Whilst trying to fix something else, I just found a bug in the campaign capture code. It looks like when you capture a fighter squadron of 12 ships, it gives you 12 squadrons of 16 ships instead. Then when you fight with them again, they end up squads of 120 fighter ships each somehow…

Methinks this is a bug, although it’s quite a fun one Also interesting to see how easily the game coped with the fighter squad size limit being exceeded. That must just be a GUI limit then, which is interesting. maybe I’m not such a crap coder after all?

Campaign code is trundling along. Slightly distracted by some work fixing Kudos: Rock Legend so it works with new video card drivers, plus planning on quietly making the crappy GSB hull editor usable at some point, and helping with the Mac port of GSB. (Yes, really it’s coming…)

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I think one of the things that makes a GREAT game better than a GOOD game, is that the great game has atmopshere. People in suits think you can buy atmosphere by spending money on FMV or lots and lots of artists, but that’s just not true. Thief 2 had AWESOME atmosphere, at a twentieth the budget of Oblivion. (guess).

One of the ways I try to ensure I get the right atmosphere into my game is to have constant reminders of the theme of the game in my head. Most of the time game development is just typing and scrolling through code, so it is easy to forget that its about lasers, explosions and battlecruisers going pew pew. That’s where headphones and multiple monitors come in. The vast majority of the time I’ve spent coding GSB has been spent either blasting the music from Star Trek or Star Wars through headphones (or out loud now ) or having a DVD of some suitably epic space battle sci-fi playing in my extra monitor, like so:

It really helps me to stay focused on what I’m doing, and how it should feel. Good games are about feel, not polygons or features. Just Cause 2 makes me *feel* like an action hero, in ways that mere technical ability or hype or clever graphical effects never can. Thats a great feeling. The guys who do puzzle pirates have the money to take this a stage further and they do. Good for them.

The nearest I’ve got to atmospheric experiences concerning aliens today was visiting a crop circle nearby. Never seen one before. Here is me in the middle being silly

Here is the cicle taken by a proper photographer.

They are pretty dull at ground level tbh. I’m sure whatever aliens make them are not ferengi, because there was nobody selling hot dogs, or even a strategically placed big ladder that they could charge admission for, to get a  good view. “Twelve rungs up? That’ll be three strips of latinum please”.

Apparently it’s a maths equation, if the circle radii get converted to ascii. I bet it was those do-gooder vulcans.

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This article on bit-tech is by me:

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/pc/2010/05/24/how-much-should-dlc-cost/1

Feel free to retweet or otherwise promote it:D

My point, which is pretty much glossed over in most discussions about DLC, is that variety is good, and the free market will decide. Some DLC is overpriced, some is underpriced. Some price experiments for games are mental, some are a complete giveaway (like Portal for free). Eventually, the free market gives us the right answer.

As an example, I think that $25 for a single horse mount in WoW is flipping MENTAL, when I worry about charging $6 for an extra GSB race. But… the free market has proven me wrong, people bought it in droves. Who am I to criticise either people who think a mount is worth $25, or Blizzard for setting a price that maximises their revenue?

I’m, just a bit sick of kids describing game develoeprs as nazis for not releasing everything they make for free, and thus venting

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I hate the x-factor and american idol and similar programs for many, many reasons. One of them, is that you constantly hear people who are awful at singing or dancing saying they have ‘done their best’. This is clearly bullshit 99% of the time.

We seem to have developed an entire culture based around low expectations and under-achievement. Mediocrity is the new celebrity. Putting effort in is so last year. The reason we all love ‘reality tv stars’ is that they perpetuate this bullshit that you can have the trappings of success and fame without doing any work. No need to do your best any more…

There is a great scene in an episode of Star Trek: DS9, where worf fails to help his brother die in a ritualistic suicide because they are interrupted by some humans. Worfs brother confronts him over his failure to help him, and worf protests that they were interrupted by two (weaker) humans. His brothers response:

“Did you fight them? Did you threaten to kill them both if they interfered? And are you here now with a mevak dagger to slit my throat and bring me the death I deserve?”

In other words, this is the klingon way of saying “So? is that the best you could have done?”
I like that. I see it so often, in others, and also in myself. I don’t think I’ve “given it 100%” or “done my very best” very often in my life. I rowed like a maniac once in a thames river race, but despite being knackered at the race end, I didn’t actually collapse and need to be taken to hospital. I didn’t burst a blood vessel with effort. If the life of myself and the people closest to me had been at stake, I could have rowed much much harder.
Gratuitous Space Battles is a game I worked very very hard on, But I didn’t work 100 hours a week on it. I didn’t skip TV entirely for a year to do it, or sell everything I owned to invest it in the artwork. I didn’t scrap the entire game and re-do it and the slightest hint of dissastisfaction. I didn’t do my best.

One of the best things about knowing, accepting and really understanding what it means to do your best, and to know you have not done so, is it means you can definitely, 100% no doubt about it, do better next time. People who go through life saying “I gave it my best shot” are just scared of admitting that in all likelihood, they didn’t, and have themselves to blame.
Of course, it might not be worth it to you to go to the extreme, insane lengths of actually doing your very best in everything you do, but I think its a good policy to know the tradeofs you make, as you make them.

Yup, I’m in motivational speaking mood

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I’ve been slightly sidetracked recently by the release of the Swarm DLC on steam (few technical issues there) and some updates to the core game which will filter through in the eventual next patch. Meanwhile, slow but sure progress continues on the fun and games of the campaign game. Here is a current work-in-progress coder art style screenshot. I’ve just finished coding the ‘scrap ships’ UI so you can scrap ships to recover some of the money. You only get 25% of the value, so it’s a desperate measure rather than a simple way to refit the fleet. It might be useful for when you have damaged ships not worth repairing, or for when you capture enemy ships that don’t suit your current fleet.

In other news, I now no longer find the big clump of black birds that live in a tree in our garden to be cute. Bastard things woke me up at 6AM this morning. I suspect they are ravens, or maybe pterodactyls. Certainly not as cute as I recall. Jack now has my express permission to get the bastards. He’s been practicing on the smaller birds. So far it’s about 5:0 to him. Nature eh?

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There was a time… it seems silly now, and Aleks talked about it on BBC TV recently, when the web was open, free, and very very democratic. Pretty much every site was some dude in their bedroom hitting a keyboard (like me!), but that didn’t last long.

Remember download.com? It used to just be download.com, then it was CNET’s download.com. Now it is owned by CBS Interactive, who also own TV.com, ZDNet,  News.com, VersionTracker.com, gamespot.com and many others.

Remember slashdot.org? it’s now part of geeknet, who also own sourceforge.

Remember IMDB and Alexa? Both owned by Amazon.

YouTube? owned by Google, of course.

Slowly but surely, in fact maybe not even slowly, all the sites on the net buy each other until there are fewer and fewer owners that control what we read, buy, see, listen to and discuss. I see this as very bad. I’m not some bearded anti-capitalist hippy, I’m VERY much a capitalist at heart. But I’m a pure free-market, small-business style capitalist. I love the idea of a dozen different companies competing to make the best product, and to give the consumer better value. I worry these days that the net is heading towards a time where we don’t do that.  Games are going that way too. Lionhead bought by Microsoft. Maxis bought by EA, etc etc…

Facebook are having a rough time over dodgy privacy settings. The problem is, it’s too late to hassle them about it. Facebook have won. they are huge, valued at 20 billion dollars. Thats bigger than the GDP of Nicargaua. Nobody is about to topple facebook as the top social website. Competition is failing.

Amazon have a similar position in the UK for shopping. Ebay have it for auctions, Google for search, maps, video and most likely small business advertising too.

The really scary thing is that this is MUCH worse than the situation at retail. With physical stuff we have vast competition. I bet you can name ten manufacturers of laptop. ten manufacturers of cars. Now name me ten online book stores.

Or even five.

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Ignore this post, it’s here purely for google, unless you know the answer.

When I was a kid, I lived in Barnes, London. I remember that near Beverly Brook there was a  piece of wasteland, not far from station road. Eventually they built a housing estate there. I’m sure I remember there being a WW2 pillbox and some factory gates there, during the early seventies. Am I imagining it? Is it true there was a factory there, maybe a munitions factory that got bombed? If so, what do you know about it? Just curious…

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Lets say you run a business. The business makes $40k in a year. You are used to living on $40k, so you spend it, and have a reasonable life. Then suddenly things go well, and you make $50k the next year. Do you

a) Have a better year, buy better donuts, drink more beer and enjoy the $50k

b) Have a slightly better year, buy a few more donuts, spend $5k of the surplus and invest the other $5k in making the business better.

c) Stay as before and invest the whole $10k on making the business better.

I think most people are like a). I think a lot of people who work for themselves are like b), including me. I suspect that a lot of the dotcom billionaires are like c). I read once that valve basically took all the money from Half Life’s success and invested it in Steam and Half Life 2. I suspect this is true. I would guess that when World Of Warcraft was making tens of millions in profit, Blizzard took ALL that money and reinvested it. Then did the same when it made hundreds of millions. It turned out to work very well for them…

The problem is, no matter how much I may intuitively see this, and would even recommend it as a policy to others, I find it difficult to do myself. Maybe I’m just not as obsessed with running a bigger company as the dotcom guys, but when positech has a good year, I tend to bank some it (paranoid about having a bad year), spend a little bit more on the business (ooh look! some professional spaceship art), and buy a new TV. I tend to fear that if I don’t spend some of the company profits when there are some, it might crash and burn one day and I’ll have nothing to show for it, whereas with my current policy, at least I have a new TV.

I read Duncan Bannatynes autobiography, which is a great read. He made an absolute fortune from ice cream sales once. he then invested ALL of it in making retirement homes. he sold his car, re-mortgaged his house, even sold his TV to make the final payment on the first home. He had multiple maxxed out credit cards at that point. James Caan did the same. They went from having a good income to being penniless and in debt, because they could see the return in the long term being a whole step-change higher.

I don’t reckon I could ever do that. And even if I could, I’d be a nervous wreck doing it. What about you? Are you risk-averse? or a dotcom dude?

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I found a bug today, after it was reported by a few GSB modders. I had done some cunning optimisation for my file handling months ago, where my Ini File loader code kept a file open during it’s lifetime in case another section from the same file got read soon afterwards.

It turns out that the C Runtime barfs if you try to open more than 512 files, under all circumstances. This is fine until you mod an extra 300 modules into GSB, then it just dies. So… problem fixed. Ideally my ini file code should be able to handle this better entirely, but thats for another time,

The second ‘bug’ is still underway, (point defence modules appear to not respond to damage, but in the debugger, they clearly do…) but its pointed me to a third one, that was also reported…

When a point defence beam shoots a missile, it may not work. The missile may be unharmed. In this instance the missile is still ‘claimed’ by the PD module until it dies, so no other PD module will have a second go at it.

I could fix this trivially, it’s just an oversight*. But would that make PD too powerful? It’s already prety good, albeit some of it’s thunder has been stolen by the Swarms Smart Bomb. It’s only going to kick in where you have a few incoming missiles and multiple PD modules. But that second chance to fire could save you from that vital pesky megaton missile, or Order nuclear bomb…

Thoughts?

*easily explained though. The neutron power surge generated by the point defence beam temporarily blinds the targeting mechanism of other PD modules from homing in on the positronic flux decoupler on the same missiles.

Edit: actually the PD bug is now fixed, making them fire much slower as a result, so I’ll fix the multiple-attempts  bug to compensate. it also turns out that the fire-Interval for guidance scramblers is misleading and not applicable, which explains its strangely high effectiveness, so that will be nerfed slightly too…

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Just a quick screenshot showing the state of the current campaign game UI. This is zoomed in on a planet to show the fleets there, the UI for building new ships and the list of facilities there. It’s all very coder-art and work-in-progress. I’ll likely not do the icons myself.

It is getting there though…

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