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Yep, the blissful silence on this blog is now over, because we’re back from our holiday / vacation in the Canadian Rockies. For me, there’s very little that’s more relaxing than traipsing around unspoiled mountain regions enjoying the scenery and the wildlife (and trying not to get eaten by the latter). Some people like laying on beaches, and that’s fine, but there’s only so much of that I can do.

This was our second trip to Canada, and whilst we did a multi-centre trip last time, this time we concentrated on the part we liked best, the Rockies and the associated parks. We had lots more time this trip and so ranged about a lot more, and even came across a grizzly bear at one point – a little more closely than we would have chosen, since it was only about 10-15 meters away on a ridge above us, but luckily it was far less interested in us and it quickly wandered off after giving us a ‘what are you looking at?’ glance. That was cool, once our hearts had returned to their normal rhythm anyway. We got to see a few more animals than last time, which is always our favourite part of this kind of trip. I’d love to spot a wolf one day, but the closest we got were seeing a few tracks.

I find myself liking Canada in general too, even though I’ve only experienced the west so far (the parks and Vancouver a few years back). From my point of view it’s a bit like America but with the volume turned town a notch or two, which when you come from a reserved / borderline emotionally repressed culture like mine can be a little more comfortable to slip into.  The money also comes in different colours for different denominations, which is rather sensible to me (am I the only one to have problems pulling out the right US bills when in a rush or in low light?), and of course has the same Queen printed on it, which is curiously comforting. And in a strange coincidence, many Canadians have a habit of appending ‘eh?’ to the end of sentences, a trait which is very common locally too – although combining the two perhaps has the danger of veering into nudge nudge sketch territory.

In all, it was a great holiday, if a little bit physically tiring – and when you live at almost sea level, hiking at 2000 feet is tough at first just because of the thinner air. The parks are a great place to get away from everything (well, except my most urgent email – but that’s being self-employed for you) and right up our street. We’ve visited mountain regions in Europe but it’s a lot harder to find the wide, unspoiled areas like you can so easily in Canada. I envy people who can just jump in a car / train and get up there for the weekend!

I’m catching up now, bear in mind I’ll be a bit busy in the next couple of weeks with all the things that have been waiting for my return.

Hell yes. It’s nice to come back from holiday to more eye-candy from leading OGRE-based projects, and this one is looking very nice indeed. Congrats to Travis and the rest of the team at Runic, on the PAX ‘09 coverage and also the recent Gamasutra article which I read on my phone at breakfast one day while on holiday (much to my wife’s annoyance ).

I’m probably the only person on the web who totally missed this until now, but The Guild is awesome. I don’t play WoW, and this pretty much sums up why I’m so afraid of getting sucked into it, but it’s definitely pretty funny.

Thanks to Niko for linking their music video yesterday.

You know how you realise one day that you’re not part of the ‘young generation’ anymore? If you don’t know this, you’re either still in your 20s, or you’re kidding yourself; akin to 45 year olds thinking they can still legitimately be part of the clubbing scene. Well, it manifests itself in a number of ways, some positive – you’re in theory more financially & emotionally stable, and you generally give a lot less of a toss what people think anymore – and some negative – suddenly you can no longer treat your body like dirt and expect it to gleefully rebound. I think it also influences your taste in games.

I increasingly feel out of whack with the popular opinion of the gaming press and enthusiasts in a way that I never did 10-15 years ago. I hate competitive multiplayer while most players on the web think it’s the most important thing ever. Instead, I like social co-op games that I can play just for fun with others. I generally don’t like long single-player games anymore – anything over 15-20 hours tends to be a bit too much hassle these days unless I can incorporate it into my social / co-op play; Fallout 3 is an exception just because it’s so very good and tugs at my nostalgia strings. I don’t feel a need to complete games anymore – simply to play them until I’ve had enough; sometimes that’s the end, sometimes I bail before that due to boredom (Assassin’s Creed, GTA IV). As an antithesis to the sprawling single-player game, I’ve come to love bite-size gaming. Anything I can play and have fun in 15-30 minutes is ideal for fitting in around other things. XBLA excels at providing sustenance in this area; Geometry Wars 2, Peggle, Rez HD, Trials HD, Pac Man CE, they’re all great hop-in hop-out games.

And so finally to the subject matter (perhaps tendency to ramble is also part of the maturation process) – in terms of what I like in an XBLA game, Shadow Complex annoyed me a bit. It looks nice, and the demo was quite fun to play, except for the fact that they shoved a bunch of cutscenes in there which seemed deliberately designed to waste my time. The acting was hammy, the plot entirely derivative if somewhat confusing (switching from odd special-op double-cross to entirely predictable girlfriend-rescue fodder – complete with ‘I’m sorry, your princess girlfriend is in another castle secret base’), and above all, incredibly bloody annoying to sit through. I should have skipped them, but I watched just in case there was anything useful / interesting in them – there wasn’t, and those are minutes that I’ll never get back. Next time, please put a splash screen up at the start reading “Cutscenes are present only for the purposes of satisfying the designer’s own need for clichéd pulp drama, and any resemblance to something you’ll remotely care about is purely coincidental.”. Thanks.

It seems like Shadow Complex wants to blur the lines between an XBLA game and what some might consider a ‘real’ game, and people seem to be lauding it for that, whilst I just want to shake it until its teeth rattle. Being ‘just’ an arcade game is nothing to be ashamed of – you don’t need extensive plots (especially ones that burn time on the qualitative equivalent of Mills and Boon), you just need a good game. Shadow Complex was fairly good fun – and I have to say not as fun as many other XBLA games I’ve played, just flashier in places – but my opinion was not helped by its annoying attempts to legitimise itself as ’serious’ game content rather than just embracing what it is – an arcade game.

RockBandContent.com is being shut down because the maintainer hasn’t got time to do it anymore, which is a shame because it’s a really nice site for browsing the increasingly crushing number of Rock Band tracks available and finding videos of people playing the charts before you buy.

However, I found over time that the best videos came from corporalgregg2, who always posts full-band videos which saves a lot of time over the individual instrument videos, as well as being very good so you can actually hear the song with everyone playing on Expert So I’m just subscribed to him from now on for reviewing the new songs as they come out. This week is really good again – you can’t complain when you get Blur, Kaiser Chiefs and Foo Fighters in one week.

One thing that’s always irked me about Rock Band 2 is that despite the song database being really good, with album groupings, filtering by artist / genre etc, album art, individual instrument difficulties and all that, it’s missing one vital feature: a ‘Recently Added’ playlist, or at least a sort by release date. When you get quite a big song list, and your friends ask ‘So what’s new recently?’, you’re forced to either remember (never a sound strategy for me), or page through all the songs looking for things that are new. It’s such an obvious feature that I wonder whether they just don’t have access to that information on the DLC files which is why it’s not there – I can’t imagine no-one’s asked for it; our list is ‘only’ 270-odd songs deep and it’s an issue, I can’t imagine what it’s like if you own all 800+ songs.

However, I found a website which helps with that in the comments of the RockBandContent.com shutdown post – MyRockBandSongs.com. It lets you add all the songs you’ve purchased and then sort them by date added. And when you add in bulk, that still sub-sorts by release date, which is perfect. At least I can whip out my mobile and look it up when someone asks, or link friends to it! Here’s my personal hastily constructed page – it may not be 100% complete, I added things in a rush.

Finally. After months of speculation and general acknowledgement by all except Sony that the PS3 is too expensive for the market, and that no amount of brand loyalty, Blu-ray cross-marketing or theoretical performance advantages were going to outbalance that inconvenient fact, the inevitable has happened and the PS3 is now £50 cheaper in the UK. That’s actually pretty good; we usually get stiffed on prices in Europe so despite not quite being on par – a $100 cut in the US should mean about a £60 cut at current exchange rates, but they do have to hedge their bets there – it’s a healthy amount and I’m sure will help sales.

The new 120GB Slim is interesting too, especially since it’s priced at the same level as the newly-reduced 80GB ‘fat’ edition (as it will no doubt be known from now on); I’m not quite sure how they expect to clear the old stock when they’re priced the same with little difference except a bundled game. Although, I think aesthetically the old machine, despite being bigger, has a nicer looking design; the new one looks a bit plain, having gotten rid of the shiny looks presumably to save on dusting.

I’m semi-tempted, but right now I already have too many games to play for the time I have available – some of that is Fallout 3’s fault; I play a lot of co-op multiplayer games with my wife & friends so I only spend a couple of hours 1 or 2 nights a week playing ‘traditional’ single player games and F3 has gobbled that up for months – and I haven’t even touched the DLC yet. We’re still playing through new Gears 2 content (Horde rocks), and new Rock Band 2 tracks (we buy something almost every week), so really we’re getting loads of play time for our money these days. On top of that, XBLA fills in the remaining slots – if you don’t own Peggle, you have not lived, Trials HD is great,  and Shadow Complex is out today too. I’m just about finding time to play Dead Space a bit – I’m 8 hours in after a month! There are plenty of games I haven’t played yet, and the end of the year will supply more – L4D2, Brutal Legend, Dragon Age maybe. So, I don’t really have time for another games machine right now – I already have 2 I’m not using (DS & Wii). Maybe if my queue dies down a bit….

I wonder if the emergence of the slim edition might finally push MS to produce a slim 360 soon though. Come on guys, the 360 has remained fat, noisy and hot for almost 4 years now, with some improvements but not really enough. The PS3 slim makes it look like even more of a sweating hulk – time to get that machine’s ass on the treadmill!

[edit]I’m disappointed to read they dropped the Linux support with the slim though. It’s the ‘official’ support they dropped, I don’t know if it will continue to be possible to do it anyway (preferably without firmware hacks), but despite the RSX lockout it was quite a nice idea, and I’m obviously always in favour of giving developers tools to play with rather than keeping people at arms length. I’m not sure what the reasoning was, I wouldn’t have thought it would be that onerous to maintain the status quo. Hmm.

I’ve watched with some entertainment the latest round of scraps across the pond about health care, which has now turned into a Brit-bashing exercise. Apparantly the NHS is ‘Orwellian’ and ‘Evil’ (allegedly that particular accusation was from the eminent scholar and international expert Sarah Palin) according to the American right-wing – which, when perceived from this side of the Atlantic constitutes most of the political spectrum compared to what is considered centrist here – all of which is news to most people in Britain, barring the usual suspects on the fringes of the Conservative party that their own leader would like to disown, but who always turn up on American TV because no-one listens to them over here.

I live in a Crown Dependency which unfortunately doesn’t benefit from the NHS, and frankly I’d love to have it over here, instead of paid-for primary care and state-run specialist care as we have (I’ve spent an awful lot of money on physios and doctors over the years). My parents moved back to the mainland a few years back and have had nothing but positive experiences with the NHS since; when we were visiting, my Mum was taken ill late at night and an NHS doctor was on the scene at her home within 45 minutes, all for no charge – something you would pay through the nose for here. It’s not perfect, but frankly IMO anyone who considers it optimal to have profit interests involved in the process of saving lives is either smoking something, or has a vested interest.

But, regardless of your point of view, it’s the blatant lies which are most amusing. My favourite is this quote from the editorial in Investor’s Business Daily, a national American financial newspaper:

“People such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless,”

For goodness sakes, who writes this nonsense? Prof. Hawking has lived in the UK all his life, and has hit back himself at this article explaining that he’s around today precisely because of the NHS, not despite it. Clearly facts are irrelevant when it comes to reinforcing your personal point of view. They’ve tried to take it back, but it just makes them look a little more stupid, especially casually tossing the word ‘Colony’ in there to somehow bolster the emotive side of the argument (taking speech tips from Mugabe now? not smart). Stephen Hawking was ‘a bad example’? In other words, they’re just making it up.

For those of you who grew up in the late 70’s / early 80’s and were into games (particularly in Britain), you’ll like this:

Via NimbleBit – thanks!

Ok, so I’ve posted my initial feelings about tinkering with Mercurial and Git, and that seems to have generated some interest. It’s time to get a bit more formal about how I’m going to evaluate them against each other, to decide which one I like to use most in real, practical scenarios. So, I decided to come up with a list of use cases for the things that I typically have to deal with when managing the repositories for a software project (open source and otherwise), so that I can methodically test them out and see how I feel about each system. I’ve tried to deliberately include use cases for things that you can’treally do on a centralised system, but that I’d want to make use of, as well as the usual nonsense that happens day-to-day on a typical project

I’ve presented my work-in-progress list below, feel free to suggest more use cases I can test. I really want to see what these things are like in practice in the kinds of situations I encounter in real projects, without actually risking a real project in the process! Like a backup / restore strategy, it’s no good doing it for the first time when the sh*t has already hit the fan.

Oh, and for fun, allegedly Git is MacGyver and Mercurial is James Bond .

Due to the nature of a DVCS, all these use cases must be tested both in isolation, and  after pushing those changes to another potentially ’superset’ repository.

1. General
   1. Commit a few changes to local repository ‘A’ but don’t push to central yet. Push a number of different changes to the central repository from a different repository ‘B’. Then, pull ‘B’s changes from the central repos to local repository ‘A’  to bring it up to date, again without pushing A’s outstanding changes yet. This is equivalent to doing an ’svn update’ while you have local uncommitted changes in Subversion, but while using the local commit features of the DVCS. How does this work in practice? [Suggested by Arseny Kapoulkine]
2. Branching
   1. Create a new public, official branch (stable branch)
   2. Create a new long-term feature branch which is intended for public consumption / collaboration
   3. Create lots of short-term development branches (or equivalent structures) intended for local consumption only
      1. What are the size overheads? (Git claims superiority here)
      2. Does this excessively clutter the public repository when pushed?
      3. Is there a better way of handling multiple local changesets which you may or may not decide to push individually, such as testing many patches (Mercurial queues seem very interesting, Git equivalent?)
      4. . Rename a branch? (optional)
3. Merging
   1. Merge changes unidirectionally from one branch to another, without having to manually pick revisions. Make more changes in the source branch and repeat.
   2. Bidirectional merge – a feature branch which is not yet ready to be merged into the trunk wants to resynchronise from the trunk and continue branched development. Merge of this branch into the trunk must be tested later after further changes
4. Tagging
   1. Create a tag against a specific branch; probably at the HEAD but look for the option to specify a revision
   2. Correct / modify / move a tag following a mistake or last-minute revision (pre-release) without having to make duplicate commits or other such spurious activity
5. Firefighting
   1. Screw-up: developer commits change to trunk instead of stable branch. Merge / move it to the stable instead – change can be left in the trunk or can be removed for re-merging, so long as the procedure is clear.
   2. Screw-up: developer commits change to stable branch that is interface-breaking, must be removed and moved to the trunk. Must be removed from the stable branch and moved.
   3. Screw-up: Revert a single change from the repository, that is not at the HEAD
6. External patch submission tests:
   1. Patch file from same branch, no conflicts
   2. Patch file from same branch, with conflicts
   3. Patch file generated on a different branch to the one we want to apply it to (include conflicts)
   4. Pull from third-party repository, entire branch
   5. Pull from third-party respository, specific changes
   6. Patch file generated from non-repository source copy
7. Backup multiple work-in-progress changes on a local machine that are not ready for public consumption; approaches:
   1. Store a patch per local branch (this is how it’s done with SVN, but too much hassle if you use lightweight local branching, DVCSs can do better)
   2. Push to a backup repository on another machine across existing protocols – ssh, https, Samba share (Git can’t do the latter?)
   3. Push to a backup respository on a USB stick (Git can’t do this?)
8. Binary files
   1. Revise a binary file over a few versions, test storage efficiency
   2. Binary file conflict resolution
9. Conversion from Subversion
   1. Import retaining history
   2. Import multiple branches
   3. Import tags
10. Integration
    1. Mailing list / RSS notifications of commits on official repository
    2. Bugtrackers
    3. CIA.vc et al?
    4. Good free & open source GUI clients for all platforms
    5. Line ending conversions between platforms

I’ve been interested in DVCS for a while; having done my fair share of branch management, something which makes that process easier and more transparent is definitely very attractive. I particularly like the way a DVCS makes it easier for people to collaborate in pockets of their own, away from the centralised environment, and track other repositories and keep their local mods up to date more easily – public-branch-on-demand if you will. However, I’m yet to be convinced by Git for everyday use. As noted, I love the idea, but Git comes across as – and this is an ironic thing for me to say – excessively geeky. At one time I might have believed there was no such thing as a plethora of geekery, but I like to think I’m a more rounded individual now

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Git is technically excellent. But a number of things about it remind me of the somewhat stubborn purisms of  ‘old Linux’, such as:

• The documentation is hugely daunting. Whenever anyone tried to convince me why Git is amazing, they point me at documentation that just makes me not want to touch it for anything important. The impression I get is akin to some Linux forums: – this thing is powerful, but it gives you plenty of rope to if not hang yourself, then to tie yourself in knots if you don’t know what you’re doing.
• It requires a Unix back end, to the extent that you have to run it under Cygwin on Windows, and its rigid filesystem requirements mean it won’t work on FAT or Windows network drives. I get the impression there’s something rather aloof about the fact that the core team don’t consider it an issue that Git won’t run on native Windows environments. There are external projects working on that, but the fact that it’s not core is a concern, since I prefer all my 3 platforms to be supported equally.
• The UIs still don’t seem very user-friendly, and most responses I see to the question of why that is boil down to “Git is too powerful to be captured in a GUI”. Sorry, but I don’t buy that – no system is too complex to be captured in a user-friendly tool, it just takes the will to do it, and like ‘old Linux’, there seems to be little will to make Git more approachable.

So, I’ve never had great vibes from Git, despite it’s doubtless technical merits. So, I decided to check out Mercurial instead – from what I read, Git is the fashionable DVCS that all the cool kids want to be seen using, but when it comes down to it Mercurial does exactly the same thing – except that it has native support for all platforms out of the box and TortoiseHg is looking pretty mature. I also read that it handles binary files better than Git too, since it does binary diffs everywhere. The documentation seemed much more approachable too, so I figured I’d have a play.

My first impressions are incredibly positive. The most impressive thing of all is that I imported a (relatively small- about 100 revisions) Subversion repository, with all the history intact, about 5 minutes after installing it, and was bouncing that across Linux and Windows immediately afterwards (haven’t tried OS X yet). TortoiseHg is instantly familiar, and despite the fact that the concepts are the same as Git, the presence of some familiarity, together with some distinctly less intimidating documentation, has me feeling far happier than the times I’ve dipped into the Git docs. Mercurial’s approachability is a positive contrast to Git’s Unix-purist, RTFM style I think. I know which I prefer so far.