Notes

Feedback is one of the coolest things in my work. It's not my first year of programming and I've written a lot of tools, mechanics and interfaces. However, ever complicated mechanism working as it should is… I don't know. It's like hearing “yes” on a graduation party, again and again :-)

It partially compensates another side of the coin. I mean a case when you are trying to understand one hundred levels of some application's abstraction for the hundredth time, again and again, through a lot of mistakes. Meanwhile, it's 2 a.m. already and coffee had replaced blood in your veins ages ago.

A great adaptation of Papers, Please, despite being only ten minutes long. Savochkin is excellent, and everyone else delivers too, including the screenwriter. Fitting both drama and a plot twist into that running time takes skill.

Considering that video game adaptations rarely set the world on fire, this one’s a real gem.

Sometimes when you developing some complex mechanic you don't have enough time time for the adequate naming of variables. As a result, there is a lot of mysterious WhatTheHeck, ApplyMagic and bunch of other LivingFailures.

It's what you should avoid despite it looks funny. You'll rewrite code you've written month or two later and it will be hard to shame its author because it is you.

This horror game may be niche, but it really is rather good. The atmosphere of a school at night, filled with dark secrets, works brilliantly. Tension rarely lets up, and the game keeps surprising you where you least expect it. I’m an old hand at the genre and still jumped more than once.

The plot changes depending on the player’s actions, so reaching the end of the story takes more than one playthrough. I think it’s worth it. The antagonist alone is a good reason: you don’t often get one who’s more interesting, appealing, and tragic than the heroes and everyone else put together.

Ever since my colleagues and I redid the automation at KPAT, it has been running on Bus Terminal Management. It’s a 1C:Enterprise configuration, so hooking it up to pretty much anything is fairly quick.

First up, we wanted to send the bus schedules to E-Traffic and Yandex Schedules.

What Are These Services?

The first, E-Traffic, is Russia’s largest aggregator of bus terminal data. It collects information about scheduled departures and acts as an electronic ticket agent. Passengers don’t have to fight their way through individual bus terminal websites: E-Traffic lets them buy a ticket from anywhere to anywhere.

As for Yandex Schedules, it’s one of the Russian search engine’s side projects. Like E-Traffic, it’s mainly for passengers, and it can quickly put together fairly complicated routes with transfers. It doesn’t sell tickets, though.

How Did We Build the Export?

At first, we built a fairly elaborate setup to send schedules to both systems. We worked our asses off, until a conversation revealed that E-Traffic already knew how to pass schedules on to Yandex. Just like that, half the job disappeared.

On the technical side, we made a web service for Bus Terminal Management. E-Traffic sent a SOAP request, the service gathered the bus schedule data from the 1C:Enterprise infobase, and back came some XML.

We didn’t even have to write code to fetch schedules from every terminal in the KPAT network: all schedules are created and stored in one place, the main node of the distributed infobase, and that’s where we deployed the web service. In the end, coordination took longer than programming.

Where Can You See It?

The inner workings aren’t visible from outside, and there’s nothing unusual there anyway: robots talking to robots, big deal :-) The result of their chatter is much more interesting! For example, here’s today’s schedule from Kemerovo to Novokuznetsk.

I have translated Stardew Valley fan manga on a wave of enthusiasm at the end of July (SV is an enormously addictive farmer simulator which went out a couple of years ago).

It was an amusing experience. Firstly, an author of the manga is Chinese and her work was already translated from Chinese to English. I'm not sure what was the bigger problem — cultural differences or language skills, but several frames were a bit difficult to understand what's going on. Secondly, I've figured out that it's a real challenge to pick proper Russian words and not to get something like a quote from an official government's letter in the end.

So, a part of sense had lost during the process, I guess, although I tried to keep everything I could and even had a word with the author in order to solve the most problematic cases. It was quite funny — I don't know Chinese, she doesn't know Russian, so our a bit poor English was the only way to understand each other.

Something could have been translated better, I suppose, and several pictures definitely could have been changed more accurately. But you know what? Hell it out, perfection is a cruel mistress and I like the result yet. Yeah, there is no big deal or something like it — a drawing style is quite common, a plot has no significant differences with the game, but… I don't know. Perhaps, visual novels made a too sentimental son of a bitch out of me :-)

Thanks to Alice for helping me with image processing, Lem for helping me with the translation and Marika for the inspiration. And, sure, thanks to Quantus for the manga.

An incredibly addictive farming simulator made with enormous attention to detail. People who know what they’re talking about will tell you about the soundtrack, the lovely pixel art, and all that. I’m no good at that stuff. I just bloody loved it, that’s all :-)

Actually, I will say something about the soundtrack. During winter, the game sometimes plays Ancient, one of the simplest yet most atmospheric melodies I’ve ever heard in a video game.

A mixed bag. On one hand, it does a vivid, colorful job of showing madness from the inside. The plot is generally decent, though at some point the ending becomes predictable.

On the other, it’s fantastically linear, with almost no challenge or logic to events. The story is told by a madman, inside his mind, and that leaves its mark on the gameplay: you can’t predict what you’re supposed to do in the next room.

So you wander around looking for triggers, trying to make sense of whatever weird thing comes next. A melting phone? Exploding clocks? Now and then, something really gets to you, like the letters between the hero and his wife. Those moments are rare, and they feel like a breath of fresh air.

Overall, I don’t regret playing it: it’s a sad, heavy story, with a lot of care put into the art and voice acting. But I suspect a lot of meaning drowned in its sea of symbolism.

Not an outright failure, but very, very weak, especially compared with the first game or its DLC. There are barely any moments that scare you, stand out, or make you feel much of anything. And when one does come along, dying yet again soon wipes it out.

On the positive side: great voice acting, decent graphics, and good attention to small details. There are a dozen or so good scenes and half a dozen gorgeous shots that might make it worth playing. They’ve put some work into the world, though it mostly makes you feel sick and disgusted rather than scared, unlike Mount Massive.

Everything else is simply bad. Clumsy stealth in impenetrable darkness; endless scripted chases; bland characters we barely get to know; frequent bugs like floating in midair or enemies walking through objects.

To top it off, the ending is utterly empty. Yes, you can piece it together, and it all seems logical, but… How do I put this? After eight hours of running from psychopaths, you want something to show for it. Instead, you get an enormous, blazing, blinding pile of absolutely fuck-all, in every sense.

An ordinary, very human story, with something missing in a very human way. A spark, maybe? An idea? A point? The closer you get to the ending, the stronger the feeling that someone forgot to put soup in the pot.

I don’t mean it isn’t worth playing. The dialogue is very natural and beautifully written, and it does about three quarters of the work of drawing you in. The game also looks good, although I don’t quite understand all the raving reviews: something like The Vanishing of Ethan Carter had more impressive scenery. Overall, it’s a pleasure to play.

But the ending is frankly rushed, and there simply is no climax. Yes, I get what they’re going for: this is life, blah blah blah, more ellipses than full stops, blah blah blah. But come on! A story that asks a bunch of questions and answers none of them isn’t all that great, however much you tell me I need to be older to get it.

I came across How to Be Perfectly Unhappy, Matthew Inman’s comic about happiness, unhappiness, and what those words really mean.

The guy has a great sense of humor, which you’d expect from the creator of The Oatmeal. When people like that get serious, this is often what you get: something funny, wise, and, I don’t know, disarmingly honest.

An interesting post about terms and wording best avoided when designing interfaces. The aside about authentication and authorization amused me.

And, of course, the list looks incomplete without the famous contacts, and semiconductors :-)

Just finished reading “Harry Potter and Methods of Rationality” — the epic fanfic based on the you-know-whose universe. An author is a tough specialist in the field of artificial intelligence and interesting on his own, but his book is what I insistently recommend to read.

First of all, it is the magnificent rethinking of the original saga. Many aspects seem not less fascinating, I may say; moreover, the plot itself is certainly excellent — I read two-thirds of the story without switching Gene Wilder off :-) Nevertheless, the author was skillful enough to make all points meet and finish a storyline in such a pretty way that I had almost nothing to complain about.

In any case, this book is a well way to meet with a lot of scientific and just interesting things which were mentioned along the way. The author is smart and his book is a smart one too.

Excruciatingly tedious gameplay that boils down to finding scraps of paper. A limp, disjointed plot cobbled together from mystical theories about the Dyatlov group’s death. As horror, it’s a complete zero. There’s little to fear: just blind monsters and occasional jump scares.

The only good bits are the visuals and sound. The people behind those did a fantastic job. Sadly, what you end up with is just a huge map with almost nobody in it, almost nothing in it, almost nothing to do, and, worst of all, almost no reason to do anything.

One of those games so good that talking about it would be unbearably tedious.

Let’s do something else. I don’t know which of these two tracks better captures the new DOOM’s energy, Gavin Dunne’s Hell to Pay or JT Music’s Fight Like Hell, so I’ll link both.

A short but atmospheric and rather punishing platformer.

It reminded me a little of LIMBO, except this isn’t the afterlife but a dark, mysterious forest full of smart, scrappy hedgehogs :-)

This definitely isn’t the best BioShock in terms of gameplay, but it’s so beautiful and detailed that I don’t really feel like criticizing it. Besides, there’s a wonderfully tangled plot! And Elizabeth :-) David Brown has already said it all in his “Limelight”; I have nothing to add.

I’ll definitely play it again, just to look at everything once more. I’m not sure how I’ll approach the DLC, though: to me, the story of Columbia and its children is as complete as a story can possibly be.

A short, vivid adventure game. No challenge, just a family story where the parents got so caught up in their own problems that they missed something really important.

I think the sister’s journals could have been removed entirely: the story comes through perfectly in the objects, letters, notes, and photographs. It would have left more mystery, more room to figure things out for yourself.

Though I have to admit, as it stands, it’s damn touching.

I found a beautifully presented diary by a Russian conscript who is now a designer at Art. Lebedev’s studio. Interesting, funny writing that you can’t put down.

Happy holiday to everyone who’s served!

The 1C:Enterprise configuration we implemented at bus terminals in Kuzbass a couple of years ago now has a nice new website.

I think it’s great! Partly because it’s one of those projects chipping away at a tired old myth about 1C that just won’t die, even among IT people: that it’s dull, sluggish software for accountants, while real programmers only write C++ (or Java, JavaScript, insert your choice here), and similar nonsense.