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In a complete and total surprise, my cousin presented to me yesterday the result of a grand conspiracy in the Ogre community to commemorate my time as project lead – a specially designed, unique Ogre statuette! Thumbnails below, click for more detail…

I literally had no idea this was going on, or that my cousin had been asked to make the delivery that day (I thought we were just meeting for a social). I was completely taken aback and very touched that the people in the community would go to the trouble of doing something like this for me. There’s a thread in the forums going into more detail on how they organised it, including the many, many different designs they mocked up and considered before voting for this one. I’m humbled and flattered.

My sincere thanks to everyone who was involved in organising this, and very well done for creating such an excellent statue and managing so successfully to keep me in the dark about it! You guys are just awesome.

Yesterday saw a triple-whammy of sugary Apple gaming goodness:

1. Steam for Mac was released, meaning all the games you own on Steam that are ported to the Mac can also be played there, free.
2. Torchlight was a day-1 release on the service, meaning Ogre (and therefore code written by me) was among the very first on the service.
3. Portal became free (for Mac and PC)

Wow. A great day for Mac gaming. I noticed that World Of Goo was up on day 1 too, and since I’d bought it on Steam I could play it right away on my MBP too. Yummy.

Curiously, considering it’s based on Ogre, I don’t actually own Torchlight on Steam – I had a free Windows-only copy from Runic, I bought a physical (Windows-only) copy for my shelf, and I bought copies for both my wife and Diablo-obsessed brother in law on Steam but I never got a copy there myself, so I haven’t tried it on the Mac yet. I need to ask my wife to log in on the MBP so I can try it!

For 18 months I’ve been told by a succession of doctors and physios that I didn’t have anything structurally wrong with my spine and that my bouts of back pain were simply ’standard non-specific back pain’ – ie muscle problems that I should just take NSAIDs for and exercise more. I’d been a bit skeptical because the problems were occasionally quite extreme and seemed to be always centred on one particular location (the joint just at the bottom of my ribcage), but after getting many opinions and one set of x-rays I went along with it.

Things have been quite good recently, up to mid-February when I had a bit of a relapse for a few weeks after doing a little too much. I raised it with my doctor again, explained that I’d been doing all the exercise and going to the gym as recommended, and yet it still flared up at what I considered to be fairly minor provocation. He scheduled me in for another set of x-rays which I expected to not come back with anything conclusive since the last set didn’t (and you can’t get into the MRI scan here unless you go through this step again first, allegedly). They took more pictures this time but I didn’t expect much given all the opinions so far.

Imagine my surprise therefore that when I got the results today, they actually had a concrete explanation for me. Apparently in my lower thoracic (ie exactly where I’d been pointing all these months) I have some disc degeneration and calcification going on, which is what is causing the stiffness and pain. This is something that happens with age anyway, but given my relative(!) youth (36) they thought it looked like it might be a result of either a trauma such as a sports injury – I can’t think of anything – or sometimes they see it in people who were child gymnasts – again not something I can attest to! Basically, something has happened to make my spine degenerate in that area faster than it should have done for my age. Too many hours spent stressed out at a desk may have been a contributing factor in that, although he thought it would have to be a lot of hours and probably combined with other factors.

So anyway, the ‘good’ news is that I actually have a reason now, an explanation for why I’m so susceptible to strains and stress on my back these days. In a way it’s nice to have something to point at. The bad news is that this isn’t fixable, it can merely be managed via careful exercise and lifestyle changes – many of which I’ve made already but I probably need to go even further. The prognosis is that I should be able to live pain-free so long as I manage it carefully over the long term to stop it degenerating further.

Following this analysis, I’ve been prompted to make a decision which I’ve been reluctantly considering for a while anyway – I’m retiring as OGRE Project Lead. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my 10 years leading OGRE from unknown personal project to where we are today, but leading an open source project requires an enormous amount of dedication, passion, and above all an awful lot of time spent at a keyboard, most often in addition to a ‘regular job’ with which to pay the bills, and I feel I just can’t give that to the level that’s required any more. It will be with no small amount of sadness that I finally take off the leader’s hat – which by now is quite battered and worn in.

I still intend to be around and involved in the project – I’ll be contributing some code, giving advice when it’s wanted, and overseeing the establishment of an OGRE Foundation to handle the donations and funding side, but the days of me living and breathing OGRE, vetting every change, and being the person with whom the buck stops when there’s a bug, will be over. I’ll basically be contributing what and when I can, but shrugging off the responsibility and expectation that is inevitably associated with being the lead developer.

We have a great team and community around OGRE and I’m sure the project will be fine with me taking a more back-seat role – time for younger and less physically challenged developers to step into the limelight

I’ve had requests to post the OS & browser stats for the OGRE site, which I didn’t include in my previous demographics post, so here we go.

A caveat to start off with – as a programmer-oriented site our users are obviously a little different in their choice of tech to the population at large!

Operating Systems

Not really a surprise there, Windows dominates the landscape, with Linux and OS X pulling up the rear. Personally on the desktop I’m a Windows and OS X user so my visits are contributing to those rows. There’s a decent showing for the mobile platforms too, iPhone and iPod particularly, a fair few on Android and even some early iPad hits.

Windows Breakdown

It’s worth drilling down into the huge Windows stat to see what versions people are using:

XP still rules the roost then, and thank goodness Vista is sinking rapidly to the bottom like the cast-iron turd sculpture it is – Windows 7 has already more than doubled its share. And it’s amusing to see that a couple of crazy b?st#rds are still running ME and NT.

Mac OS X Breakdown

I’d heard that supporting pre-Leopard versions of Mac OS X was increasingly becoming pointless since almost everyone had upgraded, and these stats bear that out – 96% of users are running 10.5 (Leopard) or better.

Even more interesting was the sole visitor running 10.7! Was that an error, or did we have someone from Apple on an unreleased future version visiting the site? And what’s that ‘68K’ entry about – someone running an Apple ][ emulator or something?

The Linux breakdown wasn’t interesting (99% ‘not set’, the rest just kernel versions), so there’s nothing to post for that – don’t email me about  missing out Linux please

Browsers

Firefox is the clear winner here at a huge 50% – this definitely reflects our developer-focussed audience. In fact, I used to be an avid Firefox user until quite recently, when the new version of Chrome added the equivalent to the extensions I relied on in Firefox, at which point I switched because Chrome is more efficient with memory in particular. IE’s share at 18% is definitely not representative of the general user population, but then our users tend to be a bit better informed than that

So there you go, request fulfilled – hope it was interesting.

Ok, so a new clause in the Terms of Service for Apple’s newly announced iPhone OS 4 is understandably causing some consternation around the internet:

“3.3.1 … Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).”

The common understanding is that this is a shot across Adobe’s bow, but also aimed at people creating emulation environments. Potential justifications for this could include performance concerns (given the new multitasking feature in 4), wanting to avoid shovelware ports from other platforms with no iPhone-specific features to make their platform stand out, or sheer bloody mindedness and wish to tie developers directly to their APIs to minimise the chance that they’ll deploy on competitors machines.

As a general principle, I don’t like this sort of thing – telling developers what they can and can’t do is stifling. But, I had to take away one positive from it – a company telling people to use native code, instead of the opposite which I’ve seen too much of lately. In recent years, the likes of Microsoft have insisted that developers use their intermediate VM layers to deploy on some devices (XNA, Windows Phone 7) – regardless that these environments have about 20 years less maturity (in terms of libraries and existing code) than what I already have in C & C++. Having them tell me that no, despite all these great battle-tested libraries that I’m used to using, instead I have to use comparatively immature ports and replacements of varying quality, just because they tell me so. That drives me nuts – sure, let’s throw away and re-invent hundreds of functioning & tested libraries just because…well, just because! They’re old and we’re new and awesome! Hmm.

So while Apple telling developers what they can and can’t use is still very wrong from a point of principle, I’m actually glad that someone is championing native code for once, rather than pushing a VM environment. I’d prefer they didn’t mandate anything at all, but I can’t deny a certain urge to fist-bump when native code was the one to get the seal of approval, after getting the impression from other companies that they’d rather no-one had access to the underlying workings of the machine. I like native code, there’s a certain purity about it – and maybe it’s like a sad old gear-head going on about how great the old V8’s used to be, but I don’t care Mostly it’s about my frustration with being forced to discard perfectly good native libraries and look for / build replacements for no good reason.

PS For the record, OGRE on iPhone isn’t affected by this new ToS because we’re 100% native, baby.

[edit]For those pointing out that C# and such eventually run on native code anyway – that’s not the point. The point is that on certain devices – XNA and Windows Phone 7 – you simply cannot use libraries that were not written in .Net originally, meaning that years worth of dev libraries are inaccessible and need to be (pointlessly IMO) rewritten in .Net. And yes, this is exactly the same as Apple are doing here (but in reverse), if you interpret it in the strictest sense that you’re only allowed to use code written in Obj-C, C and C++. I’m just taking a perverse delight in the fact that it’s C/C++ libraries from the last 20+ years that are on the winning side for a change, instead of being the ones that are excluded (which frankly I’m completely sick of).

Almost exactly three years ago, I posted an analysis of the traffic on ogre3d.org and the rough country breakdown of our users, which is always fascinating to me. I hadn’t actually been collecting web stats on the site for about a year (the previous set-up was lost when I had to recreate the server in a hurry, and somehow reinstating it never seemed to rise to the top of my TODO list), but a month ago I finally got around to adding Google Analytics to the site. The results have been very interesting, particularly when compared to 3 years ago, so I thought I’d share some factoids with you.

Visitors still increasing

In 2007, log analysis indicated we were getting a little over 100,000 unique visitors per month; obviously this is not 100% accurate due to shared & dynamic IP addresses, people logging in from multiple sites, etc, but it’s a reasonable order of magnitude indicator. Analytics is typically more conservative in its figures, since it excludes bots better as well as non-Javascript browsers, but still in the past month (actually only 28 days) we’ve had over 120,000 unique visitors to the site – and 1.2M page views – so we’ve sustained and slightly improved our user traffic. And all without any Slashdot posts Also, this doesn’t count visits to Sourceforge, BitBucket or ome static generated HTML like our online documentation pages.

The Meteoric Rise of China

In 2007, China ranked 15th in our league table of visitors. Three years on and they’ve risen to the number two spot, comfortably surpassing Germany – at first I wondered if that was down to users there using fewer proxies, but since the figures for other countries have remained fairly stable I think the majority of this is genuinely a vast increase in the number of Chinese visitors to OGRE’s site. Here’s the top 10 countries (figures are for the number of visits):

The range of countries is demonstrated by how many are in the grey ‘others’ section (38.73%). Except for the massive change in China’s share, most of the other countries have stayed approximately in their relative positions & shares of the user population since 2007.

Region View – Europe still dominates, Asia challenges the Americas

The country view is, however, quite misleading if your aim is to decide where to locate a web server for example, because it naturally biases the figures towards large unified countries (like the USA and China), and doesn’t really show a true regional picture. For that, we have to examine the numbers (again, number of visits) by continent:

Now, even though the continent view includes Russia in Europe which screws up the locality principle a bit, even if you exclude that Europe dominates our community, with close to 1 in every 2 visitors to the site being from Europe. The Americas  and Asia share most of the rest almost equally now, which is a change from 2007 when the Americas were more dominant, and everyone else shares the scraps (3.5%). The Americas figure is made up of about 86% North America and 14% South America, and Asia is predominantly (60%) the Eastern Asia countries (mostly China, but South Korea holds its own too), with South-East and Southern Asia sharing the rest – particular hotspots there are India, Indonesia, Malasia, Turkey and Vietnam.

City Clusters

One thing I like about Analytics is the ability to drill down into countries and look at the local clustering. There are the expected clusters around cities – in the USA, the top 2 cities are unsurprisingly New York and Los Angeles, although Columbus OH takes the number 3 spot, and in the UK the clustering around London is massive – but they typically represent only about 25-30% of the audience, with the rest being scattered pretty much uniformly across most areas of the country in question. It’s fun to be able to point at almost anywhere in Europe, North America and the southern and eastern parts of Asia and to have a pretty good chance of being quite near to someone who has used the OGRE site.

The Monday morning OGRE fix

With OGRE obviously used by a lot of people in their spare time, you might expect that the weekends would be the busiest times for the site, but the opposite is in fact true – Mondays are consistently the busiest days (particularly 6-9am PST), with Saturday being the least busy. Whether this is because people are working with OGRE, or just cheekily surfing in their work time rather than face the Monday workload, is hard to verify!

Final Thought

I get a kick out of looking at these stats so I hope you find them interesting too. It’s really cool to think that there are only a very small number of countries (such as North Korea and Laos) from which we don’t get any (non-proxy) visitors from in a typical month, and it’s very interesting to see how the visitor base is gradually spreading out and diversifying, something which I’m sure every site witnesses but it’s interesting to see it in your own data. The question is – will China keep the current trajectory? At this rate, they’ll take the number one spot from the USA in only a few more years and put Asia second in the regional rankings!

Writing good documentation is hard. While I happen to think that API references generated from source code can be extremely useful, they’re only part of the story, and eventually everyone needs to write something more substantial for their software. You can get away with writing HTML directly, and separately using a word processor to write PDFs for so long, but eventually you need a proper tool chain with the following characteristics:

• Lets the author concentrate on content rather than style
• Generates multiple formats from one source (HTML, PDF, man pages, HTML Help etc)
• Does all the tedious work for you such as TOCs, cross-references, source code highlighting, footnotes
• Is friendly to source control systems & diffs in general
• Standard enough that you could submit the content to a publisher if you wanted to
• Preferably cross-platform, standards-based and not oriented to any particular language or technology

When I came to write the OGRE manual many, many years ago, I went with Texinfo – it seemed a good idea at the time, and ticked most of the boxes above. The syntax is often a bit esoteric, and the tools used to generate output frequently a bit flaky (texi2html has caused me many headaches over the years thanks to  poorly documented breaking changes), but it worked most of the time.

I’ve been meaning to replace this tool chain with something else for new projects for a while, and DocBook sprung to mind since it’s the ‘new standard’ for technical documentation. It’s quite popular with open source projects now and it’s the preferred format for many publishers such as O’Reilly. In the short term, I want to write some developer instructions for OGRE for our future Mercurial setup, but in the long term, I’d really like a good documentation tool chain for all sorts of other purposes, and Texinfo feels increasingly unsatisfactory these days.

Having spent some time this week establishing a new working tool chain, and encountering & resolving a number of issues along the way, I thought I’d share my setup with you.

Read the rest of this entry »

I love it when shots from Ogre just show up in funny places. This time, it’s from a comic strip called Stolen Pixels on the Escapist, where Ogre-powered games Torchlight and Zombie Driver have been used for comedic purposes:

Thanks to BuschnicK for the heads-up on the Torchlight one, I was surprised to see Zombie Driver just days earlier too!

So, I’ve been a little quieter than usual since the new year, and that’s because I’ve been in  a rather reflective mood as I plan out how I’m going to spend my time in 2010. That’s right – planning! Talk about the final frontier

Basically, as you may have gleaned from my previous post, I’ve been looking to make some significant changes to the way I do things in 2010. I spent 2009 reeling from a back injury and trying to figure out how to deal with that given that I’m self-employed (ie I don’t get paid when I’m not working, regardless of the reason), and a leader of an open source project (with the inherent time requirements that comes with). This meant working out on the fly how to stay afloat financially, and still keeping my own interests and open-source plates spinning, without slipping back into the ‘permanent voluntary crunch mode’ style which triggered my back problems. I can’t stress enough how difficult that transition has been for me – it’s not like anyone was forcing me to work/live that way, I did it because I wanted to, but then it suddenly had to stop. When you invest so much of your time and perceived identity in something, backing away from it is very, very hard.

Of course the economic climate wasn’t great either, meaning I spent a lot of time jumping around between many small projects, leading to more overhead dealing with admin & business relations. I ended up just going almost month-to-month on-demand, not  planning very much and just being grateful to be able to work a decent amount at all – which given how unwell I was at the start of the year was definitely something to be glad about. But, now I’m back on my feet and pretty confident of my future health again (within reason – I’m not going to be bungee jumping any time soon!), I’m ready to start being more pro-active again and to map out some plans.

One thing is for sure, there’s no going back to how I used to do things. My days of saying ‘yes’ to almost everything and being at the keyboard until past midnight most days, and most of the weekend, are gone forever. I don’t regret doing it, despite the pain it ended up causing me, because OGRE wouldn’t be here otherwise and I learned a vast amount and had a ton of fun – but I’ll leave that to the under-35s in future; have fun guys From now on, I’m being ruthless and somewhat selfish about what I work on, and concentrating on things that maximise my personal love-growth-cash triangle. It means I’m passing on a lot more projects, and concentrating far more on things that are strategically significant to me, rather than anyone else.

I’m still planning to lead OGRE, so long as the community is happy for me to do so, but by necessity I’m stepping back a bit to let other people take more responsibility where they want to, and to refocus my time on mentoring and advisory roles rather than trying to be everywhere at once. We have some great people in the team and in the wider community, and I hope our MIT license will foster even more in future. Both I and the community have gotten used to perceiving me as the ‘go to guy’ in the first instance, with responsibility for pretty much everything, but in practice for some time now it’s been very much a team & community effort, just one that I happen to lead (and financially support where needed). In fact one of the things I’m quite proud of is the way so many others have picked up on the way I do things, and taken things forward themselves in a way that I wholly approve of. That’s open source in action, and I’m glad to be part of it, even if I can no longer have my fingers in absolutely every pie with an OGRE symbol on it

Here’s to 2010 anyway. It’s going to be different, but change is good.

Zero Punctuation reviewed Torchlight yesterday!

Of course he was both inaccurate (you don’t have to keep clicking at all, you can hold the button down) and overly harsh, but still very funny. It’s odd to enjoy watching something you had a hand in (albeit in a background technology way in my case) being ripped to shreds, but when it’s done in such an amusing way somehow it’s ok. I guess this is why Yahtzee hasn’t had his teeth kicked in by disgruntled game developers yet

As Runic’s Twitter said: “We’ve arrived!”.