Trawling on happypenguin.org

I seem to go trawling on the Linux Game Tome every few months to see what is going on in the Open Source game world. Normally I have a slim chance of getting most of these games working but I found Balazar Brothers which being written in Python made it quite easy. I had to install the files to make it run so some custom .deb packages and now it works quite well. It's basically a jumping puzzle game but it with more polish would be quite fun. In the future it would be nice to have a small set of simple but good quality games that average users can install on their Open Source desktop.

The english translation was a bit confusing so I've sent an updated version to the developers. I'm also not sure what to do with the .deb packages - Perhaps I should find some server space where I can make my own .deb repository...

I noticed when Balazar starts up it says:

* Balazar * (Psyco not found ; if you are using an x86 processor, installing psyco can speed up Balazar a little)

So I went and found Psyco - a JIT compiler for Python. I remember reading about this (or a similar) project a while ago but I didn't realise it was ready and working. An apt-get install later I guess it's running in the background! I think glChess was slightly faster but I'll have to investigate more in the future.

Oh Balazar Brothers is basically a mini-game spin-off of an RPG called Balazar. Haven't got that to work yet though as it tries to write back to /usr. Naughty!

Dear Lazyweb (re: Python packaging)

How are Python applications supposed to be packaged?

I was building a distutils setup.py for glChess. The distutils doc describes itself as:

... (use) Distutils to make Python modules and extensions easily available to a wider audience ...

However glChess is an application and not a library so does not need to make any of its code publically available. Should I make a site-packages/glchess package with all the glChess code? Then what about name spaces - I guess "glchess" is safe but other application names could collide with library packages/modules. Should I use "eggs" (can't find a lot of documentation on these). Note I have not found a Python application that installs its code with distutils (links anyone?).

Also as a side note is there simple way of including translation files in distutils? For glChess I have a directory of gettext translation files po/en.po, po/en_NZ.po etc which get built to po/en.mo, po/en_NZ.mo etc. These should then be installed into /usr/share/locale as en/LC_MESSAGES/glchess.mo and en_NZ/LC_MESSAGES/glchess.mo. Note that the .mo files have been renamed however distutils.core.setup() does not allow file renaming through the data_files argument.

Pouet Chess

Found another GPL chess program, Pouet Chess. Seems quite nice, very clean and simple to use (downloaded a binary and it worked fine). It's fullscreen (SDL). I don't know what chess people do but there really does seem to be a huge gap in the Linux/open source chess market. Does everyone just use XBoard? It's very functional but fairly bland looking... I guess pros use windows/web/Java clients?

Dapper and Network Manager

Got network manager working in Ubuntu LTS 6.06 (Dapper Drake)...

1. Install with Applications->Add/Remove... Internet->Network Manager (or apt-get install network-manager-gnome).
2. Disable your network interfaces with System->Administration->Networking and for each device Properties->Enable this connection (uncheck). Otherwise Network Manager will not have any interfaces to use.
3. Add the applet with System->Preferences->Sessions Startup Programs->Add and type in nm-applet.
4. Log out and log in again to have it all working!

For full instructions see the Ubuntu wiki.

As a side note this install crashed logging out of gnome. First I got a white screen with a working pointer, not response to alt-ctrl-backspace. Going to terminal with alt-ctrl-F1 caused stripes to appear and then the whole OS locked up. Grr

It's all dappery

Was playing around with the Ubuntu update manager and it now has a button to upgrade to 6.06 (Dapper Drake). So with just a few clicks and 800M later and I'm here. Quite a smooth upgrade, just need to install a few extra packages when you're done. Gnome is noticably smoother and some nice new features (like editing the menus and deskbar - very nice).

Only thing to get working is network manager again. Seem to have lost some audio codec support with gstreamer 0.10, though you can get better support using libxine I'll stick with gstreamer for now.

From the reviews/screenshots I've been seeing of Vista I think Microsoft is not making good progress. The rate of innovation seems a lot higher in Linux/Gnome and the fast release cycles is leaving MS in the dust. Vista seems to have mostly things that are matching the competition (composite window manager, applets, tabbed browsing) and added far too many user options (endless pop ups, dialogs etc). They really should have had the balls to remove a lot of fluff from their UIs as I think they peaked in usability in Windows 2000 (I'm always trying to find options in Windows nowadays).

I guess Apple will have some new innovation around the corner but for now they have the top polished GUI. Sneaky Apple...

Released glChess 0.9.3

Release glChess version 0.9.3 (screenshot looks much the same as the previous one).

Didn't get the multi-threading into it but the history bar works well and I added piece animation. This had been requested many times but now with the new code was quite easy to implement. I refactored the code quite a lot from 0.9.2 so hopefully it is more to the liking of others :).

New, improved! Now with navigation bar!

Sneak preview...

Things to do next:

• Tidy up the code a lot
• Thread the loading and saving
• Profile the code to optimise a bit

Scon(e)s

SCons - Something to look at when I don't need sleep. (Looks like a make replacement - let's bury that bitch).

Sick of Drupal

The glChess Drupal website seems to be slowly falling apart... I'm not sure if it's sf.net or the old version but I keep getting errors about not being able to log into MySQL and not being able to upload files. So I have been unable to add new content which has put a nail in the coffin for it.

So run and hide Mr Hunter as I am trying to find you and force you to whip me up a simple Rails/Zope site that I can extend.

As I side note I found that people were leaving comments on the site but were getting stuck in a moderation queue. After deleting the 75% spam there were some good comments left.

I particularly like this one:
This is some of the WORST written code I've seen. I can understand why you morons ceased working it! Sincerely, Will L G

It's always nice to receive feedback! :)

glChess 0.9.2 preview

I added the new models to glChess:

Bit hard to see at the moment, I need to:

• Adjust the sizes
• Get better textures (hint hint for someone else)
• Replace the default material (i.e. make them more shiny)
  

Slimming your desktop

LowFat - very cool.

glChess 0.9.1

A rushed release... Hopefully the more artistically inclined will provide some decent textures to replace what I've got.

I swear OOo has got worse

I've been using OpenOffice 2.0 at work and found it to be quite frankly a piece of crap. I'm sure it used to be more reliable back at 1.x. As has been pointed out by others you don't get anywhere just trying to match MS Word. I just can't decide which one is worse at the moment - they seem to be about the same.

Why can a word processor have so much difficulty:

• Getting outline numbering working.
• Handle styles appropriately so you don't end up with sections as 'Default' and 'Body Text' without being able to tell.
• Make images anchor properly.
• Have a simple diagram drawing tool that is usable.

It really doesn't have to be super fancy, RISCOS managed to work it out many many years ago. Just blend that with a modern file format (Open Document) and you're sorted.

Hopefully AbiWord will replace OOo...

New Chess Pieces

Yay for open-source.

A Mr John-Paul Gignac has provided some new pieces to be used in glChess (and other such projects). So probably in version 0.9.3 there will be two sets available (with the high-res new versions as default).



Unfortunately I haven't had enough time to make a proper release. The SVN version has been tinkered with (re-enabled texturing - hopefully someone will provide better textures/colours HINT HINT). But it isn't clean enough for a release. I have no plans at the moment for easter so maybe some good work then...

Fall back behaviour

I found an odd bug (?) when adding texturing support to glChess.

If you use a texture with dimensions of not 2^N the performance is complete crap. Now OpenGL requires textures with these dimensions but what I assume happens is if you don't provide them in that form it falls back to a software mode (maybe Mesa). Seems like good behaviour at a glance.

But it got me thinking - Is it always good to fall back like this? Yes it gives you maximum feature support (hopefully replacing the fall back functions with optimised ones) but it does make things confusing for the user/developer. I could not work out why things were so bad (and was trying all sorts of tricks to work out what it was) and it was only on a hunch that I found it. (I think I have found this issue perviously when developing).

What would have been nice is some sort of warning that this was occuring (not that I can think of a way to fit a warning like this into OpenGL).

Again Windows reminds me of its crapness

Every day I keep from using Windows the more I think "It's not _that_ bad, right?".

Well it never fails to suprise me.

So tonight I go into Windows and my wireless networking no longer works. Ok a bit of a pain but I'll delve in and fix it. So the windows wireless tool helpfully tells me it cannot configure my card and to use the configuration tool from the supplier. Ok why? Well you wouldn't actually want any useful pointers such as "I cannot configure it because this thing X has locked it". And none of the other tools seem to give any pointers (such as device manager, ipconfig). Eventually I found the Intel config tool (which had resumed control after I told it to piss off when I got the laptop) and got things working again. It's just so f**king frustrating how hard it is to find simple problems like this. And I have no confidence that the problem wont occur again.

Slick interfaces never cover up shoddy foundations.

As a side note there is an interesting bug - sometimes the display tool gets into a state where it says it is not connected to a network when it is. When you notice you do have a connection and ignore the feedback its fine but after a few minutes the connection times out and the tool disconnects itself. grr

I'm using an early version of NetworkManager in Linux and it looks really good. (I'll upgrade when the next Ubuntu comes out - I can't be bothered compiling the latest one).

Shininess!

As seen on Planet Gnome - Gnome could really get stylish if this becomes mainstream.

Launchpad integration

Hmm... I want to put the 'Translate This Application...' button onto glChess as seen in Ubuntu applications. After digging around in the source code of a bunch of applications (there seems to be an excessive amount of layers in a lot of applications...) I found that there is a library for launchpad (the Ubuntu bug/translation etc webtool) support.

So the question is does anyone know an easy way of integrating this into a PyGTK+ application like glChess? It seems most of the Gnome apps don't use glade for their main window so I'm not sure if I can do this easily (I want all the UI in glade files).

It's a glChess New Years?

I was looking through the SourceForge statistics for glChess and noticed something odd... Aparently a lot of people were out browsing for chess software at new years!?! I've always been fairly skeptical about the SourceForge stats...

Remove link (not a permalink) and image added (you can just see the peak on the left). Thanks Joel!

Oh Nine Oh

Finally got glChess 0.9.0 out the door! So it's up there on the website as a source and .deb package.

I had to end up making a .deb package for PyGtkGLExt. Hopefully Debian/Ubuntu will take the work off my plate in the future!

So one big new features is good AI support - I have it working with four AIs and you can load and save games without the AIs getting confused. It turned out most AIs don't seem to have a save function so I just inform them on load what the previous moves were.

But there's no network support now. I plan to get it back in later.