BDM

Tech that WORKS: My Legendary IBM Thinkpad

2010-11-01T15:22:00.000+01:00

A few years ago, when I entered my first year at the Karel de Grote college, all IT students had to buy their own laptop to use during the lessons. I bought an IBM (Lenovo) thinkpad. Not the sexiest laptop (damn, I swore to only use this word when referring to women, but now I failed). It's just a black, business-like laptop, and nothing else. It doesn't try to be anything else. But it's damn good at what it does, and that's the important part.

"Technology doesn't always need to be the latest brand new gadget stuff to be in my liking."

During the first years of its life, the thinkpad was really put to the test. For 3 years, it travelled almost every day from the rural town of Wuustwezel to the big city of Antwerp in my backpack.
Shamefully I must admit that I often moved it around while it was powered on. I can remember a few cases where it was dropped, or hit by something. Cables were constantly plugged in and out. Its videocard got pretty hot when I used it to play 3D games for hours. Its harddisk was under heavy load with every other install of school-related development software like IDEs, Database Servers, Webservers, and Virtual Machines. Its processor, RAM and motherboard were constantly working to get everything done.

Around me, laptops of my fellow students started to fail. Power cords and adapters got broken. Screens started to fall apart. Memory got corrupted. Keyboards started to break. Or their casing just got all messy and worn off. In some cases, the poor machines just got dumped by their owners, who wanted the newest and flashiest stuff. And who can blame them? Because obviously, times pass and technology advances. For quite a while now, I'm using a fancy new pc that runs on Windows 7.

But the old thinkpad is still in service. I haven't replaced it with another laptop. I carry it around the house, or my girlfriend uses it to do some work when she's here. The thinkpad still runs after 4,5 years without ever reformatting. It still has the same Windows XP installation, stripped of all graphical effects for maximum performance. It's still fast enough, and it even runs some "heavy" games of a few years ago. There are no signs of any wear and tear. No broken keys, no loose screen that sways in all directions.

There was one minor defect during its entire lifetime. Suddenly it started overheating. I solved this by opening the thing up, blowing some air into it, and closing it back up. Surprise, surprise, it worked! Probably something was blocking a fan.

In the video below, you can see a a guy that pours water over his thinkpad, which keeps on running fine. I obviously didn't try that myself, but it wouldn't surprise me at all. There are similar videos as well.

Anyway, let's hope this machine keeps on running for a while. But if it suddenly decides to cross the river and enter laptop-heaven, I totally understand. If not, this thing is very welcome to stay with me for eternity, as it will always have a place in my "tech that WORKS" memories.

6 PC game install and menu annoyances

2010-04-08T20:49:00.004+02:00

*UPDATE: Corrected some errors*

Time for a little rant. After playing some recent PC games, some things got on my nerves. No gameplay annoyances this time - They all have something to do with installers and menus.

Note: My own game failed on some of these points - my (lame) excuse is that it was a no-budget casual game.

English, please

Don't ever install anything in dutch on my computer. I beg you. Yes, dutch is my mother tongue. No, I do not watch any movies with dutch overdubs. In my opinion, movie-cowboys in Texas should not be dubbed in German and Nazi's should not speak English with a German accent... And for the same reason I will never, ever play a shooter in Dutch, where teammates yell "De Fijanden komen eraan" with a horrible accent. Just give me a list to select my preferred language when installing, and we're ok.

Note: If there was a "Matroesjkas" videogame in native Aaantwerps, I'd be honoured to play it. "Iedereen blijve staan of ik knal de cravate zen flosj eraf!" - or something like that.

Don't spam

Don't bug me about playing online, registering online, starting extra downloads, creating an online profile or any of that crap unless I specifically ask for it (by navigating to the multiplayer menu for example). Don't install any services, tray icons and/or download managers unless I command you to. I already bought the game - There's no possible gain in spamming and bugging me.

Don't pretend

If I need to manually restart the game after configuring my video resolution etc ingame, why even bother putting that option there? Just make a pre-config windows dialog or something. It may not be as fancy, but it saves me some time.

No labyrinths please

It's cool to have a fancy menu screen. But the main purpose of a menu is to be easy to navigate. Both with mouse and keyboard. So keep all your rotating 5-layered labyrinth clusters for your own entertainment, don't put them in a consumer product!

Try first, enjoy later

I like cool intro movies and intriguing stories. But before I immerse myself in the game experience, I want to make sure the game runs smoothly, that my controls are correct and just try out the gameplay for one minute. So if you don't plan to include a skirmish/freeroam/practice mode, at least give me the option to skip those intro movies! Preferably by pressing escape, space or enter. This prevents me from bashing my keyboard and other hardware.

The way out

Finally: If I press Escape, this means I want to pause the game and/or go to the menu (or go to a higher menu level). Nothing else. Ever. If I'm in a hurry, and I press Alt + F4, this means I want the game to exit immediately. Without warning. Without saving. If that doesn't work, I'll go with ctrl-alt-delete, uninstall the game and eat both the dvd and the packaging with ketchup.

Mission successful!

2010-04-07T21:07:00.000+02:00

Newsflash: The game/experiment is over!

We had 99 participants... Damn, so close to 100! :) Anyway, the minimum of 60 was easily achieved.

This means my work is over... Which is not the case for my partner in crime Laura: The experiment was part of her master thesis, and she's currently processing all the data and writing the paper. Since all the data is looking good, "mission succesful" is the right thing to say.

Now the experiment is over, it's no longer possible to submit the survey or your highscore. I removed the download from moddb to prevent people from trying to fill in the survey in vain. But in a couple of days/weeks, I'll have a version of the game online with all the survey stuff stripped out.

Again, thanks to all the people who played and/or told others about the game!

So how's our online experiment going?

2010-03-11T19:51:00.001+01:00

So far, we've had 36 survey participants in the past 4,5 days. Not a huge number, but not bad either... Let's just hope we can keep up the pace and get around a 100 participants over the next three-four weeks.

Of course, we still can't give away what the survey is all about. Let's just say, the collected data is looking good so far.

Additionally, we've had 772 pageviews on moddb and 140 game downloads.

You can view the highscores here: http://bramdemoor.easywebhost.be/. To get yourself in that list, you have to complete the game on 'hard'. To be the best, you need to beat Sheldor The_Conquerer, who has an impressive highscore of 445 points. Difficult, but not impossible... 480 points is the maximum!

Our thanks go out to Davy for giving us some publicity from his blog, and to all other people who participated and told others about the game! We really appreciate the effort.

If you haven't had the time to play yet, hurry to http://www.moddb.com/games/flight-of-the-strihuhn and give it a try! And spread the word to all your friends, family, coworkers, neighbours, facebook friends, blog followers, twitter followers, myspace buddies and random people on the bus and on the street.

Facebookers can become fan of http://www.facebook.com/pages/Strihuhn/361471374064?ref=ts

You can finally play it!

2010-03-07T18:23:00.001+01:00

Well, after some delay (exactly one week), the game is ready!

You can download the game from http://www.moddb.com/games/flight-of-the-strihuhn. Check out the screenshots and other info, or navigate straight to the 'downloads' section. After downloading, unzip the archive and follow the instructions in the readme (or just click Setup - next - next - next... if you can't wait any longer).

One more important note: Please do not give away the 'clue' of the survey to other people after you've played the game, and answer the questions as honestly as possible. We need as many 'good' participants as possible.

Thank you for participating, and have fun! :-)

BDM vs the bug from hell, episode 1.

2010-03-02T22:57:00.000+01:00

Just a short note. My little XNA Game was planned to be released... today. Too bad, in the last few days, a new bug has emerged. Not just *A* bug. The most horrific bug I ever faced. Almost impossible to debug and real bitch to test. And so damn annoying it kinda ruins the fun of the game.

Although I tried everything, from changing every possible parameter to bashing my keyboard until it started to continuously produce 'qkqkqkqkqkqkqk' until I rebooted it (I didn't even know that was possible!), it's still not fixed.

Which implies that the release is delayed until that bitch is fixed. The bad news: no clue how long it's going to take. The good news: once it's fixed, everything is immediately ready for the release.

Well, let's hope I'll have more luck tomorrow. :-)

Busy, busy, busy...

2010-01-26T18:51:00.001+01:00

I'm very busy with a lot of stuff at the moment... As a result, you won't see too many posts here from now until the end of februari ("most important things first", you know).

After that, I'll be back at full strength: First of all, my XNA game will be promoted. We need as many people as possible to play the game and fill in the survey. Currently the goal is to get at least 100 players/participants in one month. Will it succeed? To be honest, I don't have a clue. :-)

Peace out

BDM

Why I switched from Game Maker to XNA

2010-01-17T21:00:00.000+01:00

As you might have noticed by reading this blog, a little hobby of mine is to play around with software, with a specific interest in casual game development. For quite a long time, I used a free tool called "Game Maker" for this purpose. It's a free (the lite version anyway) tool to make games for windows. It's really simple to use; Most of the work can be done by clicking and dragging - there's absolutely no low-level programming required. But recently, I moved on and started focussing on XNA game studio instead. Read on to find out why.

1) Scalability

As with many drag and drop type tools, development speed and quality are very closely related to project size. For smaller games, Game Maker might be the top of the bill. You click "new game", and your rendering system, collision detection, level editor and whatnot are all in place. What better start could you wish for?

But then, after creating some smaller games, you move on to the real work. You want to create a game with multiplayer capabilities, a physics engine and a custom level editor. And you want to work cooperatively with a team of say 5 persons. *Dang*. The streamlined tool starts getting in the way. It's perfectly understandable; you can not logically expect a large game to sit comfortabely in the simple architecture of a tool that's designed to appeal to beginners. Whether you want to do one tiny thing that the built in level-editor does not support or you want to use complex inheritance trees or do advanced AI debugging... You'll collide with the boundaries sometime. And if you do, there's not really a way back (see point 3 below).

I know very well that creating advanced games is possible with tools like GM - Perhaps a thousand times cooler than anything I'll ever manage to put together. But from a coding/architecture point of view, I still say no. Full-scale projects require a different approach. Although you CAN make them with a tool like game maker, you're better off using something more custom. Because at one point, development will slow down, and you'll pay the price.

With XNA, I'm using C# and all possible tools to make coding easier, faster and more robust. I can architect the game code the way I want it. And if it turns into a mess, it's my own responsibility.

2) Gap between GML and professional experience

In my day job, I develop business applications in C#, using Visual Studio and Resharper. For game development, I use exactly the same toolset. I already had many moments at work where I could use something I learned during game development, and vice versa. I really like this interaction; it's nothing I'd easily give up. And if I'd choose to work with game maker and its scripting language (GML), that's exactly what'd happen.

You might say "It's better to know many different languages/environments". In another context, I might agree. But the gain of learning a specific scripting language that is used nowhere else is rather small. It's like learning a new language that you can speak only to one person.

3) No way back

Additionally, I find it hard to accept the fact that once you choose to use game maker, you're bound to keep using it. Once you start dragging and dropping and scripting, there's no possible way you can say: "Let's extract the code and move to [some completely other platform]". You have a bunch of scripts that are not meaningful in another environment. Most likely, they're not really clean and well tested either. You'll just throw them away and start from scratch, instead of converting them. While I'm quite confident that I can do exactly that last thing with XNA. Converting C# code to Java for example, is not that hard...

Conclusion

So let's wrap this up. In it's own way, game maker is a brilliant piece of software. Brilliant in the way it allows people with little experience to create games, have a lot of fun and learn many things about game development. Really, there's not one tool I'd rather recommend to people who are new to programming but want to create their own little game from scratch. But as any other tool, game maker needs to be used in the right perspective.

I used the learning perspective, but now I'm ready to move on. For actual development, that is. Because recently, I discovered another perspective to use GM... I still use it to create prototypes for my games. This requires some more explanation - I'll talk about this practice in a later post.

My XNA Game: Progress update

2010-01-11T18:14:00.000+01:00

60% Complete!

Yup, that's right. I'm more than halfway done. So it's time for some more info on the game, in addition to what I wrote in this post.

The game's protagonist, as seen in this draft, is a little but slightly overweight bird. The main objective of the game is to collect as many points as possible by picking up bonusses and moving objects from A to B. You have to evade dangerous objects such as spikes, because they can destroy the object you are carrying and/or harm your bird. If you run out of health, you respawn at your birdhouse. Each level has a time limit, so you have to rush a little if you want a highscore :-).

Level 1 is set in the forest, where the bird lives. It's an easy level that allows the player to familiarize him/herself with the controls and game mechanics. Level 2 is set in the city and has an increased difficulty. The actual playing time is around 10 minutes for the two levels combined. The controls are easy: just the arrow keys and the spacebar. Sounds ok for an all-age casual game, right?

Final (?) words on the installer

I decided to go with the visual studio setup project for the installer. While not being 100% convinced of its superiority, to say the least, I had to pick something and go with it. I tested the setup on a number of windows PC's with XP, Vista and 7, and had no problems so far. The installer downloads all missing dependencies.

There's just one last issue with the installer: the setup project creates two files - a .msi file that performs the actual install, and an .exe that checks the prerequisites. This leads to two problems...

For the download, I should create a zip file that contains both files. This seems slightly unprofessional. Players expect to download a single installer file which they can immediately execute after dowloading.
The players should in some way be forced to run the .exe file. If they run the msi file instead, the prerequisites are not checked. They can install the game even if the .NET framework or XNA runtime are missing. If they subsequently try to launch the game, they'll get a very nasty error message.

A solution would be to use a zip self-extractor, that runs the .exe file after extraction. Sadly, many web resources report problems with this approach as well. So I'm well underway but not yet done with this...

Conclusion

As the tests have proven, the game runs smoothly without framerate drops, so that's one less thing to worry about. But there's still a lot of work to in the next 1,5 months...

P.S: Still no screenshots, since there's some heavy graphics rework being done at the moment...

Dealing with bad sleeping habits (step 2)

2010-01-04T20:17:00.003+01:00

Read the introduction at http://bramdemoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/acknowledging-bad-sleeping-habits-step.html

Since the day I posted that sad story about struggling to get out of bed in the morning, I took action.

This is the new way my day starts: My stereo system wakes me up for about 50% most of the mornings. Nothing new about that; in the old scenario, this was the point where I turned over again to start snoozing for a very long time. Now, it's just a final warning that allows me to turn over one last time and prepare for the upcoming horror...

Because there's no escape anymore; every night, I put my cell phone on maximum volume on the other end of the room. Even though I really love my warm bed, the TITITITITI-sound of my cell phone alarm is just so annoying that I can't do anything but jump out of bed and turn the damn thing off. So there I stand, fully awake before 7 a.m. Now that's what I call a "brute force" technique!

Let's make that my first official good intention for 2010: keeping up this new habit :-)

And if I fail, I'll install one of these:

Happy newyear!

Creating an installer for my XNA game + Prerequisites

2009-12-27T20:15:00.000+01:00

Installer

Recently, I was looking into the possibilities I had for packaging my game (read more here). The first option I tried was the so called ClickOnce installer that is integrated in Visual Studio 2008. It turned out to be a bad choice for my particular needs; I don't need a java webstart clone, just a regular MSI installer package.

So I began my search for an install creator on the internet. Very soon, I stumbled upon Advanced Installer, which looked decent at first sight. It uses a reasonable licensing model; You have to pay for advanced features, but the basic use is free. I don't need advanced features, so I gave it a shot. And it turned out to be pretty good.

A particullary nice feature of this install creator is the nice prerequisites management screen. I defined the system requirements for my game there:

Windows version: XP or later
.NET Framework 3.5
DirectX 9.0c
XNA Framework 3.1
1024 x 768 minimal screen resolution

The installer will check automatically if all prerequisites are present, and shows a warning if they don't. This is great, but not perfect (see next section). The result is a nice Setup.msi ready to spread around. I still need to test the install on a lot of different configurations though, but I'm quite confident that it will work.

System requirements

Some more on the system requirements: I think they are very reasonable in general, but two problems arise:

.NET Framework 3.5. I know for a fact that not every user has this installed, although it comes with windows updates if I recall. Yet, it is a large download and a requirement I can't drop.
XNA Framework 3.1: It's required to run games created with XNA gamestudio. I'm pretty sure no living soul has this installed, but it's a very tiny download.

I have not yet found a way to make the installer download these dependencies automatically. Including them in the package is not an option either. So most likely, the final download page for my game will include two old-fashioned download links. Sad but true.

This makes it obvious why most casual games are created in flash. All a player has to do is navigate to the webpage, wait 5 seconds for the game to load and play. And probably 99,99% of all people has flash installed.Too bad I'm a C# programmer, not an actionscripter...

Another platform I could have used is Microsoft Silverlight. Silverlight has the advantages of flash, and allows me to use C#. I seriously considered using Silverlight when I started this project... But the DirectX features you get with XNA are just... They make you feel like you're actually developing a game (with decent GPU support), instead of trying to turn a business application or browser plugin into something that looks like a game :-).

So that's the way it will be. Anyway, considering the amount of promotion/spam we'll throw at it, I don't expect that it will be too hard to find 100 "test subjects" willing to try it out. Let's just hope these system requirements are not too annoying. Anyway, I'd love to get some feedback on this one...

Do you have Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 installed? (you can check this in "add or remove programs")
Is it too much to ask from a potential player to install the XNA Framework, or even the .NET framework in some cases?
Finally, if you are a software developer: Any experiences with 'advanced installer'? Any other install creators I should check out?

Work In Progress: Side-scrolling game

2009-12-22T20:53:00.002+01:00

It's about time to present my latest hobby project here. I'm developing a small 2D side-scrolling game, which will be used in a university experiment. The people who take the experiment (which will be 'recruited' all over the internet) have to play the game, and provide input data for the experiment by means of in-game measures and a survey. This data will be processed and presented in a university paper.

I can not disclose anything about the actual subject of the experiment. But for me, it boils down to this: I have pretty much carte blanche for the whole game concept, which made me quite happy but nervous at the same time. Failure is not an option...

I made the following design choices for the game:

Casual game, similar to many flash games
About 10 to 15 minutes of gameplay time (which is long enough for the experiment)
Side scrolling 2D platform game
Fit for all ages: no blood and gore this time...
Easy controls
Two levels: Tutorial level + Real level
No complicated story line
Free sound effects (plenty of good ones on the web)
Royalty-free music from the free domain (which saves me weeks of composing-time!)
Fullscreen (resolution fixed at 1024 x 768)

## Technical talk starts here ##

I use the folowing technology for the development of the game:

Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 (With the Resharper plugin - there's simply no life without it!)
XNA Gamestudio 3.1
Farseer physics engine
Mercury particle engine

The time I can dedicate to this project is very limited. There's not much time for second thoughts. I try to pick an approach that works and go with it. Despite that, I try my best to keep my code organized. It's a constant tradeoff between code quality and time, but so far I'm still satisfied with most of the design. The constant refactoring really pays off: adding new objects to the game domain takes almost no time, since all the behaviour is utterly generified. The use of the physics library also helps a great deal with this. I'm also somewhat proud that most of the code is clean domain code, not cluttered by engine details. Theoretically, I could copy the domain code, and reuse it in a completely different environment.

## End of technical talk #

The lesson learned so far: I could look at this limitations and time constraints as serious fun wasters, but I don't. Rather, I see them as a challenge. Complicated problems long for creative solutions, and that's what I like most...

As for progress: I'd give the game a 35% completion rating. But this is a loose estimate. I'm picking up some speed in the last week since the game has to be finished in about 2 months.

I can't provide any screenshots yet... But I will, soon enough :-)

After the experiment is over, I will keep the "game engine" as a "pet project" to play around with, and/or reuse it in another game. In a later stage, I might even open source it...

Acknowledging bad sleeping habits (step 1)

2009-12-04T20:05:00.000+01:00

This is a very atypical post for my blog. Nothing about games or other computer stuff, but something more personal. But I have a reason to write it: it forces me to acknowledge a really annoying issue that came up lately.

Today, on a free day, I woke up 4 hours later than I had planned. That's right. Not half an hour. Not 1 hour, FOUR hours. And it's not the first time this happens either. But it's never been so bad like today: I have bad sleeping habits. And I want to do something about it!

Don't get me wrong; I like sleeping. I have no trouble whatsoever with catching sleep, and I don't wake up screaming in the middle of the night. But I'm addicted to the snooze button. Most of the mornings, I don't even wake up the slightest bit, I just keep on snoozing my cell phone alarm, while my stereo system is playing in the background.

Sometimes, like today, I hit the "off" button instead of the snooze button. I found myself waking up in the middle of the afternoon, with no clue what had happened, absolutely no energy and with a terrible headache. And a very bad mood to go with that. Not the start of the day I had imagined; I wanted to wake up hours earlier, have a nice 'brunch' and get things done today...

When I absolutely have to get out of bed, e.g. for work, things are a little bit easier. When there's more pressure to get out of bed I eventually bite the bullet and get it done. But even that is getting trickier and trickier every day. I might have a too-strong evolutionary connection to some hibernating animal; when the weather is decent, I feel a remarkably stronger urge to get up and do something. But with this cold, dark and rainy weather, things get difficult...

Anyway, I could just let this pass and don't bother. But I choose not to. I will fight the demon of "10 more minutes and then I'll really get up". Look him in the eye and slay him.

So what exactly will I do about that? Not sure yet - First, I will consult the mighty wisdom of the god of knowledge (the internet) through its gatekeeper (google). Then I will return with a cunning plan that might involve anything from adjusting my habits a little to deploying that crazy alarm clock with wheels. I will report my findings here and keep everyone updated on my progress.

Wish me luck and share your snooze-stories here. It will make me feel better ;)

What I hate about RTS games

2009-06-28T13:21:00.007+02:00

I like Real Time Strategy games. You know, the kind of games in which the player has to build an empire, manage resources and order units into battle. Some games I have played in this genre include Age Of Empires, the Anno series, Warzone 2100 and Transport Tycoon (OpenTTD). All of which are great games in my opinion. But there's something I really hate about all of those games.

In the beginning, everything is nice and easy. But after playing for some time, things are going downward. Shortage of resources, army units going in the wrong direction; chaos. As the amount of clicks per minute increases, I get more agitated and frustrated. Am I the only player that totally forgets about resource management when I start attacking? The only player that forgets to research that very important new technology because I got my head al up in defending my main base? Or, referring to Transport Tycoon, the only player who can't manage 200 busses/trucks, 100 trains and 150 planes? Is that just me being a really bad strategist?

No, it isn't! In real life, I would have an army commander, a city architect, a financial advisor and the like at my disposal. But no such luck in most RTS games. In a matter of seconds, I have to switch from building a 1x1 square of cobblestone road to directing an army of thousands into battle, and back. In the meantime, I have to monitor my resources and respond to all kinds of in-game messages.

It's all just too much! It means getting the ultimate fun out of an RTS game is only possible for folks who get a kick out of extreme multitasking and micromanagement. And that's just not me. Bringing in another player to assist me won't help either: most RTS games have no option for full cooperative play with resource sharing, which dramatically cuts the possibility of players sharing the workload (OpenTTD being the exception) .

Chaos!

Time for a solution. RTS games need new ways of task distribution and delegation. Where's the eagle eye view? A tycoon leading a business empire worth billions, or a general leading an army of thousands, should at least have an option to delegate the building of 1x1 road squares and similar tasks. It would be a delight to see some RTS games that do better. Any recommendations?

I'm back!

2009-06-26T15:01:00.004+02:00

Welcome to my new blog! The simple nature of a blog makes it a good way for me to spread some thoughts into the world, without investing too much time. Although most posts are related to IT and digital media, this is not a technical blog for IT people only. I'll really try my very best to keep most posts conceptual, rather than technical.

I would be very happy if this blog could:

Interest and inspire people
Get me some feedback on some of my ideas and thoughts

While not really 'personal' in the way that I tell private stuff that I should really not tell, this is still a personal blog. Which gives me some freedom. I do not force myself to follow every last trend, because I strongly believe that things that are out of the headlines can still be interesting. Freedom is the breeding ground for creativity - And I consider creativity a very, very important skill. No idea killers here!

Since I write about things that are not specific to Belgium (my home country), I would cut off 99% of my potential audience by writing in Dutch. That's why I switched to writing in English. A language which I've not yet mastered, so feel free to correct my grammar/spelling. :)

Any constructive feedback and comments are very welcome. You can also write comments in dutch.