Fugu Talk

After trying to manually turn off comments and pings on all my old posts (you’re supposed to take the good with the bad, but I’m just gonna outsource the whole thing to Digg and Reddit), some spam is still leaking in. Belatedly, I noticed the Extended Comment Options among my unactivated plugins. Turned it on, works great. I used it to complete the job and turn off all pings and comments on all my posts, but you can specify more refined batch operations like turn off comments after the first ten are posted.

To my dismay, nay, horror, I found myself left with only four cable stations a few days ago (and two of them are public access). Apparently, the cable company figured out I’m not a paying customer. So I said, now I’ll get some work done.

But first, let me try out the video download feature on my Playstation 3. Most of the movies aren’t much cheaper than the packaged retail version, but I can watch that episode of Dollhouse that I missed for $1.99, or $2.99 for the HD version. Although the product heading says “own”, the description explains the rental policy (24 hours), which is a bit confusing, but I went ahead to checkout, where I first have to fill up my “wallet” with a minimum $5, enter my credit card number via the game controller (talk about button-mashing), and then start the download. “264 minutes remaining”. I can opt to download in the background or start playing the movie while downloading. Hit play – in crisp hi-def I see a reporter saying, “the dollhouse” – buffering, buffering – “is” – buffering, buffering. Forget it, now I’ll get some work done.

But instead, I backed out, put in a Sarah Connor Chronicles DVD, four hours later, go the PS3 download manager – “264 minutes reminaining”. Guess it didn’t continue downloading in the background. Open up the download task, see the progress continue at perhaps 0.5 MB/s (I’m supposed to have 1.5MB/s and the test at speakeasy.net says I have a bit more). Back out of the task, it stops, go back in, it continues, and there’s apparently no way to get it running in the background, now. OK, now I’ll get some work done, but it’s bedtime. So I leave it in there overnight, watch the Dollhouse episode in all it’s glory the next morning.

Now, for tonight, I’d better start downloading now. In the meantime, I’ll watch C-SPAN 2. Or maybe I’ll get some work done.

Every year I switch from TurboTax to TaxCut or vica versa, depending on what I didn’t like about the other product last year. This time around, I chose TaxCut and was peeved that I couldn’t enter individual items in my business expense fields. I tried double-clicking the fields, which I seemed to remember would bring up the tabular itemized entry in previous versions (or maybe that was TurboTax), to no avail. So I had to add up each category separately with my calculator and every time I took a pass through my taxes, I couldn’t tell if that lump sum was finished, or not. Eventually, I turned in my taxes like a bad software release ( whether or not you’re happy with it, it’s time to go, and I’m sick of working on it anyway).

Afterwards, I  opened up the program again to check on something I might have forgotten and saw, on the business expense screen, on the bottom right hand corner at the end of the “FAQ” column, an item mentioning that to itemize entries you need to select the option under the Edit menu. Argh.

• TaxCut for the most part does not require use of the menu bar menus. There are bug huge icons for opening and continuing returns, and buttons for navigating through the tax preparation and submitting the tax form. I went through the whole program from beginning to end without using the menu bar. So to decide, “hey, let’s put this feature only in the menu bar” is like saying “hey, let’s hide this feature”
• FAQ’s are generally useful, but if you have an item about the GUI in the FAQ (particularly in the nature of “where can I find this button?”), there’s something wrong with the GUI. A FAQ does not make a good GUI.
• This particular FAQ item is in the wrong place at the wrong time. I don’t know why I didn’t see it earlier – perhaps it showed up in one of the updates (after customers frequently asked about it), in which case I wouldn’t see it unless I went back to that page. Or maybe I just missed it. But that’s one of those things that should be right at the beginning of that section or even at the beginning of the whole form, not at the bottom of a bunch of “Did you know you could deduct” and “What’s a form xxxx?” questions.

It’s not easy to make a good GUI (although it should be easy to spot a bad one). However, tax programs have the luxury of being the same every year, year after year. If any program should be polished by now, it’s a tax program. No need to innovate – just put everything where we can find it (and please, no Microsoft ribbon interface!)

There’s a lot of quality free legal advice for game development now, in books like the Business and Legal Primer for Game Development and in forums and columns as on the IGDA and Gamasutra web sites. But every reference I’ve seen in these articles to open source basically say watch out for open source when you license a game engine. I see a lot of problems with this advice:

• It seems to equate open source licenses with the GPL, which requires the including application to also be licensed under the GPL. If everything you know about open source is from Business Week interviews with Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds, then you might get that impression. But most open source licenses are much less restrictive (some just require you to maintain the original copyright in the source code if you happen to distribute the source). And companies that offer code under the GPL often offer an alternative commercial license.
• It is divorced from reality. Everyone uses open source libraries, now. A quick survey of my PC, which has Crysis, Second Life, There, and a few Torque and Unity demos, shows DLL’s for the open source libraries Speex, Freeimage, OpenSSL, zlib, libjpeg, among others. And those are just the externally linked libraries – who knows how many other open source libraries were statically linked at build time. It makes no business sense to try writing every single line of code for ever-increasing features from scratch (that would take forever) or even licensing commercial libraries when the open source versions are essentially the industry standard. This isn’t just true for the game industry. I don’t think I’ve ever worked on a commercial product that did not use an open source library. Even the MacOSX is installed with a number of open source packages (OpenAL, Python, …)
• It ignores the larger issue. Sure, if you license or buy a game engine you should watch out for licenses like GPL that would impede your use of it. But that holds true for any third-party code included with the product, including commercial ones. Especially commercial ones. At least open source licenses are standardized and easily referenced (see the Open Source Foundation). How are you going to find out exactly what sublicensing agreements the vendor has for all it’s third-party components? And for those third-party components that cannot be sublicensed to you, what’s it going to cost you to license them on your own? I see my copy of Lego Digital Designer uses PhysX – that’s not open source,  but it’s free (at the moment). But other game middleware can be quite expensive (often the price is not listed – you have to ask for a quote), and sometimes the original vendor is long gone. From a risk management viewpoint, open source is a winner.

It’s a bit of an over-generalization to say open source is your friend, but to advise against it is, well, so eighties, dude. The debate is over. Any advice about open source now should be regarding which specific licenses to use (Open Source Licensing is an excellent guide) and which open source packages are useful.

I finally have most (or a good portion) of a HyperBowl level imported into Unity. Now I just need the controls, physics, animation, camera, shadows, scoring, sound, optimization…

My next iPhone project is taking a while, so in the meantime, here’s a plug for a couple of apps released by some colleagues I worked with at High Moon Studios.

Appy Newz from Appy Entertainment lets you create your own headlines (here’s my take on eHarmony):

and Flower Garden from Snappy Touch (this pic shows I don’t have a green thumb)

I’ve played around with YouTube a little bit more, lately – I’m hardly an expert, now, but beyond the bare minimum of uploading videos, I’ve learned I can embed subscribe-to-this-channel:

and also playlists. I’ve made two WordsEye videos, so here’s a short WordsEye playlist.