SteveStreeting.com

One of the problems with doing most of your business internationally is that you’re at the mercy of currency exchange rates, with the ever-present possibility of losing money just because the market changed. In the last couple of years the Pound has steadily got stronger against the Dollar, meaning it’s not a case of whether I lose, but rather how much. It has also meant that for new work I either have to stick to my Pound rates and risk being less competitive, or just accept a lower & ever-depreciating Dollar rate in order to secure the work.

Over the last month though, things have suddenly changed. The UK housing market is in free-fall, and most recently the Chancellor gave a rather unexpectedly candid interview in which he basically admitted that the UK economy is up a certain creek without a certain paddling device. Nice of him to be honest about it, but the markets aren’t used to such lack of spin and reacted quite badly (being as they are twitchy, caffeine-overdosed sheep suffering from chronic panic attacks) - and promptly leaped off a metaphorical cliff, as did the exchange rate. Perhaps the Chancellor’s honesty is attributable to those eyebrows - I’m guessing they make bluffing considerably more difficult

Lots of people are now lamenting on the news & talk panels about how this will affect the price of imports, but there’s never a shortage of people to go on these programs declaring that we’re all doomed and we might as well throw ourselves under the next passing bus. Personally I find it rather ridiculous because these are the same people that were lamenting when the rate went up in the first place, because it would cripple all the exporters in Britain (and we might as well throw ourselv….you get the idea).

Personally, I’m glad - the Pound/Dollar rate has finally returned to about what it was when I went into full-time business in 2006 ($1.77 ish), having dropped over 10% in a month. I wouldn’t mind if it dropped a bit lower - I was quite happy when it was about 1.6 personally. Sure I’ll pay more if I buy something from the States, but far more money comes in my direction from there than the other way around.

So, to the Chancellor: thank you, Darling!

I’ve had a long-running back injury (a twisted vertebra in my lower back) which I’ve figured out how to manage through experience - a bit of stretching here, avoid certain types of activity etc. It’s a bit inconvenient but after a while you get used to living with it, and it’s not that painful most of the time provided I don’t go nuts.

However about 2 weeks ago, not long after getting back from LA, I was doing something quite simple (moving a coffee table back after a Rock Band session), when something in a completely different part of my back suddenly hurt really badly.  We had guests at the time, so I quickly took some painkillers and did a quick bit of my usual stretching upstairs, but that didn’t seem to work very well - I ended up just gritting my teeth most of the evening. While I don’t like the existing back injury I have, at least I ‘know it’ and how generally to cope with it, but this time it seemed different - like someone randomly knifing me in the middle of the back, just below the shoulder blades (et tu, Bruté?), rather than just by my right kidney like the old injury always was.

Stubborn git that I am, I gave it a couple of days of fairly frequent hot-poker agony before giving in and making an appointment to see the osteopath. I cancelled it once because it started feeling a lot better before the appointment came up, but then I wrenched it again while doing the grocery shopping of all things (damn you BOGOF offers, you basket-filling temptresses). Luckily I remained on my feet and avoided shouting the foullest obscenities in my repertoire at the top of my voice; no doubt the years of Brit cultural training to avoid making a scene at all costs - stiff upper lip and all that, what? - helped in that regard

Anyway, I finally made it to my second osteo appointment today, although again it had started to recover quite well so I felt a little bit stupid; “that used to hurt like hell” doesn’t have quite the same impact after all. Luckily as a professional he could still tell what I’d damaged even without me yelping, so next came the expected ‘manipulation’ - which basically means ‘beatboxing with your bones’. This time the targets of choice were the Thoracic vertebrae and the attached rib heads, and they can clearly make some quite interesting sounds when properly motivated.

I’ll be sore for a while but with a bunch of new stretching exercises it looks like this one probably won’t be a long-term issue. It’s likely to be linked to the number of hours I spent hunched like a troll in economy class in the last month so hopefully it’ll prove to be a one-off.

My wife mentioned to me a week or so ago that one of her work colleagues had recently had a hard drive crash on her laptop. Having replaced it, she wanted to try to get some of the data back from the disk, because she had a lot of family photos on there which were not backed up (I’m sure this experience has informed her future back-up plans).

However she had taken it to a local store, which I won’t name, who quoted her £600 to recover the photos. £600! They could be excused some element of estimate padding here, since you never know how long these things might take, but £600 really is taking the p*ss. Even if it took them a couple of days constantly sitting at the machine to recover the data, that would be an inflated rate for this kind of work. At the least they could have done a quick initial test and told her how difficult it was likely to be.

I was disgusted when I heard, so I volunteered to take a look at it. It took a while to process everything, but most of that was a machine chugging away in a corner without me having to do anything. I connected the drive up to a Linux machine, so I had the option of using free tools (like PhotoRec and ddrescue) to try to manually scan / repair the disk if it was too badly damaged, but it turned out that wasn’t necessary; even though some of the blocks were certainly damaged, most of the disk was in good enough condition to get the most important data back.

I felt embarrassed that someone in ‘my’ industry tried to take advantage like that, especially of an individual over their precious family photos. Quoting the price of a new laptop to recover some data? Maybe they just didn’t want to do it, so quoted a silly price to get rid of her. Maybe they were paranoid about getting bogged down in a messy data retrieval task, although that could have been mitigated with an hour of staff effort (and a few hours of unattended machine time), which they could have required as a minimum, and should have cost less than a tenth of that price. Or maybe they just didn’t know what they were doing. Worst case scenario would be if they deliberately quoted a stupidly inflated price because they knew the photos were irreplaceable and that she’d pay whatever they asked, but I’d prefer not to believe that.

Shameful, either way.

Ok, soapbox time. I’m going to alienate a lot of people and say that ubiquitous voice acting in many games, particularly roleplaying games, is a bad thing. The reason is that it’s constraining the ability of script writers, particularly in conversations.

It’s obvious really - recording voice is more expensive than text, both in terms of the time required to produce it,  and the space it consumes on the final media. Therefore, it’s a scarce resource. You simply cannot afford to have a ton of conversation that only 5% of the player base will ever hear.

I think about the games that I hold as some of the best in terms of script writing and particularly flexible, engaging and truly variable dialogue, and they’re all in the past, because they are all text-based. Planescape Torment sits on the ultimate podium here - a game simply bursting with rich, well-written dialog with a very large number of variations. Also Fallout (the original) - where you really could affect the world around you, and have genuinely different conversations depending on what you did, and the kind of character you were. It’s watching the videos of the latest one that I can clearly see how far conversational systems have fallen from those heights.

Fast-forward to the current generation and current ’standards’ say that we can’t expect the player to actually read anything, because today’s gamers expect everything to be narrated to them, as if they’re a 3-year old wanting a bed-time story. Sure, in games like Mass Effect there’s a bunch of supplemental material that you can read if you want, but all the information pertaining to the actual game experience is stubbornly all voice acted. As such, although they clearly do try to make it individual and variable, the constraints of time and space mean that the dialog options can’t hold the merest glimmer of a candle to the best roleplaying games I was playing 10-15 years ago. How many games do we see now where the only conversation options are:

• “No thanks”
• “I’ll do it”
• “Give me more money and I’ll do it”
• “I kill you! I kill you now!”

Is this the best we can do?

Far too many games these days want to be movies so badly that they seem to forget that there are other media forms they could also be looking to for inspiration, such as literature. A good book is arguably much richer and deeper than any film could ever be, simply because it doesn’t have to rely on moment-to-moment live communication through visuals and narration; it is consumed by the mind first and foremost, rather than the eyes and ears, and as such the flow of information is dynamic - I can choose the pace at which I consume and how much I ponder. Guess what - games can be consumed at varying speeds / intensities depending on the player too, so why aren’t we giving people more opportunity to have a deeper experience if they look for it, rather than going for the lowest-common denominator, the whiz-bang Hollywood level?

Planescape Torment was so good precisely because it tapped into the principle that you can deliver good literary material in pieces, as part of an adapting, changing story, in response to the players actions. There was a huge amount of material there if you decided to dig for it, and different players had genuinely different experiences, and not just at a superficial level. The beauty of games is that they can mix different media and make it new - I don’t want to sit there just reading pages and pages of static text, any more than I want to sit there watching a long cutscene (I’ll read a book or watch a film if I want those things), but I can certainly have a wide variety of quality writing delivered to me piecemeal on demand, interactively, depending on on my actions - that’s what a good conversation system should be like, deep and involving with lots of options, that almost certainly can’t all be voice acted economically.

But, of course visual and audio spectacles sell by the bucketload to the kind of people who buy the latest consoles, and far too many of these players wouldn’t know a good book if one hit them in the face. There’s probably no going back to text conversations in games, but I do think we’re the poorer for it in many cases.

Today has been totally bonkers, but I finally got at least a large part of the Ogre 1.6.0 RC1 release done. I finished all the straggling documentation updates, the source releases are up and the prebuilt SDK for VC8 is there too. I have to do the VC7.1 SDK, the Mac OS X SDK and perhaps the VC9 SDK too (since I have a build of that locally now) yet. Florian was having a few odd linker problems with MinGW which didn’t occur on Linux or OS X so that one might take a while longer to resolve, perhaps until RC2.

It’s worth all the effort though, the 1.6 Changelog is positively bursting with goodness, and I’m pretty sure I probably missed some less headline things in there anyway. 1.6 is definitely a worthy release.

As you can see, I even found time to make a new release logo

It’s going on midnight here now though so I’m going to finish up and have a cup of tea before going to bed. Perhaps there might be rest for the wicked after all!

Bruce Byfield wrote an interesting article (discovered via Matt ‘Alfresco’ Asay’s blog, which should be required reading for anyone in this field) about the sometimes unsteady alliance between open source and business that, on the whole, I agreed with - within a given context. I do think, however, that his context was weighted towards the larger players in market that are fusing open source with business opportunities though, and wanted to share some of my experiences and conclusions from the perspective of a more individual player in the business.

Apologies for the length of this article, I had a lot to say

Read the rest of this entry »

Oo, EW.com has just revealed (picked up via RockBandContent.com) that there are more full albums on the way for Rock Band after the release of Rock Band 2:

Foo Fighters (The Colour and the Shape)
Red Hot Chili Peppers (Blood Sugar Sex Magik)
Jane’s Addiction (Nothing’s Shocking)
Megadeth (Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying)
Stevie Ray Vaughn (Texas Flood)
No Doubt (’Best Of’ Collection)

I don’t know about anyone else, but the top 2 are instant purchases for me, since both are regulars on my iTunes playlists. These are advertised for Rock band 2, but since DLC is interchangeable between the 2 games I’m betting I can still use them even if RB2 hasn’t made it to our shores by then.

Ho boy, time to prime the wallet again methinks. Until then I’ll have to just exhaust myself playing a Duran Duran drum medley. RB is definitely educational, I never realised that ‘Rio’ was so relentlessly fast & long on the drums, I have newfound respect for the New Romantics era musicians - that is, if it wasn’t all pre-programmed on drum machines…

I’ve copied this message from ogre3d.org just in case there are those that track my blog more often than the main site:

2008 OGRE User Survey

One of the questions I always get asked when talking to other people in the industry is ‘How many people are using OGRE then?’. Compared to regular closed-source software where people can’t use it unless they pay, it’s hard for us to answer this question accurately, apart from pointing at download statistics (approximate 40,000 per month, if you were wondering). However, this doesn’t necessarily reflect how many people are seriously using OGRE.

So, why does it matter? Quite aside from it being nice to know, the practical reason is that the size of the user base influences how 3rd parties perceive us, and specifically how much priority is assigned to support requests we place with 3rd parties such as graphics card manufacturers and driver writers. Put simply, if we can show we have a large number of companies using OGRE for serious projects, the more resources we can get assigned to our support requests.

Since ‘gating’ downloads with forms requiring contact information is both undesirable and impractical in an open-source project, I’m instead running a survey to try to collect this information. It’s not perfect of course, since as an opt-in process it will ‘undersample’ the number of people using OGRE, but I’m hoping it will be enough. Please participate if you’re a serious OGRE user - the survey is short and sweet, and you don’t have to provide any identifying information if you don’t want to. However, if you are able, I would ask you to opt-in to provide a bit more information like your company name and projects, since having specific companies and projects to refer to can probably help our cause.

Thanks for your time!

I’ve had a pretty good response so far, in the last 12 hours or so we’ve had over 250 people completing the survey. However, the more the better! People I speak to at graphics card manufacturers etc regularly tell me that more definite information about the make-up of our user base is important for attracting more support resources to our cause when we need them, so I’d appreciate if you’d help us persuade them

With only a couple of days to go before the feature lock-down of Ogre 1.6, in time for a release candidate next week, I decided to squeeze in one more feature of my own - Alpha to Coverage support. This allows the use of Multi-sample Anti-aliasing (MSAA) on transparent texture edges as well as the more usual polygon edges.

It headlines as a Dx10 feature, but in fact both ATI and NVIDIA have exposed it on GL and on Dx9, the latter via some nasty ‘magic’ state hacks since Dx9’s API doesn’t include it. They weren’t as nasty as I thought though, and since someone raised it in the forum recently, plus the fact that I’d been manually turning it on in the NVIDIA control panel for OgreSpeedTree, I figured I might as well add proper support for it.

In the image (if you click to get the full-size version), you can probably tell that the leaf on the right has alpha to coverage enabled, and the one on the left doesn’t - the right-hand one looks nicer, obviously. It does have an overhead of course, but those with decent cards will appreciate the extra quality I’m sure, and you can enable it on a per-pass basis in your materials to target it where you need it, which is better than enabling it across the board in the control panel like I was doing before. I’ve tested it on Dx9 and OpenGL on my GeForce 9800, and my Radeon HD 2900 (I guess I could update that, but it’s only a test box after all!) and it works nicely.

Yet another reason to upgrade to Ogre 1.6

More patent silliness from those idiots in the US Patent Office, as they get exploited by soulless corporate types again:

US Patent 7415666: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments

I really can’t imagine how messrs. Sellers, Grantham and Dersch can sleep at night, having officially claimed that calculating how far to advance down a document when you hit the PageDn is a significant innovation that warrants the protection of 20-year exclusivity that a patent brings. It beggars belief that an engineer could possibly think that way - I’m guessing a company-sponsored discount lobotomisation scheme, or perhaps it’s enough to run internal training courses such as ‘TKNGTHPSS101: Stifling innovation by patenting the bleeding obvious’.

Time to stop this nonsense. Now.