DipInit - Diplomacy Country Allocator

September 11, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games, Software

Just uploaded a new application to the site: DipInit, a Diplomacy Country Allocator. This is not only my first Mac application I wrote but something damn useful for Diplomacy players as well.

The problem is always the same: Once you found seven players to get a game going you need to allocate the seven countries that can be played. You can do that by random but why not do it based on the priority by which the players want to play each country? Good idea but what happens when two or more players want to play the same country? This is where DipInit kicks in!

You simply enter the players’ names and the priorities of the players for each country in the respective boxes where priorities range from 1 for most favorite to 7 for least favorite. After entering the necessary information you simply click a button and DipInit will then calculate the best distribution of countries for the given priorities using an algorithm and finally display the results.

There’s already a Windows application managing this, called DipCountry, but well, it’s only a Windows application and honestly: What person, who is even remotely sane, still uses Windows nowadays?

If you want to give DipInit a spin you can find more information on the respective page or simplay download it straight away.

Writing this application really got me hooked to Objective-C, Cocoa, Xcode and Mac coding in general. Guess I should be writing more stuff for everyones favorite OS or isn’t it everyones favorite yet?

World Diplomacy Convention

August 22, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games

I’ve been attending the World Diplomacy Convention 2008 at Burg Lockenhaus in Austria last weekend. From Thursday the 14th to Sunday the 17th we played four rounds of Diplomacy to find the new world champion. And now guess who made it… *drumroll* …not me!

I managed to get to the Top Board - which is more or less the finals for those of you who don’t know about Diplomacy - but that’s where it stopped for me and I could only watch a fellow German player, Julian, to win the game and take the title.

With the competition being that big - there’ve been players from all of the world - I am more than happy that I managed to place 3rd in the end. Up to now my best result in a Diplomacy tournament and that in a world championship, not bad in my books. This also scored me the “Rising Star” trophy which was awarded to the best player of all those which attended their first world championship.

For those of you interested in how a face-to-face diplomacy convention looks like and what a beautiful location we played in I uploaded a couple of photos my girlfriend took during the convention.

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Bioshock

April 1, 2008 - Games

Finished Bioshock a couple of days ago and really loved it. It is only a shooter afterall but with loads of nice twists that make it one of the best shooters I’ve played as of yet. There’s even a story that makes sense and feels right and is not just there for the sake of it like in other shooters.

It features an interesting arsenal of weapons with different kinds of ammunition for each of them. Tonics enable you to specialize your character, Jack, and attune him to different situations. The plasmids are a damn cool concept and perfectly fit the setting, a brilliant replacement for what magic is in fantasy settings.

What really got me was the first Little Sister I met. I hope I don’t spoil anything when I tell you that the Little Sisters are genetically altered and mentally conditioned to reclaim ADAM from the dead and are all guarded by a Big Daddy, the biggest enemies in the game. After killing the Big Daddy you get the option of either rescuing the Little Sister or harvesting them for ADAM. I decided to rescue the poor Sisters throughout the game as I’m a nice guy, unlike Paul who kills them on sight I might add.

There’s a ton of other nifty things and features that make this game outstanding but you should better play it for yourself if you haven’t already.

I definatly need to play through Bioshock again on the hardest difficulty as soon as I find some time. It isn’t really that hard afterall as there’s respawn points, so called Vita Chambers, all over the place. When you die you respawn in one of them with all your weapons and a considerable amount of health and EVE while all damage dealt to your enemies up until you died stays. That means you can fight the biggest creatures and don’t really need to care about how often you die. The only problem is that there’s an achievement for finishing the game without respawning…

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That is not dead which can eternal lie…

March 10, 2008 - Games, Level Design

… and even with strange æons Quake will not die.

Kell, necros and Preach finally released Quoth 2 with loads of Quake goodness. New monsters, items and environmental features make up a nice release which was long overdue. Only checked into it for a couple of minutes as of yet but while doing so realized that there are some unfinished maps on my HDD, might be worth mapping a bit again. Especially with Willem releasing ToeTag there’s no good excuse not to map on my Mac anymore.

The Quoth 2 release fits the release of SleepwalkR’s SDL port of Fitzquake quite nicely. New content with Quoth and the most brilliant engine finally available on the Mac (and Linux) - it’s unbelievable how much love the good old Quake still gets. Huzzah!

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World Domination: The Game

March 7, 2008 - Diplomacy, Games

The Washington Post had a pretty nice article on Diplomacy back in November 2004 which I was just pointed to. It’s really worth a read if you’re interested in learning more about the game or already know it.

I especially liked the following statement which is simply too true:

I would trust him with the payoff mortgage on my house — in cash. But I wouldn’t trust him to stay out of Belgium.

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Mass Effect and Assassin’s Creed

February 12, 2008 - Games

Finally managed to finish Mass Effect a couple of days ago. I almost played through it before twice but ~~stupidly~~ accidently deleted two of my save games loosing about 16 hours game time. Great!

All in all it was a really nice game although it was not a role playing game as I hoped it would be. The whole game was way too linear and on rails so it was more of an interactive movie, a damn good one at that, though. Three more things that really annoyed me:

One should think that elevators are damn fast in the future but no, you can boil coffee, take a shower or whatever until it finally arrived at it’s destination. You can’t even skip the ride.
The Mako - an armored vehicle you drive around on planets with for those of you who haven’t played the game - is the most annoying vehicle that ever appeared in a game. Please Bioware, never ever try to develop a racing game. The Mako is simply a pain to drive, I hope they added it only minutes before the game went gold otherwise there’s next to no excuse to have it in the game.
The buildings and space stations of the main storyline have been beautifully designed but for the side quests they only had three buildings to choose from. Yes, about 50 side quests and 3 buildings. Sure, they put different prefabs into the buildings but three buildings outfitted with ten different kinds of crates… I don’t know.

Before playing Mass Effect I played through Assassin’s Creed. Brilliant game, just plain beautiful. The gamplay is damn cool too, just a bit repetitive after a couple of missions but the visuals and free roaming kind of playing style definatly make up for everything.

When I first heard rumors about the science fiction background in the game I was really sceptical and didn’t knew if I should buy it anymore as I thought it would ruin the whole setting which seemed really cool so far. How wrong I was. The science fiction background - which I’m not going to spoil for those of you who still don’t know it and want to play the game - doesn’t ruin anything but really adds to everything in my humble opinion.

For more gaming goodness pay Paul a visit, he did a roundup of his gaming year 2007.