There Goes Productivity
May 25th, 2007
I have been playing Sean O'Connor's Risk clone, Conquest, for a few years now. I
recently got back into it when I needed a break and, online Hold'Em being denied to
me because CityWest had our cables in a knot again while they continue to upgrade our
service, decided to dig out Conquest. Anyhow, I found a few things to gripe about and
sent Sean an email - we occassionally trade correspondence off - and he mentioned that
I should try the latest version. So this AM, while waiting for my ftp client to upload
some Google Analytics code (Jennifer has been using it lately and I've been jealous of
all of the stat. reporting functions she has) I decided to give it a go. There goes
productivity! Sean has tweaked something in the AI's and the game is now significantly
better at maintaining balances of power and is much more challenging. I'm playing on
the Crab map right now which is bizzarre - you literally work your way across a
continent made up of many crab parts. Not my favorite map, it's hard to tell which
parts make up a continent and some of the parts have multiple entries that are not
readily apparent. It does however suggest that you could use the game as a teaching tool for learning parts of things in a novel way. I think I will be back to the classic map next game but I'll definitely be playing Conquest again soon.
The work on the Russian SKU of Real E$tate Empire and Font Fiend has recently converged. As previously blogged about, the Cyrillic version of REE required that I either convert the game to unicode or that I somehow map the special Cyrillic characters into the unused part of the ASC II map from 128..255 - and thus was born UniToAsc, a simple windows program that will read in a unicode file (WordPad can create a unicode file for you) and writes out a remapping file that lists the unicode character code and the code it has been remapped to. At the same time it writes an Asc II version of the unicode file with the unicode characters remapped into the 128..255 character code range as well. Font Fiend will read this remapping file in and automatically generate the correct font set but for those of you who are doing this yourselves I am making UniToAsc.exe freely available - here is the
link.
Absolutely, incredibly gorgeous here this week. February can inspire rants like The Long Grey Suck but this place is the center of the universe in May.
Y'all have yourselves a great weekend,
L.
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