Miscellaneous miscellany

Took Maggie to the doc for her belated 3-year checkup. We finally got a new doctor, as our old pre-move doc is now about 25 miles away.

It's interesting to read the blog of my pal Terri, as her kid and Maggie are so very very different. In one of Terri's entries, she mentioned that Dee (her kid, about a year younger than Maggie) is quite small, in the 5th percentile on the kiddo average-height chart.

In Maggie's checkup today we finally hit a milestone. In the past 6 months her growth has finally slowed to the point that she actually registers on the freakin' chart. She's dropped to the 97th percentile for height and weight, which is almost the size of an average 5 year-old.

It's funny to see Maggie and Dee together. Maggie's about twice Dee's size. They play well together, although Dee doesn't seem to be so interested in Maggie's favorite game, "run around the house and be really noisy and giggly". Last time over at the house, Dee was content with quietly sifting through Maggie's toybox.


Maggie finished her 3-week stint at Montessori "camp" in preparation for starting school in August. She's really motivated to read, so we found a place that'd take her early. It's pretty ugly expensive, but it's a great school and I'd rather send my kid to a great school and drive an ordinary car than the other way around.

I had one of those "awwwww" moments a couple of days ago. Maggie's been going to Kinder-Care for quite a while, so she's old hat at the old "play well with others without mom & dad" game, but for many of the other kids there this is the first time they've ever been away from their parents for any length of time, so there are a few who are adjusting.

Anyway, coming back from school a couple of days ago, Maggie told me "Today Elizabeth was crying because she wanted her mommy and her daddy, so I gave her a hug and a kiss so that way she can't cry anymore".

Sometimes you wonder if you're raising your kid right, and sometimes they just have a way of letting you know that you are. Whatta good kid.

---

And despite their claim to get back to me within 20 working days, shockwave.com finally got back with a reply about Duck Tiles after two months.

Impressively, they managed to be even lamer than the realarcade.com rejection letter. At least realarcade was nice enough to give me one sentence of why they didn't want the game (games of pure logic don't resonate with us. . .I mean our audience). Shockwave.com just sent me the generic "REJECT" rubber-stamp.

*sigh*

Oh well. Gonna keep on keepin' on.




Dear John,

Thank you for submitting your game, Duck Tiles. We receive several hundred game submissions per year, and we are only able to select a small percentage of those for publication on Shockwave.com. Unfortunately, we were not able to select your game at this time. We will keep your submission on file, and if our needs change we will contact you. Please continue to think of us when you produce new games, as our needs vary over game genres and while this game wasn't selected, your next one might be.

Best regards,
The Shockwave.com Games Team

-----Original Message-----
From: John Hattan [mailto:john@thecodezone.com] Posted At: Monday, April 25, 2005 3:06 PM Posted To: Game Submissions
Conversation: Game Submission
Subject: Game Submission


- Your name and contact information

John Hattan
3333 Southlake Park Road
Southlake, TX 76092

- Game name

Duck Tiles

- Are you an active Shockwave.com game developer already? If so, please list your most recent game launched on our site.

No

- URL to playable version - this is VERY IMPORTANT. If the current game is not playable, send a design document or description, and pointers to prior work that demonstrates your abilities. Links that require account creation will not be considered. If evaluation of your game requires a username and password, you must provide that information.

http://www.thecodezone.com/dt_submit/setup.exe

- Short description of the game, including the genre and why it would make an excellent addition to the Shockwave.com library.

Duck Tiles is an addictive and simple puzzle game with 216 levels, ranging from very simple to virtually impossible. The light theme (rubber ducks and soaps sliding around a bathroom floor) and extremely short learning curve will give this game very broad appeal.

- Development stage (e.g. prototype, alpha, beta, complete) and estimated time to complete.

Game is in beta and will be ready to ship in 1-2 weeks.

- Technology: Shockwave, Flash, Java, etc. Specify the minimum version number and note if Xtras or other supporting technologies are required to operate the game.

Game is written in Flash and uses the Zinc 2.0 executable builder to make the game a standalone EXE and to give the game access to the Windows registry for progress-saving. No runtime xtra or DLL requirements.

- Rights - who owns the game? Was it "inspired by" another game? Has the game been licensed to anybody yet?

The game is owned by The Code Zone and is not inspired by any other game (although the board games "Ricochet Robot" and "Lunar Lockout" have similar rules of movement but different rules of play), and the game has not been licensed to anyone.

More dozer doings

Thanks for all the feedback on the animation. To get a little more feedback, I posted a thread in the lounge at http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=327793 where I got some good feedback on the "to border or not to border" question. I think the best came from the last two responses in the thread. They pointed out that adding the thick black border doesn't really grant my bulldozer membership in the "new animation techniques" category, as the border as used in contemporary animation is added selectively and isn't just a cheap graphics trick, as I was using it. It also gave the dozer the appearance of having jaggies, which would clash badly with the rest of the game.

Since the game is being done in Flash, antialiasing is being enforced with a heavy hand. I have noticed that if you've clearly got a bunch of razor-sharp antialiasing going on, something with jaggies just stands out even more. Especially if you're running in a lower resolution, like 800x600. My little dozer animation is made up of a series of bitmaps, but they've got a nice little PNG edge-fade, so they don't look bad against other vector-based Flash stuff.

Long story short, the black border will be gone. It doesn't fit in with the game, and it was just me bowing to the pressure to make my game a bit more "hip".

I've always gotta remember to trust my instincts and not just do something because it's trendy. I always have conversations like this in my head. . .

Me 1: Hey, I oughta do cel-shading for my animations. That's trendy in games that have the word "X-treme" in the title.

Me 2: Yeah, but do you really like cel-shading all that much?

Me 1: Actually, I don't. It just reminds me of cheap wireframe effects that they had to use for old DOS games before video cards had 3D hardware.

Me 2: I figured as much. How many times have you had success when you try to follow what you think others will want rather than your own instincts?

Me 1: Not too often. Certainly not as often as when I follow my own instincts. I've got a good eye for games, and I should trust myself rather than some "industry analyst".

Me 2: My point exactly. Let's go get a sandwich.

Me 1: Sounds good.

In conclusion, the black borders are out.

---

On the "I'm thinking way to damn hard about things", I'm still working on a title. I thought of a cute punny name, but I need to give you a bit of background. One thing I thought of doing was to replace the generic targets upon which you currently roll rocks with little boxes of TNT. Once you've rolled all the rocks on all the TNT, they all explode. That way you've got a little more "real world" motivation in the game. As it stands, there's always the big "why" question in the game.

Me: The object of Bulldozer is to push all of the rocks on the targets.

Player: Why?

Me: Because. . .just because!

The exchange rather reminds me of me asking my nephews "why?" when they tried to explain that the entire Pokemon universe revolves around the theme "Gotta catch 'em all". They similarly couldn't explain exactly why it was important to catch 'em all, but they were also able to pile on the rudeness of thinking me a moron for not grokking that catching 'em all is a goal that requires no motivation other than the zen of catching 'em all.

Anyway, if I replaced targets with TNT boxes, I have the following advantages:

1. The game's now got a real motivation --to get rid of those big rocks, presumably for a construction project.
2. Every level would end with a cool explosion.
3. I could use my outstandingly punny name. . .

Bulldozer Deluxe: Construction Obstruction Destruction!

Okay, it's hard to say, but it's got three words with two-syllable tail-alliteration. That's gotta be worth something!

I'm still not married to "Bulldozer Deluxe", but I still can't think of anything better. I'd really prefer calling it just "Bulldozer" and letting the name supercede the original, but I'm worried that it'd cause confusion with the original game.

FWIW, here are the original names suggested a few weeks ago. If there's one you particularly like, lemme know. Be aware that this is a puzzle game, so any names that are particularly testosterone-fueled will just drive away women players (over half of my market) and make people think it's an arcade game.




Bulldozer Extreme
Mega Bulldozer
Bulldozer Gold
Grand Slam Bulldozer
Bulldozer Supreme
Ultimate Bulldozer
Bulldozer Evolved
Super Crush Bulldozer
Bulldozer Extra
Ballistic Bulldozer
Bulldozers Gone Wild
Bulldozer: The Return
Bulldozer: Dig That Dirt!
Bulldozer: Fellowship of the Dig
Bulldozer: The Two Tractors
Bulldozer: Return of the Dig
Blazing Bulldozer
Bulldozer: Construction at its Finest
Bulldozer Xtreme
Super Happy Bulldozer Fun
Realm of the Mighty Bulldozer
Bulldozer World
Bulldozer Land
Penultimate Bulldozer
Bulldozer: Mission X
Bulldozer Elite
Grand Championship Bulldozer
Bulldozer: The Quest for Quintana Roo
Raiders of the Lost Bulldozer
Bulldozer Wars
Dude, Where's my Bulldozer?
Bulldozer in the 23rd Century
Push The Rocks Onto The Targets With Your Bulldozer
Bulldozer Universe
Bulldozer: Now with the Taste of Real Apples!
Bulldozer: Get a Snack, and Don't Make Any Plans Tonight!
Deluxe Bulldozer: The Earth Will Move
Bulldozer: Romancing the Tread
Bulldozer: Hydraulic Edition
Mighty Bulldozer
Bulldozer Colossal
Power Plow Bulldozer
Heavy Weight Bulldozer
Bulldozer Titanium
Heavy Metal Bulldozer
Bulldozer Titan
Bulldozer Global
Bulldozer: Livn Large
Bulldozer Critical Power
Mighty Metal Bulldozer

I need your opinion about them dancin' dozers!

Got motivated today and decided to work on the animation a bit more. With quite a bit of tweaking, I was able to get Cinema 4D (which I just finished writing an extensive review, so watch for it) and Emotion 3D to play nicely. Emotion 3D's 3DS-importer is horribly broken, so I stuck with the .X importer. It works a bit, but it can't deal with textures, only solid colors. This wasn't much of a problem, as the only "necessary" textures were on the dozer's eyes. I rebuilt the dozer's eyes out of three spheres (white, blue, and black), and did a little work with boolean operators and cylinders and was finally able to make a reasonable-looking eye without textures. I also made the model a tad simpler, for one getting rid of the translucent windows, which would've been a pain to animate over a background.

I then had to fiddle with C4D, as it makes the positions of objects by default relative to the object. Like if you create a cube, the origin of the cube will be in the center of the cube. The 3DS model I had, though, had all objects' origins at an absolute point 0,0,0. It took me a bit to realize this was what was happening. When I exported my dozer, you wouldn't see his newly-created eyes. Turns out the eyes were there, but they were being moved to point 0,0,0, which was in the center of the dozer itself. Once I figured out that's what was happening, it was an easy task to move the objects' origins to the same spot.

It took quite a bit more fiddling than that, but I did get the dozer animating the way I want.

---

Which brings me to the animation itself. I need your opinion. At the following link is the animation resulting from my aforementioned struggle with the tools. One thing I can do is make a thick black "outer border" on the object. I rather like it, as it reminds me a bit of the kind of effect you see in animation nowadays (like in the Powerpuff Girls or that Clone Wars series).


Take a look at the animation on the following page and tell me (1) what you think of the dozer (color, design, etc) and (2) which animation you prefer (with or without border)

http://members.gamedev.net/johnhattan/diary/dozerdancetest.html

Thanks in advance for your opinion.

big free, no kill no tree

To quote my spiritual advisor, J.R. "Bob" Dobbs, too much is always better than not enough.

And to quote my other spiritual advisor, myself, free stuff is cool.

That being said, here's too much for free.

It's The New C Standard: An Economic and Cultural Commentary, which is a 1616-page monstrosity that meticulously details the C99 standard and (to use scientific terms) analyzes the ever-lovin' crap out of it. It charts and graphs and decision-analyzes and folds and spindles and mutilates every operator and bit of C esoterica, presumably with the aim of making better programs by showing where C's productivity trouble-spots are and how to work around them.

Unfortunately for the author, his publisher (Addison Wesley) found the book to be just too goldurned huge (books that thickness apparently can't run on standard book-printers) and dense for general consumption, so the author made the book available for free download.

The book itself is at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/dmjones/cbook1_0a.pdf. The download is only about 8 meg.

There's more about the book here if you wanna read more about its pedigree.

Long story short, if you plan to develop your own language and want an exhaustive and objective standard for the pluses and minuses of a very well-established language, or if you just want to be the biggest C smarty-pants in the room, start reading now.

Just remember to pace yourself by reading one page every morning when you start work. That way you'll be the official C Big Kahuna(tm) at your company around mid-November 2009.

Freebeez and doings

Got two freebies. . .

Linspire 5.0, formerly Lindows, is an easy-to-install Linux. Use coupon code "LycorisWelcome" and you'll get the download link.

Deep Paint 3D is now discontinued and is apparently free. Check here or here for downloads. I used an older version a while back. While it's not a good "end to end" bitmap editing solution like Photoshop or PSP, it does a few things really well, namely cool "realistic" pen effects.

Thanks to Bryan for the second one.

---

Bulldozer's pretty-much feature complete now and just needs final animation and music. I think I got a real live professional musician on the hook for some of the music. He's the former drummer for the former Ottoman Bigwigs, which is notable for being the band that would've opened for The Presidents of the United States of America during their heyday had the lead singer not left the band for an acting career.

Yeah, that's a spotty pedigree, but he's a talented guy and the Bigwigs remind me strongly of They Might Be Giants, who are well outta my price range.

Interestingly, I was talking to my movie producer pal on Saturday (who figured out that he was "family number two" in the post on friendship below, despite my attempts to obfuscate the names and circumstances). Apparently movie music is pretty dirt-simple to get, as every garage band in existence is more than happy to put music in your movie just for resume credit, even if your movies aren't top shelf material (see previous link).

This hasn't been the case for games, although I've gotten my music cheaply thus-far. The polka-anthem for Olive Wars I got in a trade for a joystick. And the bits for my Christmas Flash-game I got for $100 from a guy putting together a resume.

I could probably get music cheaper than from my Bigwig pal, but I want something special and I think he's just warped enough to make something interesting.

We'll see.

---

In the "pointless things that must be mine" department, there is this. The Dreamcast fishing controller coupled with Sega Bass Fishing was one of the most slackful videogaming experiences that could be had. I'll probably have to see how the (probably 16 bit Genesis quality) fishing game stacks up, but it's funny that somebody finally made the "do everything" controller that combines gamepad, gun, and fishing reel along with games.

Oh boy oh boy oh boy

This one's gonna be REALLY REALLY REALLY GOOD. Much better than the last two, and certainly better than the last one. It's gonna revive the whole series. It'll be really great, you'll see. Just wait and see. It's gonna ROCK!!

Why?

Because it's got this really really really cool car. It's sort of a cross between a Lamborghini and an Humvee. And it goes really fast and crashes through walls and stuff and it's just a really really cool car.

Man what a cool car. And it does all kinds of cool stuff.

Oh, and it's also got a REALLY COOL CAR!

And his suit does cool stuff too.




I don't care if this movie really is better than the previous ones. I'm not going to see it because it's being marketed to morons.

Enough introspection

Back to the freebies!

Free downloadable books from Apress. The book on SharpDevelop looks like it could be particularly useful.

http://www.apress.com/free/index.html

Reviews are a scam, discuss

Well not a scam, but now that I'm spending a lot more time writing reviews for gamedev than I have before, there are a couple of conclusions I can reach about the profession.

Namely that it's 90% a scam that depends more upon the prevailing winds of rumor and innuendo than actual quality. Probably less so in the book and product reviews that I do because there's a more objective (and easier to follow) standard to follow. If you send me a program and it crashes after 18 minutes, I won't rate it highly.

Movies, though, are a better "petri dish" for observation because they're almost entirely subjective. And here's a bit of statistical analysis already done for me by my pals at Rotten Tomatoes. For the uninitiated, RT gathers up movie reviews, determines if they're mostly-positive or mostly-negative, and gives you a movie's score based on that. While there is some subjectivity in determining whether a review's mostly-positive or mostly-negative, reviews tend to be so polarized that it's not an issue.

Now then, case in point. The original "Matrix" is accepted by most to be a good movie, and it correspondingly received a score of 87%. This is to be expected. The movie received good buzz and didn't disappoint.

Now then, the sequel proved problematic for reviewers. The buzz for the movie was still positive and there was no reason to think that a sequel would be anything but an equal to the original (as Peter Jackson showed). Following a big first weekend, the controversy began. While some liked the sequel, most thought it far inferior to the original. Despite the problems with the sequel, reviewers gave the movie A still respectable 75%, based more on rumor and expectation than the movie itself.

The third movie, though, was a much easier proposition. Since the second movie had disappointed so many fans and was filmed at the same time as the second, it was a foregone conclusion that the third movie would be as disappointing as the second. Reviewers weren't caught off-guard this time, and the third movie expectedly received a dismal 36% despite the fact that it was so similar to the second that it should've done about as well.

What's my point? It's that movie (or book or product or anything else) reviewers by and large aren't any more an objective source of the subject than you are. Their reviews are as much a reflection of public perception and rumor than the product itself. If you read a movie review, even when written by a well-respected reviewer, it's likely colored by what he's heard others say about the movie, the perception of other movies of its type, the quality of the stars in the movie, and even the quality of the poster.

It's the same for books. Gamedev gets plenty of book reviews that we don't approve because it's obvious that the reviewer reached his conclusion without reading the book ("Visual Basic SuXxOrS, so go get a C++ book"). My point is that "respected" reviewers are little better than those.

My wife met up with a guy once who was actually taking movie reviewing as a major in college. While talking with her, he kept going on about how much he loved Quentin Tarantino and hated the Coen Brothers. My first thought at hearing this was "Well then he's already failed movie-reviewing 101, as his reviews will be forever tainted by his love and/or hate of the moviemakers. A really awful Tarantino film or a really great Coen film won't be reviewed as objectively watchable or unwatchable because of his opinion the moviemakers."

Fact is, sometimes a great director makes utter crap, and sometimes a hack director makes something really good. Reviewing 101 should be "review the product, not the surroundings", but this kid missed that lesson. To be a reviewer is to try to be one of Heinlein's Fair Witnesses. And while that's a tough and sometimes frustrating standard, it's the standard.

So read your reviews with a grain of salt, but try to write 'em objectively.

And the house is blue on this side.

Lotsa things

Regarding the new "Apple machines will have pentiums in 2006" announcement. It was an inevitability. Intel machines and chipsets have been reaping such rewards from economies of scale and competition that low-end machines are breaking the $200 barrier.

It's likely that Apple took a hard look at how they could lower the price of the Mini/iMac/eMac, and they were having a rough time. They pruned every component down to the bone, found that any further cost-reduction wouldn't significantly increase their (likely razor-thin) profit margin on the machines, and looked at radical alternatives. After a couple of days, they ended up with a bunch of red arrows pointing at "Pentium processor and chipset will reduce our per-machine cost by $100" and realized that it was their best alternative.

One strategy that's going to fail, though, is to relegate the pentium processor to the cheap machines, keeping the dual PowerPC processors for the high-end stuff. And here's why.

1. Having two tiers like that, they're gonna have to constantly work to ensure that the top tier is running much faster than the lower tier, even though competing processors have never scaled in speed proportionally. If they're lucky, IBM will finally deliver on their faster processors, but what happens if IBM continues to have trouble speeding up the PowerPC while the Pentium hops past 4 and 5 Ghz? Then Apple's gotta keep using last year's Pentiums in their low-end machines. If that happens, sales of low-end machines will dry up because the (correct) perception would be that you can get a faster cheaper pentium elsewhere. Yeah OSX is different and is supposedly 18.2x more productive than XP, but that's never been an easy sell and will only get tougher.

2. When OSX-based Windows emulators like VirtualPC are updated to use native Pentium instructions, they'll gain an order of magnitude speed increase. Anyone who uses an emulator to run the occasional Windows app on their Mac will find that the $500 machine can do it much better than the $5000 machine. And that won't look good.

3. Apple's history with fat binaries is not good. Much as they like to think that OSX on PowerPC and OSX on a Pentium are 102% identical, they'll work slightly differently. Developers will have double the number of quirks they'll be working around. Tech support departments will have to deal with two different sets of applications, even though they're pretending to be one. Apple tried fat binaries when they went from 68k to PowerPC, and not many people bothered. More likely, installers will just detect your processor and install the binary that fits your machine.

Rather than keep the IBM for the high-end, Apple would've been smarter working with Intel on some kind of multi dual-core Xeon motherboard solution for the high-end, so they could still boast that 64-bit OS plus threading four processors makes 'em the top machine.

In any case, I don't envy Apple. I presume that right now somebody's digging up every quote Apple's ever made about the inferiority of the Pentium, and they're putting together a funny Flash video with that stoned-looking girl acting confused about the whole thing :)

---

On another note, I'm trying to figure out my friendships. I've got a few circles of friends and some close friendships with other families. I'm using two particular families as a case-study because I met with both of 'em this weekend. . .

One family has a really enjoyable wife and kids but a dad (my age) who, to put it succinctly, has trouble getting along with others. Over the past year or so I've grown progressively more annoyed by him that I'm reaching the point where I want nothing to do with the entire family just because of him. Shelly gets along famously with the wife and kids.

The dad (again, my age) of the other family is far more compatible with me. He's fairly irreverent and witty, and I always have an enjoyable time when we're together. Shelly also gets along well with the wife and kid.

What I can't figure out is why I end up spending so much time with family one and so little with family two. I seem to spend every weekend doing something with family one, but I see family two only every three months or so. I think part of the reason is that mom one is a "planner" type who's always putting together an outing or lunch of some time. Mom two does that sometime, but she's a tad more introverted and also is more informal, so we don't get frequent emails planning some kind of together-time.

Part of the reason I also think is because of their respective circles of friends. Family two, having a husband who plays well with others, always seems to have lots of opportunity to pal around with lots of friends. Far as I can tell, family one just has us.

Mind you, I'm not bitching about the whole thing. I'm just trying to figure out why some interactions work the way they do.

Back to work

I'm back to working on Bulldozer. It's rendering the screens now in the browser and on the main screen. I'll probably get it working very simply (no animation) so that I can send it off to any music/sound/animation people. Then I can futz and tune the thing on a live working copy.

That was a design tactic I went with for my Klear project. I described it to the guys as "Do a minimum of design, then get something working by Friday, so you can then work out the rest of your design choices on a working game". Thus far it's worked quite well, although I don't have any heavy design decisions for Full Metal UberBulldozer Platinum Plus Edition (still a working title). It's based on an existing game that's sold about a million copies with no usability complaints, so I'm not gonna do much to it other than add a Duck Tiles-style level-browser to it.

I am, however, eliminating the progression aspect of the game, which will likely cheese off a few Dozer purists. In the olden days, you couldn't play level six of Bulldozer until you defeated level five. While that does make the game more challenging, it means that probably 98% of people who play the game get too frustrated on one level to finish. In the new Bulldozer (and Duck Tiles for that matter), you can play levels in any order you want. If you don't beat a level, you get a "?" indicator in the browser to show that you tried the level but didn't succeed. My thinking is that the "?" is gonna bug Type-A personalities so much that they're gonna return to the level again and again until they beat the level and clear the indicator. But if you're more of a type-B personality who wants to play a bunch of fun levels, you won't be punished for it.

Something funny

A conservative newsletter just posted its list of The Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries. The list itself is nothing surprising for a rightwing newsletter, with books on communism, socialism, anti-Christian philosophy and evolution.

What's notable is that every book contains a link to Amazon with the newsletter's referral ID in the URL.

Remember, folks. These books are the most harmful things published in the past 200 years. And we get a 5% kickback if you buy 'em today!