About pride and accomplishment in optional multiplayer games

(This is effectively a rant about how I am incompatible with MMORPGs)

As Destiny 2 has been feeling very stale for a long time, I’ve shifted my gaze to other games. There was a rather long burst of Borderlands 3, and then a bit of Roboquest, and a longer phase on Gunfire Reborn. And all the time I’ve had a tiny longing towards Guild Wars 2. A longing that has been growing in such a way that now I can’t wait to play it. I’m also very happy that they just announced a lot of details about an upcoming expansion, including the release date. What a coincidence. Although the release is about six months away still; plenty of time to get bored, and I kinda already am. Allow me to explain:

Destiny 2, Guild Wars 2 and Borderlands 3 all have a mountain on content in them. And they are great games, with great gameplay. Sounds great, right? That a lot of content I’ve been really enjoying, taken time to get good at, and/or maxed out on. I’m on the very peak of (almost) everything. But it is not as simple as this. Things are (almost) too easy, and there is little challenge left or rewards to earn which I can do on my own. Which brings us to the following:

My time is limited.

Outside of expansions(!), a lot of content in D2 and in GW2 is just replaying old content. In D2 it is the age-old formula of bounties and the season pass, and in GW2 the latest one is the quest for a legendary amulet. These offer nothing new to the game, and just direct playing the old content again and again for some reward. I’m all for replayability, but these literally offer nothing new, or change the experience in any way.

And actually, D2 makes things even worse. It’s a loot-shooter. But the bounties require to use your less good loot. And that’s basically the content. Or well, some bounties just tell you to do X three times. And then repeat that YYY times. And if you don’t complete those other bounties while at it, you are basically throwing away almost all “progress” and ability to better “enjoy” further content.

And in GW2’s case, the new questline requires to replay both the story-content and some open-world aspects of the past several years. While this is a good opportunity for the player to spot if there’s any foreshadowing in the story, that’s about all the value there is. No skips for lengthy dialogues, and nothing to change the experience. Just a mountain of playing it all again. And the fact that I’ve already played it once doesn’t net me anything.

Then why play? Like I already mentioned with D2, if that work would be completed, it would (even greatly) enhance the ability to enjoy the new expansions, and the other repeating content. But in D2’s case the bounties are so ingrained in the game nowadays that even the expansions are filled with bounties that punish using the weapons and subclasses you enjoy.

And with GW2 (especially after the very recent legendary armory feature), a legendary piece of equipment is the literal best-in-slot that replaces everything that would ever go in that slot. It has the same stats as the otherwise best stats containing Ascended-rarity items, but it allows for free and unlimited stat swapping. After that you don't need anything else on that slot ever again. In a game like Build Wars 2, that’s the hot shit, and highly desireable. You'd be mad not to pursue that.

It’s all about the economy and playtime — and psychology

In a boring game, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to switch playstyle at will, and for free? Or in case of looter-shooters, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to sometimes enjoy our hard-earned loot, and get new loot?

I’d enjoy those things, but things just aren’t meant to be. In D2 that means being broke and longing for new fun and interesting ways to play, just brand-new content out of reach. And as it just happens, in GW2 that also means being broke and longing for new fun and interesting ways to play, with brand-new content just out of reach. Even when the games and the reward structures are completely different. The essence of all this seems to revolve around accessibility, skill, balance, long-term investment and perceived value, and efficiency. It’s quite complicated, but I’ll try to render out my own experience in relation to this:

In “short”, a lot of the content in these two games is balanced for good equipment and depending on content, almost no skill. Some content on the other hand might require near-literal godlike skill and/or a lot of time — or just a larger amount of less able players.

In D2 the open-world sandbox enemies are frail, and they die from about anything. But it’s also fun to mow down large amounts of red bars, even though there could be even more of them. But to get new ways of destruction, or any kind of real challenge, the content to play changes. There’s the adjustable-difficulty 3-player nightfall strikes or 6-player raids, and also the 3-player dungeons to explore. Strikes are the only piece of content that has matchmaking, and even that stops right as the actually challenging difficulties start. All non-matchmaking content is balanced in such a way that a lone solo player has little chance to really even begin playing them, let alone finish them (dungeons and lost sectors being the exception).

And the game makes this exceptionally hard for so-called hardcore-casuals (which I like to call myself). Every few months a new season begins, and rises an arbitrary “power cap” on equipment. It also raises the power level required on all content to match. Effectively undoing any investment towards difficult content. Soloing content like dungeons or master-tier lost sectors is something the game’s creators reserve for the sweatiest players – those with time to grind the game and increase that arbitrary power level to a sufficient value in order to match the level of the enemies. But I don’t have that kind of time. So even if I was as skilled as them, I just can’t play the same content as them, as I haven’t done the ever-elusive the numbers game beforehand.

With GW2 this changes slightly. Lot of the solo content open-world content does have challenge, but sooner or later it starts to essentially feel like the infinite variety of oatmeal. Different, but the same. The game tries perhaps combat this by being a theme-park MMO. Every playable area is vastly different than others, and as such the world feels disconnected. But then there’s some things that can’t be soloed. And everything gets very easy with more players.

In all these cases, the rewards stay the same. More players, more easy, a lot more rewards in the same time span. But at least with these rewards it would be possible to change the way the game is played in order to keep the experience fresh. Is there really no good way in the middle?

In D2 I could play with the equipment I already own and like, but would eventually grow tired. Or I could try the challenging content, and not really get anywhere. With the most fun weapons gated in that content. In GW2 I can either keep soloing challenging content and miss out on a lot of rewards. I could still purchase a limited number of new ascended-tier gear with new stats, but would eventually go broke. Or I could purchase less-able and a lot cheaper exotic-tier equipment, but I’d only be making the game intentionally a lot harder, while also missing out on even more rewards, further limiting my ability to change things up and stay in a nice position in the game.

In GW2 the most long-term cost-conscious choice would be to craft a full set of legendary weapons, armor and trinkets. Then I could just enjoy playing with what I want. But the amount of work is legendary. Just to get the gated materials for one armor weight class (out of 3), it would take an estimated 500-1000 hours of constant gameplay via WvW over 24 weeks. More if there are gaps on some weeks. Alternatively, via PvP the gated materials for the in about 280-330 hours over 6-24 months (but still a good number of hours every two months, or else things take a lot longer). Then there’s also the weapons and trinkets, and the normal materials for all these. And that is not cheap. But then again, legendaries are the be-all end-all of equipment. Equipment-wise there's nothing left after acquiring them.

WvW is just grind when solo, but PvP can be really engaging. But then it, too, eventually turns to rewards and tryharding, and starts to feel like a chore. Just like everything else. And if only I had better, more predictable teammates.

Then there’s the (5 out of 6, already have one) legendary trinket and their quests. I have no estimate on how long they take; PvE ring and accessory have similarly lengthy quests as the amulet I spoke of earlier. Second ring and accessory are PvP and WvW only, and take time comparable to multiple armor pieces. And then the weapons, which are thankfully mostly just about money, but still have a lot of gated stuff. But the weapons are perhaps the most irrelevant of these, and I already have few of them.

Let’s finally talk about multiplayer

Nearly all these problems are solvable. There’s so much more content gated in and behind raids (in either game), or fractals, or dungeons, or even WvW. Simply play them with a group for the intended experience. A lot of perfectly balanced challenge, and great rewards. Just like all things should be.

But that is the problem. It all requires a group. Not only is my time limited, but my social energy is exceptionally limited. Luckily things are easier with people I know; and I really used to enjoy doing guild content in Guild Wars 2. Unluckily the schedules and expectations eventually just took a toll on me. I just couldn’t find the social, mental or even physical energy (due to sleep problems) to always be there for the group, and fell out. People missed me, for a while. Then life went on, and getting back became hard. Then even later many people stopped playing, or found new groups, and there was nothing left.

Now I’d have to find a whole new group, and find the constant energy for it. Or alternatively I could look and fight really hard outside of the game, and eventually land in less-organized pick-up groups for a single instance of some content. But to make that happen, I’d already be expected to be master of that very content. And be expected to talk, fluently. If I can’t do that, I can’t ever even begin enjoy any of that gated story content, challenge or rewards. I really like the games, but would like them even more if I could play them they way I want, and all the content. This is not just the fear of missing out. This is missing out.

In the end I’m like Sisyphus. Forever doomed to meagre repeating work with pride and accomplishment in sight, but always just out of reach.

Top things to pursue

My long-time readers might know or guess that I struggle with anxiety about wanting to do too many things, and that I always try stay productive even when I should relax. I was recently prompted to make a ranked list of 20 things I’d like to pursue, and forget everything except the top 3. I shall now combine these concepts: I’ll make the list, but won’t forget a thing. And as everything doesn’t always have to be perfect, it is not ranked. At least to the absolute final degree. Kek. Also, true to myself the list is a mixed combination of ‘work’ and ‘leisure’. Because leisure is still a serious business, and can’t be taken lightly.

So anyway, in a surprisingly small amount of time I came up with this list, which I’ll just leave here. I feel that something important might still be missing, but this is what I came up with. And as nothing is ever truly complete, I might augment this one later. I'll try to leave a note.

• Game development
• Articulation and verbal skills via/and VLOGs
• Gaming
• Expanding social life
• Embedded programming
• Home automation
• Television and movies
• ‘Home’-server, high-availability computing, serverless and modern web infra
• a) in the cloud
• b) self-hosted
• Getting really good at cooking
• Transition in fashion
• DAW-centric music
• Skill-based sports
• Travel
• Long- and short-range radio communication, both data and voice
• Photography and videography
• Demoscene music and synchronized visuals, also on a stage; performance coding
• Writing
• Playing tabletop RPGs
• Designing my dream home together with professionals

Rambling about C# 9.0, games and networking

Back at it once again! Rambling about stuff, and not really even trying to make a point. I'm warning you. What else are you supposed to do when your train is late by several hours?

* * *

I recently got an urge to test out the new C# 9.0 language features and see if they could make it easier to write state-centric games (like USG:R I blogged about earlier). TypeScript is nice, but nothing really beats C#, so this is quite exciting. With the addition of data classes (now called just records), the promise was that it would be easier to use immutability, which is one of the core principles with React and Redux.

And things did work. And they worked just like with Redux. But that's the problem. The Redux way is that each reducer produces the new state by creating a new instance of the state with the changed part replaced: return {...oldState, counter: oldState.counter + 1}. Very simple, and the reducers stay pure by not mutating the input values. And each state object can be safely stored in case there's need to do some kind of time travel debugging or state replaying, or anything like that. But the very huge downside of this is that it gets very messy if the state hierarchy is any deeper.

The alternative is something like ImmerJS, where the reducers are allowed to mutate the state directly: state.very.deep.someArray.push(value). The library takes care of efficiently making a copy of the state object as needed, meaning that if something isn't modified, it also doesn't need to be copied either. So that 10 000 element array isn't copied each time the counter is incremented. And it works great. The code is A LOT simpler, and the performance penalty isn't actually that huge thanks to the on-demand functionality.

Imagine my dissapointment when I realized this. I'd been waiting for records for maybe few years already, before even hearing about ImmerJS. And then when I finally get them, the problem I wanted them to solve had changed... But that isn't to say they aren't a good addition, and can't be used elsewhere. But state stuff was what I was really waiting them for. For carrying simpler things - espicially events - they are great.

* * *

But back to the state games. The dream is to be able to write them in C# and surpass the productivity of React and Redux. So, what do? Why not just mutate the global state like all the other normal games. The state can be explicitly copied if need be. Well. That is a good point. Can't really counter it. (There's also some very React-like bindings for Blazor and MAUI, solving the other part of the equation).

Except if the domain is network games! If the game can be constructed in such a way that there isn't too many state changes (and preferably the state itself is small), it would be trivial to transmit those changed states over the network, and render the state in the client. And the big thing: what if we took a page out of the ImmerJS playbook, and replaced the state object on the server with one that keeps track of the concrete changes made to it? Then just the changes themselves could them be transmitted over the network. No need for expensive copying, and no need to transmit the whole state. Also no need to "manually" compute the deltas, as the data structure itself does it. It sounds so cool!

Although realisticly I'm not sure if this has ever been a problem. The states in most games should be relatively small anyway, and especially with the hardware today the deltas can be computed with just brute force by even relatively simple algorithms. Just like games like Quake 3 have been doing for ages. I highly doubt it will at any point really be that prohibitely expensive. But one can always dream of doing things better. Especially when it comes to cloud-scale and IoT, where every cycle counts.

Speaking of which. Related to the above, I've been building a general purpose framework for state based applications. I'm not sure if I'll ever really get to using it, but it's been nice coding something of my own once in a while. And using Redis always evokes warm fussy feelings :) If executed well, a framework like that might have some money-making potential. Or just be a nice tool to easily create some multiplayer games. Or just research, as always. That's the most important point.

This framework I'm making consists of an ASP.NET Core SignalR WobSocket gateway that handles user registrations and authentication (with EdDSA JWTs! Although with an unsafe curve, because libraries...) and then connects them to sessions that are persisted on a sharded Redis pool. The clients receive state updates and can send inputs to a session's input queue. They can also optionally see the other clients participating in the session. The session itself is managed by server applications (for the lack of a better name). They connect the the session's Redis server and take ownership over sessions assigned to them (or otherwise delegated upon them). Then they simply take inputs from the input queue and mutate the state based on the input and the current state (just like Redux), and finally publish the new state to the clients (in the future hopefully with a delta). They can also inject their own events (such as time passing) to the event queue. If a client needs to reconnect, it can simply read the current state from Redis. And if the server crashes or needs to restart, the state and the inputs are persisted in Redis, resulting in no data loss. Well, of course as long as Redis stays alive.

The key point is that this kind of architecture enables laughably easy way to upgrade the server code, as there isn't really any downside to killing the server application and then having it restart with changed code. When it starts it just reads the current state and starts processing inputs like before. Of course this could just be achieved by co-operatively shutting down the old server instance and saving the state before it closes. But that isn't any fun. And it would be extra effort to support taking over individual sessions. With that system it comes for free. Not that it would really be of that much use, but how cool is that in theory! (Each session has a host serial, and only the application server holding the most recent serial can make changes to the state. When taking over a session the serial is just incremented, invalidating the old server.)

Anyway. What I also like about this is how scalable it is. There isn't any application-specific code on the gateway and as all the clients communicate only via sessions, and one client is connected to only one session at a time. This means that it is easy to spin up as many instances of the gateway as is needed, and other than the Redis session backplane there really isn't any cross-communication between the gateways. Except of course the user registration and login. Also, the sessions themselves don't need to talk to other sessions and are completely self-contained except for the orchestration (what server instance starts serving a new session). This means that the Redis side of things can also be easily scaled by sharding the sessions by their id. And further, the server application nodes themselves can also be infinitely scaled. So should something happen and the games running on that framework became hugely popular, it is no problem architecture-wise to just spin up some more instances.

The only problem is how reliant this is about Redis. The initial prototype I've been building makes excessive use of Redis lua scripting and combines dozen operations in things like adding an input to the queue. It should be extremely unlikely, but should something go sideways during the execution on such a script, the recovery won't necessarily be easy. Although most of those operations are about checking consistency and updating expiries anyway, so it really isn't a problem. But what I am really interested about is the performance. I'm really curious to see what kind of performance charasteristics this kind of system has. Also, scalability is nice and all, but as I've talked about before, single-node performance is what is really the name of the game. Less nodes, less cost. This isn't really going to end up in that category ':D But hey, we have to remember that all's of course not that straightforward, as development time is also a factor. For once...

And this thing here is actually really simple and easy. I hope to prove it. At least to myself :d After that I'd like to test some other topologies. Dwell on all the missed performance and the system's dependency on Redis. A loose coupling between the gateway and the servers, but an even tighter coupling decoupling them.

But at least it'll be fun.

Dreaming about Ampere

Hello again,

quite a while since the last update. Again. But at this point you should know me well enough to expect it. Or maybe you just happened to read the previous post. Go figure.

Anyway.. One lesser thing I've been pondering is how me upgrading to an ultrawide display might have played a part in me not finding as much joy from gaming as I used to. Sure, this a minor thing considering all the other factors, but a factor nonetheless. Ar at least the lack of the best possible GPU is a good excuse to not play games. Irregardless of that, I've been in the process of upgrading my GPU for a while now, and I was extremely happy with how good of a product Nvidia managed to launch with Ampere!

"A great generational leap in performance", good pricing, and even the Founder's Edition models seem very good. Typically FEs themselves have been a bit lacking, but now it seems that they might actually be the better product! I'll still of course have to wait for the reviews, but I don't remember being this exicted about hardware in quite a while. It's also one of the very few things I've really been excited about the whole year.

As that's not all. I recently got myself the Valve Index VR kit. The waiting list for it was so long that I'd almost forgotten about it. Now, I've mostly been using it so get some exercise in form of Beat Saber, but I also did play through Arizona Sunshine. AS has some flaws, but the gunplay itself was rather nice. I also started Half-Life Alyx a while ago elsewhere, but haven't really gotten to play it more. This is unfortunate. Instead, I've been busy playing Minecraft, and just simply keeping busy.. This is hopefully maybe changing, but we'll see. Anyway. What saddens me a bit is how increasing the render resolution scale in AS made the game a lot more clearer, but completely killed the FPS. Maybe the new GPU will chance that! And most certainly I'll get that sweet 144 Hz on Destiny 2 again, too!

Hmh. It seems that "whiles" are the staple of my timeframes :p And while this post feels a bit lackluster, it feels good to produce some content once in a while. Maybe I'll even get motivated to write some development-themed post at some point, too. We can all hope, at least :) We'll see, we'll see...

And I know what you are thinking. About everything. We'll see.

I graduated

1.5 months ago. I guess it should feel like something? Clearly not, as I've been in no hurry to blog about it in more depth. And it only took 8.5 years :d

That is also probably the reason. I've been working almost full-time for about 4.5 years now, and my studies were already somewhat complete even when starting to work. During that time they just progressed slowly and sluggishly, but relatively surely. The two larger challenges were passing swedish and then of course the thesis. Everything has just been one large marathon, with the goal of just reaching the finish line.

And now I did. Sure, it's an acomplishment, but is it really anything that special? The goal was always there and reaching it didn't really come as a surprise; there was no great and overwhelming feeling reaching it. The race just ended, and there was little more to it than that.

* * *

But actually, there is a bit more. In order to get to that let's talk a bit about the thesis itself. Like my Bachellor's, Master's was about something that I was researching at the time. For many years I've been interested in backend development. Now everything's finally giving so much return of interest functionality-wise that it's worth to invest in deployment. What good is it to be able to write backends with only little effort when making them available and easily accessible is uncharted territory.

So for my thesis I wanted to take a look into the process that went to creating backends in a way that made them easier to deploy. I didn't want to chomp on a piece too big, so I purposefully didn't seek an automated deployment pipeline. I knew better than that. But the real friends are the ones we made along the way, so buckle up ;)

I had previously written a simple restaurant menu parser for my Nokia e51 in PHP. When the page was requested, the server fetched the menus from preset restaurants and rendered a slimmed down HTML-only page with just the menu contents. This was very advantageous compared to opening the site(s) of the restaurants manually and waiting for needless data transfer over a slow mobile connection, and then the slow rendering of complex content and scripts on the low-power mobile device.

Anyway. When the parser was in need of an upgrade I ported it to this new thing called .NET Core and hosted it on a now-retired iteration of usva. Then at one point I also dockerized it and made it run on Azure. This was done because that was the only application running on usva, and now I could do other things with the server (for example turn it off :p). But anyway. That was the first step on the journey of improved hosting.

Several years passed till the thesis. I needed an application to use as the base for it, and after making a list of possibilities the menu parser was kinda the only reasonable choice. Other alternatives would have been far too work-intensive in their implemenation itself. I needed a tried concept so that I could focus on just researching deployment and hosting (and common design things). But of course I couldn't not upgrade the application, so for the thesis I took the menu parser logic of the old system, and wrote a whole new site, including a history database for the foods and even some user-specific stuff as an example. I also added an admin API and some other features such as centralized structured logging.

While the academic goal was to present some design guidelines for containerized applications, the pratical goal was to create the basic building blocks that could be later used for more involved DevOps concepts, namely build and deployment automation. At the start I was not sure how these would end up looking, or even if I'd ever get to see them.

But ultimately I ended up with something I can be quite satisfied with! I could use the Dockerfile to automate building the application, and then further use Docker compose to define the runtime: namely the exposed ports, configuration and the whole set of services (application, updater-parser, database and log storage). What still remains to be improved is how the database is used, as there remained some manual steps for database migrations. But for everything else the process was automated quite far.

The goal was to simplify hosting and deployment, and it really did get a lot simpler. Just one command to build the app, another to copy it over to the target server, and one final command to update the running instances. But what is even more imporant is that it is the same three commands no matter the app. This opens the way to efficiently build automation in the future by replacing just those commands. But it also makes the manual work easier.

* * *

The work done on the thesis is just a part of a larger continuum about backend development. While the thesis (and graduation in general) is a great step, the work never ends. And I'm already busy with the "next" steps - as indicated by the surprisingly many blog posts as of late. There is always so much more work to be done to get better. This same train of thought extends to my other hobbies, too. In the shadow of the continuum, there just doesn't seem to be any time to feel the pride and acomplishment of the past.

Trying something new

Let's try something new. Or actually, something old.

What I mean by this, is that it is once again time to do some self-reflection. But this time I'd like to do it in finnish, as that is my native language and the language of most of my thought process. It should thereby be a lot easier to unload my thoughts with great precision as there is no translation overhead nor thinking in two languages simultaneously. Although, as I might have previously mentioned, another language helps to look at the thing more objectively. Anyway, it is low(er) effort, just what I need now. And there is the potential for feeling good of the end result.

This type of deeper reflection poses a great question, though. Is this something I dare to publish? Things are eternal in the internet; no backsies. And yet: once published, don't I just hope this gets read?

This was written at 2 am. Try to enjoy.

* * *

Minä olen ihan helvetin kyllästynyt siihen, että en nykyään jaksa oikein tehdä mitään. Öisin ei uni tule ja päivällä väsyttä. Mieli olisi kuitenkin täynnä kaikkea siistiä ja hienoa mitä haluttaisi tehdä, mutta kaikki jää kuitenkin toteuttamatta. Joko mielenkiinto vain menee saman tien kun yrittää toteuttaa, tai sitten ei vaan fyysisesti jaksa.

Oli kyse sitten TV:n katsomisesta, tarinallisten pelien pelaamisesta, liikunnasta tai luovasta toiminnasta; lopputulos on sama. Ei mitään. Parempiakin päiviä toki on, mutta ne tuntuvat olevan aina vain harvinaisempia ja harvinaisempia. Olen kärsinyt tästä ongelmasta nyt varmaankin kymmenkunta vuotta, mutta vasta viime vuosina se on edennyt sen verran pahaksi, että havahduin sen oikeasti huomaamaan. Ja hakemaan apua. Ikävä kyllä tämä on sellaisia asioita, joissa mitään pikaratkaisua ei ole - ainakaan pidemmällä aikavälillä.

Tai sit olen vaan ihan helvetin laiska.

Kirjoitan tästä asiasta, koska kyllä näistäkin asioista pitäisi voida puhua. Edes jollekin. Toisaalta yritän tässä hieman taas vaihtaa lähestymistapaa ja saada edes jotain aikaan. Minun on nimittäin pitänyt jo pitkään saada käyntiin - kaiken muun lisäksi - oma varsin vapaamuotoinen vlogi eli videopäiväkirja. Mutta enpä ole siihenkään pystynyt, ja se harmittaa. Taustoja vlogin perustamishalulle on monia. Erinomainen aihe vaikkapa aloitusjaksoksi, siis. Mutta ei jaksa. Melkoinen muna-kana-ongelma. Tämä teksti yrittää osaltaan olla eräänlainen kiertotie asialle.

* * *

Vlogi, miksi? Syitä en osaa asettaa tärkeysjärjestykseenkään, mutta tässä tälläinen puoliksi auki pureskeltu pohdinta:

Innostuin pari vuotta sitten "travel film" tyyppisestä Youtube-sisällöstä. Verrattain lyhyitä kiiltokuvamaisia tarinoita matkailusta. Kantavana teemana ennen kaikkea matkan hauskat kokemukset ja se mitä tuntemuksia matka herätti videon tekijässä siinä hetkessä. Näille videoille ehkä hieman omainen carpe diem -asenne oli minulle jollain tavalla pysäyttävä. Kuten aimmin Life is Strange -taustaisesti avauduin, hetkestä nauttiminen kun on ollut minulle aina varsin haastavaa. Ehkä voisin jotenkin kyetä emuloimaan tuota tunnetta jos tekisin itsekin vastaavia videoita? Lopulta ehkä oppiakin nauttimaan?

Toisaalta videoiden tekeminen olisi varsin erinomainen tilaisuus harjoitella esiintymistä, tai vielä tärkeämmin ennen kaikkea itsensä sanallista ja eleellistä ilmaisua. Ne, jotka minut tuntevat ovat luultavasti huomanneet sen, kuinka sekään ei ole minulle kovin helppoa. (Kommentoikaa toki, vaikka anonyymisti. Nettisivuilta löytyy yhteydenottolomake, joka ainakin luultavasti toimii. Tai jos on muutakin.) Kun kameralle koittaisi selittää fiiliksiään, niin niitä olisi pakko miettiä ja muodostaa kaikesta tapahtunesta mielipide, parhaassa tapauksessa kesken tapahtuman. Tämän jälkeen tapahtumaa voisi ihan eri tavalla havainnoidakin ja oikeasti yrittää uppotua siihen siinä hetkessä. Kokonaisvaltaisempi kokeminen rikastuttaa elämää ja tuottaa iloa ihan eri tavalla. Tai näin on ainakin hypoteesi.

Videoiden tekeminen on toki myös aivan oma maailmansa. Se on jotain erilaista kuin se ohjelmoinnin ja videopelien maailma missä yleensä kuljen. Mutta kuitenkin jollain tavalla tuttua. Tekeminen on toki laaja termi. Siihen kuuluu ainakin editointia, kuvaamista ja jopa suunnittelua. Kaikki näistä asioita, joissa voisi myös kehittyä ja oppia paljon uutta. Editointi on luovaa tekemistä, joskin ikävän työlästä. Kuvaaminen puolestaan - ainakin kuten itse näen asian - on erityisen hieno asia. Sillä kuten selostaminen, niin myös kuvaaminen pakottaa tarkastelemaan senhetkistä tilannetta eri kulmista (sanan kaikissa merkityksissä :p) ja ehkä arvostamaan tapahtuvaa. Jopa verrattain yksinkertaisetkin asiat voivat tuottaa suurta iloa kun niihin keskittyy. Viimeiseksi mainitsin suunnitelmallisuuden. Siinä minulla olisi kehitettävää, joskin hieman eri tavalla kuin ensiksi arvaa. En ole millään tavalla spontaani ja olen mukavuusalueellani kun saan miettiä tulevaa rauhassa. Mietin kaikkea kuitenkin varsin käytännönläheisesti, enkä tunteella. Kuinka ottaa se mukaan suunnitteluun? Ajatella, millaisia tuntemuksia voisin asioista kokea. Kun asetelmaa vie vielä pidemmälle se kääntyy, ja ollaan yllättävän syvien kysymysten äärellä. Mitä tehdä, jotta tuntisin haluamiani tunteita. Mistä oikeasti pidän?  Mikä minut tekee onnelliseksi?

Vlogaaminen on siis ehkä paitsi uusi laaja harrastusmahdollisuus, niin myös suurta potentiaalia omaava työkalu. Mutta se on myös muuta. Uskallan sanoa, että eräs ihmisen perustarve on tulla huomatuksi. Tämä blogi - ja jatkossa ehkä myös vlogi - ovat minun tapani huutaa tyhjyyteen, että minä olen olemassa. Minulla on myös vahva usko siitä, että voisin oikeasti tehdä laadukasta sisältöä, josta on ihmisille hyötyä. Joko viihteenä, tai asiasisältönä. Mutta olenko valmis tekemään työtä sen eteen, että pääsen sinne asti? Ja mikä riittää? Ehkä on vain parempi olla miettimättä asiaa.

* * *

Korostettakoon tässä suuren avautumisen vanavedessä nimittäin vielä tuota aiempaa lyhyttä tekstiä täydellisyyden tavoittelusta. Se on aivan helvetin vaikeaa, mutta jostain syystä siihen vain silti pyrkii. Ja kun sitä ei vaan voi saavuttaa, ja on niin kovin helppo menettää motivaatio. Oli kyse sitten ohjelmoinnista tai videoiden tekemisestä, tai jostain muusta. Miksi yrittää jotain, kun tietää, että sen voisi tehdä aina vielä vähän paremmin. Miksi julkaista mitään työn alle saatua, kun tiedossa olisi vielä loputon kasa parannuksia. Miten tyytyä hyvään? Tai jopa keskinkertaiseen? Miten uskotella itselleen, että keskinkertainenkin voi kelvata? Miten hyväksyä se, että aina on kriitikoita?

Kuinka heittäytyä ja antaa ei-täydellisille, mutta realistisille ja aidoille tuotoksilleen mahdollisuus onnistua sellaisina kuin ne ovat? Kuinka tuntea ylpeyttä niistä ja niiden tekemisestä? Mikä on lopulta arvokasta?

About Tracker, and being perfect

How hard can it be to just make a simple service to track a phone? Not that hard. Unless you want to be a perfectionist and overengineer the whole thing, several times over. And that is why I never seem to get anywhere close to finishing Tracker.

In the last five or so years I've learned a lot about web services and would of course like to apply ALL that knowledge somewhere. A hobby project seems like the perfect place!

• Code generation and custom tooling: avoiding repeative tasks by writing ten times as much code to maintain. And then there is this one thing that was not in the original specification and you'd basicly have to rewrite the whole thing.
• High availability and fault tolerance: considerable additional design and implementation complexity. Good luck getting anything ready when working on the project just some occasional weekends.
• Metrics: a whole universe in itself to set up, integrate and maintain.
• Devops, service orchestration and distributed configuration management: yet another whole universe, with yet more design and implementation complexity. As if you even get to this point. Sure you can devops your stub services, but that if anything is wasted time.
• Distributed tracing: better reinvent the wheel again! That way it works just the way I want.
• Extremely high performance: each small part is tuned for the best achiveable performance before integrating it to the larger system, and never finishing anything.

And of course everything needs to be P E R F E C T!

What good is a if it doesn't function as well as theoretically possible? This intra-process message queue can only pass 300 000 messages per second?? It should be able to do at least 500 000!! Better spend a week trying to optimize it before moving on to the next thing! A decryption routine that can only decrypt 20 000 packets per second? Needs to be able to do at least twenty times as much! Better to just give up or spend ages looking for a faster implementation.

How about this config file? Why it is on the file system? How to make it seamlessly work with multiple environments with different configs. What if those configs change dynamically? Better get to work already, there is much to do!

Hey, see that single point of failure? You'd better engineer it away! What failure point? I need to first map the whole system and get realtime metrics from every single thing it does, or doesn't.

And hey, see that middleware solution for solving that one problem you have? Better not use it and write my own. That way I learn so much more about the problem domain and can leave out unnecessary parts for blazing fast performance.

I'd like to have public test server for this? I wonder how I can set that up automatically. And better make sure that it does database migrations and all that automatically.

And did you know that you could run your code inside a custom operating system to save on context switching time with networking?

Oh, and there is this web application, too. What if I used modern JavaScript this time? And then the mobile app needs to be rewritten, too.

And what about...!

/dies

On 'Life is Strange' – part II

Wowzers. What a journey.

This post ended up taking a lot longer to write and in the process turned up a lot longer than I first anticipated. And I still feel this is not everything that could be said (and nor was the previous part).

Most of this was written in the immediate days after the release of the final episode and most of the editing was done by the end of that week. Afterwards it still took few extra weeks to recover enough to even be able to get everything together and add some missing observations.

But to get on with this: first some initial thoughts about the final episode. I’ll try to be vague; there shouldn’t be any spoilers. These thoughts are complemented with some self-reflection.

Episode 5

While the final episode was enjoyable, it lacked some of the magic all the previous episodes had. I don’t know if it was because of the fact that I wasn’t still done processing the previous episodes, or the fact that I had so much other stuff distracting me in real life. In any case I felt slightly disconnected.

Or maybe it was the fact that the episode was more action-oriented where the previous episodes were more dialog-oriented. Also, with so many different locations and quick transitions between them the episode felt a bit rushed. But then again, it’s also about how you view the thing. Squeezing together tons of different fan theories(intentional or not) and sensibly finishing a time travel story is definitely not easy.

There exists a variety of arguments to be made for and against the final episode and especially the endings. The disparity of polish between the endings was quite disappointing and a lot was left to be desired. And the overall feeling of sadness about the end of this all is completely another matter...

After watching the credits I still had to spend maybe five minutes just staring at the main menu listening to the music, not really comprehending what had happened nor that the game really was over.

Craving for closure

As above - and like I so subtly hinted in the previous part - Life is Strange touched me with an unexpected intensity. Partly because of the game itself(the story, the characters and the atmosphere) and partly because of how it led to some pretty major self-reflection. First about the game itself.

There is so much I want to say.
So much emotion.
So many thoughts.
So much everything.
And while that everything was.. everything, it also was almost too much.

And now the end is here and I feel empty. The closure wasn’t what I was expecting, nor was it was I was hoping. Instead, it was what I needed.

While the endings left A LOT open, they also had an adequate amount of closure to keep me from totally collapsing. This allowed me to limp to the game’s reddit community, where the feelings could be shared. Thank you all. In addition, after I had played the episodes 3&4 that I discussed in the previous post, I listened to PSNStores podcasts about those episodes. This helped me a great deal in processing what happened with those episodes.

The more time I spent reading reddit and watching interviews, the better I finally felt. Now that I’m writing this particular paragraph weeks later, I’m almost completely at ease with everything. I’ve had time to research how the final episodes, and in particular the ending, is supposed to be understood.

* * *

As the game’s developers have told in many occasions, the game was about the personal growth of Max. A nostalgic coming-of-age story. This is a crucial cornerstone to understand. The relations between characters were crafted to be so perfect and special. For example Chloe was crafted to be THE perfect friend with a deep emotional connection with Max / the player, evoking a longing for such a person in real life. But real life does not work this way. It just doesn’t.

* * *

To adequately process coming-of-age stories, there needs to be some reflection on one’s own life. This is the part that most definitely changed me. Some details below, but the gist of it is that while affecting (at least in the short term) on how I see the world, this experience also made me realize certain rather grander / fundamental things about life. Life is so weird.

The most immediate realization from this whole experience: everything will come to an end and there is nothing you can do. Ends have to be endured. It’s hard to endure everything alone, and for that you need someone, or someones. (In this case primarily /r/LifeIsStrange and the podcasts. I also had some friends, but their role was just to be an audience while I announced how this game had had such an impact on me. But that helped, too.)

In the end you’ll feel weird and dull, but also oddly at ease: there is nothing you can do now. I’ll never forget the journey, or how it helped me grow.

Transforming life

As the game and the setting were so greatly crafted, it was really easy to actually become Max, not just be someone who control’s her avatar. Not many games can accomplish this. Almost without noticing it I had slipped to be in the wonderful nostalgia-colored teenage-life of Maxine Caulfield.

This glimpse to another life. Life of an adorable, slightly geeky girl who likes photography and innocently loves to observe the world. But you can’t change your life just like that; I am not Max, nor is her life mine. No matter how much I hoped to be Max, it was not going to happen. But you can try to slowly change yourself.

My immediate reaction to this was of course to try and be more like Max, try to observe the world with that same kind of non-judging, all-seeing way. But it’s not that easy. While being bit of a stretch, I do have moments when I feel emotions somewhat comparable to hers. Not everything is perfect, but I’m pretty good in what I do and how I have my future planned. I do have the occasional moments of feeling great in life. While not happening too often, I’ve also had some good moments with friends. I should just embrace who I am, no matter what.

And you don’t actually need to have an opinion on everything, just keep an open view on the world. Don’t just plod through everything without taking a moment to appreciate what you are doing.

Do this and maybe you’ll end up more like Max. More like a better person. And don’t try to necessarily change the world, change your view on it.

Emotional layers

Having continued on this path of self-reflection were are now arriving at the very core.

This experience has finally had me realize that there is multiple layers(or segments or whatever to call them) of me. Sure, layering is a known psychological theory, but I didn’t realize just how accurate it was and that I too implemented it. There are those layers I show at work or when studying. I know it’s necessary to have some emotional separation, but that also makes be feel incomplete. And then there is that one layer at the core was affected by all this. Maybe that is the real me?

I’ve been under a lot of stress this semester, and as a coping mechanism I’ve had to segment myself to multiple distinct though-spheres(wtf is that word). Sure there is some crosstalk, but it has stayed low. While this has helped me to focus on the task at hand, I’ve began to feel the wearing effects of maintaining that emotional isolation.

There’s always been those segments, but lately they have been even more isolated. The pressure building up.

The outer layer is divided to two distinct things. There is one me for studying and another one for work. Protected by those there is the normal me for friends, gaming and living in general. But that is not everything. There have been occasional hints about an isolated layer below, but nothing really concrete.

But now this game pierced through all those layers and exposed that very core underneath, the ‘real me’ - or at least as real as it can get. There was a reason that core was isolated. It’s sensitive. And this game was . It cracked that isolation up. I’m in ruins. I’ve tried to keep everything from imploding, but it has not been easy.

Maybe the game was an escape?

Total(ish) immersion, or whatever?..

* * *

I’m actually having difficulty finalizing this section, as that would mean I accept all this.

Where has the time gone?

I don’t know how I would have fared had I not had an almost perfectly timed semester break this week. I still went to work, but didn’t have to worry about exercises and lectures. Instead I had time to focus on all of this: process everything(or as much as I could/can) and stumble for closure.

Like a comment in reddit said, it makes no logical sense for a video game or fictional characters to evoke this much emotion. But this is art, and art is supposed to have some type of an effect.

“I wish I could stay in this moment forever. But then, I guess it wouldn't be a moment.”

On 'Life is Strange'

A story first, skip ahead for the actual review.

Not long after the game's initial release I picked up the first episode and was immediately hooked. Played through it in a weekend, and then for a second time with different choices.

I immersed myself completely into the world and story, and it was intense. Couldn't even think about playing another episode for a whole week. It actually took well over a month before I could play the second episode.

And the second episode was even better. Now I had to take an even longer break.

When I finally resumed playing, both ep3 and ep4 were out, and ep5 just two weeks away. I tried to pace myself by just playing ep3 during one weekend, and then ep4 the next.

I failed. Ended up playing ep3 in a single day. And because it ended with such a cliffhanger I just had to play ep4 the next day.

That was a dire mistake. Now I'm broken and feel empty and hollow. Couldn't even function properly for the rest of the day(or the next).

* * *

This game is larger than life. The game's protagonist is a photographer, and through her eyes it is seen how vibrant and colorful the world actually is. The atmosphere is truly captivating and full of wonder, and the plot something unexpected.

It took a long time to quantify, but I finally figured out why the game resonated so strongly with me. My life is quite dull and boring, and immersing myself completely to the game world and its characters allowed me to break free from that grayness, and experience the full spectrum of the shades that is life.

There is also the role playing aspect. I'm normally not that social. I stick to the routine and am quite cautious on trying out new things. But the game's protagonist is social. Routine is broken by the unfolding events and that leads to trying out new things. Even the character interactions allow for experimentation thanks to the rewind ability.

This all is so much more than the gray ordinariness of (my) real life. The withdrawals from stopping playing are real and hit me hard. Combine this with an awesome plot that you can influence in a real way. Add a setting that allows to partly (re?)live what I kinda missed growing up. And finally add the very likeable protagonist, a great selection of songs and the very fitting and beautiful graphics(and not a single problem with performance).

6/5. Will play again - when I recover.

Be sure to read the second part, too.

(Also, there was a great opinion piece on PCGamer by Jody Macgregor, I highly recommend reading it.)

Guild Wars 2 - some thoughts

"[Y]ou have played for 255 hours 48 minutes over the past 25 days."

* * *

Now that the most anticipated game has been released, I must confess that I'm a little dissapointed.

While the overall gameplay is nice and dynamic, it gets a bit repeative even if one tries to vary doing hearths, PvP, dungeons, exploration and general PvE. And as I said earlier, I'm hugely dissapointed in the fact the game lacks any kind of mana(well, almost, initiative doesn't count for this).

On it's defence though Guild Wars 2 has a really dynamic and dodge-heavy combat mechanics to balance that otherwise cooldown-based skill system.

* * *

First I made an Elementalist, as the attunement managing was supposed require smart playing and all stuff glorious, but I found myself just using fire magic for everything due to the DPS it offers. Only occasionally did I use the other attunements. Ele also felt far too squishy in Orr even when dodging like crazy.

Then I made a Guardian. It had the survivability I wanted, and quite suprisingly also had some serious DPS, even more than my ele!

Next - not that the class was bad or anything - after getting bored(only slighlty) to Guardian, Thief was next. As initiative was a resource to be managed I was quite excited. But meh, the class felt like, I don't know, it was lacking something. So, after getting to level 24 I made an Engineer.

Now, at this point I was quite excited about WvW(see paragraph later). The Engineer has a Mortar elite skill and turrets, so it is supposed to be The perfect class for WvW defenses. It indeed offers various kits that can be freely used even during combat and without cooldown, making it a very adaptable class. Seemingly perfect, but the game has begun to take it's toll. Having already 'grinded' almost 200 levels, getting another 80 was starting to fell bit exhaustive.

Currently I have managed to get this new Engineer to level 30 and unlocked that tier two elite mortar skill. Now I feel like I might actually be able to take a small rest and do some casual WvW.

Except that I should be farming while I can, gem prices have skyrocketed during the past few days. Get some gems while they are relatively cheap. Oh well...

* * *

Endgame areas have also been suffering from an unfortunately high bugrate. Some skill challanges and events are frozen or otherwise rendered unplayeable. It is also possible to get stuck inside some objects.

On the other hand World vs World vs World has been full of suprises. During betas and also during the full game I've disliked the long distances and zergs there. It has changed, I got recruited to a smallish WvW guild by a chance and had a blast holding Redlake tower last night. Reinforcing, supply chain and breaking sieges suddenly felt much more enjoyable.

Of the importance of simplified web page system

The last few months I've been more or less actively doing site&stuff for lumicraft.fi, I've realized that the way the site can be edited has a huge impact on the amount of edits one does. (sürprise..)

Back in dea.fi and lannukka.fi for example, LCS is being used, and they are quite 'repulsive' to edit. First logging in and then using that anemic, but still syntax hilighted text area to do the edit embedded HTML(not the whole page, only the content area) and then publish the edit and have the revision show up in the changelog. But what if you made a typo? New edit, new changelog entry :(

But on lumicraft I went back to a simpler system, there's just a directory containing normal text files with WikiCreole inside. Beautiful and fast-to-type syntax. Nothing fancy required. Just edit the file and voilà!

Of course I could have continued to just use HTML, then it would have been only a matter of include(), but seems I can't get around experimenting :p

Ok, I must admit. There is no way to keep track of changes to see how the site has evolved. No way to notify people that an edit has been made. Of course a cronjob could be made to diff the files etc, but it's just kludgy. Although a daemon came to my mind, listening to file change events and acting appropriately. Might actually work, but still bit of a kludge.

But the point: as transparency increases in editing, so does productivity.

Quick look at Windows 8

Installed Windows 8 Developer Preview to a VM few hours ago, what follows is a cluttered list of visual observations. Sorry, did my best. Read it if you still want.

• Integrates your user account to Windows live account by default.
• Task manager has undergone some major changes. Sure it's more sleek, but I kind of miss the old one..
• Same applies to most default applications. Everything has been stripped down in search of cleaner UI. Like metro, too clean.
• Sending files to trash doesn't need a confirmation. Some other things have also been streamlined, can't remember now.
• Components like .NET framework are installed by a wizard.
• Much like Windows 7, at least more than 7 was like Vista.

And another list just for you, metro. Because you are so special..

• UI suddenly lost all roundings with the new metro look.
• Everything is so rectangular, clean, but maybe too clean.
• Gadgets are by default not enabled in favor of metro.
• Metro applications can't be illegitimately closed! They end up cluttering alt-tab list.
• Things like control panel are really hard to find at first.
• Many things really are touch-centric. Mouse support on some of them is broken.
• Usability is, well.. either good or bad.
• Main screen looks great, nice thing to peek and see all little bits of information.
• Individual apps(or whatever) are 'too fullscreen' and lack small features that could be found on all mouse/keyboard driven apps.

Visual

Dreamlines, well, that looks awesome.