Steam deals of the week

Steam is having one great Christmas bargain period with tons of games in it. Here's a small list of games you should definitely look out for:

Audiosurf - £1.49. If you like both music and games you should give this game a try. You can pick any song from your music collection and a level will be generated. Then you can go and try to set the all time high score for your favorite songs!
Braid - £1.74. Braid is an indie platform game that will have your brains do some overtime. It's a great looking game filled with clever puzzles.
Eidos Everything package - £35. For one low price you get every Eidos game on steam including the recent topper Batman: Arkham Asylum. It's worth it for that game alone but you also get the excellent Hitman games, the new Tomb Raider games, the two Deus Ex classics, Thief: Deadly shadows and a bunch of lesser games.
Evil Genius - £1.39. Be the horror of all James Bond wannabes. Dig a lair and fill it with heinous traps.
Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic - £3.49. It's a game everyone should have played. If you don't like Star Wars yet you will after having played through this classic.
Telltale Everything package -£35. Telltale games are the modern day snacks for us adventure lovers. They take episodic gaming seriously and release one game a month, something Valve could learn from. This deal gives you all their games. This includes their excellent Sam & Max games, the new Monkey Island games, the Strongbad series and the somewhat lesser received Wallace & Grommit and the Bones games. A must for every adventure lover.
Time Gentlemen, Please! and Ben There, Dan That! Double Pack - £1.49. Great little indy adventures. Haven't played them yet but bought them to play one of these days.
Titan Quest and Expansion - £4.99. If you like Diablo and have never played this game then it's about time you give it a try.
World of Goo - £4.29. My favorite game of last year and one of the best indie games ever created. Everyone should have played this game.

Comments

EvoLisa - Comparing two images: performance tuning

It looks like the program is rather slow. Using DotTrace , I took a look at where the bottleneck is. The method that calculates the 'fitnesse', how closely the created image resembles the original image, is where most of the time goes to. Can we improve that? So what happens in this function? We compare each pixel of both images to compare their ARGB values. The better they match, the better the result! How can be compare this? First, I tried using the naive approach: compare each pixel using a bitmaps GetPixel(x, y) . Do that however, and you'll quickly see how excruciatingly slow that is. Especially considering that even with an image of 333x333 you're already comparing a million pixels each time you compare two images! So, instead I tried using a 'FastBitmap'. It's a project I found which wraps the Bitmap and provides much faster Get and SetPixel performance. Using this instead, the performance went up by an order of magnitude! But we can still do be

EvoLisa - My own version

It's an old idea by now, can we recreate the Mona Lisa with fifty polygons by using random changes? The idea and original implementation by Roger Johansson can be found here . So, how does it work? You start with an source image. Then you create an empty image. We keep on doing small changes to this image. In my case this is one of these changes: Recolor our polygon Change the position of one of the polygon points Add or remove a new point to our polygon Add or remove a new polygon Switch two polygons After each action, we take a look and check if the newly changed image looks more like the original image by comparing each pixel. If it is, we continue using this one. If it's not, we discard the changes. Looks like a fun project! So I built my own version from scratch eight years ago, reusing some of the same ideas. Here's my result using the Mona Lisa: Mona Lisa with 50 polygons: You can see that it's the Mona Lisa but the details around the eyes and mou

You can leave your hat on

You always think that these things only happen to others. You may even think that they should have used better protection. And then one day you get this mail in your box from your guild leader: Hi there, I dont know if this email will arrive, but I will try anyway. I saw that your chars came online today. They are selling all your gear and equipment and they are not answering on guild chat. I think you are being hacked. Suddenly it's not someone else who has been hacked. It's you! So I quickly took a look in my second mailbox account and yes: someone merged my account to a battle.net account. My account has been frozen for half a year so someone must have hacked it and have reactivated it. Next thing I did was checking my characters and my armory page looked like this: Kind of them to put on my Christmas hat, it's the season!. Everything that a vendor will accept is sold however. After seeing that picture I really started to worry. They reactivated my accou

Carrandas corner

Search This Blog