Note: Last night after playing the Medal of Honor Beta I got quite upset and angry for several reasons, so much so I decided to vent my anger to a few friends on Facebook. This got a very unexpected reaction, all of the friends who read it agreed 100% with everything I said, and a few added more to the list.

So with all that in mind, I have decided to make the note public on this site, now regardless of whether or not you agree about the playing as the Taliban bit, the note does raise some very important issues about the final game; it is, after all, due out in just two months. - T

I've played a few games on the Medal of Honor Beta for Xbox 360 and I've already decided this thing is near enough to dead in the water.

First off, the multiplayer has all been outsourced to DICE, so bear in mind that the experience you have in the beta will be completely different to what you get in the full, singleplayer game. Hell, singleplayer is even going to use a different game engine, so it might not even look the same.

Staying with DICE, the game obviously uses the Frostbite engine (Mirror's Edge, Battlefield: Bad Company series and eventually Battlefield 3), but to be honest the game doesn't even look to use the original Frostbite engine that was shipped in Bad Company 1; textures are fuzzy, character models are blocky and destructibility has been completely removed. To test this I fired RPGs randomly at several walls and buildings, you see a poorly rendered puff of smoke and the wall, seemingly tauntingly, still standing.

Maps are tiny. This is coming from someone who has been spoiled by the Bad Company series, so take that with a pinch of salt. Battles seem overly concentrated on a small area and although you get the options of spawning at "base" or "in the action", there is hardly even 200 yards between the two.

You don't have enough health. You're dead before you know you're being shot at if you're not fast enough to get back into nearby cover (if any's around). That gets very annoying. Also, give me a health indicator other than an overly fake set of blood patches with varying opacity.

Gameplay is nearly identical to that of Bad Company 1 (Gold Rush). As attackers you get to crates, arm them, destroy them, and move on to the next base with more crates. As defenders, you try to stop this. In Battlefield this works really well, you're put into small squads with a large kit selection and there is a huge emphasis on sticking together. In Medal of Honor all the pressure is on you to go lone wolf it seems, and yeah, there are maybe smaller team sizes, but in real war you'd still have a squad. Oh and come on, two games later and in a different series, it's just boring.

Speaking of real war. What the actual fuck. They set the game in the Middle East. You play as a the fucking Taliban 50% of the time.

Last few things before I hit commit and instantly regret it for coming across as a whining geek. DICE has made the decision for you to use Call of Duty controls; there is no other control set. This is a very late beta, the 360 version was delayed due to some secret show stopper as it is but the game itself is due out in all of two months, I saw graphics glitches, massive lag, oh and I walked through another player. I don't remember that in Bad Company. Oh and finally, the main menu, the thing you expect to be the least taxing on the Xbox 360's processor/video unit: lags. Badly.

So then. That's a lot of things to be fixed, but I still won't buy this game, EA are trying to make money off the "War on Terror" and I refuse to play as either NATO or Taliban forces, but that's neither here nor there.

If you can find any of the few people who actually used B²e and have a conversation with them about life in the good old days, they'll tell you how much of a bare and lacking space the admin section of the blog engine was.

Contained in slash-dash (/-/) the admin contained only the minimum functionality needed for a very basic blog engine: you could create, edit and delete posts and not much else really; the settings page was present but only as a static file and all theme changes had to be done in a textbox slapped on at the last minute.

In 0.2 I introduced a whole new admin interface, the initial reaction was very positive and the layout, structure and theme has survived all the way up to version 0.4.0.alpha.

This, sadly, is where the story ends for this iteration of the admin, it was originally designed to be a companion to the old default theme, which as you can see from this site is now a bit... "different", it also quickly began to show it's limitations as I added new features, both on the user side, where things started looking a bit off to say the least (Port, to name but one), but also on my side, where as I came to add features the question of where to put them and how to integrate them became a large problem.

Step in then, the latest nightly of Square 0.4, and all ported and ready for the implementation of the content management (amongst other things) is the brand new admin:

The first thing you should notice is that the New Post page is now the default, I've realised that nine times out of ten when I reach the dashboard I don't want to know how many draft posts I have or whether a new version of the software is available, I want to write, and not as in writing in a "quick post" section where I'll most probably end up having to tweak errors in translation (default to draft being a biggy), but write as in write a fully fledged post right from the word go.

Another big change is the new menu bar: big, bright and simple. All features are now separated into their individual categories, write, edit, content and settings, rather than strewn across a one level menu in alphabetical order. This makes it incredibly easy to work out where you are, but more importantly how to get to where you want to go.

So that is it. Another day another preview of an upcoming release of SquareCMS. 0.4.0 is on track for release next month barring any major bugs arising and sets to include not only this fresh interface but the new default theme, new tags, a new content management area for images and videos and more, so, a lot to get excited for. Cheers.

Yet another insanely catchy, poppy song from the boys that brought us Goodbye Mr A and Worried About Ray.

With Square development well and truly back on track I thought it was a fairly decent time to take a step back and look at what has been done so far. More importantly I think it is time to take the wraps off some of the more exciting things I've been pushing into the release that will become Square 0.4.0.

Admin shuffle

With plugins now being implemented into the dashboard and more features coming down the pike, I thought it was best to reorganise the admin section of Square, while doing so I cleaned up the interface and gave it a new paint job, moving the Logout link outside the main navigation and integrating the product name directly into the layout. Of course this is not set in stone, so if it does not appeal to you or you feel the admin needs a complete re-structure and re-theme, just say so—before it is too late.

Content Management

Speaking of the admin, I am in the process of re-integrating non-HTML post editing, of course this means that code editing will now become available again through the code=t command in the URL, but in its' place, returning for the first time since B2e is Markdown, which is the editor of choice for the Wiki engine I created (Madina).

The final admin update, for now, is to announce that content management will finally be coming to Square, so you can upload and manage all the content you wish to use in posts or pages, including images, music and videos, stay tuned for a more detailed look at this feature some time in the near future.

Taking a leaf from Madina's book

I mentioned a few posts ago now that I wanted to rewrite Square so it took a structural approach more comparable to an MVC (Model, View, Controller) system than a glob of function files, and I think with Square 0.4 I have taken a massive step in the right direction, during the rewrite I was able to remove defunct and un-needed functions and claw back some more breathing space bit-wise, meaning that post-install (that is, if you delete square/install) Square is now a few dozen kilobytes smaller than it is in the current stable version.

That's all for now

After I fully complete the plugin system and fully add the content management features I will begin pushing out some public beta's of Square 0.4, similar to how I did with 0.3 so you can get a fairly decent preview of what is coming and get your plugins ready for the actual release.

Cheers, and Viva la Square!

I want to start off with a small factoid.

There has been around one major pre-release of Square every two months.

Considering Square started at version 0.2 that isn't really saying much, but I think that's a rather fast development cycle for one guy on his own, which is why I'd quite like the open source Square and stick it on Github in the hope one of you fine people pitch in some help. Before I'd do that though I think I'd have to clean up the Square trunk, because at the moment it seems to be following what I'd call the "Wordpress" dev cycle: shove everything in a function file and have no real structure. This is where Madina comes in.

I created Madina in just over two days, and although it still lacks some admin features it is pretty much complete for my needs. Madina is a PHP/MySQL Wiki that I built with the knowledge I have gained from writing Square and Pixel, it uses an MVC structure and as such has been incredibly easy to add functions to, I may release Madina some day once I finish the admin side but for now it is my little dev project that is giving me some very useful experience with the Model-View-Controller architecture which I think I will move Square to, so now a confession.

There are currently two versions of Square 0.4.0, the normal, true to life version which this site is running on which is fully featured and working, if not a little messy (like a ball of string) and another, I call "mad_square"–because it is both insane that I am attempting this but also based on Madina. This newer version of Square is currently functioning in only the simplest sense, and I am in the process of porting all Square's features over to it (which is better than just doing a straight copy and paste). I am fully expecting this massive and time-consuming change to do nothing speed-wise to Square, rather it will probably simply make it easier to fork and understand, so when this port is complete, Square 0.4.0 can be put straight onto Github and be given the relevant license.

So that's some updates on my current dev cycle, note that with me now making two versions of Square concurrently 0.4.0 might be a bit slower for release, because if my previous release schedule is anything to go by, you might be expecting a release next month–don't hold your breath please I don't want to be liable.

After reading this on Dan Cederholm's new Tumblr sub-domain I became intrigued as to how such a script would work which he simply describes as:

running a crontab every five minutes that curl’s stream.simplebits.com and saves the HTML source to a temporary file on simplebits.com. The script then copies the temporary file to simplebits.com/index.html (the copy was necessary as if the curl hangs for any reason, visitors won’t get a blank file)

Some five minutes later I have worked out the particulars script-wise for your pleasure, now I have no idea how to setup a cron task—answers on a postcard please—but here is the script:

<?php
// update.php

$curl_handler = curl_init("PAGE_TO_DUPLICATE");
$file_path = fopen("curl_temp.html", w);

curl_setopt($curl_handler, CURLOPT_FILE, $file_path);
curl_setopt($curl_handler, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

curl_exec($curl_handler);
curl_close($curl_handler);
fclose($file_path);

unlink("index.html"); // Better safe than sorry
rename("curl_temp.html","index.html");

echo "Success!";
?>

Credit to Dan and the fantastic resource that is PHP.net.

I saved this file as update.php on the root of my local server, pulling the contents of the Square CMS setup in the directory above it and it works a charm, your mileage may vary depending on your server setup.