Chris McCormick

I am playing two gigs in London this week. The first one is a livecoding gig, which will be my first time livecoding, so I'm a bit nervous that I will be really boring. I will basically be constructing Pd patches and sequences from scratch.

The second one is an Ill FM gig which will be broadcast on the radio. I'll be doing my normal Pd-with-the-laptop-lid-closed-and-a-midi-controller set.

Wednesday night

++ PUBCODE2 ++

Part two in the first series of livecoded music events in London.

http://toplap.org/uk/

Live coding is a new direction in electronic music and video, and is starting to get somewhere interesting. Live coders expose and rewire the innards of software while it generates improvised music and/or visuals. All code manipulation is projected for your pleasure.

When: 7pm - 11pm, Wednesday 5th August 2009

http://toplap.org/uk/event/pubcode2/

Featuring: chr15m (making machines that make machines make music) MCLD (beatboxing + livecoding, is it possible?) Yee-King + Click Nilson (algorithmic choreography) openSlub (crowdsourced livecoding)

Place: The Roebuck 50 Great Dover Street London SE1 4YG

Map

Door tax: Free

Tube: Borough (5 mins walk) London Bridge (9 mins walk)

More info: http://toplap.org/uk/

Thursday night

"You understand and agree that Apple may, in its sole discretion, [...] reject Your Application for distribution for any reason, even if Your Application meets the Documentation and Program Requirements".

-- Apple developer documentation

"The certificate does not need to be signed by a certificate authority: it is perfectly allowable, and typical, for Android applications to use self-signed certificates. The certificate is used only to establish trust relationships between applications, not for wholesale control over whether an application can be installed."

-- Android developer documentation

I was having a really dull time trying to port my GameJam0509 entry to anything other than the development platform, Debian GNU/Linux. I managed to get it running under Mac OSX 10.5, but Windows was giving me a really hard time, so I've done is what any self-respecting internet slacker would do and made a game trailer instead. This is all ingame footage (sorry about the low framerate but the game is heartily unoptimised).

Click To Play

The Infinite 8-Bit Platformer concept is an idea I had ages ago, and the basic game design is this:

• There is no shooting or killing in this game. The primary game mechanics are exploratory and social. You can run, jump, go through portals to new levels, and collect things.
• Content is user generated. As you can see in the video, the game includes an in-game editor. You can edit levels, portals (connections between levels), and items.
• It's massively multiplayer in the same way that a MUD is massively multiplayer. As you explore the levels you can see other people doing the same, and you can stop and chat with them, give them items, etc. (this bit isn't implemented yet).

So basically I was hoping that if enough people used the game enough we'd end up with a massive, social, network connected platformer which you could explore for hours and hours, always finding new and interesting things, places, and people. Maybe I'll finish it one day, we'll see. In the meantime, all there is is this trailer and blog post. :)

Anyway, one things that GameJam0509 taught me is that the old way of making games kind of bites, and the web based entries kicked butt. From now on I think I'm going to try and do game development in the open, on the web.

I've been doing a lot of really boring, but neccessary work on the documentation for jsGameSoup, the Free Software library/framework I've been writing so that I can make web based games without using Flash. So here it is (click on the image below). Enjoy!

It’s easy to ridicule the estimated 2006-or-2007 ship date for Longhorn, the next major release of Windows. But do you doubt for a moment that Longhorn will provide more improvements from Windows XP than desktop Linux will gain during the same period?

-- John Gruber, April 2004

Early versions of Gnome and KDE were pretty much just clones of the Microsoft Windows UI. They’ve diverged since then, and I’d say Ubuntu’s default Gnome desktop is in most ways better from a design and usability standpoint than Windows Vista.

-- John Gruber, July 2009