Bring It On

Everybody wants to be different. The same is familiar, the same is boring. So we change clothes, put on makeup, cut the hair – whatever is necessary to be different.

In a way, the principle applies to software too – it’s safe but boring to be the same, yet another me-too product. Thus we try to be different, if only a bit, in order to be “special”.

But it’s nevertheless a risk – if your app is too special, it will take a lot of time adjusting too. Some might not even figure out what it is about. We have to be the similar, yet different.

It’s all about the balance. There is no recipe on how to maintain this balance, regardless of countless examples where the balance was bad, just OK or simply perfect. It’s up to you.

Here’s an example where a game developer got things just right while tweaking unbelievably small aspect of the gameplay. I’m talking about the Xbox game Black.

Black is a first person shooter (FPS) and one of the last few to come out for the Xbox (not the 360, the old one). It behaves pretty much like most of the other FPSs out there – conventional weapons, conventional locations, story that does not matter, simple goal (destroy everything and everyone)… The graphics are great, but so were the graphics of many other FPSs out there.

Still, Black is a great game, one of the greatest shooters I’ve played on a PC or a console. What is it that makes it special, besides the fact that it’s made by Criterion Games, the company that has proved to know how to design fun games (they are behind the Burnout arcade racing series)?

If I had to pick one term, it would be – particle effects. The only other exceptional thing is, for the lack of better term, destructability of the environment. So, while you’re fighting hundreds of enemies per level, usually you’ll be firing thousands of bullets that would break wooden planks into shards, shatter glass windows and other glass surfaces, smash wooden palettes, you’ll even be able to destroy weaker walls. The sparks will fly into air when you hit a metallic surface of any kind, the trucks, cars and other flammable objects will burst into flames, destroying everything in their radius.

This game is pure mayhem. There’s nothing else, though – just gunfight after gunfight. But boy is it fun. This is the only game that I’ve been playing for the second time on a harder difficulty level (it does “help” that the game is quite short).

There are other advantages like completely transparent level loading: you’ll never find yourself staring for seconds at “game loading” even though some of the levels are huge. Just as well there are disadvantages like automatic save – the game saves progress, but only at a few hand-picked checkpoints inside a particular level. If you have to abort the game for whatever reason while the level is in progress, next time you’ll start from the beginning of the level (argh!).

But in the end, it’s the particle effects plus destruction of the environment that makes this game special. It’s amazing how this changes the atmosphere and immersion effect so much that it defines the game.

While waiting for the price (to fall) of the newly released Splinter Cell: Double Agent I thought I’d download the PC demo. I still have the Xbox – I will hold off buying Xbox 360 until I get a decent HD LCD TV – otherwise I would have downloaded demo to the Xbox 360 and tried it.

I was unpleasantly surprised to find out that the game won’t run on my system at all! It requires shader model 3.0 while my Mobility Radeon 9600 Pro only supports shader model 2.0. This is on a Dell Inspiron 2 years old laptop that almost had top of the line graphics card when I got it.

For comparison, Microsoft requires shader model 2.0 for Aero Glass effects in Windows Vista.

I guess this is one more reason to stick with the consoles – their hardware is fixed and stays fixed throughout the lifetime of the console.

I have mentioned my XBox several times before on this blog. Coming from a PC platform and giving such praise to the XBox says a lot I guess. Like some, I am a “single console” guy, mainly because I don’t have enough time for multiple consoles. So something like Playstation 2 was out of the question. Besides, most games today are published on multitude of platforms.

But portable factor is something completely different. If you had the chance to get a console that fits in your pocket, plays music, videos and games, has 3–6 hours of battery life, would you take it? I did.

My buddies and I have an arrangement – when one of us has a birthday, the other three contribute financially toward a gadget or two – thanks guys! This year I decided to go for the Playstation Portable (PSP) with 2GB of MemoryStick “storage”. Based on several comments from people like Scott Hanselman, I knew that besides from playing the games I will be able to use the PSP as a cheap portable media player – at the moment, 2GB black version is slightly over 250€.

The console is great. It has a clear, wide screen, good battery life, plays videos in a standard mp4 format, as well as mp3 and wma audio formats (the last one was added recently). The UI looks quite like Microsoft’s Media Center UI, which is good – it’s easy to navigate through and reasonably organized. Firmware updates are trivial – just configure the network access and click “Network Update”. PSP has 802.11b Wi-Fi built in and works with WPA encryption. New features are added all the time as new firmware versions come out. At the moment, I am running version 2.81. Games ship on a proprietary UMD media which is write only (and there are no recorders out there). UMD discs are very small and fit about 1.8GB of data, which is plenty for an average game. I’ve been playing burnout (see the screenshot above) and it looks great, slightly less cars and detail but in general just like its PS2 or XBox counterpart, soundtrack and all included.

But the great thing about this is timing – I ordered the console from French Amazon and a few games from Amazon UK. Both shipped the same day, the former was supposed to arrive a day before my birthday and the latter a day or two later. My birthday was on Saturday which means that if postman did not find us at home I would have to wait till Monday to pick any package at the post office.

But the stars aligned and both of the packages arrived and were delivered on Saturday  Talk about great timing.

As production costs rose up there were fewer and fewer companies making movies. Small studios just couldn’t keep up with the “big boys”, paying expensive actors, shooting on exotic locations and integrating all those cool looking special effects.

Along the way the quality of movies went down too. Since the damn thing costs so much, nobody wants to gamble with a huge investment and we usually get either a sequel or a “by the book” release that brings nothing new to the table. The movie industry is in a sad state at the moment and we have yet to see how if ever will it recover.

Up until recently, it looked like the same thing is going to happen to the gaming industry. The times when a single developer or a small team of friends in a “garage” could build an AAA title are long gone. Modern games cost as much as modern movies and as a consequence we get the same kind of crap – rehashed ideas and boring sequels. The bar is just too high for a small developer let alone a hobbyist.

Not any more. In a relatively surprising move, Microsoft has announced and even started shipping a beta of the XNA Studio Express. Not only is the product free, is based on an already impressive Visual Studio Express line of products, but with it comes what appears to be a very decent API, XNA Framework. Even better, the games produced by XNA Studio Express should run on the PC but also on Xbox 360!

This post on the XNA Team Blog goes into more details on the XNA Framework. The talk is quite high-level so anyone can follow the material.

Great news for small development houses, hobbyists and consumers alike – we should see a lot more original titles, some of which might even not suck. Kudos to Microsoft for lowering the bar for game production and leading by example.

Just bought a digital photographic camera for the first time (!). The reason for not doing it earlier is that I had digital video camera for years...

I chose Canon Digital IXUS 800 IS (European name), a.k.a. SD700 IS Digital ELPH (US name). The camera is incredibly small and has all the features you’d expect from a modern ultra-compact. Full review at Digital Photography review is here.

Anyway, here's how the view from my office/bedroom looks like:

I don’t remember where I got this info, it must have been some of the movie oriented blogs, but here it is: at the very end of the closing titles for X-Men 3, the movie continues (not more than 20–30 seconds) with… well, I’ll let you see it for yourself, don’t want to spoil it

I think that Half-Life 2 Episode One is the first game ever that I bought in advance without waiting for any kind of review. Half-Life and Half-Life 2 were that good. Judging by the reviews all around the world, almost everyone agrees.

In short, the game rocks. It’s just Half-Life the way we know it. Still, the pacing, the levels, the guns, the puzzles – they all fit together flawlessly. This time though Alyx has a much more prominent role and stays with you as your side-kick most of the time. The episode is short (5–7 hours) but it’s just the first part of the trilogy. The price is just right, about one third of what you’d pay for a full game.

I don’t want to spoil it for you by revealing something but I will give you a screenshot. This is a scene from City 17; in order to read a sign you’ll need to know how to read Cyrillic  Anyway, it reads “stacionar” which means “ambulance station” (very roughly translated). Judging by a few other signs with Cyrillic text and AFAICT all the text is in Russian. Now we finally know where City 17 is

I’ve been playing Serious Sam II on the XBox for the last couple of weeks. As expected, the game is a great fun. The same cool big open environments, lots of strong colors, sunshine and tons of enemies just like in the first part are all present here. Jokes are still over the top and a bit crude (raw) and there are several references to other famous games and movies. In short, this is the game that does not take itself seriously  (pun intended).

But the highlight of the game is a phrase or two that a few of the monsters scream occasionally. Have in mind that this is a fictional world you’re fighting in and most of the enemies are crazy cartoon-ish creatures. The authors, a company called Croteam, are from Croatia and they speak, well, Croatian (which is for all intents and purposes almost the same as Serbian). So instead of inventing an artificial language that creatures would use, they decided to use Croatian. Imagine my surprise when I heard a deep, deep voice threatening “Sad si nastrad’o!” (“You’re done now!”, liberally translated) coming from a monster. I get a kick every time I hear “Boli me!” (“It hurts!”) while emptying a machine gun into a red devil giant

Knowing the language monsters use makes this game so much more fun , I’d say even hilarious.

P.S. On a related note, I am ashamed to admit that I still haven't properly absorbed French, even after 4 years of living here. I made an on-the-fly resolution to make this year the year of the French language and have been seriously working on it for a month now, at least twice a week. We’ll see what comes out of it.

Well, it depends  on which one you use the most I guess… But some people obviously don’t think so. After using a particular language and only that language for a really long time it becomes a second nature to use constructs from that language. So when we switch to another, even if basically very similar language, we still type wrong constructs by inertia.

I have that problem with VB.NET – while helping my wife with her ASP.NET project I had to use VB.NET but I would constantly start typing in C#. Last time I used VB-like language was in the days of Microsoft Access 2.0, circa 1996 – and I only used a VBA derivative then.

Then the other day I needed to write a hex constant and I didn’t know how to do that. While searching the Internet, I ran into a post where a guy had exactly the reverse problem – he was trying to read C# code and couldn’t figure out the way hex constants were written.

He said how the problem was that (I paraphrase) there is a problem with the hex constants in C# because they are not written in a natural way like in VB.NET.

It didn’t occur to him that natural is different for developers who primarily use other languages

P.S. C# and C++ (probably Java too) use 0x2F, while VB.NET uses &H2F to denote a hex constant 2F. So, C# – prefix with 0x, VB.NET – prefix with &H.

About a year ago I had to go to Paris just for a day to renew my passport. I had a lot of time to spare, but not enough to go and visit some of the interesting cultural sites likes museums, monuments and other popular touristic places. So based on an advice from an acquaintance I went shopping for something for my lovely wife.

In the end I got her stylish (and quite expensive for that kind of product) cups for tea and coffee. She liked them very much so mission accomplished.

Imagine my surprise to find those same cups in the Director's Cut of Alien³ :) There's a scene when the doctor meets the guy who runs the prison at the beginning of the movie, just after Ripley is found. They drink tee out of the same kind of cups ;)