It’s popular amongst anti-copyright dorks to use the phrase ‘imaginary property’ when they are ranting about Intellectual property, usually as some juvenile method to rationalise pirating music, movies and games. Apparently, IP is just ‘imaginary property’, so why should they pay for it?

Lets make a deal, I’ll let you pay for my Imaginary property using that imaginary money in your bank account. Both exist purely as strings of numbers, agreed? But of course, if you don’t think that trivially copied strings of data have any value, please email me your sortcode, account number and bank login details. I’d like to ‘share’ your bank balance. Sharing is caring right?

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back in the early days of Positech I made quite a few smaller, lower budget games which you don’t see me actively promote any more. The games still exist though, and some occasionally sell a copy or two.

Because I’ve always developed my own web site, I’ve gone from it looking dire, to less dire, to a lot less dire, to tolerable, as I’ve introduced new games and new mini-sites for them. This means that a lot of the older games still linger on the positech site with crappy designs, older logos and screen-shots, and other badness.

Over the last few days I’ve found some time to revisit those pages and make them look slightly less dire, even slightly consistent, and make sure they link to the main page. I also added some very small text links to them at the bottom of the main page, so they aren’t entirely orphaned any more. I also added a few adwords panels (worth a try!), and dropped the price of my old budget puzzle game thing.

Step into the past with my earlier, cheaper games!

http://www.positech.co.uk/rocky

http://www.positech.co.uk/minefield

http://www.positech.co.uk/planetarydefence

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I thought it might be worth summing up what to expect in the next game, so here is a rough description of the differences:

Kudos 2 will have proper music, composed to fit the game, not just stock music that I thought I could fit around the game, like the original did.

Kudos 2 will have much better avatars, with some degree of chopping and changing, rather than just selecting preset images. They will be hand drawn art, not computer generated poser stuff

Kudos 2 has more depth to the careers. You don’t have a generic bad day at work, but a bunch of stroppy customers as a waiter, or an exciting new experiment as a physicist. It just adds some colour to the jobs

Kudos 2 will not have that confusing social networks screen. Nobody understood it anyway

Kudos 2 will have a revamped GUI that looks 100 times brighter, cleaner and generally more pleasing than the down-beat murky look of the original. Goodbye greys and dark blue!

Kudos 2 will have a far more efficient and stable graphics engine, meaning the system requirements may even be lower than before, and its compatibiltiy with video and sound card combinations should be much higher

Kudos 2 has some greater depth to a variety of the existing components, like restaurants, reading books etc.

Plus there will be more items to buy, more social and solo options, a different video game to play, totally revamped GUIs for a lot of the game. etc etc.

In other words, it’s the same concept and approach as the first game, done with a massively higher level of polish, effort, time and consideration. I can’t imagine anyone who liked K1 not liking K2, and the plan is that some people who didn’t even try the K1 demo (or didn’t enjoy it) will look at K2 with fresh eyes.

That’s the plan…

“bad wolf”

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Here is what got improved / changed / fixed on Kudos 2 today:

• FIXED *** re-jig when romantic offers are made so they come after a social event

• FIXED *** only highlight npcs for romantic invites if they are your partner

• FIXED *** heart icon not drawing on NPC window or icon.

• FIXED *** Activities should be unlocked based on how many social events you host

• FIXED *** Gender not right in job title

• FIXED *** Charisma should be reduced by irritating people

• FIXED *** its too easy to boost relationships at the start

• FIXED *** post mortem relationship change meter needs visible midpoint

• FIXED *** people shouldnt say they had nothing in common with other people if its just you and them.

• FIXED *** locked activities are still shown in the list.

• FIXED *** expanded skills interface is screwed up.

• FIXED *** tv subscription cancellation dialog doesn’t trigger

• FIXED *** correct avatar name not saved properly

• FIXED *** first day of new job doesnt seem to raise stress

• FIXED *** short bus journeys are too cheap

• FIXED *** after work screen title is in wrong place

• FIXED *** staying in reading a book should boost loneliness and its not.

• FIXED *** commute distance should be shown on job instance details.

• FIXED *** need to show the controlling attribute as well as the displayed one when viewing debug windows

• FIXED *** make extraverts more likely to meet new people doing solo activities and vice versa.

Plus a long palythrough gave me mroe stuff for my todo list. This game is HUGE, there is just too much to do…

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I made a decision with Kudos 2 that I was going to get everything working and looking how I wanted, regardless of how much hassle was involved. Partly this just means changing my state of mind when I’m typing out my ‘todo’ list as I test the game. Rather than mentally editing it to take into account technical difficulties, I just jot down how to improve the game and tell myself not to worry about what’s involved. Then when I go to implement them, I just do it, regardless how awkward some things are.

An example of this was the panel that shows the players skills. This panel just sat there and didn’t have the status update balloons which flash up when you change your attributes, but when playing it occurred to me that this would be a good idea, especially on the ‘post mortem’ screen where many of them change. Making them show up at all involved a ton of recoding. Then I hit the issue that you can have a lot of skills, and they looked horridly cluttered on that post-mortem screen.

So eventually I had to write a bunch of extra code for the skills GUI that rebuilds it just for the post-mortem screen, showing just what’s changed. This is great for the player but was a bitch to code. Hopefully, if I can keep developing like this, the game will have a far more polished feel than anything else I’ve done.

BTW server is a bit slashdotted today…

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So recently I ordered a ‘Kill-a-watt’, a gadget that lets you plug it in between a device and the power supply that tells you how many watts, volts, amps yada yada it uses. In these times of insane energy bills (mine is now £100 a month combined gas and electricity) I think it’s a smart move to work out where all the power goes. Sure, some companies quote figures, but can you trust the seller of some kit to say how much it costs to run?

The Kill-a-watt cost me £19.95 from here: http://www.reuk.co.uk/buy-KILL-A-WATT.htm and arrived this morning. Here is what the little beastie looks like:

So how do all my bits and pieces of hardware stack up? First lets try that nice flat screen monitor:

	The Monitor The monitor in question is an IIyama 19 inch ProLite H481S. It’s pretty lovely, but looking a bit small these days. this gets auto-turned off by vista when I’m away from the PC, and I also turn it off each evening. It’s guzzling 30 watts, which isn’t to be sneezed at, that’s the equivalent of 3 energy saving light bulbs. The official power consumption for this model is 40W, so it ooks like they actually overestimated its usage. I’m running it at the native res, but the (very poor) speakers were not in use. Edit : It seems that I can push it 1 watt higher by playing ‘painkiller’ by Judas Priest through the inbuilt speakers. I think i generalize this to playback of any heavy metal.
	The Printer The printer is an HP deskjet 960C, which I often leave switched on when not in use. Looks like it only uses 2 watts, probably for that little green LED. No great worry there.
	The Router I use a very flaky Linksys wireless-G ADSL gateway router. Obviously it’s always on, and because it gets upset when turned off (sometimes this piece of crap won’t turn on until its been left off for 30 minutes…) I leave it on all night too. Looks like all those flashing lights only use up 8 watts, which is not irrelevant, but not a disaster either I can’t find any official information on what power this unit is supposed to draw, so you heard it here first!
	The PC Holy cow, the main PC base unit really does guzzle the power. This reading (160 watts) was taken after windows had booted and settled down, its an Intel dual core 6600 2.40GHZ CPU  (2 gig RAM) vista machine with a Geforce 8800 GTS video card. Interestingly, I tried some experiments with heavy processor use (rebuilding my current game project, the sequel to kudos), and some mega disk thrashing (copying huge amounts of files) and the power consumption didn’t really change much at all. Make of that what you will, maybe the disk is always drawing a lot of power anyway, or maybe neither processor core is idle, or steps back its power drain when idle.
	The Game I tried starting a 2 vs 2 AI vs Me skirmish game of Company of Heroes, set to 1280 1024 res with everything set high, to see if maybe the video card could push the power consumption higher. A noticeable change, but nothing dramatic to report. maybe those people trying to sell 300 and 400 or even 500 watt power supplies are overstating their case?
	Sleep Mode ZZZZZZZZZZ. I set vista to go to sleep mode if left for 15 minutes or more, and am very happy with how it springs back to life damn fast. I still make the effort to completely power down the beast overnight, and a BIOS timer wakes it when my alarm clock goes off. is this worth the hassle? In sleep mode it looks like its drawing a measly 3 watts, less than the flipping router.  Interesting stuff

So there you have it. later today I might check out what the TV, the Wii, the other gadgets and gizmos draw to see if theres anything stupidly hungry that I’m leaving on (although generally I’m obsessed with turning all this stuff off).

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One of the things that emerged from recent playtesting was that the actual value of ‘kudos’ in Kudos 2 was a tad irrelevant. In some ways, it was an unoffical ‘score’ in the first game. getting more kudos was good, because thats what the game was about. it enabled a very few things to be unlocked, and it would slowly degrade (and have a static element based on friendships).

This sucked a bit, and needed re-jigging. I did part of that today. Kudos is n longer a seperate score, next to the current cash, and it’s now an attribute like health, IQ or Culture. You build up your kudos just like any other attribute, and its the games shorthand for ‘cool’. So buying trendy sunglasses, going to nightclubs and hanging out with trendy people raises your kudos. You need kudos to become a TV presenter or other cool udde, but if your character becomes a C++ programmer or lawyer, it’s pretty irrelevant.

I think this (currently) works better than the previous approach.  Kudos is just another thing you can concentrate on, like IQ, money, happiness or whatever, depending on how you choose to prioritize for your character. The good news is the game seems to have a lot of potential right now to enable you to play in lots of different ways, whilst still providing a challenge, and lots to do. it’s already so much better a game than the original. There are of course, lots of bugs to fix, improvements to make, and content to add, but this will be the most complex, polished and feature rich game I’ve ever developed, once it’s finally done

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I’ve done two one-hour play-throughs of Kudos 2 today, fixing bugs and tweaks as I have encountered them. I still need some more artwork, and tons and tons of bug-testing, plus some game play redesigning to make the actual value of kudos in the game more relevant. here’s my fix list for today:

FIXED *** shrink mind-state button doesn’t work
FIXED *** takes forever to build muscles
FIXED *** movie eat popcorn button needs to shuffle up 4 pixels
FIXED *** fitness maybe degrades a bit quick, esp from weightlifting
FIXED *** if some social event costs 0 and we have negative funds we still cant do it
FIXED *** calendar “time for two activities” doesn’t update
FIXED *** soccer needs higher max invitees
FIXED *** food item tooltips are wrong
FIXED *** more police days should be fit ones.
FIXED *** police workers should be immune to muggings surely?
FIXED *** tooltip for job search needs to indicate it shows current job details too
FIXED *** if you keep repeating the same activity again and again, you should get bored
FIXED *** maybe a police sound for when you do the police job?
FIXED *** do sunglasses have any effect?
FIXED *** golf should boost fitness a little bit

This is basically the way I work these days, keep playing the game with textpad open to make a list of stuff that’s broken. then when the game gets unplayable due to one of them, go through and fix them all, then repeat. The game already feels pretty addictive, and filled with stuff, which is good. It’s so much better than the original game.

In other news I see that a major games portal have cloned Kudos : Rock Legend. Meh. Mine has more personality. mine is FROM THE HEART.

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There is a tendency these days, when whining about ‘the evil RIAA and MPAA’ (often hilariously respelled MAFIAA), to be critical of two concepts: Copyright and Corporations. Again and again, I hear people saying stuff like “The corporate copyright MAFIA” and “The content lobby” and other silly terms that try to lump all corporations and all copyright holders together as some super-evil-cartel that presumably has pointy beards and cackles on piles of gold whilst stroking cats and sentencing poor innocent consumers to death.

This is silly.

Corporations produced probably 99% of the stuff in your house (at least). It’s likely everything you currently wear was made by some corporate entity. And even if you have a local independent butchers or bakers, they are likely a corporation too. Not all corporations are evil like Sony or British Airways. Some of them are small family or one-man firms that have been set up as a corporation to look more professional. Positech Games is in fact “Positech Computing Limited”, registered at companies house UK. That doesn’t stop it being just me sat in a spare bedroom.

In a similar way, copyright isn’t some evil monopoly held by EA and Viacom. I own the copyright for all my games. I know loads of people who work full time but write software or games for extra income, and own the copyright on them. Clearly not all copyrighted content earns people millions of dollars. Copyright royalties also provide an income for people not directly in control of it. I employ artist and sound people on contracts, and although they don’t have ownership of the IP, I can only afford to pay them because people are paying me royalties on my previous IP. Without copyright, my artist doesn’t get paid, and nor for that matter does my local baker or butcher.

Another popular argument being thrown around and repeated as though it makes sense is that “I don’t get paid for work I did years ago, so why the hell do musicians and IP owners, they are just lazy.”

I get paid for games I wrote years ago (very little now), and because that system works, I can invest time and energy in making them. I have worked for 8 months on Kudos 2 now, seven days a week, maybe 8 hours a day. You know how much I’ve earned from it?

Nothing

You know what my guaranteed future income is from it?

Nothing

I do this because I’m *hoping* I’ll sell enough copies over the next few years to make that investment worthwhile. If copyright didn’t exist I’d have spent those 8 months doing contract programming for some bank. The game would never get made as there aren’t enough hours in the day. THIS is why copyright exists, and why it’s a GOOD system.  Anyone who clings to some hippy dream that “artists will still make music and software and movies without copyright” is either delusional, or living off daddys trust fund. Copyright is essential to provide an incentive for people to invest up front costs in the production of copyable products. If you know of a better system that WORKS NOW, then feel free to make yourself mega-rich by showing us silly copyright supporters how it’s done.

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Why is google never down, and never slow? Maybe because it’s a rich company… but the real answer I suspect is this:

Google understand that a slow website would kill their business instantly.

When your entire business is built around web pages, you better damn be sure you serve them up fast. Literally *nothing* else is this important. That means serious backup infrastructure and emergency planning. redundant systems, and a rock solid set of hardware. When I worked for datastream/ICV we had a 15 minute response time. If a client of ours had a software problem, 15 mins from picking up the phone he had it fixed. guaranteed. because we would be at his desk (from another place in the city believe it or not) within 15 mins with an entire replacement PC. We swapped out the whole thing, then diagnosed the bug in our time back at the office. To ensure this *never* went wrong, we always sent out 3 engineers in a van when we could. 1 to drive the van (no time to park), 1 to carry the replacement PC, and 1 to open doors for the guy carrying the PC. The van contained 2 complete units, in case (never happened) somehow the PC got dropped or died between leaving the office and landing on the guys desk.

Needless to say, Datastream/ICV give great support. And uptime is great. Their satellite link died for 15 minutes once. People went ballistic. I have little doubt people were sacked as a result. Of course, also needless to say, a support contract with them is expensive to say the least. we are talking megabucks.

The thing is, if you are a big city share trader, you realise that if your real time data feed is dead, you are rapidly heading towards business disaster, minute by minute. So it’s worth paying to get it right. Right now, I’m trying to buy Sound Effects from 2 different sites, and both are slow and dying on me (all other sites are fine). These guys are literally throwing money away right now.

if my site is ever down or slow, tell me. I REALLY need to know!

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