From video editor's journal

There's been some silence on my video front, and it's not just because of Amiga references of previous posts and being much time busy with my family and paid work. Nevertheless, I do have several plans going on and got some work started too. Could I suppose divide this post to two parts related to video making, out of which first part is more strategic and another more tactical. In a way.

So first of all I have plans for videos about the following topics regarding to Zacharian Computer Detective episodes:
- Apple Macintosh video (in post-production: editing, most of the episode raw video exists)
- ICL MikroMikko Pentium video (in production: part of the episode on raw video)
- Nintendo 64 video (in (pre) production: parts on video, much undone, however)
- Atari 8-bit video (in pre-production: still planning what exactly to include)
- Brother digital typewriter video (in pre-production: still planning)
- NEC PC-88/98 video (in pre-production: I'll need quite a few things to get either of these properly running, but on the other hand might start them as a series starting with ordering them etc., as it was not so simple to even get them in the first place)
- Amiga content exploration from old disks (in pre-production: needs to get a session arranged when has time).

There are also some other topics that I have postponed at least for now, even while there might be some related work done already:
- Nokia Data MikroMikko 386 computer (got some video, not sure how to fix it yet)
- Schneider portable 386 computer (might go to pre-production at some point)
- Windows 98 computer circa 2000 type (could start working with easily, but pending)
- IBM AT motherboard to a working computer (missing casing and time)
- Locked Thinkpad motherboard (lacking time for the operation, also might lack some parts)
- Various A/V mixer devices (a bit off topic, but maybe later)
- Several Lenovo/IBM Thinkpads
- Unpacking of everything (might get these to some point, got lots of video material existing but there is already too much unpacking videos out there)
- Actually quite a bit smaller and bigger other things that might connect to some other stuff as well.

Whoah, that already made quite a list without even really trying. It'd take not so much effort to think of more stuff I'd have more or less pending for working, yet it starts to seem obvious that unless if I'll get some extra hand available or something else happens (such as needing less time with my work), I'll have a long time to work with even these things. I've stopped obtaining new computer equipment that doesn't have quite direct need in some context - both because started to run low on space to keep stuff and because will have hard time finding time to deal with already existing stuff.

Obviously also if I'll keep making stuff on videos, it will take me a lot longer to deal with the equipment than if I'll simply do the fix on the computer itself. That is why I'm not documenting every computer operation on video I do at home, such as pimping up some old laptops (from 2007-2009) to be cabable for some modern use with other people who are living with me.

When turning into tactical side, I have some potentially very good news after some bad news. They are related. Bad news is that I more or less got enough of Kdenlive. New version of Kdenlive (19.04.0) was released like couple weeks ago. My previous version was 18.12.1b from like couple months earlier, which is now labelled as unsupported legacy version, and with Ubuntu there are only Appimages available for use. Shouldn't this be a good news then though, as there seems to be lots of good new features and fixes in it and more are to come?

Well for start the new version refused to run practically any of my old projects refused to start up with the new version. This is not essentially critical, mainly because I've started such workflow with Kdenlive that I'll do one episode only and with one version, then I don't need to return to the old project since I'm doing a series. Kdenlive had been doing this on many earlier versions already, so I was sort of prepared with a workaround. I'm suspecting that the main reason is that Speed effect has been completely reworked, so the old version Speed effect (which I've used a lot, as there are some excessively long videos of disassemblies etc.) probably simply causes crash as it's no longer in the new version at all. Annoyance of course, since I can't keep long-term things or pre-prepared intro/outro sections anymore, but I can live with this.

However, when I then started a completely new project clean off, the application soon crashed. When I'll just hit Create Folder (for new clips), the new version of Kdenlive crashes abruptly. No questions asked, there is nothing to see, go home people. Well right... I could still live without making any folders, and it might work for instance by having folders done separately without doing ANYTHING else with the project...but no. I've had enough of this crap.

For around two years I've tried to live with Kdenlive, and I've managed somehow. All the time the application crashes here and there, certain features will break irrepairably the whole project and various features in the application slow down my workflow considerably and/or are just inconvenient in my opinion. Yet I have eventually managed to find workarounds, to know which places I should not to touch and to make backups frequently in such fashion that I won't overwrite the old one. Kdenlive has a lot of potential and several nice features. However, it is just terrible to work with in a long run. Many features simply won't work - not merely not working in fashion desired, but some things just are flat out non-functional or cause sudden crashes. Then when a new version appears, something might get fixed and something new usable might get added, but usually something else gets broken in trade. They've been reporting they've been doing quite a while of project refactoring, and supposedly it is now pretty much done with the version 19.04...and it still doesn't work.

Frankly, I have lost faith with the project progress with Kdenlive. It will keep developing, but I don't see any reason why it would not keep developing in rather jagged and irregular fashion. Updates will surely keep popping every now and then, and supposedly it keeps getting better and so on step by step (even with the steps back in between). However, probably also as an open source project there will keep being several temporary people assigned to the project, who will do some parts that some other people will not know about. These random branches in the project might get hanging until they are broken by some other parts later on. I don't really know if it goes exactly like that, since I've not participated, but I'm expecting the situation to be something like that.

Making a proper dual screen setup on Kdenlive was pain in the donkey.
With DaVinci Resolve it's no problem, and the layout won't get badly messed up by every startup.

So in the other words, I just don't believe Kdenlive will become sufficiently "done" for my taste in a long time if ever. I'm also weary on the fact that large sections won't work, the application is bloated and unstable and that I'll constantly need to give up with project files if I wish to update my crippled editor. I have even a feature film unedited, and I simply dared not to even try starting it with Kdenlive.

On the bright side, however, I noticed that DaVinci Resolve (DR for now on) had just gotten a new version 16 Beta almost the same time. I've ranted about this before in Facebook, and when I first tried DR in version 14, it was not possible to have audio out at all with my hardware under Linux. Version 15 last year provided the long waited audio support, but since DR would have very limited support to video and audio codecs (especially on Linux free version), I felt it's better to simply stick with Kdenlive for now. Especially as I was unable to get DR properly running out of the box.

I'm not sure if there are much real difference between versions 15 and 16, especially related to runnability on Linux, but I figured to give it a try again. After getting CUDA installed and confirmed that my NVIDIA drivers are as new as I can find (version 418.39), I was able to run DR without it getting stuck early on. I also figured that converting my videos to DR supported DNxHR codec with FFMPEG batch commands wouldn't be too bad, as I can just hit them running on background while doing something else. Obviously this converting also brings some advantage in editing, since DNxHR codec is more pleasant to process with than say H.264 (a codec which my main camera outputs), although in some cases for instance clips taken as desktop screen capture the video size might get 100 times larger (from 200MB to 20 GB in one case) if I desire to keep with the image quality.

Therefore, I got DR running without problems. And gosh, actually it felt like having a decent video editing software running on my computers for the first time for almost 10 years. I used to work with old Adobe Premiere Pro versions, but I had to move on because I'm no longer using Windows as my main computer and as my old version would not have proper support for FullHD videos (and tbh the CS2 from 2005 started to feel like lackluster in its features and usability already, that would have not bothered much before 2010). Unfortunately, then I found out that it's not a trivial task to find a proper Linux based video editor - I mean even if planning to buy something.

I haven't yet used DR for much, but the first impression after nightmares in Kdenlive felt almost like paradise. The interface seemed clear and easy to use (a video editing beginner might disagree though; there are lots of features around) and I could add, place, preview and adjust the videos just as I wanted without much effort. In addition, everything felt really smooth - stacking few videos or adding some random effects seemed no problems, while Kdenlive started to stagger if any single effect was in effect or any more than one track would be on adjacent tracks. I have noticed a bit weird fashion of acting while unconnecting audio tracks from videos (tracks jumping to the beginning and crushing old clips beneath), which seems like a bug, but I can live with that plus UNDO feature actually works no problem (unlike in Kdenlive quite often). Unlike Kdenlive, DR seems very stable too - although I needed quite a bit of tinkering to get the system into that state really.

This saying, I see huge potential with DR on my work, and it feels like DR might prove out becoming the same for video editing as Unity 3D was for game development when it become free to use. If no major unpleasant surprises will appear soon, I think I shall have a lot more pleasant video editing moments to come. Maybe simple videos will require a bit less effort to finish after all, and maybe I even will dare to finally start that old feature film editing as well yet with DR... Stay tuna heads, I mean tuned!

Go tech, Amiga!...and other digressions

Normal external FDD, Gotek modded external drive and Edirol FA-66 doing acrobatics.

Recently it has again taken me a while to progress with the videos as so much time of my so little free time has gone with Amiga.  After all, since I don't exactly have any fanbase, my retrocomputing hobby (videos included) is quite exclusively for my own amusement. Of course, should I have actual followers, the situation might change.

Then again, nowadays it's also clearly harder to get any visibility in web without tricks or money. This blog for instance can't really even be found by googling unless it's been already pre-customized to search by multiple visits on the site like I have myself. In many platforms I have noticed that the free postings will very easily sink with the stream, and only few of the many possible visitors will even get notified of the opportunity. If an example is wanted, Facebook being perhaps the most well known name where such stuff happens - I don't see most of my contacts' interesting updates without specifically going to look their pages and likewise other people whom something I write might concern won't often see. Of course I have never been very fond of Facebook anyway, and even then in many ways that site is long past its heyday in my opinion.

Various popular social media celebrities have also admitted that they have more or less agreed upon having liking circles with other popular posters - when you leave your virtual bookmark on page of another popular poster, the algorithms will note them more likely and boost up visibility of them both. Manipulating popularity lists has of course been happening pretty much always when it just has been possible. Back then when MySpace was still used, it was a common convention to post something on the pages of other bands, as that would bring visibility to yourself too. Although then I believe it was more primitive as it simply left a link to your name to more places, and there were no similar "news streams" as there are nowadays. Already back in 1960's it's told how they made Jimi Hendrix's first single Hey Joe on charts by hiring people to buy the record.

In whatever case, I'm digressing a bit now, as usual. Yet let that be happened, especially since this posting was not meant to be very stricly about just one thing anyway. Yes, I know such behaviour is not a recommended fashion of writing stuff, as it tends to confuse the readers. In "diary" texts and letters, however, I prefer  to rather give representations of my mental activity than to write a coherent text.

So let me return to Amiga for a moment. I remember how Niko Nirvi remarked in the most significant Finnish computer gaming magazine Pelit in 1990's something like Amiga would need to be missed only if likes (cute) platformers and action games, and he was never really into those. He was understood to be an Atari ST guy before moving to IBM PC compatibles, and on ST Dungeon Master apparently was his favourite game back in the days (for the record, Dungeon Master on ST appeared in 1987, for Amiga in 1988 and for PC in 1992). I agreed myself in the last post how rationally thinking there actually aren't that many reasons to obtain Amiga specifically if wants to enjoy some old games, as most games actually worth still playing would be also available on other platforms and the Amiga version is not often even the best port.

The box opened: FDD on top and Gotek under it.

Gotek is more visible now as intermediate
inner layer has been taken away.

Therefore I'll openly admit that many games I've played recently I've played largely due letting myself indulged with nostalgia - it's been a fun experience to play several games that I had played as a kid, yet I would not likely care to play them really without having played them as a kid. 25+ years of break has also affected to my gaming skills - it took me more than a couple of tries to reach to the last level of Batman the Movie, but it didn't take me long to reach way further in evolution in Eco than I'd ever managed as a kid. This is saying I'm obviously beating 10-1 my childhood self in cognitive sense, but senso-motorical skills/memories are not quite as sharp anymore. I'm not sure if my actual reflexes and fine motorics would be any worse, might even be the opposite still, but lack of practice has caused me need to rub some rust out from my bodily cogwheels.

Aside from playing and checking some old software on Amiga, I have also been improving my related hardware setup. As already mentioned in the previous post, I'm using Gotek floppy emulator for running my software on Amiga (does someone actually still rely mainly upon genuine floppies if actively using Amiga?). What I did not mention, though, is I've made certain arrangements so that I could also use real floppies when needed. There is visible on the previous post's photo next to my Amiga both an external FDD but also a brown cardboard box. The Gotek is in the box. But why?

Well first of all, I didn't want to install Gotek inside the Amiga case like so many do, because I have need to also check what some old disks contain. I still have a lot of genuine Amiga floppies inherited from my big brother, and some of the demos included are not necessarily available anywhere else, so I'm intending to save what is left to be saved anymore. I might have mentioned this somewhere before. Therefore I want to have both Gotek and FDD set up in such fashion that I can use either when needed.

Ribbon tongue from the mouth of Amiga.
Micromys V4 adapter for PS/2 mouse on the background.

Previously I arranged this by simply having the floppy cables stick out from Amiga diskette port, which allowed me to change cables between FDD and Gotek when needed.    This caused certain inconvenience though, because then I needed to have both Gotek and FDD just laying around somewhere on the desk (or put another aside every time when not used). Also FDD was prone to either cause noisy resonation while placed directly on the desk and wrong types of items might have poked the disk rolling mechanics that were now partially on open from bottom of the drive. That made me think of a case, so I prototyped a casing for both of them of a cardboard box. Happened to find a headphones store packaging quite fit for the purpose, as it had readily an inner layer that could be easily removed - therefore I could place both drives on sort of two levels, if I'll just cut holes for cables. Now the drives would be both more conveniently packed and dust covered while still available for use. This also removed the FDD resonation/mechanical hinderance issue. I made some holes on the box/inner level bottoms from where I could either stick some needles or bolts that would keep the drives sufficiently firmly on spot inside the box.

Another thing I realized is I could actually connect both drives simultaneously if I'll just swap the cable. I modified one old PC floppy cable which had connectors for two drives to function with Amiga; for PC disk drive there is a twist in the ribbon cable for A drive which needs to be straightened up so that it works for Amiga - the B drive connector in the same cable is readily usable for Amiga floppy disk drive. Now I had a disk cable to which I could connect two Amiga drives straight on.

Wait a minute, someone should exclaim now, you can not have two disk drives running on Amiga like that simultaneously! That is correct, I can not do that - additional simultaneously used disk drives must be connected from the external FDD port, and the system will get messed up, if there are two drives chained and powered. However, I'm not intending to power up both the same time. This means I can have the ribbon cable connected to two drives and just swap the power when I want to swap from Gotek to FDD. A lot less effort! If there are two drives connected in the ribbon cable, it doesn't matter if the other one is not powered up (although it does look a bit spooky when the Gotek OLED display will lit up just from ribbon cable signals when using the FDD in this setup).

Unfortunately the prototype setup doesn't yet work fully as intended. Because my desk setup with Amiga hiding under a small monitor table is so cramped, the ribbon cable is barely long enough to keep both FDD and Gotek connected the same time. Also the box itself makes it a bit effortsome to deal with Gotek USB port if I'll need to load some new images on the drive for instance. Despite these issues, I find my setup a clear improvement over earlier settings.

Regarding to using Gotek, I referred in the previous post how swapping Gotek floppy images in multidisk games is sometimes somewhat effortsome, even while it's not as bad as dealing with genuine disks. After the post I came to ponder about it a bit more. I happened to have two old external floppy drives, out of which another I got basically for free as it was stated as broken by the previous owner. I figured that inside the external floppy drive case is most likely just a normal FDD connected to an adapter board for making it usable via the external floppy connector, and opening the case showed it to be exactly as I had anticipated.

This meant that in case the broken external drive would be broken by the drive itself, I could simply swap the drive with another Gotek, which I happened to have purchased several months earlier. And how do you do, that just worked out fine in the end! Found out that it was the drive broken somehow (it rolls the disks but does not find anything - probably fixable fault, but might be currently beyond my skill and knowledge to repair it), and a replacement Gotek would fit just fine. Setting it up didn't go fully as expected though, as after reconnecting everything I had hard time to read the newly set USB pendrive for the second Gotek and even running the Amiga itself at all.

Finally I found out first that certain cables had been connected incorrectly (the adapter inside was "upside down", and there were no normal indication of anything in which way the cables should be connected). Secondly I found out that for whatever reason the first Gotek drive will cease to function if the external Gotek is connected with power off (!!!). So now the first Gotek only functions, while the second Gotek is connected too, in case both are powered up. Go figure.

Therefore with the strength of two Gotek drives some Amiga games are a lot more convenient to play with. Tested for instance Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which as a kid was a bit painful due several disk swaps while loading the game for startup (despite being on only two disks) - especially as after game over the game needs to be loaded all the way from booting again... An experience a bit similar to Commodore 64 multiload casette games... Not too fancy game really though, and actually very short albeit difficult, yet it has some very fancy cartoon graphics. Another example of increased convenience is Wings, where every mission start and end would require a disk swap - now just needs to wait for the load.

Nothing is like a dream with these systems of course, and it is not necessarily super convenient to actually set up all the disk images on both two USB drives though. Even more grey hair could potentially cause the fact that I don't have another OLED display, so all the information Gotek gives itself is a number of the selected floppy image... WELL, I can live with an external list of disk images set - at least for now.

Yet another arrangement I've done is to have Amiga audio sound better. I happen to have Behringer Truth B2030 monitor speakers that provide pretty nice audio output. Downside is that I can not usually simply plug them in on any computer or else directly, as that tends to cause a lot of interference - in addition to the fact that there are no straight 6.35 mm audio jack plugins in any standard computer internal audio interfaces.

So I'll need some sort of a mixer or intermediate amplifier in between. Coincidentally my old Edirol FA-66 Firewire audio interface happens to have very conveniently two RCA inputs that I can connect Amiga to as direct monitoring mode. Plays just nicely now, as long as not keeping the Edirol or cables on top of the Commodore 1084 CRT monitor to take too much interference. I used to have Amiga sounds played from this monitor's internal speakers, but the quality is not too fancy and it's only mono.

If you wonder what are the two audio jacks going in the Edirol's main inputs on front though, that is my main desktop at the moment. Funnily enough, I found out due software issues (there is no official support for such Windows XP era device on modern operating systems) that it is actually easier for me in most cases to use the Edirol as a plain mixerbox for speakers instead of a genuine computer audio interface. In addition of slight effort of need to start up a virtual audio server for Edirol during each bootup (yes, this could have been scripted to run automatically of course), I could not get the Edirol output properly directly from computer without lapses or crackling when running some more resource requesting games, so made this workaround. Things won't often work as expected, but usually it's good enough if the outcome is as desired.

Looming weavers of Amiga

30 years of computing cooperating on my desk.

Back in 1990's, Lucasfilm (LucasArts) and Sierra adventure games were some of my favourite games of them all - especially the ones from late 1980's and early 1990's. In fact I'd even daresay those made the basis of my good English skills as a kid, and that was also one reason I liked them. There were few of their games from the era though that I never managed to obtain myself to play.

Loom by Lucasfilm Games had been until now probably my most significant loss, and only now I also understood the name correctly. As a kid I thought Loom would be just a name - maybe some entity in the game or a character. Then I assumed it'd been about verb to loom - and this was supported by screenshots of the game that seemed to have kind of looming atmosphere there. I suppose it might still be a pun and have this intended looming in the background, but as a direct reference the name Loom refers to a loom in the game. And the protagonist is not a wizard or cultist despite his looks with hooded cape and staff but a weaver from the Guild of Weavers. Weavers with loom, I see, makes sense.

So in any case, since I have had my dear Amiga 500 set up recently and I happened to have Amiga Loom available, I finally decided to give it a shot. In my youth I was somewhat concerned about the gameplay of Loom (I knew about it through reviews), since it was experimental and lacked the traditional verbs as commands. This was few years before icons or mere mouseclicks become commonplace, and I certainly did not complain that Lucas still released few more traditional verb based games in 1990's. In Loom instead the player would simply point and click and occasionally use 4-note tune patterns as spells to interact with the objects.

For what I know, Loom was never quite as successful as many other Lucas adventures, despite it being referred to in many subsequent Lucas adventures. For the genre options from the era it surely is worth playing, however, it is more of a snack than a full meal like most other titles better remembered. A bit like Full Throttle several years later I suppose.

That is, I find Loom fairly easy and short - even by modern standards; I spent few hours with it on my first try to get it completed, and only in two occasions I had to stop for a moment not knowing what should I do. The first one was quite much in the beginning and I had not yet realized that the patterns would be usable in the opposite order: so if ECED would be opening, DECE would be closing. The second case came when I did not notice that there was a place to click in one screen.

This is saying that the game is pretty straight-forward, and part of the easiness comes with the interface: there are not close as many objects in the landscape one can interact with as with most other Lucas games I'd played. The few items you'll simply pick by double clicking, which also is true with talking and other things you can do - and usually there is only one to three things on each room to interact with for only one purpose, in addition to exits and entrances.

Usually the interaction is done by casting a musical pattern or spell which have quite obvious effects in less than difficult to figure situations such as healing an injured or waking up a sleeper. In most cases the game puzzles are just to find which spell to cast where and from where to get the spell and skill to cast it. At least no hassle with items! Generally if there is a spell that might seem logical to cast, it will progress the plot on tracks. There are couple a slightly more twisted puzzles with stairs and dragon, but since in most cases there are all the time only so many rooms you can access, objects to interact and patterns you can weave, it won't take long to even just iterate "try everything everywhere" kind of activity. Also can not die or fail by any action - except by not taking a record of a pattern heard before - there is often no returning to old zones.

On the other hand the narration is quite alright and game-wise not all that standard and stereotypic, where there simply is a great evil fellow that needs to be defeated in order to save the world. I guess there are things similar here too, but that is far from being the actual plot or anything like that. On a yet another hand, the fantasy setting and storytelling gives some very possibly unexpected twists and even fun transitions, but actually in many cases I think they go a bit too fast and a bit too much of Deus Ex Machina style. I mean that there is fairly much of moon logic at least in the events - you'll just do what you can, and that makes you getting dragged to something completely else without looking back really. In addition to gameplay differences it would have felt like more depth also in the storyworld if I would have needed to walk away from the region by my own decision because I think I've seen everything - now it's largely that if it's just possible to move on, there is nothing that could have done before.

The game is also not necessarily very consistent with style of content. I mean that despite looming dark atmosphere in the beginning, the spirit (music included) is rather kid-friendly and maybe partially even too juvenile fairy-tale like. Yet later in the game there are almost horror themes and even violence that might not be fully approrpiate for the youngest of the family, and that was a bit of a surprise (and amusement) to me. Although actually many old games are "inconsistent" with style, and in adventure games especially you can just encounter anything whenever whereever.

As I was earlier speaking of time spent for walkthrough, I reckon I'd spent at least one third less time had I played the game on PC. Testing wrong patterns on Amiga takes a while, since tunes are played with a very peaceful pace on standard Amiga 500 (RAM expansion doesn't matter). Overall much of the animation especially when there are few more things on the screen is quite time consuming from modern impatient point of view. In fact I do remember also back in the time how it was frustrating as in many games there were several scenes where the player just needed to wait till the character walked across the screen without anything to do. Loom even has the "era mandatory" maze, even while at least that is fortunately almost as straight-forward as most of the game.

Speaking of slowness, of course there there are some disk swappings too, but they are not too bad on Gotek floppy emulator where swapping a disk is just a click. It's a bit annoying when needs to do two or even more disk swappings when changing a scene though. Also has to wait for some loadings - I can live with that, and emulated loading sounds have some spirit in them, yet I wouldn't mind having a disk turbo on Amiga should one not hamper with compatibility.

Nevertheless, what is more of a problem is that needs to be quite careful with swapping the disk images on floppy emulator. There is unfortunately no way to write protect the floppy images, and swapping them too abruptly can cause the disk image to get corrupted. This is especially due the way Amiga loads and pauses a bit every time a disk is inserted, and as with Gotek the disk swapping is easy enough it can even be done by accident. So in the end I managed to corrupt my game disks and worst of all my save disk twice - first in the very beginning of testing if I can save in the first place and second time after I had already completed the game. The second time the save disk did not get spoiled completely though, so I didn't lose the saves. The risk for lost records is real with the system here. Always have a backup of your disk images elsewhere but your USB stick when dealing with Gotek, and consider backing up the save images occasionally as well!

Fantastic loom of the game is there.

Those things leads to one sad thing: rationally there are not so many reasons to play quite a few Amiga games, if you just can select any version available. Especially as for most people nowadays Amiga (even emulated) is not the platform most likely available. There are lots of games that are only for Amiga or where the Amiga version is the best version. Unfortunately the latter applies mostly to games from late 1980's, when Amiga was the super home computer in the Europe, while the former applies mostly to games that are not of my favourite genres - various action based stuff.

Playing with Amiga is not a rational but emotional choice, however. I do have lots of nostalgic feelings with this device, as it's the first computer I have really in my life. Still there is also something weirdly fascinating in Amiga and its software. It just doesn't feel like any other computer, apart of course its rival Atari ST, and therefore even titles familiar from other platforms might feel like curious experiences at least in small batches. Not to mention demos... This stuff would already call for their own article, so I'll better get back to having more of some good Amiga time.

First glance review: Empires & Puzzles

Puzzle combat action!

Spring is coming. I no longer need reflector and light while going to and returning from work at normal hours. Also the streets are getting free of snow and ice. This makes me puzzled whether I should celebrate the expansion of Zacharian empire on mobile development or just moan for the loss of winter now, but in any case I felt like playing an Android game since a while. The game is Empires & Puzzles by a Finnish game company Small Giant Games. An American company Zynga (known best from Farmville...) is about to buy SGG though, which is probably a great deal for the people working there, but in my humble opinion not that cool overall when seemingly all Finnish companies that reach some success are sold to some giants on the other side of the Globe. Well I guess they need things to make USA great again, since they're not named like Britannia.

Woodlegged jokes aside, the game itself is sort of a mixed genre game, as indicated by the name. And actually I find it very unimaginative to essentially contain game genre in the name, and that is one reason it took me a long time to bother to test it as I was expecting Empires & Puzzles to something considerably boring. It might be helpful for a casual player to find a suitable genre of course, since there are myriads of bad games out there and in most cases a random game is not really worth your time - even worse, if you don't even like the genre(s).

In any case, the core gameplay consists of battles with heroes that are dealt by puzzles - somewhat alike to Fancy Cats or (probably better known) Candy Crush Saga, where you'll need to line up same coloured blocks in order for them to blast off. When they poof, they'll cause damage to the opponent facing the blocks, after which more blocks will appear. The more blocks you'll manage to disappear, the more damage you'll cause, and if you'll make combos of many alignments with one move, there will be growing multipliers for hits.

Not even a tight match yet...

There are many games that are practically all about similar puzzle rolling, but Empires & Puzzles has its flanks supported by light RPG/strategy features, making it more interesting than a standard puzzle game in my eyes. Other parts of the game is building your stronghold and getting heroes (your puzzlefighting troops) stronger. Both parts are quite traditional resource gathering and production and training, with heroes being levelled up by combining with other heroes though (they sort of resemble game cards actually), and in between there are conquest/quest trails to go though with some cliché riddled and mostly meaningless dialogue of non-playable characters.

Even while it's a bit different combination of elements than I've encountered before, I don't see anything particularly original in any of the subelements. General gameplay reminds me much of Dungeon Link, with all the puzzle fights, hero gatherings and upgrades familiar from RPG world; just the puzzle fashion felt more original in Dungeon Link, and here the graphics style is less cute and more realistic (on level of what could be found on Marvel comics). Stronghold building then is this very typical light real time strategy game stuff, where you need X amount of resources and Y amount of time to build - and the time is usually at least minutes if not hours or even days. Some buildings allow more stuff to be made and some buildings allow more upgrades to the other buildings. Done in quite simple fashion, and it's not quite in the focus of this game unlike in for instance Fallout Shelter, in which the main focus is building and upkeeping the base.

Mentioning Fallout Shelter, a rip off of that, Hustle Castle, has been the last game I've played with some of similar mechanics with fantasy setting as well. Empires & Puzzles manages to evade most of the pitfalls of Hustle Castle. Progress of your stronghold is not forcefully pipelined in the fashion that you'd need to do every stupid upgrade for every building in practice, before can get to the next tier for any structure. Both also have some inevitable PvP, but in Empires & Puzzles it is not frustrating - gains or losses are not insane amounts of resources, but almost more important can be to gain quest kills and rank without it ruining your game.

Whereas in Hustle Castle the production of resources without plundering fellow players would take days for anything (and similarly the resources piled up for days would be robbed in an instance), in Empires & Puzzles PvP has only little effect on resource levels. In Hustle Castle you could pay yourself off with those stupidities or suffer with uncertain and slow growth, but in Empires & Puzzles it's still possible to keep slow but stable growth without paying. As something common in positive sense for both Empires & Puzzles though I find their asynchronous group PvP matches, as they are some of the better sides in both. Established in very different fashion, but both requring certain tactical aspects and bring nice change to ordinary gameplay.

Did you really think that the Dark Lords would have anything new to say after all the decades of RPGs?

 

I guess this is a slight improvement in defence over 1980's in bikini armor style.

Since I'm not very fashionable person who would renew my Android device once a year, I am glad that Empires & Puzzles application itself is rather light - it doesn't take minutes on my old Samsung Galaxy J5 to load, like so many other "complex" games do. This means that I can play a little bit on short breaks too, which is usually exactly the thing I'm expecting from a mobile game - if I'm stationed at home, I can always play with proper computer. The app does take almost 200 Mb though, which I find a bit much of used space, but I can live with it since I don't have time to play many games at the same time anyway on my mobile device. For most people with more appropriate device storage size this probabaly is no problem.

Overall I've found Empires & Puzzles to be a positive surprise, and I'm not exactly surprised if it has been at least moderately successful. I was expecting it to be a nice little game that could be played for few days every now and then, but I have been playing it a bit more often daily than I was expecting. For many aspects it seems relatively refined and balanced, so that I have been able to enjoy even as a free player for way longer than expected. I also liked how the start was not too easy, but then again the game actually does turn rather fast into grinding for stronger hero components and waiting for possibilities to play for more. In many games those are made much worse of course with Pay to Win features being much more prominant than in this one.

Much of grinding can done by autoplay too - in all irony though. As in this nowadays common feature in games that they will grind for the player without the player actually needing to play the game tend to make me wonder do the game developers really bother to think reasons why such features are desirable in the first place... I mean seriously, if the game needs features to let the game play itself, why to play it in the first place? This topic could have its very own article.

Basically this also means that I do see likely reasons why I'll quit playing Empires & Puzzles: sooner or later I'll get bored on waiting and intentionally slowed up progress as a free player and quit the game because it starts to take too much time from me. I don't see much reason why to play euros in two digits let alone three digit values for a game like this, yet it seems to me that in case not wanting to wait for days for everything that would be the price. Again, it's way better for these aspects though than many other games, or I guess I should say less bad. I was expecting getting fed up with it soon after the first week, and I have not come across it after two weeks of playing. In addition, joining an alliance has made the game more fun to play, which probably is not a surprise.
I also like it that the growth for heroes is not insane - level 10 player might have half the strength of a level 20 player, and that is acceptable, especially as there are games in which that difference would mean ten times the power difference. That just is not fun, especially when there is PvP included. Sure I am an underdog in alliance war at starter level 12, but due puzzle mechanics and non-exponential power growth, I can still be able to at least scratch the more powerful opponents. Same goes for raids - the mechanics give this impression that even the weaker player has some meaning out there, instead of being simply stomped out while bigger ones dance solos. In a way wars even remind me of the days when I played a lot of Fiesta Online and enjoyed the Guild Tournaments there, even while the game mechanics are completely different.

I wonder if the pose has a name

So shortly put, I can recommend Empires & Puzzles with relatively little reservations if you're into moble games at all. I find it as an acceptable light replacement for MMORPGs, as those in traditional sense wouldn't really work with mobile device interface and environment in my opinion. The game is has no remarkably original or particularly imagination rousing content, but it seems made with a fair deal of care and it's something easy to play.

The Good:
+ Light app starts fast
+ Relatively balanced with freemium setup
+ Not too easy for too long time
+ Power growth is not exponential
+ Alliance raids and wars
+ Relative freedom of choice with buiding stronghold
+ Smooth gameplay and various nice features combined

The Bad:
- P2W mechanics
- Quite grindy
- Storytelling is not a strong side here
- Not so much interesting content to play after a while
- Nothing genuinely original to see


P. S. I got the text above finished yesterday, and then when I went to work this morning, it looked a bit different than expected from the words in the first chapter. Found out that I had been like a regular trooper at late Autumn in the western front of 1944 with futile dreams of getting back home for Christmas after months of fighting since the D-Day, as the opponent was already beaten. No, the Spring would not come here yet, because general Winter had decided to launch its last desperate Amuri Offensive: Wacht am Tammerkoski.

So in the morning it was cold enough for the city halving stream Tammerkoski to be frozen (it usually stays flowing even at -20 C) and when I returned from work, the streets looked like this:

And the poor Tammerkoski had been mostly eaten by gigantic iron bugs:

Do Androids dream of googled Javas?

So I ended up programming a bit this weekend, as I had free at Friday, and the result is my first Android game: https://github.com/Zachax/CatBallAndroid
Basically it's more or less a remake of my older Java game (or my first Java game) called Ball Storm which I made in Christmas vacation of 2016 I believe. Simple game where you're to collect flashing balls and evade others.

Android development is relatively tempting, I guess I could argue. First of all it's a place where Java is sort of the native language. Despite still remaining popularity of Java, it is actually relatively difficult to sometimes see in everyday life where Java applications are really used. Sure, at work I'll encounter lots of applications made by Java with the customer systems (and the fun thing is when I need to resolve problems with those apps I've sometimes never even heard of before), but actually outside certain work fields and as a "regular everyman" Java is not obviously used in too many places. It can then even sound plausible if someone argues that Java is not really used for anything new anymore, but that it's a dying language (despite it has been ranked as the most popular language very recently in some polls). Well I don't think it is dying.

Anyway, since I'm already quite familiar with Java, this makes it much easier to start doing stuff with Android. However, of course not everything is directly applicable on an Android device, and especially GUI systems are apparently not directly usable on Android. Android supports its own classes for GUI stuff, and to be honest, they are for main parts better or at least easier to use than older Java awt/Swing systems. Also for Android apps you can use lots of xml encoding, which makes it making a bit like making web pages. Surely there are practices to learn, and many old things just don't work there, but if you'll learn that stuff, seems like it can for many parts be easier than older fashion desktop development.

Google also provides a dedicated integrated development enviroment (IDE) for Android called not too imaginatively (or misleadingly) Android Studio. This makes using Android application programming interface (API) quite convenient, as the IDE provides tools for writing the code, handling files, setting layouts and testing the applications with an emulated Android device - as a beginner there is hard to think of many things to miss on this system, apart maybe some features that would make starting threshold a bit lower. Although usability seems quite all right after getting used to its not too inconvenient setups (been testing clearly less convenient IDEs). Also it runs natively on Linux based OS (not surprisingly though, considering Android itself is built on Linux kernel), which obviously is nice from my point of view.

About programming itself, have to say I've come a long way during the past couple years or so. First of all, it took me only couple days to make a simple application, and I largely knew what I was doing and I felt the code ended up becoming acceptable. I think two years ago it took me like a week to do something similar, yet more primitive, where I barely knew what I really did and the code looked utterly terrible. Both times I took a tutorial and expanded it considerably, but it was quite different now than back then.

Now I mainly needed instructions how to get started with Android Studio and could refactor largely anything from my application, while earlier time I would have made a Frankenstein's application where I have only few places I really dare to make adjustments to relatively simple things in order to be sure the applciation won't break completely. So roughly put while with Ball Storm I largely just made a pre-made procedural line set for creating a ball to be iterated while now I largely got basis of an empty application granted but built the actual game on top of it with own stuff.

Even more the increased experience shows up with reading the existing code. First of all when I noticed a bug in my application (eg. score text was missing), I could find the reason and fix it relatively fast. Back then if I'd missed a } sign from end of a row, I'd been potentially lost for hours, not to mention actual issues where the application runs but something is just wrong. Secondly it's much easier to take advantage of code examples or official API instructions to make something your own. Two years ago I could not really understand much of what API documentations said, they were just confusing messy load of data to me, and I needed relatively complete examples of alien code to use. I still think API documentations are not typically made in too reader friendly fashion, but if you know how they work in general, they can tell you what can be done for real.

This would also lead to one another issue with programming, documentation about programming and learning to program. That is all with the Internet. I mean the Internet itself is a frigging mess - hypertexts can link to where ever when ever and there is no whatsoever order required (or existing) in anything outside individual page site. In addition the WWW place has been existing for well over 20 years now, and even while pages from 1990's are not too commonly encountered, it's easy to come across something that is over 10 years old and largely deprecated nowadays especially when it comes to programming with the latest operating systems. It's surprisingly inconvenient therefore to see how old some article actually is, if the original author has not bothered to stick a date on it and it's not written on a site which places it automatically.

And oh dear the path if it goes to searching for serious information from old forums and blogs...and that is what Google easily gives to you with searches about less mainstream topics... It shouldn't surprise me should the books become fashionable again after few years, since despite their slower time to get the product out, most information in internet is just so badly lacking any structure that most of that information is just unusable. I don't think any big data engines and AI solutions can fix that problem in anywhere near future.

However, it probably would surprise me, due the nature of reality I encounter daily. Nowadays when the human sciences seem the least appreciated, I tend to think that in many instances they would be the most needed to be applied before it's too late, and the representatives of human sciences have given up themselves. I don't want to see bonfires of books again in the future, just because people think books have become obsolete due internet. Unfortunately sometimes such humanware development seems almost inevitable when more and more often hearing stories like about people who mock others because they own physical property: "Why you have books? Haven't you learned to google?" Yes I have, and that is one reason why I've started to read more actual books again.

"When I was young, there was this thing called the Internet. Terrible wars raged there for years!"

I just finished a book. It was called Taistelu internetistä - Microsoftin, Applen ja Googlen digisodat. The book was a translation of Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur. For anyone interested about IT and recent historical backgrounds of certain Internet and smartphone (etc.) business of 2000's I would say that it is highly likely interesting and quite entertaining. Hard to estimate how creditable sources were used, but there were no clear indications of major inconsistencies or very probable major untruths being told by reading the book itself.

For me it was one more hole to be filled. I've had my first smartphone only in 2016 (got my 2nd now - both Samsung Galaxy J5 2015 models), as I deemed that could become handy while travelling abroad. I have sort of inherent disinterest to things that are fashionable and popular, which is partially philosophic-ideological attitude too: after 10 years it's easier to see what is actually worth something and not merely a shooting star, so then one can just pick the classics more easily and not waste time with futile toys.

On the other hand I dislike disposal culture that came with mass production. I prefer things to be of good quality and to endure for a long while, and I find it sad how technology business urges us to buy every 1-2 years new gadgets intended unrepairable and disposable despite being filled with valuable rare ores and other raw materials that are not exactly ecological to dig out from the soil. So yes, it is technically waste of time to repair many things as the time spent for repairing can easily equal several times price of a new item, but I'll still prefer to repair damaged devices if I can. In addition I'll learn if I'll try, even if I'll fail.

So anyway, I did not for instance really know much about Apple products particularly, as I had not been very interested about it. Or about the rise of modern multitouch smartphones. In the book Jobs is told to present the first iPhone in such fashion that you'll use instinctly your fingers and no need for stylus - yuk. Well, certain old mobile phones had simply dreadful interface, but I'd surely prefer proper keys over annoying touchscreen as the only control feature. Yes, I can connect a keyboard and mouse into my smartphone, but it would be hard to carry them along, and then a laptop would be better. Also I've found that a stylus would be faster to use due higher accuracy, but all the mobile device styluses I've nowadays seen in markets are fast broken, so blah with them. Touchscreen is nice add-in, but I'd still prefer it not to be the only intended user interface. Obviously I'm in minority with this, I guess despite touchscreens being so extra fragile in most cases.

I also had not I suppose thought about how past market leaders in their own fields Microsoft and Nokia were employing apparently quite much of waterfall design in 2000's, which largely led to their demise. So that requests just fell from the top without necessarily too sharp perception on the real situation, and by the time

Slightly peculiar argument in the book was stated on the pages 251-252, where Japan was referred as the wasteland of smartphones because in 2011 according to the book their market share was only 10% in 2011, while in the world overall it was claimed to be 25% smartphones of all sold phones. My living partner who lived in Japan at that time on the other hand argued that like 80% of people would've had a smartphone in Japan at the time - and that only iPhones counted into that. An obvious hyperbola of course, but nevertheless. According to her also huge amount of people also ordered iPhones over from USA as the devices were not for sale yet in the beginning, when iPhones were originally released. Sounds like alcohol brought to Finland from Estonia - also not properly readable in statistics.

In any case, I'm reserved with claims of both sides. Here it is argued that Android had around 60% share in 2011-2012 and Apple around 30% share in smartphone subscribers, and that in the beginning of 2012 over 19 million people had smartphones there (this suggests that there were 127,6 M people in Japan in 2012). This figure is more or less supported in an article about Japanese smartphone sales in 2011, where it is also referred that the iPhone was the best selling phone model for almost 7.3M out of total 24.2M smartphones sales for 2011.

So first of all, alleged 10% sales "only" for smartphones out of all mobile devices would not make the place quite void of smartphones in my opinion, especially as we're talking about millions. Secondly if they sold over 24M smartphones in 2011 in a country where that consists of almost one fifth of the whole population, it certainly doesn't seem like a desert to me. In Western Europe it's claimed to have been 32% of smartphone penetration in 2011, but only 9% in Central/Eastern Europe (document page 22); although elsewhere it is suggested that Western Europe had 22,7%. Lies, damned lies, and statistics?

It is also noted in the book that Japanese standard phones (feature phones) pretty much had the features of smartphones without app stores, so smartphones were not really even needed as much, and my partner actually disputed that non-iPhones were really not smartphones anyway to Japanese people. At this point I'll just return to the lands of non-existent sun before I'll start to digress into NEC PC-9800 series out of the blue.

To Retrocompute is Human

When mentioning by random to someone that I am interested about retrocomputing and old computers, a typical reaction is: "Why?" Personally I might get a similar reaction if someone tells being interested about fashion or modern pop music, so I understand it is hard to understand if someone is interested about something that dwells outside your own bubble. Nevertheless, while collecting old art or antique furniture is often represented as a high-class hobby and people who deal with vintage cars are rather frequently appearing in traditional media, but within IT field it often is endorsed that only the most recent technology matters.

To make straight things indirect, I'll jump back by theoretizing that a human being has basically three types of secondary desires (aka needs not essential for staying alive): rational, emotional and spiritual. On my part, dealing with retrocomputing supports all those three fields.

The way I see it, spiritual side seems to be actually the most common factor as a reason for people to get indulged with old computers and video games. On another word: nostalgia. Many people might be prone to classify nostalgia into field of emotional side, but even while nostalgia surely fondles our feelings, I tend to think that such connection to the past should rather deemed as a connection to the spiritual side of being - had you not had a place for such things in your spirit, it would not touch your emotions either. A scene of a movie might touch you regardless whether you'd seen it as a kid before, but another scene might awaken your soul only because you have experienced it so long time ago.

Similarly indeed, there is some retrieval of the past with finally finishing an adventure game Zak McKracken that was too hard for you as a kid or getting to hear intro of Defender of the Crown after a quarter century. Will it last though, likely no, and in some situations it can even lead to disillusions and disappointment - the best game of your childhood might actually suck nowadays and a certain path of thinking leads to noting how futile and vanishing everything that once mattered is. Let us not go into that though, and actually for me nostalgia is not really the decisive factor with old stuff: in fact I'm exploring more of the stuff I never even knew about as a kid. I think nostalgia is more of repetition or revision of the previously experienced, and I'm more into venturing into wastelands where no Sakari has gone before.

As rational motives I can suggest both practical and cognitive reasons. For practical reasons it could be argued that there is a lot of stuff gone past, and even if (at least some of the) new stuff would be better, the human beings are still the same as actually thousands of years ago. So if something was fun two decades ago, it can be so still today. Yes, not every old game feels very fun nowadays, but to be honest, many of them were really played for a moment already back then (except if you had bought a bad game for high price and would have been too embarrassing to just let it rot untouched) and many games nowadays are likewise played only for a moment before moving to the next one.

So I do surely claim that there are many pearls worth playing also today - for instance "Gold Box" Advanced Dungeons & Dragons series of 1980's, Lucas/Sierra adventure games or various Sid Meier's games like Pirates! and Sword of the Samurai I would easily enjoy playing still for several hours should I meet them today. Of course since I have already spent countless of hours on those games and many games lack replay value, I don't play them as much anymore, but there are still lots of good games unknown to me. Good old games can be easier to obtain for less money than new games, although for some parts the golden age of abandonware seems already gone and despite the illusion of "everything is in Internet" many old things are actually really hard to come by.

Similar logic goes to hardware - older can be found cheaper than new ones - but there it is way less clear. Software can be run with emulators that often are providing not only really authentic reproduction of the system in non-physical sense but also can actually be more compatible than the original devices. If you'd like to play all DOS games properly, you might need say three different hardware setups, yet you need but one DOSBox to rule them all. On the other hand, and this is more or less already part of the emotional reasoning as well as was the idea of old good games being still enjoyable, the experience with a real vintage device is more rewarding in sort of irrational fashion. Just like when you actually drive that decades old car, playing an old game with similarly old computer just feels more special and true - human beings have analogue senses, and digital world is just not the same.

That is, assuming the device actually works. Then again a major part of the enjoyment is actually getting the old systems back in running. Also with later knowledge and reduction in demand, it is possible to get such systems that would have been simply impossible to afford back then. CD-ROM would've been luxury in 1990 and not many people would've afforded two monitors for Commodore 128, let alone having flash drives or other modern add-in systems. Downside with physical devices is obviously that they take space. Your partner might be not too eager to let you have half dozen CRT monitors and a full dozen of old metal boxes in your shared living room.

Ironically the old being more affordable is not a very durable argument either. Most electronic systems seem to be at their cheapest at around age of 10 years, when they are inevitably obsolete for modern use and people are forced to renew them, and everyone else also already have the same or want something newer as well. However, during that phase many of the devices are thrown away because they're already broken - or just because they're old. So availability starts to reduce and nostalgia troll starts to rise its head after people get older, and for the few remaining devices there are people are willing to pay again, yet the demand is not big enough for actual reproduction to start up.

For returning yet to the rational cognitive side, at least for my part dealing with old computers is learning as well. Despite how constantly it is being told that if your IT field knowledge is from beyond 5 years, you're useless in the professional field, most of the basics of the computer systems and programming from the micro stone age are still perfectly valid today. Modern systems just have a lot more layers in between the user and the hardware, which is also what makes modern computers more dull and difficult: you could make a temperature meter application for C64 out of the box with few lines of code and couple components, but in order to make the same on any modern computer you might end up needing more code than would even fit to that poor old 8-bit computer - not to mention about getting the component side working. Yet in the depth of the core it's still about running bits - ones and zeros - with astonishing speed. If you know your history, you will understand the present better, and then you can also see more accurately what might come tomorrow.

To summarize on three arguments my answer on the question, why do I like retrocomputing: I find it interesting and educating (rational), I enjoy doing it (emotional) and I find connections to worlds unseen (spiritual). Or in a nutshell, I find it human to retrocompute.