The Sands of Thyme (TSoT)

Shame on you Bethesda!

2011-08-07T11:37:00.000-06:00

I was just wondering the web and went over to the Minecraft site. I haven't played the game much, but was just banned from a very similar game after giving them a fake email address (WTF is with devs thinking they can have my email address? NO YOU CAN'T! So stop asking!). Anyways I look around the Minecraft site, decide I won't play it 'cause it's not free and read the developers blog. His most recent post is here http://notch.tumblr.com/ . It details how they've applied for a trademark on the game name Scrolls. Seems reasonable.. although if it's granted I would then like to trademark the words "sex", "the", "a"... etc. Anytime anyone uses those words, they must pay my fee.

So now we get to the part that pisses me off at Bethesda. They've decided that, because they hold a trademark on "The Elder Scrolls" that means no one else can use "scrolls" in their name and theyr'e now sueing the makers of Minecraft. WHAT? How the fuck do you get from A to B here? Without being a corporation made up of complete assholes?

So, shame on you Bethesda for your complete disregard for the true purpose of a trademark and trying to bully a smaller company. Until such time as I see a public apology for this ridiculous misuse of the law I will not buy, support or in anyway encourage anyone else to buy or support ANY Bethesda product.

The barn door / Weiner Gate has been opened

2011-06-15T13:49:00.000-06:00

OK, I know I normally I keep my blogs pointed in a more technical direction, but whatev. I keep being bombarded with news people whining about Weiner... Anthony Weiner. The Daily Show and Colbert Report get a pass on this as the whole Weiner's Weiner thing is just too good to pass up as far as comedy goes. I know John Stewart and Stephen Colber are total Weiner hounds and just can't resist milking a Weiner. Buhdumdum.

Comedy aside I'm not sure I'm happy with the way this guy has been villianized. Ok he sent some pics of himself to a woman, or maybe a couple of women. I have yet to hear any complaints from the aforementioned females like "I don't even know this guy! Why is he sending me snorkel shots"? etc. Yet he's being made out to be some kind of sexual deviant and being a sexual deviant somehow must make him unfit to be in government... right?

I don't know, but given the choice between a guy who's so insecure that his main goals as a leader are starting wars or raping the planet and a guy who's so proud of himself that he's sending pictures of himself doing "The Helicopter" to anybody who will click "Show Attachments". I'd pick the dick swinger every time.

And don't even get me started on the blatant sexual discrimination being shown here. I'm sorry, but that fact that guys like sex is just plain genetics. The fact that we have to fight natural instincts and take a single woman even though thousands of years of evolution requires us to fuck every chick that will let us is in itself ludicrous.

The only thing this guy needs to be chastised for is the fact that he obviously doesn't know how to use his phone. Seriously dude! Who tweets and thinks he's just sent an email or private message? Take a fucking night class or something. Although the cover up was frickin genius.... AHHHHH! I'VE BEEN HACKED!!! I'm totally using that as an excuse for everything now.

Who am I stealing from excactly?

2011-03-23T20:30:00.001-06:00

Anytime you hear some bleeding heart whine about how downloading is bad for [insert industry here] , just send them this link http://www.tribune9.com/pages/tag/steven-spielberg-oceanco-seven-seas-superyacht

I have friends in the movie and music industries and while I do feel that anyone who does a job should be paid fairly for it. I think if they are ever in a position where they find themselves or their families in need of food, I would suggest they buy a fishing pole and see if Mr. Spielberg might take them out on this thing.

In these days of endless streams of starlets in legal trouble and Charlie Sheen's "Winning Speech" I find myself asking the question "If I pay for something I might otherwise download, just what, exactly am I paying to support? If the lion's share of movie budgets isn't going into the pockets of a tiny portion of the people who create the movies. How does someone who's made a handfull or two of films afford a $200 million dollar BOAT!?

OMG!

2010-11-24T16:32:00.001-07:00

Oh My Geek? Yes.

Just placed an order for a new database server at work here’s the spec:

HP ML350 G6
Single Intel Xeon 5620 (2.4GHz) (There’s room for two, but I can’t really use the second one)
18 GB RAM
Adaptec 5805 SAS/SATA RAID Controller (Wanted the 5805ZQ, but that’s not readily available yet and is still too expensive)
7 x Western Digital RE4 1TB SATA Hard Drives. Will run as 3 RAID 1 volumes with a floating hot spare.

Will be installing Windows Small Business Server Premium on it (Windows 2008R2, SQL Server 2008R2). SBS also comes with Exchange, which I’ll be putting on our web server (I think) and SharePoint which I’ll probably put on our file server.

I had considered going with SSD drives, but I couldn’t find any really good testimonials from people that had “been there and done that”. So, I decided to just go with SATA. They’re slower than their SAS counterparts, but for the price I paid for 7 RE4s I could only have bought 2 HP SAS drives. I also have a feeling that we’ll be getting more out of the extra RAM than anything else as our current config is running on 4GB of RAM.

I only filled one socket, because SBS Premium comes with SQL Server Standard which will only use 4 cores so a second chip would not be used at all. Add to that the fact that our current system is running dual Xeons from the P4 era and it never goes above about 10% CPU load during normal operation and I think you’ll agree that the money I’d spend on a second chip would be better spent on hookers and beer. Now I just have to find a creative way to expense the hookers.

On the home front I’ve decided that Friday will be upgrade day at home as well. Normally, I do a new mobo and CPU every two years and I’m just coming up on two years since I bought a Core i7 920 and X58 mobo. I really don’t see much in the way of need to go with either a new CPU or mobo right now as I think my disks are the bottleneck in my current config. So, I decided to try out SSD. I’m going with an OCZ RevoDrive 120GB. It’s a PCIe card and thus doesn’t have to deal with the limitations of the SATA bus on my X58 board. I’ll also be dropping in a few more sticks of RAM to bring me from the paltry 6GB I currently run to a more acceptable 18GB. I know I know, I should be throwing that old RAM in the wood stove in my shop and going up to 24GB, but that just seems wasteful.

BTW: I posted this to make Schmiddty salivate.

More Kinect/Cowbell

2010-11-15T17:09:00.000-07:00

I've now had a little more than a week with the Kinect and it has yet to disappoint me. I've been able to introduce people to it by merely saying "Stand There!" and they just get it. Pretty much anyone who's played it comes away with Jelly Leg and a brisk pant and or heart beat.
Now... On to the rant. Within three hours of this thing being available someone had already connected it to a PC (running Linux) and built an image recognition app that used it. That said to this day Microsoft has done nothing but poo poo the idea of anyone but them doing anything with it. How asinine is that? If Microsoft doesn't get their shit together (and I mean NOW, not "sometime in the future") and get this out there in as many hands as possible on as many platforms as possible this thing is gonna go the way of BetaMax and HD DVD.

This is a wake up call Mr Balmer. You're not going to thrive indefinitely on following everybody else and with Kinect you have an opportunity to lead. Don't waste it by trying to tie it up in a pretty bow and make it perfect on the first shot. Even after 20 years Windows still isn't perfect, but it's the biggest OS out there and a large part of that is because way back in the daysomebody at Microsoft had the vision to make developers outside of Microsoft a priority and thus create an army of applications that nobody else could compete with.

The latest release of XNA was ALL about Windows Phone 7 and not even a glimmer of hope for Kinect. Apparently someone needs a good shake, because YOU MISSED THE BOAT as far as mobile is concerned. What brainiac decided it would be a good idea to put all that effort into a market that is already so clearly dominated (by other companies) and without anything really new to bring to the table. Should you ignore the mobile market? Nope, not at all, but why would you put so much toward chasing Apple when you have a huge NEW platform on your hands that I bet Apple hasn't even thought about yet.

It's not too late, but my money is on that if you don't release Windows drivers for the Kinect and at least make an attempt at bringing non-Microsoft developers into the Kinect fold before the beginning of 2011 it's going to be dead by the end of 2011 and somebody else will have grabbed the gauntlet and run with it.

You have the chance to dominate something again. Don't piss it away by making BS excuses and trying to control every little piece of it.

Smile for the Camera!

2010-11-04T16:53:00.002-06:00

I just finished my first play session with the Kinect. I have to say “Cool”! I think it’s gonna be a Wii killer. So far I only have the base game that came with it, but even that is cool. The setup process was very neat, I can’t wait to play with the voice recognition…
This is very promising, I just hope it gets enough sales to push the big dev studios into really using it to it’s potential. EB was out of stock (big surprise I know), but Future Shop had tons of them. It didn’t look like they were flying off the shelves, but it was early afternoon and the store was pretty empty.

One thing I really feel is important to point out: MAKE SURE YOUR ATTACK CAT IS NOT PRESENT WHEN YOU PLAY WITH KINECT! I'm going to be healing for weeks now.

Making Kinections

2010-11-03T16:28:00.002-06:00

So, I’m going out to grab an Xbox Kinect tomorrow, maybe at lunch or most likely after work. I’m hopeful, but not overly optimistic about how it will score on the awesomeness scale. I’m old enough to have seen enough products in the game world that looked like the next coming of Christ and ended up being not much more than a steaming pile of camera/editing trickery.
To be honest I could care less about Xbox titles, but watching the thing in action and dreaming about what it could be I can’t help but connect Kinect with my all time favourite game “World of Warcraft”. I would pee my pants if I could venture through Azeroth and physically interact with things.
So come one Microsoft, get it together and publish a Windows SDK for the Kinect. You know you all want to play WoW with it as much as I do.

Is it done yet?

2010-10-30T20:40:00.003-06:00

Ace Spinvaders is going... umm... purple?

You may be asking yourself "Purple? What does that mean?" Well the fashion is to say your product has gone Gold, but this is no where near gold. The project started out as a way to learn XNA. Then it became something to do while I tried to recover from severe depression. Then it became something to talk about when people asked what I was doing with my life. It has accomploshed all of those goals and so now it is time to let it be free.

Now, I need to make one thing very clear. This game is not "finished", but it is as finished as it is ever going to be.

Head on over to Hazardous Studios and check it out.

Self promotion in mass media

2009-08-16T11:23:00.007-06:00

Recently I've been getting a lot of my "TV time" from the web. You know, YouTube and the like. I found that finally some of the large media companies in Canada are starting to distribute their content online, for free.

One example is watch.CTV.ca

At this point I'm quite impressed with the effort they're putting forward. There are some bugs, one big one being when the system cuts between show clips it pulls the player out of full screen mode and forces you to click the full screen button again after the commercial(s) are done.

All in all though I'd say it's a good start. The commercial breaks are very brief, usually consisting of one one 15-30 second ad plugged in 4-5 ads per 1 hour show. Which in my opinion is very reasonable.

Now here's where I'm completely confused: Pretty much 100% of the ads are self promotion of CTV! WTF is that all about? I want services like this to succeed, but how can you make any money by bombarding me with ads that no one is paying for? Usually these ads are ALL for the same show, so why are they wasting my time telling me over and over and over that I can also watch some other show? Tell me once and F Off! I should also point out that the system is not even smart enough to pay attention to which show I'm currently watching. So my viewing is basically interrupted 4 to 5 times per show with an ad telling me that I can also watch the show I'm watching now. Yes, that's helpful.

I've also noticed this practice on XM and Sirius radio, which are subscription services where you pay one monthly fee and get all the channels. SO WHY THE F WOULD I WANT STUPID ADS TELLING ME THAT THERE"S ANOTHER CHANNEL? These self promotion ads actually turn a lot of people off of these services, because they do nothing but waste our time.

So, I'd like to say this to any marketing type, working for one of these media companies who might come across this.

"If you're so lacking in imagination that the only thing you can think of tho fill your audiences time is lame, repeated self promotion maybe you should look for another line of work. I think we'd all be better off with the extra time we'll have and you'll probably be more rewarded in a career that is better suited to your skills."

To Heck With Hulu!

2009-04-08T22:37:00.002-06:00

With all the Hulu scabvertising that I've been bombarded with lately I threw the URL into my browser fully expecting what has become the ubiquitous prompt from entertainment content sites over the last year or two.

"We're sorry you're not in the US so F Off!"

Hmmm. Now I'm faced with the option: hack Hulu, which is a bit of a PITA, but not that big of a deal. Or just walk away. At some point as a consumer of entertainment content I have to say "No, you're not the worth the effort of finding/using a backdoor."

The point in short is: Hulu (and other online content distributors), if you want my views and thus my advertising dollars open the door. If you want to be on "the internet" then be on the internet. If not, just go on AOL or let the traditional content distributors like DirecTV or Dish Network, etc. carry on with the status quo.

If your not going to provide something new then we'll just keep torrenting our content which we all know is much more convenient than Hulu. When your revenues drop, don't come crying that it's because of piracy. It'll be because you didn't listen and you let your greed and self pride fool you into thinking you could wait as long as you want to give us what we want.

I like the idea of Hulu, but at this point I can't support them... even by using a backdoor.

Canadian Copyright Legislation Bill C-61

2008-06-18T12:48:00.002-06:00

Below is a letter I sent to the following:

To: The Right Honourable Stephen Harper
To: The Honourable Jim Prentice
To: The Honourable Josée Verner
CC: The Honourable Scott Brison (Liberal Critic)
CC: Peggy Nash (NDP Critic)

Dear Ministers,

I am writing to express my great degree of concern with the contents of Bill C-61, entitled An Act to Amend the Copyright Act presented by the government on June 12, 2008.
I am shocked and disappointed by the "corporate protectionism" that a bill such as this endeavors to introduce. While I feel that corporations and individuals should be allowed to protect their investments in creating and producing products I do not feel that we as citizens should be held in ransom by restrictive laws which allow certain corporations or individuals to carry on a stagnate business model instead of being forced by the market to adjust to new market demands.

The direction of this bill and many others like it is tantamount to restricting me to using my car for only one purpose and requiring me to purchase another car for every other intended purpose. It is also tantamount to saying that because I drove my friend’s car I must purchase a "copy" of his car or be faced with fines.

In a free market economy businesses are left to change (or not) with market demands. If a particular business or industry refuses to change as the market demands change they should rightfully dwindle and die.

To say that content creators will stop creating content if we don't enact laws to protect their outdated business models is ridiculous. The concept of creating and sharing art and entertainment has been inherent in the human race since the dawn of time. I have no doubt that any attempts any government may make to try and monetize our inborn desire to share and enjoy entertainment in order to pander to corporate interests will fail miserably whether or not the bill(s) you present are passed into law.

Sincerely,

Indepenedent

2008-05-24T13:30:00.005-06:00

I was ready to go off on a rant about all the game developers calling themselves "independent", but then I looked at dictionary.com's definition and WTF!? There are 23 definitions for the word.

I wanted to gripe about how it's become cool to call yourself an "independent game developer" and how most of these so called independents are more than just a couple of coders working in their basements. Many of them are established companies with fairly large budgets and and enough employees to require actual, real offices. I wanted to go on about how I think that once you rely on the income from the games you are producing as your only source of income you really aren't "independent" anymore. In fact you are more likely than not to be COMPLETELY DEPENDANT! You are dependent on your games making money and thus you must build games that you think WILL make money.

I was going to suggest that many of these independent game developers are less independent than the huge behemoths like EA, etc. Those big guys can at least afford to experiment with new stuff once in a while and give it a proper treatment. The small to medium sized companies can really only afford to innovate in small, safe ways.

I really wanted to lambaste all these people for improper use of the term "independent", but then the stupid English language got in my way (23 definitions!). Maybe they should call themselves "Small or Medium Sized Corporations" instead of ruining the term "independent game developer" for those of us who actually are independent game developers.

Incapacitation Abounds

2008-04-28T16:53:00.002-06:00

So, here I am. Finally posting to my poor, forlorn blog. The last two months have literally sucked ass. Starting with one of the people who was living in my house leaving with no notice and putting me in a bind for the shortfall on payments. I decided to put my house on the market. Unfortunately for me, the real estate market in Calgary has a dearth of homes for sale right now, presumably from all the saps like me who have gotten fed up with the poor city planning, the grind of being in a city that seems to be all work and no play and the fact the house prices went up by like 100% (or more) in the last 4 years. Now that I'm trying to sell my house it seems as one of my long time friends who was also living with me is trying to sabotage the deal by insisting on doing everything every real estate agent out there says is a bad thing. So the house sits unsold for going on two months now.

So, what does this have to do with software or technology? Well all the stress from this "crap" has put me through the wringer and depression has reared it's ugly head once again. I have done no development of any kind in over two months. I'm finally to the point where I can be somewhat functional again... this blog is proof of that. Over the last two months, in between bouts of sulking I have tried to think of where my strengths and weaknesses lie. One of my greatest strengths is that I take on new subjects with fair ease... this is also one of my biggest downfalls. I have grown so used to, and fond of the learning process that learning new stuff seems to be all I want to do. Every time I sit down to do any development, or anything else for that matter I find myself drawn into some new topic and MUST learn everything about it. Today was a good example of that. I wanted to work on a small issue tracking system for which I built a proto-type database a few days ago, but instead of just sitting down and coding it I had to go off on a tangent and start reading about ADO.net 2.0 and trying to decide if I need to use any of the functionality in it. I'm now at the end of the day and guess what. Not a single line of code :(

From what I've seen, many good developers suffer from this same problem. Maybe that's why so many projects have problems with deadline and budget overruns. It may be a common trait in the developer mentality. We all want to know how to do the next great thing, but as soon as we know we find a new "next great thing" and need to know about that.

Well, I guess this post wasn't too tech oriented, but so far I've enjoyed writing it. Maybe I'll try to do more of these philosophical type posts in the future. I've got one in mind on "What I think about Deadlines".

Shader Stall and Code Cleanup

2008-02-18T11:53:00.002-07:00

Well, this last week has been fairly uneventful. I've been playing with HLSL shaders and while I get the concepts I'm not having any luck getting them to do the things I want. So, I've done what I do best... ordered books.

Shaders for Game Programmers and Artists

Programming Vertex & Pixel Shaders

They're both a little dated, but I'm looking to get a good grounding so I don't think age will hinder them any.

With that said, banging my head against the shader wall didn't seem productive any more so I moved on to code cleanup and documentation for Zap Invasion. The code base needed a little TLC and the game play is really lame (simple). The point of the game was to use as a test bed for learning XNA and to that end it's been very good, but I still can't help but be bored by the concept.

I also spent yesterday looking at 3D Game Studio version A7. I'll throw my thoughts on it in to my Choosing a Game Development Platform article when I've had more of a chance to play around with it. First impressions though are that it's a decent engine with all the features a hobbyist would need and a good scripting language that compiles into native code instead of interpreted byte code. Although it's another engine that seems tailored around coding in the engine rather than coding with the engine, which is something I'm not really keen on.

Google

2008-02-06T22:16:00.002-07:00

Just testing out Windows Live Writer...

Google

Poor, neglected Blog...

2008-02-04T14:28:00.001-07:00

I've been busy being a scatter brain lately, working on lots of things, but not really getting anything done.

Zap Invasion now has collision detection and sound and now I'm tackling the shaders.
ZapHazrdous.com is up and running again and is now hosted off site which will hopefully proove to be worth the money.
My main workstation died.
The NANO forums are coming along nicely, although there are only two active members currently.
I tried installing PTBlog, but it didn't work and the hosting service gives me no usefull errors, so I'm looking for something new and more simple.

Let there be forums!

2008-01-19T20:29:00.001-07:00

I have created a new forum over at nano.freeforums.org the link is also on the Links menu.

Blog Blogging

2008-01-18T14:16:00.001-07:00

As you may have noticed I've installed a new blog template. Although I like the dark look and think the gfx are cool I'm not at all happy with how hard Blogger makes it to reset the size of your blog. Oh, it can be done, but not to my satisfaction. If I wanted to write code I'd do it without Blogger ever being involved, the reason I chose to use a blog package was so I didn't have to worry about that crap while I was blogging. So I'm looking at other alternatives... I might just have to dig under the pool table and get Zap Hazardous out of moth balls.

The Octree Conundrum

2008-01-08T12:24:00.001-07:00

Well, it didn't come to me in a dream, it in fact came to me as I was responding to someone else's responses to my post on the topic at the Creators Club Forums.

What I think will end up being the most robust solution is to create a "best of both worlds" component that can be accessed via a custom content processor or via runtime calls. This will allow one octree builder to service both static and dynamic objects. If I do it right I should also be able to make it handle scene management tasks related to culling as well. But, I'll leave that decision for later... refactoring is almost always a good thing when you're new to something and I've got nothin' but time.

Coding Again

2008-01-04T21:42:00.001-07:00

I've finally been able to motivate myself to do a little (and I stress little) coding lately. I've started working on an octree culling system for collision detection in XNA.

The plan is to do simple ray-poly intersection checks using the octree (in the broad phase) to cull the number of poly's that need to be tested in the narrow phase. That said, I'm a little analytically paralyzed in trying to choose where to build the tree. XNA allows for the creation of custom content objects which would allow me to build the tree for a given model at build time and thus save some processing on game start up, but if I scale the model at all then I think either the tree would need to be scaled or every call into the tree would need to be scaled, which although probably not as expensive as the tree building would still negate at least some if not most of the time saved.

I also think that the collision data doesn't really belong with the model content as what is displayed and what is collided with are very often nowhere near the same and binding the model to it's collision data tightly by building the tree in a custom content processor might undo me later on when I try to use a low poly physical object and a higher poly graphics object.

So now the question lies in whether or not to consider the collision data as content. I could build a completely custom content processor that doesn't try to create a graphical model... just an octree with lists of triangles in it's leaves. Hmmm, seems like a lot of work for not a lot of gain.

I'll sleep on it, maybe it'll come to me in a dream.

Zap Studio nears completion!

2007-11-28T11:11:00.001-07:00

The reason I haven't blogged in a while is that I've been busy building a small studio from which I'm planning on basing my design operations. The scope of my projects is going to wider than just software so any large construction will take place off-site.

Why am I here?

2007-10-08T11:39:00.001-06:00

It occured to me this morning that maybe my plans of greatness and grandure may not be clear as of yet based on my blog posts, so this post is an attempt to let you the reader know where I'm coming from and where I'm going.

I've been a professional software developer for the last 15 years. My education is in Electronics Engineering and Computer Science. Most of what I've done has been in the business sector (Accounting, Point of Sales sort of stuff). I've also done a fair amount of scientific work in the areas of computer vision and computer aided medical diagnosis. My last big project was as a lead developer and architect on one of the worlds largest production accounting systems, controlling literally tens of billions of dollars (not me personally, but the system).

Over the last couple of years I've been struggling with major depression and I believe one of the key factors to this is that I feel the work I do has no real value to humanity. It has almost entirely been for the purpose of making big companies bigger and making rich people richer.

So now I find myself 15 years into a career that I absolutely abhore and my only saving grace is that I've made a few bucks in real estate over the last 4 years (the housing market in Calgary is crazy). I'm currently on my second leave of absensce in as many years and I think I've decided to get out while the getting is good... or in my case before it kills me.

I think for now I'm going to just try and let my artistic/inventor side rule the roost for as long as I can. My goal is not to make piles of money or become a code slagger for some game company. I just want to get the stuff that is in my head out of my head and hopefully into the hands of people who will enjoy it in whatever form it takes, be it games, writing, phototgraphy. Did I menion I'm designing an electric car?

Even though I can't do software for hire anymore, I've been doing it since I was about six or seven years old, it's a major part of who I am and there's no way in hell I'm going to give it up... ever! I'm going to have them bury me with a laptop and wire a solar cell on my grave stone to power it. CRAP! I'll have to get someone to dig me up every couple of years to upgrade me.

Ok, now that I've given you a little background in what motivates me I want to tell you why I'm choosing C# over C++. The long and the short of the answer is pointers! I think they've outgrown they're usefullness in almost every case. Don't get me wrong I think C/C++ is going to live for a very long time, it seems to be the best way to get as close to the processor as you can and still be able to understand your code more than 13.27 minutes after you've written it. Some might argue that the garbage collection you get in managed languages isn't all it needs to be, but it's way better than anything I would have the patience to build. So that's pretty much the end of it for me, I didn't like PEEK and POKE and I don't like & and * any better and I out right refuse to be cowtowed into to using them. Language technology is far enough advanced that I don't think I need to either.

Now what motivates me as far as engines? Ease of use, expandability and price. If it's easy to use I can learn it quickly and start showing myself wonderfull things in days. If it's expandable I can add anything it doesn't already have. If it's cheap, I have more money left over for RC cars and beer.

Yet Another Engine

2007-09-14T13:13:00.001-06:00

I've been struggling with a bit of non-directional anti-enthusiasm lately and haven't done a stinkin' thing for the last two weeks. Until the other day, when I got a modicum of gumpshun and started looking at DarkBASIC. Actually my real interest is toward DarkGDK.Net, but this product while in itself looks fairly complete, the rest of the Dark addons don't seem to have been ported and TGC isn't really saying much about when updates are coming.

The reason I'm still looking at engines is even though I really like the structure and commercial support offered by XNA, it still lacks any physics. There are a few opensource physics solutions, but they suffer from the same old problem of no pay for the dev and thus the dev has to do other things to make a living and thus the project stalls or the dev is a dev and abhores documentation and the code remains an enigma to anyone who isn't already familiar with the library. I want to write games, not decode someone elses undocumented libraries.

Back to DarkBASIC, it looks pretty cool, although maybe a little on the slow side when it comes to math n' such. It has a large number of addons that you can pick and choose from depending on your needs, which I think is really a great concept. It's base price is dirt cheap at 60 bucks US and the addons seem to mainly run about $20US.

The one thing that puts me off a little is the apparent lack of real info coming from the TGC devs and or partner devs. I think a good developer should spend almost equal time in documentation, marketing and communication as he does in development. Yes, this means slower updates, but I think the tradeoff in community awareness and consumer confidence is well woth it.

I really want to buy it, but don't want to take the leap until I finish Zap Invasion in XNA.

Side Tracked!

2007-08-20T20:50:00.001-06:00

I've gotten totally side tracked in the last week or so. I have the article on different modelling programs I've tried about half written, but have been very intent on putting together a simple Space Invaders Clone with a full 3D model set and rotatable view.

After fighting with getting my camera to work properly, trying a bunch of different things I finally found that my first piece of code was correct, except that I was multiplying my matrices in the wrong order. BAH! Oh well, I guess that's part of the whole learning curve thing. At least I figured it out and have made positive progress.

My next task is to tackle the collision detection. I think I'm going to start with Bounding Spheres and see how it looks. Then it's on to enemy movement and some simple AI.

Graphics Content Part I - What You Need

2007-08-11T13:07:00.000-06:00

Over the last year and a half I've been learning (or trying to learn) everything I can about game development. One of the major components of any game is the graphics content and the tools for creating it and sources for buying it ready made are quite varied in price and performance.

Here's a bit of what I've found in my dabbling. I should point out that I am developer by trade and my visual artistic talents are very unpracticed.

Choose Your Required Art Carefully
If you have no budget you don't need that many assets. I would break my game down into it's art components. Let's say I'm planning on building the next WoW (Everyone is). I would break my art requirements down as follows:

Player Characters (x 1)
Non-Player Characters (x2-5)
Terrain and Vegetation (1 terrain with a maybe two types of trees and maybe some bushes and flowers)
Buildings (x 3)
Weapons (1 for each weapon type)
Clothing (x 2)
User Interface Elements (very basic squares and dots)
Particles for effects, spells, etc. (1 fire, 1 smoke)

You can only test and demo one player at a time, even in a multi player realm 1 player model is sufficient if u have name tags.

For non-player characters it's nice to show a little variance, a couple of townspeople and a couple targets should suffice.

As far as development goes 1 terrain should be plenty, if you get to the point where everything is built for one terrain and vegetation set then adding new ones at that point is cake.
As for buildings, you don't need many (look at WoW, they have what 10) even if the building looks the same as another putting different things in it changes it enough to make the average player happy.

Weapons I would go all out on, creating one model for each major weapon type. I would do this to help visualize how the weapon has to work. I think it's hard to see how a bow should work if your player is wielding a sword or hammer.

I think clothing is fairly important to the feel of a character. Having two good sets for clothing allow you to upgrade or create two characters out of one player model.

If you've got the talent to do cool interfaces then by all means throw some time into them, they can really make a simple game stand out. I've seen games that had nothing more than a really awesome interface and I though “Sweet, that look like it will be a cool game”. The main caveat is, your UI will probably change lots during development and I would choose a simplistic design at first and then sex it up after I know all the elements I'm going to need in the end.

Particles are probably the easiest. I would suggest exercising restraint with particles. Wait until you know all the particle types you'll need before doing more than placeholders. Once you know all the particles you'll need it should be easier to make them all look different enough to add pizazz to your game with much less rework.

In my next article I'll spend some time discussing my experiences with obtaining the graphic content I need for my projects.

Picking a Game Engine

2007-08-10T11:39:00.001-06:00

Over the last year and a half I've been teaching myself game programming. I started playing with Torque (TSE now TGEA was still in development). I moved on to read Tom Miller's books on Managed DirectX. Messed with Irrlicht and then Ogre and then XNA.

Here's a bit of what I have to say about each one:

Torque
Seems like a large community, lots of built in features. For some reason I really like Torque, where it not for the $300US price tag I would probably pick it up if only just to review it. Currently the flagship package is TGEA which has no managed interface so it's either C++ or TorqueScript. While I feel scripting languages have their place, I don't want to write an entire game in script and have an inate fear of pointers (or some other subconcious reason) so I'm not tickled about C++. Some of the features in Torque that interest me are physics integration, poly-poly collision detection, shader support and a nice map editor that does both interiors and exteriors. When they announced TorqueX I got all giddy, because I thought that would mean a managed interface to TGEA, but alass they have gone with XNA, which is OK, but has been slow in development. As of this writting there isn't much in the way of 3D support in TorqueX, although yesterday David Blake at GG told me that it "is coming".

Managed DirectX
I only spent a few months on this and good thing too, Microsoft decided to deprecate it when it hit Beta for version 2.0. No more MDX, they turfed it in favour of XNA. No big whoop, I think XNA being a true game platform as a apposed to just a graphics layer should pan out to be a better solution in the end.

Irrlicht
The little engine that could. The fact that this engine is opensource and totally free makes me happy to be a programmer. It does pretty much everything. It has an opensource wrapper called Irrlicht.net CP (I have no idea what the CP stands for). My only complaint about it is the fact that I think it tries a little too hard to be all things to everyone. Although it does an OK job of it and seems to get updated quite frequently. This is the engine I am currently using, its nice to be able to just plug in some assets and (for the most part) they just work, no fussing with exporters and converters and such. Unfortunately when they don't work, there's nothing I can do about it other than wait for a bug fix. I have no interest in recoding someone elses engine.

Ogre
Another opensource and completely free engine Ogre seems to be rock solid. Its community is very experienced and its much less all singing all dancing than Irrlicht. It supports one mesh format (its own). It has some simple ray casting functions so you can build a ray based collision system fairly easily (I did). It does have a .net wrapper called Mogre which I haven't really tried out, all of my experience with Ogre has been in C++. If I was doing a production level game I think I would use Ogre, but for prototyping Irrlicht is a little easier.

XNA
Bill gates and I have had a long standing relationship. His company provides me with tools and information on how to use them and I make money by selling solutions that use those tools to all kinds of other companies. I know it's popular to swear and moan about the evil M$, but they've done OK by me. In fact I wish more companies treated technology the way they do. ie: when was the last time you heard Fujitsu Consulting or Thoughtworks come out with a new application development framework and then just give it away. Ok, blnFanboy = "paused" (BTW: Don't laugh I've seen that done in production code)

I like the idea of XNA although it's still missing some fairly important stuff like collision detection, physics and animation, although they have been doing a fairly decent jorb of putting out updates on a timely basis. I don't really care much about the whole XBox 360 thing since I own a Wii and none of my friends who own XBoxes have Creators Club memberships so the ppl I would send my games too can't play them anyways. I'm eagerly awaiting next Monday when they release the news about XNA 2.0 and I'm crossing my fingers that they include the stuff I want.