Author Archives: Brit

Done with Thunderbird

by | Miscellaneous
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After moving over to my new laptop, I had to move over Thunderbird (the open-source email application created by Mozilla, the same group that created Firefox). I had a whole system in place to copy over my email, since I’ve reformatted or bought new hard drives for my computer in the past. For some reason, I just couldn’t get it up and running on Windows 7. After trying for an hour, including looking for instructions on how to do it, I eventually decided all the instructions were out-dated and didn’t work. I don’t know if this is because I’m using Windows 7, or if Mozilla changed something in the application itself.

So, I decided to just move everything over to gmail and access my accounts with gmail’s pop3 access. It was a much easier system to get up and running. Plus, I won’t have to worry about backing up my email, or figure out how to get the email up and running whenever I change computers or hard drives.

I’ve generally had a contentious relationship with open-source software, and it seems like this is one more example of the problems I’ve had with it. Admittedly, I still use Firefox, Open Office, and NSIS, although, now that I think about it, all of them were commercial applications they fell into open-source. I wonder if there’s a correlation there.

Minecraft Documentary

by | Business, Games
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Joystiq just posted a 20-minute promotional video to help fund a documentary about Minecraft. I thought I’d be able to watch it, but I watched the first five minutes until they reached the point where they start talking about the runaway success of the game that nobody predicted. I had to shut it off.

It still bothers me that Notch earned more money on average from one to two days of work than I earned in six years and resulted in financial disaster. I think I’ll have to take a break from games for a long while before I can get my head straightened out, because I have a hard time reading anything written by any small, successful indie company. It’s a bad thing that I can’t manage to listen to successful people in the games industry — it means I can’t really learn from them.

New Laptop

by | Miscellaneous
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I bought a new laptop last week. My old laptop has felt slow for quite a while, but I haven’t wanted to spend the money on buying a new one. My original plan back in 2009 was to buy a new laptop when the game started selling, but I once I started to see sales numbers, I could see that things were tight.

The test I’ve been doing with my new laptops is to see how fast they can recompile the source code. When I last upgraded my laptop, I got a 3x improvement in compile times. The new laptop brought a 31 minute compile down to 14 minutes. In those terms, it’s 2.3x as fast as my previous laptop. I have to say, it’s been 4.5 years since I bought my previous laptop, and I was hoping for a better time than that. It’s not bad, but it seems like there’s been a decline in the rate of improvement of computers. Moore’s Law is that the number of transistors double every 18 months, which is widely (and not so accurately) interpreted as doubling the speed of a computer every 18 months. It’s been three 18-month cycles since my last laptop purchase, and this certainly isn’t 2^3 times faster (which would be 8 times faster). Although, it certainly seems more than 2.3x faster in most other tasks. According to notebook check, this laptop is 2.9x – 3.8x faster in their benchmarks than my previous one.

AI Middleware [Random Thoughts]

by | Game Development, Random Thoughts, Work Ideas
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Back when I started putting together Empires of Steel, I looked around for some middleware that would help me build an AI. One really big problem with AI middleware is that the term “AI” encompasses so many different things. This means that most information about creating “AI” doesn’t apply to what your particular game is doing. I have a copy of “AI Game Programming Wisdom 2”, which is composed of a series of articles by different authors, and the vast majority of it doesn’t apply to the AI I was creating for Empires of Steel. You run into the same problem with middleware: most of the problems being solved by middleware aren’t the problems you need to solve for your game.

Anyway, I couldn’t find any decent middleware that I could use in Empires of Steel. Recently, I decided to take a look around and see if the landscape has improved at all in the past few years. It appears not. Searching for “strategy AI middleware”, I couldn’t find much of anything good. Most AI middleware seems to be pathfinding systems (i.e. given Point A and Point B and a landscape filled with various types of terrain and obstacles, the system will figure out a decent pathway between those two points). There’s some clever stuff being done with pathfinding, including neat stuff like updating the pathways based on changing obstacles, for example, a blocked hallway or a new hole punched through a wall, but there isn’t anything I’ve found that’s anywhere close to a strategy AI. Maybe games are just so unique that it’s difficult/impossible to create a general AI, so maybe attempts to create a general AI just end up pleasing nobody.

One open-source project I found on the first page of google results called itself “Realtime strategy AI game engine” and seems to have been abandoned after four months. It’s had no activity in the past three and a half years. The code that does exist appears to be composed of OpenSteer (a different open-source AI project designed to steer virtual vehicles) and a bunch of primitive stubs that were never turned into anything. (Ah, open-source. It’s filled with good intentions, but mostly abandoned projects. Generally, they die because the creator(s) get bored and disappear within a month.)

It sort of makes me wonder if there’s a market for AI middleware, or maybe it doesn’t exist because of the difficultly of creating it. It seems kind of pointless to put a bunch of extra time into the Empires of Steel AI (if sales were still really strong, I’d be happy to improve it, but considering how badly I got burned on sales). But, if there was a market for strategy AI middleware that I could spin out, that might be an interesting idea. In that case, I’d use EOS as a testbed.

The Gloaming Trailer [Video]

by | Game Development, Games
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This is just a neat little animation. It’s actually a trailer for a video. The section beginning around 20 seconds into the trailer makes me imagine creating a little wargame with these personality-filled animations. Maybe something small that would play on a smartphone or something. You’d have your own little tribe that would go through history, conquering other pencil-drawn tribes.

Coffeeshop Piracy

by | Piracy
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One of the coffeeshops I go to had their internet down the other day. Their ISP had cut them off temporarily because of filesharing going on there. Over the past few months, their network has been down several times because of this. One employee said the coffeeshop owner had been getting warnings and lists of pirated material going over his network, but he ignored it. Apparently, they’re supposed to setup a computer to filter what stuff is accessible over their network. Once they get that up and running in a few days, their ISP will give them a slower internet service and put them on “probation”. At least it didn’t seem to hurt the coffeeshop’s business; they were pretty packed.

It’s kind of too bad that coffeeshops end up being responsible for things their users are doing. I was sort of wondering how this would play out with piracy, because, while ISPs can cutoff people’s home internet, it’s harder for coffeeshops because they can’t really monitor what their users are doing and there’s so many different people that some of them will be filesharing. The website filtering system is something I hadn’t thought of, though.

On a similar note, I noticed that when I connect to the Starbucks internet, a screen briefly appears showing the MAC address of my computer. (The MAC address is a unique number contained inside your network hardware.) I couldn’t help but think that maybe they were linking people’s MAC addresses to their internet surfing. Theoretically, this could allow them to ban your computer from all the Starbucks. Your MAC address never changes, not even if you install a new hard drive and Operating System. (I guess that’s not entirely true. You could buy a new network card, though most people aren’t going to do that.) I sort of wonder if Starbucks has been banning people for pirating. Afterall, if the ISPs are cutting off service to coffeeshops for filesharing, then Starbucks might be protecting itself from ISP cutoffs by banning the offenders’ laptops.

Post Mortem Financials

by | Business, Game Development
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I have to admit that it took me a little bit before I was comfortable releasing the financial numbers, mostly because I was embarrassed by them. I was also surprised how much I ended up paying in taxes despite earning so little. I think I’m paying something like 25%-30% of my income in taxes, which is surprising considering how little I earned. Here’s a writeup: