My fave fonts

As mentioned a couple of times, I'm moving everything to a spankin' new quad-processor machine-beast. And I find little things here and there that bear mention.

Today it's fonts. As you can see from my games, I don't like to get too flowery with my fonts. A couple of the games (Pop Pies, Double Twelve) use a big fanciful font for the title, but I really like to go with readable stuff for the main text. And here are the fonts I prefer. They're readable at a distance but aren't distracting.

Note that the download sites I mentioned below might not be the preferred locations to get the fonts. Apart from the Vera Sans fonts, the licenses don't seem all that well spelled out. Best I know, most of these can be found on those "six hojillion fonts" collections, so the licenses should be pretty nonexistent. If one of these download sites is annoying, just google for another.

Bitstream Vera Sans - Very nice thick bold font. Classy looking. Wider than Arial and better for titles.

Boulder - Another nice thick easy reading font. Better than Arial Black for big titles.

Denmark - A bit star-trekky, but not so much that it's annoying. Limit this one to short bursts of text or titles. I believe this is the same font that gamedev uses for the text on its T-shirts.

Kacpo - A bit lighter than Boulder. I prefer this to Boulder if the text is really huge (like the Bulldozer main screen), as it's a bit less overpowering.


As for text-editing fonts, I still love Consolas. It's easy to read and the zeros and ones are distinct from ohs and ells, and it's built ground-up to look good in ClearType, and it doesn't look like a danged typewriter. C'mon, folks -- Courier is a holdover from IBM Selectric Typewriters. Time to let go.

Speaking of letting go, I'm enthused to see that Vista finally purged those old 8514 bitmap fonts from the font folder. Given that 8514 hardware was state-of-the-art when I was selling computers at the Texas A&M Computer Store twenty years ago, it's really time to let go.

Next to die, MS Serif!

Retro Games

As mentioned a few days ago, I will soon regain full custody of my old puzzle game-pack. Just for grins, I dug out the old source code from the archives and rebuilt 'em.

It took a bit of doing, because everything dated to 2001. The underlying class library (a pre-Sun-acquisition version of the OpenOffice Framework) consists of hundreds of files, and I didn't wanna deal with the nightmare scenario of having to modify a ton of stuff to work under the latest compiler, so I reinstalled Visual Studio 6.0.

At that point I realized that I had a job ahead of me. My old build pipeline was a byzantine scheme of batch and makefiles that could build up to 624 different targets (50 games + 2 shared DLL's * (16 & 32 bit) * 6 languages). It worked and was as elegant as it could be for the job it was doing, but it liked seeing things just-so. And I soon realized that trying to replicate that structure under Vista 64 was a no-go.

Then the lightbulb went off. Since I got Virtual PC, why not replicate my old circa-1999 build environment exactly? A couple hours later, I had Windows 98 running VC++ 6.0.

Only problem I see is that my games used .HLP files, and those were deprecated in Windows XP and are officially abandoned in Vista. So I figure I'm going to have to convert to CHM or PDF something similar, lest I force my users to go to the Microsoft site to download a crusty old help-viewer that doesn't look like it's seen an update since the games were new.


Best I can tell, the pack will have the following games. This is the Cosmi pack minus the Bulldozers. I have a top-shelf bulldozer remake, so there's little point including it here.

Adjacent See
Arcade Poker
Backgammon
Black Box Chess
CardMatch
Checker Connector
Cheesy Pursuit
Core Meltdown
Cryptograms
Deductive Logic
Engulf
Head-on Collision
Hex
Hexapawn
Invaders From Neptune!
Kizbot
Laser Clash
Make4 3D
MazeRace
Moku
Neutron Trails
Nim
Pangki
Pegopolis
Poker Machine
Push-Pull
Quinto
Reversi
Sechseck
Siege
StackBlitz
Suzy Sushi
Think Tank
Tic Tac Toe 3D
Ultimine
Um El Bagara
Vanishing Cross
Wari
Winding Standoff
Zap Pod!

Furthermore I might include these. These were games that I later rewrote in Flash for the site. The Flash versions are better, but somebody might be jonesing for the originals.

Brain Bones
ChessCards
Olive Wars!
Poker Patience
Robottack (now Zombie Kitten Attack)
Shi Sen
Voracity

Plus the games Bryan wrote for Arcade Magic and 40 Games but didn't end up in the Cosmi packs (provided we can find the source code)

Evolve
Lassoo
Hockey
Tennis

So the pack will contain between 40 and 51 games, depending on what source code we can find and how I wanna market this mess.

On a related note, what should I call the pack? In the past, the games have gone by the following names.

24 Games for Windows
Arcade Magic
40 Games for Windows
40 Games for Windows and Mac
Top 50 Blazing Windows Games
Sybex Games (Germany)
(a half-dozen foreign names)
21 Solid Gold Games
201 Solid Gold Games (of which only 50 were mine)

I'm leaning towards something like "The Code Zone Retro Pack" or something like that. Ideas?

new coverage is up

Hope you were able to grab yesterday's freebie. Today's freebie on giveawayoftheday.com is quite a bit less exciting. It's one of those completely useless "memory optimizers" that appears to give Windows more memory, usually done by trying to malloc ridiculous amounts of memory, forcing Windows to unload lots of stuff it's cached up.

Honestly, have you actually read anything by the guys who write the memory allocation subsystem for Windows? If not, rest assured that they know way more about memory and caching than you will ever know, and if you think that doing a simple malloc(some_ridiculously_large_number); now and then will improve on their handiwork, you're very mistaken.

Notwithstanding, Shelly and my coverage of Casual Connect is now on the front page of www.gamedev.net. Hopefully there's something there that's useful to you. If not, just skip to the last page of part two, as that's where we posted the pictures.

Enjoy!

Act now!

I have an outstanding freebie today, but unfortunately it's only for today.

It's Edraw Max, and it's one of those flowchart-diagramming tools, not unlike ConceptDraw or Visio 2007. To quote one of the comments, "this is what Visio 2007 should have been". It does all kinds of diagrams and has built-in templates for software design, from the old flowcharts and Booch diagrams to UML and SQL tables.

The interface is a dead-ringer for the new Office 2007 stuff. In fact, I think it's a little smoother than Office 2007's interface. It's definitely a big step above the cheesy knockoffs like AutoCAD 2009 and Adobe's CS4 suite, although in deference to Adobe, they're still in beta and are trying to make something that also looks right on the Mac.

Note to Microsoft: If you want your shiny new Office interface to catch on and not end up with an ugly hodgepodge of imitators, you'll need to let developers hook into it. Remember how easy it was to make something with MFC that looked and worked seamlessly with Office? Nice toolbars and MDI and suchlike? That's not gonna happen again if everyone has to reinvent that wheel.

If you do any kind of software design, you should have this tool. It's normally $95 (which is still rather good), but you can get it for free today only. The magical unlock code is in the readme included with the download. Just run the program, find the "register" button and enter the unlock code.

No registrations. No spyware. Just free. Today only.

http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/edraw-max/

Got an Interesting Situation

Just got a letter yesterday from the bank that's now taken ownership of my old software publisher. Turns out that they're now chapter 7 and will either be liquidating all remaining assets or will re-form themselves as a much smaller software company. In either case, the chances of me seeing another dime from 'em range from poor to nil.

Not that I was making much money off the game packs, but it was a little beer-money from time to time. The contract officially expired years ago, but it's set to auto-renew itself yearly unless I told 'em in writing that the contract's over. And while I could've killed the contract at any time, I never bothered, mainly because the games are way obsolete and I never figured that I'd get a better deal for 'em elsewhere.

Also it's probably a good idea to officially pull the contract now, lest it be considered a company asset that's sold in auction for ten bucks, putting the rights into some weird state of limbo because I no longer know who owns 'em.

FWIW, the official game-list is here if you wanna see the games and screenshots and the like. Some of the games are okay. Some are not very good. Some of the more popular ones (Bulldozer, Shi Sen, Voracity) I have rewritten in Flash.

What I'm wondering is what I oughta do with the games now that I'll be taking 100% ownership of 'em for the first time in about 15 years. I realize they're not much of an asset anymore, but people do get nostalgic for 'em and I still get emails. I was wondering if I took the pack, dug out my old compilers, changed up the about-box and splash-screen, recompiled the set, took out the games that have been rewritten (Bulldozer, etc) and released the whole set at an absurdly low price (under five bucks) if people would buy 'em.

I could certainly keep rewriting 'em in Flash, but that hasn't been a problem in the past. I was just thinking that the game-packs could be recompiled and re-released in a matter of days. And at a price of ten cents per game, it'd be a reasonable impulse buy.

Ideas?

New machine install fun fun fun

As you might've seen in the article/review I posted this week, I got a new machine. And getting a new machine means reinstalling all the conveniences and bits that make your life easier. Figured I'd document the stuff I installed with commentary.

Sorry, but I ain't putting up 30 URL's. I'm far too lazy for that. Just google for the names.

Free stuff:

Digsby - Nice IM. Hooks up to every IM protocol but IRC. It's a memory hog, but the next release addresses this, using half the memory of the original.

Juice - Good podcast receiver, although it hasn't seen a new version in a long time.

FileZilla - Excellent free FTP client. Works seamlessly with Windows explorer, so uploading and downloading is just a drag-n-drop operation.

Notepad++ - Terrific free text editor.

XCalc - RPN calculator. Good for you folks who do RPN. The UI looks like something right outta Windows 95 (and it is), but that's my only complaint.

uTorrent - Small, fast, and excellent bittorrent client. Also notable that it is the only app that updates itself properly.

Gom Player - Very nice general media player thingy. Plays all kinds of media formats. Much lighter on system resources than Windows Media Player. If only it had a mode that ran in the taskbar (ala Windows Media Player), I'd use it for everything.

NSIS - The installer I use for all of my games. Small. Easy. Free.

NSIS Editor - This is rather cheesy and never gets updated, but it works. It's basically Windows Notepad that runs the NSIS compiler and reports errors back to you.

Adobe Reader - You know what this is.

IntelliType and IntelliPoint - These are the programs that come in the CD that comes with Microsoft mice and keyboards. They basically add a couple of tabs to the standard Windows mouse and keyboard control panel, giving you a couple of extra functions like reprogramming all the soft-buttons on the keyboard.

Virtual PC 2007 - Yeah, I know VMWare is better. But I friggin' hate VMWare. First off, the free version is crippled. And it puts tendrils into every Windows subsystem that the uninstaller doesn't remove. I was finding folders of VMWare stuff in my old machine a year after uninstalling it. Virtual PC is fully featured, is free, is comparatively small and unobtrusive, and it does what I need it to do, namely run a couple of legacy OS's for me to test games.

CCleaner - Gets rid of bits of old stuff that your machine doesn't need anymore. One hint is to run the registry-cleaner 2 or 3 times in a row, as it often finds registry bits that previously depended on bits that it deleted in a previous pass. Hasn't yet deleted anything important for me.

AVG Free - Finds viruses. Is free. Duh.

Not Free Stuff:

DeepTrawl - This was a freebie that I got for helping the developer test it. It's a very nice website-crawler that finds all kinds of crap on your website after it's been put up on the server. Dreamweaver's site validation does a good job of finding stuff on your site that's nonstandard or breaks under certain browsers, but DeepTrawl goes even further. Some of its recommendations are a bit persnickety (like demanding that every picture have alt-text), but I'd rather have more information than less.

Network Magic - Makes Windows networking dirt-simple. Puts up network maps. Audits your whole network for software updates. Well worth the price. Only complaint is that the Mac version is a pretty poor cousin of the Windows version.

PowerArchiver - The best ZIP tool. There are some free ones that are pretty close and, to be honest, I'd probably go with one if I didn't have this registered.

MS Office 2007 - I could probably live with OpenOffice if I didn't already own this, so it's tough to say if I'll upgrade to later versions.

Flash CS3 - I have the whole CS3 Suite, but I ended up only installing Flash. The other two Adobe apps I use heavily (Fireworks and Dreamweaver) are now running as the new CS4 betas from labs.adobe.com. I might reinstall Illustrator, as it's a good way to convert PDF content to AutoCAD, which I occasionally need to do.

MS Expression Suite - The only thing in the Expression suite that I really use is Expression Media (formerly iView), which is still the best media browser and cataloger I've found.

Firefox Add-ons

Autofill Forms - Click the little pencil-button and your web-form automatically fills up with your name and address and such. Perfect for a free-sample-junkie like myself.

Better GCal - I use netvibes.com as my homepage, with Google Calendar in a big frame so I can see my daily agenda. This add-on strips out the bits along the top and left of Google Calendar so it works better as a homepage widget.

Better GReader - Same thing, but for google reader.

ChatZilla - As I mentioned earlier, Digsby doesn't support IRC and Trillian's IRC seems to be pretty broken, so I go with Chatzilla for IRC.

Foxmarks - Syncs up my bookmarks between my desktop and laptop. Works wonderfully. Completely invisible.

Searchbar Autosizer - Makes that little google search-field small until you need it.

Google Gears - I've not yet started using Google Docs offline, but this is needed for that.

Stuff that didn't work in 64-bit

AVI.NET - I used this with DVD Decrypter to rip the occasional DVD to an AVI file. Unfortunately, AVI.NET apparently doesn't recognize the XVID or DIVX codecs on 64-bit machines. I liked AVI.NET because it was dirt-simple to use. I guess I'll need to find another solution there.

Friday update

Howdy hoo folks. Here's an update. . .

Back from Casual Connect last week. Most of the coverage is written. I plan to hand most of it off to Drew today. Hopefully he can start cobbling it together into something resembling coverage so it can get posted next week.

Until then, here's a preview of us being attacked by a cartoon eukaryote.

The following week I have two product reviews to post.

The week after that I have two book reviews to post.

Which basically means that I own almost the entire month of August on Gamedev, and on top of that I'm still working on the super-ultra-uber-secret project that's name cannot be spoken (even though you already know what it is). Although I'm pretty much caught up in that sphere.


On that note, I might be a bit short in the content department on one facet of the uber-secret-project, so if you fancy yourself a writer and have a good idea for an advanced programming article, let me know.

If you do so, please show me a sample of your writing (i.e. an article somewhere). I'm not now in the position of having to rewrite an entire article because a good idea for an article is backed up by some semi-literate English.

I'm actually a mite short on OpenGL, so if you have a really kewl yet-unseen OpenGL technique that's worth sharing, contact me.

johnhattan@gamedev.net