Domain of the Bored

First, despite the name, this apparently is a regular release. The Get Info string says it's version 1.0.0 — no alpha there. The name of the game is “SketchFighter 4000 Alpha”, in a misplaced attempt at increasing the whole sci-fi-ness of it.

Second:

Save points must die.

Seriously. Every game that has save points can be massively improved by replacing them with a “Save game” command in the menu.

Third, the save games are next to useless. They save your last location, but not the deaths of all the enemies and objects you've blown up. So when you restore, SURPRISE! All your enemies have come back from the dead, and they're understandably pissed.

And fourth, a note to all game developers: Please ship your games set by default to windowed mode, not full-screen. Nobody has a CRT anymore, and nobody has an LCD with a native resolution of 800×600 anymore. More to the point, maybe I don't want to start right into your game right away; I'd like to go through the Options first, and as long as I'm doing that, there's no reason for me to not to have my email and IM windows visible.

I've been playing Sand Sand Sand lately. It's the successor to World of Sand, and it has some important additions.

• Water now exhibits waves. This means very little, except that it is now impossible to get a perfectly level field of Water.

• Salt now mixes with Water. Saltwater sinks in plain Water, but other than that, possesses no buoyancy; other substances (besides Water) are suspended in it, rather than floating or sinking.

• Buoyancy has been added. Oil floats on top of Water; Water floats on top of Sand. But as I mentioned above, this only applies to plain Water, not Saltwater.

• Wall has been changed to Ground.

• A new tool has been added: Seed. This tool isn't draggable; you only get one Seed per click. The Seed will disappear if it hits any substance that is not Ground. If it does hit Ground, it is planted, and grows a fractal tree.

  1. The tree starts off with a trunk made of Wood, which is a slow-burning version of Oil (in that it is flammable and erodes surrounding Ground or whatever when it burns).
  2. After a fractal generation or two, it begins growing Leaves instead of Wood.
  3. The Leaves periodically generate Pollen (or maybe it's Sap). Pollen suspends (doesn't float or sink) in any substance, including Water.

• Fire now generates Smoke, which of course rises. It disappears after a short time, but it can bottle up a small opening. Watch for this if you funnel lots of Oil through a tiny (1–2 px) hole onto a burning stick of Wax.

  

• Pouring Water now contains bubbles of air/nothing, which of course float to the top. And Saltwater, poured into Water, gets bubbles of Water.

  

And a couple of problems:

• This one existed in WoS, too: Liquids behave more like powders.

  1. They don't equalize. Create a U-shaped container from Ground, with an upright division in the middle (with a gap between that and the floor of the U). Fill one side, above the gap, with Water or Oil or Saltwater. The other side will fill up to the gap, but not above it.

     

  2. If you rush a large amount of a liquid down an incline, it takes too long for the level at the bottom to equal the level at the top. A liquid would reach the same level at both ends much more quickly than a powder; the behavior in the game is that of a powder, even when the substance being poured is a liquid (Water, Oil, or Saltwater).

  I think that this can be attributed to the game's apparent use of pixels as the backing for all game substances; they act as particles of a powder. Of course, I'm just guessing, having not seen the inner workings of the game for myself. But that is my guess and I'm sticking to it.

• If you fill a container with Water, then put a lid on it with Pollen or Ground, then inject Oil into the Water, it will float up, but it will not even out. It will just form a lump at the top of the field of Water.

• Bubbles don't happen in any other liquids or powders, only plain Water. Also, bubbles would only happen when the top is not open (as in a bottle held upside down); a bowl, cone, or box should not have any bubbles. (Maybe I'm asking too much, but you know me: I'm a pedant.)

UPDATE 2006-05-09 04:02 PDT: I knew I forgot one. Turns out I forgot two. Added the list items for smoke and bubbles (amusingly enough, both names of Growl displays).

UPDATE 2006-05-09 05:04 PDT: Error correction to the bubbles list item: Air in water isn't the only kind of bubble in the game. Also added screenshots.

sayeth the Enigmo 2 info page:

These are the game's minimum system requirements:

• 800mhz G4 or any Intel Mac. Will NOT run on older Macs with a G3 processor.

• 256MB RAM and 32MB VRAM

• Mac OS 10.3.9 or later.

• QuickTime 7

• OpenAL (Included with Mac OS 10.4, but for MacOS 10.3.9 it must be downloaded & installed by clicking this link).

(note to Pangea: real unordered lists aren't that hard. really. try them sometime. [look at the source for the page if you don't know what I'm talking about.])

but this list is inaccurate.

I ran the demo just fine on my 450 MHz G4 Cube with 1 GB RAM and a Rage 128 with 16 MB VRAM. of course, I had it at 640x480 in a window at “low” quality, but it ran well in this configuration. so, don't always believe the requirements.

incidentally, iirc, the original Enigmo was the same way.

“Distributed piloting” is a term invented by Peter Hosey in 2006 (i.e. made up by me just now) for websites like Control Our Junk (which I found on Digg) that promise to let you control some real-world object from the internet. In the case of Control Our Junk, the objects to be controlled are a radio-controlled car, a train, and an airsoft gun.

The problem with it is that in any such system, you either have nobody controlling it (nobody's heard of your website) or thousands of people trying to control it (front page of Digg). In the latter case, either people get kicked off, or all the control commands mix together into discord. The car goes every which way, the gun fires at everything, and the train is constantly going back and forth, with no apparent pattern. I guess you could call it a form of entropy.

I think a better system might be to get ~200 (maybe more) RC cars, and put them in a big arena, and give everybody at least five (or maybe ten) minutes of time. If there are <200 cars in use, a new user simply gets one of the free cars. Otherwise, if at least one person has been using a car for more than five minutes, the person who's been on the longest is kicked off. Otherwise, the new user waits in a queue for somebody to hit their five-minute limit.

OK, now somebody go do that. I want to play with an RC car over the internet. ☺