79 - my birth year and something else

Air Carrier

The rather sumptious looking Air Carrier project - a 3D aerial combat game written in Java - has put up an install guide. Basically you need to get it from CVS at the moment and run it from Eclipse. So, if you don't like CVS and Eclipse, er, you are out of luck for the moment.

There's been a bunch of testing releases for TA3D as it approaches version 0.4.0 in style. Large parts of the codebase seem to have been rewritten and many bugs fixed. TA3D is an engine to play Total Annihilation but with better graphics and AI, so you need the original TA to play TA3D.

TA3D obviously shares a lot in common with TA:Spring, however there are some important differences. Firstly, TA3D is Linux centric - whilst there is a Windows version, it is developed on and released primarily for Linux. Also TA:Spring includes modifications to the gameplay and does not make use of some TA files like maps, facts which don't sit well with the TA3D author, so TA3D definitely has a niche.

Pok3D

One of my friends is a poker nut. He was playing away on a Windows machine near me, so I thought I would showcase the power of Free Software on my shiney new laptop with it's 3D capabilities... Pok3D here we come!

aptitude install python-poker3d

-----8<-----8<-----8<-----8<-----

0 packages upgraded, 79 newly installed, 0 to remove

What!? 79 new packages!? Ok, I run Ubuntu so I already have a plethora of Python-centric stuff installed. I also have several games installed so the common game packages too are already installed. This was listing MySQL, web frameworks, and all sorts of other things as Pok3D dependencies. That's ridiculous... why the hell does a poker client require MySQL? If you want to use data locally use a simple embeddable database like sqlite. Anyway, needless to say, despite having lots of HD space and the automatic package management powers of apt, call me old fashioned but I wasn't installing that much stuff for one game. All I could think was, "bloat."