Terminally Incoherent

I was really surprised by Ned Bachel’s rant on Apple’s installation procedure. To me this installation model appears not only very intuitive but also transparent:

1. Double click on the .dmg file
2. Drag the .app file to your Aplications folder
3. ???
4. Profit

Even a clueless of users will sort-of get what is going on here. Application files go into Applications folder - and to remove application from your system, you take it out from that folder and dump it into the recycle bin. I’m not an Apple fanboy - far from it. I’m not even a Mac user. I don’t own a Mac, I don’t have an iPod, and I’m not all that impressed by the iPhone. But, I really I can’t imagine anything more straightforward or transparent than this.

Ned however prefers the windows like installation wizard. Surprisingly Jeff Artwood sort of agrees with him only to contradict himself in the last sentence. I think they are both missing the point here. This behavior is a well thought out design choice, clearly outlined in Apple developer guidelines. Say what you want, but to me this looks like a very good attempt to improve usability. You create guidelines, encourage developers to follow them, and thus offer the user consistent experience.

On windows the experience varies from one application to another. It really depends on developers choice. Some choose to use the Microsoft MSI Installer. Another popular choice is InstallShield, and Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. Some people simply choose to roll their own installer. And while all of them do the same exact thing, they differ with respect to the look and feel, and the presentation of the necessary prompts to the user.

Ned’s main criticism (other than his annoyance with zipped .dmg files which can be safely written off as developer’s mistake - kinda like putting a MSI in a zip file for Windows) is that finding the Application folder might be difficult and/or tedious. Or at least that’s the notion I got from his post. Sure, perhaps locating and opening the Applications folder might be confusing the first time around. But since installation is consistently done this way, I don’t see why would it be so much worse than a multiple step wizard. You just get used to it, just like you get used mashing the next button on the windows installer.

I think both Ned and Jeff are suffering from a classic “it’s different from what I’m used to so it must be bad” bias. They have certain habits, which are obviously a result of their OS preference. But, are windows power users really the best people to judge Apple installation method purely based on merit?

It’s interesting that Jeff does get it. In the last sentence of his post, he expresses the need for a “no questions asked” installers. He wants a big, “Install Me” button that users could press. But he seems to be so stuck in the “windows user mentality” that he does not recognize that this is exactly the point of the Apple installation guideline. The only difference between Jeff’s perfect installer and the Apple way is that one has buttons, and the other one has drag and drop mechanic. Is clicking a button inherently easier than dragging? Perhaps it is. But which design is better from the usability point of view.

One could argue that Apple’s method is more transparent to the user. Even the average user will know that all his apps “live” in the Applications folder and that’s where you go to modify it or uninstall it. Do Windows users typically know about the Program Files folder and it’s purpose? And is this knowledge a good or a bad thing? Do you want your user to know these things, or do you want him blissfully ignorant?

The truth is that we can discuss theoretical usability issue till we are blue in the face, and still get no actual insight into what users really need. The only way to see which method is better, easier, more intuitive is to put it to a test. Let’s gather a group of people with no prior computer experience (and hence no bias), let’s show them both methods, and then make them install bunch of common applications on each system. Then let’s have them report on their experience. My hunch is that we might get a 50-50 split right down the middle, with some people preferring one way and some the other. But my guess here is about as good as yours.

What do you think? In my honest opinion, apt beats both systems with respect to consistency and user experience. I mean, it will even download the package, and all it’s dependencies for you. I doubt Jeff and Ned would agree with me on this - but this is what works for me.

Long, long time ago (in 2005) I wrote about the MAME emulator which allows you to play old school fighting games such as Street Fighter Alpha, and Marverl vs. Capcom on your PC. In and by itself MAME is awesome, as long as you know where to download the appropriate game ROM’s. However, I always wondered how do people take the crazy screen shots and videos pairing characters from different games and genres. For example Ken vs. Rayden. At first I though that someone simply combined footage from Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, but of course this was not the case. It was actual game footage, with some clever editing.

So what did they use to create that video? So what game lets you have all these crossover combats? It’s a called M.U.G.E.N.

MUGEN is not really a game in itself. It is a modable, scriptable engine for the old school, 2d fighting games. It ships with no stages, no characters, no life bars, and a very basic character selection screen - you need to supply all of that to make the game work. Fortunately, MUGEN has a very large and active community which constantly churns out new content for the system. Most of the characters from Street Fighter series, and most of Marvel heroes that appeared in CAPCOM games have been carefully re-created for MUGEN including their signature combos, and special moves. Same goes for Mortal Kombat, King of Figthers and dozens of other games. People even create completely original characters, by re-drawing other sprites, and altering moves from other characters. For example, someone made a very awesome Superman based on the Magnetto model from X-men vs. Street Fighter game.

But I’m not just going to tell you. I will show you the fights I was able to stage with a little bit of digging, and downloading:

Who will win - Superman or Wolverine?

When worlds collide: Inuyasha vs. Piccolo from Dragon Ball

WTF? Oh, God, why? Petter Griffin vs. Ryu

OMG! Kill it with fire! Superboy vs. Krusty the Clown

Yes, I made those screen shots. and yes, Petter Griffin has a flaming fart super move.

Caveat emptor: MUGEN takes a little bit of work before it becomes fun. How come? Before you do anything you probably need a screenpack. What is that? Screenpacks usually contain images and scripts that make your life and energy bars look nice, make a cool character selection screen and etc. Each screenpack is a big zip containing altered data, plugins and fonts folders. You simply drop them into your MUGEN directory overwriting the old ones, and next time you start the application, it will have a brand new look and feel to it.

Then of course you need characters and stages. Importing them is easy, but tedious since they are usually not included in screenpacks. Furthermore, since it takes a lot of time and effort to create one, you will almost never see large character packs available for download. Most of the time, people will simply create characters for their 3-4 favorite fighters from a given game. So if for example you want to download the complete cast of Street Fighter, you are up for a lot of hunting, since the downloads are scattered all over the place.

Mugen Infantry has an impressive, ever growing database of characters but they do not usually host them, or direct link to downloads. They simply link to the homepage of the author, and from there you need to locate the downloads you want yourself. Did I mention that half of the indexed characters is hosted on non-english sites? Well, I’m mentioning it now. I had fun trying to figure out which link leads to character downloads in French, Spanish, Japanise and German. Whooptie do!

Once you find stages and characters you want you will usually need to unzip them and drop them into stages and chars folders in the MUGEN directory. Then you will need to let the game know about each of them by editing the data/select.def config file. How do you do that? Like this:

For each character you need to add an entry in that file. Same goes for stages.

Finally, the game is unbalanced. Since the attack timing, combos and AI is scripted by the character creators you get very varied results. For example, whoever designed the Wolverine I’m using, decided he should be a beast in combat. So as the first opponent (ie. the easiest one) he scored two flawless victories on me. I didn’t even get a single punch in, And all of that was done with long, chained 32 hit combos, followed up by special move, and more combos. Ouch!

I also noticed that Superboy has almost no recovery time to his fast and medium kicks and punches, and they do not knock the opponent away far enough. In effect you can easily get off 20-30 hit combos by just repeatedly mashing buttons.

Then again, Lobo totally kicked my ass despite that infinite combo bug giving me the unfair advantage. Which kinda makes sense - Lobo was always a total badass. I vaguely remember a comic in which he royally kicked Superman’s ass up and down the Fortress of Solitude until he got somehow tricked by some rouse and lost. Seriously, I did read that at one point - I’m not making this up. If you can tell me the issue, or at least some insightful info about that storyline, you get 10 points on the spot!

It’s only fair to mention that many of the characters I downloaded were still in beta, or even alpha testing stages. So this is where the lack of balance comes from, and it is totally forgivable.

All in all, MUGEN is tons of fun if you like tinkering, and “collecting” cool playable characters, and pitting them against each other in combat. I highly recommend checking it out.

I was meaning to post about this for a while now. At the end of June I singed up for a free Eve Online trial. I figured that since I love space trading games such as Frontier, and Freelancer, I’d like this one. I was wrong. But let me start from the beginning.

Day 1

I pretty much summed up my first impression of the game in earlier post. On the first day, Eve’s one and only server was down for maintenance. So much for a single server philosophy.

Day 2

I spent about an hour tweaking and creating my character. Their character creation setup is actually pretty awesome. You only get to see your avatar’s face for the whole game, so naturally the game gives you a really fine detail control over how you customize it. You can essentially re-sculpt the whole face to give it just the right expression. I went for a smug smuggler look - with one raised eyebrow, self confident smirk, head cocked at an angle, and a little goatee.

Choosing skills and attributes was also easy. All the choices were well explained, and it was essentially a breeze… Ok, not a breeze because the skill system is a bit convoluted, but it was not that hard. I give the character creation sequence an A+.

Once I was done, I went on to do the short tutorial. First big disappointment: there seemed to be no “mouse flight” or anything of that sort. You move your ship by clicking where do you want to go. And since you are in space with few reference points this does not always work well. In other words, you usually want to click on an object to fly to it, or use the auto pilot.

I didn’t like that. The thing that I loved in Freelancer and other games like that was the ability to mouse fly the way I wanted. Even in Frontier I could do that - it was difficult, but if you could manually on a planet without crashing it made you feel like a fucking ace pilot. Eve lacked that - but I guess I could get used to it.

The tutorial then made me do some mining (snooze) and combat (surprisingly also snooze worthy). When you mine you essentially lock onto an asteroid, and shoot at it with your mining gun for 5-10 minutes, after which stuff starts appearing in your cargo bay. So essentially, each time you mine, you can get up from your computer and make yourself a cup of coffee, because that’s what you will need to get a whole cargo hold full of precious ore. I know that mining is hard work, but is it really necessary to make it feel like work within a game?

Combat looks strangely similar to mining. You select your target, tell the autopilot to orbit it within the weapons range, then select your weapon and hit attack. So no twitch based combat here - but I expected that. But the ship won’t even shoot when you want - it shoots whenever it feels like it’s ready. You hit the attack button, and you have to wait few seconds as it adjusts itself, and prepares for shooting. Meh… Not particularly exciting.

Finally tutorial took me to a space station where I could dock. Once you land on the station you can do all kinds of fun things like trading, repairing your ship, trading some more, and trading. You trade by using spreadsheet like marketplace screen which is a little confusing at first. For example, you can easily buy items that are not on the current station, so you might need to fly a long way to pick them up.

Here you can also meet people who will give you quests. Here is another big surprise - quests have a real life time limit. This means that the quest will expire in n real days, and if you don’t do it in that time limit, the quest givers disposition towards you falls meaning they will be less likely to give you new quests. As a casual player I didn’t like that at all. Why can’t I take a break from playing during an exceptionally difficult quest?

Day 3

I set out to do my first quest. It was some silly “take this package and deliver it to some dude on a station 3 jumps away”. So I launched from the station, only to experience more big disappointments on my way to the target.

First of all, the map in Eve seemed like a mess. I tried to find my target on it, but after 5 minutes of tweaking and changing map modes I just went back to the agent screen, choose the destination from my quest log, and told autopilot set it as the target location. Frontier had an immense universe, but I was always able to find my destination targets on it’s map. Apparently Eve designers noticed that no one can use the map, so they simply allow people to set their course directly from the dialog screen.

Second disappointment was - no collision detection. The target turned out to be oriented directly behind the station I just left, so my autopilot decided to I just fly through it. I also flew through some planet on my way there. Ugh… That sucks. I was hoping you can sometimes land on planets, or maybe even play around by skimming their atmosphere. But no - I just flew right through it.

Third disappointment - jump gates. In most space games, jumping from system to system is an awesome experience. You go through some gate, and your end up in some crazy whirling tunnel, or everything flashes and etc… And while the fast travel within system in Eve is kinda cool, jump gates are huge disappointment. I got close to the gate, and my ship disappeared. Then the game started loading, and my ship appeared somewhere else.

When I looked more closely next time around, I noticed that the gate is actually supposed to slingshot you out using some sort energy beam. So you don’t really disappear. You just zoom away from the sight. Still, I liked the crazy swirling wormholes and stuff like that. Eve jump gates are boring.

I finished the mission, then took another one which required some easy combat (nailed it without even getting my shields half way down), and took another errand-boy/gopher mission.

Day 4

I hooked up with some guild… Sorry, a corporation which was recruiting in the newb areas. The people were really nice, invited me to their corporate chat room, and gave me tons of useful pointers. I ended up with bunch of good notes of which skills I should invest first, what should be my next ship purchase, what weapons should I get if I plan to do some combat missions and etc.

I have to say, I was impressed how nice these people were - especially to a n00b on a free trial like me. I even told them I’m not sure if I will still be around after my trial ends, but they were ok with that, and encouraged me to join. They also offered help with missions and etc. So the community, at least in the newb areas gets an A from me.

Anyway, I ended up making a long detour of 12 jumps to reach my new company’s base, and join it. I did the whole trip on autopilot, chatting in the meantime. Flying long trips like that is kinda boring.

Day 5

All the time I alloted for Eve was spent going back to the newb systems to finish my quest, then going back tho the first space station so that I can grab yet another dull errand-boy mission. I also tried some trading, but since I had virtually no money, and no cargo space I couldn’t really see any worth while trade runs I could do.

Day 6

Finished the mission, went back. I witnessed a space battle near the station. Around 4 or 5 ships were sitting in place shooting at each other. I decided to stick around to see the outcome. After about 20 minutes I logged out. None of the ships even looked like it was taking damage. WTF? Most boring combat I have ever seen.

Day 7

Took another mission. Realized that I will have to make like 10 jumps to get there, and logged out.

Day 8

Fuck eve, I’m done.

I just got bored with it. It seems that all of Eve’s primary activities such as travel, combat, mining and trading are inexplicably boring. The game felt like a chore, and during the week I was playing nothing really exciting ever happened.

So it’s not a game for me. I can see how people who are more into the trading and tinkering can enjoy it. I just didn’t find it fun. I think that the biggest draw in this game however is the community - wars between corporations, crazy plots, infiltration, and stories of betrayal make this game fun. But I don’t really have time to get involved in these communities so meh.

So that’s it. I haven’t logged into the game since then, and allowed my trial to expire. I’m not going back. In a way I’m relieved. I was afraid I was going to get sucked into this MMO, and spend inordinate amounts of time in it. But this didn’t happen. I just got it out of my system.

Oh my! Look at what I found:

Apparently someone is selling a full size robot from Short Circuit movie. Now, I don’t think that this is the Johnny Five (despite misleading label) because that dude is a citizen now:

img © lolbots.com

So unless we have reinstated slavery and no one told me, this must be one of those non-alive robots. But fear not - we have a plan:

1. Buy the robot
2. Live it outside during a thunderstorm
3. Robot gets hit by a lightning and becomes alive
4. 80’s style situational hilarity ensues
5. ???
6. Profit

Also, we will get a deal for a sequel, without virtually any of the original cast, save some of the extras.

Anyway, it seems a bit expensive for a fake robot, and one that is not even alive at that.

I knew using GOTO was bad, but I never realized how bad was it. Since I mainly use Java, PHP, Perl and C# I was never even tempted by it. And I’m glad. I mean Dijkstra, never said anything about Raptors:

comic © xkcd. layout edited to fit format. [click to see the original]

Sigh… If this guy only remembered to always carry his grape juice with him, he might have lived to tell us this story himself.