A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

Contrary to what Wikipedia implies, Microsoft's new XNA Game Studio 2.0 is a free download. I liked it so much I installed it twice! Actually I installed it once on my purely-virtual VMWare Windows machine, and when it finally got up to the part where it was ready to compile its sample game, it went "Duh, I can't find a 3D card." So I killed that and put it on my Boot Camp partition instead and now it all works. And so apparently I have to boot into Windows to do any work with it, which kind of stinks.

I haven't researched this deeply yet, so maybe I'll still luck out. I hope so, because doing anything in Windows is like feeling my way through a fog, while having left my glasses at home. It isn't (entirely) Windows' fault; I'm just used to how things work on Macs. I grow a new engram every time I hit ctrl - ← to go back a word and end up warping to the previous page, because the ctrl key is actually the command key here in the bizarro world. So for now I'm moving the cursor around by mousing and generally partying like it's 1992.

Anyway, I'm excited, coz XNA 2 supports XBox Live out of the box. You can't actually distribute an XBox Live-using game without Microsoft's OK, but I'm planning on getting that covered so that's fine. It ships with two example games, a basic local-play one and a network game. The former is a port of SpaceWar!, and how can I not totally respect that?

How do you install MSIE 7 without killing your MSIE 6 install? IIRC this is non-trivial. Tell me if the world has changed since I last checked.

I wanna be able to test on both...

I finally made and uploaded a ding-dong-dang MSI file. Even with this tool it's hard to figure out what the hell's going on, but I'm willing to chalk this up to my lack of experience with Windows culture; I don't know where things are supposed to go. I expect, through experience and feedback, to learn what I need to know, and no more.

The MSI-constructing application is pretty good -- it certainly lifted quite a weight off of me after I bit the bullet and surrendered our credit card number -- and has a command-line interface as well as the usual GUI. After Andy gets Cygwin and sshd running on the machine, I should be able to drive it around by lobbing commands at it from the Perl build script running on my Mac. This is like using a WALDO unit to handle the computer through 10cm of radiation shielding, and rikchik notes, this is really the only way some of us can comfortably make software for Windows.

If you'd like to test the MSI-ized Gamut, it's here: wingamutmsi-0.3.2.zip [~6MB Windows32 MSI]. That done, I will now finish the website. Eh, tomorrow.

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I just had a fellow Tetris DS player contact me offline for the first time. My handle in the game is "jmac.org", and I got an email from a guy with a much higher rating than me who I beat 2 games out of three. He just said "I just totally lost to you at Tetris, heh." I wrote back to admit he actually handed me the one loss I suffered tonight (I was on fire through seven games), and thanked him for the nice games. I considered sharing my friend code, but eh, that seemed weird somehow. Then again, what else is the thing for? I don't know.

Interesting: When playing two-player games online, I often play with the understanding that we're having a best-of-three contest, even though there's nothing in-game that enforces or even suggests this, and the players can't talk to each other (outside of spelling furtive low-reslution love notes with tetrominos or what have you). And I think that other folks often assume the same thing. I rarely see the other person drop before someone's won twice, and often see them leave as soon as this happens... if I don't leave first.

Exception last night when a person with a much lower rating kept beating me, and I stayed for three or four beatings until I finally bested them. Pride thing. I'm glad they were happy to accommodate, I guess.

My continued failure to figure out how to deploy a Java application on Windows is holding up the entire volity.net website rollout, and thus delaying our search for money. I have been consistently enraged for about a day now. I have not been this angry at a computing platform for being an uncaring behemoth since the time I was forced to work with Oracle at Harvard.

I have found programs that will take my Jar and make an .exe out of it, and even some that make an .msi installer file out of it. This is a good start, but in every case the resulting program, if opened on a machine without Java installed, will not do the sane thing of silently downloading and installing Java, but instead tell the user that they don't have any Java and leaving them to do something about it.

And this is retarded. Most any non-technical user presented with a dialog nattering about unmet dependencies or (worse) thrown to an apparently random webpage at sun.com is going to include that the program is broken or virused or something, and will trash it without further thought.

Do Windows developers not know this? Do they just not care? Does working with an OS that is already user-hating in a thousand little ways desensitize you against not wanting to produce one more way?

SO ANGRY