Coder Corner

I hate you. I truly, terminally, passionately hate you. You’re a fucking piece of insane, mind-boggling junk. Having used computers for more than 2 decades now, I can assure you that you are, without a shred of a doubt, the crappiest, lamest machine I have ever used. It makes me sad that you’re the one who survived, because you obviously deserve it the least.

And now for the question of the day:

• I bought a brand new USB memory stick. Looks great.
• I have been using it for less than a month, sharing files between 2 machines (Win2K, WinXP).
• And today out of the blue, I’m told that the stick is “write protected”. I can’t add files to it. I can’t remove files from it. I can’t even reformat the sucker. Google tells me that this is a common problem (!!) but none of the “solutions” I found online worked.
• Help? Anybody knows how to unlock that thing?

For all I can see, it looks like I wasted my money on one more piece of PC garbage, and I can just throw it away and buy another. This is fucking ridiculous. It makes my blood boil that this so-called “user friendly” PC is in fact a fucking clueless money-making bastard that couldn’t care less about users. If you would care about users you would allow me to install VC9 on Win2K, for a start!

While doing backups I found this picture of Araña, one of the characters in “Wanted - weapons of fate“. It has a special meaning for me. I see it both as a proof that the Barcelona office did have talented artists, and that “the management” (or whoever was behind the important decisions, it was never all that clear) was just living on another planet.

To me this is one of the most, if not the most awesome render ever created by our artists during the whole project. I think it is very obvious why it has potential. Why it would be a good idea to polish this secondary character, and give it some more screen time. Why it would draw hordes of nerds to the game. Why it would please all the fans (what do you mean you did not expect them to be disappointed when discovering that Angelina is not in the game?!). At the very least, if nothing else, put it somewhere on the box. Create posters. Send it to IGN and Gamespot, I don’t know. Something.

Instead… well, did you see that picture anywhere? Exactly my point.

They saved it for a mindbogglingly weird promotional stunt in a male magazine that should remain nameless. Of all the crappy decisions made during this project, this one has to take the cake. As if the readers of [Censored] were interested in buying video games !? I don’t know, maybe they got lifetime subscriptions out of that deal or something.

Damn it, this one still makes my blood boil!

Typical spanish rip off. I buy “pains au chocolat” in the Caprabo, here’s what I get. Notice how one of them, still sealed, is like 25% shorter than usual. It looks like a piece has been cut with a knife, probably a hungry employee in the pains-au-chocolat factory or something.

This is the 3rd time it happens to me, after buying yogurts already open and empty Nescafé packs (1 pack in a box of 10 containing no powder at all).

Fucking BS place.

Afro Samurai is a really frustrating game. But it has one interesting feature that makes it worth checking: you can cut enemies in half with your sword. It’s intriguing, you can move a cut-line over the character when you’re in “focus mode”, and it looks a lot like my previous character-cut demo. I wonder if they also do the cut at runtime, or if it’s all pre-cut ?? Drop me a line if you’re one of the devs!

Assassin’s Creed is also frustrating. I finally took the time to play it, and now it looks like I hit a fucking bug that prevents me from progressing further. I’m in Damascus, 4th mission, I went to the Bureau leader, I climbed all the watchpoints, but my objectives (pickpocket, etc) never appeared on the map. I’m stuck and it seems I will have to start again from scratch. Or better: forget that game altogether.

Frustrating, yes, but not as much as Nightshade ever was. Fun fact: there’s a “retry counter” in Nightshade, that lets you know the number of times you restarted a mission (in one sitting, it gets reset each time you go back to the main menu). Well I can tell you from painful experience that this counter does not go above 99 Yes, that’s right, I restarted some of those insane levels more than a hundred times. In one sitting. Oh yeah I can be pretty stubborn. But I finished the damn game, at least.

This recent podcast from Jeff & Casey about airport security reminded me of our current relocation ”issues”. Thing is, we have two guinea pigs at home. Yeah, the same fluffy animals as in G-Force. And apparently it’s next to impossible to move them to another country in an airplane. Dogs? No problem. Cats? No problem. You can take those as hand luggage provided you use an appropriate bag. But for guinea pigs, niet, verboten, forget it.

Of course we got a bit puzzled by this apparently bizarre racism against those cute, innocent rodents. So we asked. It turns out guinea pigs are forbidden in airplanes because they “could escape and eat the cables”. That’s it, that’s the only answer we got.

Hmmm. I don’t know. Are you telling me that the integrity of the airplane can be jeopardized by attacking a maverick cable in a corner, left so unprotected that it is vulnerable to a fucking guinea pig ?!

Some screenshots of what has been going on in the KP world recently:

http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_Mortar.jpg
http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_Helico8.jpg
http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_Helico3.jpg
http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_Helico11.jpg
http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_Explo06.jpg
http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_Explo04.jpg
http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/KP_Dialog02.jpg
http://www.codercorner.com/Pictures/Depot03.jpg

I know, not really next-gen looking. But hey, that’s fixed function pipeline and I’m the only “artist” involved, so back off. Currently trying to do nice looking explosions without killing the fillrate.

Also trying a “boss fight” against an helicopter. It’s a 2-parts fight where you have to finish it off by deflecting mortars shot at you from the helicopter - a bit similar to what Hibana was doing to missiles in Nightshade.

At Grin, one guy once told me something like “trust me, you don’t want to implement gameplay code in C++”. He meant we should only do it in LUA. I think I disagree. Using a scripting language does not necessarily translate to better gameplay, as the recently released Grin games unfortunately proved. For me, using LUA gave me the feeling I was programming with my left hand, while the right one was tied in my back. No power, and kind of awkward. Using C++ and having access to the full engine anytime gives me a lot more freedom and a lot more control. Going back to C++ gameplay code after one year of LUA in Wanted is incredibly liberating.

As for the argument that LUA scripts give faster iteration times because you can reload them without leaving the engine, well, there is some truth to this but it comes with the proverbial grain of salt. If you put your gameplay code in a separate DLL, there is not much difference in the end between your “game” and, say, a custom format plug-in for Flexporter. Remember Flexporter? Did you have to shut down 3DS MAX to compile your plug-in and try your changes? Nope, you just had one button to press in Flex. How long did it take to recompile your custom format plug-in? Exactly : something like 2 seconds. Iteration times for developping your own format plug-in in Flex were super fast. Well there is no difference with KP. Flexporter is the game engine, the format plug-in is Konoko Payne. It does not compile as quickly as a real Flexporter format plug-in because, of course, there is more code in a “full” game, but the idea is the same, and the iteration times are fast. Sometimes way faster than what we had at Grin.

I just noticed this post here, that I somehow missed before. I suppose it means game development was immature at Grin before February 2009? This might explain that.

Sometimes I forget why ICE is the coolest engine ever. I was working with another engine and this happened:

Object3D* some_object;

delete some_object;

and then of course it immediately crashes somewhere because of some stupid container still containing the pointer:

std::vector<Object3D*> mSomeContainer;

Fair enough, vanilla stuff. Still, it’s been years since I last saw such a primitive crash in ICE. Because my non-STL, non-standard-compliant, “ugly” containers are still smart enough to remove the dead pointers from themselves, automatically! Hell, I even forgot I had that feature. It’s been the backbone of the whole engine, for about 9 years now… I can savagely delete any “managed” object anywhere anytime, and the underlying kernel just fixes up whatever needs fixing.

STL, meh! The industry couldn’t even standardize matrix conventions between D3D and GL, everybody has to re-learn the company’s custom, in-house matrices / points / quaternions / whatever anyway. Maybe they should standardize this instead of somewhat trivial containers.

One more minus point for Wordpress. It doesn’t even export the whole blog successfully. It just exports most of it, and then the XML file just stops in the middle, ignoring like the dozen last posts. Tried again and again in vain.

So let me recap my blog experience so far:

- it got my main website hacked

- the spam keeps coming even with reCAPTCHA installed

- the spam keeps coming to posts where I explicitely closed the comments (!)

- it’s extremely slow to do anything with the available online tools

- Globat tried to use my credit card number for an automatic renewal even though I despise them:

“As per our previous notice, today we have processed your invoice
XXXXXXX in the amount of $95.40 and the charge
to your credit card came back as DECLINED. We will attempt to bill your
card again in five days. If the charge is declined again, your hosting
account will be subject to immediate suspension resulting in
interruption of service and an additional $30 fee.”

Of course it came back as declined, I blocked it against you, suckers. Oh, and they sent me this 21 days ago, so even for this they’re unreliable.

- and now it looks like I can’t export the blog to move to a saner placer.

This is just ridiculous, I don’t have time for this BS.

I’m so tired of those 2D height field fluids. Iguana did it in Heartquake 14 years ago, and people are still rediscovering them, reinventing the wheel, marketing them as new things, or proudly showing them off as the results of their “research”. Gimme a fucking break! It was cool the first time. And then everybody copied it from Iguana. In 1996 it was already dead boring, the horse had been beaten over and over again for 2 years. It’s almost 2009 now, can we move on? Please?

Soon they’ll give us shadebobs and keftales!