Category: General

Categories
Geek / Technical General

Cathedral and Bazaar…and Gaming?

In the latest Escapist, The Contrarian: Roll the Dice mentions ESR’s The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

I’m reminded of Eric S. Raymond’s essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar. He wrote about the differences between top-down, monolithic software development and bottom-up, open-source development. But the metaphor applies here too.

People don’t always get what the Cathedral and the Bazaar really represent, and it is weird because it isn’t like Raymond hid the meaning in metaphor and poetry. He says it up front: the cathedral represents software development by project leaders on high while the bazaar represents software development done by everyone. Both ways can be open source, not just the latter. It just depends on if the project moves in a direction on the whim of the few or with the natural developments of the many. That’s all it refers to.

Linux overturned much of what I thought I knew. I had been preaching the Unix gospel of small tools, rapid prototyping and evolutionary programming for years. But I also believed there was a certain critical complexity above which a more centralized, a priori approach was required. I believed that the most important software (operating systems and really large tools like the Emacs programming editor) needed to be built like cathedrals, carefully crafted by individual wizards or small bands of mages working in splendid isolation, with no beta to be released before its time.

Linus Torvalds’s style of development – release early and often, delegate everything you can, be open to the point of promiscuity – came as a surprise. No quiet, reverent cathedral-building here; rather, the Linux community seemed to resemble a great babbling bazaar of differing agendas and approaches (aptly symbolized by the Linux archive sites, who’d take submissions from anyone) out of which a coherent and stable system could seemingly emerge only by a succession of miracles.

Even so, people think the cathedral and the bazaar refers to open source vs proprietary software, Microsoft vs Linux, and all sorts of things. And apparently now it refers shallowness in video games vs the depth provided by tabletop gaming? Or the openness of a game as opposed to the rigidity?

I thought it was a good article, but the link to ESR’s work was a big stretch that doesn’t work.

Categories
General Personal Development

Goals for September

I had made up a plan for the next year or so that gets more vague and indefinite as the year goes on. It makes sense to me to do it this way since I have no idea what things will be like in a year, but I can have some very specific goals for the end of a year, such as having at least one game published and selling on my website. I had some very specific goals in August, but they didn’t all pan out. I will have to update my plans, but I’m not dejected. On the contrary, I am very pleased with my progress, even if it was slower than I wanted. I overestimated the amount of time I would have to dedicate to certain tasks, and now I have more experience when it comes to making plans.

One thing I wanted to do was make an actual website for GBGames. Currently, the main page is very sparse. I don’t actually have any games to put up yet, but I figure it would be nice to have something better than a text file with hyperlinks. I’d just prefer for it not to look so unprofessional and amateur.

Another thing I want to do is finish Oracle’s Eye, but judging from my progress over last month, I wonder if it would be too optimistic to think I can have it completed in a second month. I have to schedule certain days as development days and not deviate from it. Certain days of the week are already taken up by meetings, and some meetups are already scheduled for this month, such as the Chicago Indie Game Developer Club Meeting being held on Tuesday, September 27th, at 7PM at Dave & Buster’s. I’m also attending the Grand Rapids Schmooze on the 15th, 16th, and 17th, and since I don’t have a laptop, those days are definitely not programming days. I can, however, doodle, write up designs, and otherwise do things that require only pen and paper.

I’d also like to incorporate by the end of the month, which I don’t think is too ambitious at all. I’ve been looking into it, and at a recent seminar an entrepreneur I met suggested that I should meet with the SBA to ask for all the information I need since they give it out freely. My university has an entrepreneurship center that can help point me in the right direction for the resources I need. There are even places to go to get free legal advice.

There are other things I would like to do for the month, but the point is that I need to get a plan on paper so that I am not wasting cycles trying to figure out what to do next or what has to be pushed off to next month. By the end of the first week of September I hope to have the month’s goals specified and fleshed out. Set some goals, make a plan to achieve those goals, and then execute the plan.

Categories
General Marketing/Business

A Business Practice I’m Not Liking

I was on a student health insurance plan up until July. Since I am no longer in school, I can’t take advantage of it anymore. I started to look for a new insurance plan earlier that month, and I figured I would cancel my plan once I knew I had a replacement. Unfortunately the search and application process took a bit longer than I expected and so I was forced to cancel it before I had anything.

No big deal. I just sent an email to eHealthInsurance.com, my “agent”, and asked them to cancel my Fortis Health Insurance plan. Simple.

I did end up sending it a bit later than the expiration date, but I made an assumption that I had a grace period. You know, because good companies don’t terminate your plans without saying, “Hey, we haven’t received your payment, so we’re letting you know that your plan is danger of being terminated.” In fact, they did send me such letters.

So I was surprised to find a letter yesterday telling me that they cancelled my plan on July 27th, 2005. Um, it’s frickin’ September, and you are telling me this fact NOW?!? A whole month later you decide to inform me of this decision? The letter’s purpose was to inform me that they cancelled it because of non-payment. Huh?! I CANCELLED it, and obviously they should have received the cancellation since they didn’t send this letter until a couple of days ago. I cancelled weeks ago.

The best part? The letter informs me that this reason can be used when I finally do apply for new insurance from any company.

Why not inform me that the plan was cancelled, oh, I don’t know, when you cancelled it?

Recently I had a similar problem with my cell phone bills not getting paid. I received a bill that didn’t mention that my last month’s payment was received, but I assumed this bill might have been sent a bit earlier. After all, my payments were handled by the phone company since I had a payment plan that allowed them to take what I owed them out of my account every month. Up until the situation I describe below, I was very happy with their customer service.

I forgot that I received a new debit card from my bank and didn’t think to update the expiration date on record with the company. When I noticed that my bank statement didn’t match what I thought I should have paid out, I called them and found out about this situation.

You know what would have been frickin’ useful? Getting notice in some form saying, “We tried to collect payment, but your expiration date on your card is not correct.” Or if they don’t have that information, how about just, “There was a problem trying to get payment. Please call us.”

But no. I had to find out myself. I didn’t get charged a late fee, but I was wondering if I would have been if I had waited longer to call them.

Both of these situations are my fault in the end. I made bad assumptions. I forgot to update my information. I admit that these were my problems.

But what kind of a business forgets that its customers might be human and make mistakes? These two companies aren’t the only ones either. In the past few months, I’ve been getting the feeling that companies don’t WANT to do business with me. Seriously, why do I have be the one who finds out what the situation is? Why can’t the business be proactive and inform me about what I need to do if I need to do anything?

Imagine if I would have been sent a letter the day that they cancelled the plan. I would have been better prepared to do something about it, especially if it potentially has such a huge effect on my application to other insurance providers. Imagine if T-Mobile would have told me that they had a problem collecting payment THE DAY THEY TRIED TO DO SO. The problem would have been resolved then and there. Instead a month went by before I knew about it.

I’m 24 and haven’t been working with services and businesses for too long. Up until a number of years ago, I wasn’t in charge of my finances. I’m disgusted with the level of service I receive at some places. Has this been the status quo, or is it a new trend with businesses? Why do businesses think that they are better for upsetting me about completely preventable things? After all, wouldn’t they get paid sooner? Wouldn’t they keep business from going to their competitors?

Categories
General

It’s, Uh, Blog Day

According to Gaping Void, it’s Blog Day today.
From the apparently official site:

BlogDay was created with the belief that bloggers should have one day dedicated to getting to know other bloggers from other countries and areas of interest. On that day Bloggers will recommend other blogs to their blog visitors.

With the goal in mind, on this day every blogger will post a recommendation of 5 new blogs. In this way, all Blog web surfers will find themselves leaping around and discovering new, previously unknown blogs.

Ok, cool. I’ll give it a go. I’ll head on over to Technorati, click on Blogday since apparently everyone is talking about it, and see what blogs I find there.

1. Lironbot is a graphic artist from Israel and, as it turns out, runs Linux.
2. Life Beyond Code is Rajesh Setty’s blog. He is an entrepreneur and published author.

Ok, I know the point was to find different cultures and areas of interest. So I’ll try a different tag. Um…poetry. I don’t read a lot of it, so that has to be different enough.

3. sweeti’s space had an interesting poem comparing friends to computers.
4. ….

Ok, I couldn’t find too many for Poetry that I liked. WAY too much teen angst. How about philosophy?

4. The Master Smiled is sort of like Gaping Void except instead of business card drawings there are cartoons to accompany each post. Reminds me of the stories of Master Foo from Rootless Root.
5. …

Ok, philosophy gets pretty heavy. Politics? I’m still burned out from 2004. Sports? Meh. Sex? Too risky to check while I am at work.

5. Paperback Writer is actually pretty cool. The blogger is a published author and writes about writing. Pretty cool.

Interestingly, this conscious search for new blogs alerted me to some problems. Way too many blogs are subtitled along the lines of “Joe’s Interesting Thoughts” or “Sue’s Views on Things”. Wow, is that vague or what? Mine at least mentions that I am an indie game developer. Of course, if you don’t have a focus for your blog, that’s fine, but there should be something, right? Another issue is that some blog layouts are really, really hard to read. People have told me that my blog needs to update it’s look, and I agree, but I think it is at least functional. Some blog layouts get in the way.

Also, there is way too much teen angst poetry.

Categories
General

No More IOTD? So Long, Flipcode

I just found out from z425 that flipCode has closed. Kurt, the primary editor, doesn’t say anything about why, but at least the site will keep an archive of articles and forums.

I always planned to submit a screenshot of one of my projects to the Image of the Day. I always enjoyed that feature.

Categories
General

Learning Kyra: Sprite Loading

While working on Oracle’s Eye, I learned something new about the Kyra Sprite Engine. For some time I’ve wondered how I would load sprites from a script. Normally, I would load a sprite resource with:

GetSpriteResource( Char_Player)

where Char_Player is a constant defined in a .h file generated by Kyra’s Sprite Editor. While I could write a file to load the U32 that the constant referred to, it seemed unwieldy to have a script file that looked like:


Player 1 < < 0
Enemy 2 < < 0
...

I would think that updating such a file would be confusing, if not a nightmare.

So while perusing the code files looking for information on how to do something else entirely, I saw that the test programs provided with Kyra had lines that looked like:

bigRes = engine->Vault()->GetSpriteResource( "LARGE" );
medRes = engine->Vault()->GetSpriteResource( "MED" );
smallRes = engine->Vault()->GetSpriteResource( "SMALL" );

I was excited that I could apparently load sprites by name, but I didn’t remember seeing anything about how to do it in the documentation. I looked more closely and found something about how to refer to a sprite’s action by name, but not the sprite itself. After some more hunting through the code, API, and documentation, I figured it out.

The name of the constant Character_Player was made by creating a sprite called Player. Character_ was just a prefix I used for all characters. Kyra allows me to refer to the name of the sprite as “Player”, however. So:

GetSpriteResource( Char_Player)
is interchangeable with
GetSpriteResource( "Player")

and naturally that means that I can do something like this:

string name = GetEntityName();
GetSpriteResource( name.c_str() );

Voila! Sprite loading by script is possible! The only thing I need to do is make sure that the names that I give my sprites using the Sprite Editor are the same as the names in my script, but it is definitely better than syncing the names with things like ( 1 << 0 ).

Categories
Games Geek / Technical General

PWNED!!!

I don’t play WoW, but I thought this thread on their forums was hilarious: Son owned by Mother

Categories
General Marketing/Business

Sheep or In The Know?

An iPod Sheep Fights Back at Creating Passionate Users made me laugh. It was funny to me because it was a shrill defense against the accusation that only sheep would pay so much more money for an iPod (or Mac hardware in general) just to look cool. The Ignorance Premium, as Hugh McLeod refers to it as.

Why is the iPod so successful when perfectly fine alternatives exist? I don’t pretend to know, as I am one of the three in the world who don’t own one. But as I understand it, it is supposed to be the best form and function. It’s not just cool. It’s sexy.

And almost everyone has one. That’s what is so mind-boggling about it. If everyone has one, then how can everyone be sexy? But there it is. And people are willing to play extra for it.

Nevermind the DRM. Nevermind the issues with replacing a battery. Nevermind the need to choose between hard drive OR music player. Nevermind the lack of .ogg support. Nevermind that you can’t transfer music between friends that the local band told you was perfectly fine to do. People will pay a premium for the “best” music player, best being defined somewhere, I’m sure.

I’m fairly cost-concious. I didn’t shell out extra for a Starter jacket when I was younger even though everyone else had one and they all made fun of me for it. I didn’t think much of “diamonds” in my gym shoes, especially since those shoes were always heavier than mine. I didn’t even want to pump on my shoes. And I didn’t rush out to buy an iPod, partly because I haven’t been all that into music and so didn’t exactly have a portable CD player to replace anyway, and partly because of the neverminds I list above.

But wait. There was one thing that I fell in love with when I first experienced it. When Starfox 64 came out for N64, I remember praising the Rumble Pak that came bundled with it. Friend didn’t “get it” when I told them about it. “Wait, let me get this straight. While you play, this thing makes the controller shake? Um…so?” Since only a few games had rumble compatibility, no one was rushing to get one. Of course, once I let someone play, they quickly loved it too. Today, if a console doesn’t have controllers that “just shake while you play the game” it would be found lacking. I even bought a Logitech joystick that had force feedback.

But hey, I’m totally different from those iPod sheep. Force feedback was cool. B-)

Categories
General

Writing Well

Writing is about communication, and writing well means being able to communicate clearly to your audience.

Two kinds of writing by Seth Godin gives some quick, focused tips on how to write for different audiences. To summarize an already short post, if the audience consists of people you know, you can and should write with detail. If you write for a more general audience, you’ll need to lay off the nuance and low level details. It is one of those obvious-when-you-read-it-in-front-of-you kind of tips.

I find that my writing has greatly improved since I’ve started this blog. Any writing I did previously was through instant messages or email. Occasionally I would write a review for Game Tunnel. Even when I was still going to school, my last year didn’t require me to write papers for class as I mostly took computer science or math. I made a point to write with correct punctuation, spelling, and grammar, even when dealing with IM. I just didn’t want to gain bad habits by writing in too much shorthand: “d00d ur kool im out g2g lol”. Children are growing up today writing papers for class that are nothing better than IM conversations! Writing my blog lets me practice the art of writing a lot more often than I normally would. It is a very nice bonus since I didn’t start my blog to improve my writing.

I think I am pretty good at spelling, punctuation, and grammar. I don’t have a problem with the mechanics of writing; however, when I look back at what I wrote even just a year ago compared to what I write now, the quality difference is amazing. Perhaps part of it is because I read so much more often than I used to do. Perhaps I simply had great teachers in high school. I think that writing more often has the biggest impact since I not only get to practice writing but can also read the results. Today I can see some writing from a year or two ago that just makes me uncomfortable.

In a similar way, I need to practice coding more often so that I can look back in a year and cringe at my commenting style. B-)

Categories
Games General

Women Gaming Restaurants?

This topic is kind of related to my post on making girl friendly games. Apparently, Nolan Bushnell announced plans to found a new chain of restaurants designed to lure women into gaming. Bushnell is pretty much famous for Pong, usually incorrectly credited as the father of video games. He also created Chuck E. Cheeze series of restaurants.

I actually remembered going to a restaurant that had table top arcade games with my family when I was younger. The idea of arcade games that you play sitting down was pretty cool to me. Apparently Bushnell wants to make a restaurant that has games that appeal specifically to women. And of course, if women go, men will follow. And alcohol usually helps.

Of course, that’s the theory. Dave and Buster’s and Gameworks already fulfill the “gaming with food and alcohol”, but they don’t try to appeal to women much. What will Bushnell’s new restaurant actually do differently to bring in women? Will it actually bring in other non-gamers as well?