My Gates Motel webgame over at Gameslate is done with all the beta tests and now running smoothly. I'm kind of proud of it, a game that I threw together in 3 days from ideas that I've brooded on ever since I stopped running my old BBS. It's ended up being approx. a month of effort to polish up all of the features of the game, squash the bugs and reinstall my server in preparation for the additional load it will have to deal with.

For those of you that don't already know, Gates Motel was designed to be a webification of an old BBS game concept. Murder Motel was one of the oldest BBS "door" games actually, originally made by Sean D. Wagle for the Commodore 64/128 and cloned many times since (anyone remember "Space Ship of Death"?). Gates Motel is a variation on the theme, with an attempt to make the game universe a little more rich, add some parody humour and a more complex target system to allow for a greater number of players and quicker action. The result is even better than I expected.

Of course, I'm spoiled with better tools for web development than I ever had for making games on my BBS. I'm speaking of SQL database software of course, which makes it incredibly easy to keep track of players, items, and especially rooms/locations.

I'm loaning one of my cameras for tomorrow, where it will be used as a webcam at a wedding.

Cory & Adri, two friends of mine that I've known for quite awhile, are getting married tomorrow (July 7th). It will be a morning wedding, more details can be found at: wedding.adri.net. I wish them both the best of luck and I hope the weather tomorrow will be as they like it. The webcam will be operated by Ryan (who, along with other webcam experiments, operates TridejaCam sporadically).

Rog-Cam will stay up, while the other camera is loaned out I'll just use an old camcorder. Of course, I can't guarantee I'll be on my home cam of course, because I'll be at the wedding.

It's Super Soaker season. We've been running around in the backyard with water guns that could only be considered professional calibre… Well, okay maybe getting someone wet isn't a professional sport yet, but I don't know what category you would put these things in otherwise.

My CPS-1700 outputs water in a stream at over 300ml per second (think of it as a can of coke per second), arguably more than your garden variety of hose. The most monstrous Super Soaker outputs at twice that rate, which seems to be approaching fire-hose soakage. It's not just a question of volume and distance anymore, now the difficulty of lugging 3+ litres of water around comes into water fights.

So what fun is a squirt gun that soaks instead of squirts? After a few battles around the yard I can say that the intimidation factor leads to real honest water-phobia. Water fights are no longer spoiled by the macho madman who doesn't mind getting wet, because everyone minds getting pummelled by the compressed blast of H2O coming out of these guns. Strategy improves. And being the person with the hose is no longer a great benefit as long as the others have another source to refuel from.

We started with the medium-sized guns, then after a few trips to Toys R Us we ended up with a whole arsenal of bazooka-sized water weapons. Quickly turning hot days into duck weather.

How does that saying go? "The best laid plans..."

My wee little server box just got a major overhaul. It wasn't hurting yet, but I was feeling pretty silly with the spare parts just begging to be put together. Not only that, but I was starting to get desperate for software updates that required a newer kernel. I could have done the slow, gradual upgrade, but my Linux install was getting pretty messy anyway. So I went the whole nine yards and it took up most of my day.

Some things are running nicer than others. I love MySQL 3.23 so far, but PHP seems to have gotten bloated with 4.0 and even more Apache specific (which I don't run), so I went right back to 3.0.5.

While I waited for progress bars to finish in Linux, I was video-editing in BeOS. Expect to see some quirky-stupid videoclips soon.

Everyone seemed to hate that the Gates Motel was down. Well, just like this page, it's back up now.

My monetary situation hasn't delivered a dual-Celeron system to my desktop as I had hoped. I'm still hoping of course, but part of the reason it hasn't happened yet is because I have been spending $$ on other things such as a bigger hard drive, firewire card, etc. Amira & I also happen to be saving up for a firewire-capable camcorder.

The hard drive should send a cascade of hand-me-downs to our other PCs, which means I might finally get around to upgrading my Linux box. Some parts have been waiting longer than a year to go into that box, and I keep saying I'll do it, but I just hate server downtime. The wee little P133 in that machine has been holding its own for quite a long time now. Maybe all the activity with Gates Motel will tax it a bit.

Speaking of Gates Motel, the game seems to be pretty popular so far. There were of course a few bugs and hiccups, but on the whole it's been fairly stable. If there are no serious problems, I might promote the game a bit to grab more players.

I'm launching the Gates Motel today. Basically it's a hide-and-seek multiplayer game with a few murderous twists. Gates Motel was inspired by an old BBS game called Murder Motel which was quite popular for its time. I've added a few new things to the old concepts and built a very web-friendly interface.

You can signup for the game now, it's free to play of course. I hope you like it. If enough players join the game I'll expand the map even larger. Please feel free to send me feedback:rog@idmail.com.

The recent problems with backwards compatibility in ICQ has made me realise how much of a shame it is that there is no nice open standard for Instant Messaging.

I'm almost finding myself at some sort of peace with instant messaging. I don't really like chat paging, but I can see its usefulness and popularity with the general population. When ICQ first surfaced a few years ago, my immediate reaction was a distaste for something so derivative. We already had email and chat. ICQ just combined the two with a paging system. Suddenly people wanted this proprietary software to replace the open standard of email, which frightened and annoyed me. I don't want my messages to go through a single company controlled service, especially now that ICQ is under AOL's control.

A chat paging standard needs to be ubiquitous and should properly integrate with existing standards. Software should be smart enough to send 'offline' messages via email and use FTP/HTTP/etc. for file transfers when appropriate.

Of course, an open standard is unlikely since ICQ is owned by AOL and their chief competitor is Microsoft. There is an agreement between the two companies to merge ICQ, AIM & MSN Messenger at some point, but I expect that to cause more problems than it will solve.