Category: programming

Because I didn’t make it very fluid, I get an email maybe twice or three times a week about someone who had problems installing an expansion pack for GSB if they bought the base game from stardock or steam. The solution is easy, you need to browse to the place where the base game is installed during the installation. It had not occured to me, when setting things up, that this would be a big deal, but a non-trivial proportion of buyers don’t realise it, and they need me to walk them through it, which is fine.

Obviously I made a mental note to ensure that sort of problem will never arise with future games.

What really strikes me though, is how far we have come from the days of my gaming youth. Go back far enough and the boot-up ‘welcome’ screen on my first computer was this:

You were expecting icons maybe? or perhaps a graphic? or any way to actually launch programs or do anything? Unless you were lucky and had money to buy software, you would actually have to type in the code for each game (the whole program) from a magazine. The operating system was pretty much just a way to support the typing of characters on the screen. No danger of antitrust legislation for bundled apps there…

Fast forward through my days as a rock star and boatbuilder (long story) and I got an IBM 386. These were the days of playing X-wing. Now you might think it’s a pain to get the right drivers these days to run crysis, but back then, you had to literally reconfigure the structure of your RAM in order to run a game. People my age will get a cold sweat remembering autoexec.bat and config.sys, the two dreaded files that between them enabled you to balance your memory allocations just right to get that extra 16k needed to boot up SimCity.

The thing that really strikes me, is that re-configuring autoexec.bat and config.sys was so arcane, so complex, and so fiddly, and geeky, that not only was it much much harder than any problems current PC gamers have to deal with, but it was actually harder than most games. I may have got frustrated with constant deaths when storming the beaches in Medal of Honor, but that was NOTHING compared with the challenges presented by emm386.

As game developers, often geeky ones who are older than a chunk of our audience, we need to constantly remind ourselves that there is a huge swathe of people who never struggled with this crap. To them, sadly, the PC is just like a toaster or microwave. You press the button and then it does stuff. If it doesn’t. you complain to the manufacturer. Sadly, I suspect the nation of geeks and tinkerers we had in the 1980s has become a nation of passive consumers. Understandable, maybe inevitable, but maybe also slightly sad?

When you are running a new PC game, what percentage of your PC is actually working to produce the experience?

Obviously it depends massively on the game, the specs of your PC, your monitor resolution and other factors, but even in extreme cases I suspect it is pitifully small.

The most obvious under utilisation is the CPU. Most games still run in 1 thread, maybe 2 or 3 if there is some sound streaming, possibly more if they are ambitiously attempting multithreaded streaming in of textured data, and maybe a few more for online play. I don’t think that there are many games that will happily place 8 different threads on the 8 cores of my machine (quad core, but hyperthreaded, so showing up as 8). I can max out the CPU by rendering in a 3d package, or by compiling in visual studio, but I’ve yet to see a game manage it. I can understand why, mutlithreaded code is a bitch.

(One problem is, we don’t have exclusive access to all those cores anyway. Right now, this laptop has 53 processes running 715 threads. There are 17,000 handles open (mostly files, one assumes). All I’m doing is typing in firefox)

The second missed opportunity is hard disk access. Go to windows task manager, performance, then check out the resource monitor. Check out all that disk access. Who is doing that? and what for? You can bet that even during a gaming session, a dozen other apps and ‘services’ will be spamming your disk drive.

Of course the same goes for memory, and access to peripherals, the network yada yada.

It makes you wonder just how jaw droppingly awesome a PC game could be if it didn’t have all that nonsense going on all the time. Imagine a special ‘gamer’ mode of windows 8/9 that effectively locked out all those other services, clawed back all the RAM and the cpu cycles, and let your game have console style complete control.

A pipe dream, of course, because of backwards compatibility and a million other reasons, but I do find myself wondering what percentage of my PC is actually needed to play Battlefield:Bad Company 2.  Is it 5%? 7%? certainly not much more?

I’ve been in debugging hell for a few days. I’ve had a few nightmare bugs, and learned a few things, as well as having my indie ass saved by some lucky stuff. here is the summary:

I had a bug that was a critical, game-ruining crash thing. When I debugged it, I found the exact line of code that was causing it. I had removed a certain if() statement. I remember doing it about two weeks ago. Can I remember why? Can I hell. IF I had proper comments in the code where I changed stuff, I would have worked out what was going on. IF I had forced myself to check in more regularly and ALWAYS type detailed comments into the check-in softwares submission dialog, I would have worked out what was going on.

Luckily, it wasn’t a disaster, because a long time ago, I clearly made a decision to include my ‘design log’ in the checked-in source-controlled files. This is a long rambling document where I always type everything I’m doing, and have my list of motivating ‘**DONE**’ statements for each day. Naturally, when I made that code change roughly two weks ago, I had written about the problem that needed me to do so. Normally, finding this comment would be a pain, because there are no date stamps on the log, and I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. Hurrah! the design log also has a changelist, and I found the bit I wanted just by seeing the changes made to it in the same check-in as the code change itself.

Lesson: Keep a log of your work, and source-control it. Adding better comments to code doesn’t hurt either.

I had a virus attack on my PC. I think it was some sneaky sleeper-thing that only triggered on a reboot, and I don’t reboot often, so I’m not sure where I got it. It could well be a warez site, which I still check now and then to get some pirated links removed. This virus was pretty nasty. Not only did it breeze past malwarebytes and spybot without triggering either of them (let alone windows defender and the firewall, and the browser settings), but it didn’t announce itself at all. What it did, was trawl through every file on every drive, and with html files, it appended some javascript to the bottom of each file which dropped an exe on peoples machines who ran it. Scary as hell.

I only noticed it because I was editing my website local copies, and spotted in windows explorer that the filesizes of some basic html files were too big. Thank kahless I spotted this before uploading them. The difficult part was then removing them. I noticed that even after running multiple virus scans, and my PC looking clean, if I created a new html file and left it for five minutes, the javascript would be added. There was no dodgy process running, it must have been a rootkit or service.

Anyway… Microsoft Security Essentials is apparently ‘teh awesome’ because it not only killed the virus, it restored every one of my files to their original state without problems. And it’s free. How awesome is that?

One thing I did do, as a precaution after all this (apart from keep MSE installed and running several deep scans overnight with 3 different scanners) is to create a truecrypt container and stick a copy of my website inside it. There is no chance of some virus cracking that open and ruining those files (although in theory it could delete the container). I also keep backups of vital stuff on a thumb drive, just in case. Scary stuff though. Especially because I’m not exactly some dork who accepts .exe files on IRC or opens random email attachments. This stuff is getting harder and harder to avoid.