Thepal posted news a few days ago announcing that he has moved on from working on Fawn in his Oblivion-based remake of Serpent Isle. He is now working on Moonshade, ans has posted the first screenshot therefrom…the automaton barmaid Petra:

Why am I having Metropolis flashbacks?

Thepal comments that his modelling skills have been increasing, allowing him to develop in hours or minutes what might have taken him a day or more to do when working on Fawn. Presumably, this means that more fine screenshots from the City of (Dishonest) Mages will be forthcoming in the next few days!

(via Petrell)

Ultima creator and private astronaut Richard Garriott delivered the keynote address at the LOGIN 2011 conference. In it, he articulated his view that the “third era” of video games — casual, social gaming — is well underway, and that social games “are paving their way through the last two, and are a driving force in the medium for the next several years.”

The first era was single-player games. These games were solo merely by the inability for other players to comfortably join. This era pioneered by games like Super Mario Land, Pac-Man, and Garriottís own Ultima franchise.

…

Later, online games started to take the market. Massively Multiplayer games are gamingís second era. Ultima Onlineñoriginally called Multimañ paved the way for these games, but Garriott notes that it was a project no one initially believed it. ìThis is the hardest game Iíve ever had tried to get going,î he noted as he described the trouble.

…

The thirdñand currentñera is the time for social, casual games.ìThe games in this new grand era are cheap/free to acquire. And they spread virallyî Garriott states that heís already impressed and amazed by the amount of people already working in this design space, and by the speed this era is growing.

…

Richard Garriott claims that heís had three jobs in his life, and these three jobs cater to each era: Origin Systemsñwhere he created single-player RPGs; Destination Gamesñwhere he worked on Tabula Rasa; and Portalatiumñwhere heís currently working on two social games.

Garriott’s self-assessment largely dovetails with observations of the man’s career by outsiders, and I’d have to say that I agree with his assessment in general. Regular readers of Aiera will no doubt have noticed that I’ve been quite open in voicing my belief that social games — despite the relative fluffiness and primitivity of the current crop of social/casual titles — are a field in which there will be explosive growth (both in terms of the number of games available and the quality/engagingness of these games) in coming years.

As I’ve said before, it’s like playing games on a mobile phone. My first mobile was a primitive little Samsung flip phone, with some version of Solitaire and a primitive little driving game installed on it. And these were, admittedly, terrible games, and very poorly implemented. Now, though? I’ve got Infinity Blade (an Unreal Engine 3-powered game) on my iPhone.

That’s exactly the sort of revolution that’s about to take place in the social gaming space. Just watch.

He’s at it again!

I don’t know why he skips the whole sequence in Monitor, in favour of Fawn. I mean, granted, he is talking about how the Avatar and the Companions get put on trial for speaking well of Lord British; I get that. But still…it’s an odd starting point.

As to the whole “Guardian smiting Batlin with lightning” thing, it’s always been my interpretation that the Guardian was able to do that precisely because the Wall of Lights was open; the engine just doesn’t support lightning being served up horizontally. I realize I’m quibbling, but I’d argue that Spoony is kind of quibbling as well, looking for plot holes where there really aren’t any.

Props for the Conan the Barbarian scene, though. Witty! “Robot versions of my friends”; awesome. His criticisms of the engine (e.g. the combat and monster respawn mechanics) and the text used in the dialogue are fair, and indeed are things that Ultima fans will readily note and concede in regard to Serpent Isle. I think we’ve all seen the Monitor guards get stuck face-to-face, and it is pretty funny.

Since I’ll be spending most of today in the air, as it were, there probably won’t be much in the way of other articles posted to the site. Though I’ll try and check comments from time to time, and will have access to email whilst in airports. Provided said airports offer free wifi. Or are in Canada.

I am here. Except on a United flight.

Don’t know where I’m going
Gonna see the world, gonna be somebody
Don’t know where I’m going
I’m just steppin’ out
I’m steppin’ out
I’m steppin’ out.

I’ll try and bring you all back some pictures.

Those of you who follow the Twitter timeline of BioWare Mythic creative director Paul Barnett may have noticed this tweet late last week:

Exciting!

I won’t comment further at this time.

Dark energy is real!

And it’s speeding up the expansion of spacetime.

Speaking of space…let’s talk about orphan planets!

Japanese and Kiwi astronomers have discovered the first orphan planets in the Milky Way, and apparently they’re massive (as in: Jupiter-sized).

And numerous, too:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, explains David Bennett, a NASA-funded co-author of the study. “Our survey is like a population census,” he said. “We sampled a portion of the galaxy and, based on [this] data, can estimate overall numbers in the galaxy.” Bennett and his colleagues believe there may be twice as many lonely planets as stars, adding up to hundreds of billions of lone planets in our Milky Way galaxy alone. Aww.

Hey, what’s that “aww” for? Maybe the planets like being out on their own, roaming the stars with no clingy stars dragging them back into orbit all the time.

Help my friend Ian raise funds for MS research!

My friend Ian Crowe rides in the RONA MS Bike Tour every year to help raise funds “for all the people with multiple sclerosis who need help financially to get through life and to help increase funding for research so that one day they will find a cure.”

MMO games and their avatars.

Photographer Robbie Cooper lines up real-life photos of MMO gamers with screenshots of their virtual selves.

Cuter in real life.

Actually, it’s an interesting list — some of the comparisons are touching, others cringe-inducing, and others stereotypical — and I’m sure there’s the potential for a psychology paper examining the implications of how people see and present themselves in the virtual world.

Not that I intend to embark on such an analysis.

Verifying passwords by how you type ‘em.

It makes sense, actually. Most of us, when we sit down at our usual computer and log in to our usual services, type our passwords almost by rote; “muscle memory” does more of the work than actual memory, and we “recall” the password less by consciously calling it to mind and more by simply executing a series of hand movements that ensure the appropriate keys get pressed in the right sequence.

And usually, things like the time it takes to enter the password, the force applied to each key, and the minute delays between each key-press remain relatively constant.

Whereas someone else typing in our password would type it with a very different timing.

For once, I agree with the cops.

Okay, they actually removed this lady from the Amtrak train she was on because of disorderly conduct. But there’s a bit more to the story:

For sixteen solid hours after she boarded an Amtrak train in Oakland, KATU.com reports, she yapped loudly into her goddamned phone. SIXTEEN HOURS. And she was sitting in a designated “quiet car.”

After several passengers asked her, pleaded with her — begged her just out a sense of basic human decency — to stop yelling at the top of her lungs into the greasy little piece of plastic wedged inside her clammy paw, she completely ignored them. Then, a passenger who had reached the breaking point finally mustered the courage to stand up to her. So Beard “got aggressive.”

But wait! There’s a happy ending! These things never have happy endings, but this one does! Conductors stopped the train in Oregon, where hero members of the Salem Police Department were waiting to escort Beard off the train.

Just hazarding a guess here, but based on the image of the woman that accompanies the article, I’m thinking that the excruciatingly long/loud converstaion was probably also fairly banal and overly personal in nature. The sort that isn’t just annoying, but also very awkward to have to overhear.

Sometimes, I’m glad that airplanes (unlike trains) don’t get cell reception.

Tonight’s post brought to you by Jimi:

Trippy!

Bonus Jimi:

Trippier.

There, I said it: I think the Ultima Dragons need a presence on Twitter.

There is, after all, a UDIC Facebook Group (which has been quite lively of late; it’s a good thing). And one of the things that the Ultima Dragons love to do is talk about stuff…especially Ultima, of course.

And really, Twitter is a great resource for exactly that: discussion. Yes, the entries are a bit on the short side, but brevity isn’t always a bad thing, especially in long conversations.

Establishing a UDIC presence on Twitter would be a very easy thing to do; we could use a short hashtag like #UDIC or #udic to identify those tweets which were intended for the Ultima Dragons community, for example. A roster could be realized with a Twitter list (which I’d be happy to set up and maintain).

So: If you’re on Twitter and you’re an Ultima Dragon, ping me (@ultimaaiera) and I’ll add you to a roster list. And then start tweeting using the #udic hashtag, and pay attention to that topic thereafter (it’s easier if you use something like TweetDeck).

Get tweeting!

In a recent comment, Kevin Fishburne provided the latest updated on his work-in-progress Ultima-inspired online game, Sanctimonia. He added support for scenery objects to the engine a while back, and has been working on improving both his method of creating graphical assets and his method for displaying them in-game.

If youíve seen the recent videos of object implementation you may have noticed it falls short of the proposed ì16 different directionsî technique. This actually has been implemented and is working, though itís not easily apparent from the videos. The starfish use all 16 bitmaps, which were photographed and cropped using version 2 of the photography rig and a real starfish. I have some other bitmaps (rocks, a model tree) which were also photographed using v2 of the rig, but I consider them unfit for release.

After upgrading the rig to v3 by using a larger platform for the objects and moving the three light sources to equidistant positions I did some experiments, but am holding off until I better understand chroma key compositing/bluescreening.

Iím getting some reflected light from the platform background onto the objects being photographed. Iím in the process of modifying dowel rods and such to raise small and large objects above the platform while keeping them centered. Iím also planning to replace the paper backgrounds with minimally-reflective cloths, and adjust the aperture to focus the field of view on the object and blur the background.

Iím considering photographing objects from 32 directions rather than the current 16. This would be especially effective for larger objects such as boulders and trees, which suffer the most from having only 16 images.

The networking code is solid object-wise and the client only keeps track of the objects it needs to. Sorting objects so they graphically overlap properly in the client still has not been implemented. I also added loading object images as needed so they donít need to be loaded at startup; a primitive form of memory management.

He has also provided a video showing where things are at today:

One final note: the project’s composer, Absynth, recently moved to North Carolina, but is still working on the project.

Bandit LOAF (of Wing Commander CIC fame) alerted me over the weekend to the existence of this video from the 1992 Consumer Electronics Show in Chicago. In it, we see revealed the fact that a Sega Genesis-based port of Ultima Underworld was in the works for the Sega CD.

Wait for it; it happens shortly after the 3:00 mark:

Astute observers will also have noticed that another famous Origin title, Wing Commander, was also slated to be released on the Sega CD. Alas, while the Wing Commander port was released (and was evidently quite good), Underworld never saw the light of day.

To this day, I don’t know what (if any) licensing agreement exists between Apple-focused developer LairWare and Electronic Arts. There has to be something, because LairWare’s port of Ultima 3 for Mac has remained available lo these many years. What’s more, the OS X-specific version of the game has just been updated to version 2.2. Notable changes include:

Fixed build issue which rendered v2.1 unable to run some non-Snow Leopard systems. 
Windowed mode now double-sized when able. 
Higher quality application icon. 
Now largely localizable into other languages.

I’ve taken the liberty of updating the demo download at the project entry.

The OS X version, as was the case with the older version, cannot be completed without registering (specifically, it prevents you from reaching Ambrosia), which still costs only $15 now only costs $5!  For a professionally-done, classical graphics remake, that’s a reasonable fee indeed.

(via UO Journal)

Since I’ll be spending most of today and tomorrow in the air, as it were, there probably won’t be much in the way of other articles posted to the site. That said, I’ll try and check comments from time to time, and will have access to email whilst in airports. Provided said airports offer free wifi. Or if the planes do. But Emirates didn’t offer in-flight wifi on the way to Saudi Arabia, so I don’t imagine they’ll offer it on the reciprocal flight.

I am here.

That said, here’s a couple of amusing things I’ve tripped over in the last few hours.

Drinking an average of six cups of coffee a day reduces the risk of prostate cancer in men.

By up to 20%, no less! And if coffee drinkers do get prostate cancer, they’re up to 60% less likely to die from it.

I’ll be at Starbucks. Do you think the Canadian health care system would pay for my preventative daily venti Pike Place?

Skyrim will break you with dragons!

The game will evidently boast an “unlimited” number of the fearsome flying beasts; they won’t just be area bosses and suchlike.

That’s good…I always wondered what it would be like if the inhabitants of Destard decided to make all of Britannia their playground. Now I guess I’ll get to find out, if somewhat vicariously.

Some contaminants in water can flow upstream, and even up (small) waterfalls.

This puts a new spin on reading tea leaves.

A 20-gigapixel panorama of Wembley Stadium…

…during the FA Cup Final last Saturday. It’s a truly amazing photographic work; check it out. And if you happened to be at that game, find yourself and tag yourself on Facebook.

This is just awesome: a blood turbine.

Read thou of this:

Engineers at Switzerland’s University of Bern have been working on tiny turbines; turbines small enough, in fact, to fit inside a human artery. Working like a blood powered hydroelectric generator, a working prototype — tested in a simulated artery — has been able to produce 800 microwatts of electricity. That’s roughly eighty times the power required to power the average pacemaker; such a device could provide independent, sustainable power to neurostimulators, blood-pressure sensors, and other implanted medical gizmos. Researchers are concerned, however, that a blood turbine’s adding agitation of blood flow might lead to clotting, and are continuing to tweak and rework the design to minimize this risk.

In essence, with one of these installed, pacemakers would become self-powering. Which, if you think about it, is about as close to a perpetual motion machine as we’re going to get, ever.

It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from there.

An Israeli couple have named their newborn baby girl “Like”, after the Facebook approval mechanism.

She’s going to, like, have, like, serious issues in, like, school and stuff. Like, really.

Seriously, though: what the hell, Lior and Vardit Adler? What. The. Hell?

And speaking of “what the hell?”, look what Zynga’s been up to!

They have wrought GagaVille, a Lady Gaga-themed farm in Farmville.

“There is no curse in Elvish, Entish, or the tongues of Men for this treachery.”

Netflix, not piracy, accounts for the lion’s share of North American internet traffic.

Too bad Netflix’s catalogue sucks in Canada.

Intel goes 14 nm. Moore’s Law groans under the strain.

Is it just me, or is it getting ridiculous (and yet awesome) just how small they can make transistors these days?

Trick pancakes!

There’s a whole blog devoted to them!

Dragonlet #1 loves pancakes, so of course I’m going to have to try and make some of these now.

Entropy is universal across all languages.

Just regular-type awesome, but still:

The amount of information carried in the arrangement of words is the same across all languages, even languages that aren’t related to each other. This consistency could hint at a single common ancestral language, or universal features of how human brains process speech.

Matt Drudge is still the force to be reckoned with online.

He drives more traffic to news sites than Facebook and Twitter combined.

So you’re a rogue state with a great plan: hack the US!

The Americans would like you to know that they’ll respond in a somewhat more low-tech fashion: with bombs.

Ever wonder how Windows 7 knows it’s connected to the Internet?

It downloads a small file from Microsoft, which of course exposes your IP address to the software giant. If that doesn’t sit right with you, there are apparently ways to change where Windows goes looking for the file; you can even point it at your own server.

But was he drinking a nice Chianti?

A Moscow man is busted for eating his friend’s liver…with a side of potatoes. Which, as we all know, is just wrong: the appropriate side is fava beans.

Do be sure to read the comments at the article.

The “crowd effect” — the wisdom of crowds — is a real phenomenon.

But it’s easy to “poison the well”; “even mild social influence can undermine the wisdom of crowd effect in simple estimation tasks.”

This is a real problem in the era of Twitter, it should be noted.

This post brought to you by I can’t believe it’s not a painting:

Not a painting. Nope.

Most obvious indication? Every BioWare game since Neverwinter Nights (with the exception of Dragon Age 2) is on the list, but only three Origin games (Privateer, Wing Commander 4 and Ultima 4 appear on the list…with none of these ranked higher than 84th.

To be fair, there are a lot of worthy entries on the list, but there are also a lot of entries that make you scratch your head and wonder. Surely, Ultima 6 or Serpent Isle deserve a mention? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

The folks at WCNews note that the list skews somewhat toward Nintendo, and that is certainly true. But really, that’s not what I find egregious about it. What I find egregious about it is that Final Fantasy gets two entries in the top fifteen, and Origin’s battery of top-tier games gets nary a mention in the same range. Now, granted, you’d expect to find some inaccuracies like these in any fan-built list, but even so…it’s very disappointing.

And people wonder why I am leery of trusting the opinions of fans of any series.

Oh, that lying TSA…

So it appears that Texas is about to pass a bill banning the TSA from randomly patting down would-be air travellers; the TSA must, according to the bill, demonstrate probable cause before administering a physical search. Predictably, the “security” agency has responded by deeming the Texan law “unconstitutional”…according to the Supremacy Clause. Which, if my reading of the relevant portion of the Constitution is correct, is basically an outright lie.

Then again, I’m not a legal scholar.

Mary Poppins was right!

A spoonful of sugar really does help the medicine go down. And in the case of certain antibiotics, it also boosts the medicine’s effectiveness against persistent strains of bacteria like staph.

So why exactly did Microsoft buy Skype

And does it have anything to do with the rumours that Microsoft might also be looking to buy up Nokia? If you think about it, there is a real opportunity for some high-powered web-driven mobile communications magic to happen there.

Speaking of Microsoft…

…they’re apparently adding support for CentOS to their Hyper-V virtualization platform. Weird.

Grow a mini-garden in an Altoids tin!

Because your office deserves some greenery, but space is limited.

Genetic precursor for obesity confirmed.

And actually, it turns out that genes behave in rather fascinating ways:

…the mother’s KLF14 gene controls other genes associated with body-mass index (obesity), insulin, glucose levels and cholesterol. This means that KLF14 is a “master switch” that controls and shows the connections between metabolic traits.

Researchers made this discovery by recruiting 800 UK female twin participants and studying over 20,000 genes in subcutaneous fat biopsies. They also looked at genes in subcutaneous fat biopsies from Icelandic participants. Between the two studies, researchers discovered the connections between the KLF14 gene and distant genes associated with metabolic traits.

“This is the first major study that shows how small changes in one master regulator gene can cause a cascade of other metabolic effects in other genes,” said Spector. “This has great therapeutic potential particularly as by studying large detailed populations such as the twins we hope to find more of these regulators.”

In a way, I see this as bad news, because it makes it easier for people to now say “I have bad genes!” and ignore the fact that they subsist on a steady diet of cheeseburgers and fried chicken.

Apparently, we have a bent galaxy.

A newly-discovered arm of the Milky Way has shed some light on the shape of our swirling home in the cosmos. Apparently, it’s bent, like the cap of a beer bottle after being bent by the bottle opener.

Social media…now for tinpot despots!

A Britisn journalist gets into a Twitter-based spat with the ruler of Rwanda.

And speaking of tinpot dictators…

…Moammar Gadhafi is kind of a jerk:

Fill an inflatable boat with explosives. Crew it with mannequins. Send it out to sea in search of a humanitarian aid ship to destroy. Behold the desperate ingenuity of Moammar Gadhafi.

I suppose stranger things have been done in wartime. And as soon as I can think of examples, I’ll list them.

This is awesome: a lady snapped a picture of Endeavour’s launch…from the window of a plane!

She also grabbed a video:

Best music video ever: Pomplamoose takes on Angry Birds!

I LOLd. And for quite some time, too.

Tonight’s post brought to you by George:

Spaced out!

Slave Lake, Alberta, very nearly wiped off the map by forest fires.

“Heartbreaking” is about the only word that I can think of here. Over 30% of the town (population 7,000) has burned down; still yet more devastation is expected beyond that, if it has not already occurred. Blessedly, nobody seems to have been killed (or even hurt) in all of this, and the town has been evacuated. But even so, there are a lot of Albertans right now without homes, jobs, or anything but what little they could stuff into their cars and vans.

So, as I say: heartbreaking. And rather close to home. This Reddit thread is pretty up-to-date with information; check it out if you want the latest details. Offers of prayer, good intentions, positive thoughts, and charity donations are encouraged!

So where am I, exactly?

I’m here (assuming the Google Maps embed works):

16-year old finds possible new cystic fibrosis treatment.

This is cool:

A 16-year-old high school student may have found a new, viable treatment for cystic fibrosis through the use of computer simulations.

Marshall Zhang, an 11th grade student at Richmond Hill’s Bayview Secondary School in Toronto, Canada, used a supercomputer system to figure out how certain drugs react with proteins associated with cystic fibrosis.

Cystic fibrosis is a recessive genetic disease that causes thick mucus to build up in the lungs and throughout the body causing progressive disability and even death. This disease occurs in about 1 out of 3,000 live births, and has no cure.

This kid is…’ow you say?…going places.

Grill the perfect burger!

Sixteen tips. Pay particular attention to #10 (never grill burgers on weak heat), and also #14 and #15. Especially #15, unless the full taste of the meat is unimportant to you.

Manage digital overload!

Not that anyone here has that problem. But I’m sure we all know victims of this tragic condition, right?

Cheerful Dragon left a comment to inform us all that he has moved the downloads for his collection of bugfixes for Ultima V: Lazarus to a new location. He has updated the download links at this Project Britannia forum thread accordingly.

You can still find the downloads at the project entry, of course.

Over at the Ultima 6 Online project blog, a warning of sorts has been posted, which tells a sad in-game tale:

Recently a player in Ultima VI Online by the name of Kendram Bensen was invited into a players home, and was allowed access to his unlocked storage room.

He wasted no time taking all he could carry, without permission.

While this is not virtuous in any way, picking up items is not against the rules of Ultima VI Online. Ultima VI Online is a persistent free willed world of good and evil.
Had this player been hacking the game in anyway he would be banned and all other actions that could be taken against him/her would have been.

The point of this message is be careful when helping new players or old player. Be smart. Players can wait outside while you go in your home.

On a final note please know that it is literally impossible, for me to in any way shape or form, replace lost items or create weapons/armor of any power/toughness.

So if you play U6O, good Dragons and Dragonettes, consider yourself duly warned, and take steps to safeguard your virtual property!

(via Petrell)

Iris2, the enhanced 3D client for Ultima Online freeshards, has been updated to build 3395, after over a year of no significant news (the last update was released in March of 2010).

The project’s changelog is a bit obtuse, so I’m not exactly sure what all has been changed in this new build versus the previous release, although I’m assume that it’s the usual mix of optimizations and bugfixes that tend to characterize such things. If anyone from the Iris2 project wants to put me right in my understanding, the comments form is of course open.

Per a request from the development team, you won’t find the new downloads at the project entry, but you will find links there to their current set of downloads. Or you can hit up the project site proper to find them, of course.

(via Petrell)

Kevin Fishburne has an excellent suggestion:

I think a thread should be started where we can all tell stories about why we love Ultima. Testimonials, basically, so we can gain greater insight into each other’s understanding and perception of the series, and perhaps in some way begin to understand what we as a collective define Ultima to be.

Good idea or nay? It’s been touched on here and there, myself included, but I’d love to see everyone’s experiences in one place. It’d be hella inspirational and maybe bring us together a bit more. This is a very fractured community at times.

To which I say: not a thread. I have a category already which is labeled “What Makes an Ultima?”, which I set up as part of a project I have not yet had time to pursue. I would love nothing more than to fill it up with guest posts of people explaining what Ultima was to them and what, in their opinion, constitutes a proper Ultima game.

So, here’s the deal. If you’re already registered at Aiera and would like to contribute, let me know and I will enable your user account with post-drafting rights. (I’ll still have to approve all the articles, thanks to the WordPress security model, but don’t worry…I’ll publish almost anything!)

If you’re not registered (how come?) and would like to contribute, send me your thoughts via the contact form and I will figure out how to post them under your name.

Kevin Fishburne, as per his promise to make Aiera his main venue for announcing news updates, left a comment announcing that he had begun to implement objects in his Ultima-inspired online game, Sanctimonia:

Am well along but am still having some difficulties, as well as some breakthroughs that really please me. Object implementation has went two distinct way: 1) bottom-centered objects and 2) bitmap-centered objects. Bottom-centered objects are trees and such which are tall and have central stalks, while bitmap-centered objects are flatter and have no roots. These two designations actually control the way the bitmap is drawn in the client rendering window, and allow objects to rotate and place properly.

To illustrate, he (of course) posted a video:

Also, in an earlier comment, he posted a link to a video showing the setup of the camera rig he will be using to take photos of object models. These photos — taken at different angles — will be used to create a faux-3D effect when the player rotates the view.

Cear Dragon sent me an email to announce that Ultima 6 Online’s wiki has been re-located to the Codex of Ultima Wisdom, a welcome bit of consolidation.

He explains:

Our site now links directly to the new page he set up for us and almost all the information has been transfered. Ultima VI Online needs help from anyone who enjoys ultima and the spreading of information. The wiki has become the best place for new players to get the ropes fast.

So be sure to hit up the Codex for all of your U6O informational needs! And, of course, feel free to help out with any editing that may be necessary.