I bought two indie games, Toki Tori and RUSH which I didn’t want to own eagerly in the 2011 Summer Sale on Steam. There were two reasons why I bought them.

a) They are good games(not as amazing as Braid or World of Goo), but they were really cheap during the Summer Sale which lasted for 11 days, it cost $1.24 each, absolutely a steal for a game with occasionally free updates and Steam achievements;

b) They come from the same developer, Two Tribes, which is very small and it has only two games on sale on Steam. They were to small and too poor to put their great games on the Steam storefront on any of Summer Sale days, Toki Tori and RUSH are good games and I thought I could buy them for such low prices and offer some support for a small growing developer.

The games are good but not good enough for me to put them in my Steam game library, while I $2.48 was not a big figure to me since I had bought thousands of US dollars worth games on Steam. And I bought it mostly because I wanted to show my support and see Two Tribes to grow and flourish in the near future and come with more fascinating video games.

Time flied while I was preparing for the English test, it’s already the end of June. I must be catching up.

Not to be disappointed, progress has been made since days ago. C++ is more complex than I ever thought of as it’s much more powerful than C with class, template and other great features brought in. While it’s still under my control, I’ll spend some real time on it to acquire details in order to use them flexibly in the future.

Well, I’m more confident about breaking into programming now. Good for me, hah! Best wishes to my family and friends.

Just finished the documentation from cplusplus.com. Good for me but still lots of work to do.

C++ Documentation from this website is really fundamental for a beginner like me but not enough. I need practice coding to enhance my understanding of C++.

Anyway, it’s a good start and let’s move on.

People from the U.S. think the math section of entrance exam of Harvard University in 1869 makes SAT or GRE kind of a joke, while this does not mean the former is not a joke. Actually math section of SAT or GRE is a joke for most Chinese students, and after a view of the test in 1869 I think it’s still a joke for Chinese high school students.

And so what? From Hacker News, I learned about a website called Quizlet this morning, which was developed five years ago by a sophomore high school student who is now planning to drop out from MIT in order to make his website better. Brilliant, it’s an amazing site which can also help me with my upcoming GRE.

In America, people are able to earn their reputations when they’re teenagers or even kids. What else could I say except WOW?! In fact, I also earned my reputation when I was a teenager, however, in school.

Whose joke is it? Shit!

How have you been in 2010? For my own sake, it’s great. But I don’t think it goes for everyone.

Valve really lives up to its reputation so it’s winning the fight against the wow Mojang AB in the competition Game Developer of the Year 2011 raised by Escapist Magazine. Well, good for Valve, it would almost make it again since it was the champion last year in the same contest in which I voted for Valve in the semi-final against Zynda which is developing games for Facebook and MySpace.

However, if we would say that it won 2010 for its Left 4 Dead 2 then how will Valve get itself equipped this year? Of course we have trailers of Portal 2 and announcements of DOTA 2, but is this all Valve can come up with to earn its prestige for the past 2010? While what is the situation of its opponents? Fantastic is BioWare that it brought us the epic Mass Effect 2, surely it has been blowing everyone’s mind that StarCraft 2 was published last year.

Is Escapist going to be a brilliant predictor? Because Portal 2 won’t be released until a few days after the contest ends. Thanks to the giant Steam forums, threads come up to call people to vote when Valve has made it semi-final after easily beaten Relic with Retribution and even Crytek with its new fascinating CryEngine 3.

It is very clear to me that this is a competition to choose the most successful developer in a single year not in a era of ten years or more, because it’s brought up every single year and named Developer of the YEAR. Please help me figure out how all of this makes sense.

After all, this is not pathetic, at least we have got a lot of free updates for several Valve games, you know what is pathetic? Can anybody tell me why Mojang AB could make its way to the semi-final this year? It’s barely nothing there on its Wiki page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojang_AB, with only one game published and another two in development in all its history? Are you kidding me? Then how about Rovio Mobile with Angry Birds?

What I can see from this contest is people’s likes and dislikes but not developer of the year. BioWare and Blizzard are absolutely more outstanding in 2010 than Valve or Mojang AB, it’s a shame that one of the former ones will be gone and no matter which it is, it is better than the latter ones, one of which will stand out in the next round.

I’m not showing my dislike of Valve or Mojang AB, to be frank, I love Valve. BUT I won’t vote this time because I can’t see any justice in the contest this year.

Fight for everyone who love you and that you love, we should and we will!

Though I’m not from a Computer Science major, I don’t think it’s very difficult for to make it. I’m good at maths and I have a good knowledge of C, so it seems not so hard for me to acquire C++ or whatever higher level languages.

C++ is great, I need to begin with the most powerful language because some companies only need programmers familiar with it, just like Valve Corp.

Question is that where I should begin. “Hello world!” is easy for me so I must skip what like that I can do to save time and learn things I don’t know. C++ Primer will help me a lot(thank mikefeng, he lent me this book), but I need to learn more about STL. Of course I do not know anything about I/O interface right now, that’s what I’m going to deal with after finished C++ Primer and STL.

While, I don’t think it’s a good time for me to get my hands on Visual C++, it makes me confused right now. But surely I will get there in the future.

Any suggestion about it, you’re welcome to post here, thanks in advance.

π (sometimes written pi) is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any Euclidean plane circle’s circumference to its diameter; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius. It is approximately equal to 3.14159265 in the usual decimal notation. Many formulae from mathematics, science, and engineering involve π, which makes it one of the most important mathematical constants.

Definition of π from Wikipedia.

3.14159265 is the exactest number that can come up from my mind. I tried to memorize longer but it often went wrong for that we do not need to use it so accurately like that, instead we make it 3.14 mostly. I love π and it is an amazing constant number that I’ve been using since the seventh grade. And I remembered that I was trying to calculate π from trigonometric functions, which is one of those many ways to calculate it out, using a calculator in my hand deep in a Saturday night. Much passion about it, hah?

We call March 14 Zu Chongzhi’s Day, named after the man all Chinese are proud of. He calculated Pi precisely to the seventh digit after the dot with no electronic computer during his years which was more than 1,500 years ago. With only pens and paper, he made it that far, that great. Zu is one of the most brilliant mathematicians in the history of China, we all admire him as he accomplished what seemed almost impossible.

Excellent job as Zu did, that is a level everybody loving mathematics wants to reach, including me. I know I can’t expect much recognition when I get there now, because Pi has been calculated accurately to millions of digits after the dot. So I have to make it to my own “Pi”. Time to go, wait to see.

PS3 with no SDK available to its community will no longer compare to Xbox…

Open source will be the mainstream in the future of digital platforms…

And you’ll be shamed if you do not look like a techie at all…

With only 250 employees in total, Valve Corporation makes itself a giant cash printer even more profitable averagely than Apple and Google in 2010. With new account growth of 178%, sales growth of over 200%, Valve has gained its reputation from every corner of the world.

Steam owns my loyalty since I was introduced to it by a friend. It is one of the most fantastic online service applications I’ve ever seen. For the first time I began to learn about PC games seriously, especially those singleplayer ones. On Steam, I’m aware that there are tons of games worth my time and energy besides Counter-Strike, StarCraft and WarCraft, in which I just focus on exercising to improve my skills of operating.

After finished Portal, Half-Life 2 series, Braid, Crysis, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2, etc, I realize that E-sports is only a small fraction of the gaming industry. The imagination of game developers is more admirable, which caused earthshaking changes of my view about video games. Wonderful games should get our recognitions not only as it’s a kind of entertainments but also a kind of arts.

Valve, which was co-founded by Gabe Newell, won its fame from No.1 online E-sports game Counter-Strike and No.1 scored Half-Life series in the world in 1998. Gabe Newell is almost the richest man in the gaming industry because he owns over half the company which is now estimated to be worth 2 to 4 billion dollars. Crazy is that the number of registered Steam accounts has increased to over 30 million. It’s firmly convinced that Valve made several hundreds of millions of dollars only in 2010.

Hold 70% of the PC games sales all around the world, now Valve has expanded its famous digital distribution client Steam to Mac, almost all the famous game developers are releasing games on Steam(except one magnate, Blizzard, which developed famous franchises like StarCraft, WarCraft, Diablo), EA, Ubisoft, Activition, RockStar Games, SEGA, etc. These tycoons sometimes are not willing to release their new titles on Steam because Valve requires profit cuts from games sold on Steam, but nowadays they feel compelled to do this. Late in 2010, EA planned not to release one of its most famous franchises Need for Speed Hot Pursuit on Steam at the beginning, which turned out that it’s very wrong. Within a week after the launch, we saw NFS Hot Pursuit appeared on Steam store.

People will buy Left 4 Dead 2 despite whether they already own Left 4 Dead or not, which means that gaming market is definitely infinite. Source Engine is some old, maybe it’s time to update it, while they can’t say that Valve might bought Epic Games(for its Unreal Engine is by now the most powerful game engine in the world) some day. While Valve has just set out, we can expect more miracles with the gaming industry stepped into its spring.