All posts written in English.
My Samsung Galaxy A13 smartphone has an 8-cores processor at 2GHz, 3 gigabytes of RAM and an ARM Mali-G57 950MHz GPU.
And yet, WordPerfect for DOS was zillion of magnitudes faster than editing a WordPress blog post in this thing. How have we regressed so much?
I wish my web server were in the corner of my room:
First there’s the feeling of “I made that!” which leads to the feeling of “I can make all kinds of things!” You will definitely get that more when you install the software on the web server yourself, and also when you copy over your own hand-coded text files. (The web is just text!)
Wait, what!? A The Last of Us series!? With Pedro Pascal!? So awesome!
UnDUNE II: The Demaking of a Dinasty
Speaking of Dune II, here’s a jaw-dropping port of the game to the PICO-8! What!? Mind. Blown.
One of the things I urgently need is Margin. I need to recover breathing space, my schedule and obligations have grown again this month and it’s going downhill to chaos.
My kids are growing and demand more «family time.» I saw this period of vacations as the right opportunity to have this time because of no hectic school mornings, no school presentations to prepare or homeworks to assist, early bedtimes, etc.
So how is it possible that I’m now even more busy? Can someone explain this to me? It’s madness!
I need to stop, reassess and, most importantly, start saying «NO» to a lot of things. Reject new things and prune existing things.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! New domain, same blog as ever. Looks like people.gnome.org was shut down because Michael was the only one active there, haha. He didn’t even realized right away his blog was down.
Glad to have you back, Michael!
A phenomenal insightful article about the creation of one of my favorite games. Although the mechanics haven’t aged well, Dune II will always hold its place in history as the father of modern RTS games.
I remember a school friend raving about it, saying it was a very different game and not knowing exactly how to explain it to me. «Real-time» wasn’t a thing back then. The whole gestalt of building, gathering resources and strategically placing your units was overwhelming for us kids. Just looking at the details on the Windtraps, the little flags waving, the units walking, the sand tracks left by the Trikes, it looked like a real, living, breathing world existing right there in the screen. So fascinating.
Oh, and the manual (we had a photocopy of it) had a cool photo of the development team on the back. That was also super cool and inspiring, as the dream for Oliver, Oscar and I was to develop our own games.
I often have strange, weird dreams. So often that one of the recurring morning jokes between Thalía and I is:
Me: «I had a weird dream last night!»
Thalía: «Oh, that’s so normal.»
