Harsh J

I’m sure there has been a lot of incidents where you have cursed your most recently acquired game, be it anything from a silly to annoying bug, the lack of a feature that would have made playing more heavenly for you or even something as small as better detail on some object on screen.

Now what if the game were open source, to the fullest extent rather than just the “Extend”. You don’t like the character’s tail, you contribute an idea in form of a feature-request or by getting into the development yourself. So do million others. Together you can, over time, form a completely different game than the one you were being unsatisfied with!

Yo Frankie! - An open source game in active development.

The usual way of extending a game would be to add in map and skin packs while letting the functionality of the entire game remain constant. What if the game evolves with time, adding in new moves, more pick-ups and extras, and more elements to the game, such as weapons or collectibles?

Though these are present in some of the games alive today, it would be greater if the game were or went open-source, opening the game’s code to a world of never-before imagined possibilities and also getting in tons of optimization over time. Of course, building a game big enough like the heavyweights we have today requires the work of a large active team behind it, but once done with its release, getting in additions to the code would we amazingly easy were it supported by a good version-tracking system!

Playing such a game would mean endless hours of fun, repeated every couple of months for a completely different experience while still remaining the old charms that a player liked. New innovative concepts implemented by avid code-enabled gamers would add in more and more goodies, much like how Compiz-Fusion is today, an idea being born a day and implemented almost as fast.

Yes there would be a point where it would hit a roadblock and this is where the next game development has to begin. Ideas found in the older version could be tried out across a multitude of other genres, and what a learning experience would it be for creating that “ultimate” game many always dreamed about!

I hope some biggie in gaming gets onto this OSS bandwagon, with atleast a half-baked title cracked open, and pretty soon, since the game market is losing out on ideas really, and thats cause ideas are limited to them in the closed confines they live in.

You’d say what of the OSS games we have today, and I’d point at their evergrowing success till date. No game has ever been given a cold shoulder and kicked out of existence, right from Nethack to Nezuiz. Though this post was inspired by a particular game known as Yo Frankie!.

Results for all even semesters B.E. and B.Tech (Engineering Degrees, for IT, CSE, ECE, EEE, ME, etc.) (2nd (First year), 4th, 6th and 8th) will be out this week/month, as most ‘rumours’ go.

UPDATE: Results are out as of July 3rd/4th. Check the links below for acquiring them.

(Not sure when’s the date for other semesters, most say its 23rd)

Here’s a list of websites you can check for your results. Add in the comments if you know some other ones!

1. Anna University Official Website (Results Page) for 2008 Even Semester (B.E./B.Tech)
2. Anna University Official Website Links (Site O,  I, II, III)
3. SivajiTVAnna University UG and PG Apr/May 2008 Result.
4. Ellamey Results for UG and PG Anna University 2008 Even semester and First Year
5. WorldColleges Results for UG and PG Anna University Examinations 2008 Even Semesters.
6. Square Brothers UG Anna University results (Server 1)
7. Square Brothers UG Anna University results (Server 2)
8. ICQ Results for Anna University UG 2008
9. Get Free Source Results for Anna University UG results
10. Webdunia Anna University results for UG
11. Chennai Online Results for Anna University UG 2008
12. India Results results page for Anna University UG 2008

More will be added once results get out.

(Its a pity most sites don’t even update their pages and some like ICQ stopped doing it now.)

Good luck to all, if you need it that is.

Found that GTK’s Aurora engine is pretty better at theming than any other engine.

You can look for the package gtk-engines-aurora in your distribution and install it. I loved the tooltips shading and other nice bluish things it had to offer, and also liked the dark theme that accompanies the package. Pretty neat stuff.

Back from mars, I haven’t been doing much lately, and have moved my residence. The downtime of internet due to that also rid me of my internet addiction strangely and I feel like cooking in the evenings. Yes, very scary!

And about scary, 11:37 doesn’t follow me as often as before but I do notice it every other day. But do notice the post’s time.

Watched Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in the theaters and found it to be very bad. I did not like the alien touch given to it, not to mention the legend of the crystal skull. Previous movies (With the possible exception of temple of doom - but hey it had great action!)  had better artifacts more historically popular than the crystal skull and that’s why I like em more. This one was meh.

Iron Man was a total mechanical candy, it was sweeter than Robocop, much sweeter. The boss fight not counting, the movie satisfied my interests with just the scene where he first wears his Mark III suit. It was the smoothest thing I’ve ever seen on CGI. I’d watch it on the big screen repeatedly for that sequence alone. Heck, maybe get a HD copy of it too, when its out.

Finally, saw Forbidden Kingdom today. It was good too, if not great. But I do hope there’s no sequel to it. It ended well for once, I don’t wish a sequel to spoil it up. Well unless Jet Li decides to return somehow. The best moments in the movie were only when Jet and Jackie do their attacks against one another. Rest, including the vengeful girl and the monkey king, were sort of meh but did not spoil the fun much. Though there could have been lesser oriental decors and make up. Jackie ought to do a Splinter role in any Turtles movie, he would totally suit Splinter.

Now getting back to the interstellar space, the place where most of you never bother (Bother, not dare) to go, it feels good to have settled down to a distribution and even better to know its Gentoo, of all Linux variants there are. Sure, configuring it took around a week (Only and still my first try) but the system now no longer needs to update via those ISO methods, like Ubuntu or others need for a better experience. I’m rolling with it as it goes!

Beginning to respect cross-platform-ness, I have jumped down into the Qt/KDE river, though I still haven’t managed to get KDE 4.1 installed (Yeah Gentoo does have SOME bad points about it, but otherwise its the best for settling down upon, no version numbers nothing, you are what you’ve got.)

Programming with Qt is quite a pain for someone not used to Object Oriented stuff, but the stuff it can do does not make you give up and let go. Have started a blog on the same, and you will find the link here and content there when its ready enough.

Sorry am I getting too random here? I’ll continue over in another post then.

Image says all, and was found on this link.

If you dare to post the true output of this from Linux:

grep ass .*/*cc*.x*