I am pleased to announce that I have accepted an offer to intern at Google this summer, from May 28 to August 23. I will be working with the Search team in Mountain View, California.

Like last year, I once again participated in NEA’s Read Across America. I read “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” to a classroom of second graders at Wildwood Forest Elementary.

After the story, the students asked many tricky questions about game development and game design. Some days are like that, even in Australia.

If you are using Box2DFlash v2.1a with Adobe Flash Professional CS6, you may encounter the following error message upon trying to compile any of the examples under Box2DFlashAS3 2.1a\Examples\:

Source\Box2D\Dynamics\b2World.as, Line 871 1046: 
Type was not found or was not a compile-time constant: 
  b2Fixture.

This compile error occurs in Benchmark.fla, HelloWorld.fla, as well as because the project Target has been inadvertently set to Flash Player 9. Simply change the Target to Flash Player 10.3 or above to eliminate the compilation error.

If you are using gpg, you may want to add the following to your ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf configuration:

personal-digest-preferences SHA512
cert-digest-algo SHA512

in order to prepare for the eventual migration off of SHA-1 in OpenPGP.

If you’re interested in contributing to a related follow-up work, then please take a moment to participate in my newest research study, the Concentration Game.

• Unlike on the Mac, TeX tool support on Windows is quite a challenge. With the exception of Sumatra PDF, there are basically no PDF viewers that support source synchronization. Be sure to use the full installer, and not the portable apps version of Sumatra PDF.
• To get PDF synchronization to work, you’ll need to set a few AUCTeX variables in Emacs (M-x customize-variable). The first is TeX-view-program-list, which is perhaps the most complicated. The Name should read as Sumatra PDF, and the Choice should be set to Command parts. Then, you will need to insert (INS) two Command parts:
  1. The first Command part has a value of "C:/Program Files (x86)/SumatraPDF/SumatraPDF.exe" -reuse-instance, adjusting accordingly for your actual path.
  2. The second part is a Predicate and command part with a Predicate of mode-io-correlate and a Command part of ␣-forward-search %b %n. The character ␣ is meant to represent a leading whitespace character.
  3. The third part is a Command part with ␣%o. Once again, don’t forget the leading whitespace character.
• Since the last step isn’t entirely obvious, the following screen capture should help you with this variable (click to enlarge). And if you’re curious about what %o, %n and so on do, then check the variable TeX-expand-list.
  
• Select Save for future sessions and then restart Emacs; otherwise the next step won’t work without knowing some Emacs tricks. For the remaining variables in this recipe, remember to Save for future sessions as well.
• The next variable is TeX-view-program-selection, where the Viewer for output-pdf should be set to Sumatra PDF.
• Similarly, find TeX-source-correlate-mode and set this to On. Finally, set TeX-source-correlate-method to synctex.
• You’ll probably want to setup Emacs with (server-start) ahead of time, so add this to your init.el. On Windows in particular, (server-start) is problematic and can fail by default with something like: error: The directory ‘~/.emacs.d/server' is unsafe. This is due to a permissions problem; the file ~/.emacs.d/server needs to be owned by you. The easiest way to do this is through the command-line: takeown /f server, though you can also use the GUI to take ownership of the file (Properties > Security > Advanced > Owner). If you like, you can optionally also set the variable TeX-source-correlate-start-server to Always.
• The only thing left to do now is inverse search. Under Sumatra PDF, go to Settings > Options. Set the inverse search command-line to c:\emacs\bin\emacsclientw.exe --no-wait +%l "%f" or equivalent.
  
  Initially, Sumatra PDF may not have the inverse search field under Options. In this case, you can initially set it through a Command Prompt with "C:\Program Files (x86)\SumatraPDF\SumatraPDF.exe" -inverse-search "C:\emacs\bin\emacsclientw.exe --no-wait +%l \"%f\"".
• It’s recommended that you restart Emacs at this point, unless you’re an Emacs guru.
• Whew! To perform forward search (from within Emacs) hit AUCTeX’s built-in C-c C-v (View). To perform inverse search (from within Sumatra PDF), double-click the area of text.

If needed, you can get a quick reference of the changes to your init.el custom-set-variables for a sanity check.

This article describes the process for playing Fallout and Fallout 2 in windowed mode (that is, not full screen) successfully on Windows 7. The modifications to both Fallout and Fallout 2 apply to the non-DRM versions available at GOG.

• For Fallout 1, you will need to use D3DWindower. Unfortunately, the program and Geocities site (surprise!) are in Korean or Japanese, but a badly ported English version is available if you look hard enough. Extract the files and copy them directly into the Fallout installation directory.
• For Fallout 2, use sfall.

Files

Because these files have been difficult to track down, I’ve mirrored them on my own site below (the MD5 hash is indicated in parentheses):

• sfall 2.18 (01445fc48d54a0008efe6b20e101a32f)
• D3DWindower (9da511a067880f7410a866ee07f9aa3f)
• D3DWindower English (b5eff19dfc41728936598008f436cd73)

Fallout 1: DirectX Windower

For Fallout 1, it’s not entirely obvious how to get the DirectX Windower to function, so use the following steps:

1. Open D3DWindower-English.exe. You can hover over a toolbar item to get its name.
2. Click the Add Program toolbar item and add falloutw.exe.
3. Click falloutw, then open the Settings toolbar.
4. Set Height and Width to something appropriate, such as 1024 (H) and 768 (W) (the original game is 640×480). The English translation here is in error and the parameters are named in reverse.
5. Enable Window Mode. Under Window Mode, uncheck DirectX 1-7 and check DirectX 8-9. Otherwise, the game will mysteriously crash.
6. The remaining items can be left in their default state.
7. Use the Run program icon to run the game.

Fallout 2: sfall

Copy ddraw.ini and ddraw.dll in your Fallout 2 directory. Edit ddraw.ini as desired. Most of settings that need to be tweaked can be found under [Graphics].

Contrary to popular belief, the window can actually be moved from the top left of the screen by setting the WindowScrollKey property in ddraw.ini. Then, holding down the appropriate key and moving the mouse will move the window.

If you find newer versions of these files, please let me know and I’ll happily update this page.

def factorial(n):
    if n == 0:
        return 1
    else:
        return n * factorial(n - 1)

There are many good highlighting plugins to choose from, but this one is officially used by WordPress.com.

Indie Game: The Movie has just been released. It can downloaded in non-DRM format (1080p mp4, among others) directly from the filmmakers. I’ve been looking forward to the release of this documentary for quite a while now.

I’ll be at the Foundations of Digital Games 2012 conference all this week. This year, the conference is hosted in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Finished the Dropquest 2012 multi-step scavenger hunt by Dropbox, albeit with some help from online forums, Internet searches, and even a bit of Wolfram Alpha. The Dropbox Blog has more details on the magical journey.

I voted against NC Amendment One.

There will be pork. Laurel and I attended The Carolina Pork Experiment at Motorco. My friend Stacie Nagy participated in the cooking competition, and came away with the Theo Peck Experimental Cooking Prize. Congratulations, Stacie!

Lately, I’ve been more and more frustrated with Google‘s increasing clutter, but their attempts to integrate their Google+ social network into their other offerings is what finally pushed me over the edge. I think other users may be feeling the same way, given some recent traffic statistics.

Consequently, I’ve decided to seriously use DuckDuckGo as my default search engine for the next month. This post serves as my commitment device.

Though I can’t give these classes the full attention that they deserve, I’ve already found the online lecture format to be an improvement over the traditional classroom model of learning. Certainly, it’s possible to master these topics through self-study, but having forced deadlines has served as an excellent commitment device.

I participated in the NEA’s Read Across America and received a personal Certificate of Appreciation for my dramatic reading of When Charlie McButton Lost Power. Afterwards, the classroom of second graders at Wildwood Forest Elementary were quite enthusiastic and asked many good questions about video games, including “What is your favorite food?” and “How do I unlock characters in Super Smash Bros?”.

At this year’s Carolina Games Summit, Rogelio and I presented a talk on Introduction to Game AI Using Python. You can browse the project files for your own use (and experimentation!) at our GitHub page.

If you’re interested in learning more about Game AI, take a look at Beginning Game Development with Python and Pygame by Will McGugan (Amazon), as well as Artificial Intelligence for Games by Ian Millington and John Funge (Amazon).

Thanks to everyone who was able to attend!

Colophon: The libraries PyGame and NumPy were used in the development of this demo. The PlanetCute prototyping tiles were used for the sprites, with the free background music provided by Deceased Superior Technician.