Better Games

(Continuing my treatment of Facebook games)

Given the number of * Wars games there are, there is sadly little content of interest. There is some adventure in exploring new content, but no staying power. They eventually devolve into a treadmill of grinding through new content, and waiting for new content. More jobs with different names dropping equipment with higher numbers and different names.

However, there is one group developing interesting games, and another with one good game (Nitrous Racing, and several boring games: Monster Defense and Fish Life, among others).

The first single-handedly developed five games that I was willing to try. Three of those were pretty good.

The games are Mad Scientist, Robot Builder, Robotico, Star Conquest, and War Machine.

The first three are good enough, that I will break them out separately. Star Conquest was a good try, and worth discussing. War Machine is actually one of the best * Wars games, but, ultimately, is not enough better.

I wanted to give a peak today of a tool I developed to help with the timers (in Tcl of course!).

Let's say you have some zombies cooking in 14 minutes for Mad Scientist, or you need to wait 45 minutes for more energy. You're in the middle of New Stars or NedOS programming, so you might get distracted and forget to look at a clock for an hour or two...

Enter Snack. Snack is a Tcl package for generating sound. It is really easy in wish:

$ package require snack

Now you need to load an alarm sound to notify you that it is time.

$ snack::sound s -load $path_to_file

Then set the alarm:
$ after [expr ($hour*3600 + $min*60 + $sec)*1000] {s play}

That's it. Just set the variables {hour,min,sec} and up-arrow to the after, and hit enter.