ProgRamming :)

Two years ago, I was a happy man. I was just leaving a great restaurant with my girlfriend after we had an excellent meal. We were heading back to my place, a little bit drunk and it was a cool Saturday evening.

Two years ago, I had just gone to the farmer's market with friends, tasting great food and buying lots of it. God bless them farmers.

Two years ago, I was still working in that same boring company half-doing a boring job. But things went well then, so I didn't care much.

Two years ago, I had seen Sonata Arctica's concert in Paris and enjoyed it a lot (though the drummer looked like a 10-year-old).

Two years ago, we had released ReXplorer's latest version and thought we had push the limits further with the minimap extraction and stuff.

Two years ago, my father had called me to tell me my grandfather was dying after many years of pain. He was to follow his beloved wife that passed away the year before.

Two years ago, you were making a long walk through Sweden.When I logged in back home after the restaurant, I learned you'd never come back from there.
You introduced me to their music but you will never come with me to a Sonata Arctica concert.
We'll never work again on ReXplorer together.
We'll never fight 3 CPUs on Funeral Pyre again.
I didn't know I had to bury you one week before my grandfather. I wasn't ready for that. I wasn't prepared.

Two years ago, I was a shattered man.

Hey guys !

Like in the previous blog entry (omg, 4 months without blogging), I need beta-testers for my project. Recap of what it is :

• It's for a website. No need to install anything on your computer except for a web browser.
  
• It's about StarCraft. You need to know what SC is about and have some replays on your HDD (not too big of a requirement, I guess )
  
• You need to be serious. By that, I mean you want to do a good job and not register "just to see what it's all about".
  That also includes you being curious and want to test every single aspect of the website to see what could possibly be wrong.
  
• You must know how to make constructive comments. Simple "this is bad" or "it doesn't work" comments are useless and won't help. Preferred ways are things like "when I do this and this with this data, I have this error message (or it does this while I expected that) ; here's the URL".
  
• Having notions of website security flaws would be nice (but not required) ; if you know what cross-site scripting or SQL injection attacks are and you are able to try them on the site, then be my guest. I'd really like to know the potential flaws of the site before putting it online "for real".
  
• OR if you don't have a technical background, then having a good idea of a website's ergonomy and user-experience would be great.
  
• OR you have a lot of experience with replays sites and think you know what such a site should offer.
  
• This is the last beta test session before the final release that should occur in June if everything is OK.
  

• Manifesto7
  
• Centric
  
• Nitrogen23
  
• pachi
  
• thedeadhaji
  
• nemY
  
• yenta
  
• katona
  

Hey guys !

As I said in this previous post, I will need beta-testers for my project. Here's some info about it :

• It's for a website. No need to install anything on your computer except for a web browser.
  
• It's about StarCraft. You need to know what SC is about and have some replays on your HDD (not too big of a requirement, I guess )
  
• You need to be serious. By that, I mean you want to do a good job and not register "just to see what it's all about".
  That also includes you being curious and want to test every single aspect of the website to see what could possibly be wrong.
  
• You must know how to make constructive comments. Simple "this is bad" or "it doesn't work" comments are useless and won't help. Preferred ways are things like "when I do this and this with this data, I have this error message (or it does this while I expected that) ; here's the URL".
  
• Having notions of website security flaws would be nice (but not required) ; if you know what cross-site scripting or SQL injection attacks are and you are able to try them on the site, then be my guest. I'd really like to know the potential flaws of the site before putting it online "for real".
  
• There will definitely be a second beta-test session afterwards (in late February, I think). Participants to the first session will of course be the first contacted for this second session.
  

It's been a while since this blog hasn't been updated... as the title implies, I've been very busy these past few months because of different issues :

• New job. I stopped working in my previous company (in which I had worked for 6+ years) in early September and started working in the new one in mid-October. The new company is an IT service company and I didn't start working "for real" until December 11th. All of this changed many things in my life : new people, new habits, new places... I can't say everything is for the best but that was what I was looking for so I won't complain (yet)
  
• New project. I've started working a lot on a new SC-related project. It's kinda huge, especially since I'm working alone on it (but I've received much help from PoP ; thanks man !) but I'd like to have a closed beta in January and a release candidate in late February. Who knows.
  
• Personal issues. Along with all the professional changes, things haven't gotten very well in my private life too. I'm feeling much better now and I've learned a few things about life in general, which is quite good in the end.
  

Yay, I've just seen this on YGOSU.com (former YGCLAN.com) !
Move your cursor over the "APM GRP", "UNITS", etc... buttons and enjoy Amazing work by YGOSU.com develoment team.

I want to thank sailor from YGOSU for having taken time to e-mail me about problems found in RepASM and waiting for me to solve them It is really appreciated and I truly enjoy what they have made with our tool ^^

OK, that was the minute of self-satisfaction, you can now get back to work :D

It all started with a news on some French video games website like 6 months ago. I didn't know anything about that "BioShock" game so I read it. It was all about the atmosphere and the morality in the game and I liked it instantly ; the more news I read about this game, the more confident I grew it was going to be a great game. So I pre-ordered the PC version on Play.com (much cheaper than in French stores) and I received a few days after it was released. Let's rock !

(note : I will try as much as possible to put sensible things inside spoiler tags)


"Uncomfortable" you say ?

After dealing with the Securom problems (had to reboot twice, remove AVG... -_-; ), I was finally able to play the game. Minimal introduction, plane crash and voilà I am in the underwater city named Rapture.

What's that giant lighthouse ?

The idea of an underwater city is original and very well made : no space station or stupid fences or invisible walls that put physical boundaries to the gamer, the limits are here perfectly understandable and having all this water around adds a little bit more pressure to the atmosphere. You're locked hundreds of meters underwater and it makes you nervous but it's just the beginning...

This is what you see from the bathysphere that takes you down to Rapture

Actually, the moment you arrive in Rapture shows a poor guy being slaughtered by a mad woman equipped with butcher's claws. Ouch. Meet the splicers, original Rapture inhabitants who have lost their mind ! The levels are filled with barely lit rooms or flicking neons where disguised splicers crawl in search of a substance that lets them live so beware : they are angry, aggressive and armed.
Then you enter the second level, the "Medical Pavilion". That one is wicked. Mad plastic surgeons, failed experiments, angry dentists... you name it. This level is worse than a horror show and is a nightmare if you don't like hospitals

OK, do I really have to go in there ?

Finally, you'll meet the Little Sisters : little girls under the control of a parasite sticked in their body and you'll have to either help them or kill them to help you go further in the game. Needless to say, you'll get more help by killing them than saving them... so what will prevail ? Your own morality or your desire to finish the game with more ease ?

Make your choice

All these factors together combine to give a really unique experience to BioShock which makes you very uncomfortable and nervous. This is interesting because the horror does not from the single fact that aliens have invaded Earth/a spaceship and are ugly ; the horror deals with your own conception of morality and inner fears.


Plasmids

I must admit I was a bit disappointed with the introduction that does not give any information about who you are, what you are doing in an airplane, etc... + Show Spoiler +

• back when they were still mentally fit, people living in Rapture have recorded their thoughts/impressions on tape. So you'll find tape recorders here and there in the city and you'll be able to understand what happened in Rapture. Some (most ?) of them are really creepy.
  
• hacking is a way of life. Rapture has many automatic machines : vending machines, security cameras, surveillance bots... and all of them can be hacked so they work for you ! The hacking system is a bit boring at times but really, this is useful 100% of the time.
  
• the research camera. You can take pictures of different things around you : splicers, Little Sisters, Big Daddies, defense turrets, security bots, etc... The more pictures you take (up to 3 for one single enemy), the more you know about them : this will allow you to get boosts or increase damage against them. Of course, you progress more slowly if the subject is dead or has already been taken so the idea is to take a picture of them in the middle of battles (you get bonus points for that) ^^
  
• inventing items is good. Some items/ammo just cannot be bought but you can make them using various pieces of junk you find here and there Kinda funny, it lacks a bit of variety though.
  

Like the "would you kindly..." thing. Man, I was blown away at the end of Hephaestus level. At some points in the game I was a bit suspicious and disappointed : when Atlas tells you to go get his family, you do it. When Atlas tells you to go kill Ryan, you do it. I was like "geez, this guy does everything as told, what a puppet". I couldn't have been closer to the truth :D

The revelation

Today's article will introduce a series of thoughts and (hopefully) discussions around the e-sports phenomenon : what it is, what are the main events in e-sports, what structures exist to support it, etc...


Introduction

I think all of you know how great StarCraft works as a real e-sport in Korea. Though its predominant status can be a topic of discussion in itself (why it became so, how big it is, can other games claim their share, etc...), it's not really what I want to talk about now. I will be more focused on how e-sports are seen in other countries, especially in France since I live there and can comment on it. I will try to give my point of view for other countries as well, so natives from these countries can debate about it and maybe change my views Anyway, let's go.


e-sports ?

By "e-sports" I mean the ability of a game to transcend its state as "amateur game" to "professional game". Where contestants will play against each other in offline competitions to win relatively large sums of money and where these same contestants will be able to make a job from it. Yeah, that's quite restrictive but that's what I want to discuss.
Now, how many games have achieved this status ? I can think of two RTS (StarCraft and Warcraft 3), many FPS (Counterstrike, Quake 4, Painkiller in some way, some others I'm forgetting), a few simulation/sports games (FIFA or PES series, NFS). World of Warcraft seems to emerge as well but I have no clue at how it works as a competitive game (if you know and want to comment, please feel free to do so). I'm not even sure I should include the simulation/sports ones but since I do not know much about them, I will keep them.
As far as I know, except maybe for a few FPS games like Quake 4 or Unreal Tournament, there are very few game companies that develop a game specifically for its competitive aspect. It's simply too risky as e-sports is very young and there are too many unknown variables. However, it is clear Blizzard is (again) making the first move with StarCraft II by gathering a lot of information from the gaming community and modifying the game accordingly. We'll see how it works in a couple of years...
I have also read a recent article about the remake of Speedball 2 where the game's designer says he thinks about making it an e-sports game. Wait and see.


Events

There are two events that can be seen as "major e-sports events" and one I don't know much about but seeing his list of games is making me suspicious.

• World Cyber Games (WCG)
  
  Of course, the well-known WCG has been around for 7 years now and is considered the biggest e-sports event worldwide. Originally organized by Korean companies/associations, it has known an incredible rise because of the good marketing and publicity that was made around it but also because of a good management and attractive money prizes.
  
  
• Electronic Sports World Cup (ESWC)
  
  Created by a French company, the ESWC started back in 2003. The idea is to offer ladder services where people will play to qualify for the grand finals that will happen in early July in France. The prizes are generally high (started with 150,000 $ the first year, reached 400,000 $ in 2006 but was lowered in 2007), split among 5-6 games : Counter-Strike, Counter-Strike Women, Warcraft III, Quake 4, Trackmania Nations, PES 6.
  
  
• World Series of Video Games
  
  This one is a newcomer and has an original format : like other sports (beach volley is a good example), it is a tournament with a circuit including different stops in various countries : mostly USA (Dallas, LA), Sweden, UK, Canada... attendees gather there for a 3-4 days and the winners earn money and points. At the end of the tour, the players with most points will be declared grand winners and earn more money (this might be inaccurate as I am quite unfamiliar with WSVG). The games are... odd : World of Warcraft, Quake 4, Guitar Hero and Fight Night Round 3
  

For most people at TL.net, chrisbk was the other guy coding ReXplorer and RepASM. For me, he was one of my best friends (THE best friend online). I'll try to explain in this post who he was, what he did, etc...


Teh man

Strangely, I do not know much about Chris' life before we met. I'll try to compile a few things I know about him.
Chris was born on 30th June 1980 in Vesoul, a town in eastern France (Franche-Comté for those who know). Chris became quickly interested in computer programming so after graduating from university with an IT diploma (don't know the English/American equivalent so let's just say he graduated, OK ? ) in 2003, he went on a 6-month training to Fraunhofer (for those who don't know about it, they are a German company who invented the MP3 format). And that's where the fun starts.


Teh mighty meeting

Both Chris and I had registered to the same French message board (mainly about PC hardware but it has now extended to cover pretty much evrything), me in 2001 and him in 2000. Strangely enough, we did not "meet" before mid-2003, when we began chatting on a "general talk" topic on the Programming forum. I discovered quickly we had the same humor and loved saying stupid things but what started it all was...


Zombies Lake : one of the worst movies ever

...awful movies. Not horror movies no, awful ones. Like in "terrible", with bad actors, bad director, worse scenario. Movies so bad you can't help laughing while watching them. Maybe I'll make some revies of the ones we've seen if people are interested
Anyway, this kind of film is very hard to find, especially that most of them are on VCR only, so we used "teh w4r3Z P2P" to get them and shared them together. We began chatting in PM and that chat lasted 336 pages (at a 40 posts/page rate, you do the math) from October 2003 to May 2006. And I don't even mention the megabytes of MSN logs I have at home where we used to connect as soon as we got back from work until late in the night
We talked about everything : bad movies (of course), girl problems, programming (of course #2), stupid people, how to piss off mods on our forum, music, etc... We had the same taste in almost everything and I knew he would be there if I had a problem. Man, had he been a girl, I would have fallen in love with him :D
Anyway, in late December 2003, I welcomed him in my small Parisian apartment and we played Double Dragon on a Neo Geo emulator all night long


Yeah, crappy game. But we ended up beating it !@#

At some point, Chris crashed my agonizing and crappy armchair. Good times :D


StarCraft

Then in 2004, I discovered TL.net and "how to play StarCraft". I became quite addicted to it and showed this whole new world to Chris. He started playing SC again and we had lots of fun playing 2v3/4 CPUs on Funeral Pyre with our mighty 60 APM
Somewhere in 2005 I had the idea of a PHP extension that would analyze replays. Chris started coding it (I didn't like C/C++ back then but Chris was great with it) and quickly had some prototype in March.
Two months later, I got dumped by my GF and in order to stop my thoughts wandering too far, we started "RepTip" which was a custom tooltip in Windows for replays. Yeah, that was the ancestor of ReXplorer


Far away

During all this time, I learned that Chris had a thirst for traveling and visiting big spaces. At some point, he almost went for a 6-month long trip to Australia. The main problem was, as always, money because he had finished his studies and couldn't stay much longer in Germany. So he had two choices : travel around the world or start a job life. He ended up choosing the latter because of moral issues.
Using the French programming forum, he found someone that helped him finding a job in Angouleme (western France), where he spent a year and a half. Saying he didn't like the job and the city is an understatement. So he saved up money, prepared physically and decided he'd go for a walk in Scandinavia in April 2006. A long walk, starting in Malmö (Sweden) and ending somewhere in Norway. He arrived at Malmö on April 19th. He was near Göteborg on May 19th when he was hit by a car (straight road, good visibility, day time... the driver was just an old man who didn't see him) and passed away a few hours later.


Chris checked up and good to go !


Of course, his death affected me deeply. It still does, as I think of him every day especially when I listen to music he made me discover or when I watch stupid movies (I recently watched Attack Force with Steven Seagal, great one). It's a very hard thing when young people die ; they are not supposed to. I was very sad when my grand-parents passed away, but I keep telling me it's "normal", it's how it works. But a 25-year-old... man, his life had barely started

Geez, when will they get Internet access in heaven ???

So I've regaind interest in programming for RepASM and ReXplorer. I'm not quite sure if it's the "SC 2 side-effect" or if I've just found the motivation ; maybe that's a combination. Oh well.

Anyway, maybe some of you have seen what was new in the latest version of RepASM that was released 2 weeks ago but I will assume you haven't because most people are mainly interested in ReXplorer than RepASM (if interested at all -_-; ). So here's what is being made for ReXplorer 2.1 :

* Winner detection in tooltip : yeah, this one is merely an integration of what was made in RepASM but I've seen a few flaws here and there so I will fix them. Remember that detecting the winner is limited : it's only for duels (1v1) and is a guess based on who leaved the game first or who made the last 20 actions in the replay.
Progress : 75 % (fixes and translation are missing)

* Web-based update for version detection : as many people out there, I'm tired to have to change ReXplorer's code and release a new version each time a patch is out. So what will happen is that when a patch comes out, you will be able to update ReXplorer's version management by launching the configuration tool and make him download the information from repasm.net. Since the information will have to be updated by myself in the first place, you might have to wait a bit before it's done
Progress : 0 %

* Replay renaming : OK, anyone can edit a file name. But editing 100, following the same pattern is really painful. So ReXplorer will help you rename your replays according to pattern you will define yourself. For example, you will select 24 replays, right-click, select "Rename...", enter a pattern like "%R1v%R2 - %p1 vs %p2.rep" and all your replays will be renamed like "PvT - PuSan vs Tossgirl.rep".
Progress : 0 %

* Dependancy check in the installer : trying to find if the user has the right dependancies on his computer is kinda hard but I think I have found a (not-so-clean) way. The idea is that if the user doesn't have them, a popup will appear and ask him if he wants the installer download it for him.
Progress : 50 % (check is OK, needs to download the dependancies)

* Fixes : the matchup for Use Map Settings games is kinda tricky to find but I believe I've found something, at least for duels. ReXplorer needs to support the new version format as well (1.XX.X).
Progress : 100 %

* Translations : most of these features will have to be translated... I'll try to post for help in the BW forum as soon as I have the full list of what needs to be translated. Hopefully you can help

So yeah, it's still under development but I hope I'll have something fully functional in like 2 weeks. If everything goes well. If you have some wishes or think of things I can add to ReXplorer 2.2, now is a good time to tell me


There are other nice non-ReXplorer things in the making, too. Well, mostly in my mind and a bit on paper but nothing has been written yet. I'm quite sure people will like what I'm going to do but hey, you never know, maybe that will be completely useless ^_^;

Earlier today I was reading a very interesting article on a French gaming website (here is a link for the French readers) where the writer wondered if the whole "2.0" concept could be applied to video games. After some introduction, let's try to discuss this in the light of the upcoming StarCraft II.


2.0 ?

In case you've been away from the Internet these past few years, there's been a large "community effect" initiated by websites such as MySpace or YouTube. The idea is to build a sharing community where users will be the main content providers of the website ; of course, this has created a large hype and is still very popular.


2.0 in video games

So how can this be applied to video games ? Well it's kinda obvious : while online gaming is now almost impossible to miss for more than a decade, the most significant turn was made by massive online games like World of Warcraft or Second Life where millions of gamers regularly meet and act together.


Two important games where the community plays an essential role

But that's not exactly "2.0"-compliant This is more "1.5" as the games rely a lot on the companies that made them and users cannot really create their own part of the game. So a better example of what the "Video Game 2.0" should be lies in Sony's upcoming Little Big Planet on Playstation 3. The idea of the game is quite simple : it's a platform game where you need to help your character find the exit of the level. Except that the level was created by another user. This concept looks attractive in the fact that it will make the game endless.


What about SC 2 ?

So is there any room for that 2.0 thing in StarCraft II ? Yes and no.
No because I don't think Blizzard is going to include such a new and risky concept in SC 2. I think it's now safe to say that Blizzard will NOT take many risks with SC 2 : same basics, almost same units, same concept... I know the game isn't finished yet but I don't see Blizzard releasing SC 2 with major changes from what it is now in its alpha state. They need to make a solid game to live up with fans' expectations and also keep up the e-sports work that has been going on for a few years. So no, I don't think there will be fundamental changes that will introduce major changes in SC 2's core.

But there are some aspects of the game that could benefit from this "community sharing effect". The most obvious examples are maps and third-party applications. How many websites out there have their own mapping section with many interesting maps ? What if Blizzard officially supported fan-made maps and allowed users to upload/download/tag/rate/(whatever you think is useful) them, wouldn't that be a good thing to finally have an official website for all these things ?
As for third-party applications, it would be a good idea to finally have some open-source code (or at least officially supported entry points) to let people build their own plug-ins to SC 2. What is the purpose of using exotic or proprietary file formats ? If it's to protect StarCraft's resources, let me tell you it was completely ineffective. It took years before people were able to reverse engineer most of Blizzard's file formats but it never stopped people from making tons of mods. So not only was it ineffective but it made modifications a hell lot more complex to build and distribute.

To me, it's time Blizzard realize that users really want to improve their gaming experience and they should support them. I don't know what's planned for SC 2 in this matter but I sincerely hope it will be much better as SC 1. They have understood that the community played an essential role during the whole alpha/beta phases so I think they won't let us down. And if they still do... well, we'll be there to reverse engineer the whole thing :D