Blogs - applehq

I had been planning to post some experiences of the games in my desura library when played with the desura linux beta, to help improve the user experience.

Unfortunately, my testing has been wildly inconsistent and some builds have been pretty nasty.

Anyway, my results don't particularly hold up to any scientific rigour, so are completely useless. That said, I don't wish to give up on getting them.

Based on what I experienced (on good days): java games work, mono (.NET) may work (I've got 2, and it's 50:50), and everything else probably won't. Running a game from desura is likely to break a game that works when installed natively too (e.g. Braid crashes with GLXUnsupportedPrivateRequest).

The well of ideas has been flowing, albeit not quite the same ideas that I had before.

The strange ideas of last week are still around though; that has morphed into a system for MMORPGs that removes a level cap. Yes; that sounds horrible (e-penises galore), but I think the system would promote starting characters fresh every-so-often as well as keeping one forever.

With that idea out of the way, I tried to think of a story that could be told.
While I came up with a nice sci-fi theme, it wouldn't go well in MMORPG form, so I'm thinking of it as a FPS.

The story starts off about 1000 years in the future. Society has gone down the drain, but humanity is still around.

The energy crisis has been solved; death is almost completely overcome ("nothing stopping you standing in front of a truck") and space travel to other stars (in one lifetime) is a reality. A very slow reality.

Much like long-haul trains of the 19th century and intercontinental flights of the 20th/21st, cryo-stasis sleeper ships are the preferred to travel long distance.

So, our protagonist (you) are on one of these, heading to some (TBD; HD 85512 b looks promising) star; ETA: 1,000 years.

On the ship, everyone is put into stasis for the duration of the "cruise" (I imagine you'd want to be awake at take-off and landing), including you. Except every-so-often you (yes, you; the protagonist is, as always, special) woken to fight some monsters or fix the engines (or something).

The catch is, the environment (the ship), and the person waking you, is almost always different.

In a less-far fetched idea, instead of a star you're heading for Jupiter (or one of its moons), but the only story idea for the ending I have is getting flung out of the airlock.

Anyway, it's not like I'm creating games right now...

I've been having some really strange ideas for games I might want to make lately.

The ideas aren't strange, but the fact I'm having them is.
They are fun ideas; things that would either be fun or super-frustrating.
But, I wouldn't know where to start with them...

If my ideas become more glamourous, I'll let you know.

That amazement is in the fact that I finally got it to work on my (64bit) system (though only been trying for a day).

My 32bit Gentoo laptop was having the login crash last time I tried, but so was this one before. Believe me, I know exactly what the desura guys are doing to fix this (i.e. try a fix, see if it works, upload if it does, yell if it doesn't, repeat) and they have my highest respect. TBH, it's just as bad as me, trying to run ./desura --forceupdate 6 times in a row.

Lets try gaming now...