Zero-G Adventures

For the previous episodes, see

• Message in a Beacon, Part I
• Message in a Beacon, Part II

Unless you’re the superstitious sort, you know I lived. But superstition is a symptom of a hyperactive survival instinct, which will serve you well out here in deep space…wherever we are. I won’t hold it against you.

I can’t tell you if the station worked as intended. I can tell you that most of my struggling with the clamps was far too late — we were probably clear of the solar system and still accelerating while we were being assaulted by that vibration.  I’ve gone +c between stars since then with just the pod damper, and the stop at the end gives me that same awful feeling, a half second of non-existence, every single time.

I may not know exactly where I am, but I am extremely lucky to be alive. No matter that I might die sucking vacuum; life is a gift. +c travel changes you.

I’ve written this as an introduction, because maybe we won, and maybe somebody will come looking for us, and find this. But probably not. Probably you’re just another welder like me, or an excavator or an engineer, who didn’t have the misfortune of bouncing off a planet on the way in.

With that in mind, I’d better skip ahead to the news.

I’ve found another pod with a human inside. I had to kickstart it (the trajectory backtrack looks like it went *through* a star), but everything held up and my new friend Angie came through okay. I expect we’ll probably find others. These pods are insanely tough; I know I’ve put mine through hell already.

I’ll leave these survey beacons for people to find, and maybe we’ll arrange a meetup somewhere. I’ve left space at the bottom; say hello.

Also, we’ve been talking, Angie and I, and what always comes up is this: If we survived, maybe the station did, too. If anybody should happen to come across it, we’d sure like to know.

Good luck and be safe,

Einar

—

cool story bro, is she hot?

-aa

—

There have been three humans at this beacon before me (assuming Angie is not some lonely man’s delusional fantasy), and none of you have said where you are headed. Therefore, you are all idiots. 

No sign of the station. Its construction is unlike our pods. It’s unlikely it would have survived.

There’s a pulsar about 120 LY ++X,-Y,+Z from here. High radiation will put you back in safe mode so watch yourself. I won’t be back to rescue you. I’ve dropped a (much less verbose) beacon at a safe distance.

I’m going coreward. Prefer G class stars.

-Ariel

—

more loot at F-class stars & up
but ill hit up any Gs I see

-jj

—

And now I know where Ariel went. ;}

-

—

> _

UPDATE: User Streams

The following people stated their intent to stream. The bold, starred* ones were active and appeared to be working on games, last time I checked.

• amassingham
• bigbass1997
• danlthemanl
• DaviDeMo*
• edg3*
• Folis
• galman33
• hume*
• mozzfly
• Nick Cash
• Perrin
• quill18
• raptor851*
• rvmook
• spooderw
• xBlinkedx
• Yaru
• zairon
• voidah
• zoomyzoom*

If you haven’t checked out the Ludum Dare site, you really should. 

It’s my first time competing, but I’ve gone through the archives and it seems like it’s been growing like crazy, and for this, the tenth anniversary, it’s completely out of control. There were over 600 submissions last time. No prizes, just people doing it for the love. Amazing!

The event isn’t all for people making games. It’s for people who want to learn about the process; it’s also for people who love to play games and want to see some really creative artists in action. While the competition is running, there should be tons of people streaming their epic battles with code and art, mostly on Twitch.tv, Justin.tv and Livestream.com; those streams should start to get very interesting as the games congeal on Sunday. Here are some search links to get you started:

• Live Ludum Dare streams on Justin.TV
• ludum dare 23 on Twitch TV
• ld48 on Twitch TV
• Ludum Dare streams on LiveStream.com (click the Live Now tab)

Finally, as always, good luck.

For the previous episode, see Message in a Beacon, Part I.

Mars had thrown their moon Deimos, all 6 km of it, at us, and was preparing to follow up with Phobos, 11 km. Amalgamated Command had press-ganged us into the task of retaliation. Earth, too, had a moon to throw around.

Another team had recovered the secret machinery behind how Mars had moved Deimos so easily. It took them some time to figure out how the mangled pieces fit together.

What they assembled…it’s not quite a propulsion system. The scientists described it as a “frame-dragging inertial damper.” You put it inside whatever you want to move, and then you spin it up, and gradually the mass of the thing seems to drop to almost zero, so it takes practically zero force to push. When you remove the power, the mass returns. That’s my understanding. I don’t know if the theory makes sense; I’ve never had to open one up to fix it.

They retrofitted our work pods with scaled-down copies of the Martian inertial damper — the tech is durable, like I said, and it saves fuel — and we salvaged existing materials from old mining operations to build the underground station. We built the work site as deep as we could get it. The plan put our living quarters in the middle and a huge Martian-style moon-chucking damper wrapped around it, which saved hauling extra dirt for the barracks. In retrospect, there’s a setup here; did you spot it? I don’t think any of us did, until the station started spinning.

It was three weeks before completion day, but when the vibration started, we got the idea as quickly as our emotions would allow. It takes time to accept you’ve been lied to and betrayed, and to be honest, I’m still not convinced.

You don’t hear much of the scuttlebutt from that far underground, but it would be nice to think that there was some justification; that something went horribly wrong. I want to believe we were caught up in Plan B, and not just expendable. Maybe Mars caught on and we had to act suddenly. Maybe the Phobos interception team missed or was wiped out, and we became the latest group of poor heroes, launched suddenly to do the double-duty of smashing Phobos on the way to smash Mars.

Anyway, my survival instinct is a little stronger than any glory-seeking impulse. When I heard the second generator come on, I got in a pod. I thought that maybe I could escape to the surface in time to avoid being dragged off to Mars. But the station was fully locked down, the docking clamps would not open, and I couldn’t reach them with a cutting torch.

As I was doing this, vibration from the station was conducted through the clamps. It rang inside my helmet. It didn’t sound like the dampers in pods; it sounded machine-like, but unstable; it sounded like it was crushing rocks. It sounded like we were all going to be heroes, real soon now. It made the desire to flee into a primal instinct.

Eventually, I calmed down. I settled into the pod and just waited. It was useless. I wasn’t going to be able get the pod free, and I was out of ideas. As the sound peaked, I guessed I was dead.

And then, for just a moment, I was positive.

Part III of Message in a Beacon is now published.

In wartime, the difference between a soldier and a worker is that the soldier had the good sense to ask for a gun.

But that’s not entirely fair. There are far more people on Earth than Amalgamated Command could ever throw away senselessly. You have to go where the work is, even if you know it puts a bull’s-eye on your head. Nobody eats for free.

That was most of the problem. Put a different way, Mars was sick of our begging. They had a whole planet and six hundred times fewer people to feed, but apparently it doesn’t make economic sense to ship rice. Starvation is better for the economy, I guess.

Earth managed to get some AC troops over there and organize a command economy for about ten years, and my parents told me those were good years, calorie-wise. But when it broke down and we withdrew, they were even less accommodating than before. Then there were those years of flooding in Europe, and I guess it was obvious that we were scrounging up more parts in orbit to send a second wave of troops. I mean, there really wasn’t anything else we could do.

So, they threw the Ring at us to keep us occupied.

Then, it was known as Deimos, Mars’ smaller moon. At the time, it didn’t make much sense that they would move it at all. Martians are all about efficiency. For what it would cost, they could have built hundreds of perfectly horrible bombs.

They were explicit about it being a warning shot. They had rigged it with explosives, with the idea that it was going to do a tight parabola around Earth, blowing off fragments at intervals. Those chunks were supposed to rain down and cause “sub-critically catastrophic” tsunami and fires. Then we’d have to rebuild, and we’d leave them alone for a while as we tried to recover. And starved. Typically callous. Who attacks with a weapon of mass destruction, as a warning?

The official story is that our brave, suicidal (and probably totally inadequate) scavenged orbital group got moving and set off those explosives early, before being wiped out by a Mars interceptor fleet. I think it’s more likely that they screwed up and triggered a failsafe. Anyway, for the past two years Earth has had the Ring, roughly where our geosynchronous satellites used to be.

We mostly escaped harm, and there was a bonus. We started picking at the fragments for metals. There is olivine in Deimos that you can break down with focused sunlight, which is way easier than digging under topsoil. Earth started building some decent tech again, for the first time in a long time.

That’s what my team was doing — pulling metals out of a gift from Mars — when we heard that Deimos’ bigger brother Phobos was breaking orbit. I mean, we’re all thankful for Martian generosity, but that was just too much.

Within a day of that news, we were press-ganged. Congratulations and welcome to AC, ensign. Here’s your knife. We actually didn’t get guns. Too much risk that we might shoot at something today and hit a friendly next week.

We were critical to the survival of Earth, we were told by our new commanding officer, while she dragged us and our equipment off to the Moon. We were privileged to be the agents of the biggest counter-attack in the history of war.

I had my doubts.

Part II will follow tomorrow.

Ludum Dare, the 48 hour death march game writing competition, is this weekend.

While I expect to fail, there are different kinds of failure:

Good Ludum Dare failure:

Contestant goes out in a blaze of glory. Contestant was too ambitious; head exploded.

Bad Ludum Dare failure:

Contestant collapses in a frustrated heap. Contestant couldn’t get game to run in a web page. Batteries in contestant’s mouse died. Contestant couldn’t think straight from lack of food and staying up all night Thursday.

With that in mind, here’s what I’m doing to prepare:

1. Readying my brainstorming and design tools. Sketchpad, tablet, Photoshop, outliner application, whiteboard, crayons, whatever…just make sure it’s ready to go. I don’t want to spend a lot of time drawing non-game-art when I could be coding or crafting, but I do intend to sketch out my plan to keep me focused. This will keep me on track when I start to get tired. Also, if things aren’t going as well as I planned (which is most of the time), a good design outline/sketch makes it more obvious what can be dropped from the plan.
2. Preparing my development tools and references. Verify free disk space. Prepare a clean project for the competition. Create shortcuts and/or aliases to code I’ll want to refer to, and websites that I always use, e.g. the 3D Math section at Euclidean Space.
3. Ensure my project skeleton (structure and makefile) is sane. Make sure I can build a game with my libraries when the time comes. Create a clean empty project that includes needed libraries.  Test this by making a copy, and building a minimal program in the copy — something that loads and displays a title screen and plays some music. Then see if the build works. My game will run in a web page, so I have to upload the test program and make sure it can load the resources it uses. I also write code on a Mac most of the time, so I have to try my test application in Windows to be sure it is going to work there. I need to submit my source code too, so a script to package that up would not be a bad idea. 
4. Look at old projects. Look for repeated common code. Don’t spend time writing loggers when you could be pushing pixels. I’m adding frequently used routines now to my personal library, and then I’m going to quit thinking about it. Remember, if you’re going to use your own libraries, you need to share them so that everybody can use them. This is something to think about this more than 5 minutes before the start of the competition. I have to package everything up and upload it somewhere — I will use one of my web sites, but Dropbox would probably be fine — then post to the Ludum Dare blog so that other people can have a look at what I’m using. It’s only fair.
5. Stock up on energy and resources. Get lots of sleep, and have food ready, along with whatever other supplies you’re going to need. My mouse uses batteries, so I have extras on hand, and a backup wired mouse.
6. Book the time. Explain to family, friends and needy acquaintances that it’s probably in their best interests, and yours, if they will leave you alone between X:00 Friday and X:00 Sunday. It’s competition time!

Yes, the point of this is to learn and have a good time. But it’s worth doing a little planning.  

Okay, I’m breathing easier now. Did I miss anything? Leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

I’m really looking forward to seeing the theme and what everybody does with it. There are a lot of really talented people competing. Check out the blog: there’s some amazing stuff going on there.

One final thing: don’t forget to vote for the theme! First rule of democracy: when you don’t vote, you don’t get to complain. Well, you still can, but people will call you an idiot behind your back.

See you Friday!