Having reading an article on de facto standards (or informal standards) and still thinking about my Lbreakout2 level sets and while looking at a Sokoban game it occured to me that the Tile based levels used by so many games could quite easily be represented in X11 Pixmap Format. Most games prefer to use a text based file format to make it easier to edit things without any specialised tools and the X11 Pixmap format is one of the few text based image formats. Using a popular existing graphics standard game developers could make use of a much wider variety of existing tools and it would have other benefits like allowing the easy generation of thumbnail size previews to show the what the levels look like at a glance. As an example, I drew Minesweeper level in XPM format.
In a similar vein I have long wished I had the time and skill to take the dia.shape format and reorganise it to use SVG with some custom markup (instead of custom XML with embedded SVG) as this would make it easier to reuse SVG tools for generating Dia shapes and it would also mean that librsvg could generate thumbnail previews of Dia shapes for us in Nautilus, the Gnome File Manager program.
Garden State
Finally released here in Ireland about a week ago, a big group of the tramps[1] all went to see Garden State.
With any luck the rollout of digital cinema in Ireland will mean in future there will not be any more waiting months and months for for sloppy seconds when films eventually finish their run in the U.K. and the prints can be shipped over. The wait for House of Flying Daggers was so painfully long I was tempted to borrow it from a friend who had bought it while in Asia and not bother seeing it in the cinema at all. Despite this kind of messing hordes Irish people still go the cinema regularly.
The film itself has an interesting timeless quality to it. I don't that in a grandiose way but rather that it doesn't seem very heavily anchored to a particular time or location despite the title being an allusion to New Jersey. The film didn't particularly grab my attention or excite me, the amount of reviews and publicity material I had seen probably didn't help. Dealing with a state of numbness and feeling of emptyness and trying to find ones place in life makes for an interesting but not very uplifting story. Even seeing Natalie Portman in her underwear didn't help. There were some funny moments, although some of them like the petrol pump gag seemed very incongruous[2]. The film was likable enough and I simple interesting story but I my expectations were too high and I was underwhelmed. Zach Braff and Natalie Portman played their parts convincingly and they did keep me moderately entertained for a couple for a couple of hours. All in all a fairly average experience.
I wish I'd written a script where I would get to kiss Natalie Portman. :)
[1] Not real tramps of the hobo variety, but what we call the trampolining club for short.
[2] It feels like bad pretentious writing to use words like incongruous when I could just as easily say out of place. And even using the word protentious probably makes me sound even more full of my self. Hopefully someday I'll look back at this and marvel at my apalling lack of writing style and laugh (or go back and change it before anyone notices).
