A Clockwork Mind

Where the dogs of society howl

Rich Bryant — Sat, 17 Nov 2007 02:06:00 GMT

I owe you this. I owe this to the team. I owe it to those who have read and believed in us. We're a badass team and you'll hopefully have seen some of what we can do. Those screenshots alone should blow your minds.

This is how it is.

When your life falls to pieces, when you throw away what used to be, you need to re-evaluate. You need to work out who you are because that's different to who you were with somebody else.

I have done that, and here's who I actually am.

I'm a country boy, from a line of farmers on one side, smiths on another and engineers via my mother. Time has come to accept and embrace that. I have a plan and it's probably not what you expect.

In 3-5 years, I will be going home, back to the country and I'm going to retrain as a farrier with what I've saved over that period. Then I've got fours years of grinding poverty through the apprenticeship to look forward to and then I will be what I always wanted to be. I'm a maker. I need to make things. I hate offices, I hate aircon, I loathe meaningless projects that I'll never care about. By the time I get done, I'll be in my mid-forties. But I'll be in my mid-forties looking forward to my perfect life. As opposed to the embittered old programmer facing only an eternity of doing the same shit.

However. I am, as some of you know, one of the best fucking programmers ever to grace this planet and I intend to go out in style.

Our concepts are solid. Our fundraising systems and internal comms are ideal and revolutionary.

We can and will do this, even if I have to do it alone, and it's going to be on my fucking tombstone.

"He changed things."

Faith will be the last virtual thing that I make, and the finest.

Who's along for the ride? It's going to be wild.

Planning It Out

Rich Bryant — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 14:54:00 GMT

If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.

In order to plan, you first need to assess your assetts. As of current status, those are:

4 very talented analyst/developers

1 excellent project manager

1 technical author

A complete concept system

A few bits of concept art. A lot of experience. An achingly empty void of actual stuff.

What we need is our documentation up to scratch first, and that means actual system docs comprising high-level design docs, system models, USE CASEs, and yeah, why not, test driven object models too.

Then we plan out a proof-of-concept.

Then we write tests which fail.

Then we make the tests pass.

Then we reverse engineer our working code back into the UML.

We begin with the UML so my next post will be a short tutorial on UML for developers.

Squaring the Circle

Rich Bryant — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 17:10:00 GMT

Yeah, I'm back. First, let's do the apologies. Apart from what's stored on this site - and hence, not in my home - I have no code, no documentation, no designs, no art. This was caused by an unfortunate incident involving hell not having such fury, and which saw rather a lot of destruction of hard drives in both my dev box and my backup server, but I look upon this as an opportunity to rationalize and rework.

Second, the formalities. Hi, people who give a shit and fuck you Prok. And I will, too. But you're going to need to wear this bag in case my eyemask slips and I don't know how we're going to cope if my earplugs fall out. Anyway. Moving swiftly on.

Now then. This is inspired by Psychochild, as so many good things are. Not that this idea is necessarily good but hey, it's mine and it's the first design-related idea in ages so it makes me happy.

Let's talk about WoW. WoW has this big issue described quite eloquently as "Playing Alone Together". It also has a big fat issue when it comes to endgame, because players have been effectively taught to solo everything and don't understand, want or see why they should need to group up with others.

Now, here's the cunning plan.

What you do is, you're developing for levels 70-80. Up to lvl75, you keep the quests exactly as they are now. Come lvl75, you start introducing parallel quest streams. The first stream is the basic solo quest. But there's not enough of them! Players will whine! But this is deliberate.

The second stream is harder and will need 2-3 characters to get through it at all. But the XP/Loot rewards are commensurately better. And there are less solo-artists getting in your way. Not instancing, just rely on overcrowding.

For 79-80, I'd put in a third stream and reduce the amoutn fo available first and second-stream quests still further. These also shouldn't be instanced, but should require 4-5 characters to get through them and be rewarded appropriately.

What does this mean? It means you can solo, but other people will piss you off while do it. But those other people could be useful to you because if you team up, you could do the better quest line. It's training the players to group by annoying them.

And from there, you go to 5-man, 10-man and 25-man raids. Because they've learned it.

Your decision - smart or stupid?

I ain't dead.

Rich Bryant — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 10:20:00 GMT

Although in all fairness, I've kind of wanted to be lately.

Brief rundown:

1. Moved mother out of ancestral home.

2. Completed first Triathlon.

3. Seperated from wife.

4. Started new permie job.

Anyway, #3 should be done with by tomorrow night and an end to the endless packing and boxes and just general heartache is in sight.

I hope to be back to business here as soon as possible.

Thank you all for your patience.

Nuts.

Rich Bryant — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 12:04:00 GMT

It looks like I owe Steven Davis a dollar.

Clicky.

Rekindling

Rich Bryant — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 14:42:00 GMT

Life and work have stalled me recently, but my enthusiasm is back. Spurred by playing bad games and most of all, by this announcement from Microsoft:

Wow! It's hard to believe that a year ago on this blog we announced the first release of XNA Game Studio Express. Now, here we are again at Gamefest 2007 and, on behalf of the XNA Community Game Platform team, I am pleased to announce our next release: XNA Game Studio 2.0. Let's take a look at some of what's new in XNA Game Studio 2.0!
What’s New with XNA Game Studio?
XNA Game Studio 2.0 works in all versions of Visual Studio 2005. This includes Standard and Professional, as well as many other specific editions.

The new and improved interface makes it easier for you to manage your Xbox 360 console.

You’ll find that managing and building content is easier and more consistent in XNA Game Studio.

We’ve included project templates for content importers and processors.

You can configure how content is processed with the new ability to set parameters on Content Processors.

What’s new in the XNA Framework? Now you can:
Create rich multiplayer games over Xbox LIVE using the new networking APIs.

Create Audio more effectively with the new XACT editor!

Host XNA Framework games easily inside a Windows Form.

Use the virtualized GraphicsDevice: no more special code to handle device reset and recreate!

Take advantage of render targets that are more flexible, consistent, and easier to use. Xbox 360 and Windows now support multiple render targets (MRTs) as well.

Easily nest one component inside another thanks to improvements in GameComponent.

Enjoy many more enhancements and tweaks!

Most of our development on this version has been in response to your feedback. What you see here only scratches the surface of everything new in XNA Game Studio 2.0. As we near the release of XNA Game Studio coming late 2007, we'll have more information.

The networking stack shall be ours! Finally!

I hope it will integrate nicely with WCF on the server....

On Love and Death and Contracts

Rich Bryant — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 16:32:00 GMT

You probably neither knew or cared, but last night another Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak was announced in England. Even now, all farms are being sealed off, all movement of livestock is a criminal offence until restrictions are lifted.

All the animals on that little farm near Guildford are being slaughtered and burned.

All farm animals within a 3 kilometer radius will be slaughtered and burned over the next week.

This might effect some our attitudes to what we do, but I'm going to talk about farming and about meat and about love and about the implicit contract involved in the whole process.

My father had 112 acres of wonderful light sandy soil in Wiltshire. He was a "small farmer", always an amusing description for such a huge man. At its height in 1999/2000, he kept 130 head of organic beef cattle.

The last outbreak of FMD was in 2001. That time, it took two weeks before anyone imposed movement restrictions because the Ministry of Agriculture (since rebranded in an unsuccessful effort to dodge the sheer loathing they inspired at that time) was panicking and trying to take orders from their uncaring masters in Brussels.

By the time the movement ban was imposed, the disease was reasonably widespread, although not yet at epidemic levels.

The Ministry appointed a statistician, Professor Roy Meadows, to the containment action. This was the man who in 1988 had predicted 25 million deaths from CJD by 2000 so perhaps they knew what they getting.

Meadows instigated a 3km burning policy around every suspected outbreak in the country. Over 8 millon cattle and untold numbers of sheep and pigs were shot by men in NBC suits out there in the fields then piled in heaps and burned. Confirmed cases of FMD were later assessed at 340 among seventeen herds.

We never got an outbreak at home. We got the cattle in as soon as the first outbreak hit the news, we quarantined them. However, nearly two miles away, a man lived who had moved from London the year before and had bought some pedigree sheep as a hobby. He refused to pen them in, and one of them developed a limp so he immediately called in the Ministry. Any farmer could have told him the animal had snagged its hoof on some rocks, but he knew nothing. So he called them.

Everything within 3km was slaughtered. We were just inside the radius.

Before that time, we suffered quite badly under the BSE restrictions. Even though we had a fully organic herd, this made no difference. "British beef" was suddenly evil and we barely scratched a living, despite the fact that we could absolutely guarantee no BSE in our herd. But my dad kept the faith.

He loved his animals. He named every one. Not fancy pedigree names, mostly silly pet names, something reflective of each animal's personality because he knew them all so well. He cared about each one.

This may confuse people who don't work on the land, because they were beef cattle and they all went for slaughter in the end, but that's the great mystery and the root of all religions. When you raise meat, you do it with love. When you kill your beloved cattle, you do it with love and you know that the bargain is there - this meat will be eaten, tasted, it will bring joy. People will respect that something loved and valued died to feed them, to give them life.

Butchers will show care and pride in their work as they prepare the meat. Chefs and cooks and people at home will show care in their cooking, everyone who eats will understand this bargain and without ever needing to take a moment to think about it, they will understand this sacrifice which is made for them.

This is why the disconnect between country and town is so very wrong. People in towns buy prepacked meat from supermarkets who care only about their profit margins. Food is sanitized and artificially beautified, made to look like any other commodity. This push away from our ancient understanding leads to massive factory farms and battery hens and pigs then never see natural light and the uncaring, unconscious cruelty of a society which has lost all memory of where it came from and what it is.

Do the kids who thoughtlessly scarf a Big Mac ever consider the literal life and death nature of their actions? Don't bother to answer, please.

After the slaughter, something broke inside my father. He no longer named new cattle, he no longer seemed capable of bringing himself to love them. Two years after the cull finished, on the very night of the day the compensation cheque finally arrived, he died from a massive heart attack despite having never showed any signs of a weak heart or having any family history of it. He was sixty-five years old, still the strongest man I ever knew.

His heart was broken, it just took that long for him to finally admit it.

My father loved his animals and he could not bear their senseless, wasteful, uncaring deaths. He could not bear that they died without love. I still cannot bear the wasteful death of my father from a broken heart; it probably shows.

But I can still keep to the contract. When I eat, I think about what I'm eating and the years of work and care and love that made it possible. I think about blood sacrifice and life and death. And if ever I think about waste, it's not litter or municipal landfills I see in my head, it's huge pyres with black smoke pouring from them and the sensless destruction of a life's work.

Levels suck, skills suck; the other reason

Rich Bryant — Mon, 16 Jul 2007 08:59:00 GMT

I was just talking to somebody who used to be my friend. A long time ago. We fell out, over the concept of Skinner boxes. See, I had design ideas. He had design ideas. I'm a programmer. He isn't. This gives me balance of power over who gets their ideas implemented because I don't want to code Skinner boxes. I don't want to code little boxes of Skills or certainly not levels. Skills suck because you can never balance the damned things.

Classes suck for all the reasons that many others have already illuminated but mostly, in my opinion, because of Level25 Despair.

Level25 Despair is what the player feels when their character reaches level25 (or any similar point between 1/3 and 1/2 way through the fixed progression). It basically says "Christ. It's taken me [%a stupid amount of time] doing [$something uninteresting] to get even a third of the way through Level25. Level26 is going to be worse. There are 70/90/[%Another Number] levels. That means I'm going to spend an enormous amount of time being really quite bored. Fuck that noise. Time for some HALO."

Then you've got Level45 Despair to look forward to after that. Are we excited yet? Didn't think so.

Most grind-based MMOs these days try to make the process a little less boring. Quests and such. But once you've run 25 levels worth of quests, you're pretty sick of them. Some of them encourage social play by making characters advance faster if grouped. This just means you have a whole lot of really bored people doing something boring in the vain hope that achieving level 26/36/56/60/70/90 (delete as appropriate) will open up content to them which is interesting. Which it will be. For a day. After that, it's just a different grind.

The thing about design -not code, design- is that really it's only possible to evangelize and motivate if you believe in what you're evangelizing. Or if you're a natural con-artist, I suppose. And i hate level25 despair. I hate all the despair in all the levels. I hate knowing that some basement-dwelling spotty little virgin can be "tougher" than me because he spends 72-hours straight grinding in a manner that I both can't and won't. I thinking that I have to somehow earn the right to enjoy content that I've already paid for by running pointless and inappropriate quests for dispensing machines that will send the next person to do exactly what I just did. I'm a pretty talented guy; I'd quite like the opportunity to showcase that.

I want to be able to play for an hour and enjoy whatever content I feel like enjoying. And then I want to be able stop when I choose and do something else. If I enthuse about a game to my friend and the amazing things that are in it, I don't want to show him screenshots. I want him to log in and me to meet him and take him there. I want him to have a chance to do what I can do, even if I've been a subscriber for four years and he's never played a computer game before.

So these are the choices that influence my designs.

My ex-friend, he's a DING junkie. He likes code to tell him when he's achieved something and when he should be satisfied. He likes food pellets. He's a rat in a cage. Not that I told him this ages ago, or at least, not until the argument stopped being about what's enjoyable and started being about who can be more personally offensive to whom. Luckily, it's really hard work to offend me. My ex-friend's skin isn't quite so thick, which is why he decided that it was was "ex" in the first place.

I just let him go.

Maybe I am a rat after all. But I'm not in a cage.

Crunchy crunchy crunch

Rich Bryant — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 17:49:00 GMT

I haven't been doing much of anything except work, and deadline is next Saturday night so you got another week of blessed silence from me approaching.

Unless i kill somebody. Which seems more likely by the hour.

Nintendo wants you to write Wii games

Rich Bryant — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:56:00 GMT

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/06/28/nintendo_readies_wii_programming_tool/

Whoah. I was expecting this, but not for another year or so. For those who don't follow links, Nintendo are releasing WiiWare, following Microsoft's lead in freely available console-game creation kits which MS have forged with XNA Studio.

Depending on how long the environment takes to be released, this might considerably lengthen the lifespan of the Wii as a device.

The Lifechanging Books Meme

Rich Bryant — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 10:30:00 GMT

My much better half, or by volume, my much better third, has a meme going. Since it's an interesting one, I shall attempt to propagate it.

The task is, name the books that changed your life. As far as i know, there's no upper or lower limit on the number of books. It's also a tough call. When first challenged, i thought it'd be easy. Then i got stuck. Then i really, really thought about it and realized that life-changing books are rare and also that they tend to happen when you're young enough that your life changes on a day-to-day basis.

Compiling this list felt really pretentious. I thought i'd be throwing in a few curveballs and naming funky works by William Gibson and Iain Banks, Carl Hiaasen and Chuck Pahlaniuk. But they didn't change my life. They changed my week or my weekend, but not my life. The following is not an easy list either to name or to read and i would never have bothered with most of them if i hadn't been under threat of a beating and loss of sports for failing to do so. But, under duress and full of resentment, i read them and they changed me.

#1. The bible. No, really. It changed my life. After i read it, i never really believed another damn thing anyone ever told me. If that, the most important thing in the universe, they all said, if that was mere fiction - as it self-evidently is from start to finish - then lies and fictions are all we have.

#2 - Q by Luthor Blisset. Luthor Blisset never wrote of a word of it but it's a work of absolute genius. Q teaches us how belief turns into cynicism which eventually becomes weariness at life and how it works.

#3 - Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco. This is a story of how amused cynicism turns into belief and belief destroys everything despite its utter falsity. We are none of us immune to these fantasies, it says. And it's right.

#4 - Moonfleet by John Meade Faulkner. This teaches that there's no good people or bad people and that everyone does bad things, but that doesn't mean that's all they do. I read Moonfleet when i was six. I've been looking for it ever since.

#5 - The Gallic Wars by Gaius Julius Caesar. Like most of my updated list, this was read under threat of Jesuitical violence at school, and to make it worse, in the original Latin. Nevertheless, once you get the hang of it, Caesar wrote his propaganda very beautifully. The syle is sparse but every phrase is perfectly chosen in a manner approaching that of Japanese poetry. Caesar's choice of word-orders and even his use of military terminology in relation to interpersonal affairs is not only indiciative of the immense strategic capabilities which he was, let's be honest, showing off about, but it also echoes down through the centuries to display clearly the origins of formal English speech. If you think you can speak English, read Caesar. In Latin.

#6 - Paradise Lost by John Milton. I've been known to be somewhat scornful of poetry (and the "of poetry" bit may be redundant...) but when you read Milton, it takes you a long time to actually figure out that poetry is what it is. The endless rolling verses numb the mind slightly and you stop noticing them until, and this is important, you try to remember any of it. Then the verses and meter do their magic and the phrase or stanza you were thinking of appears whole in your mind. I don't know why Milton works better than other classic poetic works for this, but i can't recall swathes of Beowulf or any of the Sagas whereas Milton leaps straight back into my head.

Also, there's a fair chance that if Milton had been writing any time before about 500AD most of the Western world would now be Satanists and it would mean something very different. Do thou the Devil's work.

#7 - The inevitable Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I won't go into details but most of you already know why and how.

#8 - Summa Theologica by St Thomas Aquinas and this one's a tie with Opus Minor de Ocularis by Roger Bacon. Because learning how to think and how to ask questions is the most important thing we can ever learn, and Bacon and d'Aquino summed it up in theological terms. Aristotle is also worth a crack but to be honest, i found him somewhat dry - St Tom and Old Roj are lively and enthusiastic by contrast.

So, now to tag people who won't notice.

Blanked

Rich Bryant — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 13:41:00 GMT

I'm spending today writing a physical design spec document because i have Blanked. And it'll last all day, i know from experience.

Today, my own code means nothing to me. It might as well be written in Sumerian stick-writing and describe the inner workings of the female mind because i do not understand it at all.

Everyone else's code is even worse.

Blanking usually only lasts the period between sleep sessions - this is not a constant - and it's not common. Maybe once per year, maybe once every 18 months. So i'm not too worried about it. The first time it happens, it's terrifying - and it's not just me, this happens to pretty much every programmer i ever met, we just try to repress the memory as quickly as possible - and you think you'll never be able to properly understand this mad esoteric shit ever again. Luckily, you're as wrong as you would be if you were asked to make any estimates on the day that you happen to blank.

I'm going to sit here and fiddle with graphs and font-sizes and make myself look busy.

Don't ask me anything.

Paul Barnett's Challenge

Rich Bryant — Sun, 20 May 2007 12:51:00 GMT

Over MMOG Nation in an excellent interview, Paul Barnett of Warhammer Online says the following:

Great test! Fantastic test: ask anyone who reckons they’re a designer, anybody, and say to them: “With the game of Chess, what rule would you change? What would you change it to, and why?” And then, watch the response.

Heh. Sounds like one of Psychochild's Weekend Design Challenges.

There are two answers to this.

Answer #1 - None of them. Chess works, why screw about with it?

Answer #2 - Okay, so i absolutely MUST change something? Okay then. In that case, my aim is to produce a different experience which is equally or possibly even more fun without spending money on new design features. So, every time it's your turn, move two pieces.

I'll let you work out the ramifications for yourselves.

Flamenco Guitar

Rich Bryant — Fri, 18 May 2007 22:34:00 GMT

Hurts.

That is all.

Audio Review - MorphVOX

Rich Bryant — Tue, 15 May 2007 09:57:00 GMT

You can get MorphVox ona week's free trial at http://www.screamingbee.com/

My review is here. Overall verdict, impressed but vaguely disquieted.