Dear Facebook:
I am not on Facebook. Anyone on Facebook claiming to be Ron Gilbert and a game developer is impersonating me. It’s frustrating because my friends think they are following me. They are not.
Thirty years ago today I made the final gold masters for Monkey Island.
Some notes about these.
These are the final source backups I made when the game left test and the gold masters were sent off.
They are labeled 1.1 because the game got bounced out of test during the final two weeks and so the version got bumped when it went back in.
For the younger readers out there: These are not USB devices and you can’t text your friends or watch TikTok videos on them. I know. Crazy.
UPDATE:
The day has come and gone and I didn’t get a happy birthday card from Disney with the Monkey Island IP tucked inside. There is always next year. Fingers crossed. Maybe it because I don’t subscribe to Disney+.
“The Muse visits during the act of creation, not before. Don’t wait for her. Start alone.” - Roger Ebert
One of my favorite quotes and one I keep needing to remind myself of. No matter how blocked or stuck I am, if I just force myself to start writing or designing, it’s not long before the ideas start flowing.
After posting the Delores code, I read a comment from someone who lambasted me for not using compliant JSON for the .wimpy and other data files.
They are 100% right, I did not use compliant JSON for those or any of my JSON-like files.
JSON was created by Doug Crockford, whom I worked with at Lucasfilm. Doug is a super smart guy and JSON is one of the best formats I’ve ever seen. Fully compliant JSON is also a pain in the ass.
Given that this was my engine, I decided to change it. For the record, my JSON reader can read compliant JSON just fine. With the right flags, it can also write fully compliant JSON.
Here is how my JSON differs and the reason for those changes.
- Keys in a dictionary don’t have the be quoted if they are simple alphanumerics.
a-zA-Z0-9_
{
foo: 100
}
- Values that are simple alphanumerics don’t need to be quoted.
{
name: Delores
}
- If a file doesn’t start with a
{or[then it is assumed to be a dictionary.
foo: 100
The main reason for this change was for the Prefs.json file. I expect these to be edited by consumers and { } is hard to understand if you’re not a techie person. I was seeing people add new keys after the closing }
{
foo: 100
}
bar: 1
99% of my JSON files are dictionaries, so it seem fine to drop this requirement.
- Commas are optional and ignored.
{
foo: 100
bar: 200
list: [ 1 2 3 "four" 5 6 ]
}
There is no syntactical reason for commas. If you need multiple items on one line, then you use them.
{
foo: 100, bar: 200
}
This is also OK. Commas don’t matter
foo:100,,,,,bar: 200
The only thing I don’t like about my custom format (and the reason for the initial complaint) is they can’t be loaded into any of the excellent JSON editors.
That is true.
I guess everyone needs to come around to my JSON format.
Good news everyone… I got my microSD card and Plex installed!
Bad news everyone… The Plex server is running. I can watch video from another computer, but I can’t get my Amazon Fire TV to see the new Plex server. I used to run a Plex server on my Mac and everything worked fine with the Fire TV, but no-go on the Pi. I’ll dig deeper next weekend.
My latest weekend project. I’m going to build a Plex server using a Raspberry Pi. I’m tried of having to run Plex on my computer every time I want to watch something.
I’m always amazed they can sell these so cheap. The 11 year-old me’s head would have exploded.
UPDATE: My plans have been thwarted by not owning a microSD card. I guess it will have to wait until next weekend.
This isn’t really about Linux password manager, it’s more about password managers in general. It seems like everyone is going for “cloud storage” of my passwords. This is nuts. I know they “claim” they are fully encrypted and they don’t have access to the passwords, but why should I trust them? These passwords are my life. It’s crazy that this has become standard practice in the password manager world.
I use 1Password version 6, because after that they went subscription with MY passwords stored in the cloud with a “promise” that they couldn’t decrypt them. I can’t get (or find where to get) 1password 6 for Linux.
I might opt for one of the command line managers. I loose browser extensions, but honestly, those are probably way more insecure then cloud storage.
Here is my first Grumpy Gamer post from my new Linux laptop!
Installation basically went OK. There was some confusion because I don’t want to dual boot into Windows, I want Windows gone gone gone from this laptop. I had to disable a thing call RST and turn some stuff off in the BIOS I don’t understand, but in the end it’s all working with a minimal amount of swearing.
Two issues I see right away is I really miss Little Snitch. It’s a great Mac firewall that monitors all out going internet connects by program and allows you to selectively block them for a given duration (with a nice UI including a map showing where in the world it’s trying to connect to). If you’ve never run with something like this, it’s damn scary how many programs try and connect to the internet. Not sure if there is anything like it on Linux.
I use One Password a lot. There is a Linux version, but it seems to only be available with their horrible subscription. I’ll have to investigate more.
Update 1
I miss dropbox. That might be an issue for working the game as we rely on dropbox a lot. It’s not that there aren’t other services like it, it more that the entire team uses it and I can’t make everyone switch. I might be stuck using the web interface.
Slack won’t run. It launches and then quits. I can use the web interface if I have to.
I really miss the cmd key for copy/paste in the terminal. My laptop has one of those silly Windows keys, I want to remap that so it can copy/paste/undo across all apps.
It’s going to be at least a week before the machine “feels” right.
My linux Laptop (Dell XPS 13) arrives today. I tried to order it from Dell, but ended up canceling the order twice. Every time I order something from a on-line store not named Amazon I’m repeatably shocked at how bad it is. I eventually canceled both incorrect orders and just bought the same laptop from Amazon for the same price and it took 2 days to arrive, not the 9-15 days directly from Del. There is a reason Amazon is eating everyones lunch.
Enough ranting about Dell. On a lot of levels, Amazon is also a crappy company in that they don’t pay taxes, screw over Seattle, refuse employee attempts to unionize, etc, etc, etc. But they do know how to ship stuff and run a website. If I had 140 billion dollars I’d sure as hell be super nice to my employees.
I digress again…
Anyway, my Linux laptop arrives today… wait it’s not actually a Linux laptop, it’s a Windows laptop because Dell doesn’t make a Linux laptop with a 512GB SSD, so I had to buy a Windows one and will install Linux as soon as it arrives.
My goal is to see how far I can get developing my new game on directly on Linux and not the Mac (I haven’t developed on Windows in years). Can I ditch the Mac and go 100% Linux?
For working on the “game”, this shouldn’t be a problem once the engine runs on Linux. The few custom tools I use (Wimpy, for example) and all built from the same code the engine is, so once it’s working under Linux, they should compile as well.
The real issue is going to be developing the “engine”, which I spend most of my day doing. Writing C/C++ code in a nice text editor and compiling it isn’t really the issue. It’s mostly that I’ve gotten very used to the visual debugging found in Xcode and Visual Studio.
It seems that Linux IDEs are really behind in this. Once I get started I’ll explore it deeper and I hope I’m wrong.
I’ve been a full-time Mac user for 20 years but Apple seems to get more and more paranoid and authoritarian as time goes buy. I would love to move to Linux, but I don’t know if I can without making a lot of productivity sacrifices.
I’m going to install Ubuntu Budgie going solely on the fact that I like the looks. I’ve resigned myself to installing Linux several times before I find something I like.
We’ll see… I have my finger crossed.