http://t-machine.org Internet Gaming, Computer Games, Technology, MMO, and Web 2.0 Wed, 02 Jul 2008 17:03:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Yahoo recently posted a page listing and describing eight different design patterns for a reputation (or ranking, or achievement) system for a community - where community could be a web community, the players of a particular game, etc. For a long time now, I've been meaning to write a post ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/07/01/reputation-and-ranking-systems-for-online-games-and-web-games/ Or so this blog on security says. "Some experts claim that two-factor authentication won't work. They are wrong, of course." The expert linked to is Bruce Schneier, and the main attack he points out that isn't affected by TFS is ... fake website asking for your credentials. Funny. That was one of the ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/07/01/two-factor-security-solves-everything-well-done-blizzard/ So, here's a question for Agile developers: when you're using Scrum as your development process, and your game is in pre-production, at what point do you move to Production? And, more importantly, how can you tell (that you've moved)? Is Scrum in fact a permanent Pre-Production, right up until the ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/27/scrum-and-production-pre-production-in-games/ What is Pre-Production in games development? What is Production? What's the difference? I've just written a (draft) post that requires you to know those things well before it makes sense, and I started off by including a grossly over-simplified idiot's-guide to these things. Then I looked back and saw it had ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/27/game-process-what-are-pre-production-and-production/ Someone at work forwarded around this article/manifesto about how "Great story is the Holy Grail of gaming". I read it, and replied that I found every single paragraph had at least one stupid claim or ridiculous statement in it, and that overall the manifesto was basically a load of ****. It ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/25/stupid-article-on-videogame-story-design/ If you do much work administering linux servers - or, especially, if you DON'T do much, but occasionally need to - then it's a massive time saver to be fluent in one of the text-based file editors that are found on all versions of Unix. As a developer working with ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/19/sysadmin-help-exceptionally-good-quick-guide-to-vi-vim/ Based on my unscientific quick straw poll, the majority of computer-literate people have no idea how WLAN / wifi / wireless LAN security works and - worse - are actively exposing all their data and passwords to all services, having convinced themselves that they are "mostly" safe or secure. I'm posting ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/15/wireless-security-did-you-know/ At the Casual Games conference at GDC 06, one of the audience stood up and asked the panel of Serious Games or Casual Games industry experts whether they thought that Brain Training was going to do similar numbers in the US as it had done in Japan, and how that ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/11/dr-kawashima-who/ I just heard this talk at the MMOGfest academic mini-conference last week - apparently, it's mostly the same as the talk he gave at the independent MMO conference earlier this year, but I think a lot of people didn't manage to go to that one, so it seems worth reporting ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/11/dr-bartle-three-views-from-2018/ I'm seriously fed up with the mediocrity (you could use worse words; I'm being civil here) of most MMO publishers' patching systems for MMOs. The very least you should expect as a player, even back in 2001, should have been something akin to the PS3 / 360 patching systems today: ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2008/06/09/mmo-patching-how-it-ought-to-be/