These are my links for August 14th through September 4th:

• Downloads (2010-2011 Fall) | CS 193P iPhone Application Development –
• UIPickerView – Creating a simple picker view | iPhone SDK Articles –
• Steve Jobs: Jerry Pournelle Reflects –
• Dreamstime – Stock Photography
• Fotolia.com – Royalty Free Stock Photos
• Evernote software company plans new studio, aggressive hiring in Austin –
• Five Ways to Speed Up Lightroom – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog –
• Does the 1796-97 Treaty with Tripoli Matter to Church/State Separation? –
• Python documentation –
• Why most people don’t finish video games –
• Tracking the Trackers: To Catch a History Thief | Stanford Center for Internet and Society –
• Violet Crown Trail | Hill Country Conservancy –
• South Austin Medical Clinic –
• World War II in Photos – Alan Taylor – In Focus – The Atlantic –
• Understanding & Using Ansel Adam’s Zone System –

Back in July, I made a video to illustrate how Project Reality plays, and to have a few laughs with some CoFRs I had been playing it with.

After getting a few comments on it in the last couple weeks, I just realized that I only casually linked it here on drzy, without so much as an introduction or the embedded video from YouTube.

So, as for the introduction: This video shows me playing Project Reality Mini Mod on a public server that happens to have a few other CoFRs also playing. I think this is version .32 of the game.

Those that play this BF2 mod know that you only can identify teammates. There is no way to tell who an enemy is specifically in-game, and there is also no concrete way to tell you’ve killed an enemy aside from standing over his still-warm corpse.

I took a demo of an especially long and intense play session on the map Road to Kyongan’Ni. I had no idea that I had any interaction with anyone I knew, aside form players on my team. It turns out, I had a pretty good battle with my friend Shack and his squad. By pretty good, I mean: they killed us, ran up the hill, avoided an oblivious tank completely, and then killed us a couple more times.

So, I wanted to show this to him and the other CoFRs. I recorded the demo and uploaded it to YouTube. It’s got a fair amount of views and a few comments over the months. At the least, it’s worth listening to the soundtrack by Matisyahu. And although it seems like it at times, I did not synchronize my camera movements to the songs, it just worked out that way.

Red Orchestra was born a mod for Unreal Tournament 2004. I played it quite a bit back then, when the total numbers of people playing per night was less than a hundred. But, as I’ve said before, I’m a glutton for obscure mods.

The game came out of obscurity somewhat when they worked a deal with Valve to develop a standalone version. The new game was called Red Orchestra: Ostfront 41-45. I didn’t purchase it when it was released, but I did participate in the beta before. The addition of vehicles, and improved physics were nice, and the gameplay only got better. I can’t remember exactly why I wasn’t interested enough to purchase it, so I will blame it on a random MMORPG.

About a year ago I was goaded into finally picking up the game by some CoFRs. While my heart belongs more to PRMM, I have varied my gaming diet with influxes of RO.

As usual, I don’t get to the point of the post right away. Here it is: The Red Orchestra team hosted a contest for custom maps, and the result is a new map pack of 32 maps approved and released. I got mine from fileplanet but the main Red Orchestra site lists some alternative download sites. Fileplanet does have a great writeup on each of the maps in the pack.

These maps look great and the fact that there are so many probably means I will spend time that I should be using to study or code to play all of them.

I am shocked to see that I have never made a main page posting about the main draw to the forums.

Urban Dead is a web-based zombie vs. survivor game. I didn’t think I would get hooked on a web-based game since the time I ran Black Nova here (only old school drzy fans will remember… all one of you). I have personally been playing this since last year.

The game has inventory, levels, ability to play as a zombie or survivor, and has pretty regular updates and additions. It creatively uses javascript and CSS to make an almost graphic looking naviagtion system, while still being entirely graphic-less. Although, there are many firefox extensions released that enhance the game.

We have a survivor and a zombie group here at drzy that grew from a CoFR and friends group. Check out the Urban Dead portion of the drzy forums if you are interested in joining our group and have some connection to me, CoFR, or one of the members of our group, MRH.

More info about the game itself is at the Urban Dead Wiki