Quantum-thoughts

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Braindead ramblings about needing a new job!

I’ll just repeat what I posted to +Dan Groom instead of elaborating I think:
“Circumstances might be changing where I am :/ might be time to kick games development to the kerb as a career it’s just pissing me off too much constantly having jobs disappear beneath me every time I start to get back on my feet :(“

I dunno, I got into games development like a lot of people did/do because I wanted to make games, duh! However, I’ve made racing games, MMO’s, mini-games, a Kinect title (can’t discuss), worked on a new platform at Sony (also can’t discuss!), currently I’m making a mobile game and out of all that the things that really motivate me have been +Pioneer Space Sim and the handful of other little things I do that are not done at my work.

That last part really just sums it up for me right now, I could be doing anything with my day job because it rarely reaches the core of me that is genuinely excited about game development so why not get paid better for doing something else and put all of that passion for games coding into the spare time projects that I love instead?

Of course I do have 8+ years of game dev’ experience and I don’t want to leave, I keep hoping something that inspires me will come along at any moment like it did on the MotoGP games. I had a tonne of health issues back then but even when we knew we were fucked as a studio I still had to spend the last 3 days coding furiously to improve the texture compression on PS3 because it truly mattered to me that we shipped with that fixed, that it looked as good as I could make it.

+Richard Coen told me that he had to fix a bug with that particular bit of manic coding in the following weeks :D but that’s what you get when you take a 2 week task (according to our PS3 lead coder) and do it in 3 days and it was worth it. The customisable bikes and riders in MotoGP 10/11 looked a lot nicer than the MotoGP 09/10 ones.

That game, Monumental Games and the people I worked with there meant that I cared about what I did, not all the time of course, but often enough that it was worth being paid crap.

Recently though, it’s gone and I don’t know what to do now.

I’m spending today recovering from a hangover after going out and talking about this that descended into just drinking and wearing silly glasses :) Listening to Insomnium, coding a little on +Pioneer Space Sim , looking up contact details for people I need to start emailing again about possible jobs etc.

Hmm, mega-ramble and no punchline. Sorry folks!

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Stunt Car Racer

The other week I helped a guy called Daniel Vernon open source a project that he’s been working on and had created a website for here: http://stuntcarracerwin32.bravesites.com/

Anyway this came about because I was impressed with what he’d done but I found the controls confusing as I always used to play on the Amiga with a joystick. So I emailed him and asked if I could add XInput support for the Xbox360 joypad and he very kindly agreed – sending me the sourcecode in the process.

In the same email I had asked if he was going to open source the project. He was interested but didn’t have time so said that I could do it if I liked.

First up I looked into various open source places and more specifically how to transfer project ownership since I figured it is really Daniels project. Eventually I opted for a SourceForge project using their Git repository (although there is still an SVN repo I need to remove!). With the project uploaded, I created a branch and implemented really basic pad controls, did all the usual and it’s now available in the master.

So why am I posting this? Because he is now also a project admin, there’s a few more things like screenshots and a downloadable zip, and the code is up for anyone to take a look at right here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/stuntcarremake/

Hopefully I’ll even find time to do something useful with the XInput stuff :)

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StoryBricks is up on KickStarter, aka putting my money where my mouth is.

It looks like KickStarter is becoming more and more the route to funding for a lot of projects.

StoryBricks have just created their page and I’ve put forward what I can afford right now and here’s where I explain why it’s not just because thedarkproject & Psychochild work their.

First a little background; I’ve funded one other project previously, a much smaller effort to produce a sprite animation creation tool – this one I originally decided to back because I had a much much much earlier version of the tool already through my involvement with the “Natami” project. It came from such humble beginnings and was such a clear little idea that I wanted to support it.

StoryBricks is obviously a little bit different, it’s not a 2 person team working on a tool … oh no wait, it kinda is :) Everything is relative.

They’re a small team of developers, admittedly some very talented and experienced developers, who are trying to redefine the way that MMOs/RPGs/Storys in general can be created and edited in games. That’s a tall order when you look at the hundreds, literally hundreds, of developers required to create the tools, gameplay and content for a regular MMO or RPG. It seems like a goal that’s worth pursuing because the real joke about the “kill-10-rats” meme in MMOs/RPGs is that sadly it is real!

It could be argued that it affects more than just MMOs in fact but lets stick with the territory that StoryBricks are after.

Real story, that develops and reacts to you as you play – something tabletop gamers are used to and that I haven’t seen in a computer game beyond the most cursory of changes in so many years that a little of what I feel for gaming has slowly withered away – might actually be possible. Of course I can see uses for it far beyond MMOs, hell I’d like to use it in Pioneer to give it more character(s), or think of Deus Ex where following leads changes the plots as characters realise you’re onto them but instead of being scripted it could be dynamic involving the various attitudes of the NPCs to you and those characters.

That sort of thing has to start somewhere, and it looks like it’s starting with StoryBricks and their KickStarter page – I think Psychochild (aka Brian Green) does a much better job of writing up what it’s about so go read that.

Right I’m not good at explaining myself so I’ll stop there but hopefully you can see something of what I see in it and maybe fund it a little too.

Andy

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Embarrasing search history…

My embarrassing search history will now also include the term: “How long to boil an egg?”

I’m 32 and I’d forgotten!

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WordPress so far…

So far WordPress is proving to be “ok”. it’s just another blogging service after all except that I’m hosting it on my own site, which is itself hosted on a service somewhere “out-there” in the world at large.

I’ve managed to wrangle the plugins to handle cross-posting a bit better now, had to actually edit some of the php :/ a bit crap. Also the actual importing from LiveJournal just doesn’t seem to handle comments and for some unknown reason they removed the ability to import LJ’s exported XML files… Fuck knows why.

So you’re reading this because you want to get your comments from a LiveJournal based service (InsaneJournal, LiveJournal, Deadjournal, etc) then here’s what I had to do… it’s hilarious you’ll “love” it.

1. I had to find the fixed version of LJArchive which still works with LiveJournal – thankfully someone had paid to have it fixed!
2. use LJArchive to download your LJ, then export it to an xml file. Or if you have a lot of posts, split it into posts grouped by year NB: this is what I had to do.
3. Now go and grab version 2.6 of WordPress, it has to be an older version because they still had the xml importer back then. A slightly newer version like 2.7 might work which would avoid the manual upgrading step but this is just what I did!
4. Setup WordPress 2.6 but don’t go customising anything.
5. Go to Manage -> import ->LiveJournal, it will ask for your LJ xml file, upload it and import. If you have multiple xml files that you separated by year then just repeat it for each year, don’t worry if you upload one twice, it seems to handle that, mostly.
6. Once you’ve imported everything you need to “upgrade” WordPress 2.6 manually. This means you need to download the latest one, extract it and overwrite your WP 2.6 installation. There are instructions here.
7. You should now have your posts, your comments and everything else from LiveJournal AND if everything worked you’ll also have the latest WordPress.

Discovering this process was a pain in the balls, but actually doing it wasn’t too bad. Just a bit time consuming so I hope you have more luck whoever you are!

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Paradise Lost Gig

Thursday night was the Paradise Lost gig at the Rescue Rooms, or whatever that room upstairs behind it is called!

We got there I time to most of Vried play their set, which was interesting because when we arrived they were playing something that sounded really good, heavy, fast, lots of shouting etc and I thought “Oh good, loud, fast metal, shame we didn’t get here a bit earlier!” and then they went downhill a bit and I found most of the rest a bit disappointing in comparison. So it sounds like they can do good stuff but might be a bit hit-or-miss.

Insomnium however, well, I got home, slept, and then bought two of their albums as soon as my PC would boot. Really impressive, consistently great sound at the gig. Danni of course already knew about them but great discovery for me since they’ve got a good few albums out and I can do some catching up at my leisure! Currently deafening myself to them right now in fact.

If there was one downside to the Insomnium set then it was that they made Paradise Lost seem really flat and dull in comparison. Not really what you want for the headlining band that you’re there to see. They were good, solid performance and played songs I liked, I found the songs from the new album a bit off but then I hadn’t heard them before and they were amongst ones I had. Always a weird effect that, familiar vs unfamiliar songs from the same band always makes me feel like there’s something dissonant about them. Anyway rambling aside I ended up getting quite bored during their set!!! Sat and chatted for a while and drank too much beer for a week/work night.

Some good, some bad. One new band to follow plus I got to see a few friends I don’t see often enough. Actually “Regain The Fire” is just playing and it’s fucking awesome.

Adios!

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Moving over to a wordpress journal, don’t panic!

I’ve been meaning to do this for some time, not leaving LiveJournal, but having a separate blog that is cross-linked.

It took some bloody effort to pull all the data across, mostly due to LiveJournal AND WordPress being crap at exchanging and sharing data. Specifically comments.

Well, lets see how this cross-posting and comment handling actually works then, by the way if you’re reading this on LiveJournal… it did ;)

Andy

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Rant rant rant

I should stop reading the news.bbc.co.uk because there’s always something on there to piss me off.

Tonight there are two stories the first _really_ gets to me:
“Schools should be fined for illiteracy, says riot panel”
“Fine schools for poor literacy” – what a master stroke, put all the emphasis on the school failing them. Obviously it’s the schools, that’s where you learn EVERYTHING in life. Parents aren’t involved at all, or society, or the child themselves.
Teachers seem to be facing a barrage of bullshit lately and especially from our own government about how it’s the schools that are failing kids. No emphasis is made about the child, or their home situation, or the background and environment they live in – nope, it’s all the schools fault. This in the same week as reports that suggest that schools should act as surrogate families to give children the support some of them don’t receive at home.

It pisses me off. Almost – almost – every teacher I’ve known as a kid growing up was working damned hard, often seemingly against government and local education authorities, to do their best for me. I say that as someone who went through special needs, truanting, being bullied extensively and finally left with 6 GCSEs compared to the average 9, and only 3 of those C or above. It took a lot of help to get me that far.

Since I’ve grown up I’ve met many more teachers, friends have become teachers,is a primary school teacher and I constantly see them all working long hours and taking their work not just home with them but letting it dominate their lives in many ways that those of us in regular careers just don’t face most of the time.

How about fining the parents for poor literacy? The teachers will have battled their way through years of large classes with seriously disruptive students, little to no support, the parents are sometimes violent and abusive, the pressure is unending, OFSTED will turn up at random and if you don’t demonstrate actual progression within a 20minute monitoring session you FAIL the inspection, and all the government seems to do is blame the teachers for everything.

What next? Were the riots actually the schools fault? Should there be an anti-rioting class? Or were the teachers not caring enough? Or too soft? Or not educated enough? Or too elitist due to their education?

Bahh, fucking idiots.

The other thing that annoyed me was this one about Google and British MPs being “unconvinced” about the reasons for not pro-actively filtering content:
“Google under fire in UK MPs report into privacy”
Which is what you get when the technically savvy face off against the technologically illiterate… it’s probably the schools fault somehow.

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Casual Hobbyist

Today I implemented part two of font rendering from font’s exported using BMFont, a handy tool for creating texture pages of fonts. Surprisingly painless! I’ll probably share the code at some point with a simple OpenGL app. Most of the code comes a post on GameDev.net by Promit but rendering blocks of coding and handling formatting is taking more thought. It will in no way be “good” code :)

Also of note; I got one of those home energy monitors, deliberately getting one with the ability to pull XML formatted data of it :) currently highest to get the highest score… I mean the lowest! Lowest, must remember that!

Currently my entire house is using 166 watts… now I just need something to compare that too.

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Long time no post… no, not really

gloomie_cookie informs me that she hasn’t posted for a year!

What have I been upto? It was my little sisters (she’s 30, not that little) wedding on Saturday, I wore a suit with tails, photos will be destroyed from orbit. It was a nice event, even the church blessing on Sunday was ok although I did have to sing… that wasn’t good. I think if you removed all of the other problems with religion there’d still be the singing and fucking retarded hymns to put me off.

Other than that, working, lots of working.