Astrophotography Targets for October

Like a bag of trick-or-treat candy, October holds a multicolor variety of sweet targets: pale blue galaxies, red and teal planetaries, and deep red nebulae.

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Astrophotography Targets for September

The reign of the nebula continues in September, but the bright objects of Sagittarius give way to the fainter and subtler clouds of Cygnus.

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Transcendence Screen Saver

By popular request I've taken the Transcendence engine and turned it into a screen saver. Now you can watch your favorite Transcendence ships attempt to blow each other up, all while saving your monitor from dreaded burn-in.

Transcendence Screen Saver 1.0a

9.99 MB
14 August 2010

Astrophotography Targets for August

If you ever wanted to be an astrophotographer, August is the perfect month to start. In the Northern Hemisphere, August nights are warm and generally clear, at least in many parts of the Western United States. More importantly, August has more beginner-level objects than any other month of the year.

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M63

M63 is one of the first galaxies I ever captured. Now, with better equipment and some more experience I visit the Sunflower Galaxy again.

The Astrotourist: M63

Astrophotography Targets for July

July's most famous jewel is the Great Hercules Cluster, also known as M13.

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M106

Active galaxy M106 is one of my favorite targets.

The Astrotourist: M106

Astrophotography Targets for June

The month of May got all the good ones, but June still has some beautiful galaxies, including gigantic M101.

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NGC 4216

Beautiful NGC 4216 is flanked by two smaller companions: NGC 4222 (left) and NGC 4206 (right).

The Astrotourist: NGC 4216

Astrophotography Targets for May

May is officially recognized by every self-respecting international organization as Galaxy Month. You can see from this giant list of targets that some of the best galaxies are out this month, including M51, NGC 4565, M63, and M104.

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Backup Appreciation Day

I was taking my laptop out of its travel case on Friday night when my tired hands slipped and the laptop flopped out of its case and crashed corner-first to the floor. Though at first the damage seemed minor, a scratchy whine from the hard disk and an ominous black screen on boot convinced me the fall had been fatal.

I had almost everything on that laptop: the latest source code to Transcendence; six months worth of raw  astrophotos; specs and presentations for work (though no source code); and of course, gigabytes of music and photos. It was the perfect opportunity for another episode of Backup Awareness Day. But holding my battered laptop in my hands, trying once more to see if maybe this time it would turn on, I did not fear data loss because I had been religiously following a backup plan. In the event, I lost only about a hour's worth of work that I had been doing on the plane. Everything else was backed up.

I have two different backup strategies. For work I use a Live Mesh folder to store specs and other documents that I'm working on. Live Mesh synchronizes all those files across all my work machines and also keeps a copy in the sky (though the latter is limited to 5 GB). A few months ago, because of an experiment gone awry, I lost the BitLocker keys to my work laptop (which is essentially the same thing as losing the whole hard disk). But to recover, all I had to do was repave the machine and rejoin my mesh. All my files were automatically synchronized.

For Transcendence and other personal projects (including music and photos), I have an even simpler strategy: Every night a 3:30 AM a batch file runs that copies all modified files from my laptop to a terrabyte drive on my home network. Later, a second batch file will copy that backup drive to a second terrabyte drive.

On Saturday I bought a new laptop (an envy-inducing Sony VAIO—I might as well make the best of the disaster, right?) and by Saturday afternoon I had most of my applications reinstalled and all of my files restored. Ironically, the one thing that I did not back up was the batch file that did the backups and saved my data, an oversight that I have now corrected.

Transcendence Update

Since the release of Transcendence 1.0 last month, the attention the game has gotten has been great! Derek Yu (of Spelunky fame) wrote about it on TIGSource, and Reddit picked it up, neatly spiking my traffic to crazy levels.

All in all, more than 10,000 people have download the game (which means that the number of people who've reached Heretic without resurrect has probably increased by one or two).

Of course, new releases always come with new bugs, and this one is no exception. With the help of the community, I've fixed a handful of important bugs and put together a 1.01 release. The full version history is here.

Looking forward, I expect to work on the following things:

• Changing ships: Some of my plans for 2.0 will require this, but I want to get in the support for it sooner rather than later. Although the capability will not yet be used, the support will be there for mods to take advantage of it. This will probably show up in version 1.1.
• Game stats: One feature of sandbox games that I want to add to Transcendence is a more detailed set of statistics. For example, the game should track things like the amount of profit the player has made in trading; the number of slaves rescued; perhaps even the number of civilians killed. At the end of the game, the player can get a listing and compare their performance against others. This will probably show up in version 1.1.
• Transcendence server: Ultimately, people should be able to share their stats with others. The Transcendence game server would keep game records in a central place so that players can share their stats. I would also use this server to automatically capture crash information (Debug.log) and game-play information (e.g., how many people reach St. Katharine's star?). This probably will not show up until 1.2 or beyond.
• 2.0: Finally, I plan on spending a lot of time designing the post-Heretic game. I already have a lot of ideas, but I can always use more. Sometime in the 1.1 time-frame I will begin sharing some of my plans on the forums. I can't wait for your feedback!

As always, thanks for your support!

NGC 2903

After all the El Niño-spawned clouds this winter it was nice to have some clear nights again. This is an image of NGC 2903, one of the galaxies of Leo.

The Astrotourist: NGC 2903

Transcendence 1.0

After years of work, dozens of intermediate releases, and thousands of suggestions and ideas from the loyal community, Transcendence 1.0 is finally done! To everyone who has ever played the game, and especially to those who have patiently stuck with me for release after release, I offer my most heartfelt thanks. This truly could not have happened without you.

When I released Transcendence version 0.7 back in November 2003 I was confident that I could finish a 1.0 release in a couple of years at most. Even as recently as late 2008, I thought 1.0 would appear in early 2009. While I clearly haven't learned much about predicting my own development cycle, I have learned quite a lot in creating this game. In honor of this release I'd love to share some of what I've learned in hopes that it might be of use to some of you who are engaged in your own game projects.

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