Hmmm.

The Code Zone Developer Diary's seventh birthday is tomorrow. Should we have some kind of celebration?

Sheesh

I was testing a pal's piece of software a few days ago, and it wanted Sun's JRE (Java Runtime Environment), so I installed it. Today it popped up a little box saying there was a new version available and that it'd like to install it. I told it to proceed. After popping up a progress box for a few seconds, it told me that my Java was all updated and hunky-dory.

Being justifiably suspicious about how Java does things, I checked the Java directory. Sure enough, there was shiny new "Java JRE 5.0 update 2". It was right next to the "Java JRE 5.0 update 1" folder. That's right, it installed 128 meg of updated JRE and left 128 meg of the previous JRE right there to sit unused forever.

The Java people are the most brilliant I've ever seen at shooting themselves in the foot. Every time they decide to embrace a feature that everybody seems to be doing nowadays (like making software automatically check for updates and update itself) they do it in a boneheaded way which will get fixed for the next major revision in two years.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Sun screwed up Java royally. They grabbed everyone's attention early on with web page applet scripting technology that was literally years ahead of everyone else. They could've owned the friggin' market for web applets, and they totally blew it with unfriendly installs, runtime versioning nightmares, and general stuff that's gone completely against everything that made applets promising --applications that are seamlessly cross platform, are easy to maintain, and are trivial to administer.

Zero outta three ain't bad. Oh wait, yes it is.

Question that's been bugging me for 25 years

The theme song for the TV show "The Jeffersons" is all about how George and Weezie Jefferson got rich and moved up to a "deluxe apartment in the sky" on the East Side of Manhattan.

Now then, the song's not as obvious as the themes to "Beverly Hillbillies" or "Gilligan's Island" that give you a complete back-story. Suffice it to say that the Jeffersons got rich by growing George's startup dry-cleaning storefront into a chain of eight dry-cleaning businesses, thus allowing 'em to move from their little house in Queens (next to the Bunkers) to the aforementioned East Side penthouse.

Now then, the song's all about how they're now rich and are "moving on up" in lifestyle. In the bridge in the middle of the song, however, is the line.

Fish don't fry in the kitchen. Beans don't burn on the grill.

I've never understood what this line's doing in a song about being rich. Is it meant to imply that rich people don't fry fish and eat beans?

The line immediately after is "Took a whole lot of trying, just to get up that hill", so perhaps the line refers to how George and Weezie didn't have time to cook because they were working so hard at the business.

Any other theories?

Yummy fleks!

One thing that's very cool about living in Southlake (besides living about a mile from Pat Summerall) is that we're a scant few blocks away from the HQ of GermanDeli.com. Their warehouse doubles as a storefront, and it's the best place ever to pick up sausages, chocolate, and extremely dense bread.

Of course that also means that my wife's new favorite breakfast cereal is Kölln Knusprige Haferfleks Schoko, which is a bit hard to explain to people in conversation.

This year we're going to go trick-or-treating at Summerall's house, just to see what we'll get.

kids' software

As a new owner of plenty of kids' software, I'd like to boldly predict a steep decline in the market for kids' software. I've got at least a dozen CD's of Disney, Strawberry Shortcake, etc, and I've yet to run even one of 'em. There's so much good kids stuff online that I haven't needed to. Between noggin.com, playhousedisney.com, and nickjr.com, there are enough educational Flash-games for kids out there to keep Maggie occupied forever.

There are also some good toy-related sites. Thus far, Maggie's favorite is pollypocket.com. The games are quite well thought-out. For one thing, every game requires the kid just to click once on the screen to make things happen. She just doesn't have dragging and dropping figured out, and some games won't work unless you can do it.

Note that there are also some truly awful toy sites. The "bratz" site, for example, is just an extended commercial for the toys. PBSKids.org is a mixed bag. It's got some really good kids games (Cookie Monster's Cookie Crunch is a favorite), but there are also some games that are obviously slapped together and don't work well. The Barney site is particularly disappointing, with only a couple of mediocre games to show.

Mind you I'm not predicting the demise of kids' software. Maggie's Kinder-Care, for example, has computers but no internet. I'm not sure what games they're running, as I haven't seen any licensed characters in 'em (Mickey, Reader Rabbit, etc). And I don't think they make educational software without licensed characters anymore.

Yay

The new 8400's about ready. The new Dell 24-inch LCD also has a media-reader for a half-dozen different memory cards built into the side. Dunno if we'll ever use it, but it's a nice addition.

Got all the software moved over. I had another MS Office license, so I didn't get a chance to see if uninstalling Office also un-activated it so it could be moved to another machine. The Macromedia apps all have a menu item to un-activate themselves so you can install 'em on a new machine, so those moved over easily.

Got a couple of apps (namely VectorEye, Sothink SWF Decompiler, and GameSpace) that are married to your machine unless you get another set of serial numbers. VectorEye sent me a new number immediately. Still waiting on Sothink. I'll probably just leave GameSpace, as it's a good excuse for me to pester Caligari into letting me review their fancy shmancy new modeler.

---

Posted this in the screenshots thread. It also belongs here. Tell me what you think. It's almost done.

New stuff

Just got another Dimension 8400 here. Pretty-much the same as the other machines (3.6 P4). We also replaced another monitor. Since Dell's got the 24-inch LCD's now, we got one of those. It's now on Shelly's CAD machine. It's quite nice for AutoCAD, now that it's got a bigass properties-bar on the right hand side of the screen. You can now keep the properties bar up and still have room for your project.

Dang, 1920x1200 resolution in 32-bit color. I thought I was cool in college when I had an old NEC MultiSync that'd do 800x600 in 8-bit color, mostly running Windows 2.0, as it was the only app that supported such a setup.

Can't write, gotta read

Read read read, all I does is read.

I came back with about eight "to be reviewed" books from the GDC. I'm reading Crick's "The Astonishing Hypothesis" for a reading group. I've got Mario Puzo's "The Last Don" from the library (so It's promoted to the front before it's overdue). Got about three software reviews in the queue too, so I've gotta do them.

I swear, I read more books than anyone I know, and I still can't get caught up.

I need more coffee.

---

On another note, I missed a seminar about Flash at the GDC, as I had an interview scheduled at the same time. Wonder of wonders, the guy doing the seminar posted the whole goldurned thing on the web.

read it here

Honestly, it's much better than I thought it'd be, and I'm now sorry I missed it. The author gives a good honest assessment of Flash and its capabilities. More importantly, he imparts about a dozen secrets of commercial Flash development that you can't do without.

---

I have now become Robert Redford's character in Three Days of the Condor.

"All I do is read books!"

Oompa Loompa Doopadee Doo

I tire of the folks in movie message boards who are excited about the new Charlie And The Chocolate Factory movie because it'll be closer to the author's "original vision" of the story.

Now then, it has been about 25 years since I last read the book and my memory is a bit fuzzy about details, but I don't recall the book being all that different from the movie back then. It's certainly not something like The Running Man or I Robot where the only thing the books share with the movies are the names of some of the characters. The differences I recall between the book and the 1972 movie are as follows. . .

1. At the end of the movie, Willy Wonka assures Charlie that the other kids will return to their original lives unharmed. At the end of the book, from Wonka's office window Charlie sees the children leaving the chocolate factory all twisted up, covered in trash, etc. as a result of their misdeeds.

Frankly, I think this is a case of screenwriters fixing mistakes in the author's narrative. Charlie is supposedly the most kind-hearted of all children, yet the book has him blithely shrugging when he sees his pals permanently harmed for their foolishness. It recalls the whole dilemma of the moral man who goes to heaven but finds only sorrow there because he knows that others are suffering proportional to his reward.

In order for Charlie to truly be the most kind-hearted boy of all, he would certainly have condemned Willy Wonka for harming his friends, so the screenwriters chose to have the children repaired and returned to their old lives "a little wiser" and without a lifetime supply of chocolate, which greatly softens the ethical contradiction at the end.

2. In the movie, the Oompa Loompas are singing orange-skinned dwarves rescued from LoompaLand. In the book, the Oompa Loompas are 3,000 black-skinned pygmies that were imported from "the very deepest and darkest part of the African jungle where no white man had been before".

Yeah. I'm certain that they'll be returning the whole slavery aspect of the story to the new movie

3. The movie had songs in it. The book didn't.

Big whoop. The Lord of the Rings books had songs in 'em that didn't make it into the movie. Go complain about that.


In short, the new Charlie And The Chocolate Factory will do exactly squat towards realizing the author's "vision" for the material. Given that it's being done by the man who single handedly killed any chance for Planet of the Apes to return as a franchise, my best hope is that it'll be an easily-forgotten trifle, like Return to Oz.




. . .and yeah, I do think to hard about some things. What of it?

Good deal

If you want "The Incredibles" on DVD, the best deal is at Ultimate Electronics. It's $12, and you get a $5 UE gift card when you check out, so the price is effectively $7.

If you also want "Bambi", there's a $3 coupon for it in the Incredibles box. Use your new $5 gift card with the coupon, and you basically end up with both videos for about $20.

Disney's also got a long-standing deal going where you can get a "B-list" DVD (Robin Hood, The Rescuers) if you send in three proofs of purchase, so if you can find another cheap Disney movie (not necessarily at UE), you could end up with four DVD's for about $30-$35.

The only problem is that you've gotta put up with Ultimate Electronics, which has been an annoying experience for me both of the times I've ever entered the place. Unlike Best Buy, I always seem to be the only person there, and I'm always followed by a salesman who wants to give me bottled water and sell me a plasma TV when all I want is a friggin $12 DVD.

Post Post Post Mortem

Finally back to the old grind here. I didn't post a graft update, but suffice it to say that I've got about 40 nice pens (two that light up), a couple of aluminum water bottles with compasses (nice), toy airplanes, a couple of slinkys, a couple of "to be reviewed" books, a little wooden man (see the photo gallery).

I also got an N-Gage QD phone. It wasn't free, though. Turns out I missed out on Oluseyi and Dave Astle's interview with Nokia on the expo floor. Following the interview, they gave 'em both new-in-box N-Gage phones. Oluseyi was quite excited about getting a shiny new toy, but wasn't really sure quite what to do with it. Knowing that the N-Gage is a Series 60 phone that supports the new Flash Lite 1.1, I offered him $50 for it. He accepted, and I finally had myself a Flash Lite capable device for a reasonable price.

And no, I didn't cheat Oluseyi out of anything. I mentioned to him that it'd fetch more than $50 on ebay, but I had an actual use for it, so he was cool with selling it to me.

Thankfully Macromedia's finally got a reasonable program to get a player for the phones. They've had the player for well over a year but haven't been in a hurry to make it available for download because they were trying to set up deals to put 'em in the ROM of new phones. Finally they gave developers a break and made a phone player that you could download for the reasonable price of $10.

Thus far, the player works just fine. The question is now what to get working on it first. I fear the little gizmo just doesn't have the screen real-estate for Brain Bones, so maybe Olive Wars or my Jetlag knockoff will have to be first :)


Oh, and I do have a rant I'm working up regarding the new Popcap Game Framework, along with Torque 2D and Flash and Director and Java. Gimme time to collect my thoughts on the matter, and I'll present on The Way Things Should Work(tm).


And I'm not going to present more reasons not to make a game engine. If you're not convinced by now, you deserve your fate.

Pre-postmortem and post-postmortem

The airport-postmortem is below the line.

The second suitcase was delivered around 5:00 yesterday. It's intact. The other suitcase was dropped off at the Samsonite store for warranty zipper-replacement.

Final pen-count is around 40. I'll have a good rant about web-games coming up soon. Stay tuned!

---

Much like last year, I'm writing my final GDC update and postmortem while in the airport waiting for my flight. Finally got to see a bit of San Francisco early this afternoon when we made a short picnic-stop at a little bayside park near the format Presidio (now the home of Lucas' Industrial Light and Magic). Saw the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz through early afternoon fog, which seems strangely fitting for the view.

I stayed around the expo floor until the bitter end, otherwise known as 3:30 pm Friday. You could definitely see the folks who were the "professional" trade show folks, as they had their booths broken down and were carting their little wheeled "trade show-booth-in-a-case" boxes outta the place by 3:45. I hung around for about an extra hour, as we didn't have all of Oluseyi's video encoded on his laptop yet, and all the video was done on my video camera. We didn't have an annual GDC wrapup dinner this time, as just about everybody's plane was leaving one or two hours after the GDC ended. We weren't leaving until the next day, so we had time to take things a bit slower. There's a nice little Greek restaurant a block away from the hotel, so Shelly and I grabbed a couple of kabobs and humus. There's also a great little organic-homeopathic-new-agey-whatever-fruit-n-vegetable store on the way back, and they have free samples of all their stuff there, so Maggie had plenty of opportunity to graze on fruit on the way back. They had some really good fresh mangos that Maggie fell in love with, so we grabbed one of those to eat at the hotel.

San Francisco Travel Tip: It was over $100 cheaper to fly into Oakland rather than San Francisco, and $10 worth of mass-transit fare dropped us off right in front of our hotel. Check it out if you're traveling.

Attended the indie roundtable on Friday morning. I think the best thing I get out of those roundtables are URLs. This time I found that with about $30 and a little effort, you can get your product listed on Amazon.

And, like at most GDC's, I decided to change my focus. I'd been holding off on finding a publisher for my stuff, but I think I'll start shopping my new games around to 'em. It certainly couldn't hurt, and having someone else publish my games would be significantly less hassle than rolling it myself.

Back to Texas to recuperate for a day, then back to real work on Monday. Hope you enjoyed the coverage!

GDC post-postmortem

I wrote a short GDC postmortem on the laptop while waiting for the plane, but I'm too goldurned lazy to go get the thing and post it. It'll appear later. If you see it up there, read it first, thus putting things in order.

The zipper split open on one of the suitcases while being thrown on the luggage carousel. Some of the clothes made it. The rest are apparently wrapped around a conveyor belt driveshaft somewhere below D/FW airport.

The other suitcase is apparently still in Oakland.

Good work, United.

Got a good night's sleep. It's good to sleep in your own bed again.

See you at next year's GDC!

Day four impressions

Day four is when folks start to get tired. The initial expo-floor crush has slowed to manageable levels. Things just aren't the roar that they have been.

San Francisco's nice, but like most cities has its problems. The mass transit system's great. There are lots of good restaurants. Parts of the city smell funny. There are homeless people everywhere. There appear to be fewer fundamentalists and more touchy-feely new-age types (which is a net plus because no touchy-feely new-age person has yet tried to convert my kid or demand my tax money to promote his world-view).

There's a table of Scientologists near the train station, complete with "e meter" and a pile of L Ron Hubbard books. For the uninitiated, Hubbard claimed that aliens were murdered by an evil being named Xenu 75 million years ago. The ghosts of those aliens are stuck to us and cause all of our mental problems. Using an "e meter", which is a cheap galvanic skin response meter in a fancy case, you can shed those aliens and become "clear".

And no, they're not as fun as they sound. They take themselves way too seriously and are only too happy to start smear campaigns against their critics. some of my best advice for mental health is to avoid 'em.

We ate at a restaurant mentioned in "The Maltese Falcon" yesterday. Halfway through our meal a group of college kids rushed in and handed us a flyer saying that this restaurant had been cited ten times for health code violations. They then hung out outside while the police kept 'em at bay. Of course, they weren't there because they were worried about my health. They were a group of young racketeers for the local union, which the restaurant had apparently offended in some way. Good food, though.

Between the homeless people and the union racketeers, I got yelled at a lot today.

How can a movie about robots have fart jokes? Farting would require a digestive tract, which robots presumably don't have. Oh well.

Expo floor opens. John explodes.

I missed the "wall of game" thing at the Metreon center across the street. I'm actually a bit disappointed that I didn't see it because it seemed like the kind of event that would send chills reverberating throughout the entire city. Nolan Bushnell got a star on the walk for pioneering Atari and bringing video games to the masses. Mario the plumber and Sonic the Hedgehog received similar stars for being the animated bitmaps that sold the most game hardware. The guy who made Mario got a star, but the guy who made Sonic didn't. I guess in that case the achievements of the animated bitmap outshone those of the human being who actually made the effort to create it. Token "rat who went down with the TechTV ship" Adam Sessler was there, presumably gritting his teeth through the bottomless douchebaggitude of the whole sorry affair.

And yes I checked. Douchebaggitude does exist in the dictionary, so it's a perfectly cromulent word to use in normative conversationality.

Well, the expo floor opened today, and there was a serious mad crush of people that overwhelmed the folks at the gamedev.net booth, situated near the entrance. They gave away about several hundred T-shirts, and your own humble servant pitched in to help. I also hawked the pens that we're handing out like. . .free pens. I tried to sweeten the offer by loudly pointing out that gamedev.net pens are superior because they're not only capable of writing in ANY language, but they can also write in uppercase AND lowercase. That did get pens moving, so we were happy. T-shirts were an easier sell, because it seemed like everybody wanted the "I Make Games" shirts. From what I could see, gamedev's pretty well-received by those who know what it is.

Other observations: Sun's apparently given up the ghost as far as making workstation-class machines go. Their booth was staffed by several sexy-looking tower machines with teal faceplates. They also had shiny silver "Powered by AMD64" on 'em, so I presume that Sun's now doing high-end PC clones in sexy-looking cases.

John performs a moment of silent meditation for the demise of the SPARCStation.

The Nintendo keynote is today. I presume it'll be packed to the rafters given that Microsoft gave away a thousand TV's and everyone will wanna see if Nintendo can outdo 'em.

I think the free beer count between Oluseyi and myself was 16. I'll have to check the photographic records to be sure.

Day two observations

The wireless connection we have here is abysmal. It's possible to connect, but the shared bandwidth is approximately zero. The update I posted yesterday was posted via an unsecured router that was across the street from my hotel that was restarted about every 15 minutes. . .and that was STILL better than the connections available for attendees at the Moscone center. The attendance is expected to double today, so I expect things to get even worse. I'm considering signing up with an AOL account just so I'll have enough bandwidth to post updates.

In stereotypical San Francisco fashion, there's an "Out Of The Closet Thrift Store" on the train route from Moscone to my hotel room. I've been considering checking the place out, mainly because finding a classy black pump in a men's 13 is quite difficult.

Unfortunately, other than the city itself, Moscone has little to offer over the old digs in San Jose. I don't know if it's the fault of the GDC brass or the city itself, but the convention isn't scaling all that well.

The expo hall opens today. We will be providing a full accounting of freebies (including beer) as soon as we're sober enough to write about it.

My pen-count currently stands at minus one. I lost the pen I brought with me and had to buy one at the gift shop, which drops the official count into the negative column. Trust me, I'm as disappointed as you are. According to Dave, gamedev will have 2,500 pens at their expo booth, and I intend to take most of them, so hopefully I'll have a brighter picture tomorrow.

Day one observations

The writeup of the Casual Games Summit is ready, and I'll post it in a couple of hours when I get with the rest of the guys and figure out where the new GDC admin page is.

The gist I got from the Casual Games Summit is that nothing really new happened in the past year. The moneymaking model seems to be split between the "download the demo then pay $19.95" model and the "subscribe monthly and play all the games you want" model. The technology has really stayed static over the course of the year. No really interesting new "gee whiz" technology this time around.

"Oluseyi" isn't just a handle. It's actually the guy's real name. Far as I can tell, the name can only be pronounced by dolphins, but he doesn't mind if you call him "shay", which isn't bad. Interestingly, that means that he's the only person at gamedev who does use his real name for his login.

And no, "John Hattan" is not my real name. It's just a handle. My birth name is "L33t Lord Vladimir Armageddon III".

If we ever have an all-gamedev tug-o-war, bet on the team that's got Oluseyi and me on it.

The Moscone thing is rather a pain to get around. It appears that the whole thing is vertically oriented, with registration taking up the entire first floor. That means that once you're registered, you'll have to do everything else on the second and third floors.

I've got a "quality of life" summit today. I genuinely don't know what to expect for this one.

Expo hall opens tomorrow.

No pens yet, which is downright unacceptable, given that gamedev has its own pen this year. I didn't even get a canvas duffel bag. I hang my head in shame.

Day zero

Well I assume this is now showing up on gamedev's official GDC page, so I'll go ahead and chronicle day zero, AKA Sunday, AKA the day before the GDC opens.

Day Zero

. . .was an adventure unto itself, mainly because it was the first time the three year-old kiddo flew on a real-live airplane. Since Shelly had accrued a bit of vacation-time, we decided that it'd be nice to make a family vacation of things. Biggest problem is that, being insufferable cheapasses, we went with the Priceline flight, which was cheap but left at 6:30 am. Which means that you need to be at the airport around 5:00, which means that you've gotta be out of the house around 4:30 am, which is a time completely incompatible with three year-olds. She was at first very excited about the plane-ride, but as soon as the excitement and the breakfast wore off, she couldn't keep her eyes open. Bits of excitement now and then woke her up, like the people-movers at the Denver airport. The whole trip, though, threw her schedule off pretty badly and she ended up spending about 16 hours sleeping once we hit our hotel.

We're staying at the Carl Hotel, which is a little place in the Haight-Ashbury(sp?) area. We chose it because it's near a cousin of mine, and there's also a train stop near the hotel. And when I say "near", what I mean to say is that the train stops approximately three inches outside our window. Thankfully the train doesn't run from midnight to 6 am, so we've got a built-in alarm clock.

The hotel is also about four blocks from Golden Gate park, which has a terrific place for kids to play. The weather was absolutely perfect (72 degrees and sunny), so there were hundreds of people in the park. . .all of whom brought at least eight dogs. The weather forecast is partly cloudy and beautiful for the rest of the week, which is about the best forecast I've seen for a GDC.

The GDC is only about 15 minutes old right now, so there's not much to report on yet. Moscone center (the new GDC digs) is several times the size of the old San Jose Convention Center, so we'll see how well it'll scale to the event.

Funniest conversation so far. . .

Security guy: Are you going to ride the elevator.
Me: Yes.
Security guy: You need your GDC badge to ride the elevator.
Me: The press lounge is on the third floor, which is where I get my badge.
Security guy: But you need your badge to get to the press lounge.
Me: So I need to have my badge if I want to get my badge?
Security guy: Yes.

I got it straightened out a few minutes later before we ended up causing a contradiction that would break any laws of physics.

Talk to you later!

Reason number one

Well, it appears that a couple of you need a bit more than "I know what I'm talking about", so I'll enumerate the reasons as I have the opportunity.

And if you're champing at the bit to tell me that Id writes game engines and is more successful than I am, be aware of one thing. I know Id. I've met Id. I live in the same town as Id. You, sir, are no Id.


That being said, here's Reason Number One To Avoid Writing A Game Engine.

Maturity of tools. The whole "developing tools to make tools" mentality is terrific if your industry or platform is in its infancy. Problem is, it's not. You're developing for a very mature platform using even more mature tools. You're developing at the end of the chain of toolmaking, not the middle. You've got the tools at your disposal to make the end-result of efforts, which is an application for end-users (i.e. a game), not more tools for yourself.

As an analogy, let's imagine for a moment that you're repairing the roof of your house. Now the general game-engine-builder mentality would necessitate that one look at the task at hand, figure out the tools necessary to solve the problem and construct the tools without regard to tools available, no matter their level of maturity, because existing tools will be assumed to be inadequate from the onset and should only be used to construct further tools.

In this instance, you notice that nails must be hammered into your the shingles six inches apart, so you decide that a tool that could better perform the job than the one at hand (namely a hammer) would be a two-headed hammer with heads six inches apart. You immediately set about to constructing this two-headed hammer.

Problem is, unless you intend to hammer in an amount of nails with the two-headed hammer that will justify not only the time taken to hammer the nails but also the time and effort required to construct the hammer, you're wasting your time. More likely than not, you could hammer in all the nails "the old fashioned way" and complete the entire roof-job in the same or less time than it would have taken to construct the two-headed hammer.

Furthermore, you're taking an enormous risk in developing the two-headed hammer, because there's a reasonable chance that, upon completing it, you discover that two-headed hammers don't exist because they don't work as you thought they would, and existing hammers made by tool builders with far more experience than you are good enough to do the job.

That's why people who build end-user products don't waste lots of time at the onset building specialized tools. If you see people building a house, they use tools at hand, even though they're not always 100% suited to the task at hand. If a homebuilder does make a tool for a job (like a cardboard template for some scrolling window-work, for example), it's done very quickly and simply and is intended to be discarded after its use.

Even worse, most of the people I've seen who are developing game engines are developing 'em without even having a well-defined end use for it. That's like making a two-headed hammer just because you're assuming that two-headed hammers are better, and not because you think your roof repair job necessitates it.

Bottom line is that you've got time-tested tools at your disposal, from computers to operating systems to graphics subsystems to 3D hardware to graphics libraries to compilers to level-building tools. You can pretend that STL is a poor tool and you can make a better one that'll be better suited to your games, but you're wrong.

In other words, If you're planning to write a game engine or are in the process of writing a game engine, stop now.


And since I'm feeling charitable, here's Reason Number Two To Avoid Writing A Game Engine.

Reusability is a myth. If you make a game-engine, you will use it to develop one game at most. Pretend that you'll use your magnum opus engine to develop a whole series of robust games, but you won't. The one thing you'll learn in the development of your engine is that your engine is inadequate and must be rewritten.

And this fact will remain no matter how many times your engine is written. If you do end up writing a game with your newly-completed engine, all you'll think is how your project would be more satisfying if you just added one more feature or structured things just a bit differently. If you do manage to complete your game, your next project will inevitably be an improved engine, thus giving your engine a duty-cycle of one game, which negates the entire point of having a reusable engine.

More likely than that, though, you'll grow frustrated with engine-design decisions that you made early on. They'll gnaw at you. You'll feel assured that the project will go smoother with an improved engine. And you'll abandon the work you've done to improve your engine. And that's even worse than the previous scenario. At least in the previous scenario you developed one game, albeit in an unsatisfying way. In this scenario, you developed an engine for which there exists zero games.

So the end result is that you'll have one unsatisfying game or zero games. And that's a lousy choice to make.

If you want an engine that can be used to make reusable games, get one. There are lots of 'em out there nowadays. A good number of 'em were written by people more talented than you and are being used to make games better than yours.

In other words, If you're planning to write a game engine or are in the process of writing a game engine, stop now.

Quick notes

Keep an eye on this developer journal during the week of the GDC. I'll be restricting my most sarcastic commentary for it. The GDC coverage page is almost ready and will be up and running from the gamedev front page on 3/7. It'll link back to here, so it'll be easy to find.

---

Next, to all those Mac zealots who are calling Intel a copycat for making a small prototype PC, shut up already. Your beloved Mac Mini that Intel is shamelessly knocking off is itself a shameless knockoff of the Cuppucino PC's which have been around for years. The biggest functional difference is that they're cheaper and are available with a DVD burner, and the biggest stylistic difference between 'em is the pattern of vents on the top of the case.

So just quit it. Tiny PC's have been around since the freakin' Timex/Sinclair. Furthermore, the original Mac interface was borrowed from Xerox. Steve Jobs' NeXT cube design was lifted from Pixar.

"The fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a telephone attached!" -- Abraham Simpson

A reminder

It's March and I haven't mentioned this in a while, so it's probably time for me to make the official public service announcement. I see people falling into bad habits, so it's important that this be said.

Note that this announcement is not made lightly and is backed by the wisdom of more years in the industry than pretty-much anyone on this site. It is important that you read this advice and follow it. If you follow this advice, you will thank me someday. If you don't follow this advice, you will someday wish you had.

That being said. . .

*ahem*

If you're planning to write a game engine or are in the process of writing a game engine, stop now.

You're welcome.

Workin'

Headway is slow, but I'm working on the Flash-PHPObject-PHP-MySQL-Mambo integration for my games. Things are starting to work, but it's slow going.

• Flash I know
• PHPObject is pretty trivial.
• PHP is uncharted territory for me, but is pretty easy to wrap your mind around.
• MySQL is even further uncharted than PHP.
• Mambo has been working much harder on the user-experience than the programmer experience. Doing things like getting the current user and logging the user in are fairly hairy.

Thankfully, I spent $5 on FlashChat, which integrates with PHP, SQL, and Mambo pretty seamlessly (along with a buncha other content managers like PHPNuke). They broke out the Mambo code into a small source file that does about everything I need.

But it's still slow going. MySQL is next. Whee.