In defense of online console subscriptions

 Widely disliked to the point of being considered predatory, difficult to measure in terms of real cost, and one of the most common points of attack against consoles from PC gamers, paid online multiplayer services in consoles are what I will try to analyze and defend in this article.

Analyzing Nintendo Switch Online Subscription

First, to simplify our analysis, let's focus on the most basic of these subscriptions: The Nintendo Switch Online individual membership, costing $19.99 per year. It doesn't offer much in "extra" content, except for some old Game Boy games that you could easily play on an emulator and which likely cost Nintendo very little to provide. From those $19.99, we need to subtract the actual cost Nintendo incurs to maintain online game servers for you (one extra player). For a very rough estimate, you can rent a Counter-Strike 2 game server (at retail prices) for about $1 per player slot. Of course, you won't be playing just one game, but over time and across 38 million subscribers, the cost is averaged out, and the actual cost per player should be fairly close to that. That still leaves $18.99 from your subscription going directly to their pockets. "Outrageous!" you might say, "To pay $18.99 just for the privilege of playing online." Well, it's not that simple. Let's continue with the analysis.

The Present Value of Subscription Payments

There's a formula in finance that allows us to convert any future payment to a present payment, or even a series of future payments to a single present payment and vice versa.

If C is your future payment (say a single subscription payment), i is the yearly interest rate that Nintendo gets for their savings, and n is the number of years until you make that future payment, then that future payment has a present value (PV), (i.e., it is currently worth to Nintendo):

So, for example, if the yearly interest is 2%, when you start a subscription, the first payment (happening the same day) is worth, obviously, $19.99 to Nintendo at that moment in time. But your next-year payment is worth $19.60. In other words, Nintendo would not care if you want to pay another $19.99 next year, or just pay $39.59 the very first day and be done for two years. Similarly, your third year payment of $20 is worth an equivalent payment of $19.21 if you made it the first day of the first year. So you could pay $58.80 up-front and be done for three years; Nintendo would be unaffected either way.

The Real Cost of an Online-Capable Switch

Assuming a lifetime of 7 years for a Switch console, that would be 7 payments of $20, spaced out over that period. That's equivalent to an up-front payment of $131.96. With an introductory price of $299.99, that means that in effect, Nintendo is selling an offline-only Switch for $299.99 and an online-capable Switch for $431.95. They are just "forcing" those wanting the online version of the Switch to get a loan with 7 installments of $19.99 at 2% interest from Nintendo to pay those extra $131.96 for that version. This is probably done because it's easier to convince your parents to pay another $19.99 per year instead of getting you a $431.95 Switch, even though it's effectively the same cost, just structured differently.

Why Charge More for Online Play?

Where does that leave us? Why does Nintendo charge those who want to play online multiplayer $131.96 more? There are three answers that I can think of:

1. They are simply copying Sony and Microsoft. I will not consider this as a real answer because it simply changes the question to "Why is Sony charging those who want the online version of PlayStation more?" which cannot be answered by pointing the finger at Nintendo again. We only picked Nintendo for the analysis because it was simpler, but my conclusions should more or less apply to all three consoles.
2. They charge online players more because they are more "hardcore gamers" and are willing to spend more on their console than those who only play single-player games. That means Nintendo is earning pure profit from these players. We'll analyze this case further down.
3. Online players are more focused on their favorite online games. A player without a subscription will play one single-player game after another, spending all their time exclusively on finishing games. A player interested enough to buy a subscription for online play is more likely to focus on one of the fewer online games, say Splatoon, and spend most of their time on it, leaving less room for finishing single-player games. I find this answer very likely to be true. Anecdotally, I've been mostly an online player for many years, and I definitely bought fewer games back then, while now I play mostly offline and buy more games, finishing (or dropping) one after another. If this is true in general and not just in my case, then Nintendo is likely charging more up-front to make up for that loss of future income. Often, console hardware itself is sold at a loss, so the way to make up for that loss is by selling games. But if your intention is to buy two games over 7 years (say Splatoon 2 and Splatoon 3), then obviously Nintendo can't have that.
4. A combination of #2 and #3 could also be the real answer. Analyzing that is the same as analyzing #2, which we'll now do.

Potential Consequences of Banning Subscriptions

Let's assume then that Nintendo is overcharging online players. Is that outrageous? What happens with these profits? What would happen if they were somehow forced to reduce those profits? Imagine that a law gets passed that bans subscriptions for consoles. What now? How does Nintendo react to that? Any of the following, or a combination of them could happen:

1. The price of the console itself could be increased. 38 million subscribers out of 143 million units sold very naively means that about 26.57% of the sold units were those hypothetical "online" units that effectively cost $431.95, and 73.43% are those offline-only units that cost $299.99. Now these two models are equalized, so the end result would be an online-capable unit for an introductory price of $335.06. The bad thing here is that we may have gone from a situation where the "hardcore online players" were subsidizing cheap consoles for the offline-only players, to a situation where the offline-only players are now subsidizing the costs of the online players.
2. The price of all games could go up by whatever amount is needed to keep the profits the same as before. Again, the offline-only players would end up paying more in the long run, and the online players would end up paying less. If your subscription effectively costs $131.96 like we showed, paid by 38 out of every 143 users, and the average player purchases 6 games per year over 7 years, then that would be a $0.83 game price increase.
3. The price of just the online games would go up by whatever amount is needed to keep the profits the same as before. If you are an average online player, then you'd see no difference in your wallet in the long run. If, as I suspect, the online players buy fewer games, say 3 games per year over 7 years, then that would be a $6.28 game price increase, only on the online games.
4. Nintendo could invest less in research or game development in order to keep their profit the same as before. What this means for the next console or the next game is impossible to predict. It is safe to say that without the current level of R&D, the next console will be less capable and/or more expensive to manufacture.
5. Nintendo could accept the loss of profit and make smaller dividend payments to their stockholders and/or have their stock decrease in value. The end result of that would be some amount of investment leaving the company and going elsewhere. Needless to say, this will not make their next console better or cheaper; quite the opposite.

Market Dynamics and Subscription Models

Of course, all of the above assume no player movement to or from other platforms. It is possible that the PC gaming market is starving for a new gaming machine with the payment structure that PC gamers are used to, i.e., a big up-front payment for the real cost of the hardware and the OS software, no subscriptions, and low game prices with little to no platform markups. In which case, the moment Nintendo decides to stop their subscription model, they get flooded with new players and don't need to do anything at all to make up for the loss of income.

But it's also possible that it's exactly the other way around: that the up-front cost is already too much for console players, that PC players will never buy a console just because the subscription model was abolished, and the market is actually starving for an even more subscription-based service. For example, remember that hypothetical $431.95 subscription-free online-capable Switch? Well, it's exactly equivalent to $65.43 yearly payments for 7 years with no up-front cost. Or even $5.51 monthly payments for 7 years, no up-front cost. And you can kind of do these things by buying the device with a credit card, though those have much higher interest rates than what we assumed so far.

Hell, you can get a PC effectively on exactly the same subscription model as a Switch. For example, buy this laptop:

and pay up-front $303.28 (about the same as the introductory price of a Switch), pay the other $65.21 with a credit card (23.76% effective yearly interest rate), and then make 7 yearly payments of $19.99 on that credit card.

My guess is that if there was space for gaining meaningful market share by dropping the subscription price or even getting rid of it completely, one of Sony, Nintendo, or Microsoft would have already done it. You'd expect that the first one to do it would immediately steal a good chunk from the other two, especially if they waited for one of the other two to announce a pricing change, like when Sony added two more higher tiers to their subscription service. It's also possible that while their market research may show an average improvement in profit margins if they abolish subscriptions, the standard deviation is too high, meaning there's a good chance of reducing their profits below some threshold that would force them to re-implement subscriptions, with unpredictable effects on their users' nerves and reputation. They would certainly look desperate if they were the only company that had to bring back subscriptions. My guess is that their market research shows the opposite: that moving even more of the cost of the console away from the games and hardware and into subscriptions makes more sense in the current market. At least Sony seems to think so, as they showed by recently adding higher tiers, and both Sony and Microsoft now provide games "for free" as long as you pay the subscription. It looks like this model is working for many people. And with Steam Deck and other PC handhelds on the market, Nintendo has even less reason now to try and capture gamers interested in paying up-front for hardware as long as later costs are low.

Comparing to the Commodore 64

To put things into perspective let's compare to one of the best selling computers ever, that was also widely used for gaming: A Commodore 64 would cost $395 to months after release. A floppy drive would about a year after release cost $300. That's a total of $2275.96 in today's money. A 21" CRT uses about 100W, the Commodore 64 uses 21W, for a total of 121W. At $0.076/KWh in 1982 and with 2 hours of gameplay per day, that's $6.71 per year or $22.36 in today's money, more than your yearly Nintendo subscription. Commodore 64 games typically cost $30 around 1984 (really hard to find original pricing information) which is $92.50 in today's money. A Switch uses 8W and a modern monitor of similar size uses 25W for a total of 33W. At 2 hours of gameplay and at $0.1643/KWh, that's $3.96 per year on top of your $19.99 subscription. Or if you play handheld, $0.96 per year on top of the subscription. So a Commodore 64 was 488% more expensive than a Switch, its games cost 54% more than those of the Switch, and the costs for playing it 2 hours per day were about 7% less than those of a Switch on a 21" monitor, or around 6% more expensive compared to a Switch played handheld. And it was not online.

	Commodore 64 (adj. for infl.)	Switch (some adj. for infl.)
Hardware cost	$2275.96	$386.58
Game cost	$92.50	$60
730 hours of electricity cost	$22.36	$3.96 (on a monitor) $0.96 (handheld)
Online multiplayer cost	N/A	$19.99

Conclusion - Fix It Yourself

If you're still certain that Nintendo would actually increase their profit by offering the option to pay the full price up front, I recommend you put your money where your mouth is and offer that service yourself on the market, and become rich. Sell Switches with an add-on service: Your clients pay an extra $131.96 up-front, and you cover their Nintendo subscription costs for 7 years. You should be able to sell more consoles than anyone offering just the console.

Otherwise, don't fuss. As we saw, any up-front cost is equivalent to some recurring cost and vice versa, whether it's paid per game you buy, or per month, or per year. And there are more options than there ever were. But "don't fuss" doesn't mean don't ask console manufacturers to improve their offers. Just don't accuse them of not choosing the price structure of your choice. Convert everything to a present value and compare the different offers. Then use a credit card to move up-front payments to the future, or deposit money up-front in an account to bring future payments to the present.

Trash Favorites: Games

Here are some hot takes, because I love venting by shitting on people's favorite games. I will also suggest superior alternatives.

GTA San Andreas

This game has aged like a smartphone. The camera sucks, the controls are mediocre at best, and the sound quality is inconsistent. Fights are based on finding a way to cheese them, and the lack of either a proper save system or proper checkpoints means so much replaying that, in an age where I have another hundred games that I want to play, it means I won't bother replaying this one. I used to like this game a lot when it came out, but nowadays? I only touch this again because there are no other good open world games on Switch. Superior alternative: Postal 2

Doom Eternal

Possibly the biggest disappointment in my life when it comes to gaming. I loved the Doom reboot. Loved it. With the exception of some of the optional challenges and the shitty boss fights (I dislike inorganic boss fights and bosses with phases as they feel cheap to me), Doom 2016 is one of the best games I've ever played. I pre-ordered Eternal, thinking I'd get more of the same. Instead, I got an annoying puzzle platformer shooter. Now, I wish I could find what else the designers of this game worked on so that I can avoid buying it. In fact, that's a good idea for a website that I'll consider making. Anyhow, the level design looked good to the eye but made zero sense: Two titans (who at that point you have no idea what they are) are frozen in place as one struck the other with a lance. You need to find a battery to plug into the lance so that it turns on and pierces the chest of the other titan so that you can slide through the wall and fall behind the titan in a place looking like Bowser's castle, with spinning flaming chains, and other silly distractions and traps. What the hell were they thinking when designing this level? They were simply trying to make it "look cool" with no consideration of whether it makes sense, if it is fun or even what game they are designing levels for. The graphics were great. The music was fine, though Mick did a much better job in Doom 2016 in my opinion. The gameplay was garbage, focusing on quantity over quality, with the challenge being mainly to figure out the correct sequence of enemies to kill and with what weapon and on what weak spot instead of just going with the flow like in 2016. You used to have a set of amazing tools to have fun with, now you have an array of puzzle pieces to be selected in the right order when they aren't cooling down or out of ammo. And, maybe worse of all, the story and the protagonist would only need to be slightly worse in order to reach the point where they are so bad that they become good again. Unfortunately, they didn't reach that point, so they are both left being just shit. The protagonist, who I refuse to call Doomguy or Doomslayer as he is clearly a different character, since he can't even punch as hard or move as fast as the 2016 Doomslayer or even the original Doomguy unless he has his abilities charged and not in a cooldown or whatever. So anyway, that new boy bent the knee to some king almost at the start of the game. Absolute Haram. Meanwhile, the Doomslayer in 2016 was smashing screens on the ground because he couldn't bother to listen to Hayden's attempts to provide exposition. This new boy is some Game-of-Thrones-nerd's wet dream and does not belong in a series like Doom. Superior alternative: Doom (2016)

Red Dead Redemption 2 Online

An empty, boring hub-world that you very slowly traverse, going from mini-game to mini-game, because that is all Rockstar knows how to do nowadays. Superior alternative: Any Civcraft-style Minecraft server.

GTA V Online

See Red Dead Redemption 2.

Skyrim

This is still one of the best games I've ever played, but Bethesda deserves a ton of shitting for still having game-breaking bugs even after re-releasing the game countless times and for not providing a save-fixing service for console players, not even as a paid service. My opinion about Skyrim is oscillating between 0/10 and 11/10 fast enough to be audible to humans. Superior alternative: Skyrim, when it works.

The Witcher 3

Also buggy, but also not as good as Skyrim. The Witcher 2 actually kept me playing a bit longer then 3 before I went back to Skyrim. I may finish this someday. It's just not high in my priorities based on what I saw after a few hours of playing. Superior alternative: Skyrim

Stardew Valley

I liked fishing in this game. And that was all I liked. Everything else I hated. Farming was tedious. I couldn't care less about the villagers. I constantly wanted to take my protagonist back to his previous career. Finally, I got extremely pissed during the egg hunt because it would not let me go fishing. Overall, it has this mildly puke-inducing Nintendo-goodie feeling that I cannot stand in games. Superior alternative: Rimworld in peaceful difficulty.

Undertale

Yeah, ha-ha, genuinely smart gimmicks all over the game but it was uninteresting and had boring gameplay, mediocre graphics, and an annoying cast of characters. Some amazing music though. Superior alternative: Browsing /b/ for 20 minutes and then going out with a real person.

Bloodborne

Other than the amazing graphic design and atmosphere, this was a disaster for me, one that I thankfully didn't pay for. Not only do I not like the idea of souls-like games in general, because I get precisely zero kicks out of overcoming tedious, hard, trial-and-error challenges, but Bloodborne also seemed unpolished to me. I didn't bother to go past the first two fights or so. Superior alternative: Diablo 2 or 3.

Monster Hunter Generations

Horrible world design with invisible walls all over. Practically unplayable without looking up stuff in the wiki unless you luck out. Needlessly complex mechanics. No feeling of control, it was like I was simply SMSing my character what to do next and the character would sometimes do it while some other times maybe he didn't have time to really check his SMSes right then and there. Basically take the cheap, inorganic boss fight mechanics that I keep complaining about and make a crappy game around them and only them. Superior alternative: Terraria

Rainbow Six Siege

Pretty boring. I played it with friends too, so I had someone to talk to while I was down. Still, I got bored by how little action this game had. The action is good but so little as a ratio of time spent on the game! And I wasn't even half bad - I did fine after some rounds - but the only reason that I didn't uninstall it after a few round was that I had friends in my party. I played for a few days, then dropped it for something else. Superior alternative: TF2 or Overwatch.

BF2042

This is not really a hot take, as this is, after all, widely considered one of the worst Battlefield games. First of all, it does not feel like BF. Specialists? Really? Are they copying Rainbow Six? And the cringe every time they open their mouths is truly unbearable. At least EA reduced it a bit in the latest patches. I should have guessed the series would eventually become a cringe-fest from back when they started selling ridiculous atmosphere-destroying cosmetics in BF5. Superior alternative: BF2142

Baldur's Gate 1

I did not play this back in the day. I got this and BG2 after I liked (though not loved) playing BG3. I still have not tried BG2, but BG1 was unplayable for me. At this point you'd have to pay me quite a lot to play this. It is basically a save-load simulator: Tons of trial and error, and I mean tons. Easy to die. Needlessly complex mechanics. Random deaths galore. I played for some hours and got rid of it. I don't care how innovative this was when it came out, it is complete garbage by today's standards, and there are tons of other games from the same year that are still perfectly enjoyable even today. Maybe BG2 is better, but I doubt it, we'll see. Superior alternative: Divinity: Original Sin II

GTA Vice City

More punishing than San Andreas. Again, I don't care how innovative these games were. There is no enjoyment to be had by playing this today for the first time. If you are nostalgic about it, then fine. But there are tons of other games from the same era that are excellent even by today's standards. FFS, the way-older GTA 2 is much better and super fun to play, even today. Superior Alternative: GTA 2

Mario Odyssey 

Nice controls and graphics but I couldn't find anything interesting in this game. It felt slow, unrewarding, and pointless. Superior Alternative: Super Mario Bros.

It Takes Two

I never finished this game. Developers seem to forget something: Players have the option to stop playing. If you make your story so shit that the "best ending" is to actually stop playing, some players with brain cells will actually do so. We are not bound to the couch, nor did we run out of other games to play. The moment the psychopathic elephant scene was finished, we decided that we do not want our characters to succeed. We were immediately pitted against them. Any willingness to help them get back to their daughter was completely eradicated. So I finished the game, with the actual good ending, by uninstalling it so that they never go back to their daughter. I bought this game because I liked "A Way Out" but I'm not buying any more of this tone-deaf moron's creations. This game really did make me feel like I was scammed out of my money. Superior alternative: Unravel Two

Heavy Rain

Annoying controls, annoying camera, extremely boring story - gameplay slow enough to be played by a tree. I dropped it midway, read the rest of the story on Wikipedia and I am thankful I didn't continue playing it. I loved Beyond Two Souls, but Heavy Rain was just unbearable in every aspect. Superior alternative: Beyond Two Souls

Another World / Out Of This World

One of the worst "games" I've ever played. I get it: amazing graphics for the era, but it, and other similar games like Dragon's Lair, are basically walking simulators with the difficulty turned to "impossible" so that you have to fail at every scene a few times until you find what to do, each time having to replay previous scenes. I don't understand why "games" like this even get anniversary editions. There's zero fun to be had there unless you are a masochist or have been completely blinded by nostalgia. Just go watch the whole thing on YouTube. Superior alternative: Another World walkthrough videos.

Dwarf Fortress

A shitty game with great ideas that served as the basis for so many great games. I would not recommend it to anyone, not even the new graphical version. I just cannot picture any person I know that would enjoy this. There is no sound, alerts don't interrupt by default the game even if they are important (have fun changing the default behavior by going through a list of hundreds of alerts choosing which ones you want to interrupt the game when you don't know what half of them even are until you lose a game for missing them), the game runs too quickly by default. All of these contribute to having no clue about what is going on around your fortress. Top that off with the slowest saves ever so that you cannot save-scum by saving every day and you are basically forced to eat shit whenever the game feels like it. It takes an inordinate amount of reading wikis and forums to find out how to do the most basic things. Nothing is intuitive. Nothing. Every single serious choice in the UI is made in the most awkward way. I really wanted to like this. It seems like there is a gem behind all the trash, but I don't have enough time to waste trying to find the gem only to be tricked by not knowing something and losing it again. Games take a long time to restart too, it's not like this piece of crap gives you a quick way to learn from your mistakes. I also strongly believe that the game will become even worse in the future as more features are added to it when what it needs is 1 metric ton of polishing and a major redesign of the interface, which becomes harder and harder as more bloat is added. Superior alternative: Rimworld

Do you disagree with me? Leave a comment and I guarantee that it will be ignored because you are objectively wrong.

Arrowheads - Gigs and jobs

Some months ago I wrote about a currency system that I use in my Ironsworn campaigns. One of the features of that system was that you could earn currency (arrowheads) for doing some job (or a gig) in a settlement. I provided a system that lets you create oracle tables that tell you how much time you spent working and how many arrowheads you earned which was trying to keep it balanced at 10 arrowheads per day. Since then I've switched from that system for jobs to one that I think works much better.

The new system assumes a flat amount of time is spent if you decide to work as I noticed that especially when playing in a party, tracking different finishing times for each players gig/job was tedious. So in the new system, when you work, you spend 10 hours on the job, flat. If 10 hours in a single gig don't make sense, then perhaps you searched for a gig for 1 hour, worked 4 hours and then had to waste another 2 hours arguing with our boss about getting paid, then another 1 hour searching for another gig and then working for 2 more hours. If you prefer tracking hours in such detail, go ahead and simply keep it on average 10 hours. If you're rather not have to care, just make it a flat 10.

Another difference in this newer system is that working is a risky activity. You will Face Danger every day that you work. We assume that jobs/gigs are Dangerous (in rank) by default. On a strong hit, you did the job perfectly, you take 10 arrowheads plus the regular +1 momentum from Face Danger. On a weak hit, you did the job alright, you get paid 10 arrowheads but you have to reduce one track by 1 as appropriate for your narrative. Perhaps you dropped a heavy thing on your toe. Or you worked in a smelly place for 10 hours and this dispirited you a little. Or you annoyed some god and now you'll be a bit unlucky (-1 momentum). Or your clothes got torn and you need to spend some supply to repair them. If you score a miss, you messed things up badly. Not only you won't get paid but, for a Dangerous job, you need to reduce a track by 2. But you are probably already wondering: what stat do you roll for this Face Danger?

Before you roll for the above Face Danger, roll a D6. If you roll 1-5 translate that to the corresponding stat: 1=Edge 2=Heart 3=Iron 4=Shadow 5=Wits. If you roll 6, then you have two options: Either you chose whichever stat you like, or you increase the rank of the job to the next level (so, initially, from Dangerous to Formidable) and roll again a D6. A formidable job will subtract -3 from a track if you fail your Face Danger roll but if you score a hit you get paid 20 arrowheads (refer to the hourly rates in the Arrowhead Purse asset in my previous post). If chose to upgrade the rank of the job and you roll 6 again, you may choose to upgrade it even more, up to Epic. An Extreme job pays 30 arrowheads, and an Epic job pays 60.

Once you know what stat to add to you roll and what rank the job has, try to envision what job you found and how that stat applies to it that day. If the job is ranked higher than Dangerous envision not only why it is more dangerous or difficult but also why you are getting paid more for it. If you are a healer and you roll Iron on your D6 roll, then perhaps someone asked you to tend to their sick husband but at a critical moment the patient started flailing around in confusion and you had to pin them down. Or maybe even though you are a healer, the only job you could find was helping some merchant move heavy boxes around. If you are a warrior and you roll Shadow on your D6 then perhaps you found a job as a replacement guard, saw a pickpocket and had to tail him for a while before arresting him and finding where he hides all the stolen goods. Or perhaps you found an opportunity to steal from someone, maybe someone you dislike, if you don't mind stealing. If the stat you rolled does not make sense in the narrative, consider your time wasted; you did not manage to find a job that day.

I find that this system of jobs/gigs adds a bit of normalcy when I need it with the potential for some silliness too, like the example of dropping something on your toe that I mentioned above or fumbling a simple job because of bad social skills. You should remember, though, that you don't have to work on every chance you get. You can get arrowheads as a reward, either pre-agreed when you Swear a Iron Vow or as a gift from an NPC to thank your character. You can scavenge arrowheads when appropriate with Resupply. Perhaps you find them whenever you score a strong hit on Resupply or you can Ask the Oracle if you found any. You may pickpocket them with Face Danger +shadow and so on. Find the balance that you like between doing gigs and actually adventuring.

Maybe my next post will be about actual professions as assets. I wonder what it would be like if there was a party where one player is, for example, a rich merchant, who has hired, and has to keep paying the other players as guards. Or maybe a modified version of the Commander asset, where its strength is replenished by spending arrowheads (paying to hire new mercenaries or heal existing ones) and also needs a payments to keep it's strength up (weekly/daily salaries for the mercs).

Bists

Here's a game I published under a different pseudonym some time ago. It's written in Pico-8 which is a fantasy console, hence the 8bit style. It's less of a game and more of an aquarium where the creatures actually evolve their brain to survive. But you can join in too if you want. X opens the menu, Z selects inside the menu or joins the game if you are outside the menu. Arrows move you around. Z changes your bist's color if you have joined the game.

I'll just copy-paste my past description:

Bists have a brain with 23 parameters that governs how they behave, how much HP they have and how fast they are (more HP = less speed). They are aware of their nearest green bist, the nearest red bist, as well as the nearest food source. The decide how to move towards or away of these things, how far to look for their closest bists and food, when to switch their color, how often to think, and when to slack off and slow down their falling HP. When their HP is full they give birth to offspring that has randomly mutated parameters.

Food tends to spawn in one tight (near the bottom right) and one wide (near the top left) cluster.

Every now and then a trap will spawn. This looks like food to the bists but it will freeze the bist that eats it for quite some time.

Be patient, bists sometimes take a long time to evolve. There is a speedup option in the help/menu page that you can use if you can't wait.

You can also join the game and try to outlive the oldest bist or try put evolutionary pressure on them (e.g kill some while you are red, and soon bists will be avoiding red bists)

Make sure to check out all the the options that can be found in the menu in the help/menu screen.

If you evolve any interesting brains paste them here in a comment! You can save to the clipboard the brain of the oldest bist by opening the help/opts page finding "SAVE TO CLIP".

Every now and then bists will play a custom cry which is 100% based on the parameters of their brain. You can also listen to the cry of the oldest bist by saving it.

To load a brain and add it to the game just ctrl+v in PICO-8, then open the help/menu page look into the menu for the "ADD FROM CLIP" option.

Finally this is the cart:

Save it on your computer and open it with Pico-8 to play or edit the code.

Arrowheads - Currency system for the Ironsworn tabletop RPG

I recently started playing Ironsworn, a tabletop RPG. In its world (the Ironlands), even though the rulebook describes caravans trading iron and even the existence of iron coins, (which I think would be useless) the people are not using currency to trade and instead choose to barter. I think the game leaves out money mostly because it does away with many potentially complex mechanics and tracking money would probably be one of them. For example, you don't keep track of how many rations you have with you, or even all the details of your inventory. There is a supply track that ranges from 0 to 5 and this represents your overall preparedness for traveling which could include rations, water, the state of your camping equipment, utensils etc. If you wonder if you have something specific on you that you haven't explicitly noted down, you can just roll the dice find out if you do (or ask your GM if you're playing with a GM). This abstraction of detail is actually nice as it help you focus more on the story. But in one of campaigns I'm playing in the Elder Scrolls universe. And that in that universe people use gold coins to trade.

My first attempt to simulate "having money" was to use the Fortune Hunter asset. But that card is quite limited for what I was envisioning:

As you can see even if you unlock all three abilities, the only ways to acquire wealth is as payment for a vow and by scavenging for precious items. I wanted to be able to be hired for jobs and even to hire others. I wanted to be able to pay a doctor to heal me. But at the same time, the track at the bottom of the asset card, which abstracts your wealth as 6 possible values seems handy; I definitely don't want to track the exact number of coins on my character and have to erase and write numbers. Ironsworn tracks are nice.

So I made my own asset, which belongs to a new category of assets that I'll start to use in my campaigns: Items. Those can be acquired by simply having the item but you still need to spend XP to unlock more of their abilities. I have two versions of this asset which are basically identical except the name of the currency. For my solo game in the Elder Scroll universe I just use "Coin purse" which holds gold coins. For my campaigns in the Ironsworn universe I thought that in such a world people could be using iron arrowheads as a currency since they are relatively small thus easy to transfer, they require some craftmanship to make (so they are worth more than their weight in iron), and even if you can't find someone that accepts them you can still use them to make arrows for hunting or defense or even smelt them down for iron. So, here's the current version of my "Arrowhead purse" asset:

Use this json file to import this card into Asset Workbench. Or use this json to import it into Ironsworn Journal

I'll put a disclaimer here: I own Delve, the expansion to Ironsworn, but I am still going through it and I'm not even done with reading about all the new moves it brings. So if something below is not compatible with it, expect me to change it in the future. This currency system is still evolving.

So let's break it down: First, the card tells you that its tracking your arrowheads (or your coins in the "Coin purse" incarnation of the card) only as a multiple of 10. So when your track says 30, you have about 30 arrowheads. Obviously if you have about 30 arrowheads and you give someone 10 of them, you'll be left with about 20 arrowheads. But how do you handle cases where you give less than 10 arrowheads? Do you move the slider on the track or not? And here the card provides a probabilistic solution to this: Roll a single challenge die (that's a D10 for Ironsworn), and compare the die with the amount of arrowheads you are giving out. If the die is equal or less than the amount of arrowheads you are giving out, then move the slider as if you have just given 10 whole arrowheads, otherwise, assume you gave the arrowheads without moving the slider at all. This, in the long run, is a fair system. The benefit you get from not moving the slider even though you gave someone arrowheads is counterbalanced perfectly by the punishment of having to move the slider by a whole 10 arrowheads in even though you gave someone less than 10 arrowheads. The same goes on for when you receive less than 10 arrowheads: you roll a D10, compare with the number of arrowheads with the die and if the die is equal or less than arrowheads you are receiving, you move the slider by a whole 10 arrowheads, otherwise the slider stays where it was even though you "earned" arrowheads. As for quantities like 24, simply move the slider by 20 which is done without using a dice roll, and then roll the dice for the remaining 4. Specifically for 24, you'll end up moving by 30 on 40% of the times, and by 20 on 60% of the times. On average you'll be moving 40%*30+60%*20=24 arrowheads; it's perfectly fair.

Of course the only exception to this is when your purse is at 0 or 100. In those cases you assume, respectively, that you cannot give out any arrowheads or that you cannot accept any more arrowheads into the purse. Don't try to roll the dice to see if you can spare 3 arrowheads when the purse is at 0. If you are at 100 in your purse and you need to store more arrowheads, like the card explains, you can store more arrowheads in other locations, maybe in your backpack, or in a chest in your house. Consider the implications of storing arrowheads in those places though: maybe you should mark Encumbered cause you are like a noisy, walking piggy bank. Maybe the arrowheads are at higher risk of been stolen while you're away from them.

The Arrowhead Purse itself is not without risk of being stolen but I'd consider it the safest location on your person. If someone steals the purse itself from you, you can always just make a new but empty one with a bit of leather and cord. Do not discard the asset card, just don't use it without having a purse on you.

The first ability of the card is about your ability to trade. It lets you trade arrowheads for supply when it makes sense according to the fiction, for example when you're in a settlement or during an encounter with someone on a journey. It also lets you hire others and be hired for arrowheads. It gives some hourly rates and a monthly rate as an example of what work-hours cost. These rates should be adjusted by you to fit your world and your situation. Adjust the supplies price upwards if you think the community is very isolated or in need of basic provisions, or downwards if you are in some more central location with a lot of trade going on. Item prices are not described on the card (not yet, I may add them in the future) but as a guideline I think an average iron tool or weapon costs about 50 arrowheads. If you want to Ask the Oracle about prices you can roll on the table below and then adjust according to your circumstances:

Roll	Supply price	Average iron tool/weapon price
1-10	1	Sold for 43, bought for 23
11-20	2	Sold for 43, bought for 23
21-30	2	Sold for 65, bought for 35
31-40	3	Sold for 43, bought for 23
41-50	3	Sold for 65, bought for 35
51-60	3	Sold for 65, bought for 35
61-70	3	Sold for 87, bought for 47
71-80	4	Sold for 65, bought for 35
81-90	4	Sold for 87, bought for 47
91-100	5	Sold for 87, bought for 47

The price spread between bought and sold price is there so that you can't just make money by trading items between two nearby settlements. You'll need to find settlements with drastically different prices to do profitable trading. Trading supply is cumbersome since you can only carry 5 with you so I don't believe a price spread is required for this one. In any case, you shouldn't consider these prices permanent. If you keep selling iron goods or supply in the same place, soon their price there will fall. If you keep buying them from the same place, their price will soon increase. Ironsworn is not made, even with this money system, to simulate accurate trading. Who knows, maybe in a future version of this system I will make a map generator with reactive pricing that you can use if you like to trade during your campaigns that much. And of course feel free to use your own pricing system! If you want you can remove the spread of prices and make almost all trading profitable.

As the card says you can also improve prices to your favor by using Compel. There's even the third ability of the card that improves, if you unlock it, your odds when you Compel. Keep haggling reasonable: as the rulebook says about Compel, ask yourself if the NPC would be willing to consider the offer you are making, or if you are unsure Ask the Oracle. If they wouldn't you cannot Compel them. And if you miss while Compelling to haggle, don't Compel again unless your offer is radically better.

For example if you want to get someone to follow you in your mission to kill an Elder Bear, first, start by thinking what would be a fair offer. Consider how long it will take and how dangerous it is for them and refer to the work-hour prices provided by the Trade ability, adjust as needed. Then if you want to offer them a fair price then, depending on their profession, their disposition and their character, you may even skip Compel altogether; you don't have to Compel for every trade if the trade is fair and makes sense for the NPC (think of hiring someone who calls themselves a mercenary and has a known price for slaying beasts). If you think they may refuse the offer despite the fair price (for example if you are trying to convince a simple farmer to help with that Elder Bear), then Compel. If you miss, you can only Compel again if your new offer is radically better than the old one (as a rule of thumb, at least double or even triple your first offer). A farmer that refused to help you slay a bear for 50 coins will definitely not even consider doing it for 60 coins, so don't even try that. But for 150 coins you may be able to try to Compel him again. If on the other hand you are trying to Compel someone to lower the price of a sword from 50 to 40 and you roll a miss then the price is 50, don't try to Compel again in such cases.

Flaunt, is the second ability and is based on an ability found on the Fortune Hunter asset but works slightly differently and doesn't cost you arrowheads. If Flaunting fails, you may, if it makes sense in your narrative, Compel again, this time making a generous offer as you're Compelling twice in a row. As always don't Compel unless the NPC is willing to consider it. If you Flaunt and roll a miss, maybe you insulted them they may kick you out of their house, attack you or simply be unwilling to listen to your offers anymore. Maybe they got pissed off by your attitude and they make a request that you cannot afford, just to spite you.

So how would you earn money? Well for one you can Resupply and sell your supply to someone willing to buy it. If you do that keep in mind of how much Resupply you can do in a day and as, we said before, remember to adjust the price of supplies downwards if you keep selling it in the same place. 

Another way to earn money is that you can Ask the Oracle if the NPCs you just killed or forced to surrender have arrowheads on them that you can take. Or ask the Oracle if the place you are runsacking has any arrowheads in it, or any items that you can carry to a settlement to sell for arrowheads. If the place you are ransacking is dangerous or has hidden places where the money could be, Face Danger as appropriate when taking them.

If you are pickpocketing someone, Ask the Oracle if they have arrowheads on them (or precious items), and Face Danger as appropriate. When Asking the Oracle about the existence of arrowheads or precious items don't forget that the answer is for you, the player, and may not be necessarily known to your character. If you think about pickpocketing someone and the oracle says they have nothing of value, your character can't magically decide that they won't take the risk of Facing Danger to pickpocket them. Perhaps you should have Asked the Oracle if they look like they have arrowheads on them and if the oracle says yes, then you Face Danger to pickpocket them and interpret a strong hit as actually finding something, while a weak hit as simply not getting caught but finding nothing.

Another way is to routinely earn arrowheads is by finding an odd job or maybe even a proper job if you feel like it. In one of my campaigns I'm playing a missionary so I made this table that I roll on to figure out what kind of work I found to do in a settlement, how much I get paid, and how many hours it takes:

Roll	Description	Earnings
1-5	Wasted one hour and found no job.	0
6-56	Housework or fieldwork for 11 hours.	6
57-89	Guard duty for 11 hours	12
90-97	Teaching or preaching or acting for 7 hours	8
98-00	Exorcism for 6 hours	78

This table was calibrated with a program to give you an average of 10 arrowheads per day and an average of 10 hours of work per day. The reason I used a program is so that I could make tables for all players in that campaign, customized not just in terms of descriptions but also with different number of rows in them and different distributions for the potential daily wages, with some players wanting less variation and others wanting more. In the future I may turn the program into something easily usable like a webpage but for now it's just a Lua script that needs editing. You can download it from here if you want. If you don't know how to use that, try reaching out to me and if I have some time I can help you.

For another character I play, a trader, I use this table when I'm in a settlement:

Roll	Description	Earnings
1-2	Wasted 45 minutes, I cannot set up shop today.	0
3-41	Traded trinkets for 11 hours.	0
42-79	Traded trinkets for 11 hours.	10
80-90	Traded trinkets for 11 hours.	20
91-00	Traded trinkets and appraised items for 11 hours	40

And this one when I'm just in someone's homestead where trading trinkets for 11 hours doesn't make sense:

Roll	Description	Earnings
1-10	No work but no time lost either.	0
11-90	Housework/fieldwork for 12 hours.	10
91-00	Appraise items for 4 hours	20

Once more, these are calibrated using the same program to waste on average 10 hours per day to earn 10 arrowheads.

You may be wondering, how come, according to the card, a person can earn about 144 arrowheads per 40 days, but with all these table you'd be earning up to 400 arrowheads per 40 days? For one, Ironsworn are supposed to be way above average in terms of abilities and conviction. Your character can perform, when given the chance, much more valuable work. Secondly, I did not assume that people work all 40 of those days. Perhaps they take 1 every 7 days off. By making this adjustment people need to perform troublesome work for 8.4 hours per day to earn 144 arrowheads every 40 days. But why only 8.4 hours? People in medieval style society would be working much longer than that. While this is true, it's also true that people did a lot of work at home too. Whatever "free time" you think the average person has after those 8.4 hours, is probably occupied by doing some other kind of work at their home which doesn't contribute to their 40 day salary. But, hey, I'm not a historian, feel free to adjust any numbers you don't like.

As you've seen, I keep using 40 days as a standard for time and salaries. That's because I like to keep track of time in my games and to do so I devised the following system: When I start the campaign I decide what year it is, with year 1 being the approximate time when people started arriving to the Ironlands. So, usually, I start somewhere at year 100. I divide the year into 4 seasons with 40 days each. I don't have months in my calendar, or you can consider the seasons your months if you want. Then I decide what season and what day within that season it is. Days within the season obviously range between 1 and 40, there's no 0 day. Lets assume we're starting at day 5 of spring of the year 105. I will then make a new epic progress track named P105 with 5 ticks in it. I use P for sPring, U for sUmmer, A for Autumn and W for Winter. Eventually I may come up with some custom season names for my campaigns but for now this works for me. Then, every time I Make Camp or Sojourn through the night or if I Make a Journey through the night or in any case when a day passes, I put one more tick in the progress track. When it gets completely filled, I make a new track for the next season (U105 in our example) and I put 1 tick in it. When I take note of events in my notes, I write the date down in the very compact form "5P105", meaning "the 5th day of spring of year 105". This helps me make the weather different for each season and gives me a very good sense of how much time has passed since past events.

Now back to the currency system. If you use it, it may make sense for you to ignore the equip and provision options of the Sojourn move. It kinda doesn't make much sense to have that "free" supply which you could immediately sell for arrowheads. Instead just purchase supplies with your arrowheads and if you don't have any spend some time there doing some odd job to work there like I explained above. To clear the unprepared debility simply pay for an extra unit of supply which you do not add your supply track, so to go from unprepared to 5 supply you'd need to buy 6 supply.

In the future I want to try and refine how other tracks can be affected by trade. For example health. Currently if there is a doctor in a settlement I simply pay them to heal me. I consider it formidable work that takes two hours (as an example), so I give them 4 arrowheads and gain 2 health. But I don't make the Heal move because, the way I see it, my Wits have nothing to do with the risk I'm taking. Some users on the Ironsworn discord had suggested that Healing is always about you even when someone else is doing it, so I should still roll for the Heal move even when I hire someone to heal me. I am not convinced by that argument because when another ally heals you, they roll on Heal, you do not roll on top of them to see if you "took it right". If what they say was the case, I'd expect that when an ally helps heal you, they role for Aid your Ally (Secure an Advantage) and then you roll for Heal. But that's not how it's done. Still though, I understand the need for the Heal to possibly fail because of how my body reacts. Just because I hired someone doesn't mean that I will 100% get better. That risk can be easily introduced by Asking the Oracle if the healing was successful, or by rolling for Heal +Iron which kinda signifies my character's endurance. I'm still not decided on what's the proper way to do this. Finally I want to produce some more detailed price lists based on this medieval price list. So expect future updates on this system!

 Attributions:

• My asset's icon by https://lorcblog.blogspot.com/
• Ironsworn by: https://www.ironswornrpg.com/ 

War and War games

I've been told a few times that one cannot be against war (or the army) when he plays war games. That's not true. War games only simulate the funny and good parts of war. Yes there are some good things in war and conflict in general.

First of all they give you controlled violence. Most people (especially males) are inherently violent. Society makes you inhibit these instincts and empathy makes you realize and in some cases feel the pain you cause if you become uncontrollably violent. But because no instincts can be truly suppressed, without a cost, society provided, throughout history, ways to let the steam off: controlled wrestling, soccer (Laaaame! you call that violence?), and lately: war games.

Secondly, war is about cooperation. You obviously can't accomplish anything if people don't cooperate. Until now, it looks like the most efficient way to cooperate under stress, is centralized control via a pyramid scheme. People like cooperation whether in war or not, and war games provide that. But the best part about cooperation in war games compared to cooperation in real war is that in the game YOU get to choose your leaders, IF you want any at all, while in war they are forced upon you. I would hate having to follow orders from some drunk useless guy just because he happened to be over me in the hierarchy. On the contrary, I loved following, almost blindly, the orders of some amazingly organized squad leader in BF2142. If you get to choose the people that I will cooperate with, cooperation will always be fun, while in the army you just have no choice.

Accusing someone that liking war games is the same as liking war itself is no different from accusing someone of liking death because he laughs with black jokes, or being racist because he laughs with racist jokes. Or accusing an actor of being Nazi because he really wanted to play Adolph Hitler. A joke is joke, an act is an act, and a game is game. I (and most people) would OBVIOUSLY stop liking war games the minute death in them was made permanent or killings in them resulted in children left without a parent. Sane and educated gamers realize that death in real life is permanent and not fun. If some don't, well... as I said: "sane and educated gamers". You'd better start looking for some other problem in your society that's causing those minds to fail to realize why real war is bad. Let's say patriotism (especially if it's taught to children) or anything that makes people value someone else's life less than their own based on imposed differences like ethnicity or race.

Fuck SFTM

Sooooooooooo.... Ehem... It looks like the LuaJIT interpreter I have included in SFTM was infected. If you look at the comments on the initial post about SFTM, an anonymous user had warned me about a virus in the interpreter. Back then, only the heuristics of Avira was detecting that virus but even that user said that after an update Avira stopped detecting it. Other AV programs weren't detecting anything. Now Avira detects it again as TR/PSW.Nilage.hij. It looks like it's a hijacker stealing Lineage passwords (who plays Lineage on the official servers anyway?). I sent the file to VirusTotal and 18 AV programs are detecting it as a virus so it's official... FFS I've spread this file over many of my projects but thankfully all of them are private ones (except for SFTM obviously).

If you downloaded SFTM then scan your computer although it doesn't look like a spreading virus. I'm sorry for causing any trouble. I uploaded a new clean zipfile so you may download that one if you want. It will probably be faster too since I will inlclude a newer version of LuaJIT.

I still cannot remember if the included version is one that I've found on the web or if I had compiled it myself. I can't believe that I was running a virus since 2008-2009 since I had scanned my flash drive hundreds of times... I guess they just started detecting this variant of the virus (other variants existed long ago).

I've also made, and still not published, UFTM (Ultra Fuck This Mind). An optimized, and upgraded version of SFTM. The main change is that SFTM now will not try combinations completely randomly, instead it will actually think which combination is the best to play, based on the average information it expects to gain by playing that combination. The main disadvantage is that it's Ultra slow. I may upload it soon though.

Edit from 2021: Apparently this might have been yet another false positive but DYOR: https://www.solarstrike.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=1393

Left 4 Dead 2

I bought Left 4 Dead 2 during Steam's Xmass offers. I bought the "for four" pack for about 15 euros and gave the three copies to some friends. It turned out one of them hated zombies and never actually played it... >:-E

My first impressions were great. The game run smoothly on my computer (I had more FPS with it than with TF2) and it felt a lot like Alien Swarm, only harder. It was nice until I decided to play Versus.

Versus is a gamemode for 8 players. 4 of them play the survivors and the other 4 keep respawning as special infected (ie: bad-ass-zombies) trying to kill the former 4 guys (3 guys and 1 gal actually). I loved playing as a zombie, it was really fun even though I actually played less than the survivors since I spent quite some time waiting to respawn. What RUINED that game for me is that you can't stick in one team. After the survivors win the level or have their brains eaten, teams are switched. If there is a thing that can ruin a game for me is to be forced to change roles... I disliked it in Max Payne 2 when I suddenly had to play that chick, I disliked it in Halo 2 although I haven't played it myself, I disliked it in Zombie Panic! (and that is the reason I ALWAYS play as a zombie in Zombie Panic!). I don't have any problem seeing a story from different perspectives, I just want to play in ONE of them. It ruins my immersion if you suddenly force me to play something different. I'm trying to convince myself that I want to eat brains and 5 minutes later I have to protect my own brains??? What the fuck is that? I uninstalled L4D2 for that reason! I want to play as a zombie, I don't care about scores. I don't care about competition. Just find me 4 players that want to play the campaign as a survivor-only-team and let me eat their brains.

I might be overreacting but NO, I will not reinstall L4D until they put this gamemode in: Campaign with human opponents in the role of zombies. There are many people enjoying playing campains (including me) and there are many people (I guess) that would love to play freely as a zombie (including me again). So this gamemod is a win-win, they will all get satisfied. After all I am offering for free my intelligence to replace an artificial intelligence, and Valve doesn't want me too...

Laggy new year

EA sucks. Really... Not only they didn't pay the overtimes of their workers but their games are very costly and in many cases install DRM software which actually are rootkits for fuck's sake.

I suck too. Why? Among other things because I paid for one of their games: BF2142.


BF2142, or Battlefield 2142 is a really great game that was released three year ago (but still costs 30 euros in Greece). In fact it's one of the best first person shooters I've ever played if not the best one. And being the best FPS is the only reason I haven't thrown my copy out of the window. The Battlefield series was started by DICE which was afterwards acquired by EA. And obviously EA is now guiding DICE's efforts wherever it will create moooaaar money for those chairmen that haven't written a single line of code for they games that made them rich.

For the last three weeks at least, an extremely annoying bug (known as hesitation lag/bug) appeared in BF2142. Every three seconds or so the game pauses for half a second. The bug appears on a per server basis after playing for 10-45 minutes, makes the game unplayable and will not go away unless you restart BF2142. But that is not much of a problem compared to the position of EA on it.

Here is a taste of the bug:

There is a thread (in fact there were much more but they were joined) in their official forums where many angry players, including me, complained about the problem. For the last three fucking weeks the only answer by a forum admin was "we are aware of the problem and we are looking into it". For the love of Khali do they need three weeks to address a simple lag problem? Even if they hired a new programmer, trained him and put him to work on it, it would take less than three weeks to solve it!!!

So the situation now is that a three years old game is completely unplayable for hundreds of players (if not thousands) and EA isn't saying anything on what causes it. Instead, me and a bunch of 10 more players on that thread are speculating on what is causing it like it is our job after paying 30 euros to figure out what is wrong.

So next time you think about buying something from those money-eating lets-mess-a-game-up'ers remember that although the game manual doesn't state it, supports is not actually available after 3 years.

I am going to play some Dystopia now, a free half life mod created by amateurs that has less bugs than most EA games. And it's a complex game to make and to play.


I'm gonna write something about Dystopia soon cause it is really worth it as well as my $10 donation. Until then stay away from scams.

SFTM v2.0

Super Fuck This Mind (my Mastermind solver) has been upgraded! Parts of it have been rewritten and it includes 5 new features:

1. You can tell it to ignore combinations that contain a color more than once.
2. Color names can be easily customized.
3. You can now play your own moves instead of the suggestion that will always be given. That way you can continue old games by playing the old moves again.
4. The above settings can either be typed into SFTM whenever you run it or read from textfiles.
5. If it detects a mistake it will ask for the correct combination and spot the mistake you did.

I also included a benchmarking version too which will tell you how many moves are needed on average for different settings.

Here is a screenshot:


Don't forget to read the included README! It explains most things, I think!

You can download SFTM from here. Have fun cheating!

iDirt

One more natural Apple advertisement. In Patras as well...

iBroke

Apple is known for its innovative advertisements:

Windows 2.03 on a Virtual Machine

Virtual Machines can be proven very useful tools. I have been using QEmu for some time now but I recently switched to VirtualBox (commercial, but free of charge, edition) because I desperately needed the USB support. Here is a screenshot showing my four desktops while in one of them is a virtual machine running XP in fullscreen mode:


Apart from running a "useful" OS on the virtual machine (it's useful because I needed to use a 3G GPRS USB modem which doesn't work on Linux) you can also run old or rare OSes. I tried Warp but I couldn't install it just like Windows 1.0. So I tried Windows 2.03 which did install and run properly. I also made a video with a quite lengthy tour showing most of their programs. (it's five minutes long!)

Here it is:

Hanoi Towers Solver

I just made a small program that solves, step by step, the Hanoi Towers puzzle for any number of disks. I though it's worth uploading it, so here it is. As always, it's a console application with nice (for my taste) ASCII graphics. It runs on both Linux and Windows as it is written in Lua. I included two Lua interpreters (for both OSes). To run it just drag and drop the .lua file on the interpreter. (after unzipping everything, of course). Here is screenshot: (When giving the number of disks remember that the total moves for the solution are 2^(number of disks)-1. And you will have to press as many Enters as the moves.)

Game of Life

It's been some time since my last post. Since then many things happened. Well in fact just one serious thing: my laptop's HD has been fried... :-( At the same time I fell in love with Ubuntu Live CD which I've been using for the past 5 days...

I went to some stores but I couldn't find any IDE HD with more than 80GB capacity, so I'll wait one more day for their supplies to arrive. One of the salesmen told me that they "might" get some IDEs for laptops this Friday. >:-(

Anyway. Today I made a nice little prog that calculates a possible state in Game of Life that will evolve into a specific state after one step. I'm too tired to explain more about the Game of Life so try wikipedia. :-)

Here's what I made with it:

 # ## ## #      #     #                                         
           #            #                                       
  #### ####   ##### ####             ###########  ###########   
 ##   #   #   #  # # #  #                 #            #        
 ###  # # ## ####  #  #   #               #            #        
  #####  ## ##  ## #######                #            #        
#  #  # ##  ######   #  ###               #            #        
   #   # #  ##  ##  ##   ##               #            #        
       ## ###  # ### #####                #   #   ##   #        
    # # # # ##  ##   # ##  #              #   #  #     #        
    # ## #  #    #  # # ## #              #   # #      #        
   ###  # #  ##### ### ###                #   ##       #        
   ##   ## # ## ###  # ### #              #   ##       #        
 ###  ###   #    #   ## #  #              #   #        #        
   #### # # ### #  ## #  #                #   #        #        
    #   ### ######## ######                                     
  #  # # #####  ####### ## # 

To the left is the first state which evolves into what you see to the right. (TrT stands for Tritonio). I simply gave the right state to the program and it calculated the left one. The script uses an algorithm similar to the one I used while making my keyboard.

I am trying to make an "INSHAME" logo right now but, if at all possible, it will take much time due to it's size.

If you are really curious you can find the Lua source code of the program here but it's undocumented, written in the past three hours, and geek-only. ;-)

UPDATE:

Finally the Logo has finished!!!!!!! Here it is!!!

# #     ##  ##    #  #     # #  ##  # #   #  #  ## 
   #            #  #  #            #         #     
  ###   ###    ### #####    ##      ##  ##  # # #  
 ## # ####  # #### # # #    ###    #   # #  ####   
 #  # # #    # ##   #      # ###   # # ##     #   #
  ##   # ##   # ## # ###  #      # ## #  #  #  #   
  ##    # #     ###    #   #####   #  #  ####  ##  
  ##    ##   #   ##       #     #  #  ## #  # ###  
 #  #     #        #   ####  #  #### ###      ##   
  # ###  #  #  ## #    ###    # #  # ### #### ## # 
#   #    #    #     #           #     #  ## #  ##  
#  #       #  #    #   # ## #  #   ##  #          #

This evolves into INSHAME! :-D
I am still improving the algorithm.

SFTM (mastermind solver)

SFTM (SuperFuckThisMind) is a Mastermind solver. It's nothing too advanced. It supports any number of colors (although they are represented by numbers) and any number of places. You can download it by clicking here. The zipfile includes the Lua sources, the Lua interpreter for Windows and a batch file. Unzip everything in the same directory and then run the batch file.

[EDIT] Version 2.0 is out! Read the related post.

Strange Xmoto physics

I was waching a replay in xmoto in slow motion... These are three frames:

It's funny that the bike doesn't break with falls like this one while it breaks if you touch something solid with your head... :-)

Abandonware

Surely you've heard of terms like freeware and shareware but perhaps you do do not know what abandonware is. Adandoneware is a term, without any particular legal meaning, that is used to describe software that has either been placed on the public domain by the copyright holders (usually the company that produced it) or that no one is willing anymore to enforce it's copyright. For example some really old games are not sold anymore and the company normally doesn't care if you start making illegal copies since it won't loose any money at all.

There are many sites with huge collections of abandonware. Most of them host old games for DOS or Win9x but you might also find some programs too. My favourite site for abandonware is Abandonia but you can find others by Googling abandonware. I also found this interesting torrent on The Pirate Bay which supposedly contains around 3000 old games but I haven't downloaded it yet...

Before downloading any abandonware make sure that you have installed DosBox (it's the best DOS emulator out there and you will need it to play those old games) and also do not forget to check for alternative versions of the same game that run on modern systems. For example Heretic is a great game but why would you play it on DosBox while you can use ZDoom to run it with higher resolutions etc?

While witting this post I also came across a site that offers $200 to anyone that finds the English version of an old and extremely rare (based on the very few results that Google returns if you search for it) game called Fatal Encounter.

For more info on abandonware you should also read this article from Wikipedia

Salad Fingers 8th episode

I have already written a post about David Firth's creations. I wrote about Salad Fingers which I hope that you watched and "enjoyed". The reason I post today is that the 8th episode of Salad fingers has been released! It's called the "cupboard" and I found out about it today. So if you haven't watched the previous episodes, do so and then watch the 8th too.

I also found a little secret. After Salad Fingers (on the 8th episode) gets electrocuted by the radio and puts his hands down, you can hear a weak sound playing for some seconds. Well I don't know if it is meant to be a stomach growl but at least that is what Firth suggests:


To see this picture yourself use the trick that I described in this post (read the important edit carefully).

DosBox - DOS emulator

If I had to sort the OS that I have used by how much I like them I think that I would end up with this list:

1. Ubuntu Linux
2. Windows XP
3. MS-DOS 6.22
4. Windows 95
5. Windows 3.11
6. Windows 98 (stay away from me!)

The third place is held by MS-DOS. A simple and fast OS. It would be at the second position if it supported Internet... But DOS is now completely abandoned. Even Microsoft Windows does not run old MS-DOS applications and especially games!

Thankfully some guys made DosBox so that everybody can play his/her favorite old-fashioned games. DosBox is a free, complete Intel x86 PC emulator; it emulates the CPU, the graphics card, the sound card and supports joystick, mouse and many other things! It is open source and free software and will run on Linux and Windows. To play a game simply mount a directory as a drive in DosBox but I won't tell you how to do this. Instead go to this page to download DosBox and then visit the Wiki for more information on how to use the program.

Some suggestions:

• Backup the configuration file and edit it. Learn all options and try all of them! Check this page for more info. You can achieve great results by messing up with the configuration file.
• Find Heretic - Shadow of the Serpent Riders, Descent I, Blake Stone and Doom. Play them. ;-)

There is also another DOS emulator for Linux called DosEmu. I don't have much experience with it but I think that DosBox is better.