Prison Architect is still in an early alpha build, so large changes are bound to occur. I can’t wait to see what else they put in this game!

The purpose of the game Prison Architect is to design and run a prison that runs perfectly, meaning every prisoner has his needs fulfilled and while at the same time having a positive cash-flow for the prison. This is a lot harder than it looks, and even minor stuff like getting everyone in the shower without it turning into a massive fight is an obstacle.

Well, I was streaming this game on my twitch channel last night and had a blast doing it, ending up with eight straight hours of video. Below is when I got too impatient and suddenly had doom on my doorstep. Enjoy!

Well, this wasn’t really what I was going to write about.. I was rather going to spend a few minutes telling you about this new game that might come later this year. The reason I want to tell you about it is the fact that it’s not well known at all, it’s developed by a single person, and it looks awesome! Like really, really, really awesome!

The game I’m talking about is Banished, a game by Shining Rock Software, and it’ll be a game where the purpose is to control a little village (later town) and see to it that they survive by building shelter and storing firewood and food for the winter. The developer of the game describes it like this:

Welcome to the world of Banished! In this city-building strategy game, you control a group of exiled travelers who decide to restart their lives in a new land. They have only the clothes on their backs and a cart filled with supplies from their homeland.

The objective of the game is to keep the population alive and grow it into a successful culture. Options for feeding the people include hunting and gathering, agriculture, trade, and fishing. However, sustainable practices must be considered to survive in the long term.

And as if that hasn’t intrigued your interest enough, here is a game-play trailer of an early alpha:

And here is a game-play video (also early alpha):

Did you find this game interesting? What game(s) are you really anticipating?

At the top of Saint Peter`s Church in Rome

Fireworks at New Years Eve just outside the Colosseum

Motiv:

Etter at jeg kom med min nådeløse dom over hennes egenskaper som menneske og SEO-ekspert (jeg kan ikke understreke nok hvor lite peiling jeg mener at hun har som dette) så vil jeg si at hennes motiv er veldig sterkt. Hun blokkerte meg umiddelbart på G+…

Ressurser:

Vi har mange tydelige eksempler på at Maria Johnsen har tilgang til SEO-ressurser som for eksempel nettverk av blogger:

• Orginal: http://www.maria-johnsen.com/SEO-Norge/
  
• Lenker til: http://www.golden-way-media.com/no/
• Lenker til: http://www.seo-norge.com/ og http://www.billigseo.com/

Her ser man at hun sitter som innehaver av mange nettsteder, og hun er kjent med hvordan man bygger opp blogger for å lenke mot hverandre for økt effekt. Og dersom jeg var i tvil om at hun styrte alle nettsidene så slapp jeg å være det etter at lenkesjekkeren min rapporterte lenkene som døde, hun har blokkert domenet mitt fra å sjekke hennes sider.

Dårlig språk:

Sjekk for eksempel denne lenken hennes.

https://twitter.com/MariaJohnsenSEO/status/322357530145722368

SEO Firma – Hvordan finne den rette arbeidssøker til den rette arbeidsoppgavebilligseo.com/blogg/seo-firm… #SEOfirma

— Maria Johnsen (@MariaJohnsenSEO) 18. april 2013

Ærekrenkelse:

Et annet litt morsomt punkt er at hun faktisk nevner ærekrenkelse på Google+ dagen før den første tweeten om meg blir postet. Oh, the irony.

Oppsummering:

Alt dette mener jeg at viser en ganske tydelig indikasjon på at det faktisk er Maria Johnsen som har satt i gang denne kampanjen mot meg. My own personal hater

La oss starte med første del av historien først; hvordan kom jeg egentlig til å finne ut at jeg hadde en hater? Det har seg slik at en hater sjelden kommer for å fortelle deg selv at han/hun er en hater, men man må grave litt selv. Det hadde seg slik at jeg skulle prøve ut en ny søkemotor som tar hensynet til personvern veldig sterkt, og da jeg i søkefeltet skrev “erbors” i stedet for “erbros”, viste den meg faktisk de resultatene uten å fikse skrivefeilen slik google ville gjort. Det viste seg å være både interessant og morsom lesning, for oversiktsbildet ser omtrent slik ut:

Et søk på lxquick for “erbors”

Min første reaksjon var naturlig nok sjokk, men bare sekunder senere hadde jeg sendt lenken til noen kamerater jeg pratet med på skype på samme tid, og vi lo så vi fikk tårer i øynene alle mann. Tenke seg til, her har jeg fått meg en hater også har hun/han ikke fått navnet rett engang? Det er jo både hysterisk morsomt og litt trist.

Vel, i alle fall begynte jeg å nøste litt i trådene, jeg måtte jo se om jeg kunne finne noe mer informasjon om dette, og hvor stort dette prosjektet til hateren min egentlig er. Svaret: ganske stort! Etterhvert som jeg nøstet opp i trådene fant jeg ut at denne personen har tilgang til ganske store ressurser når det gjelder nettverk av falske brukere (eller boter om du vil) både på twitter, pinterest og blogger rundt omkring. Det første jeg fant var twitterbrukeren Jeohacker og hans to tweets om meg:

Kent-Rune Henriksen A Student from BodøIs a Pedophile or pedofil blogymate.com/post.aspx?blog…

— Jeohacker (@Jeohacker) 4. april 2013

erbors.net forhandler narkotika pinterest.com/pin/3610620950…

— Jeohacker (@Jeohacker) 2. april 2013

Hvordan vet jeg at dette er roboter? Vel, for det første kan man sjekke lenken som går til bloggposten på Blogymate. Twitterposten har fått over fjorten tusen retweets, men likevel er det bare 21 stykker som har lest artikkelen? Det gir ingen mening dersom dette hadde vært virkelige mennesker som skulle retweete en post, men det gir mening dersom de er boter.

Den andre twittermeldingen nevner pinterest, og bildet under er lagt ut av brukeren erbroslureri.. Kreativt navn, og det vitner for min del om en person som ikke har norsk som førstespråk (Ref. Maria Johnsen).

På pinterest har faktisk hateren min klart å få både navn og brukernavn korrekt, så der ønsker jeg å gi en liten applaus.

Følg med inn i neste post for å se hvorfor jeg mener dette peker mot Maria Johnsen.

Dersom du er interessert i å se innslaget kan du bruke denne lenken, og her kan du finne artikkelen Avisa Nordland skrev om saken.

Redis is the shit!

But what I suddenly realized was that I didn’t actually need to use redis as a database, I just wanted it for it’s neat pubsub feature. PubSub is quickly explained one client acting as the publisher and one or several as the subscriber, where the subscriber would get the messages from the channel it subscribes to. This worked out perfectly for me when using Predis for the PHP redis library. Setting it up was very easy, and after loading the library I could quickly do this to publish to a channel of my wish:

$data = implode($array, "::");
$client = new Predis\Client();
$client->publish('new_message', $data);

After that I could quickly get the published data from node.js by installing the node_redis package via the node package manager. After that it was easy to subscribe to a channel and set up a message event, and then just splitting the message to get the original array back.

rediscli.on("message", function (channel, message) {
    console.log(channel + ": " + message);
    switch(channel)
    {
    case "new_message":
        redis_message (message);
        break;
    default:
        console.log("No channel");
        break;
    }
});

rediscli.subscribe("new_message");

function redis_message (data) {
    var array = data.split("::");
    var rid = array[0];
    var uid = array[1];
}

I would never have guessed that the setup and code implementation could be that simple. Now I’m quite in love with redis, and I also have a small key->value database in backhand too, which I’m quite sure I’ll have use for it in just a little while.

One of my greatest feats was when I found out that javascript, and jquery in particular, isn’t that hard to work with and when you just get the basic understanding it’s actually quite logical in it’s behavioral (as most computer programs). What this did was open for some new methods for data layout and usability for the users, and where I prevously have had constant page loads I now just have ajax calls or (best of all) using web-sockets. In the future I’ll probably go all the way over to web-sockets, as the performance gain is quite noticeably.

In my previous werewolf game I had troubles with the chat interface as soon as it was about 10 concurrent players using it since I used simple ajax calls to fetch a new version of the chat every 3 seconds (and even that was too slow I felt). The reason for this slowness was due to:

1. Needed to fetch the latest chat history from a database with several thousand records.
2. No cache
3. Reloading the full chat, not just the new messages and including html formatting.
4. And not waiting to see if there are any new messages, just reloading every third second no matter what.

Node.js is a dream come true for real time content updating

All of these things were a resource drain of large proportions, and I understood I would never be able to have a large user base with that code. So I started anew to address all those problems, and what I came up with in the end was a node.js backend with socket.io for the websocket support. I still use mysql for the database, but now it caches the chat data it loads, so only the first time someone goes into an unloaded round will there be any calls to the chat table in the database. And also with this method it sends an update only when something new is added to the chat, and only the newly added part. Best of all? No latency. Sweet mother of god!

I am very happy with this, and I’m now just looking for a more efficient way to communicate between php and node.js (I tried over tcp with curl, but the latency was way too long), hopefully I’ll have a solution where I can use redis as it seems pretty much like what I want to do and it supports both PHP and node.js. Update: Implemented redis and wrote about it here.

And here, after this wall of text, is finally the image from the round interface showing off the beautiful chat with a scrollbar from ScrollPane.

The first attempt at a round interface for my werewolf game

International Bakery ringer om en kake som må hentes:

En mann ringer feil og kommer til en svært behjelpelig Lenny

Forsikringsselskapet sliter med Lenny

Lenny vet ikke så veldig mye om e-post, men snakkingen får han til

Og til slutt, den merkeligste jeg fant

Har du funnet noen andre gode så hadde jeg satt pris på å få høre om dem i kommentarfeltet.

So, why do I say it’s better than Hamachi? I have read rumors around the internet that it is more stable for games than what Hamachi is, but the main reason is the fact that Hamachi limits any group size to a maximum of five clients (including the creator). So if we are six players who in turn is going to host a server, we would actually have to create six network groups to have all players see all other players, and let’s say seven players each being able to host a server? 10 groups! Outrageous.

Well, luckily no more, because with Comodo Unite this hassle is gone, or so I hope at least. I’ve just installed it and the next months I’ll be testing it quite a lot and I’ll write a follow-up once I feel I’ve tested it enough to write a conclusion.