(If you’ve just started reading, the first post can be found right over here.)

And we’re back! Thanks to these fine folks I’ve got SC4 running happily in a window, so it’s time to get back to building. But before I do, I think it’s important to assign a representative in this district of the city, someone who can act as my eyes and ears in the pixellated world below. There could only really have been one man for the job, and I assigned him a shitty little run-down shack near the crater’s edge. How’s it going, Garrosh?

Same shit, different day.

Socketrape is expanding nicely; added protection from the fine folks at the Firestarters, Inc. fire station and Dr. Zed’s Vivisectorium should keep these miserable fuckers alive at least long enough for this cesspit to flourish. Road, power and water connections have been made to the nearby ether, the residential and industrial districts suffered aggressive expansion, and the citizens are predictably complaining about every little fucking thing they can think of, the ungrateful mongrels. They’ve even been asking for trees and parks long after my inclusion of the local community garden, This Is Where You Bury The Bodies. It’s a hard life being mayor, but someone has to do it. Somehow, despite the constant bitching, these parasites love me all the same.

Island of Dr. Moreau

Things have taken a turn for the worse, though — while I was constructing my little island paradise home and wasting far too many taxpayer dollars (yes, it needs a moat!), the rest of the city was dying of thirst due to the water towers conveniently located in the heart of the industrial district being shut down because of — wait for it — water pollution. The inclusion of a costly yet pleasantly industrial water treatment plant did little to stop the powers that be opening and re-closing the adjacent water towers, so the city’s water supply has been moved elsewhere, amidst constant complaints about pollution, garbage, and requests to build a fucking church.

I mostly just ignored their pleas, and continued to build a ridiculously elaborate park/recreation area near my house and the city hall, in an attempt to raise the land value to a ludicrous level. Meanwhile, the city is going to hell — there’s a massive cloud of pollution around the industrial district (no thanks to the new oil power plant), barely any interest in commercial development, hundreds of jobless residents, and the city advisers yelling at me constantly about education, pollution, water supply, hospital funding, all while my cash supply goes slowly down the drain, the city unable to maintain its maintenance costs.

What began as a pipe-dream is quickly becoming a logistical hell, as New Gomorrah is collapsing under the weight of its own decadence; the irony of the situation certainly hasn’t escaped me. Even Garrosh is joining in with the picketers; he wants better education, is infuriated by the terrible health-care, and complaints about city-wide traffic problems are coming in from all sides. Even the prisons are overflowing, crime rates hitting new highs as there simply isn’t any way to contain the legions of convicts.

Could this be the ill-fated end for Socketrape and New Gomorrah? Not if I can help it, that’s for damn sure.

There must always be a Lich King Grease Pit.

It’s been a long time since I last played a SimCity game; I remember as a kid I used to be obsessed with the series, back to its humble beginnings, and one of my favourite ways to play the game was to load one of the pre-built cities — SimCity 1’s Boston was a great choice — and then impact the populace with a veritable Pandora’s box of disasters, starting with a few nuclear meltdowns and following up with earthquakes and fires, enough to level the city and leave barely scraps of polluted, wrecked, burning wasteland behind. From there, I’d build up a new civilization upon the ashes of the old, Mad Max-esque nightmare world.

The other thing I used to love doing started with SimCity 2000, where it became the goal of myself and a friend to build the ‘perfect’ city, which generally meant cramming as many arcologies together as was physically possible, not to mention building a ridiculously elaborate and fancy garden around ‘my’ house in the game. Skip forward to SimCity 4 and, with the help of a custom region file I hacked together years ago (which provides a region several times larger than what the game would normally allow), it’s time to combine those two goals into what is bound to be a logistics nightmare: an attempt to create the biggest city I’ve ever made, while simultaneously ruling with unparalleled levels of sadism and cruelty. Welcome to the freshly-founded hell of New Gomorrah.

The first day — which is to say, the last few hours before I haul myself off to sleep — has been short, but eventful. New Gomorrah and its first sub-city, the capital of Socketrape were founded, a substantial and obligatory industrial zone was formed, Bob’s Grease Pit (the first commercial venture to rear its ugly head) was made into a historic building to ensure that there will always be a Bob’s Grease Pit, and I dropped a sizeable chunk of burning cosmic rock into the middle of the freshly-populated residential zone, partly because it seemed appropriate, and partly because I just felt like being an asshole. What better way to drive the fear of god into these people (metaphorically speaking; it’s more like a fear of angry nerd) than to crush their puny homes with the unstoppable might of a fucking meteor, and watch the fire spread like… well, like wildfire. It didn’t take long for the wretched leeches to rebuild upon the ruined terrain, anyway, though I think I’ll leave the meteor crater as-is, something for those peons to remember me by.

But alas, the hour is late, so the city must remain further unscathed for the moment. Next time, things are really going to get ugly.

Next: Rise and Fall

Well, it’s been a couple of months since my coding project was put on indefinite hold — a roguelike-in-development known as Gravel (a portmanteau of Gravecat and RL), which ultimately ground to a halt after I realized simply that what I was doing was largely futile; as much fun as I may have been having, there’s too many other roguelikes out there which do the exact same thing, most notably Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup, which had already accomplished much of what I’d hope to achieve. After much tinkering and two major rewrites of the code, the project was put to rest, until a time that I’d come back and resurrect it with a new purpose and goals.

That time has now come, and dusting off my old code, I’m beginning with rewrite numbero tres — the old code is simply too haphazard and poorly-organized to make a viable base, and I’ve made somewhat of a breakthrough with my display routines since then. My new project, Kobiak, stands on the shoulders of (and re-uses much of, albeit repolished) Gravel, and aims to be a roguelike/tactical RPG hybrid, something which I believe is at least somewhat unique and original compared to the original plans. Rather than a lone adventurer exploring a dungeon — as is roguelike tradition — the plan is to employ an entire party of like-minded adventurers, with combat being far more tactical than simply butting heads with a dragon until one of you dies.

It’s still early days and I don’t want to say too much so soon, but I’ve got big plans for this one, and my restructured code is being designed specifically with future expansion and easy modification in mind, so hopefully I won’t run into the road-blocks that forced me to re-write Gravel almost from scratch twice over. I’m already very happy with the display engine, though, which — in classic roguelike tradition — is ASCII all the way, but with a twist that I’m keeping under my hat for now.

I’ll doubtless be rambling more in future as the project takes shape, so keep your eyes peeled!

It’s been a while since I’ve updated this blog; largely due to having little to say, but I feel I should update and say something, if only to confirm that — yes — the doom and gloom is over, and I’m back in a relatively sane, healthy mental state. With that in mind, something has been vexing me lately:

I live in a small apartment building, the kind where it looks like a regular house on the outside, but each of the three floors is a separate apartment with a common stairwell and front door. Mine’s the one at the top, and when I moved in here, the building was all mine, so to speak — nobody else lived in the other two, and life was good. Now begins the mystery, however, of whether or not someone has moved into one of the other apartments.

Evidence for started with a repairman coming to the house to fix the intercom for flat 1, mysterious sounds which may or may not have originated in the stairwell and could easily have been from the neighboring house (which I know is populated), and a partial boot-print on a couple of letters that were on the floor by the front door (which could just as easily have been caused by the postman, the cleaners, or any other maintenance staff). Evidence against is mostly blind hope — as I like the idea of having the building to myself — and a stack of letters to “the occupier” of flats 1 and 2 from things like the city council and the TV license folks, which have been uncollected for quite some time. I also haven’t noticed any letters addressed directly to anyone but myself or to a generic “the occupier”, though they could have simply been collected if the neighbors are more dilligent than I.

It’s all quite mysterious, and perhaps even vaguely eerie. Am I alone in this building, or are others lurking about, unseen, unknown, but living mere feet away from my front door? One thing’s for sure: If I do have neighbors, they’re pretty damn quiet.

Thoughts on the past indeterminate period of time:

I look worse than I feel, but that’s not saying much, I look pretty dreadful. Food didn’t stay down, but that’s okay because it was terrible anyway. Started smoking again, missed my sweet, sweet cancer-sticks. Reality is about as interesting as it can be, which is to say, not at all. Been having extremely vivid and more-bizarre-than-usual dreams lately, which I’m sure is a sign of something, but I’m not sure what. Google’s latest foray into mimicry vexes me only mildly. A brief addiction to Pepsi Max has been quashed by apathy. I don’t miss people, per se, but there are some folks who I feel like I should talk to more often. I’m so used to lies, that sometimes I forget how to tell the truth. I think everything would be better if I could just learn to chill out and not be angry at things. I had one other thing to say, but deleted it because it sounded stupid. I think the problem with the world is that I don’t feel like I belong here. On a brighter note, my debt’s going down pretty steadily, albeit slowly. End of line.