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1997 in review: | |
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Dec 31
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Merry Xavmas and Happy New Year! Sorry for the long delay, I'm
still on vacation in sunny California, not too far from the lovely San
Jose home of a certain elusive software developer related to the royal
Cheshires. Dr. Cheshire, I presume? Well I finally did it. Since I'm in Stuart's area code, I decided to give him a call yesterday, and we ended up talking for over an hour. It was great to finally hear the human voice behind the legends. Stuart was friendly, enthusiastic, sometimes a little too excited when he gets going about some technical rant, but otherwise surprisingly down to earth. So Where's 0.99.8? Stuart confirmed that Bolo 0.99.8 (and much of his life) was put on hold these past few months because of nagging final details of his Ph.D. dissertation. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of undergoing this rite of passage, just because you turned in your dissertation and passed your oral defense doesn't mean you're done. Your committee (the expert faculty who advise and evaluate you) can still require all sorts of revisions and rewrites, holding up your final degree, not to mention Bolo development. Well at least now Stuart is finally done with revising the dissertation. Starting in the new year, he will begin working 2 days a week at that certain green glass enclosed complex in Cupertino. (I actually drove through Infinity Loop yesterday - what a rush!) What he'll be doing at Apple remains to be finalized, but it'll be interesting research and development in their networking division. Why part-time, you ask? Stuart actually requested the restricted schedule so that he can focus on Bolo development for the next few months! No I don't think he has a particular deadline date in mind, but he is eager to wrap up this chapter of his life and deliver version 1.0 finally. And yes, he remains committed to doing the Wintel port himself in the very near future. We also talked at length about the recent (past few years worth) of evolution in Bolo playing styles. The game has changed a lot since its inception, when Stuart envisioned shifting alliances, players coming and going at will, not to mention low-latency networking all around. He is aware of the new style of play with game teams being set up in advance and the deleterious effects of splits requiring holds. He agreed with the advantages of client-server networking and thinks that will be an important future step in the game development - but only after version 1.0 sees the light of day. I may yet meet him in person on this trip, but it's hard what with our mutual vacation schedules. At least now I won't be shy about ringing him up. :) vMac Bolo - Yet Another PC Bolo. Chris Howard aka mecca supplied this interesting screen cap of Bolo running on his PC using vMac (a freeware Mac Emulator for PC). He said, "The keys don't work for some reason but vMac is in early alpha stages (0.18) and it only emulates a MacPlus." No there is no networking as of yet, and color graphics would be nice too. GorbaChuck. The ever elusive _sluggo released this picture of himself to #bolo. It joins the many other pictures of famous and not-so-famous players in the OBHP's Multimedia People Archive. aIndy 3.1 is out, really. Apparently I goofed on the FTP archive and didn't make the file readable by the world, I'm surprised nobody pointed that out over the past 5 weeks until Matt Koehler aka Pooh did today. Sorry guys, it's all fixed now. Download aIndy 3.1 by WWW (faster) or FTP. New Bolo servers? Santa has been very good to me, and some time in '98 I will be buying some decent new computers. (If anybody has opinions on what can be bought for about 50 grand, drop me a line. No, I can't buy a dozen G3 Macs and give you one.) The upshot of this is, I expect to dump the venerable fly, a poor under-equipped SPARC 5 which is now serving up the Bolo FTP Archive. While I'm at it, I'll probably move the WWW server too so that both will be on the same machine. Then again, by the time I do all this, maybe commercial Bolo will be out and I'll be relegated to a wannabe amateur act in their "History of Bolo" hot links. :)
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Dec 17
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Euro Bolo Tourney? Jonny Bravo <aaw21@dial.pipex.com>
is organizing an European Bolo tournament. No details are available
yet, but he's gotten most of the Euro "name players"
signed up and lots of new talent too. The tentative list of
interested players includes: Darth Vader, Cliffa, Lonewolf with cub,
Donkey Shot, ScumBag, Bartman, Great Polla, Ulfilas, Tewe, Alec,
Stalker, Inferno, Lord, Yzerman, Hamlan, Diablo, Jonny Bravo,
MooseJaw, John Barton, Tom, Orre, Benjamin, Oshkosh. D.A.T.A, Smoke,
KoroDullin, and J.Freeman. Chicago beer^H^H^Holofest recap. The Chicago gathering was pretty low key. Max got there on Saturday right after Thanksgiving and went out with Squelcher to our old haunt, the Clark Street Ale House. Somebody apparently forgot to call MegaWatt who was in town and missed out. I got there on Tuesday, and Max, Squelcher, and I returned to CSAH. We somehow managed to run up a bar tab greater than our dinner bill! Squelcher is actually a remarkably normal looking guy, and stayed out with us until last call in spite of having to work at 7 AM just a few hours later. We never got a chance to Bolo. Hopefully when Kimboho visits Duke next month we will get to do some real 'festing!
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Dec 12
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Bolo 0.99.8a4 and counting. I don't recall if I mentioned
this, but as of many moons ago Bolo did get past a2, with the a3 and
a4 private alpha versions sent to just Matt Slot aka Black Lightning
and Kevin Whitty aka KevDog, the respective administrators of the
U.S. and European trackers, just to work out some kinks in the new
tracker information. Allegedly these are now all taken care of, but
there has been no other news since. U.S. Bolo Trackers. While Bolo 0.99.8 is still languishing in limbo, the various trackers are now pretty much ready to go. The biggest change is that Don Thompson aka nix, the administrator of the current official U.S. tracker at <http://bolo.usu.edu:50005/> doesn't have the time to redo his tracker for the new version. If/when 0.99.8 is released, the official tracker will switch over to BL's web-based Bolo tracker at <http://tracker.avara.com:50001/> which is already 0.99.8-compatible. Euro Bolo Tracker. Meanwhile, KevDog has also totally rewritten his Euro Bolo tracker at bolo.abo.fi, port 50000 to be compliant with the new version. The following is a sneak peak at his tracker's output:
Game: 130.232.208.95 {50000} Map: Chunky Monkey IX
--> No modem players, please!! <--
4 players | Shells: None | Map mines: Not allowed
2 neutral bases (of 13) | Mines: 2 per base | Tank mines: Always visible
14 neutral pills (of 16) | Trees: Full | Man mines: Visible if observed
Ring delay: 231/500 | Assisted brains | Ver. 0.99.8 PASSWORD!
LOCKED!
1. KevDog ...... kevdog.abo.fi
2. Cliffa ...... cliffa.abo.fi
3. Darth Vader ...... m08.informatik.uni-bremen.de
4. Scumbag ...... rlmac3.path.cam.ac.uk
Game time limit will be reached in approximately 1 hour and 12 minutes.
The tracker has had its eye on this game for 2 minutes.
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Dec 8
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Merry *!@#% Christmas. For those of you who are South Park aficionados, a great article appeared in the December issue of Premiere: The Movie Magazine. It appears our dynamic duo are doing quite well in Hollywood. Here are some unauthorized reproductions of the article, strictly for your amusement. They are of course copyrighted by Premiere so don't you dare distribute them!
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Dec 5
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Innocent Bolo. No it's not new and it's not PC Bolo. About 3
years ago, a Mac Bolo player nicknamed Guilty from the Washington area
tried to write a PC clone called "Innocent Bolo" for a high
school programming project, but he never finished it. It runs on DOS
only and it does not support multiplayer networking. The speeds
and graphics are also not authentic enough for even single player
action. Basically it's not bad for a high school computer project, but
it ain't PC Bolo. Feel free to check it out at this unofficial download site - I have no idea if the binary is safe/authentic, so may the downloader beware. Cry Wolf! People really need to stop with these "Omigod I found PC Bolo!" hoaxes - it's hurting legitimate efforts to port Bolo to the PC. I know you PC users are impatient, but it's just a matter of time before all the legal and business angles are worked out for a real, authentic, Stuart-endorsed version of Wintel Bolo. This might take a few months or (in all likelihood) a lot longer, but until then settle down already. If you want some information, go read the AA section in the Bolo FAQ. There is also another group of high school kids who are toying with making "Gnolo" - a free Bolo under the GNU license, but again you've got to realize how challenging this task is. Even if they pull it off, it'll take many months and until then you're just going to have to wait!
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