Iwan qubodup Inactive on Tumblr

I’m over there from now on.

Just got the hint on #archlinux: pychrom

1. GTK app window which contains the element(s) of which you want to change the look (I wanted to change the link color in Firefox’ UI, in this case “See All Recommended Add-ons”)
2. gtk-theme-switch2 [AUR] which allows you to apply a theme to all existing windows with the press of “Apply”
3. Two editor windows, one with the theme that you work on, one with the theme that you learn from

What you have to do is the following: install some themes, then switch between them until you find one that changes something you want to change. Then open this theme’s file and learn how it does what you want to do. Repeat. Use the theme switch to constantly test your changes.

PS: Zenburn woot!

PPS: The Widget Factory [AUR] is superb in showing many of the elements you might have missed in your theme.

I made a mood board (inspired by Durian) for DungeonHack. Mood boards are a place for quickly post images you think are cool. Videos too. Whether or not this one will be used needs to be discussed first.

A good mood board should follow following rules:

1. It is hosted by somebody else, who is reliable, so the images don’t get lost and you don’t have to take care of anything.
2. Multiple users can post.
3. It looks simple (dark background, little space between images).
4. The embedded image needs to be large enough to see it. The option to increase the size should be there, but one should also be able to see everything by simply moving on the page, without opening new links to full size images. This is important for the ‘quick’ aspect of mood boards. They are for creating a mood through multiple inspirational graphics, not the details matter most, but the resulting mood from looking at all images.

Forums are a bad place to put up ‘inspirational images threads’. They have a format that disturbs usually, often the layout doesn’t fit and browsing them is annoying. See this and this for example.

Tumblr has a 15 images per page limit, which might be annoying, but it is so easy and quick to set up, every project should have such a thing, if not every developer of a project. The different mood boards could then be combined in a Soup like mine or FreeGameDev’s. The 15 images/page limit could also be fixed using Soup.io.

I basically only want to motivate you to try milkytracker out yourself, because you will be able to make something that does not sound like something horrible, like what I did. Youtube tutorials are very good for learning to use it!

Get it: flash/.mp3 | .xm

License: cc0

I noticed today, that finally OpenClipArt looks good. Cleaner layout, previews for all images!

You can look at old versions in the wayback machine. For example (2008-06).

I did not try uploading in the new style, but even if it works the same way as before, I will not feel “why am I doing this, hardly anybody has the time to browse this site” any more! :)

The next step is making OpenFontLibrary pretty. It´s wiki is nice already.

I created a preview gallery (WARNING 13MB OF IMAGES ON ONE HTML PAGE) of (nearly) all OFL(P) fonts. I think it was well-received. The code used for making it and also included, all fonts, are available in this thread.

OFLB’s wiki looks nice by the way.

I emulated a svn-style log of a git repository by converting it using git log --pretty:

git log --date=iso --pretty=format:\ "------------------------------------------------------------------------%n %h | %an | %cd | %n%nnothing%n" > pp.log

I needed it for a code swarm video of Pink Pony.

The result is probably good enough.

#freenode@freenode.net told me that internet drama caused the on-line IRC client Mibbit to be blocked from the IRC server Freenode, which is popular amongst open source projects.

The solution is simple: use Freenode’s web client (which isn’t as horrible as it was the last time I tried it).

Luckily it’s possible to create auto-join links, by providing username or channel parameters.

http://webchat.freenode.net/?nick=visitorOGA&channels=opengameart will connect to the #opengameart channel as “visitorOGA”.

http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=opengameart,freegamer will connect to #freenode and #freegamer, but ask for username first.

I use Irssi at home and my auto-join list is currently #freegamer,#opengameart,#parpg,#loveclub

I donated 92 EUR (130 USD) to OpenGameArt (OGA). The money will be used to finance art commissions chosen by OGA’s admin, Bart. The art will be released under the GPL2/3+ and CC-BY-SA3+ licenses.

I was not just donating money towards a cause that I like, I was also playing a massively multiplayer game of “fill the progress bar”. The rules are simple: you and other players around the world donate money until a donation status bar is filled. For clarification, take a look at the “Mixing Games and Applications” presentation, in particular p. 41.

For a status bar to exist, there needs to be a limit and when the limit is reached, something has to happen.

• In OGA’s case the goal is “commision of a freely licensed piece of game art”.
• In Howitzer Skirmish’s case it was supposed to be “development of an open source game” (technical problems prevented success).
• For Ardour it is “allowing the developer to work maximum possible time on the free software DAW”.

Ardour features monthly subscribtion-donations. A yearly donation produces 3.30 USD less fees though. You can also finance Ardour feature requests. However they lack limits and thus progress bars and people seem to underestimate their value (or are just not interested).

Projects that want money should figure out limits/goals and use progress bars. Or at least graphs - something to feed the eyes - players usually like to consume graphics after all. For example PMLE could use them, as there are “donation limits” set for some compositions already. Unfortunately, there are no freely available scripts for automated donation visualization.

PS: Ardour’s developer told me that he uses the Drupal lm_paypal module for the subscription system. The rest is being done through some PHP, which he might release in a month or two.

I released Cave Boy 1.0. It is a simple move-in-maze game. Sound is perhaps the only thing that makes it special. The project can be downloaded here and it requires LÖVE to run. License is zlib/zworks.

The game was inspired by Strong Bad’s Secret Collect!. At least I think so. I actually have made a mockup of Cave Boy half a year ago. I was already thinking of such a game look more than a year ago and created a nice-looking mockup using ray tracing in blender, but unfortunately lost that one.

I pushed the first revision soon after recording and cutting the first few sounds. I actually created some sounds before writing the first line of code. The time between the first push and the last push (which then was released as version one) was less than 14 hours.

I used GitHub for hosting. Because I included all sources of all audio files created for this project (even those not used in the final version), uncut, in flac format, the git repository is over 70 Megabytes in size. Not sure if I’m going to abuse project hosting space in such a way in the future…

• GitHub page
• Ohloh page
• LÖVE Club discussion

Yesterday I met SiENcE, who revealed to me the game idea he lately played with: first you build, then you destroy. The games referenced were Bomber hehhe [review, screens, video] and Rampart [review, screens].

I was skeptical about the ‘build’ thing, because I remember from child days, that destroying was disproportionally more fun than building. Probably all this means is that the building will have to be spiced up with rewarding the player a lot.

So after coming home, I took Shapes.love by MHD and added some colors and sound effects to it. The result, SuperShapes.love, will hopefully be helpful at exploring the building phase of aforementioned idea.

I got an idea for a simple color mixing game. Instead of presenting a well-structured description of it, I will explain it in the order of my thoughts. (Whether I managed this is questionable, as for example this sentence (this one (um..)) was written when most of the text below was already written.)

For a start, here is the image my idea bases on and which got influenced by the idea:

I was drawing a minimalist style image of plants. Then I thought about how the image did not satisfy me. I added a bee, but it did not help much. Then I got the idea to add berries to plants for more detail. I added berries to the pink and green plants.

I do not know when I thought of turning it into a game, perhaps when I was drawing the background. (Which was fun to make. I like hard-edge gradients.)

The idea was to let the player control the bee to harvest nectar from the plants to deliver it to its hive. However, bees alone wouldn’t give the game an interesting character.

By ‘character’ I mean ‘what there is to discover in the game’. The bee is kind of cute and can move around and harvest nectar - that’s it. This is not much ‘character’, it is a tech demo. Even though it has a graphic/sound style, the style is discoverable in mere seconds and there’s no reason to keep on playing. The bee may be cute, but it’s boring.

I felt that bees should not have a deep or whacky character, so I thought of adding a mad scientist that gives life to the bee (probably after having taken if first) and orders it to harvest honey, FOR HE HUNGERS FOR BREAKFAST. (Do mad scientists say “I hunger for”? Or is this something vampire-exclusive?)

The scientist would be of the Dr. Strangelove, Doctor Neo Cortex, Dexter, The Brain, Mojo Jojo type: extravagant, overly dramatic, hilarious, uppercase.

This image of ‘Ze Scientist’ was made after I finished writing all text to visualize the character, split the text a bit and act as a consolation for giving you a break if you’re reading what is around it.

Oh yeah, since I decided that sucking nectar is the theme, I added berries to the blue plant. Also I thought that berries would re-generate the nectar. Their fullness could be visualized through color saturation or size or both.

About the harvesting: The bee would suck the nectar (color) out of a plant and become of that color itself. When sucking the color out of different plants, it would gain a mixture of the colors.

For making color composition an easy task, the bee should also be able to get rid of the nectar it carries. For getting rid of one color type, it has to fly to a plant and press the ‘spit’ button.

There would be only one or a few ‘missions’ because I see no skill to ‘master’ here. If you can color three colors, you can also mix ten more. The game would thus be based on one or very few missions, unless I come up with ‘more game to play’ that is not repetition.

The overall structure of the game is:

1. It lives! - Intro sequence featuring ze scientist creating ze bee and giving it ze task
2. Bzz - Mission or missions for ze bee
3. Breakfast! - End sequence in which a rapid change between dramatic and non-dramatic shows ze scientist breakfasting
4. Apres-bzz - Some surrounding (the scientist’s room?) for ze bee to freely explore

I started thinking about what name to give to it. I first thought of “Bzz” and “Zzz” and “Sum-Sum” (this is how you write “Bzz-Bzz” in German). All of those names are already used and “Zzz” is kind of lame, so in combination of thinking of the mad scientist, I remembered that some of those like to have a strange German accent saying “ze” all the time. Ze Bee it is!

While writing the text above I thought of two more things. I paused from time to time and wrote them down below (in order of coming up with them):

1. Delivering the honey can be made to look like peeing, but I do not like this idea, it is neither pretty nor interesting.
2. I believe that bees do not get nectar from berries (do berries have nectar?) but this problem solves itself, as the bee has been engineered by a mad scientist and therefore there is no need for realism. (Not that there would have been a need for realism otherwise, but I prefer to avoid misinformation.)
3. The game has actually some educational value about color mixing. It also allows for two different scenarios: subtractive color mixing by day and additive color mixing by night (luminous plants).
4. Fireflies can be used as ‘decoration’ for night time play. They could also interact with the plants (they sipped some of the mad scientist’s reagents?) by blocking them. The player bee would have to fly near them at some velocity to scare them away.
5. A better idea for delivering honey: the containers which the player has to deliver the honey to contain water, in which the player has to dip the bee in. (The scientist gave it some basic swimming skills!) Then it has to be shaked (movement physics underwater should be different) for the nectar to dissole in the water.
6. Thought: if berries are used, the result is probably rather ‘jam’ than ‘honey’. Maybe a combination? This could be used for more diversity again. So flowers should be in the game too I think.
7. About the lumenous plants from #3: why would they be lumenous? Did the scientist spill some of his reagents? Is there a nuclear power plant nearby? I do not know yet.
8. What color does the scientist want? Well, how about three jars, and scientists just says “Bring me three different kinds of honey, ze bee!”. When the three jars are full, the scientist will judge them (insert color value comparison math here) and point at the one he doesnt like and complain about it or say they all are too similar, if they are. The mission or “what the scientist wants” can use some more thinking though.
9. I never red ‘Doctor Frankenstein’ - I only experienced the character through various interpretations in cartoons. I will read and listen to it. Perhaps it will help me define the mad scientist’s character.

Daniel Cook finally decided to license his ‘free’ game art on Lost Garden under the CC BY 3.0 license!

I created an Inkscape import of the .ai file that he released. (It’s not perfect unfortunately.)

As I said, this stuff is by Daniel Cook - licensed under CCBY3.0US.

You can download the SVG file here.

Daniel Cook has been releasing his artwork ‘for free’ for some time now, but there was no clear license attached to it, clarifying whether or not it was allowed to use the work under open source-like conditions.

His style is mainly cute-vectorish, but also some high-quality pixel art is in his list of (cc by-licensed) game artwork.

Some of his superb 2D tiles made it into Hero of Allacrost, a development-in-progress, GPL-licensed role-playing game.

Some of his works are only avaliable through proprietary file formats, but luckily most of them can be imported by GIMP and Inkscape nearly lossless.

Update: Danc now also provides an SVG file! Awesome! Best to forget about the one I delivered. ;)

I hope it will stay.

I want Flickr to include something like the Public Domain Dedication, but I don’t know how to convince them. I’m afraid I should first ask Creative Commons to create an all-permissive, no-attribution license.

Here’s what I have written so far (for Flickr):

Hello,

I want to be able to have an automatic licensing option to distribute my photos under public domain-like terms, to make using them easier (keeping track of sources is hard work and sometimes attributing all sources is not an option).

14 threads have been started in the Flickr Ideas group, requesting public domain as a copyright option. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14]

At least 8 threads exist in the Help group on the same topic. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8]

The first of these threads was started on 26 January 2005 and the latest on 27 January 2009.

5 threads got replies from group administrators/moderators. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

Which is available as source.

This work is dedicated to the <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/”>Public Domain</a>.

Due to restrictions of the Flickr licensing system, this work is marked with a Creative Commons Attribution License. Please disregard that license. You may feel free to attribute authorship to me, though.

Also, please consider <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/help/contact/”>letting Flickr know</a> that the community would like Public Domain as an automatic licensing option.

This will produce:

This work is dedicated to the Public Domain.

Due to restrictions of the Flickr licensing system, this work is marked with a Creative Commons Attribution License. Please disregard that license. You may feel free to attribute authorship to me, though.

Also, please consider letting Flickr know that the community would like Public Domain as an automatic licensing option.

After realising that the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication is not a license and that everyone’s complaining against it was kind of valid, I threw together four licenses that permit any kind of use with no conditions.

zlib License-based: “Ze All-Permissive License” (ZAPL)

This work is provided ‘as-is’, without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this work.

Permission is granted to anyone to use this work for any purpose, including commercial applications, and to alter it and redistribute it freely.

BSD License-based: “No Warranties Permissive License” (NWPL)

Redistribution and use, with or without modification are permitted.

This work is provided by the copyright holders and contributors “as is” and any express or implied warranties, including, but not limited to, the implied warranties of merchantability and fitness for a particular purpose are disclaimed. In no event shall the copyright owener or contributors be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this work, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.

MIT License-based: “Complicated Permissive License” (CPL)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this work to deal in the work without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the work, and to permit persons to whom the work is furnished to do so.

The work is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liabilty, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from out of or in connection with the work or the use or other dealings in the work.

Public Domain Dedication-based: “All-Permissive No Attribution License” (APNAL)

The work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

• Tablet Maltreat
• Sans-Serif Sucks
• Quality Let’s Plays
• Public Domain Textures
• Information Design
• I Like Music
• I Lerne Türkisch (German)
• I Draw Comics
• Freier Spieler (German)
• Command-Line Image Editing
• qubodup at rubyweekend#2

Reverse psychology

osi-bad.png osi-bad.svg osi-evil.png osi-evil.svg osi-no.png osi-no.svg

• Eye Catcher 2000
• Martian Graffiti
• Eye Wars: Subway Day
• Street Crossing Scout

Yay! Now I will have to learn a bunch about photo camera functions, the RAW format and how to edit it!

Yay! A voice actor showed up on the FreeGameDev forums!

He (Magnus Hoelvold) is not all that interested in licenes, but hey!

He’s a student/actor/silly person (self description). BLOG LINK TIME!

A relative died.

I´m back from the viewing. 20% sniff/crying, 75% “have you met …” and “this is …” and “let me introduce you to …”, 5% off-topic.

Ok, so I’m sitting in front of the flat’s door, because I had to give my keys to my grandaunt when I was in Amsterdam, because she went to Berlin while I stayed there and my mother gave the keys to neighbours which are now not at home and I’m using out home’s wi-fi to write this post.

Oh yeah, mom doesn’t answer the phone.

I can survive for about 1.5 hours but after that I only have two books with me.

I suppose I can stack my bags so that they perma-press the light button…

My solution is not as obvious as xkcd is unfortunately.

I hear someone coming, perhaps the neighbours that have my key?

…

No, it’s not them.

I’ve been coding some extremely naive implementation of Cast Lead. It’s still pre-interactivity and not online yet.

I presented the game idea to the LÖVE forum.

• Project page

grep -o ‘xmlUrl.*’ file.html | sed ‘s/href=”//’ | sed ‘s/”.*//’

In this case all href= links get extracted from a HTML file. I used it slightly changed (by replacing “href”) to extract links from an XML file.

I started uploading the photos, but one of the SD cards is still at L’s.

See this collection for what I have put into sets so far.

Museums closed and no more tickets for the parlament.

Climbing up to the Gellért-hegy, visiting the Citadella.

I’ve never seen so many national and European Union flags on a city’s streets.

I get the impression that every ambulance has it’s own individual siren sound.

Walking down the Andrássy út, visiting the Szépmûvészeti Múzeum, eating at Café Vian. Everything great!

Yesterday L. arrived and we walked around for a while.

I made lots of pics, but the hostel’s workstations have a too old Flash version, no Java and don’t allow installing those.

I don’t want to upload the pictures in batches of six, so I’ll probably do all the upload work after coming back to Berlin.

I’m going to the supermarket to get some breakfast.