Linux love-in lovin’

In an effort to convince Future Publishing - the company that produces LXF - that Linux isn't scary, we're going to hold an "I Love Linux" day. We've snagged various laptops and workstations, installed a mix of Linux distros onto them, and on August 31st will setting them up in a meeting room and inviting anyone interested to come along and try it out. The question is, what would they like to see? Games? Web browsing and email stuffage? Office productivity? Or something that they don't already have on Windows? Send in your ideas...

On the Brain Party front, we're now past the 30 minigame barrier, and are approaching a release. With my short attention span, it's no surprise that I've recently started hacking on Fuzz (my other pet Mono project) some more in an attempt to actually make a release this side of Christmas. I haven't mentioned it on here for a while, so you'll be forgiven for forgetting that Fuzz is my grand attempt to make 2D game programming as simple as writing some XML and providing pictures.

Much of my programming is based around reading the HotPicks games section, seeing a game I quite like, downloading the game, then cloning it in Fuzz. I'm not terribly interested in making accurate clones (ie, many levels, or powerups, etc); instead, I just want to make sure the Fuzz engine can handle that type of game. In LXF84's HotPicks - soon to land on your doormats shortly, I'm sure - Mike reviewed TuxFighter, so I've produced a clone for Fuzz. However, in doing so I had a read through the Python source code, and it's fascinating because the author seems to use another language than English as his first language, and yet that hasn't stopped him from using English in some of his variables.

Sometimes one variable appears to mix languages, for example, "MaxMinusLenRaketen" didn't make much sense until I figured out that "raketen" was probably "rocket". Other times, the language changes across parts of a statement, such as "self.drehen = self.drehen + self.rotieren * PLAYER_ROTATION_SPEED_SLOW". Other lines are completely incomprehensible, and, to an English speaker, sound rather funny, such as "if self.drehen > 0 and Mauswinkel > 0". Anyway, I've got the game to work in Fuzz, and that's what matters.

In a big step forward for the mag, Mike has posted some original content to the LXF website - stuff that wasn't in print, and probably won't ever be in print. No, we're not becoming a webzine, but we think you folks would appreciate more to read on the site. What do you think?