It’s no secret that the King’s Quest series from Sierra Entertainment is by far my most treasured video game series, with King’s Quest VI holding the spot of my most favorite game ever. I’ve always had a soft spot for classic point-and-click adventure games, and certainly have noticed their absences in modern day gaming. I thought we might see them reemerge when the era of mobile gaming was just getting big, but there’s no real noticeable titles that have come from that. I couldn’t help question why that might be, and Ken Williams (Part of the husband-wife duo along with Roberta Williams, the creators of the King’s Quest series among other classics) makes a great point in a recent interview with Game Informer:

Yesterday, I took the day to sit down and really evaluate the Oculus Rift as a user and as a developer. Early in the week I also received my Google Cardboard and was pleasantly surprised at how well it worked, all things considered.

Using the Oculus Rift

Initial setup of the Rift was not too terrible involved. A couple USB cables, a sync cable between the camera and the Oculus Rift, power and I was up and running. Windows 8.1 actually also picked up the Rift, but I elected to pull down the latest runtime (at the time, 0.4.4-beta). Past that, I jumped right into a few things I had pre-downloaded such as the Oculus Tuscany Demo (video) in which you walk around a beautiful home and yard, the Welcome to Oculus (video) experience which details the paradigm shift that current VR tech can offer and A Chair in a Room (video) which offers an immersive horror/scare experience.

A little over a month ago, I had begun learning the Unity Game Engine. Five weeks in, I wanted to share some of the lessons I’ve learned in this short time and demonstrate that you can achieve some pretty awesome things in Unity in an extremely short amount of time. Additionally, I’ve also had to dive into some extremely amateur 3D modeling (which I’m less proud of).

First Stab at an FPS

This is the genre I usually default to. I generally play anything, but FPS seems to be my “default”. I figured I should start with something I was comfortable with, something I knew the mechanics of so I knew if something was “off”.

Late last week, a couple colleagues and myself discovered a small bug in Cloud Foundry’s gorouter in which a websocket upgrade was not completed if a comma-separated list of values in the Connection header was provided. A pull request was pieced together, submitted and is currently being looked at by Pivotal. However, I figured, why let the learning stop there?

There were several things that I was unfamiliar with:

This is a topic I’ve seen come up a couple times in the last few weeks. It started with Dr. Nic Williams when we were discussing share-my-cloudfoundry when he wanted to provide compatibility with Cloud Foundry v1 and v2 in the same application. This situation came up again with a personal project that I will detail later.

It required a bit of discussion, but I finally tracked down the answers. Although the cfoundry gem states that it is compatible with Cloud Foundry v1 and v2, after some digging, it looks like it’s only compatible with v2. To make things a bit more complicated, even though the old cfoundry library was moved to a separate repository, it retained the “cfoundry” gem name, meaning I could not include both gems in a single Gemfile.