth. In my latest game I deliberately created a guy with 4 strength because I wanted him to travel light and carry only that which was useful. But as you can see in this recent loadout below, I'm still stowing a spare set of recon armor in case a Glowing One makes me dump in my Brotherhood suit.

Weapons: A3-21's Plasma Rifle, Combat Shotgun, 28 Frag Grenades, 15 Frag Mines, Mesmetron, 3 Plasma Grenades, 4 Plasma Mines, Plasma Pistol, 9 Pulse Grenades, Scoped .44 Magnum (56 WG)
Apparel: Enclave Officer Hat, Power Armor, Power Helmet, Recon Armor. (71)
Aid: Blood Pack, 9 Buffout, 3 Dirty Water, 14 Med-X, 15 Mentats, 2 Nuka-Cola Quantum, 4 Psycho, 17 Purified Water
9 Rad-X, 25 RadAway, 6 Stealth Boy, 79 Stimpak, (sue me, I'm a HP whore), Sugar Bombs. (28)
Miscellaneous: 16 Bobby Pins, Carton of Cigarettes, Cherry Bomb, Conductor, Fire hose Nozzle, Ink Container
Leaf Blower, Pack of Cigarettes, 5 Pre-War Money, 12 Scrap Metal, Key ring with 14 keys on it (29)
Ammo: 202 rounds .44 magnum, 20 darts, 285 Energy Cells, 50 Mesmetron Power Cells, 493 Microfusion Cells, 280 Shotgun Shells. (0 WG)
Total WG: 184

What bothered me about Fallout was not so much that the heavy weapons, like a Flamer, weighed only "15." Maybe they're made from futuristic lightweight metal. No, it's more that a pair of freaking TWEEZERS was equivalent in weight to a motorcycle helmet. It's not even that the WG figure represents a total encumbrance factor – that either the item's size or fragility makes it difficult to carry - because a pool cue has the same WG figure: 1.

So I chatted up Todd Howard of Bethesda Softworks, Fallout 3's game director, about this. First off, is "WG" equivalent to anything?

"Not really," Todd said. "It's sort of close to pounds, but we intentionally don't really say what it is. It actually started based on the weights we used for The Elder Scrolls, which most people don't know are the also-amorphous ‘stones.'"

OK, fine. If they didn't peg WG to something, I will. And I'm going to base it on the weight of beer. A bottle in Fallout is 1 WG. In real life, a bottle of beer, depending on how stout it is, will weigh roughly three-quarters of a pound when you figure in the glass. By figuring my total burden as it relates to at least one item in my possession, I could start imagining how large a load I was carrying around.

But what I couldn't measure is ammo, meds and chems, which have no weight value - and I wasn't going down to the local needle exchange to weigh whatever approximates a Jet syringe. Why didn't Bethesda give them a weight? Because in the game, these are very valuable items. Why wouldn't an RPG, which is more based in realism and more dependent on choice-making than other genres, also require players to be more conscientious about what they're carrying?

"In regards to ammo and money, it's just too granular a decision for the player, if they had weight," Todd said. "You don't want to make that a choice for the player; he already has to manage so much in his inventory and you need things he can find that are an instant win - ammo, money, drugs, etc, things that help keep him alive and playing. It would just bog the game down too much to find ammo and be thinking, ‘Do I want to pick up two of these bullets or the whole stack?' We felt that decision should be on [which] weapons to carry, not what ammo."

Yes, but when a Gatling Laser weighs the same as a frosty 18-can fridge pack of Miller, your decision to carry two is not because of their combat utility but the resale value in Rivet City. Todd said that's entirely valid reasoning, and strength is meant to enable it.

"Much of your character's power comes from his stuff. The more he has, the better he is. Even if he's not using it, it becomes money," Todd said. "Players get pretty good at the value versus weight game quickly."

You might figure that, in the long run, it all balances out. Tweezers are overweighted, bazookas are underweighted, and everyone gets along. But my previous loadout would weigh 138 pounds (1 WG = 0.75 pounds) and still fill up a Public Storage room. Todd insisted that developers discussed the question of how much a player should be able to carry, "right until the end. … We kept narrowing and narrowing what a low-strength versus high-strength gave you, because it was too powerful."

Was too powerful? In the finished game, a Fallout 3 character with the bare minimum strength of 1 can carry 160 WG. I searched for a real world comparison, and this is the best I could do: The Improved Load Bearing Equipment in use by the U.S. Marine Corps since 2005 can carry - ready for this? - 120 pounds. If beer is our unit of measure (and why shouldn't it be?) that converts to 160 bottles of beer (or WG). In other words, any vault reject a notch above total weakling - a 2 strength or better - will out-lug any Marine, even the one assigned to carry the mortar and shells.

Partly to spite Bethesda, I created a character with 1 Strength and assigned the rest of the points to more useful attributes. I never use melee weapons, anyway. I also manually assigned weight to my ammunition and chems (1 for units of 10). I quickly saw how right Todd was.

In Fallout, your ability to meet more difficult challenges depends a lot on the equipment you have, and it's usually items you build or buy that prove the difference. Financing that comes from the resale of surplus items, not the discovery of treasure. Realistic strength would leave you endlessly grinding before starting the next job.

As for ammo, I gave up on that shortly after a raid at the Super-Duper Mart. I was robbing Raider corpses for spare rounds to fight off the survivors and writing down the totals. It was indeed too granular a decision, and got in the way of more pressing challenges.

So, even though with a 5 strength, you can run from Megaton to the Arlington Public Library loaded down like a Peruvian donkey, let's just say the future is made of super-light plastics. And the radiation turned everyone into Lou Ferrigno.

[Images from the Fallout Wiki]

SPEED
Game:Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas
Test Subject: Carl "C.J." Johnson

Originally, I wanted to test the scale speeds of the Team Fortress 2 characters, especially Scout, who could probably outrun Carl Lewis like a Porsche outruns Stephen Hawking. The problem with this, as with other games, is measuring the distance those guys cover in real world units. I'd have to know, say, Heavy's IRL height (6'5?") and be able to lay him end to end over a straightaway to get its real distance. I'm not a modder, and I wouldn't have that kind of time anyway.

So I then looked to the Grand Theft Auto series. From Claude to Niko, you've always had the ability to overtake a moving car on foot and jack it. I really wanted to know these guys' running speeds, and they live in cities with structures based on real world ones. Unfortunately, everything in Liberty City is a compressed distance, so running Niko across the Broker Bridge still wouldn't tell us much.

But in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, there's this Easter egg, which identifies the specific dimensions of the Gant Bridge, including a length of 159.7 meters. During the first few tests, something seemed way off. First, 159.7 meters isn't even a 10th of a mile, and C.J.'s runs - at a sprint - were keeping up with traffic and returning mile times of 17:41. So I had to measure this bridge for myself. If I knew the actual scale speed of a vehicle in the game, I could derive its length. This database lists all such attributes.

Thus aboard an NRG-500 motorcycle running at its top speed of 118 mph, I made five maximum-speed trips across the bridge, at a flying start, with a median time of 18.15 seconds. If the Gant Bridge really was 159.7 meters, the bike would have been doing 20 mph, not 120 mph. It's possible they're talking about a distance shorter than the one I was using - toll booth in San Fierro to concrete strip at Tierra Robada - but at top speed, the bike should be able to cross 159.7 meters in just under 3 seconds. Either way, 160 meters is a fraction of the bridge's length as it relates to C.J.

So, at top speed, the bike is traveling at 173.16 feet per second. Multiplied by 18.15, we discover the length of the Gant Bridge is 3,142.85 feet, which is nearly 1 kilometer. As another control, I went back and rode with traffic, matching its speed. We crossed the bridge in 1:09.16, which is 30.98 miles per hour. I damn for sure could see a developer setting standard traffic speed to something round, and 31 mph is almost 50 kph. So, I'm pretty confident the sign is incorrect, and I got this measured as close as possible.

Now, back to running it. C.J. has five paces on foot: a walk, a "brisk walk," a "jog," and then two sprints, one with the A button held down, and another that provides a burst of speed by rapidly tapping it. The C.J. I was playing had maxed all of his physical stats, so he could achieve top running speed and not tire out, at any distance. Back at the bridge on foot, I took him through the five paces.
Walking
At his slowest C.J. covered the distance in 8:22, which equates to 4.2 miles per hour. Frame of reference: 4.0 is the fastest most walk on a gym treadmill. At the "brisk walk" pace, C.J. covers the distance in 4:44.03. Remember our treadmill? This "walk" is more than a jog, it's 7.54 miles per hour. It's equivalent to a 7:57 mile time. My best time in the mile - running - is 8:21, five years ago.

Running
Now it gets good. At the third pace, "jogging," C.J. crossed the span in 2:43.16. If he held that pace he would run a marathon in under two hours, which is unprecedented. Holding down the A button, C.J. crossed the bridge in 1:38.11, or 21 miles per hour. That's a mile in 2:44.84, which is inhuman. Remember Roger Bannister? The first mile under 4 minutes? C.J. would run the first one under three. He would beat the world record holder by a larger margin (in seconds) than he would have lost this year's Kentucky Derby.

Sprinting
Rapid-tapping the A-button gave C.J. just a 16- second advantage, which means this loses its effect pretty quickly. Still, at minimum one can assume some world-class sprint times. How world class? Try torching Usain Bolt's records in the 200 and 100 by two and one seconds, respectively - 17.1 and 8.58 seconds. Granted, that speed figure is derived from a running start. Real-life sprinters have to react to a gun and get up to speed. But, remember, C.J.'s sprint lost effect, I'm not sure exactly how far in, so most of this time was derived from a run at the standard "A" pace.

Incidentally, C.J.'s motion capture actor was Eddie Goines, a star wide receiver at North Carolina State University and a classmate of mine. I knew him pretty well, as well as a sports writer knows one of the team's stars, anyway. As a flanker, he set all the receiving records that Torry Holt and Koren Robinson would later break. As a freshman, Eddie was the fastest on the team, clocking a 40 yard dash in 4.35. A 4.09 is thought to be the NFL record. CJ's time is 3.15. I'm sure Eddie would be delighted to know that, at least in a video game, he's by far the fastest human alive.

MOMENTUM
Game: Assassin's Creed
Test Subject: Altair

No one would expect to fall 40 stories onto the top of a parked car and survive. However, at least it stops the body from crashing all the way through to the ground. Now imagine falling that height into a pile of hay that's roughly 2 meters wide by a meter and a half tall.

That's the first "leap of faith" in Assassin's Creed, from the tower at Masayaf. Holy catfish, that poor bastard who jumped with Altair at the beginning was lucky to get off with just a broken leg. And it is far from the steepest drop in the game. The infamous steeple on the cathedral at Acre is nearly twice as tall. Fresh off our victory in San Fierro, the Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures set out not only to fix its height, but also to calculate how much hay you'd need to land safely.

Ubisoft verified that Altair's height and weight, for purposes of the game's physics, was 6 feet and 190 pounds. This would be useful in calculating his stop. But that's all we got from them. However, one of the locations in the game is Jerusalem's Dome of the Rock, whose dimensions are known. The structure's walls are 11 meters tall. Putting all this information in the hand of a trained scientist - devoted reader Matt M. - we were able to come up with some good estimates.

Matt worked up all three heights, but let's use Acre's as it is the most impressive. We were able to time the drop from the top of the steeple -4.1 seconds - using this video (which I downloaded and measured frame by frame). Working backward, we found that its real-world height would be 82.37 meters - about 270 feet. In the game, Altair is accelerating to 39.69 meters per second, acquiring a momentum of 3,420.48 kilogram-meters per second.

That's certainly a large number, but what does it mean? Matt breaks it down:

Basically, whatever catches him has to has to reduce that momentum to zero in under 0.05 seconds, which is the difference in time between Altair falling 82.05 meters and falling 80.05 meters at that speed. That means in the space of 2 meters - which is a little lenient since the floor of the cart is, what, half a meter off the ground? - the hay has to provide 68,298.25 Newtons of force. It's 136,596.5 Newton meters of work, which is a ridiculous thing to ask of hay.

Certainly, Kotaku Weights & Measures does not want to be unreasonable in its dealings with dead vegetable matter. And I'm not sure what could provide that kind of stopping power in that space, other than Kevlar. Or pavement. So I asked Matt if he could figure how large a haystack would be required to cushion a fall from such a height. We used the elasticity of military-grade bungee cords as a guide (using specs found here).

In the case of Acre, the haystack would be so big it would dwarf most other buildings in the game - 40 meters (131 feet) at its point, 67 meters (219 feet) wide at the bottom, if the dimensions conform to the original tiny pile. The freefall into such a mass of hay would last only 2.87 seconds. In terms of volume, it's more than 2.7 million cubic feet of hay - 2,695 times greater than what Altair is leaping into. I kept picturing Phil Hartman sitting atop the amazing mountain of Colon Blow cereal.

Alongside this you can see comparisons, to scale, of the heights Altair falls at the Dome of the Rock, Masayaf, and Acre, and of the size of hay he hits in the game relative to the size he would need to survive. "Leap of Faith" indeed. Sounds more like Altair's in a suicide cult.

The Kotaku Bureau of Weights & Measures gratefully acknowledges the contribution of Matt M. to this post. Follow him on Twitter.

Video games were invented in the latter half of the 20th century. Meaning that their subject matter is, more often than not, set in the 20th century (or later). But if they'd been invented earlier...

We'd (hopefully) have ended up with games like these! WARNING: some of the pics after the jump, which were entries in a competition over at Gizmodo, deal with questionable stuff. You know what? History is full of questionable stuff.

65 Ancient Video Games I Wish Existed [Gizmodo]

Here’s a gorgeous little puzzle game to warm your cockles. Called Use Boxmen, it’s a deceptively simple Flash game, requiring a decent amount of smarts. There’s tones of Cursor*10, a lot of platform nous, and an interesting play on multiple lives to complete a level.

(...)
Read the rest of How Do You Play? Use Boxmen (184 words)

---

Posted by botherer. | 27 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags:
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

I would have posted about this earlier, but I read slower than Helen Keller when she's wearing gloves.

Well Played 1.0 is an anthology book of videogame critique, and probably one of the most interesting I've read. A group of twenty-two writers made up of designers, scholars, and bloggers wrote on subjects as wide-ranging as why BioShock's story is a failure, to an indepth analysis of a game you've never heard of called Mines of Minos.

It's got its low points, of course (it must be written somewhere in the halls of academia that any article written about Metal Gear Solid must be so self-important and needlessly complex so as to be completely useless), but overall, I learned quite a bit from this book which alternately attempts to push forward the discussion on games as an aesthetic medium, while not losing sight of that which made them so alluring in the first place. 

You can download the entire book here for free (minus images), or purchase a physical copy here. 

Apparently, many people don't know what's a browser and they think it's the same thing as a search engine. I've recently quoted some posts from Google Chrome's help forum which were strange: users didn't like Chrome and they thought that the old search engine was better. "I want the old Google search engine, not Google Chrome. How do I go back to regular old Google? I want to change my default search engine from Chrome to Google."

Scott Suiter, a former Google intern, asked 50 passersby from New York what is a browser and the responses were almost unanimous: a browser is a search engine. Some even said that their browser is Google.



According to Wikipedia, "a web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web." But search engines are the applications that help you find web pages and they're so important that they became synonymous with web browsers. It's an involuntary synecdoche, a figure of speech in which a part of an object is used to refer to the entire object.

{ via Andy Baio }

I was looking forward to Wayforward's remake of A Boy And His Blob the moment I heard it announced, but I had no idea what I was really going to see until I actually witnessed the game in action. During our recent visit to the Wayforward offices during E3, Director Sean Velasco took the time to walk us through all four of the levels in the E3 demo, including the Forest, Swamp, Cave and Gearworks levels.

We'll show you all four walkthroughs over the next four days, but for now you can hit the jump and watch Sean walk us through the Forest level. Prepare yourself, because once you see your very first Boy/Blob hug, you may be enamoured to the point of no return. If you like what you see, tune back in tomorrow afternoon for our exploration of the Swamps level!

[Want to see our original videos a little bit earlier than they go live on our site? Subscribe to Destructoid on YouTube!] 

My God this game is looking incredible.

After more than a year in production (and after a fair share of Destructoid posts about it), the fan remake of underrated Game Boy game Metroid II: Return of Samus is nearing completion. Now, before you go clicking the jump and checking out the recently released third trailer for the game, I have to issue a warning: If you are a retro Metroid fan (and especially if you love Metroid II and Super Metroid), this trailer may give you a stroke.

I don’t even know where to start. Shall we talk about the gorgeous, SNES-era graphics? The stunning animation? The music? Hopefully the left side of your face doesn’t go numb after viewing. If you can still type, sound off in the comments with your thoughts. Could this be one of the most beautiful Metroid games ever? I say most definitely yes! Let’s just hope Nintendo and its highly paid lawyers don’t freak out too much.

And, for the record, “getting the fish sweats” is a very good thing. Just ask all the Destructoid editors after our ridiculous (and delicious!) sushi binge right before E3.

[Via GoNintendo]

[In Music Mashup Monday we feature various amagalmations of videogame tunes and popular music, as well as remixes and orignial tunes. Music only gaming geeks could truly enjoy.]

Recently, remixer AfriqueDeluxe impressed us with his chill rendition of "Green Hill Zone" from the first Sonic the Hedgehog game. Somehow he was able to blend Sonic and Black Eyed Peas' Fergie into something not only listenable, but wholly enjoyable. This was especially impressive, as he was working with Fergie's annoying "Glamorous" as a source tune.

He is back with a new tune which again combines Sonic with another unholy source, Michael Jackson. Jacko's "They Don't Care About Us" has been worked into Sonic 2's "Casino Night Zone," 2 player mode. While it may not be as "first class" as his Fergie tune, it's still pretty damned good. Check it out after the jump.

Also, as a bonus, check out the incredible remix from Chrono Cross by remixers zyko and Destiny.

This post is a repost for something I sent to Linux Today. Their original message was here, where they invited people who don’t think Mono causes AIDS to justify themselves. I replied here. This is a repost, for the benefit of assorted aggregators. Some context may be lost by not reading the original “invitation” first.

—————————————————–

I am a member of the Debian Mono Group, Debian CLI Applications Team, and Debian CLI Libraries Team. I’ve been working on packaging for the Mono stack and applications which make use of it in Ubuntu (and Debian) for just under a year. And, fully aware of the flame war, threats and personal attacks which will follow, I’m going to take you up on your “invitation”. I speak for myself here – not for the Debian project, nor Ubuntu, not for the Mono project, nor for my employer.

Your request was for “a calm presentation of why Mono is desirable, why it is not a threat, and why it should be included in Ubuntu by default”. I’ll answer these three questions individually, then offer a general comment on your post, as well as the wider “anti-Mono” movement. This message is GPG-signed to ensure it is published unedited. The message as-sent will be made available at http://retro.apebox.org/herewegoagain.txt to allow people to verify authenticity signatures themselves.

Why Mono is desirable

That’s a question which depends on whom is being asked.

If you’re asking a user, then the answer is “it’s not”, any more than a Scheme compiler or LOLCODE interpreter.

If you’re asking a developer, then the answer is VERY different. Mono provides a well-balanced framework to enable Free Software to be developed quickly, effectively, and efficiently. By “balanced”, I mean it is unlikely to win every single contest that one can throw at a programming language – memory footprint, execution speed, availability of libraries, and so on – but does fairly well in ALL of them. Speedwise, Mono is much faster than Python – up to several hundred times faster according to some benchmarks. It has a fraction of the memory footprint of Java applications. It has modern features such as garbage collection which make it easy peasy to write code with compared to malloc()-happy C or C++. It is a well-balanced framework. As such, for people looking to write apps for a Free Software environment, it offers a compelling choice of framework on which to build. Several apps which have only existed for a short time – such as GNOME Do – make full use of functionality provided by Mono in order to be written very quickly and easily, compared to chasing SIGSEGV around due to human errors inevitable with C-based development. Mono was first conceived as a way to escape from the absolute horror of maintaining a large GUI C codebase (Evolution).

Taking it further, Mono on the whole also enables easier migration – for both developers and users – from legacy CLR frameworks such as Microsoft.NET. Students who learn Visual Studio.NET at University can take their skills and directly apply them to creating or improving Free Software on their shiny new Ubuntu installations, without the need to learn a new language. Businesses with investment in .NET-based applications can look at replacing their servers or desktops with Free Software. Whilst providing .NET compatibility has always been a secondary goal, it is an extremely popular one, which has prompted a lot of input and development work from assorted people into the Mono codebase.

It should be noted, however, that this use-case (Windows migration) is not cause for including Mono by default (any more than, say, Wine), and indeed, the libraries required to run the majority of Microsoft.NET applications are excluded from Ubuntu installations due to lack of necessity.

Why it is not a threat

This is a question which will cause nothing but angry flames – although it certainly won’t harm your page hits and resultant ad revenue. Mono is not a threat because it is not special in any legal regard. Many people have spent hours if not days and weeks attempting to explain this. I’ll try to do so again. There are a whole smattering of reasons why it’s not an issue, covering a wide range of topics. I’ll present these points individually.

• Mono is not the result of any deals between Novell and Microsoft. Mono was started 4 years before that unfortunate deal took place. Mono gets no special treatment under that deal. It is not mentioned in the deal (as with other apps). This is important to note.
• Mono is covered by the OIN, as with most other major Free apps. Patent attacks against Mono carry the same risk to attackers as attacks against any other OIN entrant. Attacks against Mono would risk patent “world war”, which Microsoft cannot win. Such an action would harm their business – and lose them money.
• Mono implements an international standard – albeit one from a convicted monopolist. If this is a problem, why do people use C, the standard from convicted monopolist AT&T? Mono implements an improved, Free replacement for a proprietary offering. If this is a problem, why do people use GNU (which provided an improved, Free replacement for proprietary UNIX)?
• Regardless of whether or not any specific patent licenses over ECMA 334 and 335 cover Mono’s implementation of those standards, if indeed such agreements are available (ITWire’s curlish “attempt” to secure such an arrangement aside), the fact that statements have been made in public supporting the idea of royalty-free licensing essentially reduces the financial impact of such infringement to zero. If Foocorp has a license to use patents, under a “non-discriminatory” license, and did not pay for them – then it would be discriminatory to change anyone  else for them (breaking the signed terms regarding patent licensing), and as such, those patents lose any financial value. They may, however, still hold non-financial value (such as their use in defending against patent-related attacks), hence not making the patents “free for all” in any understood sense.
• Mono cannot be “disabled” via an incompatible change to Microsoft.NET, for two reasons. Firstly, such a change would also break every single existing app for Microsoft.NET (in fact, if it were to happen, then the best option for those users would be to run their apps with Mono instead). Secondly, support for Microsoft.NET is a secondary goal for Mono – if Microsoft change something in .NET 5.0, then so what? It doesn’t prevent Banshee or GNOME Do from compiling and running fine on non-legacy systems like Ubuntu.
• Absence of “patent protection” is not the same thing as “patent violation”. If I offer to sell somebody a promise not to sue them using any of my patents, their taking me up on my offer is no guarantee that I even have anything valid to sell them – merely that they are willing to buy it. If Jim buys protection from any patents I hold, it does not mean that Jim is infringing on anything specific – nor that if Ted does the same thing, that Ted is violating anything either. If a house insurance policy includes flood protection, it does not mean that your house will be flooded – and not buying flood protection does not mean that you will be flooded either.
• Patents covering a specific implementation detail of a project cannot kill it dead – the example here is Freetype. Apple made some patent threats against the Freetype developers, for using their proprietary hinting data stored in TrueType fonts. You’ll notice that Freetype still exists today – this is because the specific METHOD that apple laid claim to was worked around, and auto-generated hinting data used instead. Apple’s threat was diffused, and the project went on. Suggestions have been made by FUD vendors that the Linux kernel contains a number of patent infringements – if specific details are ever provided, then those specific infringements can be worked around. A patent infringed in the Linux kernel would not cause all GNU/Linux distributions to be shut down overnight – and it’s disingenuous to suggest that any other Free Software is any different on that front. Even if a fundamental patent is infringed in Free Software, it’s no big deal – as a core change can be made, and applications etc which expect the “old” way can be modified to work with the “new” way, easily. Only proprietary applications cannot be fixed in the event of radical change – and proprietary apps are a secondary concern.
• The layering of escape routes is extensive in Mono, especially Mono in Debian/Ubuntu. In the first instance, the contentious Microsoft-sourced non-ISO libraries such as System.Windows.Forms are not included by default, and are rarely used in Free applications anyway (because WinForms looks like ass, amongst other things). If a reason is found to remove these non-standardised libraries, then bam, they’re gone – without harming Free apps. Secondly, if a more severe change is required, then the Mono packages can be patched to remove the infringement. If more drastic changes are required, as mentioned above, then the applications can also be patched to support any core changes. And, taking it one step further, if the whole of Mono needs to be pulled, then applications can be ported. The porting process would potentially be slow and painful, and cause great harm to an application’s future rate of development (although no worse than if the app was written in the target language from day one), but nobody who has written an app they care about would simply throw their hands in the air and say “never mind, it was fun, but the Man says I have to stop now”.

Why Mono should be included in Ubuntu by default

It shouldn’t. Not in the sense that has been publicised on blogs, newsgroups, forums, and so on. We don’t want Mono installed by default on any distribution. Mono is a software platform, and software platforms are boring at a user level. Ubuntu shouldn’t ship with Java, Scheme, Assembly, LISP, etc, frameworks by default either. They are not interesting to users.

What we want by default are GREAT APPS. A user should boot an Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu, or whatever CD and say to themselves “Wow, this Free Software stuff is great, I definitely don’t need Windows anymore”. All Ubuntu derivatives, as with all distributions of Free Software seeking to convert people to Free Software, should be chasing the best applications available. In the case of Ubuntu, a decision was made to include a note-taking application and a simple photo library manager, by the Desktop Team.

They determined that the best note-taking application to offer their users was Tomboy. Tomboy has a feature set far greater than the “Sticky Notes” applets provided in both GNOME and Windows Vista, and can be seen by new users as an easy replacement for Microsoft’s proprietary OneNote product, which retails for £80. The only other comparable GNOME application is Zim, a “Desktop Wiki”. Zim is a high-quality product, but it was decided by the desktop team to use Tomboy instead, as it is easier for non-technical users (and is the default application in its class as picked by the GNOME project).

They also determined that the best photo manager to offer was F-Spot. F-Spot is directly comparable to Apple’s proprietary iPhoto application, or Google’s proprietary Picasa application. It is NOT directly comparable to “file browser” type applications such as gThumb, as one of the key features of photo album applications is allowing you to tag your photos with important metadata – gThumb works on a per-folder basis, not on a “all my photos” basis.

Both Tomboy and F-Spot require the Mono JITter, and a set of libraries such as GTK#, in order to execute. So in order to offer these best-of-breed Free Software applications to new users (determined to be best-of-breed by the Ubuntu Desktop Team), parts of a Free Software runtime are required – the same way including the GNOME System Monitor requires GTKmm. As long as Tomboy and F-Spot are best-of-breed, they should be included – and with that, whichever libraries they happen to use. If other Free applications surpass one or both of these, then they should be used instead – if a Mono-based application surpasses a different application in a different class, it should be used instead. This is not based on preference for a given framework – although it is my personal belief that a high-level language such as C# or Python enables developing such an application much more quickly and easier than C would.

The post on Linux Today

Your initial post makes it clear that you are not even-handed on this topic. Here are some specific phrases whose purpose is to “throw mud”, and show your pre-determined judgements on the topics you claim to want to hear about. It is THIS, clear preconceptions and bias, which compel those with plenty of insight on Mono-related topics, not to bother. Which leaves only the anti-Mono people to pretend they have a majority.

“There are other, better applications that could be included” – Name them.

“forcing Microsoft technologies” – Help! Help! I’m being oppressed! No, not really. Good technology is good technology, and Not Invented Here never helped anyone. None of the Desktop Team are pro-Mono (most of them are Python fans), and no unilateral decisions are made over which applications to include. Nobody is “forced” over anything. No Mono-related packages have been marked as Essential:yes.

“unholy embrace into Ubuntu” – Demagogy. Microsoft are a corporation, not a supernatural entity. Suggesting any level of “unholiness” gives far too much credit to them. They are a corporation, with a wide selection of idiot senior managers, and a limited selection of competent developers. Nothing more.

“Mono fans have been creating a giant ruckus in the Ubuntu forums” – actually, it’s the anti-Mono crowd responsible for this. If you refer to accusations of censorship, then you’re being mislead (or intentionally misleading). Those who read the specific details of those accusations can find rudeness, threats, arguments, and worse – with anti-Mono people at the core. Childishness does not win arguments – nor friends amongst moderators.

“have not bothered to say why removing Mono from the Ubuntu installation CD” – To this, I offer a quote from Thomas Jefferson – “Ridicule is he only weapon which can be used against unintelligible propositions. Ideas must be distinct before reason can act upon them”. Demands to remove Mono from a default Ubuntu system are not based on any rational suggestions – there are no packagers offering superior replacements, only people demanding that because in their personal ill-informed opinion everyone will be sued to death, that Mono applications should be purged. This is, in short, software terrorism – demanding a change in someone else’s policy and telling them they are not Free to make their own choices, based on personal politics. Rational minds can dissent on questions of Mono, but until there are adequate replacements for Mono applications, complete with functional migration path, the choice is simple – make Linux suck more by moving to an inferior default application set, or “make do” with Mono. It should be noted that people with rather more to lose than random anonymous people on web forums – such as Mark Shuttleworth – have said on record multiple times that they don’t have any such fears. I would personally support a move from any Mono-based application to a non-Mono-based one, with demonstrable technical superioriority.

“simply including it in the standard repos is not acceptable.” – It’s perfectly acceptable – however, it’s not the only argument put forward. Suggestions range from reclassifying Mono as non-Free (moving it to third-class citizen status), to its complete removal from the archive, to the expulsion from both Debian and Ubuntu for anyone who has worked on Mono packaging. Free apps in general should be in the standard repos – regardless of their implementation framework – but if a specific application is best-in-class, it should be included by default.

“The inability of Mono fans to answer that simple question has me a bit bothered, as though there is a deeper agenda.” – If you want to make accusations, make them plain. Don’t play the Fox News game of “well, I find it *interesting*” – call a spade a shovel. If you have specific accusations to make about people who are not anti-Mono, then make them, or to put it bluntly, don’t spread lies.

The anti-Mono “movement”

Some people are “for” things. They are for Freedom, or for technical superiority, or for a sports team, or whatever. Some people are “against” things. They are against political candidates, or Microsoft, or people from certain places, or whatever. Some people define themselves on the basis of what they want, others on the basis of what they do not want. Mono causes immense anger amongst that second group – specifically, people who use GNU/Linux not because they are “for” anything, but because they are “against” Microsoft. This can be easily seen – using names like “Microshaft” or “Micro$oft” or similar childish attempts to define a “them and us” situation and ridicule the “them”. Mono is symbolic – it is Free (something they are supposedly in favour of), but Free on the basis of something sourced from the Great Satan – an inexcusable mix.

Many of those who advertise themselves as anti-Mono are, quite frankly, frightening. Calling for the deaths of Microsoft employees (see comments on Boycott Novell), or trying to have people who make positive comments about Mono fired (see recent comments on Ubuntu mailing lists), or making insinuations about anyone who does not agree with them (see pretty much every news post on Boycott Novell itself) – this is ugly behaviour, the absolute worst kind of advert for the “Free Software community” imaginable. If people want to be “against” Mono, then there are sane ways to do it – for example, by working on or packaging alternative software. Calling for people to be expelled from Free Software communities because they don’t work on apps you like is, in short, the antithesis of supporting Freedom. If the anti-Mono crowd want to be taken seriously, then they need to UNDERSTAND what they fight against – they need to have sufficiently intimate knowledge of what Mono is, how it works, and why, in order to know where to direct their energies (and general shouts of “ZOMG! MICRO$HAFT!” isn’t well-directed). I would LOVE to see some high-quality apps for GNOME written in, say, Java or Python – as the competition would only result in better applications.

However, the vast majority of the anti-Mono crowd are not developers or packagers – they are back-seat drivers. They make proclamations about how other developers (who are surrendering their time to developer Free Software) should instead use the framework of THEIR choice, not the developer’s. This is another reason why anti-Mono arguments are given so little respect – the sheer cheek, the PRESUMPTION that they somehow are in a position to make demands of other developers, is galling. Free Software is a meritocracy – those who do things earn respect. Until the anti-Mono crowd actually make a contribution to Free Software, they will continue to be treated as cranks – and their questions left unanswered.

In the end, there is NOTHING which will cause the Mono controversy to disappear – as long as vague threats of legal attacks are manufactured and fuelled by certain members of the community. Much like a presidential birth certificate, there is simply nothing which will placate those who have already made up their own minds without any concerns about basis in reality or fact. Anti-Mono arguments based in reality or fact are fine, and I welcome them – but I’ve very rarely seen them. And even when they are offered, they are offered drowning in a sauce of demagogy and FUD so thick as to obscure the salient point.

So, I think that’s what you were looking for. Repost it or don’t. It’ll make for a new chapter in the daily personal attacks I receive from the oh-so-sophisticated anti-Mono crowd.

–Jo Shields

——–
Understanding is a three-edged sword: your side, their side, and the truth

When I met with Telltale Games to take a first look at their upcoming series of Monkey Island episodic games, I was pleasantly surprised to have the opportunity to meet Dave Grossman, writer/programmer of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge. In our conversation, he revealed a highly exciting bit of information about the team working on the new series.

The Telltale offices are chock full of LucasArts talent who participated in the development of the series, which should give any fan more than enough hope for its continuation. Grossman, however, expressed a certain level of guilt about working on a Monkey Island title without the participation of Ron Gilbert who, along with Tim Schafer, rounds out the trio of people most responsible for the games' success.

To hear Grossman tell the story, it sounds as though such guilt has been assuaged more than a little bit:

Once the ink was on the contracts and we didn't have to keep the thing a complete secret from everyone in the industry, I called Ron and said, 'I'm doing another Monkey Island game.' Ron said that he was going to be in town in a couple of weeks and he'd cancel all of the things he had scheduled to do and just hang out in our offices. So, we had him for three days. He helped out with the story and designed a few puzzles for us.

I was already pretty damn excited to get a new Monkey Island in addition to the remake of Secret of Monkey Island. Now, I'm ecstatic, especially with all the other details about the game that I'm going to be bringing you a little later in a preview from the show. Stay tuned!

Prepare to meet your frosty, carbonated maker in this E3 trailer for Telltale's Tales of Monkey Island.

Brings back memories, doesn't it? That's Dominic Armato voicing Guybrush there. He's the original voice actor for the character, and it shows. Who else could pull off a line like, "Here comes Guybrush Threepwood's glowing sword of hot monkey vengeance!"?

No one, that's who.

I love it when a good rumor comes true. Earlier today I watched a demonstration for LucasArts Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition. It’s a beautiful remake -- completely 3D -- of the LucasArts classic.

If you’re a Monkey Island purist, relax; the game you remember and worship is intact. You can switch to the classic view (with crappy cursor support) at any time with the press of a button. But you probably won’t want to: the environments and characters have a delicious hand-drawn despite Secret of Monkey Island’s ascension to current generation consoles.

There are changes, but they’re subtle. The best example of this is the work on Spiffy the dog inside of the SCUMM bar. In the original version, the close-up of spiffy was canned because of space concerns. In the 3D remake, the close-up has been added. Light touches ambient touches have been added as well -- the classic waterfront is now packed with ancient ships and the moon’s reflection on the water is much more robust.

I wish I could have seen more of the game, but unfortunately, the demo was short. I left with a smile. I grew up with the LucasArts classics and from what I observed, it appears as though LucasArts is being as careful as possible to preserve the game.

Microsoft's new motion controller is a camera, that uses object, movement, and voice recognition to deliver a new kind of immersive gaming experience.

It may look a bit like a Wii sensor bar, but it's something altogether different. Project Natal, as Microsoft is calling it at their 2009 E3 press conference, is a camera and sensor assembly that recognizes faces, body movements, objects, and even voices in order to integrate the player into the gaming environment. Examples shown at the conference include a boy holding up a skateboard, which then appeared on the screen, with the boy then riding said board by just swaying back and forth on his own two feet; two women trying on virtual clothes using a camera image of themselves; facial recognition; voice control; buzzing in to 1 VS 100 by raising a hand;and even browsing the NXE using hand controls as in the movie Minority Report.

Project Natal creative director Kudo Tsunoda took the stage, showing his Xbox Live avatar moving with his movements and playing various tech demos, including a handball game and one that allowed you to paint with stencils.

Development kits are arriving at Microsoft partners today, so while there's no word on when this amazing technology will actually make it into player's hands, with developers like Fable's Peter Molyneux behind it, we can expect great things. Things like this: Molyneux came on stage to present a demonstration of Milo, in which a real woman and a small boy on the screen interact. The boy recognizes her emotions, throwing her a pair of goggles, which she reaches out and grabs.

Everyone at the press conference was floored. This could very well be the sort of show-stopper that Microsoft needs to take home the fictional press conference of the show award.

The fragments of dialogue in this gives a way a fair bit of what’s going to happen in the game, so if you’re allergic to spoilers you might want to avoid it. A rather classy little trailer for Mass Effect 2, anyway, and I’m loving the super-detailed science fiction cities. Falling-to-death dude looks remarkably like the zombo-drones from Dark Athena, too. Hmm. More on this soon, as John gets to see it at E3.
(...)
Read the rest of E3 09: Mass Effect 2 Trailer (0 words)

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Posted by rossignol. | 47 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: Bioware, e3 09, Electronic-Arts, mass effect 2
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

The new PSP Go, leaked just before E3 thanks to the June issue of Sony's own Qore, is tiny little thing. Bigger than an iPhone—but not by much—and slimmer than the original PSP.

When placed side-by-side against some of the current portable gaming competition, the PSP Go illustrates just how different it is from its peers and predecessor. The screen ratio looks similar to older PSP models, but is considerably smaller in size—3.8 inches versus the PSP-3000's diagonal size of 4.3 inches or 11% smaller.

On par with than Sony's other slide-out device, the Mylo 2, from which the PSP Go looks to have borrowed some of its design choices.

The PSP Go is also pretty efficient on overall hardware footprint. The LCD screen is 0.3 inches larger than the iPhone, but thanks to the slide-out controls, doesn't have nearly the same amount of extra plastic flanking each side.

The removal of some of the PSP's original buttons (display, sound, volume) go a long way to keeping the look more efficient than earlier models.

Versus the Nintendo DSi and DS Lite, however, we see just how much smaller the device is in its open position compared to its dual-screen competition. Screen-wise, the DSi and PSP Go are closer than ever, as the former got a quarter-inch boost over the DS Lite's screen, with the Go shaving off a half-inch.

Weight-wise, the PSP Go sounds pretty light—approximately 3.8 ounces, if the 43% lighter than the PSP-3000 figure (and our math) is accurate. That makes it lighter than the iPhone (4.7 ounces) and Nintendo DSi (7.5 ounces).

Keep in mind that these PSP Go figures aren't official, so things may be slightly off. But if you need to budget pocket space for the Fall, it might be handy.

Via Offworld we notice that 2D Boy have released a “not-revolutionary” Rapid Prototyping Framework, to help other would-be devs on their way. This gives you a trimmed down version of the tools 2D Boy used to make World Of Goo. 2D Boy explain:

This means two things:

1. Minimizing the amount of code required to set up a new game
2. Providing all the basic facilities so as to avoid wasting time reinventing the wheel (2D rendering, sound, input, persistence layer, and resource management)

Which is probably quite neat, if you’re wanting to make a 2D game from scratch.

Related stories:

• Craning Level
• Brazilian Dogfight: HAWX Demo
• Anyone for Cricket Demo? (trad.)

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Posted by rossignol. | 41 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: 2D-Boy, free
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

On Monday we released Tomboy 0.15.1, the latest development release on the road to 1.0. It features a lot of the same fixes from 0.14.2, and some other improvements:

• Preview of new Web Synchronization add-in
  
• Work around problems on Windows caused by having multiple GTK+ applications modify PATH
  
• Search for phrases by surrounding them with quotes, save the width of the Notebook pane, and other improvements to the search UI
  
• Better HIG compliance in synchronization UIs
  
• All the same fixes from 0.14.2
  
• And much more!

I'd like to talk to you a little bit about this "Web Synchronization" add-in. From a feature perspective, the biggest problem with Tomboy has been how difficult it is to synchronize your notes between multiple computers, and to share your notes with your friends and colleagues. We have note synchronization but it's hard to set up unless you have your own server. You can share notes with Giver, but that has its limitations as well. And how do you view your notes when you're on a device without a Tomboy notes client?

A long time ago I blogged about how great a free "Tomboy Online" web service would be as a fix for these issues, but I never had the time to follow up on it. Until now.


Meet Snowy. Snowy is a project started by Brad Taylor to bring your Tomboy notes online. It's "Tomboy's best friend on the web", as Brad says. Here is what you can expect from Snowy in the coming weeks and months:

• "Tomboy Online" - a free hosted service (running Snowy), where anybody can create an account for securely synchronizing their notes.
  
• Fine-grained privacy settings to let you mark your notes as public, private, or shared with specific friends.
  
• Edit your notes directly in your browser!

Brad started Snowy in his spare time, and recently our team at Novell had a Hackweek at our disposal. So last week, Brad and I decided to really get this project off the ground. It is still an extremely new project, but we feel it's far enough along to solicit feedback and contributions from the community. Some basic facts about the project:

• Snowy is AGPL-licensed. I firmly believe that our community needs to step up and start offering competitive AGPL web services. If we want to stay relevant, that is!
  
• Snowy is developed in Python on the Django web framework. Most people who expressed an interest in working on this were most familiar with Python for web apps.
  
• Snowy is developed in GNOME git. If you watch the commits list, you've no doubt seen the recent activity.
  
• Snowy is easy to deploy on your personal server. If you don't want to trust Tomboy Online with your notes, you can still use Snowy to give yourself web access to your notes, or just to provide a more convenient way to synchronize.

Snowy is brand new! I hope in the screenshots you see the potential, but I'm sure you also see how much room there is for improvement.

What works:

• Tomboy<->Snowy note synchronization
  
• Online note-viewing
  
• User registration
  
• Database administration and other fancy Django stuff

Where we need help:

• Authentication review, OAuth
  
• HTML/CSS/JS to prettify everything
  
• Design and implement all that cool note-sharing stuff
  
• Little features like copying a friend's note into your collection, or downloading/emailing/printing any note straight from your browser
  
• Security audit
  
• Your ideas!

You may be wondering how Snowy and Tomboy communicate for synchronization. I will talk about this more in a future post, but we have designed a REST API for web synchronization. This API is easy to consume from the client end, and easy to implement on the server end. This means we should have no trouble adding sync capabilities to Tomdroid and other Tomboy note clients. It also means that if you don't like Snowy, you can create your own web service that implements the same API, and still use the same web synchronization add-in included in Tomboy.

We still have a lot of work to do to make synchronizing and sharing your Tomboy notes effortless and fun! Outside of Snowy, here are some things we'd like help working on:

• Automatic background synchronization in Tomboy
  
• Web synchronization support in Tomdroid
  
• More features in the web synchronization add-in, like:
  
  • One click to get from your Tomboy note to its Snowy page
    
  • Control your sharing preferences for a note without opening your browser
    
  • Easy access to friends' notes

By the way, if you plan on using Tomboy 0.14.x for a long time, you'll be able to use the Web Synchronization add-in, too! When we launch Tomboy Online, downloads will be available for 0.14.x users on all platforms.

Stay tuned for more updates, and a demo server for everybody to play with!

This post brought to you by the Tomboy Blogposter add-in.

Ever since Alex let Tomboy see the light of day, I've been aching for some way to sync the catalog of musings and information that I've accumulated between the various computers I interact with on a daily basis. In particular, I've been complaining about this to various friends (especially Sandy) for years and, aside from boring them nearly to tears, I haven't done anything about it.

Unlike many ideas that I kick around in my head, this one wouldn't give up the ghost. When Sandy was in town recently for work, we turned whining into action and started scheming and hacking on a way for Tomboy notes to be synced and viewed on the web. We call this project Snowy.

What is Snowy?

Snowy is Tomboy's best friend on the web. Snowy is an online service that allows you to view, edit and share the notes you create in Tomboy on your desktop computer.

Snowy leverages Django, a powerful (and pony powered) python-based web framework, and is based upon several powerful Django applications, among them: django-reversion, django-evolution and django-piston. This has allowed us to get a rough structure up in an incredibly short time (you can look at the commit logs for yourself!), and leveraging proven, scalable components like we have will hopefully allow us to continue at this breakneck pace.

Tomboy synchronizes with Snowy using the new Tomboy Web Sync Service Add-in developed by Sandy. We've defined a solid REST API to allow Snowy and Tomboy to communicate, and also to allow other folks to develop their own apps based upon the same kick-ass synchronization add-in.

Much like Tomboy, Snowy attempts the same innovative design ideas by starting you off in editing mode with an unobtrusive contentEditable-based WYSIWYG editor. Hate save buttons? No problem. Snowy will auto-save your note every 4 seconds so you don't lose a word.

Everyone has a smart phone nowadays, so Snowy will feature an interface tailored to the iPhone and Android style of devices. This will likely be read-only as neither browser allows contentEditable divs.

And, in addition to allowing you to host your own instance of Snowy if you're so interested, we plan on hosting Snowy as a service called Tomboy Online.

Caveat Emptor

Unfortunately for those of you who want to use this yesterday, much of what I've mentioned is still in progress. Snowy is currently under heavy development, and is not ready for production use. Like any good K9 companion, Snowy will file your taxes improperly, reconcile with your ex-girlfriends and burn risotto if not watched carefully.

If you want to teach Snowy some new tricks, we could use the help. Django experts and designers are especially welcome, but folks who want to provide input, test, document or translate Snowy are warmly invited.

Getting it

Snowy's code is hosted on GNOME Git. Please check out our handy INSTALL guide to get started.

Getting in Touch

We're just now setting up much of the infrastructure for Snowy, so you'll need to bear with us. For right now, Sandy and I hang out in #snowy on irc.gimp.net, and I can be reached via email at brad (at) getcoded.net.

Ed: Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get reCAPTCHA up this evening so that I could open up comments to anyone. I'll try to do this for future posts though. If you have feedback, please shoot me an email or join #snowy.

Purple sneakers? Hah. Nothankyou. Oh! Unless they're custom purple Cons covered in Grim Fandango artwork. Now that, that we can consider.

Reader Tonks - who also made those Noby Noby and Phoenix Wright kicks - sends us his latest work, showing that his love, like ours, is as strong as ever for Tim Schafer's wonderful adventure game.

And as strong as ever for wonderful video game sneakers. Even if they are purple.

The Grim Fandango Converse. [Kyozo Kicks]

Cougem writes "John Fremlin has released what he believes to be the worlds fastest webserver for small dynamic content, teepeedee2. It is written entirely in LISP, the world's second oldest high-level programming language. He gave a talk at the Tokyo Linux Users Group last year, with benchmarks, which he says demonstrate that 'functional programming languages can beat C.' Imagine a small alternative to Ruby on rails, supporting the development of any web application, but much faster."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Flash drives aren't quite a dime a dozen, but it's pretty easy to amass a bunch of them in your office drawer. This guide helps you turn them into software-packed giveaway drives.

Many readers were curious about the giveaway flash drives in my laptop bag. Why give flash drives away? I found that despite only using a single flash drive, I had a drawer full of them in my office. Between promotional give-aways, lost or abandoned drives with no identifying information, and friends tossing their old small drives my way, I had quite a pile of them. Rather than let them rot into obsolescence, I pack them with software to give away to people. Whenever someone sees me using my flash drive on my laptop to run all sorts of programs, or someone expresses interest in the kind of stuff we write at Lifehacker, I've always got a few in my laptop bag to share.

My approach to creating the drives is to create mock drives on my main computer. I have a folder for each of the smaller drive sizes, like 128MB, 256MB, and so on. All files for that size flash drive are stored in the folder, ready to be copied onto a drive. I aim to only use 50% or less of the capacity of the drive. This way the person who receives it won't have to clean house immediately to get some usable space for their own files. The list below is arranged in order of drives from smallest to largest. Each size includes the contents of the previous size, so Firefox, for instance, is on every drive size even though it only appears under 128MB; the largest drives contains everything on this list.

I include applications based on one of two reasons: Either the application is one I use on a daily basis and love (like Firefox and Everything), or the application is good enough for me to recommend it, even though I don't use it on a daily basis (such as Thunderbird). Every drive includes, in addition to the software listed below, a readme file with a basic explanation of the software's functionality and a link to the software's website. Without further delay, the lists!

128MB Drives

• PStart: The PortableApps.com menu is great, but PStart is a tiny, no frills, start menu I prefer.
• Firefox: The ever extensible browser we all know and love.
• Notepad++: Notepad on steroids, great for casual notes and coding alike.
• EjectUSB: Tiny utility for shutting down and removing traces of applications before removing your flash drive.
• 7-Zip: Archive creation and extraction tool.
• ClamWin: Virus protection on the go.
• Easy Duplicate Finder: Speedy little app for weeding out duplicate files.
• Q-Dir: There are a handful of great portable file managers, but Q-Dir won me over with the 4-pane design.
• Everything: Ultra-fast NTFS file indexer, I can't image using a computer without it.
• Fast Copy: A file copying application that is head and shoulders above the cruddy default Windows copy handling.
• KeePass: Excellent password manager, strong passwords are must.
• U3 Removal Tool: I don't give away drives with the U3 system still on them, still I include this tool so that recipient can help other people ditch U3.
• VLC Media Player Portable: Rock solid music and video playback.

256MB Drives

• FastStone Capture: No longer freeware, the link here is to an older but still great version. My favorite screen capture tool.
• FileZilla Portable: When the basic FTP in Firefox won't cut it, FileZilla picks up the slack.
• ImgBurn: Fantastic CD/DVD burning tool. Requires a small tweak for portable usage, explained at the link provided.
• JkDefrag Portable: Like FastCopy, a much better defragger than the Windows default.
• JPEGCrops: Excellent bulk image cropping tool.
• Pidgin PortableInstant messenger with support for multiple chat protocols.
• Sumatra PDF Portable: Faster and more portable than Acrobat.
• Toucan: Backup, Synchronize, and encrypt the contents of your flash drive.
• WinDirStat Portable: Visualize disk usage for easy disk cleanup and management.
• Eraser: Secure file deletion.
• Irfranview: Snappy image viewer with a ton of features.
• System Information for Windows: Returns a huge amount of information about the computer it is run on like hardware configurations, serial numbers, and more.

• 512MB+ Drives

• Open Office: Open source and portable Microsoft Office alternative.
• Mozilla Thunderbird: Robust email client.
• Mozilla Sunbird: Calendar and Task management.

If you have a suggestion for an addition to the list of portable apps I include on my giveaway drives, sound off in the comments below; I'll try the software out and consider adding it to my next batch of giveaway drives.

Last year I wrote about some feeds offered by YouTube that weren't available in the interface. Since then YouTube added feeds for search results, videos from a channel and even from your subscriptions: just click on the orange icon from the address bar and you should see the feeds.

That means you no longer have to visit YouTube's homepage to find new videos from your subscriptions. You can subscribe to the following feed in Google Reader or another feed reader:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/username/newsubscriptionvideos
(replace "username" with your YouTube username)

The great thing is that you can subscribe to other users' feeds. For example, you'll find a lot of interesting videos in Google's subscriptions, which include channels like: Webmaster Help, Google Talks, Google Developers etc.


If not all the videos are interesting to you, use the query parameter to show only the videos that include certain keywords in their titles or descriptions. For example:

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/base/users/google/newsubscriptionvideos?q=mobile

Read more about YouTube's feeds in the Data API reference guide.

Up until now, the only image that has been released about Team ICO's next game is a single image of a chain hanging down what appears to be a well. Today we help lift the curtain off of this project a bit and shed some light on what Fumito Ueda has been up to these past few years and as you will see, it is rather close to ICO.

Jim’s already done an extensive round-up of the more interesting mods for Stalker: Clear Sky, but me, I’m happy sticking to the original Stalker: Shadow of Chernobyl. While the Oblivion Lost mod and its million features is the most renowned fan-tweak, there’s much to be said for retaining the game’s original structure rather than necessarily embracing such sweeping changes. With that in mind, I’m very much enjoying replaying SHOC with the Stalker Complete 2009 modpack. Primarily, it simply makes the game much, much prettier. How pretty? This pretty:

More shots below.
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Read the rest of Ultro-Mod: Stalker Complete 2009 (185 words)

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Posted by ento. | 75 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: free, mod, stalker
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

The Cappuccino team has announced Cappuccino 0.7.

There are some fairly big improvements:

Aristo New Look Open Sourced

Sofa has been working on a new look, and Aristo has been released to the world via PSD. It is very cool that the look and feel has been open sourced.

All the controls have been updated to use the new style, and we’ve added a few new controls as well, like checkboxes, radio buttons, and segmented controls.

Theming

We didn’t just build one new look for Cappuccino, though. Instead, we built an entirely new theme engine which will let anyone create a theme for Cappuccino. All the properties of the standard controls are fully themeable in all the different “theme states” (like “pushed”, “disabled”, “normal”, etc.). In the coming months, we’ll be sharing new themes with the community, and building a site for users to post their own themes for others to download and use.

Interface Builder

Those of you who come from a Cocoa background are used to using Apple’s Interface Builder tool to layout your Cocoa applications. Thanks to a technology in 0.7 called nib2cib, you can use Interface Builder to layout Cappuccino applications too. All of the classes supported in Cappuccino 0.7 that have Cocoa analogues are included. So, you can drag checkboxes, sliders, text fields, buttons, and lots more. You can even instantiate custom top level objects, or custom view subclasses, which will be converted to the right class in Cappuccino by the nib2cib tool. Once you’re done laying out the UI of your application with Interace Builder, you can use it’s target-action and outlet technology to build up its logic as well.

It is also cool that Narwhal an early implementation of the ServerJS work has made it in there. Great work guys!

Witness the Robot Chicken creative team using the Spore Galactic Adventures editor to create their own fanciful tales of poo-flinging.

Hot on the heels of this morning's announcement that the Robot Chicken team was providing downloadable adventures for Spore's Galactic Adventure's expansion comes this video, proving the fact. It features one hell of a Spore rendition of the titular chicken, along with a bonus appearance by Breckin "Garfield's Jon Arbuckle" Meyer. It doesn't get much better than this.

While cosplay can often be an amateur, stinky affair, sometimes people put a little more effort into it. This gallery - of some Mirror's Edge cosplay - is one of those times.

The work of Jesse James Allen and his crew, it shows Faith (played by Yen Ryder) doing the kind of thing she does best, in the kind of places she likes to be seen.

While some of the shots in the gallery are a little cheesy, others restrain themselves enough to bring a little light to our dreary Monday morning.

The Mirror's Edge [Savage Land @ Flickr]

Wie es aussieht, werden Special Agent Booth und Knochenspezialistin [rolle=Temperance Brennan, Bones] noch eine Weile Zeit haben, um endlich zueinander zu finden. Fox hat die Serie "Bones" Berichten zufolge für zwei Jahre verlängert. [Alle Infos bei Serienjunkies...]

Always fan of a bit of maths on RPS. So when Simon Parkin made me watch a little procedural city demonstration that’s been doing the rounds, I thought I should share. If you want to know how it’s done, you should turn to the developer’s enormous diary of its development. If you want to know what it does, you should look at the video beneath the cut or consider downloading its very-much-pre-alpha screensave incarnation.
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Read the rest of We Built This City On (er) Maths: PixelCity (0 words)

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Posted by KieronGillen. | 36 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: Pixelcity, procedural generation
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

Google first implemented a basic task management service as a Gmail Labs feature, then it developed an iPhone version and an iGoogle gadget. Now you can manage your tasks from Google Calendar. There are two ways to view your tasks in Google Calendar: in the right sidebar, where you can also manage your tasks, and as a built-in calendar.


Here are some of the details of the integration with Google Calendar:

* Tasks that have due dates will automatically appear on your calendar in the All Day event section.
* To create a task with a due date in Calendar, click on an empty space in Month view or in the All Day section and select the Task option.


* To attach a due date to an existing task, click the right arrow next to the task in question in the Task list. Then, click on the calendar icon to select a date.
* To modify a task's date, simply drag the task to a new date (as you would with a calendar event).
* To mark a task as complete from within Calendar, click on the checkbox next to the task.

Unfortunately, you can't use "quick add" to create tasks, the tasks calendar can't be synchronized with other applications and you still can't receive email or SMS notifications for tasks.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Media Players seem to be a hot topic right now. After the upgrades to Scott Schiller's SoundManager, Paul Bakaus of the jQuery UI team now puts a firm stake into the ground with the uberplayer.

The uberplayer takes a leaf out of the book of the UI of standalone media players. Instead of cluttering the interface with all kind of controls it only shows what is needed on demand. The different menus slide in and out as needed, there is a coverflow menu with video previews and very useful keyboard shortcuts.

Check it out - I love the amount of detail that went into it and how smooth the overall experience is.

Schizoslayer pointed me at the trailer for the forthcoming Unreal Tournament 3 mod The Ball. It’s out on the 7th, and the trailer really looks quite exciting. It’s got a mesoamerican theme to its first person puzzling, and has the vague vibe of you being a tiny person in a world of Marble Madness. Except with stress on the word “Madness”. It’s got that horror-movie vibe about it. For more information, you can have a look at the site, but it’s best to just sink up the atmosphere from the trailer.
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Read the rest of To Sphere Is Human: The Ball Trailer (26 words)

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Posted by KieronGillen. | 23 comments | Donate or subscribe to RPS | Post tags: mod, The Ball, Toltec Studios, Unreal Championship, whacking great apes
This article is from Rock, Paper, Shotgun. If you're reading it on any other website, they're stealing it from us without permission.

Scott Schiller has updated his popular SoundManager 2 library to include new functionality made possible by Flash 9, such as:

* Full-screen MPEG-4 video (HE-AAC/H.264) and audio support
* "MultiShot" play (layered/chorusing effects)
* Waveform/frequency spectrum data
* Peak (L/R channel volume) data
* Audio buffering state/event handling

In addition, SoundManager 2 now includes improved console.log()-style debugging, a troubleshooting/help tool, and the project website sports redesigned documentation, updated API demos, and more examples.

One of those examples is a "360° UI" sound visualization; this is the screenshot at the head of the post. The website features plenty of other demos, including full-screen video playback, etc.

This obviously takes SoundManager to a whole new level and is very exciting stuff.

There's a new Wolverine movie in theaters, which means it's time for another developer to take a stab at Marvel's stabbiest super-hero with X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Developer Raven Software isn't altogether unfamiliar with Wolverine, having played about with him in both the X-Men Legends series and Marvel Ultimate Alliance; but this is the first time the developer has flown solo with the most fearsome Canadian on the face of the planet. Just like the film, the video game adaptation of X-Men Origins: Wolverine is all about Logan, his claws, and people being punctured by said claws. Raven has stated over and over again during the development process that they are trying to capture the essence of the character - trying to deliver the ultimate Wolverine experience.

Has Raven successfully translated the raw brutality of the world's most popular savage to the video game stage, or is X-Men Origins: Wolverine as forgettable as so much of Logan's mysterious past?

Loved
The Best At What He Does: Raven set out to create the ultimate Wolverine experience, and they've pretty much nailed it. This version of Logan far surpasses the movie version in terms of sheer brutality, literally tearing into enemies with everything he's got. The lunging mechanic is pure Wolverine, though one has to wonder why he can only jump extremely far when there's an enemy nearby. Feral senses are an interesting way to convey Wolverine's more bestial nature, using colors to indicate the way that Logan smells the world. If you're a fan of the scrappy, relentless, savage Wolverine, then this is your game.

It's Not All Slice And Dice: While slashing enemies to shreds with your claws can get you out of most situations, there are certainly situations where the block button is essential. More skilled players will get a kick out of the counter-attacking system, which has Wolverine retaliating in various entertaining ways if an enemy's strike is blocked with just the right timing. The quick kill system is basically a timed button press that results in some of the game's goriest deaths. And as implausible as it might sound, deflecting an incoming missile back at the shooter with your claws is extremely satisfying. All in all the combat system is deep and entertaining enough to keep you smiling throughout the entire length of the 8-10 hour game.

Build Your Own Logan: There are multiple ways to customize how your version of Wolverine plays. As you level, you gain skill points that can be used to beef up the powers and skills you accrue as you play. You also unlock up to three mutagen slots, which you can assign any number of powers to, from converting damaged caused to health to increasing the experience gained with each kill. It gives the player a little bit of control over how the game plays. It might not be much, but I appreciate having the options available.

Double-Sized Boss Fights: While some of the boss fights are nothing more than glorified brawls, there are a couple scattered throughout the game that are simply amazing. I don't want to spoil anything here, but one boss fight in particular had the X-Men fan in me wanting to stand up and applaud. The big Gambit fight is another one that had me grinning ear-to-ear. I couldn't have imagined a better place for these two characters to battle it out.

The Inevitable Fan Service: The developers at Raven further prove their comic book pedigree by including little nods to characters and events taking place in the past and distant future of the Marvel Universe. Audio logs scattered about various levels give us insight into the motivations of the characters working behind the scenes, while cameos from other Marvel characters give us some interesting information as to the origins of others. Between the little nods and the unlockable costumes from Wolverines come and gone, there's plenty in the game to please the hardcore fans.

Achievement Tracking: A small feature more than likely thrown in as an afterthought, the screen that keeps track of your kill counts for specific achievements is an excellent addition to the game. Developers need to pay attention here. If I have to kill 2,000 enemies to gain an achievement or trophy, being able to see how many I've got left to kill is not only convenient, it's an excellent motivation to go back and replay through the game after you've completed it.

Hated
Haven't I Stabbed You Before?: X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a beat-em up. I understand this, and I can forgive fighting the same peons over and over again. In fact, there's actually a nice variety to the smaller enemies you encounter, so that part really doesn't get stale. It's the big enemies that get repetitive. The giant magma elemental is impressive as hell when you first encounter it, but after the third or fourth time the encounters start to lose their punch. Simply varying the enemies in a slight way would have served to keep things fresh (oooh, it's a blue magma elemental!). Instead, Raven just throws the same giant creatures at you, sometimes in pairs just to keep you on your toes.

Attack Of The Technovirus: As with any movie tie-in, X-Men Origins: Wolverine had to make the movie release date, and in doing so obviously missed out on a little bit of quality assurance testing. Bodies have an odd tendency to hang in the open air rather than settling to the ground, for instance. The Gambit level is particularly buggy. At several points during the drawn-out chase after the ragin' cajun I found myself slicing and dicing at him only to discover that the Gambit I was fighting was simply a glitch that wouldn't die, and that my quarry had already run along further down the level. There are also a few horrible camera glitches in the same level that left me shifting my perspective dizzyingly for several minutes as I tried to navigate a narrow ledge. Top that off with some frustratingly buggy enemy behavior (can you say infinite impalement loop?) and you've got a game that didn't get nearly the polish it deserved.

Making It Look Too Easy: Wolverine is one of the toughest characters in the Marvel universe; I get that. Certain allowances have to be taken with a character like that in order to make an enjoyable video game out of their adventures. Raven has done an admirable job of making Wolverine a walking, talking, spinning engine of brutal destruction - perhaps too good of a job. There wasn't one point during the game that I was worried that I might die, save for a portion towards the beginning where your powers aren't quite working up to speed.

Tomb Wolverine: A game this focused on brutal action completely loses momentum when you suddenly find yourself pushing statues about on platforms in order to unlock doors. This is not something Wolverine does. If Wolverine wants a door, Wolverine MAKES a door.

Raven Software has done a lot of things right with X-Men Origins: Wolverine. They've captured the look and feel of Marvel's claw-wielding sociopath better than any other game before it. They even attempted to do something new, introducing real-time healing that more often than not saw my version of Wolverine running around with strips of cloth pasted randomly about his chest and blood pooling around his ass in a rather disgusting fashion, but they certainly did try to do something different. I've the distinct feeling that if they hadn't been tied down to the movie's release date, this could have been one of the best comic book video games of all time.

Flaws aside, X-Men Origins: Wolverine still manages to be the best it is at what it does, delivering many hours of satisfyingly brutal action the merry Marvel way.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine was developed by Raven Software and published by Activision, released May 1st for the PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Nintendo Wii, Nintendo DS, PSP, and PC. Retails for $30 - $60. Played Xbox 360 version. Completed game on standard difficulty, unlocked three extra costumes, earned 40 out of 50 achievements.

Confused by our reviews? Read our review FAQ.

On May 5th, general users will have access to an entire year of Microsoft's brand new operating system, Windows 7, for free! It is already available to download for MSDN and TechNet subscribers.

From the creators of Dragon Quest V, Final Fantasy III and IV for the DS, Thousand Arms, Fatal Frame, and Grandia comes Nostalgia, an original steampunk role-playing game for the Nintendo DS.

Released in Japan as Nostalgeo no Kaze, Ignition Entertainment and Tecmo join forces with Matrix Software and Red Entertainment to bring the game stateside as Nostalgia. It's a combination of a unique setting with some of the top talent in old-school RPG development. Players will explore the world of an alternate 19th-century Earth in the role of Eddie, a headstrong Londoner who gathers a group of quirky companions together, travelling the world in a "steampunk-inspired" zeppelin. Players will visit alternate versions of New York, London, Cairo, Africa, and Russia; doing battle in both traditional turn-based combat and massive airship battles.

While the game sounds impressive, the development team's pedigree is even more so.

Developed by Matrix Software (Dragon Quest V PS2, Final Fantasy III-IV DS), in association with Red Entertainment (Gungrave, Bonk, Thousand Arms), Nostalgia brings together a powerful think-tank of old-school Japanese RPG development talent to present a stunning new vision in gaming. Produced by Keisuke Kikuchi (Fatal Frame, Tokobot) and directed by Naoki Morita (Sakura Taisen), with art direction by Yoshiteru Tsujino (Far East of Eden), airship design by Takuhito Kusanagi (Grandia, Blue Submarine No.6, Samurai 7), and enemy design by Keita Amemiya (Iria- Zeiram the Animation, Kamen Rider), Tecmo has amassed an all-star dream team of industry veterans to forge a brand new DS adventure that hearkens back to the classic glory days of Japanese role-playing games.

Nostalgia is due to be released in North America in September of this year. While we await screenshots and the like, feel free to drool lightly over the feature list issued with the official announcement.

Key Game Features:

• Ambitious, fully 3D polygonal graphical engine offers dramatic, sweeping camera angles and impressive vistas rarely seen in a DS title.
• Cohesive, anime-inspired art direction that effectively captures the game's turn-of-the-century charm.
• Travel to incredibly unique, non-traditional RPG locales via airship including London, New York, Cairo, Africa, and Russia.
Features two distinct combat engines: One is a brisk, turn-based close-quarters melee between your party members and monsters; while the other offers thrilling, large-scale airship battles. In addition, your battle skills are scored at the conclusion of each conflict, inspiring strategic mastery.
• Handy in-game notebook feature keeps track of people, monsters, airships and items you've run across. • Plenty of user-defined customization, allowing the player to trick out his or her airship with various weapons, armor types, and special skill attacks. The player can also choose character-specific skills from a branching tree for a more personalized experience.
• Explore a variety of diverse, engaging dungeons that include brain bending puzzles and tricky Indiana Jones-style traps.
• Optional quest system inspires players to approach the adventure from a less linear perspective, extending the life of the gameplay experience.

Steam's weekend deal should take care of any leftover PC gamers who've yet to experience the glory of The Orange Box, with the whole shebang available now for 66% off.

Unless you don't have $10 to spare, there is officially no reason why you shouldn't at least own The Orange Box by the end of the weekend. $9.99 gets you Half-Life 2, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Half-Life 2: Lost Coast, Team Fortress 2, Portal, and some cake.

Okay, I lied about the cake.

The Orange Box for $9.99 [Steam]

Demigod had a regrettable launch. Too many pirates, server infrastructure couldn't cope. But after a week we're sure Stardock would rather forget, things are looking up!

A status report on Stardock's site lets us know that while for an unfortunate few the online-only game is effectively broken, for "most people" things are "working pretty decently". Which isn't a clean bill of health, we know, but it's also good enough for people to at least dip their toes into the game's cold, icy depths.

While it's easy (especially if you actually bought the game) to get angry at Stardock for such a sloppy launch, try and remember that a big reason it was so sloppy in the first place is because the company shipped the game without DRM. Which really is something that should be applauded.

Demigod: Day 6 Status Report! [Stardock]

The hack disables direct control of Mario completely, and only allows you to manipulate him via mouse-drawn lines.