Well, they did warn us: BioWare made the stupid call back in March to "stand by their endings". That's really not the worst part about how things played out. Sure, there's plenty of lore breaking here (the relays were just "heavily damaged" rather than destroyed - someone with a few working neurons finally remembered the marker they put down in "Arrival").
No, the really stupid part is the "F*** You" ending they added. If you are frustrated by the endings, it's fairly natural to turn around at the end, and take a shot at the "star child". In the original ending back in March, all that resulted in was venting. Now, it immediately ends the game with star child saying "So Be It" angrily, and the reapers wipe everything out - you get a fade to black with a beacon left by Liara as a warning to the next cycle.
That's just arrogance - it's the BioWare team telling the fans "Don't like our endings, well, screw off". Fine - I'll screw off. The Mass Effect 3 franchise is now dead. If you want to treat a paying customer (one who bought the games on PC and XBox) this way, then fine - I don't need to ever buy anything associated with the Mass Effect story again. Or anything that Casey Hudson is associated with, either.
Just to be clear - while I object to the 3 main endings, I don't consider those to be arrogant. It's the new thing they just added that's arrogant. To even get there, here's what BioWare expected us to do:
Have a save sitting just before the Cerberus attack (a couple of hours of gameplay before the ending
To get all three options, invest in another 5-6 hours of Multiplayer - your readiness rating rots down to 50% if you - like me - haven't picked up the game in a few months
After replaying a few hours of the main game, and investing all that time in multiplayer, you might be a bit frustrated. You take that out by shooting star child. BioWare decides you are unworthy at this point
No one needs to reward that kind of attitude. That's business killing stupidity.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at using a mapping specification (in XML) so that the XML parser in VA will return Smalltalk objects rather than an XML document object. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
You can also watch it on YouTube:
Today we'll look at setting up a mapping of XML to Smalltalk objects via a mapping file. We'll still be using the same orders example we've been looking at; this time, we have the additional mapping file:
To run this example, use:
AbtXmlBasicSamples mappedExample
and that code looks like this:
| mappingDOM mappingSpec result |
self isDataInFile ifFalse: [self setupData].
self isMapInFile ifFalse: [self setupMap].
" Create a mapping spec from the order map "
mappingDOM := AbtXmlDOMParser newNonValidatingParser
parseURI: 'order.map'. "The image must contain Smalltalk classes conforming to the map."
mappingSpec := AbtXmlMappingSpec fromMappingDOM: mappingDOM.
" Parse the data "
result := AbtXmlMappingParser newValidatingParser
mappingSpec: mappingSpec;
parseURI: 'order.xml'.
^result abtXmlMappedObject.
What that does is read the mapping data first, to construct a specification - that will be used when parsing the XML in order to get objects instead of a basic DOM object. The results should look like this:
If you take a look at the mapping XML file, you'll see that it's pretty easy to understand - setting one up yourself would not be a problem.
Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.
Congratulations to Georg and his company on reaching their Silver Anniversary:
7/7/1987 I founded my company, thus we will celebrate our silver anniversary 7/7/2012. Hereby I invite you and your friends and colleagues to celebrate with us. Saturday, 7/7/2012, an open day will take place from 10 am to 4 pm in our house in Wallstr. 22 in Köthen under the motto "Actually what does the company Heeg do?".
I'd love to be there with them to celebrate, but it's a bit of a walk for me :)
Welcome to episode 25 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Dawnguard has shipped (at least on the XBox) - and we're back to talk about how we're playing. We are joined by guest host Chris Grundtner - Austin and James are the only members of the regular cast who play on the XBox. All three of us have started out on the Dawnguard path, so that's what we talk about here. We'll be back soon with another episode - we'll have lots more to say about this as we play more!
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Welcome to episode 25 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Dawnguard has shipped (at least on the XBox) - and we're back to talk about how we're playing. We are joined by guest host Chris Grundtner - Austin and James are the only members of the regular cast who play on the XBox. All three of us have started out on the Dawnguard path, so that's what we talk about here. We'll be back soon with another episode - we'll have lots more to say about this as we play more!
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.
To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at simple socket communications, using VA Smalltalk and VisualWorks Smalltalk to set up an example. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
You can also watch it on YouTube:
Today we'll look at using sockets for basic communication in VA Smalltalk. In order to get something real, we'll set up a socket server in VisualWorks, and have VA Smalltalk interact with that. To get started, load the TCP support into VA:
That loads in the basic support we need. We'll be running two bits of code - the first bit below is in VW, the second, in VA:
"In VisualWorks"
SocketAccessor exampleIPServer.
"get port number from VW Transcript, then run this"
socket := AbtSocketStream openAsClientToHost: 'localhost' port: 49174.
socket nextPutAll: 'hello'.
socket cr.
socket flush.
ans := socket upToEnd.
Transcript show: 'From VW: ', ans; cr.
socket close.
Over in VisualWorks, that sets up a simple server that waits for a string terminated by a CR. We dutifully send that from VA, and then get back a similar string from VW. On both ends, we print the results to the Transcript:
Need more help? There's a screencast for other topics like this which you may want to watch. Questions? Try the "Chat with James" Google gadget over in the sidebar.
We took a trip to West Virginia today - one of my wife's co-workers is getting married, and it's happening just across the MD border, way out on the panhandle. That sounded like a nice little getaway, before the huge, nasty thunderstorm. First, it was awful to drive through - driving rain, high winds, debris on the roads. Finally, we got past that, and could not find the hotel - Google was directing us out onto a private road. Fine - we stopped and asked - and after a bit more circling, discovered that the reason we missed the landmark (a huge Wal-Mart) was... no power. The hotel had no power either, and thus, no way to check us in (or issue keys). So.... off to town, where there's one other hotel.
That one was booked. Ok, off to Frostberg (some 20 miles north) to a Days Inn. Road closed, huge tree across it. At this point, we started wondering which sins we were being punished for :) We headed back to the hotel we had reservations in, figuring we could sleep in the van, hope the power came back, and maybe shower in the morning. My daughter went in to sit in the lobby, and we lucked out - the night manager remembered that he had left one room open after someone else decided they didn't want it, and we got in.
So here we are, in a room with no power, using glow sticks and my iPhone for light, and tossing this out using the phone's hotspot capability. Oh, and the shower has no flow power, so there's that, too :)
Welcome to episode 83 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.
This week we have a session from STIC 2012 - John Thornton talking about Amber Smalltalk. If you would prefer to watch the video, then head on over to the STIC site. The abstract for this talk:
Amber is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language that runs on top of the JavaScript runtime. With Amber, client-side web development finally gets the power and productivity that has existed for decades in other Smalltalk dialects.
You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Welcome to episode 83 of Independent Misinterpretations - a Smalltalk and dynamic language oriented podcast with James Robertson and David Buck.
This week we have a session from STIC 2012 - John Thornton talking about Amber Smalltalk. If you would prefer to watch the video, then head on over to the STIC site. The abstract for this talk:
Amber is an implementation of the Smalltalk-80 language that runs on top of the JavaScript runtime. With Amber, client-side web development finally gets the power and productivity that has existed for decades in other Smalltalk dialects.
You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes (or any other podcatching software) using this feed directly or in iTunes with this one.
To listen now, you can either download the mp3 edition, or the AAC edition. The AAC edition comes with chapter markers. You can subscribe to either edition of the podcast directly in iTunes; just search for Smalltalk and look in the Podcast results. You can subscribe to the mp3 edition directly using this feed, or the AAC edition using this feed using any podcatching software. You can also download the podcast in ogg format.
If you like the music we use, please visit Josh Woodward's site. We use the song Troublemaker for our intro/outro music. I'm sure he'd appreciate your support!
If you have feedback, send it to jarober@gmail.com - or visit us on Facebook - you can subscribe in iTunes using this iTunes enabled feed.. If you enjoy the podcast, pass the word - we would love to have more people hear about Smalltalk!
Welcome to episode 26 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Today's episode doesn't have much to do with Dawnguard - Michael Lucas-Smith and James Robertson instead turned to mods (and to a small extent, to the Dawnguard XBox exclusive). What's covered is the mods we have installed, and what they add to our Skyrim experience. That conversation took long enough that this is being split into two pieces. This is part 1 - part 2 will be out shortly.
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Welcome to episode 26 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Today's episode doesn't have much to do with Dawnguard - Michael Lucas-Smith and James Robertson instead turned to mods (and to a small extent, to the Dawnguard XBox exclusive). What's covered is the mods we have installed, and what they add to our Skyrim experience. That conversation took long enough that this is being split into two pieces. This is part 1 - part 2 will be out shortly.
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Today's Smalltalk 4 You looks at change recovery in Pharo under the worst circumstances - what if your working image won't start?. If you have trouble viewing it here in the browser, you can also navigate directly to YouTube. To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Join the Facebook Group to discuss the tutorials. You can view the archives here.
To watch now, click on the image below:
If you have trouble viewing that directly, you can click here to download the video directly. If you need the video in a Windows Media format, then download that here.
Welcome to episode 27 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Today's episode goes back into Dawnguard - Austin, Chris, and James pretty much wrap things up on the Dawnguard side of things. We discussed the Werewolf perks, the Werewolf totems, the "Lost to the Ages" quest, and general gameplay stuff - including how much fun it is to turn into a Werewolf and just run off on a rampage. Still no luck finding a Legendary Dragon though - none of us has seen one yet.
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.
Welcome to episode 27 of "Thu'umcast" - a podcast where Michael Lucas-Smith, Scott Dirk, Austin Haley, Makahlua and I document our trials and tribulations in Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Today's episode goes back into Dawnguard - Austin, Chris, and James pretty much wrap things up on the Dawnguard side of things. We discussed the Werewolf perks, the Werewolf totems, the "Lost to the Ages" quest, and general gameplay stuff - including how much fun it is to turn into a Werewolf and just run off on a rampage. Still no luck finding a Legendary Dragon though - none of us has seen one yet.
If you liked our work on That Podcast, you'll probably like this. We intend to stay with the same idea - a gameplay podcast. If you don't want spoilers, don't listen - we are going to be talking about how we play the game, and what we ran across as we played.