So after writing about decisions and their consequences in Mass Effect 2, so about games trying to mimic life more and more in some ways, this here is a nice example from the opposite end of the spectrum leading to games and real life merging over time:

What when life turns more into a video game.

In this Dice presentation that is making the rounds right now, Jesse Schell, Carnegie Mellon assistant professor of entertainment and technology, talks about a likely future vision where rpg- risk, reward and achivment elements from games merge with community features of facebook and the good old real life.

Scary and appealing on different ends, definitely interesting.

Also made me think of area 5´s nice new intro song =) (even though i liked the old one better =( =) )

So after going through some annoying computer fixing over the weekend

i took two days off from work to relax and get back down to earth before getting back into the things i work on, had to calm down and relax some for once =)

So i played through Mass Effect 2, one of the several big titles on my pile of shame waiting to get played whenever i might have a day or two off in one go (and man is that pile growing).

I won´t write a full in depth review on this, there are plenty of those around already so on that end, to keep the review bit shorter:

Its an excellent mixture of action and rpg elements with great storyline, satisfying gameplay and beautifully polished presentation.

If you´re interested in the least in sci fi, action focussed gameplay  which also has propper storytelling or good game design you should totally play this. What may seem like, oh, yeay, another space action shooter thingy has such an involved storyline and so deep characters that one gets attached to it like with very few other games.

What i´ll focus on more now is the decision making part in Mass Effect.

Decision making always had a role in games, since, well, at the core its all about the player deciding to some extent how things progress.

Mass Effect 2 is among those games where its more about decisions that have a bigger impact on the storyline in the longterm and less about the small itsy bitsy things (though there are some of those, too).

For Mass Effect 2 Bioware has actually toned down or even thrown out a lot of the typical to rpg in detail tweaking of character stats and upgrades and in return put way more focus on upgrading characters through actions in the game and also having much more focus on the dialog and quicktime event decisions the player makes.

I´m a bit torn apart whether i love it or not:

In Mass Effect 2 decisions one makes as player have a big impact.

They set who your team members are, with whom you have a love relationship and even way bigger scale things like the fate of an entire race or the entire galaxy.

On one side that´s great because it gives the decisions a weight like in few other games.

One really sits there and has to think forth and back sometimes whether one wants to choose this or another option during a conversation. In some moments, unlike in the classic dialogue tree system of mass effect 1, there are also events where one quickly has to decide how to react during a conversation, without having time to think about the decision lengthy.

The decision making also gives the game and game series a huge amount of replay value in theory because one could play through each part several times to experience quite different outcomes.

On the other side that´s also where the downside comes in in my eyes:

Its sometimes difficult or not possible at all to foresee all the possible consequences of a decision in the moment one makes them and the earlier big decisions come into the game in its progress, the more content one would have to play through again to experience the rest of the game again but with having made a different decision at that one moment in the storyline.

Some spoilerific examples in this paragraph to give an idea of the scale of the consequences:

-For example in Mass Effect 1 one decided to kill or leave alive a character of a race and based on that all of that race treats you quite a bit different in Mass Effect 2 throughout the storyline.

-In Mass Effect 2 itself building and maintaining relationships plays a much bigger role and there are several points in the story and gameplay where deciding one way or the other leads to different team members in the crew and possible different relationships, in some cases making one character happier upsets the other with the outcome that one can´t have a love relationship anymore with a character one maybe got along well with throughout the whole game before.

So the thing setting it most apart from many other games is both a strength and a weakness depending on what´s more important to you:

Your actions have consequences, big consequences in many cases, and unless you play through several hours of content several times you´ll have to live with a decision you made because it can´t be changed in any other way in many cases, throughout .

Its great when one plays through it and throughout the game is happy with all the decisions one made, or more the outcome they lead to.

Its also ok if one is fine with it no matter if it went as one wanted or not.

But if someone is an ocd type guy who wants to experience all sorts of outcomes or one wants to play through it once with outcomes one wanted, well, that´s tough.

If one wants to change some of those decisions that´s not made easy at all, one basically has to know which save slot was closest to that decision, then load that, pick a different decision and play the rest of the game onwards from there.

That may sound like a typical game scenario, but in Mass Effect,where decisions have so much more impact and can span over 2-3 games each with 15 hours or more of game time, at some point it becomes way less compelling to play through big chunks one experienced several times already to be able to do one different decision at one moment.

I´d really like to experience some of the rest of the game after having made a different decision in some sections but with my work, looking after my nephew and other things keeping me busy i will likely at best get to do one more playthrough of this before Mass Effect 3 comes out and that´ll be it.

I think the Mass Effect creators would do great in changing their saving/loading model a good bit to allow people like me to actually experience more of the story alternatives.

Things i´d like to see regarding that:

-If one could also add a note to a save slot, so type a short message that could for example be “before deciding for this girl” or “start of krogan killed path”, just a small reminder for when one wants to access another decision option

-If the game would auto create a save each time before a big decision is made

-if one could skip through chapters after playing through it once until one has another big decision to make

-If for every save slot there was a “last time on..” summary at the beginning where one can look through either the last few moments and current mission info of the last time one played it or even through a keyword list of big decisions one made.

-if one could create folders or another way to seperate saves for different story branches

Yeah, such things would make it more gamey and take away a bit from the weight of the decisions, having the option to experience it in different way easier and all that.

On the other side it would give players the chance to experience more of the decision outcomes than they would do now and would also allow them to, after knowing the outcome of some decisions next time, maybe more make those decisions they are happier with.

Mass Effect 2 is a great game and also good in reminding one that in real life some decisions have big impact and can´t be reverted, but i´d like it if in Mass Effect 3 it gives one the chance to be able to change decisions in easier way since, well,

isn´t it one of the great sides of games compared to real life that one should be able to experience more in the way one wants to and actually see how things would have gone different if one made a different decision in that one moment?

I could keep this post much shorter, but since some of my experiences and findings might some day be useful to others in case they have a similar virus issue, i´ll go into more detail.

Ok, so on saturday my mom came to me and she was interested in looking for info on a recent movie on the web.

My mom is a very charming and intelligent person but not into computer things at all. Like so much not at all that she is still getting used to getting the mouse cursor moved to where she wants.

I guess its a thing of not getting used to it while being younger and then on top of it being worried she might do it wrong which is one of life´s big self fullfilling prophecies in my eyes, but to that in a bit.

So i sat her down in front of my old pc, reminded her how to open the browser, navigate to google when she is searching for something and then type in the key words she looks for and hit enter.

She did so and while i was working on my mac, she would go through the search result pages, so far so good.

I thought.. Cause when i looked over to her monitor i noticed that not knowingly she had pretty much instantly navigated to some piracy sites.

I should have thought of the side that entering keywords “<moviename> + movie” into google is likely to return some movie pirate sites among the other hits..

Well, i told her about this issue and that she should better visit one of the few bigger known movie info sites rather than clicking links where it has download movie, torrent, xvid, avi etc in the name, address or description.

I thought with that it was sorted out.

Well, after a while she got bored of not finding what she wanted so i decided we could look together.

Well, then i noticed something weird was happening with the google site: When searching for something it would list search results, but when actually clicking one of the search results it would suddenly forward me to some spyware/malware sites instead of the linked search result site. And yes, i checked that the site we were on was really google.

I noticed that suddenly happened in all of the browsers installed on that machine.

Obvsiously my mom, in less than 10 minutes of surfing the web had caught some nasty thing which was quick to change settings and files on the system.

So i thought the best thing to do would probably be to download and run the next best Protection app, so i downloaded Norton 360.

During install of that one of the installer parts already crashed, but the installer went on besides that.

At the end of the install process it said something in the vein of some files were corrupted and it started a repair process.

Once that was done the machine had to be rebooted.

Well, after the reboot what happened was that on the windows user login screen as soon as one would log in it would automatically log the user out again, so there was no way to get into windows anymore.

I tried various things to get into windows again, starting protected mode, debug mode, trying to restart the last working version etc, etc, all haven´t worked anymore.

So back on my mac i googled some for possible reasonings and found various threads on the topic. What seemed to be a common case was that some Antivirus apps would in case of some infections on the system modify/ delete userinit.exe, which is needed during user login.

Great, so i install an antivirus app and the first thing it leads to is i can´t log into windows anymore..

The pc in question had been my work pc a while ago before i got a new box and also a mac next to that. It didn´t have any most recent projects on it but basically my backlog archive of older things, newer than my last full archive backup on the external drive and older than anything i worked on in more recent history.

It wouldn´t have been a huge loss but still an annoying one to format the hard drive to clean install windows on it right away and not knowing what was lost.

So i wanted to get access to the hdd again to backup the most important things and afterwards wipe it and clean install windows.

Since i didn´t have a second pc close and even if i had i wouldn´t want to connect the messed up hard drive to it, it was a rather cumbersome and longwinded process to backup the important files without being able to get into windows.

It took me most of sunday, so i´ll keep it at the points that actually had some benefitial result:

-I downloaded knoppix on my mac and burnt that on cd. Knoppix is basically a full on linux version that can sit on a single cd or dvd (back in computer sciences eduction a few years ago we even used a smaller version that could sit on a floppy disc) and it can boot and run from that cd.

No install required at all.

So yeah, thanks to knoppix i could start the system, connect a second external drive and copy everything important from the main drive onto the second one.

On a sidenote knoppix starts up with a very linuxy look (blocky single color text reminding one more of shells and dos days than a modern OS gui) but under the main menu there´s an option graphical applications there and among some others a full on graphical user interface is available there.

Bottomline on that point is I recommend that anyone who has a pc should put his windows cd with serial and a knoppix cd next to that in a well known seperated safe place for easy access anytime when needed. It might save your day or many years of content on your pc =)

-I copied a working version of userinit.exe into Windows/System32 which then allowed me to boot up Windows again and actually log in.

(I had found the info on this in some forums: a version of userinit.exe is in C:WINDOWS\system32\dllcache or in case one installed service packs also in C:Windows/ServicePackFiles/i386 which one can copy to the system32 folder)

-I could then start up Windows and check for any other important files i hadn´t copied yet and copy those over to a backup drive

-At that point i finally got kinda sleepy, it was already late at night/early in the morning, so back up now after some sleep what i´m doing right now is wiping the hard drive and reinstalling windows freshly on it.

Ok,

so this experience mainly reminded me that its always a good idea to have a good backup solution =)

It also further decreased my trust in antivirus and anti malware apps.

They sure are very useful in many cases, but in this case they basically caused me much additional trouble. Looking through forums for possible help i also noticed that threads of incidents where userinit.exe was being corrupted or deleted by antivirus apps after an infection of the system were dated as far back as 2003.

So that sorta made me worry why in all these years the anti virus application creators haven´t addressed this problem to a degree where the app would either not delete mandatory system files or if it does so when it detects an infection, why then does it not replace them with a working copy?

Its also not the first problematic experience i had with anti virus tools:

A few years back i had another computer getting infected experience and back then one of the things the virus did was basically causing files from all my main anti malware/ virus programs getting corrupted/ deleted so none of those would start up anymore and therefore none of them  helped a lot getting rid of the infection.

So it wasn´t the fault of the tools in that case but that experience had already reduced my trust in them a lot, what are they good for if in case of a serious infection it can happen that none of them work anymore or they delete mandatory system files while getting rid of the infection and that way render the system useless themselves?

Bottomline for me is now its probably no bad idea to have some installed and use them as they get rid of many problems but best to have a good backup solution and don´t trust on the anti malware tool for sure getting rid of bigger issues and still leaving the system in usable state after their cleanup.

Another thought all this brought to me was it reassured me that yes, there totally is a market for something like the iPad.

You know, a computer for all the people who don´t want to or can´t deal with such things. Who want to browse the internet but maybe aren´t that savey regarding hey, maybe you have to check the url of external links better before clicking them. Or hey, if you got infected in some way here´s how to copy rescue files using linux and then its best to reinstall windows.

There are many like that.

People like my mom.

Actually not just people like my mom, because me, surely working  lot with macs and pcs actually creating content i will still always need some full on machines for work, but yeah, just for casualy surfing on the couch i´d actually like it, too if the thing just does what it should do and one surely never experiences anything like this =)

After all the heated discussion from all sides in the past few days which often went overly emotional i felt like this post by Grant was a great refreshing change of pace.

I was thrown out of the CS5 beta today, my constant change and addition requests were seen as “disruptive”.
I can´t go into the details for NDA reasons but i´m sad its seen like that when someone complains because he hopes for improvements.

So in a previous blog post i wrote about my initial impressions on the iPad, listed a few things i missed but it was obvious that i was overall excited about it.

I totally understand it when not everyone is, but now i see some blog posts by some people that make me seriously wonder what kind of koolaid some people are taking and having written about the topic before i feel obligated to go into more detail on some of those than just writing a comment under some of those blog posts (which i also did in some cases).

So i see some articles like thisone

where the author predicts a dark future of closed system computers being the only existing ones

started by the iPad. Even more funny: What she offers as solution suggestion against that is actually buying the iPad but then hacking it. No no, it doesn´t make sense to instead buy systems you like from companies you like or ones you like the philosophy or approach they have

and actually also buy apps, games, music etc you consume on the platforms you like so people actually keep making content for those platforms. No, sure, you should instead buy the system you “don´t support” and then hack it to i guess install stolen apps so at the end everyone looses.

What nonsense..

Then i see something like this

Here the author puts out something like this:

“The thing that bothers me most about the iPad is this: if I had an iPad rather than a real computer as a kid, I’d never be a programmer today. ”

Sure, will give him buzz among bloggers and on twitter (heck, i´m writing about it, too), that doesn´t make it any less total nonsense though.
That´s as if someone in the early computing days said people wouldn´t get into programming when we now switch to more modern systems.

Or no one learns programming anymore because higher Level languages than Assembler are created.

Like, really, seriously?

Of course people will still be interested in creating things, just probably to a good degree for and on different types of devices in different ways.

The iPhone allows total computer newbies to create photos and videos and upload and publish them on the web with the touch of a finger.

Just like that the iPad will make painting and some other things over time more approachable to many than Photoshop etc.

And who then really has interest in going deeper can then get a mac or pc  (if he doesn´t already have one) to create apps and other things for pcs, macs, consoles, iPhone, iPad and whatever.

When one looks at the progress on the iPhone market  the impact the device made has lead to way more people becoming programmers, not less people.

Thousands upon thousands suddenly have interest in creating apps in Objective C, C++, C#, Javascript etc (depending on development tools/environment used) for the Iphone and iPod touch.
Whether one likes it or not there are also many script kiddies trying to get known by trying to get the jailbrake for the newest iPhone OS out the door as first one.

And regarding prophecies that the iPad would lead to a future with only closed systems:

Hardware manufacturers make hardware that sells. If a new device type sells well, they will try to add something similar or better to their portfolio, not suddenly drop their entire existing portfolio of other hardware that still sells well.

[addition] On a sidenote when i first started iPhone development i only had a pc and i bought a mac so i could also create mac and iphone content. Then i also got myself an iPod touch and an iPhone for testing. Now i´ll get an iPad next to those. I know many, many developers who do it in similar way. ..[/addition]

As long as people still buy pcs and macs for work they will also still get made.

The iPad is not perfect by any means, its an 1.0 version.

If someone moans about lack of a camera or multitasking or similar things, no matter if one misses those features or not, those are reasonable complaints.

I think its fine the iPad is a closed system, because it is not meant to replace pcs or macs, its meant as the casual device one uses on the couch while relaxing.

Where i see see a main problem with the app store is not that its a closed architecture itself, its that apple regulates which applications can get on there.

It would be much better if only apps would get blocked which are crashing.

At least they should have a grown up or anything goes section where people get notified that its on own decission to download these apps and then that´s that.

So i totally endorse requests for a more open app store approval way.

But blog posts like those i linked to, man..

Agree, disagree, have another interesting thing to add?

My rants are exactly that:  rants, with my personal view; always eager to hear what others think on such topics though =)

I think where many articles i´ve seen miss the point is: Sure its not better than any console and won´t replace people´s main console or main portable, at least not initially.
And yes, it is not a full fledged pc with a full fledged pc / mac OS one can connect all sorts of devices to and run any app one wants on.
So its also not intended to replace people´s first/ main pc/mac.

What it can do though is become a device which one gets as second or third semi pc type device one has at home. Let´s say the pc is somewhere and this device is on the living room table.
One just uses it in between, and hey, when one already has it there, one can also play a game in between.
It doesn´t run all pc apps, neither is it best suited for gaming or reading books,
but it can be a great device many get because its overall a good package with many features, which then also gets used for those purposes its not best at. Sounds familar?

I think Apple often finds a good balance of price, feature set, polish and a big focus on usability and this could be the next example for that.

I think the ones first to be scared are Nook and Kindle and well, regarding games maybe something similar happens like on the iPhone: Many don´t see most games as as good as on the ds or psp, but i hear more and more gamers who always have their iPhone or Touch with em and therefore automatically play less ds/ psp games.

I´m not sure if it will be the iPad, but i´m sure a device of a similar form factor will be on the living room table in most households in a few years (if technical evolution continues and we don´t have world war 3 ahead ).
And yeah, i think as package overall the iPad is a good contender for that spot on the table.

Thanks to Rob i heard of igameswf the other day.

I had known gameswf for quite a while and tried it before, but yeah, it was quite surprising to see their repository now has a igameswf version up there.

A bunch of things don´t work as they should yet, some things don´t perform as one would like but then it also has some features the Adobe solution won´t have.

I´m getting ahead of myself though, let´s go through it one by one:

Its an xcode project which when compiled and installed nicely runs an app with an swf on the iPhone.

That app itself allows to load and run other swfs from the web.

The default swf in the igameswf is basically an input textfield with a flash made keyboard below it so that one can enter an url to load another swf.

One can replace that swf with a different swf which then performs a bit better than when loaded in at runtime into the container.

The default swf in there is a good indicator for strengths and weaknesses though:

The keyboard already wasn´t very responsive on my iphone 3g (noticable delay between pressing a key and it responding) but i´m sure it would be better on 3gs, maybe even smoothly usable there without any delay, dunno.

Overall the performance was nowhere near to something one for example could have made in unity iPhone or Objective C, but it felt pretty comparable to the flash made apps using the Adobe Packager solution i downloaded from the App Store up to now.

Trying out a few more swfs i noticed that quite a bunch of API side things are not fully implemented yet so if one would want to deploy a full game using this solution one would very likely have to focus on simpler things or test and tweak it a good bit to work around current limitations.

I imagine a similar thing should be the case with the Adobe solution though.

Overall its impressive that

1)  with the gameswf solution one has support for more Actionscript versions/ target Player version made for flash content, even if not the full flash API is integrated; the Adobe solution only supports AS3 content made with flash CS5 and upwards, deployed directly as ipa app

2) one can load in other swfs at runtime with code execution for them

3) one can in theory use more of the iPhone sdk and that way iPhone features than with the Adobe solution as it is based on an XCode project deploy manner

Still of course this is in early state, right now it would probably be most useful for creating nice flashy menus, but yeah, nice to have options and definately something interesting, i think Adobe would do great in taking note there on a few ends.

How we got to where we are:

There´s a long story regarding Flash on the iphone, or more: that it isn´t there yet:

Adobe had announced a long while ago that they were working on a flash player for iPhone.

Apple blocking the flash player:

Then, after some forth and back, and some silence, News made the round that Apple does not support having flash run in the browser of the iPhone, the reasoning given was that the performance wouldn´t be good enough.

(

Tangent:

My view on flash content running in the browser of mobile devices right now:

I use all sorts of technologies and languages to create my games and apps and next to others i used flash since its first few releases as flash, but yeah, even i have to agree there, flash running in the browser of a mobile device of today just is no good idea.

When some people ask for flash running in the browser of a mobile device its usually thanks to an illusionary expectation that it might perform well while at the same time not affecting the performance of the browser or the whole device.

That just isn´t possible right now because flash mostly runs using the cpu, also for most graphic related things, Adobe just has neglected making propper use of the gpu for all graphics related operations for many years.

That means flash content performs badly and has very high system requirements regarding cpu speed when running comparably simple content that would run much better when done in other technologies.

I´d welcome a browser plugin for mobile devices if and only if Adobe makes propper full on use of the gpu for all graphical operations and that´s not gona happen anytim soon, they are just at the step that with the latest player video playback gets accelerated in some cases

)

So what did Adobe do then?

Adobe working on solution to bring flash to the iPhone as native app:

On their last Adobe products centric conference they announced that the upcoming Flash CS5 ide would allow flash developers to deploy Actionscript 3 driven Flash apps to the iPhone, as native iPhone application.

That way  no plugin or standalone player is needed and Flash developers could publish their apps on the app store.

in fact at the same conference Adobe showed a few apps already on the App Store that used an early alpha version of that technology in their creation.

This lead to quite mixed reactions:

On one side it created a big media buzz, on the other side the released apps couldn´t convince many:

They were mostly very basic apps that despite their simple content with not much going on were quite big in filesize and ran at quite stuttering framerate, especially on devices older than the iPhone 3G S.

Progress, the state and where to go from here:

In the coming weeks and months some hyped it up, others, including me, talked in very worried way about the possibly limited functionality and in comparison probably bad performance of the flash made iPhone apps.

Adobe staff members were then always quick to argue that

a) their technology is still in early in development version and would be improved considerably before launch

and

b) one shouldn´t expect performance like on a desktop machine on a mobile device and also that apps not made as native app using objective C would not lead to the same performance.

While i give them a), they will have real trouble with that b) type arguing and attempt to “educate” developers like that to lower their expectations and live with it as if it was no flash/ Adobe specific limitation:

Other technologies like unity3d have prooven time and time again what all can be achieved with third party middleware on an iPhone or iPod touch, with many action intense 2D and 3d games and other apps rushing the app store charts for months and running great even on the oldest devices.

Well, Adobe still has time to deliver, i think they did good in cancelling their public beta cycle to focus on the development to improve it as much as they can before release, even if their given reasoning for that was highly questionable.

Again, i´m not one of the guys with a “flash is all bad” view; i like using every technology for what its good for, but yeah, Adobe has to deliver and they have to surprise everyone who has lost belief in them after several disappointing releases.

Flash is in theory an ideal technology for creation of 2d animation and generally media heavy centric content and it would be great if Adobe could actually make it a good choice regarding it leading to comparably well performing content that can also use the features of the platforms it runs on well.

Sadly it doesn´t look like that right now what with the apps released so far which either perform bad or are very simplicistic; and the workflow required to create the content doesn´t seem ideal at all either, what with the restriction to only support Actionscript 3 content and then also not deploying an xcode project but rather a finished app that is hard to test and impossible to extend further.

(Basically flash developers going for the Adobe solution are restricted to only using those features of the iphone sdk to which Adobe has implemented access via their Actionscript api as one can´t use any of the other features on xcode side as is known by now judging from what Adobe has released as public info so far)

I think for all developers interested in iphone and multi platform content creation in general it would be a good idea to check out the alternatives, and don´t believe too much in any hype no matter if positive or negative, before being able to try the technology or several of the resulting apps first hand.

I´ll write on some of the other options for creating 2D and 3d games and other apps for the iPhone and other platforms as i get to it since with the Adobe solution its a wait and see right now. And well, if and when the Adobe solution is available i´ll write some more on that in between, too =)

My donation ambitions have been severly limited by Apple now

So basically i wanted to donate something to help organizations doing their job in Haiti and since i´m not exceptionally rich and rely on client work to pay my bills i thought a nice thing to do could be donating my returns of a month for stuntmanbob for the iPhone.
So i bumped up the price a little, wrote a blog post about it and also added a note regarding it in my app description on itunes.
Basically just saying before people get angry about the high price they should consider i want to donate all returns for a month to haiti help organizations and they should read my blog post for more info.

This is how it looked:

i also submitted an update to the game with some new levels hoping that once that got approved the sales would go up some.

Well, then my app update didn´t get approved for a while and then i got informed by Apple that i´d have to change my app description because they “don´t allow donation references in the iTunes description” there.
So yeah, i removed those references now (and the updated description version should be live on the app store soon is on the app store now) and dropped the price down again cause without the explanation that the money will be donated people wouldn´t accept such high prices for most games and write negative reviews.

I understand why Apple does that, they probaby don´t want to deal with donation related stuff or people doing fraud or something, but yeah, its a bummer for people who actually want to donate and well, without being able to say that on the page for the product one can´t really motivate people a lot.

 
I´ll still donate the returns of the full month, but yeah, its a bummer in a way.

Well, maybe now the update to my app will at least get approved soon.