For Gunter and Krieger et al.

And then there were none.

Looks like the proverbial Texas snow day has come for the year. A bit of a disappointment really. Looks more like a light shower from here but can't be too safe. Texas drivers are really quite dangerous when its not 100 and sunny out. Most everyone today is "working from home". Me, I'm just going home. C'yas.

Bedford, Texas (76021) Conditions & Forecast : Weather Underground

Yeah Development!

Some days are just utterly derailing. Some weeks end up that way as well. For those days...the Lord gave us the D.

AGEIA ?!?

"Physics is cool. Simulations that use physics are cool. People like cool." Thus I imagine is how the AGEIA PhysX dedicated processor was born those years past. The thought natch was that you could add a card to your computer and give players a boost to physics processing for games much like Voodoo did when they made the world 3d. Good idea, I guess. They missed a few things like the explosive growth of computational power on graphics cards and multi-threaded, Moore's law powered, CPUs. You've all heard about how DX10 will enable physics processing on the graphics card right?

Well it looks like AGEIA is ready to address this shortcoming and today has released the SDK for free to developers. Imagine all those dev sighs of release. Collectively they might blow out the candle on Sonic's birfday cake.

Hate to break it you boys but do you remember when people actually paid money for sound cards? Like in the eighties or some junk? The problem here ain't the devs, the problem isn't even that its a bad idea or that it isn't implemented particularly well (you know like more frames) the problem is it costs $300 bucks.

The End of Hot Chix

A New Mac has been brought into the office and with it a huge amount of work has been pouring out of rickb. We've upgraded to run on the new Intel Processors. The Mac no longer uses PlayGATE and instead has an all new launcher application. The whole thing is packaged and the update works completely different, no more Vise installer. The bad news, well, it won't spawn, minor, really I tell you.

The big news however is that an era has come to pass. When this new Mac came along we all shifted down one, bloo gets my old one (maybe he can actually answer support tickets) and I get rickb's old one. In addition some new tools were born, I lost a Linux machine and now my Mac build box does all old the archive building as well and an old resurrected machine is now at my disposal for an internal web server to host production wikis and bug trackers. Tools that the Sys Admin is always too busy to keep up with. Shame really but such is life in a tiny company.

Where was I. Ah, yes, the end of an era. With all this switching of Mac's I didn't save off old data and I have now lost the collected work of over 5 years of skimming Hot Chix threads in OT. I always planned to get them up on a gallery link but as the folder bloomed to 10 gigs what became apparent was that despite the innate abilities of Hot Chix, their greatest contribution was as a dev tool. Most people wouldn't think of Hot Chix as a dev tool...right? Well they'd be wrong.

You see, people would invariably walk into my office, whether I was game manager or senior producer as I am now, and begin blathering about whatever thing they thought about over the weekend, or how cool the latest Linux distro is or wouldn't it be great if we could have wandering deer in the game for people to shoot at and it would be a great lead in to more sophisticated AI entities to do things like Old French Whores!

This is where Hot Chix would come to the rescue. As they would enter a beautiful flat screen would present them with zooming and panning beauties that, in an all male office, would stop them cold. They'd even have a seat, forget what they were talking about and kinda stare, mesmerized by the sight of such wonders as woman. This would naturally leave me uninterrupted and allow me to get to them when I was ready. Way better than taking a ticket at the deli counter if you ask me and probably the greatest time management tool a producer could ever have. So today I would like to bid a fond farewell to the Hot Chix. I know Mo would weep if he knew.

P.S. On the plus side, I start rebuilding tomorrow and this time I really will try and get them up on the Gallery site.

Interesting Quote

This came from MUD-Dev today and it sums up the PvP space fairly well.

If you change "no AI will ever match" to "no AI in existence matches", I'll agree with this.  Academically, however, there is a critical difference between software opponents and human opponents: the software opponents exist to entertain you.  The human opponents are only interested in their own entertainment, usually meaning your defeat.  It is this notion that underlies my disinterest in worlds dominated by player actions. - JB

I'm certainly interested in worlds dominated by players but there is a good underlying opint here. It is much easier to manage the experience of entertainment when you design it specifically and much harder to manage the entertainment when you leave it to the players. Yeah, earth shattering right. While this can be used as a simple metaphor for "player content sucks" which is oft bandied about it interests me because a PURE PVP game basically starts with the premise that the players will be if not generate, the majority of the content and we then have to design systems to reduce the suckiness of that original sin. There in my fellows lies the rub.