1-800-GOOG-411: now with maps

Posted by Arnaud Sahuguet, Product Manager, and Mike LeBeau, Software Engineer

In case you hadn't heard, a few months back we launched 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) in the U.S. It's a free telephone service that lets you search for businesses by voice and get connected to those businesses for free.

Today, your GOOG-411 experience just got better: during your call to GOOG-411, just say "map it", and you'll get a text message with the details of your search plus a link to a map of your results right on your mobile phone.

Try it out, and add us to your phone book while you're at it. Let us know what you think either by emailing us or by joining our discussion group.

Beep... please leave a message after the tone

Lugaid has Stand Alone in the FG forums. An RTS game for Windows, although I'm not sure if it is open source and able to download and play it yet. He says:

RTS game inspired by defence games. Project is almost finished, it needs more maps and graphic sets, maybe some more units. At first Interface is quite cumbersome, but not after you get used to it.

Fortress Logo

I will also note that we have started making progress with Fortress, inspired by the classic DOS game Castles. We have a logo, a very early prototype, and a wiki. Yesterday I compiled this list of gameplay elements that basically describe the key concepts of the game. Somebody has started working on models for the game too.

If you are interested, check out what we are doing and throw in your own thoughts in the Fortress forum. It will be an entirely open source project. A skilled artist or two would be really helpful. :-)

Despite my involvement (at the moment it looks like I'll be the main programmer) I have resisted bringing it up here since I don't want to abuse FG as a platform for pimping my own projects. However we have reached a point where there's a bit of momentum and it would be a good opportunity for people to provide some input before project direction becomes harder to influence.

Anyway, I'm actually away right now (back Sunday) so it's a short one today... *vanishes*

Gate 88 to become open source?

Before I start, a quick note of two changes made here. Firstly the main articles are linked on the front page now - they were getting buried too quickly. Secondly I reorganised FG forums to condense them a little - there were too many subforums. Also FreeForums seems to be a bit more stable now so There are handy links on the right of FG for the latest forum entries and help wanted sections. I encourage you to join in the open source game chat. :-D

I'm going to open with a Web 2.0 gripe. If you don't like gripes, skip the next paragraph.

The Ubuntu forums recently "upgraded" with a "Web 2.0" feature to display the thread tree. It's a feature of little or no use in a forum where people just want to read page by page. I have a P3 1000 laptop with 512 megs of ram. My iGoogle homepage does not seem to help matters either. Firefox becomes sluggish, sometimes hangs for 5-10s, with this new feature. Is this what Web 2.0 is? Bloat? Crapware in web pages? I remember playing Wing Commander II on a 286 10mhz. Admittedly it was slow, but it was a graphical 3D space game that came on a few floppies. As I write this, firefox grinds to a halt, consuming just short of 200megs. This is ludicrous. All to display some glorified text. Welcome to Web 2.0.

Sigh... ok, zen, be positive, karma, appreciate the better things in life...

The i-team project gets a new forum, meaning I have one less reason to browse Ubuntu's! Yay! It also got a wiki. By all accounts there has been quite a lot of coding going on by the i-team guys so I'm hopeful we'll see something fairly soon.

The rather more mature Atomic Tanks project, another game similar to Scorched Earth / Worms, just released version 2.4 of their game. The game is portable to Windows and Mac OS X although there only seems to be a Linux binary (rpm) for the latest version. According to the release announcement it also runs on DOS, which is quite interesting. Do I sense a DOS revival, FreeDOS stealing in on the alternative OS market to consign Linux to an early Internet grave? DOS was the most fun I ever had with an OS, but then again I was young and hence not very cynical. With age comes experience, with experience, cynicism. ;-)

It seems that the rather cool freeware abstract RTS game Gate88 has an open source future. I encourage people to lobby the author in a friendly manner to speed up the process. I got in touch yesterday although he has yet to reply.

Google Desktop now available for Linux

Posted by Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager

Just a few months after Google Desktop became available for the Mac, I'm happy to tell you it's now available for Linux users too. Google Desktop for Linux makes searching your computer as easy as searching the web with Google. Not only can you rediscover important documents that have been idling on your hard drive for years, but you can also search through emails saved in Gmail or other applications. All office files, including documents and slides created with OpenOffice.org can be easily found. Since some Linux users are program developers, Google Desktop was designed with the ability to search source code and information contained in .pdf, .ps, .man and .info documents. It also features the Quick Search Box ,which you can call up by pressing the Ctrl key twice. Type a few letters or words into the search box and your top results pop up instantly. Keeping with a global focus, you can use it in English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean --and it works with many versions of Linux too.

With this launch, Google Desktop is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. Try it out now and read more on the Google Desktop Blog.

Ga-Ga for Gadgets

Posted by Sep Kamvar, Engineering Lead for Personalization

Sometimes I think I know a lot. I can code like a champ and also know the difference between a Monet and a Manet. But on closer inspection, maybe I don't know very much at all. When it comes to fine wines, for instance, I can't tell the difference between Châteauneuf-du-Pape and Chateau-de-Cardboard, and if you asked me who played in the Super Bowl last year, I'd probably say the Dolphins. And lots of people at Google are like me: we know some things, and have some good ideas, but we certainly don't know everything or have all the good ideas.

So when we designed iGoogle, our personalized homepage, we baked that recognition right in to the product by developing the Google Gadgets API. Google Gadgets are applications that developers can create and anyone can embed into their iGoogle homepage or their own website. In the year and a half since we launched Google Gadgets, we've seen a lot of growth in this program. The developer community has created thousands of gadgets, and the top gadgets get tens of millions of pageviews per week. This is great for our developers, as iGoogle gives the gadgets broad distribution, and it's great for our iGoogle users, as they benefit from a richer variety of options for their personalized homepage. There have been some really interesting gadgets created, from to-do lists to Zelda, from a pair of eyes that follow your mouse around the screen to an entire customer relationship management (CRM) application.

We've been hearing from a lot of gadget developers that they'd like to spend more time developing if they could, and we've been thinking about ways to help them do that. To that end, we're happy to announce Google Gadget Ventures, a new pilot program that will help fund third-party gadget development and gadget-related businesses. We plan to offer two types of funding: $5,000 grants for gadget developers who want to invest time making their already successful gadget even better, and $100,000 seed investments for new gadget-related businesses. For now, applications are restricted to gadget developers who have more than 250,000 pageviews per week on their gadget.

Our hope with Google Gadget Ventures is to help create an ecosystem where developers can spend more time doing what they love -- building great gadgets. You'll find more details on how to apply on Tom's post on the Google Code Blog and the Google Gadget Ventures web page. I'm extremely excited to see what you all come up with!

New advisory group on health

Posted by Missy Krasner, Product Marketing Manager

Every day, people use Google to learn more about an illness, drug, or treatment, or simply to research a condition or diagnosis. We want to help users make more empowered and informed healthcare decisions, and have been steadily developing our ability to make our search results more medically relevant and more helpful to users.

Although we have some talented people here with extensive backgrounds in health policy and technology, this is an especially complex area. We often seek expertise from outside the company, and health is no exception. We have formed an advisory council, made up of healthcare experts from provider organizations, consumer and disease-based groups, physician organizations, research institutions, policy foundations, and other fields. The mission of the Google Health Advisory Council is broadly to help us better understand the problems consumers and providers face every day and offer feedback on product ideas and development. It's a great privilege for us to work with this esteemed group

Google Health Advisory Council
(Institutions or affiliations are listed for identification purposes only.)

Chairman
Dean Ornish, M.D., Founder and President, Preventive Medicine Research Institute, Clinical Professor of Medicine, University of California, San Francisco

Douglas Bell, M.D., Ph.D., Research Scientist, RAND Health, RAND Corporation

Delos M. Cosgrove, M.D., Chief Executive Officer, The Cleveland Clinic

Molly Coye, M.D., M.P.H., Chief Executive Officer, HealthTech

Dan Crippen, Former Congressional Budget Office Director & Reagan White House Assistant

Linda M. Dillman, Executive Vice President, Risk Management, Benefits and Sustainability, Wal-Mart

John Halamka M.D., M.S., Chief Information Officer, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center & Harvard Medical School and Chairman, Healthcare Information Technology Standards Panel (HITSP)

Bernadine Healy M.D., Former head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Health Editor & Columnist, U.S. News & World Report

Bernie Hengesbaugh, Chief Operating Officer, The American Medical Association (AMA)

Douglas E. Henley, M.D., F.A.A.F.P., Executive Vice President, American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP)

David Kessler, M.D.,Former FDA Commissioner, Vice Chancellor-Medical Affairs & Dean, School of Medicine, UCSF

John Lumpkin M.D, Senior Vice President, Director of Health Care Group, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

John Rother, Group Executive Officer of Policy & Strategy, AARP

Anna-Lisa Silvestre, Vice President, Online Services, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan, Inc.

Greg Simon, J.D., President, FasterCures

Mark D. Smith, M.D., MBA, President & Chief Executive Officer, The California HealthCare Foundation

Paul Tang, M.D., Internist & Vice President, Chief Medical Information Officer, Palo Alto Medical Foundation (PAMF) & Chairman, Board of Directors, American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)

Sharon Terry, M.A., President & Chief Executive Officer, Genetic Alliance

John Tooker, M.D., MBA, F.A.C.P., Executive Vice President & Chief Executive Officer, American College of Physicians (ACP)

Doug Ulman, President, Lance Armstrong Foundation

Robert M. Wachter, M.D., Professor of Medicine, University of California-San Francisco (UCSF); Associate Chairman, UCSF Department of Medicine; Chief of the Medical Service, UCSF Medical Center

Matthew Zachary, Cancer Patient Advocate, Founder & Executive Director, The I'm Too Young for This! Cancer Foundation for Young Adults

Update: Added links to two more bios.

9,000 and counting

Posted by Rodrigo Vaca, Channel Marketing Manager, Google Enterprise

This month, we passed the 9,000 mark for enterprise buyers of the Google Search Appliance and the Google Mini. That's a great beginning, but we want to reach out even farther, which is why we're embarking on a partnership with Ingram Micro, one of the largest global distributors of technology products in the world. Ingram has extensive reseller relationships that can help us deliver the power of search behind the firewall to businesses of all sizes, more efficiently and at a larger scale than we could on our own.

Both the Google Mini and the Google Search Appliance are available immediately to qualified Ingram Micro solution providers in the U.S., with plans for a phased rollout in other regions through the end of 2007.

Contact us here to obtain a Google Mini or here for a Google Search Appliance.

Sauerbraten, Vega Strike, Project Kilo

Did I not mention this Sauerbraten update? I don't recall doing so, and I swear it was not a thread in their forum at the weekend despite being listed as posted on the 12th June. Anyway... it fixes a whole lot of bugs, adds graphical enhancements, and cleans up scripting support a little. Probably more of an update for people making mods/games with Sauer than players but, shucks, I love this project. Embarrassingly this was a 2006 release... *oops*

There's the possibility of a StarShip Troopers: Last Defense, the Glest mod, becoming available for FreeBSD.

The Java Classic RPG project has posted a snapshot for anybody who wants to play with it in it's very early stages of development. Work continues at an impressively frantic pace, soldiering away on features. Hopefully a modeller or two can start contributing to the project to make the artwork updates as impressive as those to the codebase.

I keep pestering the Vega Strike team to make a new release. I, and others, frequently get pointed to the SVN version. However it turns out that there is a Windows build of the executable made every few weeks, although you will still need a subversion client to get the latest version of the game data.

Talking of pestering projects, I'm trying to convince the Project Kilo guys to use Sauerbraten as their game engine. Project Kilo is an effort (well, currenlty mostly an idea) to create an immersive single player 3D RPG game. Sauer is the engine also behind the Eisenstern project, another 3D single player RPG effort with slightly less lofty (but still impressive) goals than Kilo.

Eisenstern

The main feature of Sauer is in-game multiplayer map editing where all map elements are defined as cubes or combinations of cubes, it makes a lot of sense to map modellers. I think the combined nature of Sauer's very easy map creation and it's development supporting Eisenstern makes it really suitable for, at the very least, prototyping a concept like Project Kilo. With little or no code the Kilo team can be up and running in no-time, and (being open source) they can build additional features into Sauer as they require them and possibly even feed back upstream. I think it's a far more pragmatic route than taking an engine like Crystal Space or OGRE3D and creating the game logic from scratch. Map modelling itself will become far more of a burden using this approach, let alone the extra effort to make a playable scenario.

I'm not saying that Crystal Space and OGRE3D don't have their place in development - they are important game creation tools - but if somebody has done 95% of the work for you like the Sauer team has, by implementing a game [engine] that not only makes map modelling easy but lets you roam around massive maps with fancy effects and is easy to customize, then surely it makes sense to start there instead of starting far behind them.

People should do as I command suggest because I am always usually right. ;-)

Put your photos on a map, and Picasa on your phone

Posted by Ping Chen and Joel Onofrio, Software Engineers

If you've ever seen a great picture and wondered where it was, wished you could visit that exact spot yourself, or found yourself itching to share a great photo with somebody -- but you were away from a computer, we've got two new features on Picasa Web Albums to help you out. First, we're excited to let you know about 'Map My Photos' -- it lets you show exactly where you took your favorite snapshots. When you share an album with friends, they can see your best photos arrayed on a map (or even Google Earth). It's the perfect way to showcase a memorable road trip or a globe-trotting vacation.

Here's how to get started: when you create a new album, just fill in the optional 'Place Taken' field. You can even drag and drop individual photos directly onto a map, and use built-in Google Maps technology to pinpoint exactly where each was shot. For a quick peek at what the results look like, check out our test gallery.

But wait! There's more. We're also launching the first version of Picasa Web Albums built specifically for mobile devices. You already have a couple of pictures stuffed in your wallet, and maybe even a few wallpapers stored on your phone. But what about all those snapshots you can't carry around? With Picasa Web Albums for mobile devices, your favorite pictures are always with you. So next time you're at a loss for words when describing just how awesome, cute, or beautiful something really was, just grab your phone for visual backup.

Of course, the mobile version of Picasa Web Albums lets you keep track of photo updates from friends and family, too. Just click 'My Favorites' from the main screen to see the latest photo albums that your contacts have posted to Picasa Web Albums -- you can even post a quick comment on their photos, using your phone. Thumbnails and photos are automatically re-sized for your device's screen, so pictures look good and download fast. All you need to get started is a phone with a web browser and a data plan; learn more here.

As you enjoy your summer travels, remember to take plenty of snaps, and share the most beautiful places in the world (and don't forget to use your phone to show off pics from back home!).

More organizing tools

Posted by Darren Delaye, User Experience Designer

We collaborate using Google Docs & Spreadsheets so often at work that I now have more than 300 online documents. My project teams create shared documents and spreadsheets for everything: taking notes in meetings, planning product launches, analyzing usability studies, and much more. I also share docs with friends at work to plan baseball outings, and my fiancée and I are using a shared spreadsheet to help manage the guest list for our upcoming wedding. In other words, I'm one of many with a desperate need to organize all my online documents. Thankfully, I got the chance to design a new interface for Google Docs & Spreadsheets that includes folders and some convenient ways to quickly manage and access all my documents (and if you're like me, your own collection of online docs and spreadsheets is growing daily).

Now when you sign in, you'll see a new interface that lets you create personal folders for each of your projects, and drag your online documents and spreadsheets into them. On the lefthand side, you'll see a list of all the people you are collaborating with; click on any name to see all the files you're working on with them. To read more about this new interface, head over to the Docs & Spreadsheets blog.

The wedding planning continues -- but at least all the docs I need are now easier to find in a folder. Hope your own organizing is easier now too.

Introducing Google Earth Outreach

Posted by Rebecca Moore, Manager, Google Earth Outreach

When Google Earth launched two years ago, it was fun to see that many people around the world used it to fly to their homes, navigate around their neighborhoods, and explore the planet. But when, in September 2005, it was used to rescue stranded victims in the aftermath of Katrina, we realized that Google Earth had the potential to be a significant tool beyond personal exploration. We began to see public-benefit KMLs created for things like environmental protection and global public health. A large number of non-profit groups started contacting us, asking good questions: can Google Earth help us illustrate our projects in a new and more compelling manner than text and slideshows? Are there methods or tools for importing our existing data into Google Earth? Can you tell us about any other non-profits who’ve been successful at using GE to reach a new audience, raise awareness, gain volunteers, inspire people into action, and create a tangible impact?

We listened carefully and worked on this for more than a year, and now, the answer is “Yes!” Today we're formally launching Google Earth Outreach, a program designed to empower non-profit groups with the resources, tools, and inspiration that they need to leverage the power of Google Earth for their cause. This is where public service groups can find online guides and video tutorials, inspiring case studies and a gallery of high-quality, public-benefit KML. We are offering free Google Earth Pro licenses to qualified non-profit 501(c)(3) organizations. And the Earth Outreach team is also moderating a forum to foster discussion, exchange ideas, and give technical support.

We're excited to see the birth of Google Earth Outreach, and it's truly an honor for us to be able to support the critically important work of these groups. As Dr. Jane Goodall said, "Only if we understand can we care. Only if we care will we help. With Google Earth Outreach, more people have the chance to see, to care, and then to act."

Update: Here's some video from our Google Earth Outreach event on Tuesday. Enjoy!

Why we're buying DoubleClick

Posted by Alex Kinnier, Group Product Manager

In April we announced that we're buying DoubleClick, a leading company in the ad serving business. When we made this announcement, we gave some of our reasons. But because online advertising is complicated, I thought I'd step back a bit and offer some more context. If you're an expert, please bear with me, as some of what follows will seem elementary to those already familiar with the online advertising world. If you're not, I hope this gives you a better understanding of how advertisers, publishers, ad serving companies, agencies and other companies such as Google all fit into this exciting new mix.

A little history
In the earliest years, online ads were simple banner ads on websites. Advertisers would purchase these banner ads for those sites their customers would likely visit. A tire company, for example, would place banner ads on sites for automobile enthusiasts.

An innovation followed: Text-based ads targeted at search. Type “drip irrigation” into a search engine and up pop ads, or “sponsored links,” to gardening service and supply companies. This development made online advertising accessible to small advertisers for the first time. According to a May 2007 IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) study called the "Internet Advertising Revenue Report," text-based search ads now account for 40 percent of online ads. Google, Yahoo! and MSN are the leaders in managing this category of text-based ads.

The same IAB study notes that display ads account for roughly another 40 percent of online ad sales. Unlike text ads, these may incorporate 3-D graphics, full-motion video, sound and user interactivity. And the remaining 20 percent consists of other categories such as email, classified and lead-generation ads.

Three portals – AOL, Yahoo! and MSN – lead the industry in display ads. Each has more than $1 billion in annual display ad revenue. Content sites such as CNET and ESPN.com are also in the game. Google, however, has been a minor player in display advertising.

Meanwhile, ad serving companies such as DoubleClick, Atlas, and MediaPlex have been helping advertisers get their ads onto these sites and measure how effective the ads are. Since Google has never played in this space, acquiring DoubleClick will enable us to complement our search and content-based advertising capabilities. Its products and technologies will help to improve online advertising for consumers, advertisers and publishers.

By enabling our AdSense network to work with DoubleClick’s delivery mechanisms, for example, advertisers can obtain more precise metrics in order to judge the effectiveness of their campaigns. The combination of the technologies and expertise of Google and DoubleClick will help publishers better monetize their unsold inventory, thus helping to fuel the creation of even more rich and diverse content on the Internet.

What ad serving is
As you might expect, ad serving is the act of serving, or delivering, ads to websites. Google and DoubleClick play different but complementary roles in online advertising. Google primarily sells ads, and DoubleClick delivers (serves) ads. The relationship between Google and DoubleClick is analogous to the relationship between Amazon.com and Federal Express. Amazon.com makes money by selling a book to the consumer. Federal Express makes money by delivering it to the consumer.

For some perspective on the relative size of the ad serving business versus the online ad sales business, some industry estimates put the latter, globally, at about $20-30 billion. According to various eMarketer studies (available by subscription), estimates of ad serving, on the other hand, are many times smaller -- probably 20 times smaller, or even less.

How ad serving works
There are two types of ad-serving products: publisher and advertiser-agency. Publishers use ad-serving products to manage how and when the ads they have sold appear in their websites. For example, will the ad appear on the front page of the site, or on a subsequent page? The process of placing the ad on the appropriate page and in the appropriate size is managed by the publisher’s ad server.

In addition to placing ads in the right location at the right time, ad servers report on the performance of the ads. This is an absolutely vital function. Real-time performance reporting enables advertisers and agencies to change the content, and timing of ads almost on the fly. The value to the advertiser-agency of an ad-serving company such as DoubleClick is having a single place to measure and report on all online campaigns for ads that run on different sites across the web.

How Google and DoubleClick differ
Google makes money primarily by selling text-based ads to advertisers and their agencies. These are displayed on Google.com and partner sites through our AdSense program. We get paid when consumers click on the ads.

DoubleClick is in the ad-serving business and has two primary products. DART for Advertisers is an ad server that gives advertisers/agencies the tools to plan, deliver and report on their online ads. DART for Publishers gives publishers the tools to place ads on their site, optimize them, and assess placement to make the best use of their ad inventory. For the most part, DoubleClick is paid by advertisers and publishers to serve and report on ads. These are two vital and interrelated functions. Allowing agencies and advertisers to deliver ads in the right context and monitor their effectiveness maximizes the return on investment for a given ad or campaign. Ultimately, this leads to better and more relevant ads for the consumer.

Why we're buying DoubleClick
In summary, we're buying DoubleClick because:

1. DoubleClick's products and technology are complementary to our search and and content-based text advertising business, and give us new opportunities to improve online advertising for consumers, advertisers and publishers.
2. Historically, we've not allowed third parties to serve into Google's AdSense network, which has made it hard for advertisers to get performance metrics. Together, Google and DoubleClick can deliver a more open platform for advertisers, and provide the metrics they need to manage marketing campaigns.
3. By combining Google's infrastructure with DoubleClick's knowledge of agencies and publishers, we can create the next generation of more innovative ad serving technology, one that significantly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of online advertising.
4. To manage ad inventory, some of the largest publishers use DoubleClick DART for Publishers – but a good portion of it goes unsold. It's our view that the combination of DoubleClick and Google will help these publishers succeed by monetizing their unsold inventory.

We believe DoubleClick can help Google deliver better, more relevant display ads, which improves the online experience of consumers. From a technical perspective, Google will also be able to get web pages to load faster by reducing latency from ad servers. Publishers will benefit by making more money from remnant inventory and – as has been the case with other technologies we've acquired – we hope to make ad serving more accessible. Smaller publishers would get access to DoubleClick's ad serving technology, enabling them to better compete in the global marketplace.

Advertisers and agencies will benefit, too. AdSense will support certain ad tags so advertisers will be able to use a broader selection of formats in our ad network, improving ad relevance. And the experience for advertisers will be more efficient, because there will be an ad server that provides consolidated reporting and management of display ads on all properties and networks. More generally, we'll be able to use our technology and record of innovation to improve the quality of existing products in the marketplace. We intend to invest heavily in R&D and product development to respond to the demand from publishers, advertisers and agencies for better tools.

In short, Google’s acquisition of DoubleClick will benefit all parties in the online advertising business, including advertisers, publishers, agencies and, most importantly, consumers.

Debunking reasons not to open source indie freeware games

There are many significant indie game projects that are committed to creating a quality free game where the developers are afraid of the consequences of making the development public by publishing the project under an open source license.

Now I'm not saying that open source is the only way people should choose to release their indie games - different situations do need to be evaluated on the merit of the benefits brought by being open source - but frequently, when asked, the reasons for declining to open source a project are usually bogus.

One of the problems is that the topic of open source is a polarized subject - people are either strongly against it or strongly for it. Those falling into the latter category are almost always experienced with using and/or developing open source software, and in my experience those against open sourcing of their projects often do not fully understand the concept, do not appreciate the benefits it brings, and suffer irrational fears of what might befall their project should they license it as Free Software.

Over the years I've tried to change the minds of several game project developers, usually met with stubborn resistance. Hopefully this article can help projects earlier on in their development cycle before people have committed themselves to keeping their free game project as a closed source one.

Frequently cited reasons for keeping a game project closed source:

• People will cheat


• The code is a mess


• Control of the project will be lost


• Somebody will steal my/our game


• The game will be spoilt (i.e. we don't want to reveal the story)

People will cheat

True, there will always be those who try to cheat at any popular game. However do you think security through obscurity will prevent this? If anything, it is worse; the project may be less secure because the design and implementation are not under scrutiny. You are better to open it up early so people can point out the flaws and they can be addressed early - to change a design or implementation in a mature project is far more difficult and the subsequent upheaval will upset many players.

The code is a mess

I've seen this one countless times: "I want to open source my project but the code is a mess, so I'll wait until I clean up the code."

I've also seen this one many times: "My [piece of hardware] died and I lost everything :'(."

And this one:

That last one was silence. People often get distracted by real life and disappear. An exciting looking set of screenshots become vapourware and onlookers get frustrated.

Nobody writes perfect code or the perfect design the first time, even seasoned pros. Nobody cares if you have hacks or the code is a mess. They do care if you release a fun game. Guess what, if your project is open source and attracting interest, somebody may even rewrite parts of it for you. If you suffer a hardware failure or find something else that takes you away from your project or the Internet, or you even die (it happens!) then you have left a legacy that others may continue.

Control of the project will be lost

Ok, if you are an asshole this is probably a valid point. Abrasive people will upset others, beyond the point of redemption. So all you obnoxious and inconsiderate baffoons have me here, I can't debunk this for you. In which case loss of control of a project may be an indication that you should correct your ways? A blessing in disguise! However, for decent people ;-) it is a myth...

Control of the project remains in the hands of the contributors. Sure, if you stop and people continue your work you may lose control but then you are no longer working on it? If you get re-involved in the project you will find developers receptive. Otherwise you keep as much control over your game as you allow others to have (you don't have to let everybody have commit access or admin rights) and almost always contributors are very, very respectful of the original author.

As long as you work on your project, you will have significant influence. Exchanging direct control for influence is almost always going to be a healthy trade off. You will find more developers means better design decisions, better implementations. Although implicitly you lose complete control, you will still be directing the efforts of others. After all, the original game was your vision so people will listen by virtue of that alone.

If there is a rift so deep between contributors that a fork is created, the fork will be a different game, and you will be remembered for giving birth to the concept of this different game should your own project subsequently stagnate. In reality there are few forks, especially of open source games. Other than situations where development of the original game has all but completely stopped before the fork, or the fork has the blessing of the original author, I can't think of any bitter forks off the top of my head. TuxKart and SuperTuxKart maybe? When was the last TuxKart release? Are the games as similar as the names? :-)

Somebody will steal my/our game

People can't get away with stealing a project. I've seen a few cases with applications and usually the community backlash and lobbying shuts down the violators. I just can't see a commercial game company getting away with ripping an open source game. Not only will it be an open-shut legal case should it go that far, you'll have a large pool of support from a vast community of open source advocates. To be honest, I bet there'd be lawyers who'd even take on the case pro bono for you.

If it's not a commercial violation, then it'll be a fork of the game. Developing an open source game is not easy. It's a long hard slug. Forks only occur in extreme circumstances:

1. There is an impasse between key contributors in desires for project direction. The games will be different. You still were the original author(s) and still will be credited for your work as long as you were not a total asshole.


2. Your project stagnated. Isn't a fork and continuation of your work better than it bitrotting and decaying into a part of Internet history?

Ok, some of your artwork and media may make it into other open source games, but isn't that a compliment? Are you not pleased that your efforts have made the world a more fun place by contributing to another game? Hell, you can put it on your CV, that your work is in projects X and Y because it is that good.

The game will be spoilt (i.e. we don't want to reveal the story)

For a complete game, the majority of players will not go to the kind of lengths necessary to have the game spoilt for them (i.e. look at the code or research the story).

Some people will play the game early in development but they form the community that tests and contributes to the game. Somebody has to know things early, and the fewer that do, the fewer can make the project happen. The more people contribute to your game, the better it will be. Sure, a few people will not get the opportunity to enjoy a fresh experience with the final game, but they got to experience it develop, which is a different kind of enjoyment. And the rest of the world will get a better game because of the extra input.

Also people do not have immutable memory. If I play a game again after years of not playing it, I do not remember everything. It is ridiculous to be worried that people who try the game in it's early stages will have their experience ruined should they return later once the game is ready.

Afterword

There are freeware game projects where there is significant momentum and organization behind them. The benefits of making such projects open source are often not immediately that significant. However frequently these projects lose that momentum, a community that has existed on propaganda and screenshots gets frustrated and in the end the project actually upsets more people than it brings enjoyment to - you had the opposite effect! Games are supposed to please people!

If the project is open, the community can rally should problems be encountered, and the chances of your game making it become far higher than if nobody has access to your work.

If momentum is never lost, the extra contributions, the extra eyes and testing to remove bugs, the extra demand for porting to other operating systems will all benefit your project. There may be administrative hassle (forums etc) but almost always for decent projects volunteers will take that on for you. The community is a resource and open source projects can and should use their communities. Freeware titles just can not do that.

Make the smart decision, open source your freeware game. There is a good reason that those experienced with open source strongly advocate it's application. It works. It's not a miracle cure for a dying project though, so don't wait until you have already lost your way, strike whilst the iron is hot. It is never too early to open source your freeware game project!

New dictionary translations

Posted by Miguel García, Software Engineer, Zürich Engineering Office

Google's automatic translation is handy for getting translations of complete sentences, paragraphs, and documents. But when you need to translate a single word, a bilingual dictionary can be very useful because it gives you translations for the many possible meanings a word might have. With that in mind, we've added dictionary translations to Google Translate. Now, for example, if you want to know how to say "play" in Spanish, you can use our dictionary translation and learn that depending on the context it can be "jugar", "tocar", or "obra", among others.

A smooth Apps move

Posted by Vikaram Gupta, Software Engineer, Google Apps

Today, it becomes a lot easier for organizations and schools to start using Google Apps email services without leaving any of their valuable email data behind. Our new self-service mail migration tools enables administrators using the Premier and Education Editions to easily copy existing mail from an IMAP server over to Google Apps. Now businesses and schools can spend less time worrying about "maintaining infrastructure" and focus more on the things that matter most to them -- like healthcare or educating students.

One of the first organizations to test this out, Central Piedmont Community College, replaced its old email system for 30,000 users in just 3 weeks. And that process came down to 3 million emails flying from their server over to ours in just 24 hours -- more than 2,000 emails per minute, all without missing a beat.

Once you're part of the Google Apps family, you can be sure there are more exciting things to come. In the past month alone, we added five new improvements to make it even easier for organizations to share information and work together.

King's Quest

I'm not a big fan of just repeating what I see on the Linux Game Tome so I'll be brief about these two: Warzone 2100 version 2.0.7 and X-Moto 0.3.0 got released. The former is a bugfix release (which was sorely needed) and the latter quite a lot of new features (notably hotseat multiplayer) and a new maintainer.

A few days ago I lamented about Adventure Game Studio not being available for Linux. I really should do my research before making such assertions... it is. Not only that, there's this groovy project to take all the hassle out of finding and installing AGS games - the Adventure Game Goddess.

Forget about boring hand tasks and enjoy the games ... One click: the game is downloaded, installed and set up. One click: you are playing

How cool is that? You can even run Kings Quest VGA I using the AGS Linux version, with a few tricks. How cool is that as well? I wonder if the same process works with KQ VGA II? So many questions...

For those unfamiliar with the King's Quest series of games, it is probably the most promininent series of the genre. There's a lot of history and a lot of hardcore fans, many of whom were disappointed when Sierra was consumed by Vivendi Universal which eventually caused a rift with the lead author and the demise of the series after 8 games.

The Silver Lining

Some fans felt so strongly that they went on to create the The Silver Lining, a spectacular looking fan-made project to create a 3-game (or 3-chapter) continuation of the series. It was formerly entitled King's Quest IX before Vivendi Universal made them ditch the official affiliation. Sadly, The Silver Lining is closed source (but freeware) and Windows-only. I did lobby a while back to make them open source it and use OpenGL instead of DirectX but it fell on deaf ears. I must say, I was not enamoured by The Silver Lining tech demo either, whilst the stills look great the animation and scene transition was shakey at best, and there was a lot of aimless wandering around with very little to interact with. Still, it's just a tech demo, so I shouldn't be too harsh.

There's even a remake of KQ III (complete but Windows only and freeware) and KQ IV (in progress - although I'm not in the mood to read up on it but I bet Windows only and freeware). Project X looks interesting - produced by the same people behind the KQ III remake, Infamous Adventures.

I would do a KQ article with more information on and screenshots of each game, but it's too much freeware and not enough open source for my liking, so this little ramble will suffice and you'll just have to take my word for it that everything I mentioned looks at least ok or possibly even rather lovely. I reckon there are enough links to keep keen adventure gamers happy. ;-)

Medieval / fantasy models required

There's a couple of newish irrlamb gameplay videos. Worth watching if you want to see what the game is like and how devious some of the gameplay can be. For me, irrlamb is definitely one of the most exciting open source game projects around at the moment, being both innovative and challenging in it's gameplay.

Expect some really nice graphics in the next UFO:AI release. A few modelling maniacs seem to have gotten very interested in contributing, which is always good for an open source game project.

OpenTTD Hi-res

As of some time last week, an interesting major change landed in the OpenTTD development trunk - loading of 32bpp graphics and levels of zoom. It's one of the big steps along the road to getting high resolution graphics into OpenTTD. Also it provides a platform for the artwork contributors to see their art in game rather than have to paste it together to showcase it. A completely Free (no TTD required) and beautiful OpenTTD just got one step closer to reality. I'm hopeful that maybe a beta of this work might appear before the end of the year. The image to the right is an actual in-game shot! :-)

Java Classic RPG, the Eye of the Beholder & Dungeon Master inspired project, gained climates this week. If only the quality of the artwork matched the quality of the code developments! I was thinking about this, along with working a bit more on Fortress, and observing Scourge developments, and realising there are very few open source / free medieval and fantasy model resources going. Most projects with good artwork in this genre are either pixel art (like Wesnoth and Daimonin) or restricted (like Planeshift and Eternal Lands).

So, yeah, I think the scene needs a bit of dedicated medieval and fantasy modelling to happen so that all the exciting medieval and fantasy projects can pull quality artwork from a common base. Maybe there already is this kind of stuff available, do you know where? Or maybe there are people out there interested in modelling this kind of stuff. Do you know any? Spread the word!

I'll end today on a coding note. I was working on a layout engine (as part of Vexi, an open source project I lead) and came up against a problem where conversion between ints and floats and back (Java) was causing the assigned space between child boxes to be less than the parent box (box being a layout construct - don't worry about it). The solution was a bit of casting voodoo. I love it. :-)

// casting voodoo to make sure we don't have leftover pixels

diff = child.contentheight + (int)(slack+total) - (int)total;

My attempts to explain that to my girlfriend were a spectacular failure! :-D

New or shiney

The FG forums seem to be experiencing more downtime, which sucks a little. Oh well, such is the risk ya take when using a free service.

There's an interesting article on the state of Linux gaming (parts 1, 2, 3 online with more to come) and, although it covers both commerical and open source games, since the majority of good games on Linux are open source games (ok, that's flamebait, but still...) most of the games in the article are open source. ;-)

Apparently Ubuntu is brilliant for gaming. Good to see people impressed by Free Software, even it's it is running proprietry stuff.

Ok, back to Free game matters, and a 3rd release of irrlamb is out. It's cool to see regular updates to this new and innovative 3D game where you control a sphere and use physics to overcome obstacles and puzzles. I tried it out on my Linux laptop and it both ran well and was fun to play. The graphics are never going to be earth shatteringly great but they don't need to be - the game is simple and the graphics in general are nice and clear and well suited to the game. There are binaries available to download for Linux and Windows. The development roadmap has a few interesting features plus a focus on making it a "fun game" - high scores, level unlocking, the kind of features that give you impetus to play it more.

After a bit of downtime, the VDrift website is back up. The next release will focus on polish - one very well done car and track with a nicer GUI. I think it is a good move and they should set a high standard for cars and tracks included in the default distribution. It will provide motivation for creating better tracks - if it's too easy to get stuff into a game then often the need is not there to keep working on a model once it has reached the "acceptable" standard. Raise the standard, and contribution standards should theoretically go up. Anyway, more information is available on the release planning page in their wiki.

When developing an open source project, there is always a trade off between developing new features and perfecting what you already have. Personally I think the VDrift guys have chosen the right moment to stop working on features and refine what they have done so far.

Which brings me to the title of this post - new or shiney. I think it's fair to state that code can never be both new and shiney. New code has bugs. Shiney code has been refined over time. New and shiney is not a concept that transfers from the tangible reality of goods to the abstract world of programming. New or shiney, pick one and stick at it. ;-)

ScummVM gains AGI support

There is a new release of ScummVM out. The adventure game engine that brought classic Lucasarts titles to Linux and other modern operating systems, now supports Sierra and other AGI based games through the latest version 0.X.0 (or 0.10.0 in standard numerical format). This brings a plethora of freeware titles, that previously could only be run on Windows or through WINE, to Linux.

There are a lot of AGI fan games out there. A lot. Of course not all are high quality but there are some gems out there. Since the games themselves don't tend to be open source I'm not going to delve too much into it so if you know any cool AGI games please comment and share them.

I was under the false impression that AGD's King's Quest remakes were AGI games, when they are actually AGS games. So you won't be playing those natively on a non-Windows system any time soon. :-(

Too many AG* acronyms... anyway, briefly back to the AGI stuff and here's an article giving an overview of AGI code. It looks pretty obvious so any budding adventure game makers - and there are few around, this is a dying genre :-( - might want to look there.

Somebody challenged themselves to come up with an original game mechanic/concept per day for 300 days. Some of the ideas are dubious at best but still a good source of inspiration.

Finally, Julius in the FG forums posted a few more sound resource links, so there's no excuse for creating quiet Free games any more since there's so many options for you to give your game some ear candy.

Google and open source OCR

Posted by T.V. Raman, Research Scientist

From time to time, our own T.V. Raman shares his tips on how to use Google from his perspective as a technologist who cannot see -- tips that sighted people, among others, may also find useful. - Ed.

As someone who cannot see, I prefer to live in a mostly paperless world. This means ruthlessly turning every piece of paper that enters my life into a set of bits that I can process digitally. I scan in everything. Until now, I have relied on commercial OCR packages to convert these images into readable text. OCR is perhaps one of the areas where the benefits of Moore's Law are most evident; today, OCR can do remarkably well when handed a page image. Until now, my only dissatisfaction with the status quo in this area has been that commercial OCR engines afford me little flexibility with respect to training them to do better on documents that are specific to me.

The advent of our own open source OCR initiative, OCRopus (source code: Ocropus Sources) is a welcome change in this regard. I introduced support for OCRopus in Emacspeak recently, and the HTML output this produces compares favorably with output from commercial OCR engines, provided you place the page at the right orientation on the scanner. OCRopus' extensibility, and the ability to express the OCR as a structured HTML document makes it an ideal starting point for producing rich spoken output. The possibilities are enormous for people being able to collectively train, customize and improve an OCR engine.

It's The Future, Stupid

I wasn't going to post today 'cos I'm busy, but I can't resist...

There's an update on the combat plans for space game SFZ, as well as new screenshots. Direct from the DevBlog:

After experimenting a bit we decided against making sfz combat based on fast reaction time and dogfight navigation, which quickly leads to frustrating "where is the enemy" problems. Instead weapons won't have to be aimed manually, they'll work like turrets, and if the enemy is in range you will be able to hit him without effort.



The deciding factor in combat will be stuff like weapon ranges and strengths and weaknesses of different weapons against different shield-types, homing missiles and counter-measures, maybe also a bit of energy management. This makes positioning, tactics and equipment a more interesting component.

I can't stress how much I agree with this. Think about it, it's set in the future. Auto-tracking should be a given. Surely space combat will be about decision making not faster-than-light reactions, so it's nice to see they are emphasising this and reducing the efforts required to target enemy ships.

Anyway, they still have a long way to go but it's nice to see well considered design decisions early on and, if they can get some models the quality of those frequently contributed to Vega Strike, they will have a very good game indeed if they can execute their plans.

No sooner had I posted about 8 Kingdoms yesterday, than somebody commented with a link to a Ubuntu .deb they had created, so have a go. I did, although it did not hold my attention for too long (it's late, I'm busy, etc) but it looked good from what little I saw of it. Not quite my style of game - seems much more rooted in table top war games than I like - but should definitely interest quite a few stategy fans.

Not game specific, but this online book on producing open source software is a very good resource for anybody running an open source project. Developers should check it out.

Another good resource, for open source friendly licensed music, is Jamendo.com so anybody looking for music for their game might want to check that out.

Asia-Pacific Open House June 28th

Posted by Christine Hong, Head of Engineering Operations, Asia Pacific

We're hosting an Asia Pacific open house for engineers on Thursday, June 28 from 6-9pm on the Google campus in Mountain View. Ping Li from Accel Partners will moderate a panel discussion by the four directors of our engineering centers in India, Korea, Taiwan, and China. They'll talk about top tech trends in their respective markets, and we'll demo products developed in each location. Of course, there will be plenty of food & drink, and a raffle. This should be an informative networking event for Bay Area engineers and entrepreneurs with a technical background.

Agenda:

• 6-6:30 pm - Registration, food, drinks
• 6:30-8 pm - Panel discussion and Q&A
• 8-9 pm - Product demo, networking, and a raffle drawing

If you're an engineer or an entrepreneur with a technical background who'd like to come, please email me at chong at google dot com for your invitation. Make the subject line "APAC Open House 2007" and include:
- name
- title
- affiliation/company
- contact info

We're looking forward to seeing you on the 28th.

Carbon neutrality by end of 2007

Posted by Posted by Urs Hoelzle, Senior Vice President, Operations

Climate change continues to be one of the biggest, most challenging problems our planet faces, and we know that a sustained global effort is needed if we're going to have any hope of reversing its effects. In that spirit, today we're announcing that Google will become carbon neutral by the end of 2007. This is an important step in our long-term pursuit of holistic environmental solutions.

Our plan to neutralize Google's carbon footprint includes three basic strategies:
- reduce energy consumption by maximizing efficiency;
- invest in and use renewable energy sources; and
- purchase carbon offsets for the emissions that we can't reduce directly.

To calculate our carbon footprint, we took into account emissions from purchased electricity, employee commuting, business travel, construction, and server manufacturing. In a partnership with the Environmental Resources Trust (ERT), we have independently verified this assessment, and will do so every year.

In order to meet our short-term goal of carbon neutrality, we have decided to purchase some carbon offsets. To be clear, we see carbon offsets not as a permanent solution but rather as a temporary tool which allows us to take full responsibility for our impact right away. By investing in projects elsewhere in the world that cut the overall amount of greenhouse gases, we can help reduce climate impact now while we develop more sustainable strategies for the future. When considering an offset project, we carefully examine the project's environmental integrity, its ability to be monitored and verified, and the impact that our investment will have in furthering that project's goals. In other words, we want to make sure that our offset funding directly enables the project, and that the carbon savings of the project are real.

As you may have read, Google already has several other environmental programs and initiatives in place. Last week we announced the Climate Savers Computing initiative to greatly improve computing energy-efficiency standards. (Make sure your next computer purchase is a compliant PC!) Transportation is another major area of focus. Our employee shuttle system provides a commute for more than 1,500 Googlers daily around the San Francisco Bay area, and several hundred more have also taken advantage of our rebate when they bought a fuel-efficient vehicle.

We're equally committed to finding and developing new green technologies and sources of energy. We just completed our solar panel installation in Mountain View, the single-largest corporate solar installation in the U.S. to date. We've also joined the World Resources Institute's Green Power Market Development Group, so we can work with other companies to make more green power available to everyone. And of course Google.org is working on creative new initiatives, including plug-in hybrid cars. In addition, we've set ourselves the ambitious goal of creating 50 megawatts of new renewable generation capacity--enough to power 50,000 typical U.S. homes--by 2012.

Still, we're only one company, so aside from improving our own practices, we want to do more to raise awareness and commitment worldwide. We feel we can best do this through our products and services, which reach millions of people every day. For example, Google Transit makes it easier than ever to find and use public transportation around the globe. New custom tabs on iGoogle bring climate news, energy-related talks on video from our @Google series and other environment-related content to your homepage. Google Maps users have created mashups to show possible coastal flooding if the sea level changes, or to map climate data for cities worldwide. And we're urging lawmakers to create clear public policies on important issues like energy-efficiency standards, increased funding for public research and development of energy technologies, and regulation of greenhouse gas emissions.

To learn more, visit our new site on energy initiatives, which details much of this work to date.

More sharing

Posted by Sam Schillace, Engineering Director

We're pleased to announce that we've acquired the assets of Zenter, a company that provides software for creating online slide presentations.

You've heard us talk a lot about using the web to improve group collaboration and information sharing. These days, when you create a document -- whether it's a text document, a spreadsheet, or a presentation -- you usually want to share it, collect feedback, or communicate about it in some way. We on the Google Docs & Spreadsheets team focus on making this experience easier and more powerful for you. In particular, we're working to add presentation-sharing capabilities to Google Docs & Spreadsheets, and we're excited about the addition of Zenter's technology and team to that effort.

YouTube in 9 more domains

Posted by Sakina Arsiwala, International Manager, YouTube

The YouTube community began life speaking English, but thanks to the uniquely expressive medium of video, today there is a global village of content makers and viewers. With a noteworthy number of YouTube visitors now coming from outside the U.S., it's high time we go multilingual.

Today at a Google press event in Paris, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen are announcing the launch of nine new domains in Brazil, France, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Ireland, and the UK.

In response to many requests, each new site is fully translated and localized for each country including content (Featured Videos, Director Videos, Promotions), as well as the interfaces, search, user support, and such community features as video ratings, sharing, and content flagging. And these new localized versions are built using Google search technology, so you can quickly find more of what you want to see. Perhaps best of all, you can continue to use youtube.com, or move to one of these localized sites -- and switch seamlessly between the two. Happy creating, viewing and sharing!

Update: Removed link to user content.

8 Kingdoms and Strategy

8 Kingdoms

Legacy of Magic

8 Kingdoms is a 3D turn based fantasy strategy game. Build empires and conquer enemy kingdoms. I came across it in the Ubuntu forums where the poster suggested the graphics were not that great. Well, the graphics look pretty good to me. In fact I quite like the plastic-like model style. It gives the game an interesting look and feel. The game is at version 1.0 so is fully playable. :-)

The map is hex based which also intrigues me. I always find hex more fascinating than boring square grids. There is only a Windows installer and a tar.gz available for download, so non-Windows players will probably have to compile it themselves.

Keeping on the strategy theme, I came across a game I'd lost the link for a while back. Legacy of Magic is a very promising looking fantasy war game. The homepage is a development blog although there has been no update since November 2006 so I'm going to email the author to see how he is getting on. It would be a shame for such a nice looking game to cease development.

Another upcoming open source strategy game seems to have lost it's way a little - the Galaxy Mage website is down [so that link won't work] but the code is always available from it's project page. The last code change was only a couple of months ago so hopefully the website will be back up soon and work resumed.

There's an interesting update on the Allacrost website regarding development. Basically they tackled the major architectural hurdles in the 0.2.0 release - the rather nice consequence of which is there will be much less time before the next release. :-D

Also the Egoboo Resurrection project released version 2.3.8 of their continuation efforts for this classic open source RPG game. It introduces new levels and bug fixes, but still is only being built for Windows although the game has strong Linux roots so surely will still be compilable should somebody take it on. I think they just don't have Linux expertise amongst the development group at the moment so head on over there if you think you can help out.

Not quite open source games, but I found this open source Java virtual PC rather fascinating and the 3 demo pages (1, 2, 3) have it running DOS (FreeDOS maybe?) loaded with several of the classic games of the DOS era such as Prince of Persia and Lemmings. Quite a nostalgic way to pass a few minutes of time for the elder gamers amongst us. Anyway, a quick reminder to help you get started:

C:
dir
cd prince
prince

A clean energy update

Posted by Dan Reicher, Director, Climate and Energy Initiatives, Google.org

Today Google.org is launching an exciting project that offers a glimpse of a smarter energy future: cars that plug into an electric grid powered by solar energy. Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (“plug-in hybrids”) can achieve 70 -100 miles per gallon, quadrupling the fuel economy of the average car on the road today (~20 mpg). As we demonstrated at today’s event, plug-in hybrids can sell power back to the electric grid when it's needed most through vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology

As you may know, one of Google.org's core missions is to address climate change. In the U.S., transportation contributes about one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions –- with more than 60 percent of those emissions coming from personal vehicles. By accelerating the adoption of plug-in hybrids and vehicle-to-grid ("V2G") technologies, this new project, RechargeIT.org, aims to reduce emissions and dependence on oil while promoting clean energy technologies and increasing consumer choice. Linking the U.S. transportation system to the electricity grid maximizes the efficiency of our energy system. From these efforts, we believe the environment will benefit -- and consumers will have more choices to fuel their cars.

We've been working with Google engineers and Hymotion/A123Systems to build a small fleet of plug-in hybrids, adding an external plug and additional batteries to a regular hybrid car so that it runs on electricity with gasoline (or even better, biofuels) to extend the driving range for longer trips. Here's what it looks like:



Since most Americans drive less than 35 miles per day, you easily could drive mostly on electricity with the gas tank as a "safety net." Our goal is to demonstrate the plug-in hybrid and V2G technology, get people excited about having their own plug-in hybrid, and encourage car companies to start building them soon.

In the preliminary results from our test fleet, on average the plug-in hybrid gas mileage was 30+ mpg higher than that of the regular hybrids. In conjunction with Pacific Gas and Electric, we also demonstrated the bidirectional flow of electricity through V2G technology, and have awarded $1 million in grants and announced plans for a $10 million request for proposals (RFP) to fund development, adoption and commercialization of plug-ins, fully electric cars and related vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology. (Here's the full release.)

As for Google Inc., today the solar panel installation we announced last October is now producing clean, renewable electricity for our Mountain View, CA headquarters.



The system will offset peak electricity consumption at the solar powered offices and the newly constructed solar carports have charging stations for the plug-in hybrids. At 1.6 megawatts -- with an electricity output capable of powering approximately 1,000 average California homes -- the Google project is the largest solar installation on any corporate campus in the U.S. to date, and one of the largest on any corporate site in the world. To see how much electricity these panels are producing right now, visit our new performance monitoring site.

To learn more about the initiative, we encourage you to explore the rest of RechargeIT.org. And to see what others are saying about plug-in hybrids and V2G technology, be sure to watch this video.

Shadey

Shaders seem all the rage these days. Now Thunder n Lightening has support for them too just days after Danger from the Deep implemented shader support. Wavey reflecty shiney water. I smell pretty FOSS games! :-)

Boson

Actually the first FOSS game I remember getting such fancy effects was Boson. A 3D RTS, the codebase suffers from KDE dependencies which limit portability somewhat as well as making it a pain to install on Linux systems without KDE. Given how cool it looks, I'm sure they'd be much further on as a community if it was easier to install on non-KDE systems. I'm sure they would get much more developer interest if the game were available for Windows and Mac OS X and available in a format other than tarball for Linux.

Somebody just pointed me in the direction of Qonk, a space strategy game. It's in the early stages of development but has a much smaller scope than typical space strategy projects like FreeOrion, so is already very playable. Games only last a few minutes, and it is billed as, "a small build-and-conquer strategy game with very simple rules."

Finally, Bygfoot 2.2.0 was released mid-May. Strangely it didn't appear on the Game Tome or Freshmeat. It seems that new developers have taken on the mantle of improving this FOSS football management game, which can be downloaded for Windows and popular flavours of Linux and probably compiled on Mac and BSD systems. This is the only well-featured open source football management game going although personally I find the UI to be counter-intuitive. Other than that I found it a lot of fun when I played it last year so it can only be better now.

As a recovering Championship Manager addict (that game destroyed my teenage years) I'll probably not try too hard to get into Bygfoot. ;-)

Cereal Monopoly

I'm the Microsoft of my kitchen. Nobody gets in on my cereal without there being trouble - I invoke my landlord status. But if my cereal is out, I'm having some of yours if you live here. So today I ate some of my housemates shredded wheat. That stuff tastes like paper - who in their right mind would like the taste of that? This, of course, is why we have such a variety of games. To some people, some games are boring and pointless, but to others they are the ultimate form of fun.

One of the things I love about Sauerbraten is that it empowers people to create really amazing looking maps like this without that much effort. Instead of spending hours trying to manipulate abstract file contents or fighting map editors, you can just build it as you see it rapidly. It's like the IDE of map making tools and games.

I overly built up one Dungeon Master inspired FOSS game, but another that is very actively developed and looking very, very promising is the Java Classic RPG project. The development blog makes for an interesting read as well as a good way of updating the community on the progress of the game and I encourage other FOSS game developers to indulge in a similar practise.

The Privateer Gemini Gold 1.02 final release is out. Improved ship models, higher resolution base graphics, and improved game balance are the highlights of over a year's worth of development since the 1.01 release. It really is a good game, and it's Free and Open Sourec Software and available for Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows. So, download it already! :-D

That game should be very popular. I'm hoping as a consequence of this, Vega Strike will get more attention. Actually there has been some excellent work by a new developer who took on the task of cleaning up the VS codebase. Today his branch got merged into SVN head. The two threads tracking his work (here and here) make for interesting reading if you like following development. The benefits should be a more stable and memory efficient VS release in the future, plus quicker compile times and better usage of common libraries which were previously being manually maintained in SVN by the VS developers.

I probably don't need to talk about the latest Alien Arena release, so I won't.

This blog's M.O.

Posted by Elliot Schrage and Karen Wickre, Global Communications & Public Affairs

Just about 3 years ago, we launched this blog as a fast and direct way to reach Google users, friends and anyone else interested in our goings-on. Even though it's a blog from Google, it's by Googlers, not from a single executive (or founder). We've encouraged hundreds of people to write about news and ideas from all their respective corners of the company. A lot of the posts you read are news and updates about products, because that's what the bulk of Googlers work on. But with an eye towards transparency, we also share our positions on issues -- for example, our role in China, our perspective on digitizing books, our comment on a lawsuit. And occasionally we're keen to share snippets of our culture or highlight industry developments we find noteworthy.

Our communications team manages the blog, but consistent with our grassroots way of doing things, it's Googlers who propose content and write the posts (and likewise, develop new blogs). When it comes to editing copy, we aim for a very light touch -- focusing mainly on clarity of information, not sanitizing style.

Since this blog first appeared, another 52 Google blogs have also launched. At present, 18 of them are not in English, and we expect that number to grow as we expand around the world. All of these other Google blogs (the full list is on the righthand side of the main blog) have smaller readership because they are more tightly focused on the details of a specific product (like AdWords or AdSense or they represent Google in a country (including Poland and Brazil), or they speak to a niche audience, like librarians or webmasters. Typically they don't feature the same topical expanse we think will be of interest to most Google users.

In short, we're relying as always on the power of the Internet -- in this case, the incredibly easy-to-use publishing platform known as the blog -- to help interested folks understand how we work, and what we do. As new resources and media tools come into being, we want to make use of those too. One of these is the Google Channel on YouTube, where it's a priority to post videos and presentations by Googlers, including our executives, as quickly as we can following public events.

Through all of these means and others -- podcasting, video blogs, forums -- we plan to continue being as direct as possible with you concerning our news and views. So thanks for reading, and stay tuned.