Good News, Bad News, Worse News

Oh well, best laid plans and all that.

The good news is that my book is now available from Amazon.com. The bad news is that it has already attracted two unfavourable reviews. The worse news is that nobody has actually read it yet.

The problems started when it was decided to not include CD-ROMS with the book itself. This is actually quite sensible in a way. Since you need a network connection to actually use XNA on an Xbox 360 it seemed reasonable to drop the content and make it available on-line. And at least that way we could ensure that the content was up to date.

But not before the Amazon blurb (and Barnes and Noble too) had gone out with the promise of shiny disks. Not surprisingly the early adopters (the ones whose opinions are most important) have heartily slammed the book for not delivering on the promise. I can understand where they are coming from too. If I'd bought something which was mis-described like this I'd be angry too.

I think this is really a failure of process. Microsoft Press and Amazon (et all) should have a proper mechanism whereby when the description of an item changes all the existing purchasers of the item are informed of the change and given the option to back out of the purchase. I'm pretty sure I'm not the first to have been caught like this. But it still hurts.

DreamSpark for Free Stuff

Last week Bill Gates (you might have heard of him - used to run a software company as I remember) announced a new Microsoft initiative called DreamSpark. This gives all students (even those unlucky enough to be at places which are not in the Microsoft Academic Alliance) access to free Microsoft software, including Visual Studio 2008 professional, Windows Server 2005 and Microsoft Expression Studio. And they also provide students with free 1 year XNA creators club memberships. You just have to go on to the site and sign up. If your institution isn't listed as one of the authenticating places (for some reason Hull is not on the list) you can use your Athens username (which all Hull students have) to get access.

To find out how to do it you can read more at Ed Dunhil's blog, where he describes the process. I've just tested it (don't ask me how) and it works fine.

This is wonderful, since it means that any student with an Xbox 360 and Xbox Live membership can now write games for their console. And with the upcoming community developments it means that in the slightly longer term they will be able to publish them out to everyone on Xbox Live.

Earthquake Alert

Such is life. I've only been back from the San Andreas Fault ridden California a couple of days and we go and have our own earthquake in the UK. 5.3 on the Richter Scale too, whatever that means (in our house this equates to "Rattling of windows, scary whooshing sound and ponderings as to the brick resistant properties of an 11 tog duvet.").

Actually it was rather frightening but there doesn't seem to have been any damage done. For me the worst part was the silence afterwards. It really was eerie.

I Want Another Robot

I find the "naked" one rather scary

They had these in the GDC exhibition. They are called Pleos and are actually rather neat. Very like an Aibo, but with a much more organic feel to their movements and behaviour. You can get them in the UK, but they are of course at rip-off prices compared to their American cousins. Ebay beckons......

Early Radio

As luck would have it I was due to do an early radio thing this morning. With added jetlag. Fortunately things worked out quite well, as my whacked out body clock had me wide awake at five in the morning, and I actually got to the studio early. Things seemed to go OK, and I staggered into work for a rest. Or something.

Bright and early Hull

Back in Blighty

I got back bright and early this morning. And then spent most of the day asleep.

Getting rid of the last of the silly pictures, I wonder what the aircraft cleaners will make of it?

Thanks to these folks for making sure that I had some legroom on the flights.

Quite a nice SF sunrise to finish off with.

Cheap Travel

I'm not actually branching out as a travel agent, but I do have a couple of cheap tickets for a day in London for anyone living in Hull. The day in question is next Saturday, 1st March. If you and a friend fancy a day trip to the big city, along with Travelcard for the tube, for the knock down price of 35 quid the lot (a substantial saving on what I paid incidentally) get in touch.

Update on 2008-02-27 09:26 by Rob

The tickets have been taken.

A Mean Knight in Shining Armour

At 6:00 this morning I was sitting in the departure lounge (4:00am start - what joy). The girl sat opposite me was in a bit of a tizzy. Her iPhone had locked up and she asked if she could use my phone to make a local call. Being the kind generous soul that I am I said I'd rather not, because my free minutes don't work that well in the USA, in fact I get seriously gouged whether I make or receive calls (which made those two phone calls on Tuesday at 4:00 am unwelcome for a multitude of reasons).  Fortunately for her an American sat next to me was better placed to help, but I sat there feeling a right heel for not helping.

Anyhoo, it occurred to me that my best course of action was to solve the problem itself so I asked if I could see the defunct device.  It was stuck on an SMS send screen.  She reckoned that she had already tried to reset it but I'm made of sterner stuff. It turns out that if you hold down the menu and power buttons for long enough the device will actually shut down so that you can restart it. I wish I'd thought of doing that before I looked mean.

Night Views

Warren and John's hotel faces in a much nicer direction than mine. And they have a balcony. Cue Rob turning up with a tripod and a winning smile.

Straight out from the balcony

Looking towards the bay

XNA on Zune for Mobile Gameplay

I wish Microsoft sold Zune in Europe. The Zune does what an iPod does, but better. The screen is bigger and it has network sync, so that you can get content, including recorded TV, off your media PC and into your pocket with no wires.

Playing a game on a Zune

And soon you will be able to write and play XNA games on it. Wonderful. The thrust at the moment is for developers, you will use the next version of XNA Game Studio, 3.0, to compile and deploy the programs.

The Zune uses a version of the .NET Compact Framework, just like the Xbox 360, and you get all the neat debugging support that you have on that platform. You also get a very healthy 16MB of program memory for your code to stretch its' legs in, which on a portable device like this is an incredible amount of space.  It even works on all the Zune platforms, including the tiny diskless ones and you also get access to the media the Zune holds. You can even get information from the audio signal, so that you can create programs that respond to the beat in the songs.

I found all this out at the second XNA session of the day. They had a bunch of Zunes running a bunch of games. Of course, given the hardware constraints of the Zune device, we are not talking about huge, 3D first person shooters here, only the 2D parts of XNA are supported, but it does mean you could take the same game code and run it on PC, Xbox or mobile devices. Your games can even make use of the networking support built into Zune, so that you can create wireless games.

The first version of Game Studio 3.0 will be out in April, with the release version by the end of the year. The XNA team have been very good at keeping to their release dates, and I'm really looking forward to seeing this come out.

XNA Community - Now we can all play

After lunch we had the first of two presentations that aimed to put meat on the bones of the keynote announcements yesterday. This dealt with how you will get your XNA game up onto Xbox Live Arcade so that anyone in the world can play with it.

The process is going to be community driven, with developers performing peer reviews of the content that has been submitted. Once a few of reviewers have taken a turn with your game and agreed with your game description it goes out there for the masses to play with. There is a very precise rating system, so that particular aspects of the game can be identified as "adult". There are very powerful tools available to shut down a naughty game and ban the creator, and so I think that in the situation Microsoft have made the best of a very bad job.

It would have been much simpler for them to just say "this is too scary" and walk (or perhaps run) away from the whole thing. When YouTube started up they were a comparatively small operation with nothing much to lose. They didn't have time to police their content and so nowadays you can find pretty much any kind of material up there. Microsoft are trying to do the same with games, but being a much bigger target they would be in trouble if they got this wrong. The fact that they are trying to build a workable, scaleable system to manage the content is hugely impressive. They freely admit that they don't quite know how it will turn out and some aspects of policy are not clear yet. Three things stood out for me:

1. It is going to happen, you will be able to get your XNA games out to a potential audience of 10 Million Xbox owners.
2. You keep ownership of the game you submit. Microsoft just provides a channel for the distribution.
3. This is going to create a new ecosystem of people who gain respect and a role simply as trusted game reviewers who tell it like it is. Even if you don't write games, you could still make quite a name for yourself just doing this side.

The service goes live in the USA later this year for testing, with full roll out across the 'states by Christmas. Not sure when we will get it in the UK, but I'm looking forward to it.

Live Forever with Ray

Ray Kurzweil gave the second GDC keynote. He was talking about the next 20 years of games, and specifically the behaviour of exponential growth in relation to human development.

Ray at the GDC

If something increases by a seemingly small percentage at regular intervals, the growth seems to chug along for a little while and then suddenly takes off at an enormous speed.  Start with 100 pounds and earn 10% interest per year. After 1 year you get 10 pounds interest. After 2 years you get 11 pounds interest. Three years gives you around 12 pounds. Spool forward a while and the rate of increase really takes off, after 10 years you have over 200 pounds. This is the principle that is supposed to pay off my mortgage, providing the rate of interest stays OK (which of course it hasn't.........)

Anyhoo, back to the keynote. Ray made the point that as technology progresses more and more of our businesses are becoming information based. He reckons that with a move to nano-technology for production industry will be information based, and that with the work on genome sequencing health already is, etc etc. And with exponential growth continuing in the field of information processing for the foreseeable future things are just going to get more and more interesting.

I'm not completely convinced by this argument myself, making wonderful hardware is all very well, but the human race has proved spectacularly inept making software and so I don't think that everything will turn out quite as rosy as the predictions from Ray. Having said that, he is rich and successful and I'm Rob, so we will see.

One thing he said did intrigue me though. Ray reckons that the pace of medical development means that at the moment for each year that goes by we add around 3 months to the average life-span. If this is exponential, and he reckons that now health research is based on information processing it should be, in the not too distant future we will be adding more than a year to the average life-span each year, which means that we are in potential "live forever" territory. I'm not sure where this leaves video games, although I suppose we'll all need something fun to do during our infinite retirement....

Growing your own game content

There are two ways you can get content into games. You can hand craft and design your entire environment, painstakingly the drawing trees, rocks, grass and sky. Or you can get a program to create all this for you. In the first approach you get exactly what you want, but it takes a while and you have to do all the work yourself. In the second you use carefully managed randomness to get something which "grew" by itself.

First thing this morning we were at a talk by the developers of FarCry 2, which is due for release later this year. They've gone for the programmatic approach to making their jungle. Their trees really grow, based on parameters and design settings from the graphics designers creating the game world world. They don't actually create the scenery when the game runs, instead they use a whole bunch of programs to make it before it is fed into the game. The end result was really impressive, with very realistic trees which wave in the breeze, and even come to bits when the weather hits storm force.

I expect that in the future more games will work this way, as the power of the consoles increases and the increasing amount of detail in the game environments makes it harder to make this stuff by hand.

GDC Update

I went to a couple of other sessions yesterday which were of note. The first was an Xbox Live session. This really has taken off in a big way. There was much description of how to improve "conversion", which is where you persuade someone to take their trial version of the game and pay money to convert it into the full game. As the presenter said, most of this is common sense, but it was nice to see it backed up by statistics and set down in one place. The key things are:

1. Make sure that the trial gives a good impression of the best bits. If the game takes a while to get going, don't just give the player the first level. Make something special for the trial game that gives the whole experience.
2. Make sure that you don't give the farm away with your trial. People playing the trial version for 5 hours is a problem, they should have bought the game a long time ago. This is hard to do without conflicting with rule 1 of course. Time limited play is a good plan.
3. Make the game really, really, easy to pick up. Someone who has paid good money for a game will be motivated to invest their own time in learning the controls and gameplay. If they have paid nothing to get started they are much more inclined to ditch your game if they find it hard to understand at the start.
4. Have a natural end point for the trial that leads nicely into the full game.

Another thing that came out of the discussion was that Xbox Live are very amenable to highly original ideas, much more so than "proper" game developers. If you have an idea this is a good place to take it. And with XNA games now appearing on Live, and a means for getting a following using the community stuff that is coming soon, things can only get more interesting.

The final presentation I went to was from Nintendo. Takao Sawano had come over from Japan to explain how the Wii Fit platform came about. This is the latest in the sequence of "disruptive technologies" that the Wii and the DS have brought to gaming. The presentation was simultaneously translated from Mr Sawano's Japanese text, but none the worse for this, with the translator keeping up admirably. The Wii Fit game took as its' starting point a pair of bathroom scales. Mr. Miyamoto, the legendary Nintendo producer reckoned that people might like the idea of tracking their weight using the Wii. The presentation showed how they developed prototype hardware using rotary encoders to measure the weight before finally fixing on the use of four strain gauges fitted at each corner of the platform.

I know a lot about strain gauges. I used them to weigh fish in a motion compensated weighing machine that I helped build a few years back. They are very accurate and highly sensitive. Using them means that the platform can measure changes in weight in the tens of grams, even being able to detect when you raise and lower your hand. They are also fast, so the game can get fresh readings 60 times a second. This has led to all kinds of games based on weight shifting and aerobics. In the exhibition they have some set up with a skiing game that looks ace.  In Japan they've sold well over a million so far and the game comes to Europe in late April. Of course I'm going to get one. It might even help me get a bit fitter...

The Great Smell of Rob

I keep ending up in Wallgreens chemist (or pharmacy as they call them here). It seems to sell everything I need. Today I went in having exhausted my supply of the great smell of Lynx. The shop keeps things that are mildly valuable under lock and key in the aisles, and so I had to press a button on the display to get someone to come and liberate what I wanted to buy. As soon as I pressed it a digitised voice announced loudly "Assistant to Deodorant Display". A girl with a bunch of keys turned up within seconds, walked straight past everyone else and up to me, and opened up the shelf so I could get what I wanted.

Perhaps I needed the deodorant more than I thought...

Living History

In the afternoon another amazing presentation. Two people who created the field of computer games.

Allan Alcorn and Ralph H. Baer - you owe these guys

Ralph made the first ever home video game. First ever. It was entirely analogue and made up of discrete transistors. He patented it (along with 150 or so other ideas that he had) and got everything started. Allan Alcorn designed and built the first ever Pong game for Nolan Bushnell at Atari. Then he went on to create the hardware for the first Atari VCS.  That we have the video game industry in its present form is down to these two people.

XNA Everywhere

Filling up for the keynote

Today was the first keynote day. John Schappert of Microsoft took to the stage and told us where XNA is going. The answer is everywhere. The long awaited "YouTube for gamers" is taking shape, which will make it possible for creators to put their XNA content out there for anyone to play.

John Schappert watches one of the demos.

This was nice, but nothing that had not been expected. What came next was a bit out of the blue though, in a wonderful way. Chris Mitchell came on and started talking about portable code. And showed XNA running on a Zune. Running very nicely too. This means that soon we will be able to create mobile XNA games as well as Xbox 360 ones.  Very cool. XNA developers are now mobile developers too. Wahay!

This really hardened my resolve to get a new Zune (and might explain why the larger ones are suddenly harder to get hold of). Fortunately Derek had put me on to one in stock in Circuit City, so right after the keynote I was straight out for an 8 block walk up the hill to get it. And I have. And it is ace. And soon I will be able to write games for it.

There are some sessions tomorrow on how things are going to work. I'm really looking forward to them and I'll post details as soon as I know myself. This GDC just came alive for me. Wonderful stuff. And, just to make the morning perfect, I saw someone pick up and take away one of my VerySillyGames prints....

Jack or Master

Today I went to a couple more sessions in the IGDA Education Summit. I like going to these, whilst they are not always directy relevant to what we do at Hull, they are always thought provoking. The keynote, by Ian Bogost, started by making the point that game developers will always need to know how to program. Always good to hear. Then things diverged a bit from my experience. Ian talked about the old days, when only one or two programmers made entire games, and some modern day games, for example Everyday Shooter, which have been produced by one person. Whilst there are one person bands who can do all the audio, graphics and design parts of the game it is definitely the case that when seeking employment a game developer will be employed to write code.

The way I see it, if you have knowledge of the other aspects of game development then this makes you a better game developer. If you are one of the lucky ones who actually can do the whole thing, there is no reason why you shouldn't show off by making a complete game. Whatever happens you should try to make something that will get your name out there.

One point that was made well was that if you want to make a good game you need to recognise that you will need people that are not like you to be successful. Which brought us back to teamwork again.

Exploding Umbrella

It rained today. Lots. Unfortunately I hadn't packed much waterproof, and so it was down to Walgreens (which is rapidly becoming my favourite store) to buy and umbrella. They had a big display of them right in the doorway. I don't remember seeing it yesterday when it was dry...

Anyhoo, I bought a modestly priced device which is trademarked "St. Crawford London". Perhaps Americans think that the brits are better with rain. It looked OK so I opened it up and sallied forth. Whilst waiting at an intersection for the lights to change I noticed a button in the handle. So I pressed it to see what happens..... The results were most impressive. The canopy instantly compressed at speed, dumping a load of water on myself and those around me. A portable version of instant unpopularity. I re-opened the thing whilst avoiding everybody else's eyes and slunk across the road. Stupid rain.

Learning the Ten Commandments. And other useful stuff.

No pictures today. Work beckons. I started off the day at the Education summit. The keynote was given by Ernest Adams who set out his ten commandments for Game Developer Education. I've not got time to list them all, but I was particularly taken with number 9 "Award precision and punish hand waving" and number 8 "Gameplay comes first". It was also nice to see commandment 5 making the point that you should "Require Teamwork". Some of the others weren't that applicable to us at Hull, because we concentrate on the programming aspects of games rather than the whole game production process (that way our game development students graduate as genuinely useful computer scientists) but it was nice to find that we don't break any major ones.

Next came a session on how to create a successful game development course. It was interesting to see that as one the members of the panel were keen on teamwork and communication skills. One even said that you should encourage your students to enter competitions. Go Hull.

In the afternoon I changed tack and went to some XNA presentations. There were three excellent talks on how to optimise and debug XNA games. This stuff was great. Proper computer science being used in a really strong context. At the end they gave us a CD-ROM with the sessions on it. I hope that this material will also make its way onto the web at some point. If you are into coding you would love this stuff.

Then in the evening we staggered out to a free party and then ended the evening in the sports bar.