Category: Ramblings

Whatever I happen to be thinking about

GDC? Books? A web site? A blog post?

I never seem to find time to write posts here anymore.  Well, to be more accurate, I get frustrated with the number of things I get as direct responses to posts (or even just random mails from people from this blog).  Honestly the top two questions I get are people wanting me to send them copies of my books and people asking me for help with their homework.  These are normally followed up shortly by those same people letting me know how much of a jerk I am for not relenting to their request.  It doesn’t seem to matter if I ignore it or respond politely, the same result occurs either way.  It’s almost enough to make me wonder why I even write anything (and I’m fully convinced it will be worse at least for a short time after this post).

Anyway, enough random complaints from me, and onto what I originally was going to write about..

After the two topics above, the next most asked about topic is about books.  When is my next book coming out, when am I updating one of my older books, etc.  So let me ask you what you’d like.  If I were to write a third book, what would you like to see?  I’m guessing not many people will suggest science fiction or an in depth discussion of the civil war.

If you haven’t heard recently (sometimes I am a little slow on the announcements) we have launched a new creators club web site.  It has a new starter kit for you to download and enjoy, a number of samples to look at, and even new forums.  Naturally, there is more there as well, so go check it out!

We also have our Dream. Build. Play. contest going on, and we announced some of the prizes which are simply amazing in my opinion ($10,000 cash, a new computer, a chance to have your game published on Xbox Live Arcade and more?).  There was also a ‘warm up’ contest using the Spacewars starter kit that had some amazing entries.  I’m excited to see the things that will come out of the real contest now.  Like I’ve mentioned before, I’ve always wanted to run a contest for something like this.

As part of the GDC list of announcements, we also have a lot of great information.  Such as Creators Club members getting a license to the Torque X engine.  None of this even hints at some of the things we are hoping to have done in the not too distant future.  For anyone who thought we were going to be resting on our laurels as they say, rest assured we are doing nothing of the sort.

Now if I could just get myself to be more like Shawn and actually write some technical posts here once in a while…

Reflection

With a title like that I’m bound to start discussing the intricacies of one of the CLR features am I not?  Well given the day, I have to say of course not.  I’m going to take this time to remind myself of the things that have happened over the last year.

Have you heard?  We shipped the Xna Game Studio Express!  Honestly, I thought I had written a short post stating that, but apparently I’m losing my memory in my old age, because it certainly doesn’t appear to be here!  For that, I apologize, but it wasn’t a secret that it was coming out, so hopefully this isn’t a surprise to anyone!

As I insinuated in a post a few months ago, this release has been quite ‘special’ for me.

This time a year ago I was still in the DirectX team.  Such a thing as “Xna Game Studio Express” didn’t exist, and the amount of people even aware such a thing was being considered was very small.  This team has gone from essentially nothing to having a product out that will changes the rules in this industry. This was all done in the space of a single year’s time (really in just a few short months).  This is an absolutely remarkable achievement, and I hope every single person who helped make this possible feels the same sense of pride that I do.  The hard work shown by this team and how we pulled everything together to allow all of our anxious customers to start using Xna was a sight to behold.

When I see things such as Xna Racer and various other games being created in the community that prove all the people who were telling me how impossible it would be to create such things using managed code, it makes all the long hours I’ve put in over these years to help make this happen worth it.

It’s not often in life you get to be a part of something that not only can change the industry you work in, but can spawn an entirely new one as well.  What this team has accomplished in such a short time speaks volumes about the passion and dedication they have and bodes well for the future of this product.

We’ve accomplished all my original goals for managed code in gaming.  We’ve released a product with plenty of support.  We’ve opened up the Xbox 360 for development using managed code.  We even have a contest going for you to enter to win great prizes.  I’ve been trying to set up a contest for a very long time.

Knowing some of the features we have planned, and seeing what the community already has done in such a short time, I couldn’t be more proud of where we’ve ended up.  The excitement is just beginning.  The rest is up to you!

Random XNA thoughts and links..

Well, maybe not so random.

First, ever wonder what the XNA Framework was?  Look at Mitch’s latest post on the Xna Team Blog..

Second, a coworker has recently started a blog, and he has a number of interesting posts, including explaining why he joined the Xna team.

Which makes me get quite nostalgic myself.  Shortly after we announced I sent out an email internally, which i’ll now include here (albeit slightly modified for the public)..

—- Insert Sentimental Thoughts.

I can’t decide if it seems like yesterday or a lifetime ago, but GDC in 2002 was the first public showing of what became known as Managed DirectX.  Since that date I’ve listened to countless people telling me how and why managed code could never be a viable game development platform.  Actually, I guess that’s a lie.  It started before then since it was an uphill battle in the DirectX team just to get it to ship in the first place.

Yet here we are today, and listen to the buzz.  It was almost instantaneous.  Gone are the cries of impossible, replaced with the excitement of “when can I get it” and “omg, are you serious?”  Just wait until later this year when they’re actually using it.  I can’t wait.

I’m sure everyone gets up and comes to work for their own personal reasons, and I doubt everyone shares mine, but what gets me going (and keeps me going) is a combination of two things.  One, the ability to make a difference, and I’d be lying if I didn’t say there was a certain egotistical aspect as well.

Not only am I no longer alone, there’s an entire team focusing on much larger issues, bringing an entire end to end solution.  This team is fulfilling not only my original goal with Managed DirectX — opening up game development; but going so far beyond what I had hoped it’s hard to describe.  It’s been a long time since I’ve been so excited about a project, and it’s a feeling I’ve missed.  Not only do we have the “egotistical” aspects intact, but we have the opportunity to change an entire industry for the better.  If that isn’t making a difference, I’m not sure what is.

Truth be told, this is probably one of the most sincerely “proudest” moments I’ve been able to achieve in my career, although I’m sure it will be surpassed later this year when we’ve actually shipped and people are using our stuff.  We’re not only pushing people towards the next age of game development, we’re defining what that means.  I couldn’t be more excited.

Cornucopia of topics, redux…

So much has been going on, it’s hard to believe that it’s been since April since I made my last post.  Well, aside from being quite busy I was pretty annoyed at the spam I was getting before, so I guess a break was a good thing.

It’s been a while since i’ve posted though, and heck, Gamefest is right around the corner!  There are a number of presentations there covering Xna, and I’ve personally been hard at work getting ready for the conference.

In the meantime lots of other things have been happening.  David posted an entry that started a buzz thinking we were removing a lot of functionality.  I enjoy seeing the passion people display when talking about these things.  We’re trying real hard to develop a framework you’ll enjoy using.

Then you have people like the folks at Garage Games (they make the Torque engine) who are doing a session at gamefest.  They key quote from that one?

“GarageGames, in collaboration with the Microsoft XNA group, recently ported its full-featured game engine to managed code for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Xbox 360.”

Pretty exciting stuff there too.  Plus, maybe we’ll have new announcements.  That’s always exciting.

Then you have other randomness going on just in the world.  The other day I went out to Olive Garden for dinner.  The first 15minutes were spent waiting for a table, which wasn’t that bad.  It was pretty fast for Olive Garden, plus the most attractive woman I think i’ve seen was there waiting as well.  Everything went down hill from there.  While we were being seated a party of 9 showed up and were told they’d have approximately a 20minute wait.  That becomes important later in the story.

After 15 minutes of sitting down looking at the menu (really, it’s not that big), our waiter finally arrived to get our drink order (we already had our entire dinner planned out by then).. So we order everything.  10 minutes later our drinks arrive, one of them wrong.  5 minutes after that, our appetizers arrive. Those are wrong as well.  Oh, and one of them is missing completely.  So, it’s been 30 minutes, half our orders have been wrong, and we haven’t even gotten our main meal yet.  Good times!

15 minutes later the wait comes back and informs us that he had just left the kitchen and our food would be right out.  Good thing, we’re getting pretty hungry..  15 minutes later, he stopped back by the table.  He apologized profusely, but they are short two cooks, and the food will be right out.  He also asked if he could get us some more breadsticks.  We were pretty hungry, so we said sure.

15 minutes after that, he stopped by the table again.  He apologized some more.  It’s his first day, he’s overwhelmed (wait, I thought there cooks missing?)..  He doesn’t have our breadsticks, but we’re in luck.  Our food will be right out.  15 minutes after that, the manager comes to our table (he doesn’t have the breadsticks either) and apologizes.  But our food will be right out.

10 minutes later (100 minutes since we’ve arrived if you’re keepign track) our food finally arrives.  Yay!  Out of the four entrees we ordered only three show up, and two of them are wrong.  Another 10 minutes goes by before our final entree shows up.  It’s also wrong.  As our last entree arrives what do we see?  The party of 9, leaving.  They had already been seated, ordered, served, eaten, and were leaving.

After two hours of some of the worst service I’ve ever had the manager apologized a lot.  They gave us the meal for free and added a $50 gift card, but even then I wasn’t overly happy about it.  Crappy service is bad enough, but when the waiter is directly lying to us?  We never did get those breadsticks either.

ZMan also made sure people knew that he’ll cover the Xna Framework on his site once we go live as well.

I also noticed that Dave is “slowing down” his playing of World of Warcraft.  I had done the same thing due to a variety of factors, namely frustration with the end game, and the extreme amount of work I have to do.  I’ve been playing again more recently, and although I only have a small amount of time a day I can actually play, i’ve been enjoying myself again.  My current guild isn’t looking to do any big 40man raids, but we’re working our way into 20man content soon, and that’s good enough for us for now.  I’ve been playing on the Eitrigg server, and while I’ll probably regret this, feel free to stop by and say hi sometime..  You can see our guild forums @ http://www.darkcrusade.org

I must say.. I typed a lot more than I expected..  Now I guess I’ll crawl back into my hole and write some more code.. =)

You can thank whoever decided my blog was spam worthy…

From this point on all comments require my approval before they are posted, and if the 200+ comments I just had to delete/moderate on that last post are any indication, you can expect a lot less posts from me because frankly, I don’t have the time for that crap.

I apologize that the “few” will be ruining it for the “many”.

Exciting new announcements!

Well I have to admit, I’ve been anxiously awaiting the opportunity where I could finally get out and let the public know some of these things, and now the reigns have been taken off and I’ve never felt better about the opportunity to write a blog post.

First and foremost, myself.  After almost 8 long years I’ve decided to leave Microsoft because I’ve gotten an offer that is simply too good to pass up.  Starting Monday I begin my new career being the guy on the other end of the phone when that Verizon Wireless employee is asking “Can you hear me now?” continously.  Can you imagine the endless joy that can be obtained by sitting on the phone saying “Yes.” all day?  Sure, I have to take a little pay cut, and lose my benefits, and move into a cardboard box downtown, but if you ask me, it’s a small price to pay for doing something you love.

Now, I know you’re probably worried about what my leaving will do to either Managed DirectX and/or the XNA Framework.  Unfortunately with this announcement they’ve taken my secret decoder ring, so I’m no longer able to translate the secret messages I get.  However, based on my last few meetings before they stole my ring, this is the most likely direction they are going.

The XNA Framework will still be cross-platform, but Windows and Xbox 360 have been removed from the list.  That’s just “too hard”..  Every abacus platform has been added though.  This should allow us to get the results we’re hoping for.

We’ve decided that the choice of languages was entirely too large.  From now on, all managed games will be written in COBOL.

Due to these two changes, that should lower the development time of the framework, and it looks like it will be finished well before our current June 2017 release date (of course, if we run into problems with those two changes it still might slip).

As you can see, there’s a lot of great stuff going on.  I for one haven’t been this excited since..  Well, this time last year!!!!!!

World of Warcraft – Redux

Aside from this one sentence here, this entire post will be completely devoid of any information about Managed DirectX.  Instead today, I’m going to discuss World of Warcraft.  I’d put a link to the site here, but gee, it happens to be down right now.

Anyway, i’ve played the game for a significant period of time.  I had a level 60 character in the closed beta, and since release I now have 4 more level 60 characters, plus a spattering of non-level 60s (including a number higher than level 40).  Every one of my characters has ‘PH4T LEWTS’ (ie, epics), and the most played of them even has the full epic armor set.  I’ve been involved in killing all of the major ‘bosses’ in the games, have slept through runs of Molten core, been involved in the ‘server first’ kills of the Blackwing lair bosses, etc etc etc.  Once bored with all the PVE stuff, I started from scratch over on a PVP server and levelled to characters to 60 there.  I’ve done the faction grind for the battle grounds and gotten my ‘uber epics’ for the exalted reputation there.

In short (or in long depending on how you look at it), i’ve done just about everything there is in the game.  I’ve done it on a PVE server, i’ve done it on a PVP server.  I’ve played the game since it was released, and for almost a year before that.  Perhaps I’m speaking since things aren’t ‘new’ anymore, but it’s this man’s opinion that the game has digressed dramatically since the release.

If people remember my first post on this subject 6 months or so ago, I was exceedingly frustrated.  I was about to quit the game.  The only reason I didn’t was because I had formed some great relationships with some of the people I played with.  While the game itself was lacking in the ‘fun’ department, I had a vested interested in maintaining the relationships that had formed, and that kept me in the game.  Due to circumstances that I wish were different, those relationships were no longer allowed to continue a few months ago.  Thus, the only reason I was playing the game was now gone.

I decided the best course of action would be to try to re-invigorate my excitement for the game, which was the catalyst for the move to the PVP server.  I have to admit, for some time, the added excitement from the PVP server did serve it’s purpose.  The game was exciting again, and I was having fun.  However, once I hit 60 again, I hit that wall that I described in my last post.  Sure, I could find another raiding guild and relive the content i’ve already experienced again, but why?  So, in one of the more ironic decisions, I decided to relive all the *beginning* content again, and re-rolled another character on that server and levelled him to 60.

I was at a dead end.  I could re-roll yet again, or I could continue to play one of my many level 60 characters who had nothing to do.  This was right around Christmas, and I had decided to most likely just stop paying, little did I realize Blizzard would help cement that decision for me.

Imagine you’re a big company.  You’ve just developed the most successful MMO ever to be released.  You have upwards of 5million accounts.  Christmas is 3 days away.  What do you do?  Well, if you were the *real* Blizzard, naturally the best answer is to open a few new servers and then *LOWER* the population cap across all the rest of your servers forcing every single person to wait in a queue to simply play your game.

I could go on and re-iterate many of the points i made in the previous post, but as much as I can’t believe it, the majority of them are still valid, and if anything worse.  Constant nerfs, hot-fixes for player-helping bugs, player-hurting bugs ignored, queues, server instability, communication, etc.  With the sheer amount of money they make a month, I can’t fathom how over a year after release this isn’t fixed.  Why release new content when the content you have doens’t work?

Did you hear?!?  Medivh opened the gates!!  And to think, the server only crashed 7-8 times to make it happen.  Oh, and they had to stop people from creating new accounts to go watch it.  And people still couldn’t watch it when it happened.

My account expired (and wasn’t renewed) on January 20th.  There’s no doubt that the time I played, it was a great game.  However, was is the keyword in that sentence if you ask me.  For myself, I’ve lost all respect for Blizzard as a service unit.  It’s sad, because if they ever do a Starcraft 2, I’ll actually have to think twice before buying it.  Ah, who am I kidding, i’ll buy it.  Any type of business that requires them to provide a service to me though? Forget about it.

Oh, and since my account is canclled, no, you can’t have my stuff..  Honestly, if it wasn’t against the rules, I’d probably just sell my account.  I’m sure I could get a decent price for my level 60s split across PVE and PVP servers all with epics.  That’s not even considering they all have epic mounts and i have somewhere around 2k gold..

360

Although it is probably a mistake, I’ve put my Xbox Live Gamertag on my blog page.  Despite my potentially obvious bias, I’m quite pleased with the new console.  For all of you still waiting to get theirs, if it makes you feel any better, I just got mine yesterday, and I’ve been trying hard since launch.  So don’t just assume that all of us here have them, because we have to wait in line just like everyone else.

Geometry wars is entirely too addicting.  I haven’t even gotten a chance to try out the other arcade titles, nor many of the other games I have because of it.  Although I did pick up DOA4 today, and will try to get some more time in with PGR3 and Tiger Woods later tonight.  That doesn’t even consider I still need to try the rest of the arcade games, and NFS:MW and Ridge Racer and Tony Hawk and Call of Duty and Kameo and … oh man.. too many games…

Stacks!

So I have a buddy that recently embarked on a new adventure that could be quite thrilling.  Ok, so he got a new job.  Now, i’ve had friends get new jobs before, so what makes me go decide to talk about this one?  Simple, he is now working for the company doing Stacks Poker.

Oh, I guess it helps to mention that Stacks Poker uses Managed DirectX thus the reasoning behind my interest.  As a matter of fact, they’re still hiring a person to do some MDX work, assuming you don’t mind working in Toronto. 🙂

Myself, I have an avid interest in poker, have tried a few online poker sites before, but considering I have more than an avid interest in Managed DirectX, you can rest assured I’ll be keeping an eye out on this one as well.  I’d recommend you do as well!