Matts Ramblings

I was discussing skate 3 with my brother tonight, we chatted briefly about how the fun factor didn’t last very long, how you really didn’t have to learn the world in order to do the “do anywhere” challenges, and it just lacked the seamlessness that was found in skate 2.

And then it dawned on me. How often does the third game in a series turn out to be brilliant? It seems the first game has a new and fresh idea, the second game expands upon the core of the first game, adding the polish and ideas that the team didn’t have time to put into the first title. The third title though, seems to suffer from far too much temptation to do something different

Of course with every rule, there are exceptions, but aside from super mario 3 and grand theft auto 3, all of the third title games I can think of that aren’t suspect are driving games (burnout 3, forza 3, GT 3). don’t worry too much though, there’s always driver 3 to even things out.

With so many sequels with 3 in the title slated for later this year, I’m a little worried, I suppose we’ll see if my little theory holds up, or whether its just confirmation bias, but I’m hoping that we wont need to revisit the third title syndrome!

So, today I resigned from Krome, and I’ll be moving down the street a bit to Creative Assembly!.

So, here’s to exciting new times, new faces (some old ones too!). Life certainly is interesting right now.

I remember watching a video of the marvellous Brian Cox describing the difference between”Time-Like” events and “Space-Like” events in relativity

He postulates that, if the sun explodes, it’d take 8 minutes for the radiation to get to us letting us know that the sun has exploded. and whilst he goes on to discuss that particular events may appear reversed in “time” during such “space like” events (which is equally fascinating) the general situation described has fascinated me ever since.

That some events could have such inevitability, is quite an interesting thought. The light at we humans use to see is always “from the past”, even fractionally or minutely. How amazing it is that the universe we perceive has already “happened”. it is, in a sense an inevitability. Even more so when we gaze upon the stars, and see light that is millions of years old, the past encoded in that radiation tells a tale which cannot be altered, we see the retelling of history at the speed of light. the future, which has already happened in that very far away place, is always inevitable.

I’ve also been pondering how some things in life seem to have their own inertia. some events seem to happen no matter how much you try to push them, or how much you try to stop them from happening. It’s as if the sun has exploded 8 minutes ago and there’s nothing you can do to stop it from happening, and you can see it all unfolding in front of you.

I’m almost certain that such things dont really exist, but are merely fabrications of the human condition, but its certainly fun to ponder. Maybe I’m just going through the motions convincing myself that the decision my brain made some time ago is what the voice in my head has actually consciously decided to do. oh. shit

The universe is an interesting place

Last month, I ordered a piece of kit called the Axon Ax-50, a now discontinued guitar->midi converter. Now this box just converts the signal from a special pickup, called a divided pickup into midi. So, I also ordered a GK-3 from roland, which is their “divided pickup”. and today, I finally managed to find the right cable to connect the two.

I tried setting this up on my Ibanez SZ520FM, however the gap between the body and the strings at the bridge was really high, and positioning the pickup correctly was quite difficult.

In the end, I decided to put the pickup on my old samick strat copy, the difference was remarkable, Instantly better tracking as the pickup was much closer to the strings.

The way it works is, that the pickup has 6 magnets in it, one for each string. As the string vibrates over its magnet, it induces a current. This is how normal guitar pickups work too, except the GK-3 has SIX pickups, instead of being just one!. So each string’s signal is sent to the ax-50. The AX-50 then analyses each string’s signal, and works out what note was just played. It then generates the midi code for that note.

This is why you need a 15 pin cable, because you need to send 6 audio channels at once!.

And now finally, mr ax-50 is happy.

Yesterday, I took a soldering iron to my old samick strat copy. It had been suffering from some intermittent shorting in the input jack (which resulted from a previous fix due to no output at all). I had a slightly cold solder joint on the input jack itself.

turns out there was a lose solder joint too

I also had a look at ben’s maton mastersound 500, which was also suffering from no output at all.

all the internals looked fine, but I’m convinced the tone pot has a short/cold solder joint. I’m going to de-solder, and re-solder that on the weekend (or when I can acquire a multimeter)

It’s interesting to compare the internals of an almost 15 year old, woeful, strat copy from korea, and that of an australian made instrument.

Because some ideas are just so god damn crazy, you have to share them

So there I was, sipping a cappuccino, thinking about turn based games. Im quite interested in the concept of non-time limited turn based games at the moment, the kind of games where it doesn’t really matter when (or where from) you make your “turn”. I’ve also been playing a fair bit of Football Manager.

So, somewhere in my coffee addled brain, comes the idea of mixing football manager, with space hulk. But random boring space dudes with guns who shoot aliens has been done so many times, and one of the beauties of football manager type games is the growing and training of youth players into snarling demons of goal scoring (or opponent felling) fury, in other words, the personal connection you have with your virtual minions.

A few more sips of coffee and my brain responds with, “Well, what about dwarf fortress then?, everyone loves those kooky beer addled mining obsessed frequently suicidal lava re-routing dwarves”.

A little something went bing inside my head. It was obvious. It just had to be..

THE DWARVEN MINING LEAUGE

the worlds premier mining league, made up of 20 teams of the best, fittest, meanest, drunkest dwarves this side of bloodmurder. they compete, week in, week out, in specially constructed mines. battling it out to see which team of cantankerous drunkards is the one which will lift the coveted golden axe at the end of the season.

In true management game style, teams are made up of up to 32 dwarves (with 11 working at any one time). dwarves can be sold, traded, fired, trained, in the usual manner, and of course, one of the vital statistics of any dwarf will be simply labeled “beer”.

Each team also has a specially constructed “mine”. Think halfway between dungeon keeper, and dwarf fortress. Traps, lava pits, mineral deposits, can all be used liberally in the design of the “mine”. And each team makes sure to tailor its “home mine” to suit the skills of its particular set of superstar miners. Each mine has two halves, which are identical, making sure that each team has the same chance to retrieve as much loot as possible within the time limit for the game. Its possible of course to make substitutions during the duration of the round.

The winner is simply the team who can mine the most valuable material!

So, thats the bat-sh*t crazy game idea for this week, maybe I’ll get around to making it one day

My brothers birthday is coming up, after a bit of deliberation, I decided that I’d use my shiny new soldering iron and build him a reverb pedal from BYOC (http://www.buildyourownclone.com/).

This is quite an undertaking, the last time I tried to solder anything, the result was, shall we say, less than satisfactory. But, onwards I pressed!  The Kit itself comes with a rather awesome metal box, and the required bits n bobs and a nicely marked out PCB.

I quickly got the surface mount components on the board over about 3 hours, spent two hours unsoldering two components (a diode was back to front, and a capacitor was in the wrong spot!). Then I had a shocking realisation, It wasnt going to fit in the box!.

The belleton “brick” unit solders to the backside of the PCB, and I hadn’t trimmed the stems from the mounted components low enough to get a flush fit!. So, I had to desolder the brick, trim the legs, and re-solder the brick back on. Somewhere in this process, I managed to do a bit of damage to a few components. oops!

So, now, it works, but I have a lot of hum. I’m guessing that one of the capacitors I damaged is fried!. So ill have to replace that, but It’s been a rather awesome learning process, hopefully ill have it working soon. I’m definitely a lot more confident about my soldering(and desoldering!) ability now!

This time last year, I designed a 2D engine based around timeline processing.

The goal was to take SWF files, strip the animation using gameswf, and re-export it in a format that my engine would understand. Effectively turning flash into an authoring tool for my “engine”. I had started development, but hadn’t got all that far when I commenced employment with Krome, which then ended up eating my spare time for the latter part of the year.

Given the current furore around apples stance on adobe’s CS5 native flash recompiler, I’ve been tempted to de-mothball it and see if I can finish it quickly. It might be an interesting tool for those well versed in authoring flash assets, and looking for a way to still release on the iPhone platform.

On the other hand, the continual EULA changes on Apple’s side make me reluctant to sink time into a project that would be limited to a device that currently I’m really not keen on tying myself to.

The original intention was for the timeline processing engine would be come the UI engine for a later, more advanced game engine (which incidentally, I’m starting to design now). perhaps I should just bring that component forward instead.

The question is, would anyone find this useful? Would it actually solve anyone’s authoring problems? Or would it just be easier to go learn Unity3D, assuming that they are able to release under the current EULA’s?

Apple appear to have outlawed the use of middleware in their latest iPhone eula. The unity3d community are waiting on legal advice as to where the os4 eula leaves them. All this as a result of apples rather weird and unexplained “war on adobe”.

It’s worrying for a few reasons.

One of the reasons I stepped away from active iPhone development was the lack of transparency in the review process. In the games industry, console manufactures have clear TRC ( or TCR depending on who we’re talking about ) requirements which you, as a developer must adhere to in order to pass certification. Apple either has none, or refuses to publish theirs, leading to a somewhat annoying and fruitless process when attempting to get applications approved for the service.

And now with the rather agressive change to the eula, it shows that apple are quite comfortable changing the playing field underneath developers for it’s platforms. Where was the consultation with developer groups? Or effected middlware producers? This isn’t the first time this has occurred. A friend reminded me of the JIT compilation changes last year in the 3.0 EULA, and I’m willing to bet this wont be the last.

One thing Microsoft understands well is how to keep developers happy. Apple, whilst having a very good understanding of what makes consumers happy, are proving time and time again that they just don’t get developers

Unfortunately for them, it’s the developers which produce the software that drives the sales. Apple are obviously trying to position the iPhone in the mobile gaming section, but continue to alienate those who could really provide the content to show the iPhone and iPad maturing in this sector. Games are expensive, front loaded projects. No one is willing to risk a significant amount of money and time producing a game only to find that the next revision of the os legally prevents release on the iPhone/iPad

Until such time as we get transparency, very few really ambitious titles will be made for the platform. And that’s a shame, wouldn’t you rather have the next ico or zelda on your iPhone Instead of yet another fart or soundboard application?

It’s just to risky to bet on apple right now.

Edit: The Unity3D folks have published a blog on the matter (http://blogs.unity3d.com/2010/04/10/unity-and-the-iphone-os-4-0/). I particularly like one of the comments.

“Doing business with Apple is putting your head in the lion’s mouth… a lion that’s inclined to bite it off for no better reason than “because”.”

Here’s a list of some of the things I’m trying to do this year, I’ll be providing various updates as I go, maybe even some photos!

• I’m going to build a guitar fx pedal, as an excuse to learn how to solder. probably something  like http://www.buildyourownclone.com/reverb.html
• I’m going to write a mac client, and an iPhone application that will communicate over wireless networks. This is part A of SuperSecretProject number 3. Part B requires some actual hardware, a few gutted wiimotes, and some arduinos. This might take a little longer
• Im writing a PC Game, with my own technology. This is SuperSecretProject 1 The technology itself will be shared across the remaining SuperSecretProjects, and some of the other bits n bobs listed here.
• I’m also designing a iPhone game, this is SuperSecretProject number 2.
• I’m designing an iPad application, which uses touch input to generate MIDI/OSC output. The aim would be to run both mac/pc and handheld with editable interfaces for super awesome audio munging funtimes!
• I’m writing music, because my brain just cant take all this programming, all the time.
• I’m reading up on agile processes. The way we make games is broken, there has to be a better way.
• I still need to sit down and learn XNA/C#.

So, anyone have a time machine?