Friday, July 4, 2008

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The pitfall behind higher level languages: Part 2 30.06.08
In Part 1 of this discussion / entry, I went over a bare-bones analysis of the pitfalls created by investing in technology which is well meaning in theory..but can fall short during the execution phase.
So what was the end result you came to? What was the impact of end-userusage and what language did it cause you to pick (if any)?
Great question. My answer just comes down to “Barriers”. The more barriers presented to the player / potential customer, the higher the chance of a missed sale / opportunity. Obviously the exception of course is to games and/or products which people will still buy no matter what ridiculous layers the company places between you and the software.
We can pick out just about any barrier, but I’ll try and focus on a few that relate to higher level languages.
#1 - Piece meal Install process: More annoying than forcing the player to go through several unneccessary clicks during a crappily made installer, the piece meal process is far worse. You download the game demo you wish to play. Uh oh..during the install, it seems as if you’re missing a certain library or runtime dependency (inevitably due to legal restrictions of this 3rd party dependency). No problem, here’s another link to an installer to run to fix that up. *sigh*.
#2 - Garbage Collection is fantastic…until it activates. Most higher level languages usually toot the horn of the ability for Garbage Collection which just means the runtime (beit something like Java and/or .NET) will keep and maintain a list of references to the objects in your code. Once all the references to a specific object fall out of scope, this object is marked for Garbage Collection. It’s a very important and terrific aspect of a higher level language to ensure stability, but to the novice developer, it can cripple the performance of your game while the runtime arbitrarily decides it needs to do some spring cleaning.
So everyone usually points to the “bonus” of Garbage Collection, without letting anyone know that they then proceed to do everything possible to disable / delay it.
#3 - Virtual Machines are getting better with new machines. Even with the newer VM’s for .NET and Java, there’s still a feeling that the more RAM / CPU, the better. On the majority of platforms out there, the VM’s have come a long way to be a viable competitor to native code. The only caveat I would add, is that it doesn’t seem to scale terribly well down the chain. I would love to see some more performance stats for those who are still running Windows98 on 512 - 1Gig of RAM.
Just to sum up this point, I think VM’s have come a long way and have made great strides in terms of providing an optimal performance environment…just make sure your target audience has the rig.
As for what technology I ended up choosing for my project, I’m sure there’ll be a part 3 of this article…
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iCANN drops internet domain restrictions making it even harder for customers to find you 27.06.08
Well ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), is the overseer for setting a standard of organization for domain naming (among a few other things).
In other words, companies can buy up a .com or .ca of their address, educational institutions snap up the .edu addresses, and non-profit (and other) organizations pick up the .org address. You can also organize your webpresence based on geographic location. Japanese sites can use the .jp domain extension, .ca for Canada, etc.
Yesterday ICANN announced that in its current proposal due for vote in early 2009 is to drop any domain extension restrictions.
Well….crap!
Currently the enjoyable and painless part of the internet is being able to nearly-find the company / product you’re looking for by hopping onto a browser and typing in .com or .ca (or whatever). 95% of the time, I hit the site I want right away.
Besides the obvious real-estate cash grab by ICANN, the new proposal just makes it THAT much harder for potential customers to find you and/or you to find the sites you expect to be there.
Most companies will probably have to snap up and register some permutations of their company just to preserve their identity / brand.
The CBC (www.cbc.ca) could need to register:
- cbc.news.ca- www.cbc.news- www.cbc- www.cbc.sucks- communist.broadcast.centre
You get the idea
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World of Workcraft - (No, it’s not the onion) 23.06.08
What do you do when you’re tired of slaying dragons as your “day job”?
Log on to World of Workcraft of course! Make the projected sales figures for the boss, or you’re fired!
http://www.wegame.com/watch/World_of_Workcraft/
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The pitfall behind higher level languages and technology 22.06.08
During the past month I’ve made the most progress on a game I’ve been itching to create than I have for the better part of a year. I can attribute my “spurt” in getting results happening on the project, based on taking a step back from what I was doing before and making some tough but necessary decisions.
The crux of my initial slow progress, was mostly due to my investment and belief that higher level language development would be my “silver bullet” vs. potential deployment platform(s) along with the assumption that this solution path would give me more time to invest in actual game content and game play, rather than plodding through the lower level codebase.
I was convinced that even though I had a healthy background in C++, the “future” of running a successful indie business would rely on C# or Java, both of which are extremely fun to develop in, and both of which I have enough experience with to actually use productively. Then something funny happened on the way to making my game…
I realized that even with the power and flexibility that higher level languages offer, it’s still a lot of actual work to get the moving targets of a game working together in harmony!
During my evaluation period, I was finding that it would take me *roughly* the same amount of time to develop similar functioning game code across all three languages, despite the unwritten promise that higher level = RAD = less “work”.
So if the development time is roughly the same across each language, then the impact of the end-user usage ended up being my determining factor.
Gee…what a concept.
Tags: , Posted by wazoo in blog 3 Comments →
Windows XP/Vista system tweaking guide for games 21.06.08
Was attempting to debug an issue I was coming across in Windows Vista and came across these rather extensive system tweaking guides.
http://www.tweakguides.com/TGTC.html
“Extensive” in this context is also a bit of understatement. The Windows Vista guide is 268 pages in length!
Tags: , , Posted by wazoo in blog 1 Comment →
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The pitfall behind higher level languages: Part 2
iCANN drops internet domain restrictions making it even harder for customers to find you
World of Workcraft - (No, it’s not the onion)
The pitfall behind higher level languages and technology
Windows XP/Vista system tweaking guide for games
Who is “the business”? I want to know!
Happy Tax Freedom Day Canada!
Hey Opengl.org..it’s 2004 on the phone and he wants his site back…
June 2008 - DirectX SDK released
Leaving in “god mode” game codes for special needs kids
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