Here is a film you may like if you are a bit geeky and haven’t seen it:

Enigma (2001)

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0157583/

What is it?
A low key drama / love story about code breakers fighting to break the German enigma code during World War II

Who is in it?
Kate Winslet, Jeremy Northam, Tom Hollander, Matthew McFadyen, other people.

Quick Plot:
Tom Jericho is a code breaker based at Bletchley park, recalled to help break enigma again after the Germans mysteriously change the code mid-war. Interleaved with the code breakers attempts to break the code, is a love story between him and fellow Bletchley park worker Claire Rommelly, and a spy story based around a ‘mole’  feeding information to the Germans. There is little to zero action or spectacle. Only one bullet is fired as I recall. And the car chase may disappoint smokey and the bandit fans.

What’s Bad about it:
Some fairly cringeworthy romantic scenes and dialog. An annoyingly repetitive musical theme. A few fairly contrived and convenient plot devices. Some general purpose stereotyping of maths geeks.

What’s good about it:
It’s about the birth of computing AND fighting WW2. What’s not to like? Plus a great supporting cast, and a good script in places. Surprisingly historically accurate (glosses over alan turing though, presumably because they wanted a heterosexual love story). Also, it treats you like you are paying attention, and doesn’t break down the complexity of the core topic (encryption) to sub kindergarten levels like many Hollywood movies would.
The plot is complex enough to keep you guessing.

Best Scene:
Tom Jerichos explanation on how enigma works to the American General. This is the way all programmer should speak to their boss when asked that irritating question “How long will it take?”

Best Character:
Jeremy Northam was born to be the slimey, suspicious and sarcastic British Intelligence chief.

Best Quote:
“Given the circumstances, Miss Wallace, I think we might risk first names.”

Buy it or Rent it. It’s good

I’m working on both an expansion, and some UI improvements for Gratuitous Space Battles. I’ll blog on them when they are ready.

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I just released patch 1.31 for Gratuitous Space Battles, which has a number of minor tweaks as well as hopefully a fix for startup freezing on some machines.

I did the first 3 new ships for the next expansion today, in terms of getting them working in the game. They look pretty cool. I also have the backdrops done, and the two new weapons. Its stil a few weeks of getting all the new ships done, and the balancing of the new ship designs and weapons. Then I need two really good balanced new missions. I’m pretty sure one will be small, one big, and one has a nice nebula, the other is simpler but with asteroids.

I havent decided if one will be a survival mode yet.  Survival mode is fun, and has high scores, but skirmishes make for more challenge options. I might run some stats to see how popular each mode seems to be.

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It’s very common for people online to state (on the subject of games pricing) that
“If you dropped the price, you would sell way more and make tons more money”
It is not that simple. I’ve done a lot of tests, and found that the twenty – twenty four dollars price is right for my games. Lowering the price makes me less money.
But why oh why do the steam holiday sales work then? here is my best guess:

The sales == attention == increased visitors.

Getting tons of eyeballs on your game will mean more sales. This is just basic business. There were whole websites dedicated to promoting the steam sale, no wonder games in the sale sell tons more

Also, this is not the whole story. When you hear people say “I dropped the price of game X, and made twice the money”. That is NOT the whole story. For the whole story you need to know what happened to the sales a month after the price reverted to normal. You really need an A/B test in different universes looking at the lifetime sales of the game in both scenarios.
You basically can’t tell whether the 100 extra sales are the 100 people who would pay $5 for the game but never pay $20, or whether they are the people who hadn’t heard of the game and would have paid $20, or the people who keep meaning to one day get your game, and will eventually buy it for $20, but bought it in the sale to save money.
It’s the last last group I find interesting. I suspect the vast vast majority of Democracy 2 buyers are in that group. I sold 4 copies of that game this morning (it’s an oldish game now, so that’s good!), and it’s $19.95. People who have been waiting since I released it in December 2007 for me to offer it below $19 are still waiting, and I see no urgent reason to cut the price now. If you really like the idea of a complex and serious government-sim, Democracy 2 is your best choice. It’s a love it or hate it game, and not something people buy for $2 on a whim. The price reflects that, and likely always will.

Theres some interesting analysis by a fellow indie of his ‘pay what you want’ sale here. Notice that if he basically just told everyone paying under £1 to get stuffed, he would only have lost out £2.40. If just two percent of those cheap-buyers had raised their price to £1, he would be in profit. In other words, you can ignore the cheapest-paying 85% of your potential market, and hardly lose a penny.

In more fun-related news I’ve been getting decent nebula renders arranged for the next expansion, and working on improvements to the graphics in GSB. Better engine glow effects (you will hardly notice, but subtly, subconsciously you might), and optimising for maybe some better particle effects. Come monday morning I’ll be doing real work on new ship stuff.

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The more I use the global hyperweb, and the more I rely on it, the less tolerant I become of everything that is *not* web-enabled. In fact the idea that anything I might own, invest in, or have a relationship with would not be accessible online or have an associated website is just infuriating.

We are now at the point where almost every business has a website. Even our local plumbers, or even butchers and bakers have a website. Admittidly, a lot of them suck, but the fact that they exist is better than nothing,

Hopefully, eventually things will go further. I might want a cup of tea in 5 minutes time, but I can’t turn the kettle on through the internet. I’m not sure if we have any cat food in the cupboard, and if there was a webcam in that cupboard, I could check that from here. On a cold icy day, it would make sense to turn the car on 5 minutes before leaving the house through a web interface.

Ok, so thats all a bit unlikely for now, but we live in a world where if you buy a new TV today, it will have a remote control that will control absolutely sod all else in your house. I have some software on my laptop that lets me share folders of pictures on the TV, but theres no easy way for me to adjust the tv volume or change channels from this laptop keyboard. This sucks.

Friends of mine who are a bit older, and dont use the web would consider all these ideas insane, and for the lazy, and totally uneccesary. And yet I remember my grandfathers black and white TV didn’t even have buttons for channels (you literally had to ‘tune-in’).

I reckon in 20 years time the idea that you couldn’t turn the cooker on or dim the lighting or lock the catflap from your laptop (or phone) will seem quaint. Whose with me?

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These probably need to be darker (I might make that configruable per map), but is this better?

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Now and then I search google for an answer to a question and don’t get a  good answer, and this time I’m doing my bit for the greater good to answer these:

“Is it worth putting foam insulation lagging on hot water pipes?”

“Is it worth putting reflective foam insulation around lagged hot water pipes”

“What is the difference in insulation between no pipe-lagging, foam pipe-lagging and foam plus foil lagging?”

Yup, this isn’t about games

background: i have a cold old house with a  freezing cellar, and the last occupant did NO insulation. The hot water pipes for the radiators go under the floor in the cellar ceiling, exposed to the cold and damp draughty cellar. A lot of my heating costs were being wasted heating up a damp cellar we never use. So this needed fixing.

Now there is ‘reading books and believing them” and then there is “getting real data”, so I went and got one of these (an infared thermometer £20)

Then I lagged some pipes using that foam insulation stuff, tied on with cable ties. Then as an experiment I doubled up on them by also wrapping that foil stuff you get for the back of radiators around them too, and took measurements. Heres a picture showing all 3 scenarios, where I haven’t finished yet (I ran out of tape…)

With NO lagging, and the radiators on, the temperature of the exposed copper pipes was 57 degrees.

With just tied-on foam insulation, the temperature of the foam was 21 degrees. ( a reduction of 63%ish)

With tied on foam AND a layer of reflective radiator foil, the temperature of the external foil was 12 degrees. (a further reduction of 15%ish)

Obviously the lower the temperature the better, I want all that heat kept in the pipes going to my radiators, not leaking out into the cold air of the cellar.

Conclusion: it is HUGELY worth you lagging any pipes in unused unheated rooms with foam insulation. It is also very worthwhile wrapping the lagged pipes with a  layer of reflective radiator foil. I tape it up with special reflective tape and both the tape and the foil is dirt cheap. The foam tubes are about 50p each.

If you pay heating bills where you live, you would be mad not to do this

And if you don’t know where the heat goes, get an infared thermometer. They double up as laser pointers to entertain cats.

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Spam is getting cleverer. I deleted some spam from the forums yesterday, and about 100 spam comments this morning form the blog. The thing is, they are becoming more and more cunning. They are contextual spams, that do a passable job of imitating genuine comments from people, albeit confused people with English as their second language.

For example, on my blog post about PC power consumption I got this:

“I don’t have concrete figures, but they should be using very little power with no load attached”

I suspect that the blogspam AI has scanned that post, then gone through a huge database of sentences that contain similar words to words which show up in my post (such as power, load, figures) and pasted in a sample sentence from what is obviously a different, but relevant conversation. All very clever. But two things strike me as not very clever:

1) If you are trying this super advanced AI-spam, try not posting 100 comments in 1 day from the same username on different topics. Thats kind of a big huge giveaway isn’t it?

2) This is a shit way to make money. Do you really think that if you spam a million blogs with pointless comments, enough idiots will follow links in the posters signature to convert to paying customers that make it worthwhile? Do you actually think google are stupid enough to push up your search engine rankings because you get 1,000,000 backlinks from totally irrelevant blogs?

The spammers seem to think that if they send enough spam, and get enough traffic, they will get rich. I think that’s an incredibly naive and scatter-gun approach. I earn enough money, but I don’t get a lot of traffic. The reason my traffic converts into enough sales to pay my bills is because I get relevant traffic. Traffic from people who play PC games, preferably strategy games, ideally (at the moment) sci-fi fans or political gaming fans.

If I look at traffic from ’stumbleupon’ the site that semi-randomly sends visitors to something roughly in a category they enjoy, it converts at a rate of about $0.01 per visitor. If I get traffic from a PC strategy gaming website the return is up to sixty times higher. Quality not quantity. The 1,000 true fans, and all that. My tip for the people behind new AI spam is to go write some decent AI software for something useful such as natural language processing for customer service support enquiries. You will earn more money and feel better

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She said I could decorate it “however I wanted“.

Oh rly?

Stage one:

You will need

• Marzipan
• Christmas cake
• Icing
• Klingon d’k tahg

Stage 2:  Imperial klingon emblem cut out into marzipan and smaller icing using klingon weapon

stage 3: Add some edible gold stars to represent the many star systems of the klingon empire! and tada: A feast fit for a warrior! Qa Plagh!

” batlh Daq joH’a’ Daq the highest, Daq tera’ roj, QaQ DichDaq toward Hoch.”

You might remember me from such festive treats as my klingon pumpkin

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I’ve been reading a huge 5 or 6 volume book called ‘World War II’. A bit of an arrogant title, assuming you can cover the whole topic, but it was written shortly after the war by Winston Churchill, so he’s allowed some slack. Obviously it’s insanely long, and I’m only on volume 3, but it’s fascinating stuff, especially when you are working on a battle game .
Here is some of the stuff that has stood out as interesting to me so far.

1) Invasion of Poland my ass. We get taught in school that this is when WW2 started, but thats bullshit. Hitler had already frogmarched into a number of countries by then, and Mussolini had been misbehaving too. We didn’t officially declare war with Germany until then, but the idea that this was sudden or even slightly unexpected is wrong. There was tons of obvious buildup.

2) Everyone thought England was fucked. The Germans assumed they could conquer us, The Americans had strong doubts we will hold out any longer than the French. (They wouldn’t send us arms that they secretly thought would end up in the hands of conquering Germans).  The global consensus was that England would fall next, and Hitler would have the whole of Europe soon. Nobody took seriously the idea of the Brits fighting to the death.

3) The British Navy was fearsome. We kicked ass in terms of naval combat. The Germans didn’t really try to engage the royal navy, because they were just outgunned and they knew it. The story of ship v ship combat (ignoring subs) for the first part of the war, was the royal navy tracking down enemy ships and sinking them. No wonder we have this ‘brittania rules the waves’ lyric.

4) The battle of britain was vital purely because it stopped Germany having air cover for a seaborne invasion of the UK. They knew their ships wouldn’t make it over the channel without air superiority, which is why they tried to take out our air force. The whole bombing of cities was just plan B after it was obvious that an invasion was impossible

5) The Italian army was rubbish. Really hilariously bad. There were some engagements where it was literally a 100 to 1 ratio of British troops lost to Italians killed or captured. That’s just laughable. This isn’t knocking the Italians, it’s probably just that the average Italian soldier wasn’t as keen on the war as the Duce. Good for them!

6) Churchill was on the ball. This was not some upper class twit drinking port and leaving the war to the military. He was intimately aware of troop dispositions, strategy, diplomacy, economics, and always hassling everyone to get things done better, faster, and with more enthusiasm. He was determined to take the fight to the enemy, and a big believer in using new technology to win the war.

It’s especially amazing to read Churchills multi-thousand page history of the war, know all about Bletchley park, and notice he never even hints at what went on. Talk about keeping a secret…

I’m sure in 4 years time when I finally finish the books, I’ll have more to report If you have a million hours of free time, I recommend it as a fascinating read.

I’m working on the UI for a custom challenge editor thing…

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