vorax.org

Once upon a time I used to play a lot of VGA Planets. We had hours of fun thwarting each other in interplanetary warfare on a grand scale. The game itself was pretty crusty to look at and the user interface left a lot to be desired but the game-play itself was great.

I'd like to see an online game inspired by VGA planets that brings the best bits of RTS and MMORPG together into an "Emperor's chair" perspective where you have to set up trade, wage war and harvest resources to increase your vast inter stellar empire.

The state of USB on Java and more to the point the state of Serial communications via USB on Java are absolutely shocking! There is no decent platform independent support for Serial port communications. I was absolutely staggered to find this fundamentally basic feature of any programming language missing from one of my favourites.

Well, Vorax (the server) has been evicted from the house on charges of disturbing of the peace. Gradually over the years the fans have become louder and louder on the box and as such, I've moved the poor (whining) thing to the garage.

Vorax is dangling from a shelf and is wired into the main network via an ethernet over power plug I bought ages ago but could never get decent speeds out of in the old house. As it happens, I'm getting nearly 200MB/s out of the EoP in the new house so Vorax is quite happy in it's new domain.

Well, I find myself coding in C again for the first time in a long time. Much has changed in C since I last used it in anger and having been working in Java for ages, moving back to C feels a bit like my left foot has been tied to my right wrist somewhere in the general vicinity of my butt and that I've been handed a very large gun to use. i.e. it's powerful but rather tedious.

I found a cool program today for working with abc music notation called Five Line Skink. It allows you to rapidly type some abc, listen to the sound, export a midi file and even output to staff notation as well! All in all, most handy.

If like me you use Ubuntu 10.04 64 bit then you'll probably want to have flash work in a sensible way.

Garran stood on the watch tower, it was cold, cold, dark and miserable. An icy drizzle fell from the sky, not even the rain's heart was in it this evening. Garran had often wondered what the point of posting guards on a tower in the dark was, him and Berrick could not see anything in the pitch-black night. It was quite tonight, maybe the rain and made the beasts retire early he thought, cold, dark and silent like the grave.

MEX is a first person game. The player takes the role of a Mech pilot. Players can customize a build for their Mech, compete in arenas (PvP) and take part in a co-op story line. Game play time is spent in your Mech, in this regard the game is much like a flight simulator.

The Plague lord stood at the tower window seeming to gaze off into nothingness he extended his senses to survey the horde below, he did not see them, but rather felt the presence of their damned souls. As he briefly connected with each of them in turn he could feel their burning hate for him, hate for life, hate for the living, self-loathing, and cold despair that only the tormented dead can know.

Beras closed the book, it’s heavy leather binding thudding down on to the old vellum pages. He was old, he felt old, he felt older than the ancient dusty tomb in his hands. Still he wanted to learn, his mind was bright, agile, almost child like, only his body was failing him. At first he hadn’t minded growing old, but as his health began to fail he was forced to waste his precious seconds resting in order to maintain himself. Beras had read this particular volume many times, he was fascinated by the Author’s assertion that the Gods were beholden to men.