I know this article pretty specific on the german audience but could be interesting for foreigns too.

I live in the german federal state "Bavaria". It's quite big so people would expect a lot political diversity in it. However the last 48 years one party hat the absolute majority (+50% of all votes). This year it all changed when the party dropped below 50% the first time after years.

Does this signalize a change in the political culture here in Germany?

First let me describe the wider context of these happenings.

In germany we used to have 2 big and 2 small parties.The big ones were the social-demokrats("SPD") and the christian-democratics("Union"). The small ones, a liberal and a green party only played a small role in the parliament.

Suddenly this twistet a little. We now have more community-oriented parties and also a leftish party which is mainly coming from the old soviet government in east germany.

This made our political world change a lot. And I like it not because I like these parties but how there is more variety in the parties I can vote for. Maybe now politicians are going to really do what they think the people want and are more scared of loosing popularity. Of course this can be seen in a bad sense as this may increase political ads and such nonsense but we don't have to be so pesimisitc all the time.

I myself belong to one of the German Pirate Party and feel like it' a good way to express my political opinion and maybe change the world a little.

Well, to sum up this article. Big parties are getting less popular, small parties are rising and political diversity increases. YES its a good thing :)

The games industry has experienced a lot of change in the last years.

Games are not the same anymore. The main reason for that is that they're targeted at a completely different field of users.

Today the most important aspect of game design is simplicity. What i mean? Well, in the old days you had to read a manual or go trough a giant tutorial to understand how to play a game. Some games (think of Unreal) didn't even have an intro put a text printed to the console.

Just think of today's games. "Causual Gaming" is the new big thing. On the wii youve a simple stick that you flip around maybe one or two buttons to press and it's fun. A lot of people play it and by a lot i mean that it gained a big part of the market share in the last year.

From the beginning of humanity on people were lazy. We don't like to do stuff we have to concentrate for. We don't like having to make up solutions ourselves. So why not make games as easy to play as possible? You've one generic way to play RTS games, one for shooters and so on.

Of course this can mean something bad too. You start to actually have to do the same thing in every of the games you play. At some point it could get boring or not special anymore.

Not special? A game like Crysis costing 15 million euros is just a generic game? What the fuck, dude!

So to finish up this post. Game Design of today is the art to combine both, simplicity and uniqueness.

I don't know what to blog today so i just gonna show a in my opinion funny picture

For decades programmers wondered how to find out wheter youve writte good and straightfoward code or not.

How to know it? Here the answer:

Funny but true :)

Today I want to talk about something way more serious. The direction our governments are heading and how wrong it is in my opinion.

In the days of 9/11 and Al Qaida a lot of politicians are vowing for more control of citicens and possible criminals. I disagree.

Sure terrorism is a terrible thing and sure I belive that those people need to be punished for what they did or will do. But i don't belive that a restriction of privacy will actually improve the situation.

Just think of state where everything is controlled by the government. Flight movements, Telephone calls, Emails etc etc etc. You would have no way to communicate without being heard or seen by somebody working for the government. In the end those technologies could be used to restrict things vital for our society as freedom of speech or religion.

Why am I blogging about this? It's a thing that concerned me a lot lately. The german government is starting to do exactly what I just wrote. I see extremist parties and people i would not trust trying to gain power and I don't want them to be able to know about who I sleep with or which party I would vote. Just to name an example.

Of course all this could be used to control any minor crime like software piracy, double-parking or farting in church. But isn't it a bit extreme and unappropriate?

Here in germany we had decades of no one dieing of terrorism. So why increase surveillance? Maybe it is too easy in a time ruled by media who just talks about crime and violence. Think about it...

If you look at the mainstream games out there they all have only a few common denominators. Unreal Engine and Cry Engine just to name two of em. But all those games look the same, don't they? All those games feel so generic and uninovative.

I will tell you why.

As long as I've been in this scene I felt more and more like using a complete framework will just start to limit you. You've to use their script engine, their AI, their GUI, their scene-format maybe even use a pre-made set of meshes and textures. How do YOU expect to create something unique?

I don't think that people should code everything directly from scratch and DO belive in frameworks easpecially with coding languages like C++ that doesn't have native low level functions but uses C's. That's also a reason i started coding my network framework.

I think if you see your scene graph and your AI-system as part of your game logic than you will be able to achieve a lot more diversity (a word I really like) and maybe end up with something really rare (rare sounds nice too).

So don't do it the easy way... do it YOUR way!

A thing that always fascinated me about humanity is it's freedom of speech, religion and whatsoever and where it has brought us. I think giving everyone the ability to do whatever he wants makes this world so diverse but also so full of anger and misery. It allows us to do whatever we want and go whereever we want. We try to control it with ethics or some sort of military or police, but as we germans say "you don't have to do anything but die".

Having Freedom as the most powrful factor in our all lives why not put it's power into a game project...PROJECT FREEDOM!

Who has done it already? Just think about it. Sandbox games! GTA, Spore, Sims etc etc etc. They're all successful but they miss one big factor. One person being completely free is fine but what about having something like in reallife where dozends or hundreds of people are interacting? This pushes us into a multiplayer environment and at the point where i ended up after a lot of months in thoughts.

Of course something is missing. In real life we've ethics and nationalities that somehow put an order into this messy and big world. So i have to think of something that acts similiar. Maybe invent a religion inside the game? Well thats something i will discuss at some other point.

But what about groups of players? They must be able to own parts of the environment and to manipulate it. They should also be able to invent stuff like machines or weapons, craft and trade them to have some kind of economy.

On the other hand you have to be careful not to put too much restrictions on the player to keep the concept of a free environment.

So i end this small post with a question:
What should a player be allowed to do in a multiplayer environment ?

Hey you guys,

i felt the need to finally put something on this page just to try it out. PivotX seems to be kinda neat but it's not easy to use either imo.

Well if anyone wondered what i was doing the last weeks. Here's the story.

The last months i spend a lot of time looking into different? game and also network concepts. What i realized that the open source world doesn't have any neat network engine out there. Stuff like Zoidcom or RakNet is and will never be openSource and free to use (zlib style).

So i thought it would be a nice exercise (and base for my project which im gonna tell you more about in the next weeks) to code a little network engine. It's API should be lot like irrlichts one: easy to use and very straightforward. I think i did a good job with that. I implented reliable UDP and a nice callback class. It worked pretty well :) (not normal with my code).

Having a UDP implementation i thought TCP would be as easy as UDP. But a working TCP implementation only exists in my head. You know Berkley Sockets are like a box of pralines, you never know what's inside. So i found myself being stuck with a really strange behaviour. Where my connect attempts always get refused. I hope im gonna fix it tonight (i mean its just the 15th night i try to or so :) )

if you wanna check out my lib click here .