Author Archives: Dennis

Entangled

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It never ceases to amaze me just how entangled my life has become with certain people. Knowing that I’ve lost them, am in the process of losing them, or will lose them in the future fills me an almost crippling fear.

I’ve always been afraid to be abandoned, to be left or to end up lonely, even though I’m very good at being alone. One of the first dreams I remember having was one in which I was being left by my parents while walking back from school. I can’t have been more than six years old at the time.

It’s been the reason for a lot of my behaviour, both good and bad. I hope people won’t judge me too harshly.

Trust and Grudges

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Recently, I found out that one of my friends had been gossiping about me to an aquaintance of mine. They know each other through me, and they’re not close.

The aquaintance was someone I’ve never felt very close to and it was a very one-sided relationship, where she was high maintenance and was dealing with some issues she needed to talk about. I felt compassionate and wanted to help. Since that time she’s been doing much better and has moved on and no longer felt the need to share. Things have been cool and casual since then.

I can’t say that I was surprised that the aquaintance was gossiping. Kind of her thing, I suppose. However, my friend really surprised me. And it hurt. I confronted him almost immediately after hearing it, and he apologised right away, saying that he understood my objection and said he shouldn’t have done it.

It shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. I’ve noticed that he has a hard time relating to anything outside of his own frame of reference. He’s said so on several occassions, when talking about other people we know — people who I’m very close to — where he said he had lost interest in them because his life was so different from theirs. I find it unthinkable, really. People who are different are interesting, and friends whose life moves in a different direction then yours are extra interesting! But to each his own, I suppose.

The subject matter of the gossip suggests that my life may have also veered off in a different direction and that perhaps that’s the reason for the temporary lapse in judgment. To me it doesn’t matter, but obviously to my friend it does. What bothers me is that it has never been a discussion between him and I, but he finds it easy to discuss it with a relative stranger, and a blabbermouth at that.

If he had a problem understanding something about me he could’ve just asked and I would’ve discussed it with him with no equivocations. I could have explained a few things, perhaps give him a frame of reference. Perhaps it would have meant he had retained enough respect for me not to gossip. Perhaps it would’ve happened regardless of his understanding, but at least it would’ve been informed gossip!

Blah blah blah. Water under the bridge, you’d think. It’s been a while ago. But… I’m finding I have trouble letting go of this. A breach of trust I’m having a hard time getting over. My brother is telling me to slowly build up trust and not to trust my friend with sensitive information for now, but I’m wondering whether something hasn’t been broken irreparably.

I think I’m a bit of a grudgebearer. How weird is that. I never knew.

Cain’s “Brown Pride” Tattoo

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With the rematch between Junior Dos Santos (JDS) and Cain Velasquez (CV) set for tonight where they will battle for the UFC heavyweight championship, the inevitable story of CV’s “brown pride” tattoo has come up again. He claims the tattoo signifies the struggle and hardship his parents went through in order to provide him with a good life. It honours them and their sacrifices.

Detractors and critics will say that brown pride has the same connotations as white pride and that disallowing one type of bigotry should mean you disallow all types of bigotry.

Personally, I’m very much on the fence about this one. On the one hand, the term “white pride” has been hijacked been hijacked by racist and fascist groups and while I truly cannot comprehend taking pride in a coincidence, or in a concept you had very little to do with overall, it’s true that white pride no longer means the same thing as brown pride does. So if he’s proud about being brown, fine.

On the other hand, brown pride, like white pride or Irish pride or gay pride or Jewish pride, does claim a superiority by one people over another. On top of that, there’s a special intensity of that conviction that comes with applying a permanent mark on your body in the form of a tattoo to signify your pride. I immediately distrust people who so narrowly represent themselves.

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Shadowrun: Corrosion – A Tough Decision

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Since starting development on Shadowrun: Corrosion I’ve had a tremendous amount of fun watching it manifest into something that people actually seemed to enjoy. I never actually thought that what started as an educational project for my brother and I would eventually attract more than 250 players.

One of the challenges was trying to stay true to the SR3 rules. We thought that if we just kept on trucking and kept expanding the foundation and implementing more material, we’d eventually get there. We made a few changes in order to standardise a few things because the rules have so many exceptions that it was going to become impossible to keep track of all those exceptions in the code. We built a fairly flexible foundation in which we were able to implement almost 95% of all the rules fairly loyally.

For all the things we did right, we also had a lot of problems — problems we unfortunately were not able to overcome.

The first problem was the performance in missions. When we first started out, things were jerky, but it was acceptable as an alpha because we thought we would be able to come up with some performance enhancements in order to improve upon that.  Unfortunately, we never did and in developing the options further, the performance just suffered more and more. We never did find a way to boost the performance.

The second problem was the fallout of implementing PvP. There was quite a backlash from the players because it was implemented too quickly and without a good understanding of the consequences. For a long time we were looking for the right way to offer PvP options without people getting ganked right, left and center.

The third problem was that the more we developed, the better we understood what we did wrong and what we had to redo to keep up with the curve. A good example was our shop mechanics.

The fourth problem was that despite several offers for help, I wasn’t able to set up an infrastructure for code sharing, testing, quality control, etc.

All this created a situation where we had a hard time keeping up with the demands of the players, creating some friction with people like Rockso, ShadowDragon, etc. As we kept developing, we kept falling behind further and further and it became clear that the project was collapsing under the weight of itsown ambition. Adepts hadn’t been implemented, let alone the matrix or the astral realm. No complex behaviour trees for opponents like I wanted…

I can go on, but I won’t because, well… no use crying over spilt milk.

The death blow came with the latest problems with lag. What is causing the sudden bursts of lag is still somewhat of a mystery. It’s likely that our server is being brought down by the large number of queries. It’s not a beefy server, but one that I would expect to have more than enough resources to cover us. Having set up a test environment on my rather bad ass box at home, I can safely say that there’s no lag here, confirming my suspicions that it’s our server.

So we had a choice to make; either we were going to move to a different server — perhaps something a little more professional — and start paying, or figure out a way to lower the load on the database. Unfortunately, the latter option means we’ll have to make some seriously fundamental changes to the framework. In hindsight, we over-extended ourselves and were too ambitious.

So as of right now, I am ceasing all development to Shadowrun: Corrosion. My brother has moved on to other games, mostly developing stuff to earn his degree while I have several small projects going on. I also have some ideas on different games that may or may not come to some sort of fruition.

Luckily for all of us, there’s an RPG in development as well as an ambitious MMO. Check it out on www.shadowrun.com.

It’s been a great experience and I’ve had a lot of fun chatting with all of you. I’ve also been amazed at how loyal most have you been and your advice and suggestions have been invaluable to me. You’ve taught me a lot.

It’s been real.

The Men Who Don’t Fit In, Robert W. Service

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There’s a race of men that don’t fit in,
A race that can’t stay still;

So they break the hearts of kith and kin,
And they roam the world at will.

They range the field and they rove the flood,
And they climb the mountain’s crest;

Theirs is the curse of the gypsy blood,
And they don’t know how to rest.

If they just went straight they might go far;
They are strong and brave and true;

But they’re always tired of the things that are,
And they want the strange and new.

They say: “Could I find my proper groove,
What a deep mark I would make!”

So they chop and change, and each fresh move
Is only a fresh mistake.

And each forgets, as he strips and runs
With a brilliant, fitful pace,

It’s the steady, quiet, plodding ones
Who win in the lifelong race.

And each forgets that his youth has fled,
Forgets that his prime is past,

Till he stands one day, with a hope that’s dead,
In the glare of the truth at last.

He has failed, he has failed; he has missed his chance;
He has just done things by half.

Life’s been a jolly good joke on him,
And now is the time to laugh.

Ha, ha! He is one of the Legion Lost;
He was never meant to win;

He’s a rolling stone, and it’s bred in the bone;
He’s a man who won’t fit in.