It’s a space game.

Orbiter 8 is a space trading game set in the year 2140. The game plays out across the whole of our galaxy. Players will move from star to star in their Orbiter 8 series ships and conduct intergalactic trade to earn sweet, sweet credits. Those credits can then be used to buy larger shipping containers as well as weapons and armor. In addition to trade, players will be able to blow each other up.

In order to trade stocks, you need to have a brokerage account, visit https://www.stocktrades.ca/ to get one.

It’s a blockchain space game.

Orbiter 8 runs on the Ethereum network, which is a distributed public ledger. To record things in a ledger, the network has to put entries “in order”. You can imagine why this make sense for financial transactions. It is also useful for keeping track of which order players take turns in. In Orbiter 8, gameplay is throttled by the speed at which the network can process transactions. Thus Orbiter 8 is a turn-based game where you don’t have to wait on anyone else to take your next turn, but you do have to wait on the network to record your last turn. This is leading to a casual style of gameplay.

Because Orbiter 8 runs on Ethereum, each turn will require a small micro-transaction to be processed by the network. This fee is built into Ethereum and the money goes towards the miners who run the nodes that sustain the network. Some designers of Web 3 dapps include additional fees that go to themselves, as authors of the dapp. While I have no issue with that model, I’ve chosen not to include any such fees in Orbiter 8.

It’s a pure-blockchain space game.

The ethos behind not charging fees goes much further. With Orbiter 8, I would like to design a dapp that strives to follow the “unstoppable code” mantra that you often hear discussed in the distributed ledger space. What this means is that all of my core gameplay will exist within the code that runs on the Ethereum network. This will provide the “logic” and store the game state, but players will need a graphic interface to represent the data and provide menus to interact with the contracts. This is the game client.

I am building the Orbiter 8 client to be a standalone Web app. By standalone, I mean that you do not need to access the client over the Web itself. I intend to design it so you can put a copy on your hard drive, on a USB stick, or anywhere and it will work. In the true spirit of an unstoppable distributed application, we can release the game client on an immutable storage space such as the Interplanetary File System. However, although the client can be run from anywhere, I do plan on providing a website that will serve a copy of the game client and other Web 2.0 content.

One way to imagine this paradigm is to use the familiar game of chess. The part of chess that makes it a game are the game board restraints and the rules of the game. You can thus imagine the those rules being managed by smart contracts that record each turn to the the distributed ledger. Taking turns would require sending specific message to the contracts for the game. The game client makes it easy to send those messages by showing the user a graphical representation of a chess board and allowing human friendly user interfaces such as being able to click and drag a chess pieces to a new place on the board.

This paradigm means that anyone could potentially build a totally different game client that interacts with the exact same game – including myself. The client I am building today, designed to run in a web browser, uses simple vector images and provides attractive but rather simple graphics. I could potentially rebuild the client entirely using an advanced game engine such as Unreal or Unity without having to make any alterations to the fundamental game itself.

It’s also going to take a while.

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, I’ve been working on Orbiter 8 for more than a year. I have broken the concept down into 4 achievable milestones that, once complete, should get me to a “beta” version of the game. I plan to release a public demo for each of these milestones and I released Demo 1 of 4 in Janurary of this year (it’s buggy, but it works). I am actively working on the second demo and have made a lot of progress. I hope to finish and release Demo 2 before the end of this year.

I don’t intend to do it alone.

To be honest, I have already had a lot of help. An artist and friend Walter |2| Costinak provided all of the branding behind Orbiter 8, including the name itself. I’ve taken |2|’s design direction to heart which includes keeping the graphics and interfaces as clean and simple as I can. I’ve also had a few friends and colleagues offer help structuring my code and have even provided pull requests along the way. I have so much appreciation for the support and it has encouraged me to see this project all the way through.

However, I believe this project may be more than just a one off. I am deeply interested in what can be done with Web 3 dapps and have been looking into recruiting other creative and establishing a studio. |2| already named it Partavate. Perhaps I’ll have more to post about that in the future.

You’re invited to ride along.

I’ve started setting up ways to communicate about the progress of the game. First there’s the official Orbiter 8 website. There you will find a link to the Orbiter 8 Twitter account as well as an invitation to join the Orbiter 8 Discord group. I have also setup a form to collect email address for a newsletter which I have not started sending yet. You can find that form near the bottom of the website’s homepage. Not only are these good ways to keep tabs on me, if that’s what you’re into, it’s a great way to support me, also – if that’s what you’re into.

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Meanwhile, I use Facebook on a daily basis. Sometimes I keep tabs on my mobile. My problem with Facebook has recently become what my problem on MySpace used to be. I don’t like the software. I want something very different. I stay for two reasons. First, I know a lot of people who are active on Facebook. Second, I haven’t found an alternative I would want to encourage my friends to join.

The recent closure of Internet connectivity in Egypt during the revolution sends a strong message about ownership of the Internet. Ownership should be distributed. The tool that replaces Facebook should be distributed. Diaspora perhaps?

It’s really pretty simple. If we the people can hang on to the Internet – even if it means building our own – then we stand a chance. Otherwise, nothing changes from the way things have been for thousands of years. This is about to become very important.

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Unfortunately, Stephenf missed obvious points. First, the trend isn’t strictly with computers becoming more specialized. There’s also a trend of specialized devices becoming more computerized. Actually, we’ve had specialized devices for a long time. Take a car radio for example. A car radio was once electro-mechanical with no logic circuits. Somewhere along the way car radios became digital devices with lcd displays. Now, folks have full blow media centers inside their automobiles. There exists a giant webbing of technological points and the tendency is for those points to converge – for gaps to be filled in. Netbooks are an example of a gap being filled in. The devices are more powerful than smartphones yet more portable than laptops. Netbooks are popular because they filled a need.

But lets forget about all of that for a while, because it doesn’t actually matter at all. The previously mentioned facepalm had nothing to do with technology trends. Right now, the iPad is being discussed to the far reaches of the globe . The device did not have any features that surprised anyone. Yet, because of Apple’s reputation, the device is important. Apple has a cult following, this is what cults do… And Stephenf’s attempt to rationalize the value of the device with a long winded analysis of technology trends just sounds like desperation.

Maybe the iPad is in alignment with a technology trend. That’s not why the device fails us. It’s not even the lack of Flash support. The problem is the way the system is locked down. Apple cultists don’t care, they’ve already bought into iTunes and their collection of proprietary cables. By the time you’re a priest, you’re a lot less likely to question your religion. For the rest of the world, the ones that just want a simple specialized device for a particular job, we’re all going to buy the one that works with the rest of our toys while costing much less.

I don’t care if the device fails or succeeds. I know that there are enough people who don’t want an oversized iPod that there will be plenty of alternatives on the market. Google, Palm, and Nokia all have superior operating systems to put on competitive devices. All three of these companies have operating systems that can multitask. Go ahead, pretend that doesn’t matter. Even on specialized devices, it matters. Furthermore, all of these systems are far more open.

Being first to market doesn’t make you best. Ask the people who wrote the AltaVista search engine. The go ask the people who wrote the Webcrawler search engine. At the end of the day, the iPad just doesn’t matter.

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Interoperability

Remember when we first adopted technologies such as RSS feeds and publicly available Web application APIs? The design change was a shift to better interoperability for the user. The result was a better overall user experience on the Internet.

This concept is echoed all over in webOS’s design fundamentals. The recent cat and mouse game with Apple over iTunes is the most widely known and obvious example. This was never an issue for me. I use Ubuntu as my desktop operating system. There’s no version of iTunes for Ubuntu. Even if there was, I wouldn’t use it. I prefer to simply copy my DRM free music right from my hard drive onto the Pre. Increasingly, people want the media they buy to play on all the devices they own. With webOS on the Pre, it’s just that easy – without installing any additional software.

Palm introduced us to the world of device syncing a long time ago. This is how most iPhone and iPod users update their music now. Unlike these devices, the Palm does not require any additional software installations for the user. In fact, information like calendars, phone numbers, and even your facebook accounts are all kept in sync over the wireless connection.

Palm is making it a point to have webOS openly communicating in every way it can. In a way, a Pre running webOS is a well established little node of your social network. If you’re chatting with a friend over google chat and they go offline, you’ll automatically switch to sending text messages to their phone. The experience is seemless from your point of view.

Application Development

I recently installed the Palm Mojo SDK and built my first test app. With my existing CSS knowledge, I laid out a simple tile based grid with a sprite on top. I was surprised to recognize the MVC architecture of the framework. I’m familiar with MVC from building Web applications. Any Web 2.0 era developer will likely remember how things changed with MVC frameworks first came on the scene. The big difference here is that the language is javascript and the application runs on the smartphone client instead of a web server.

A significant section of the tech community criticized the SDK. It’s entirely true that developing games that take advantage of the machine’s hardware is not possible in the SDK. However, early homebrewers had 3D videogames running on the Pre before the SDK was released. The Pre and webOS have the capacity for gaming level graphics.

The Mojo SDK creates a low barrier of entry to thousands of Web developers interested in building smartphone apps. If you want a simple interface for your Web app, building it on the Pre is extremely easy.

Conclusion

If you’re like me, and you’re a fan of Clay Shirky, you might already see the formula that’s at play here. Palm opened up channels to lots of existing technology by improving interoperability in webOS. Then, Palm made it easy and inviting to come contribute to this new exploration. Palm didn’t just release a great smartphone, they created an architecture for participation. Thank you Palm.

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Apparently, group think settled on the title of “Social Media Expert” recently. Meanwhile, the title is being mocked in a few places. Here’s what I know about social media – it’s not likely, perhaps not even possible, to be a social media expert. If you knew everything about social media this morning (even though you didn’t), by this evening it will have changed and evolved so much you’ll have already fallen behind.

In fact, I would go so far to say that anyone who is willing to call themselves a Social Media Expert immediate brands themselves as a fake – a seller of snake oil in a roadside freak show. That’s not to say you’re not wonderfully gifted in understanding the ebb and flow of social media dynamics – but an expert you are not.

So here’s an alternative, call youself a Social Media Specialist. Face it, you’re not an authority on social media. Social media is greater than any one of us. However, if it is your passion, if you are dedicating a significant part of your energy to understanding it and being involved in it – then call yourself a specialist.

Hey, that’s just my $0.02.

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First, there’s this popular link over on GOOD showing the amount of calories in gasoline. Meanwhile there’s a considerably less popular link to NutriStrategy’s calories burned per exercise. From the first link, we know that gasoline has 31,268 calories per gallon. A Ford Escort gets upwards of 40mpg. Lets make the math easy and say it gets 31.268 mpg. (See what I did there?)

31,268 cpg / 31.268 mpg = 1,000 calories per mile

This car weighs almost 2,500lbs. The average American is slightly lighter. According to that NutriStrategy chart, running at 10mph for 1 hour burns 1126 calories for a 155lbs person. Can you run at 10mph for a full hour? Holy crap. Anyway, lets pretend you can. In 1 hour at 10mph, you’ll run (approximately, I’m no mathematician) 10 miles. (See, I’m doing it again.) So, lets do the math.

1126 c / 10m = 112.6 calories per mile

Neat.. so we’re looking at a car using somewhere between 8 and 9 times as many calories per mile. Now less toss weight in. The car was 2500lbs (not including the person) and our person is 155lbs.

2500lbs / 155lbs = 16.1

The car is moving the same amount of weight as 16 people. Now, you might say “but a lot of that car weight is the engine itself…” True, but the same is true for the human, no? So lets keep going a moment. Let see how many cpm per pound we’re using.

Car: 1000cpm / 2500 = 0.40 calories per mile per pound…

Human: 112.6 / 155 = 0.73 calories per mile per pound…

Assuming a car speed of around 60mph, that means a human uses almost twice as many calories per pound to move at 1/6th the speed of the car. That is assuming no extra load for either. Toss in another person or two and a couple of hundred pounds of gear, what do you think is the best way for you and your mates to travel over long distance?

You may also want to visit Technomono directly to their website https://technomono.com/best-shoes-for-after-bunion-surgery article and learn further information about foot injuries.

Now that I’ve blogged in support of the automobile, I’d like to say that I’m not a big fan of America’s addiction to cars. I’d like to see better use of trains, actually. However, pretty pieces of art showing calorie use compared is kind of a load of crap. Speaking of crap, I wonder what kind of numbers you would get if you compared the emissions per calorie consumed for a car versus a human? Ewww….

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Look at the current generation of mobile devices. While these devices do not “live up to the dream” of mobile computing, they are rapidly evolving in that direction. Here’s a day in the life of a future mobile device.

Your device is sitting in a magnetic cradle where it is connected via bluetooth to your media center. When the alarm goes off, the media center plays a soothing beach track to wake you up. As you wake up, you tap the top of your device and say “weather”. As you finish getting up, the day’s weather forecast is played through your media center. You shower, dress, grab your device and head out the door.

Walking up to your car, you tap out a few menus on your device’s perfectly fluid multi-touchscreen user interface. By doing this, you’ve remotely unlocked your car and started your engine. This also started a bluetooth connection that enabled the Amcrest GPS Trackers to boost your device’s performance as well as a bluetooth connection to the car radio. After resting your device on the car’s magnetic cradle, you tap the top of your device and say “news”. While driving to work, you issue a variety of voice commands such as “local” and “technology” to guide the news reporting. Today you’ve decided to listen to the latest BBC podcasts and live streams.

Once at work, you sit at your desk and pull up your tablet computer. In the bottom of the computer there’s a rectangular bay that perfectly fits your mobile device. You drop your mobile device into place and the tablet prompts you for a passcode. This passcode requires turning circles on the screen in a combination pattern. Once logged in, the tablet computer interfaces with our mobile device. The tablet can now use the networking capabilities of your mobile device. All of your personal files are now accessible by the tablet computer including those stored on a cloud. The mobile device works as an authentication system for online services. With your mobile device plugged in, when you go to Facebook, you are automatically identified via your mobile device.

Enough of the story, but you get the idea. Your mobile device will become what your wallet is today. It will also become what your

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Now how cool would it be if you could sync your iPod style device to this database at any time and keep it up to date with the database?

As an example, you could hook it up to a GPS and it could tell you interesting things about where you’re at in the world. Imagine driving past a national monument and the kids in the back seat are treated to a history lesson on the flip down video screen.

Another example, you’re laying on your back with your significant other and looking at the stars. One of you asks about a constellation so you pause that romantic background music long enough to get the low down on those heavenly bodies.

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What I would like to see happen next wouldn’t be as “easy” as our current batch of social networks. Because it’s not easy, I don’t expect the idea to ever take off. Still, I would like to see it happen just as much.

I would like to abstract the friends list concept entirely. This would also require abstracting the identity concept entirely (see OpenID and Sxip). Anyway, the concept is such that you manage a mast friends list somewhere. This would contain considerably more complex information than what most social networks offer now. It would allow for grouping, would show number of hops between you and another person, and would allow for public/private view management. Above all else, it would be build such that you are not locked into any one platform. If you build a personal home page, you could write an app that enables your social network. If you installed a piece of popular web software for content management on your personal site, it would include plugins to activate your social network.

Basically, what I’m getting at, is removing the social network from the walled garden of a service provider. Now instead of having a profile on a service, you have your own website that you can develop as you see fit.

I think that this concept will eventually happen in one form or another. It’s taking a while for the identity management stuff to catch on so I’m sure it will be a long time. I’ve thought about the problem in a few different ways and I’m not sure what the best method of solving the problem would be. Maybe it’s built on something as simple as defining relationships in your anchor tags.

Just thinking out loud about this one. If anyone knows of projects of this nature, please let me know.

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