Quitting Smoking

This entry was originally published at Ken Noland

Some say it’s the hardest thing they have ever done. Perhaps they are right!

The truth of the matter is that I have smoked for over 8 or 9 years and I am physically addicted to cigarettes. I have tried to quit multiple times in the past and have been met with failure every time. I wasn’t motivated enough, or I just didn’t have the will-power. In fact, I’ve tried to quit so many times now that my friends, at the mere mention of me quitting, take on the old “we’ll be there to support you”, but aren’t too terribly surprised when they see me walking down the street with a smoke a week later.

I’m on day 3 right now. It’s not the longest I’ve gone without smokes, but it is hard, especially considering all the stress I’m under. The part that bugs me the most is not the fact that I am not smoking, but the simple fact that I can not concentrate. I require a certain amount of focus to get my job done, and right now I simply don’t have that focus since my brain keeps telling me that I need nicotene.

I’ve researched quitting smoking many times over. I know how long it takes for my lungs to heal, for my risk of heart disease to decrease in half. I even know how long it takes for my taste-buds to regrow and my sense of smell to return. I know the health benefits of quitting smoking, and I also know the truth behind Camel cigarettes and the chemical additives, besides nicotine, that they add to increase the addictive power of cigarettes. Despite all that, I’ve never managed to quit before… I simply wasn’t ready!

Am I ready now? … No … Not really!

This was a spur of the moment decision. One that I have stuck with for the last few days. I’ve already gone through the first couple of days, so the level of nicotine in my system is at the lowest it has EVER been in the last 8 years and the nicotine receptors in my brain are starting to heal, which means the worst is *almost* over. I say “almost” because today is the turning point. Today will be the final battle over my brain and my pure addiction to cigarettes. So far I haven’t faired well, but I always like to root for the under dog!

-Ken Noland

Take-Two Owns X-Com?

This entry was originally published at Ken Noland

I was digging around some of my old favorite games today and I stumbled across X-Com, perhaps one of my absolute favorite games of all time, and so I opened it up and played a quick round. I got my ass handed to me within the first five minutes because I was playing on the ‘Super Human’ difficulty level, which means the computer never misses a shot and the enemies are ten times as hard as they would be in the regular difficulty level.

I felt inspired, so I decided to check up on this old favorite of mine. I figured I would see a reference or two to the successors of X-Com, but what I didn’t expect to see was that Take-Two now owns the copyrights to X-Com. They purchased the rights about a year ago and they have released X-Com: Terror From The Deep on Steam. It made me wonder if they were thinking about expanding the series, or perhaps taking it back to its roots and remaking the original X-Com: UFO Defense?

I wonder what Take-Two’s plans are with this series? If EA aquires Take-Two then what would happen to the series?

Hmm…

-Ken Noland

A Note About DRM

This entry was originally published at Ken Noland

Digital Rights Management is an evil word that typically spawns images of some giant publisher enforcing their copyright protection method on the consumers. To date, no popular DRM has stopped piracy and only serves to protect the data for a while until someone out there finds a way around it. It’s sad, but true.

Piracy in the games industry is rampant, to say the least. It’s single handedly killing the PC market and forcing alliances to be built in order to combat it. Unfortunately, the power to stop it doesn’t rest in the hands of the developers, nor the publishers for that matter, the only way to combat piracy is to fight it at the government level.

It’s clear that no matter how hard we try to develop the best algorithms, securing our content and enforcing our tight rules, there will always be someone out there willing to spend hours just twiddling bits until they crack the code that frees up the game. In some places, it’s a contest.

The reason why I say it’s in the hands of the government is because, by their very nature, programs are executed locally on a machine. If it runs locally, then it can be modified and thus it becomes an issue. This fact means that it is outside our control to %100 digitally secure an application. We can, however, determine individuals who have modified the program when they connect to the internet. We can’t do anything to stop them because then that would be intrusive, so we should be able to hand a list of offenders to the government and have them investigate this. However, I guess the government is a little too busy with fighting other wars instead of focusing on little, multi-billion dollar economic problems.

The typical form of DRM secures things at the application level. A simple parity check on the executable is enough to prevent modification on the executable, but what if someone find where that check is occurring and overwrites it with their own function, thus continually allowing them to modify the executable at their whim. The next step is to encrypt the data with some sort of algorithm. Sure, that sounds great, but once you deliver the key, then they know the process the algorithm uses and can break that. Okay, so instead of providing just the key, they enforce you to register the product which will then unlock the content. Once again, this process can be reverse engineered and cracked just as easily as breaking an encryption algorithm.

Why not go for some high level techniques, like issuing licenses that are stored in a secure place on the hard drive and those licenses are encrypted per machine so that no two machines are alike and then utilizing this to encrypt the code and data? Well, at this point you are getting closer to a final solution, but nonetheless it can be cracked by overriding the license utility with the necessary code.

Back to square one…

There is no %100 secure digital solution. The only thing we can do is detection, and even then there’s no one to stop these guys from distributing hacked copies of the game. Massive Multiplayer Online content is a lot easier, because if the data on the hard drive doesn’t match with the data on the server then the user is banned… easy enough! But what about the single player experience? What about those who don’t play well with others? Well, I guess they will have to learn to play on consoles because at the rate we are losing PC development studios I don’t see too many PC titles coming out.

Well, enough of a rant for now… back to work for me

-Ken Noland

Iron Lore Is No More

This entry was originally published at Ken Noland

Iron Lore closed its doors this last week. Another victim to the PC game market. The Creative Director, Michael Fitch, had some things to say about the untimely demise on the quartertothree forums.

The PC game market has seen some interesting twists and turns in the last few years. The rise of digital distribution, the rise of piracy and the fall of consumer confidence. If you walk into your local video game store, you’ll be lucky to find a single rack of PC video games, and if you do it’s typically hidden away, tucked into a far corner away from the Playstation 3, XBox 360 and Wii console games. I don’t blame them, the PC is dying out in the retail market, but the digital distribution market appears to be booming.

Despite the digital distribution market success, publishers have also been feeling the pinch of the PC gaming market. Consumers often go with the biggest bang for their buck, but often times this means settling for a less then optimal hardware configuration with driver and compatibility conflicts leading to probable failures in some of the more demanding PC game titles.

As far as the piracy goes though, I personally would like to see more action on behalf of the United States government in combating this economic assault. I blame the government for not taking action against this! As developers, we don’t have the right to storm into someone’s home and throw them in jail and slap them with a huge fine if they are proven to be pirating, or supporting the piracy of games. I think making a few examples would put the fear into the everyday individual, thus deterring piracy and giving us developers more legit sales.

Another option that no developer has unleashed yet is completely thrashing the game once it has been determined invalid. I have yet to see this brute force method used to combat piracy, but it is a weapon in our arsenal.

Anyways, enough rambling about this. I would like to personally thank Iron Lore Entertainment for giving us 7 years of great gaming and producing some great talent in the Boston game development scene. Titan Quest was an amazing game and one the was under reviewed and is a testament to what a small team can do with a great vision!

Cheers to you, Iron Lore, and I hope all who are lost in the transition find a good home!

-Ken Noland

Game Development Game

This entry was originally published at Ken Noland

I was browsing through a series of articles(such is my morning routine) when I saw a friend’s name pop up on the list. Sure enough, it led me to a page about game design. I followed a couple links in and I found this awesomely hilarious game…

You have to download it and try out your managerial skills!

-Ken Noland