Junk Bytes

The last time I announced a Stick Veterans milestone was at 100 maps . Since then, Stick Veterans has reached an amazing 500 user-made maps (thank you everyone for making this happen!), and this time I have a proper way to celebrate it: version 1.0 beta  has just been released.

After loads of work, online multiplayer for Stick Veterans seems to be progressing very well. In fact, it is nearly complete, as showing in recent tests. Today I ran the first playtest with 3 people; we connected over Hamachi , a free VPN solution, and it pretty much went smoothly (except for some non-critical bugs). Bad news is that LAN connections might be the only thing supported , with little hope for worldwide online games. I already mentioned that in the game's web pages ( Itch.io post / Gamejolt post ) but I shall lay down the whole story here. In commercial games, online multiplayer is achieved by putting up dedicated 24/7 servers (preferably in various locations throughout the world) to which the players connect. In non-commercial games  (like Stick Veterans), we have to make do without servers, as they cost money (non-trivial amounts of it). As such, we simply allow any player to act as a server themselves, and other players connect to them. This is called...

Stick Veterans  has been revamped into version 0.9.6 , with the most important addition being the Capture the Flag  game mode.

Version 0.9.5 of Stick Veterans  has just been released, marking the 5th update of this game.

Two days ago I published a new version of Stick Veterans . Version 0.9.4 marks the 4th update released for this game, and also the one that has taken the longest.

Stick Veterans  has only recently reached the "100 maps milestone", a feat for which I need to thank you guys.

For all the hackers out there reading this shitty blog and my foolish thoughts i have a book recommendation for you. The Hacker Ethic by Pekka Himanen, Manuel Castells, Linus Torvalds

Last year i visited Hamburg between 27-30 December for Chaos Communication Congress (probably the largest hacking conference of Europe). So i'm posting here a link dump of some interesting projects that i've encountered. freifunk.net abcdd.org no-spy.org cschh.de hamburg.freifunk.net tails.boum.org

Been a long time since writing a blog post so i'm coming back with this freebsd kernel module. I've started last week to code this freebsd write blocker and hope that it'll end up being a kernel module. Still there's much work to be done (reading about all that filesystem shit, kernel services that deal with the reading storage devices and blablabla). Anyway if you don't know what a write blocker is you can check it right here . There's also a linux write blocker so it's a good start for me even if freebsd kernel differs significantly from linux kernel I'm progressing regardless of the reading stuff so you can check my project or even test it by the time the first beta release will be announced. You can look at the code on github anastmag/freebsd-write-blocker . I hope that from now on my blogposting will be more frequent. I'm planning to write an article about my first trip to Fosdem 4-5 Feb that took place this year. It was amazing. ...

Global Game Jam  ran a couple weeks ago, and this year I was able to participate. The jam's theme was  "Waves" . Teaming up with Chris Sotiropoulos , we made this little game :

Quick update on Stick Veterans : new version 0.9.3 with a few additions / fixes / improvements. Flamethrowers (honestly this alone should be a good enough reason to post). Slowmotion mode (that too). More discernible team colors, gameplay improvements, AI behaviour revamped Other stuff blah blah Download from Itch.io  or Download from Gamejolt