i am ian wright

Performance, economy and price, you can’t have all three, there’s always a compromise. The difficulty comes in deciding where to compromise and figuring out which is best in the long run. For example lets budget £3,000 for a car, it needs four wheels and preferably four seats.

Compromising performance gets you a 2002 Ford Fiesta 1.4 Diesel, 64mpg and 68bhp. Compromising economy gets you a 1996 Skyline 2.5 Turbo, around 20mpg and over 250bhp. Compromising price gets you a 2006 Alpina D3 2.0 Diesel, 47.9mpg and 200bhp but for three times the budget at £9,000.

Personally I wouldn’t drive the Fiesta, couldn’t afford to run the Skyline or buy the Alpina but they illustrate the point nicely.  I’ve been looking at the total cost of ownership over a few years for a variety of cars that I’ve been considering. What I’ve found is that it’s cheaper over three years to buy a less economical car than to pay the premium for the “economical performance cars”. It’s food for thought so now I just have to make a decision.

I think I’m nearly finished making the new blog.  There are a few more tweaks to be made to my font and I’d like to add an instagram feed eventually.  It’s been interesting playing with the new update to Concrete 5 and the add-on to make it work with WordPress. I much prefer working with Concrete 5 to WordPress but I’m not sure how effectively the site will perform or how google will deal with it.  Essentially there is a WordPress installation which manages all the content for the blog and then generates a feed of that information.  There is then a plugin in Concrete 5 which scrapes and then injects that info into the Concrete 5 layout.

Hopefully I’ll be able to launch the site this evening to get a better idea of how it runs on a real server rather than my development one.

Following on from yesterday, I downloaded Borderlands from the Mac App Store along with Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Portal and Portal 2 from Steam.

Borderlands worked immediately with the 360 controller.  A good start.

Portal 2 also worked straight away but sadly none of the other Steam games recognised the controller.  I tried the exec 360controller command in the developer console but that didn’t make any difference either.  Having done more reading online it appears that the Mac version of Steam doesn’t support gamepads with the source games.  An article written in May 2010 mentions:

Gamepad support, despite it being listed in the options menus for games, is not something the beta has. I was told by Valve earlier that this support is definitely on their to-do list.

Unfortunately it looks like that may not happen as it has now been a year and a half since the article was written and it’s still missing.  I suppose it comes down to the fact that Half-Life 2 is now over eight years old so it predates the xbox 360, Steam and Lion. I’ll keep my fingers crossed that someone will work their magic and make these things talk to one another but I think the chances are slim.

I saw a lady on the gadget show playing games on a MacBook Pro with a 360 controller and as I already have two wireless controllers for my 360 I thought it was worth investigating.  A little bit of research online told me that you need a Microsoft dongle to make the wireless controllers work with a computer or I could buy a wired controller for less than the cost of the dongle.

I bought a wired controller this morning and I have spent all afternoon fiddling about but it doesn’t seem to work with Steam.

I installed the driver from here: http://tattiebogle.net/

The preference pane installed perfectly and all the buttons of my controller were recognised including the force feedback rumbles.  This was encouraging.

So I tried GTA Vice City which I had purchased from the Mac App Store.  The camera just span around and around.  I pulled out the controller plugged it in again and it worked briefly before the camera started spiralling again.  I pulled it out and tried again.  This time it worked a little longer but immediately started spinning while I was in a shoot out with the cops.  Not ideal.

Next I tried Half-Life 2 purchased on Steam.  At first the controller did nothing so I triedGamepad Companion which made my character intermittently walk into walls and then refuse to respond anymore.

I looked on Steam’s Support pages and found this article on using and xbox 360 controller with source games.  They mention using the configuration files with Half-Life 2 so I tried that.  Still no joy.

I have now read so many articles and watched about ten videos where teenagers tell me how easy it is to get the 360 controller working on the mac but I still can’t figure it out.  Perhaps it’s the fact that I’m trying it with old games?

I purchased Borderlands from the Mac App Store but I can’t download 9.51Gb on my 0.2Mbps connection so I’ll download it at work in the morning and try again tomorrow night.  Hopefully that will work otherwise the controllers going back and I’m giving up on portable gaming.