New C-evo maps

I have made a couple of preset maps for C-evo today; both are very small maps. One is best for a 1-player game against the AI; there are a number of starting positions but the human has a better island. The other has three starting positions on a tiny map.

Also included is one of the “Total fairness” C-evo maps.

The main reason I have made these maps available is because I had a small file with just one map which was only about 800 bytes in size; since the Desert Island CD uses the ISO filesystem with a 2 kilobyte block size, making this file a little bigger (any size 2048 bytes or less) doesn’t increase the amount of space the file takes up on the disc.

It can be downloaded here:

http://samiam.org/cevo/

Why Google has made public DNS servers available

Google has made public DNS servers available for one simple reason: They want google.com to resolve using their IPs (74.125.93.xx) instead of other IPs. Notably, if you use OpenDNS, a request for google.com resolves to OpenDNS’ 208.69.36.xx IPs.

This takes, or has the potential to take, ad revenue from Google, so Google responded by having very easy-to-configure (how hard is it to forget “8.8.8.8” and “8.8.4.4”?) DNS servers that don’t include any ads—besides the ads Google themselves include in their search result.

They made the DNS servers geek-friendly: Their DNS servers do not redirect NXDOMANs (DNS replies saying “this host name does not exist”) to an ad-filled page, but correctly forward NXDOMAIN replies on to the end-user.

There’s a good reason OpenDNS’ president is scared of Google’s DNS servers; by offering for free (ad-free) what OpenDNS offers, they have undercut OpenDNS and, quite frankly, OpenDNS’ days are numbered. Yes, they do offer spam/phish/adult content filtering, but the market for that is smaller than the market for “My ISP’s DNS servers suck, give me something more reliable”.

Disclaimer: I sent my resume to OpenDNS a few months ago and never heard from them; while I didn’t get hired at Google, I had a very pleasant experience interviewing with them a few years ago.

C-evo tutorial finished

While I finished all of the essential writing for the C-evo Tutorial yesterday, I spent some time this morning cleaning up the wording (removing typos, simplifying one paragraph that was a little hard to understand, etc.) and have uploaded the tutorial here:

http://samiam.org/cevo/

C-evo tutorial made

I have spent a good deal of the last 24 hours working on a C-evo tutorial. It can be downloaded at http://samiam.org/cevo.

New Deadwood snapshot: Google DNS servers

In today's Deadwood snapshot, I have updated the default DNS servers in the documentation and example dwood2rc files to be Google's newly-announced public DNS servers. More information about these servers is here:

http://code.google.com/speed/public-dns/

The snapshot can be looked at here:

http://www.maradns.org/deadwood/snap

I found a couple of websites with small games

Last night, I found a couple of places where I can look at and download small games.

The quickest way to find small games is to go to a website hosting files from the “demo scene”. One very significant part of the “demo scene” is coming up with tiny little demos or fully playable game whose .exe fits in a given size, such as 4k, 32k, or 96k. 4k gives you a very basic Tetris clone; 32k can give you a remarkable playable game in the vein of a 1980s or early 1990s Amiga or Atari ST game. 96k can give you a small but complete full game; there’s even a playable First-person shooter that fits in 96k (but, alas, can be finished in about 15 minutes).

The website I used to find demos was http://www.pouet.net/; the page which starts to list the tiny playable demos is at this link.

The one I like the most is a 32 kilobyte PacMan-style game. This got a few bad reviews when it first came out, but ignore them; the game has since been updated with sound added to the main game and the collision bugs people complained about have been fixed.

Some other notable demo games include a Tempest clone with 21st century graphics and sound, complete with configuration menus in only 96k (but the extensive eye candy sometimes makes gameplay a little difficult, and the screen moves around while playing in a way that can give you a headache), a 32k clone of a late 1980s platform shooting game which while beautiful and groundbreaking for its time, has hard-to-use controls, and a 32k clone of a late 1980s platform jumping game that, while amazing, is a very challenging game and the controls are a little awkward.

Another place to find tiny games is http://www.acid-play.com/, a listing of thousands of Windows freeware games. Finding diminutive games is a little harder at this site; there is no way to sort games by size. However, each game has its download size listed, which makes it possible to browse for small games.

There are a few tiny gems here; one I like is a simple little late 1980s shooter called Light-Z which 7-zip compresses down to 174k.

I’ve decided to put that 32k tiny Pac-Man style game on the next version of my Desert Island Disc. I would like to have precisely seven games; I haven’t decided whether to make the seventh game the 21st century Tempest clone or the simple shoot-em-up Light-Z.

Javascript Manic Miner

I found a version of Manic Miner more suitable for putting on the next (2010) version of my Desert Island CD: There is a Javascript implementation of Manic Miner out there.

I was able to scrape all of the files needed to play this, and after using PNGCRUSH and advpng to make the PNG files as small as possible, I was able to get this entire working Manic Miner implementation to fit in under 32k (7zip compressed).

Unlike other Manic Miner implementations, where the authors take a sadistic delight in hiding the cheat codes from users (I don’t understand why Andy Noble changed the cheat code for Manic Miner), this one is easily modified with a text editor to change the initial level or give the player unlimited lives; these are even variables easily set at the beginning of the program.

So, I’ve gotten Manic Miner down from 450KB to 32KB. Like I said before, I’ll put wedding photos in the newly opened up free space or another tiny video game if I can find something usable out there.