SteveStreeting.com

I was playing about with working in Photoshop today because I needed to polish off a logo for the new product I’ve been working on during what time I could find in the last few weeks (which has often been evenings and weekends), and while I was at it I decided to update the Ogre logo a little bit.

Yeah, I know - it’s totally derivative and shamelessly jumping on the ‘wet floor’ bandwagon, but I don’t care; I like it. I thought about putting a shimmery effect on the floor or something but I was already short of time.

I’ll be able to reveal the product I’m talking about soon, the legals have now all been signed so I’m getting ready to go. All I’ll say right now is that it’s a commercial Ogre add-on component which I hope will be quite popular among the higher-end Ogre users. I want to spend a little more time polishing it with my closed beta users before opening it up to a wider audience - the prospect came up on rather short notice so I want to concentrate on the loose ends and make sure the quality is there before unleashing it. I have standards to maintain

This is one of my favourite recent ZeroPunctuation episodes, after all what’s not to love when he can somehow find a way to include a Dave Dee Dozy Beaky Mick & Tich reference in a MMORPG review?

Damn, it’s not a bad situation to be in, but I suddenly feel even more swamped than usual with gaming opportunities. Rock Band continues to be a bottomless well of fun, with its continuous drip-feed of new content and experience-driven gameplay, it just seems to get more enjoyable as time goes on as the song library expands, and you get to grips with the less known tracks. However, my birthday just passed and I received 3 new games, two for the Wii and one for the DS, both fairly neglected platforms of late.

Okami was a title I almost picked up during my brief stint with a PS2, but I’m glad I waited since the brush interface is more natural with the Wiimote I’m sure. Obviously the ‘watercolour and ink’ graphical style stands out, as does the influence of Japanese legends and Shinto religeon, so it has a lot of individuality about it, which is what drew me to it. Funnily enough when you play it, it actually feels very much like you’re playing a Zelda game. Superficially there’s the fact that you’re a wolf going through ‘darkened’ lands with a weird little sidekick which has much in common with Twilight Princess, but it’s more than that - the gameplay structure is also very similar, in that it’s basically an explore-em-up, with a character who discovers more about themselves and the legend they embody as they progress, adds new powers, fights the minions of evil, through a combination of open-air regions with relatively random encounters, peppered with ‘dungeons’ (in essence). Even the tutorial style and visual cues feel very similar, even though the implementation is somewhat different. I’d be willing to bet the lead designer played a lot of Zelda - this game is definitely cut from the same cloth, which is no bad thing and it is very enjoyable. In fact after Wind Waker, Twilight Princess and Phantom Hourglass I was feeling a little tired of Zelda, not in terms of the pure gameplay mechanics but just because I don’t really like repeating myself so much - so it’s quite nice to find a game that uses a similar, very solid gameplay style in a new context, without having to go find the boomerang / bow / hookshot all over again.

Boom Blox is definitely a Wii game. Incredibly simple to pick up, you chuck balls at stuff or grab things and yank them - you can’t really go wrong with that. My friend’s 5 year old son picked it up in about 10 seconds flat and loved it, and I’m finding it strangely addictive too. Theres a kind of visceral satisfaction in chucking balls at things to knock them over, evoking memories of coconut shys and the ‘knock over the pyramid of cans’ games at funfairs that every bloke secretly likes having a crack at even if we do pretend we’re only doing it to win stuffed toys for partners/children. The puzzling elements of it mean it stays interesting beyond this, as you calculate various trajectories that you could try to get the whole level done with one throw. Great stuff, and I’m rather gutted to hear that it’s been a bit disappointing at retail. Hopefully it’s just a slow-burner, because it deserves to do well, or the world has no taste.

Finally, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, which a friend was kind enough to get on import for me because it’s still inexplicably absent here in the UK. Again, this is a game perfectly suited to its hardware, this is Brain Training for those who are more into lateral thinking than rattling off their times tables - in other words, right up my street, since my brain rarely likes to work in straight lines even when only moderately addled. It’s a weird fusion of Mensa test and Enid Blyton, so much so that I keep expecting to be awarded ‘lashings and lashings of ginger beer’ on the completion of a puzzle (”Rather!”) - the only downside to this theme is the distinctly painful Dick van Dyke accent that the Professor’s nephew has (cor bloimey guv’naar) which is a bit like nails down a blackboard for anyone on the east side of the Atlantic, but luckily fairly rare once into the game - a reason to be cheerful that the DS carts don’t have much space for full voice acting ;). The puzzles themselves are varied and interesting, and the more difficult ones have certainly had me chewing my stylus so far - the best ones are those that you initially think are impossible, and after staring for a while at the seemingly impenetrable fortress of logic you suddenly realise one of the walls is made of papier maché. Priceless.

Given that I have a lot of work backed up and am heading out to Siggraph in less than 3 weeks, this perhaps isn’t the best time to have this number of distractions, but I’m not complaining

E3 was on while I was away, so on my return I eagerly checked the various gaming news for what juicy nuggets had emerged - and that would be almost none.

It’s telling that probably the biggest news was that Final Fantasy XIII is no longer to be a PS3 exclusive - not even a timed exclusive, it’ll be multi-platform at launch (in the US and Europe anyway). A headline grabber for MS for sure, but while I get the feeling that this will be greeted with equal amounts of teeth-gnashing and gloating from the Playstation and XBox fanboy camps respectively, for everyone else located on planet Earth it’s really not that interesting. After all if you were already a Final Fantasy nut willing to buy 13 (plus) of these titles, you probably already owned a PS3 in preparation anyway. Personally I played one (FFVII, considered to be a high-point of the series, or so I’m told) and have no particular urge to play any more. But, I suppose there will be some who pick it up just because they can now.

My guess is that the staggering costs associated with making that kind of game, combined with a lack of the kind of crushing dominance of the market that Sony promised (and some might say, rather smugly took for granted for a while), meant that Square just couldn’t make the numbers work as a platform exclusive. I’m guessing they got a sweetener from MS too which no doubt helped their bean-counters sleep at night. Once again I have to shake my head at the unnecessary partitioning of the consumer market that a console war entails, and hope someday we move away from it.

Nintendo showed a shocking disregard for their platform - and while they’re printing money for doing fairly little I can understand why. The MotionPlus add-on for the Wii controller certainly looks interesting but is all potential and no practical use right now. They’re milking a few franchises some more, but really no future Wii games look interesting. My Wii has been off most of the time for the last year, with small resurrections for Super Mario Galaxy and now for third-party titles Okami and Boom Blox which I got for my birthday and are very good, but that’s been all too rare. Nintendo seem to be relying on the casual audience to buy the console by the bucketload and use it to play maybe one or two games at family gatherings, and for the core gamers to eagerly lap up fairly formulaic franchise revisions. For a company that occasionally comes out with pure brilliance (Wii Sports, Super Mario Galaxy), it’s being pretty uninspiring most of the rest of the time.

Microsoft is chasing the casual market like everyone else on the planet these days, nothing really to see there.

The single interesting thing at E3 for me was the official unveiling of Rock Band 2’s feature set and track list, which are both looking very fine indeed. I like that you can import ‘most’ of the tracks on the RB1 disk as well as the DLC so once you have it you can just play RB2 with hundreds of songs. They also appear to have addressed all the little niggling things that people (including me) have mentioned could have been better in RB1, like flexibility of the band setup. Nothing startling, just reassuring that Harmonix appear to be listening to what their customers want.

So, apart from that - yawn.

The last few weeks have been pretty hectic for both myself and my wife, with weekends and evenings frequently acting as extensions to the regular working week as much as anything else, and as such the trip we’d booked to Paris a few months back kinda snuck up on us - pretty much before we knew it, we’re sat in a cafe blinking at the sun, frantically trying to excavate memories of school French lessons buried under 15 years of neglect.

Our ‘planning’ consisted of remembering to pack in time, and rushing about to buy a new camera the day before, since ours suddenly decided that it wanted to pursue a new career as simply a pint-sized viewer of existing photos, rather than actually detecting and recording anything new (translation - le CCD est mort). As such we mostly winged it, alternating between ‘doing’ the major sights and just wandering about aimlessly to see what we’d encounter. Luckily Paris is a perfect city for that, easily walkable with great public transport, the architecture and layout is interesting in itself, and the smaller streets are peppered with curios shops, art galleries and cafes that will sell you delicious coffee and heaven in a pastry casing every 20 feet. A perfect environment to point randomly in a direction and decide to see what’s over there.

It reminded me of Rome in that regard, with the exception that if you suddenly realise you’re an hour’s walk from the hotel with flagging feet, there’s always a Métro station nearby to come to your rescue. We’d been warned that the Métro could be confusing, but once we tried it we struggled to know what the fuss was about and used it all the time. Maybe it’s familiarity borne from my frequent use of the London Underground in years gone by, but it really couldn’t be simpler - even the busy hub stations were pretty easily navigable provided you kept your wits about you. All in all, hugely convenient and much less claustrophobic than the London equivalent, since the trains are larger and both directions typically run next to each other, rather than in separate tunnels like in London, which makes the stations roomier and less stuffy.

Culture abounded of course, we spent most of my birthday in the Louvre and still only covered about 2/3rds of it, and even then not in a level of detail that could be considered any more than ‘passing’. Expecting crowds, we headed to the ‘big hitters’ early to leave time for more leisurely exploration later, but it’s perhaps telling of my psyche that whilst gazing at one of the most celebrated paintings in the world I was easily distracted by how our new camera’s face recognition algorithms locked on to the Mona Lisa’s face from way across the room. Somehow exclaiming ‘cool!’ and tinkering with a new gadget in the presence of a 500 year old masterpiece seemed disrespectful, but I couldn’t help myself. So I’m a geek and a philistine.

The only issue we did have was that on our return flight from Charles de Galle didn’t go particularly smoothly - on arrival the airport didn’t seem to have any record of our return flight, and for a while the check-in staff were all Gallic shrugs and ‘come back in 15 minutes, maybe it will show up then’. Eventually they figured it out and it turned out the flight did exist despite never showing up on the departure boards, just as I was trying to phone the airline myself (this was a brand new route on a budget carrier, so it was feasible they’d reorganised it without telling us). After that we got to stand in a passport control line for 40 minutes, rather bizarrely since we were leaving rather than arriving, while 2 bored-looking officials flanked by huge lines of unoccupied booths (I assume everyone else was on lunch) processed the hundreds of people all gazing repeatedly at their watches wondering if they would make it to the gate on time. It certainly convinced me that if I was looking for an alternative international hub to go through for future trips, Charles de Galle would not be high on my list. Gatwick and Heathrow might be chaotic cattle markets, but at least they exude an air of efficiency most of the time, which was entirely absent here.

On the whole though, a great short break - just long enough to unwind a bit, but not too long as to let things pile up too much If you sent me an email or something in the last week, rest assured I’ll be catching up in the next few days.

It’s formally the end of an era - even though Windows 3.11 (aka Windows for Workgroups) hasn’t been sold for PCs for some considerable time, Microsoft has still been licensing it to embedded device manufacturers right up until the present day. However, now they’re finally pulling the plug.

I’m actually impressed they kept it up this long! Most serious enterprise software vendors will support product lines for 10 years at a stretch, but it’s been 15 years since WFW was released - that’s pretty impressive.

So why do I care? Well, in a way WFW is ’special’ to me because it marked the start of an era when I was genuinely glad to use Windows. I’d used Windows 3.0 and 3.1 at home before then, and they were ok for the odd bit of word processing but most of the time I was pottering about in DOS because that was where all the action was (I remember one of my friends at the time going on about how much he liked Slackware instead, but foolishly I ignored him). However at work, a PC with WFW on it replaced my green-screen terminal which only had access to a proprietary mainframe and a proprietary Unix system (SCO System V if I remember rightly - ugh). So I welcomed WFW with open arms Over the 90’s I spent a lot of time deploying & developing on various Windows systems, and generally enjoying it. I enjoyed playing with all the new stuff coming from Microsoft in fact, because they were changing the way things were done, for the better compared to what I’d used before. Looking back it seems such an innocent time

It didn’t last though. In the early noughties, I perceived MS becoming more and more self-obssessed, inward looking, and dedicated to their vested interests as a primary motivation, and decided I was seeing a very similar pattern to what had made the old proprietary systems so limiting a decade before - an incumbent protecting their monopoly, more than innovating for the better. The feeling that I was part of something exciting, interesting and positive ebbed away, and my cynicism reached record levels. You might call it an IT worker’s mid-life crisis It’s hard to put an exact time on it, but I think 2001/2 was the tipping point where I went from ‘relatively happy Windows developer’ to ‘ready for a new way of doing things’. Open source entered my world at about the same time.

So, for me WFW brings back nostalgic memories of a time when, even though it might not have been fantastic, Windows was something I would choose to use over alternatives, and the future looked bright - Windows was going places and changing life and work for the better. How times have changed. Or maybe it’s in fact me who has changed?

I consider LinkedIn to be one of the few genuinely useful things to come out of the whole Web 2.0 gold rush, since it’s a business-oriented, generally ‘fluffless’ site (if I see one more virtual gift or stupid time-wasting Facebook application, I’ll lose all will to live) - as such I actually do use it fairly regularly. I finally got around to creating an OGRE Group - feel free to join if you’re a professional OGRE user / contributor. I use LinkedIn to remind me who I can refer OGRE-related jobs to, so it might be worth your while

I had to chuckle at these comments from Microsoft’s VP for “Windows Consumer Product Marketing” Brad Brooks on what they’re going to do about Vista’s current image problem. He says all the bad things people are saying about Vista are lies:

“There’s a conversation in the market place right now and it’s plain wrong,” he claimed.

Ah, I see now Brad. As a paying customer I’ve bought several Vista licenses and been totally underwhelmed by what I got for the money, and have been far more engaged with OS X in almost the same period, but I’m just plain wrong. Thanks for clearing that up.

“Windows is awesome… Windows Vista is a good product.”

Gotcha. I was thinking the best adjective to describe Windows, particularly Vista, was ‘adequate’, but clearly I slipped up and used the wrong ‘A’ word. It’s an easy mistake to make, after all I am dumb enough to be fooled by all the lies in the marketplace telling me Vista isn’t the dogs bollocks. Doh! You might want to give your partners cue-cards, just incase they forget how totally awesome it is during sales pitches.

“Also, Microsoft needs to get partners familiarized with Windows Vista ahead of Windows 7, as that OS will use the same hardware specifications. When you make an investment in Windows Vista, it’s going to pay forward into the next generation of the operating system we call Windows 7,”

Gee, thanks for making the incentives clear for me there. You mean I can invest my time & money to deploy Vista, so that it’s easier for me to spend more time and more money on the next iteration? Here I was measuring software against how much return I got on my investment, when all along I should have been looking at it as an investment towards future purchases I can make from Microsoft. Sold! Just a shot in the dark Brad - did you sell extended warranties at some point in your career?

As my daughter said, the ‘truth will make us strong’.

Your daughter may be right Brad, but you have a rather strange notion of the word ‘truth’ - but then you’re in marketing, so that’s not really your fault. Feel free to patronise your customers a little more at the next event, I’m sure they’re loving it being implied that they’re just stupid for not realising how totally awesome Vista is.

I’m going to risk being called a dunce for not picking up on this until now, because I think there are probably other people with this annoying problem too. When you’re debugging in VC++, by default raw pointers only display a single item when you expand them, like this:

Now, if you know this pointer is actually a series of items and not just one, you really want to inspect them all - you can add array indices (pFoo[n]) but this is awkward if you want to browse rather than cherry-pick single items. I’ve sometimes used the ‘memory’ view to get around this, which is especially useful if you’re looking at an array of bytes, but arrays of floating point values aren’t that readable via the memory view.

The way to force VC++ to display raw pointers as arrays is to add ‘,n’ to the end of the watch expression, like this:

And if you want to skip a bunch of items, just use pointer arithmetic as usual, such as (pFoo + 50),100 showing items 50-150.

If you knew this already and think I’m a muppet for only just figuring this out, bully for you (although why didn’t you tell me, you bastard? ). I’m hoping to help the poor saps like me who have found this clunky in the past.