Kynthelig

Gary Gygax 1938-2008

2008-03-05T17:05:00Z

Theory - update

2007-08-30T10:47:00Z

Just got back from the exam and I've managed to pass my Driving Theory test.

Theory

2007-08-29T13:10:00Z

I have my Driving Theory test tomorrow morning. Supposedly forty minutes worth of screen tapping in order to get the 30/35 questions correct that will enable me to take my Practical test before my end-of-September deadline.

I know, I know. I'm a little old to be finally learning to drive. In my defence I live on an Island 30 miles long by 15 miles wide with great public transport.

I, like many folks, assumed that the Theory Test would be realtively easy. Stopping distance at 70mph is such and such, that sign means I can expect to see elderly or disabled folks crossing the road soon, that sort of thing.

Not so! On a whim I purchased the LDC Learn2Drive course for the PC and ran through a few of the mock exams.

I am glad I did.

Sure, the signposts and stopping distance questions are still a breeze. As are the "Do you A) Wave your fists and sound your horn or B) Try to stay calm when a motorist pulls out on you?" questions.

It's the more obscure ones that trip you up. Questions such as:

"In which book will you find a list of Disabled Motoring organisations?"

or

"You have broken down. How far away from the vehicle must you place a triangular reflective warning sign?"

Turns out my wife's car actually does have a reflective triangular warning sign underneath the spare tire. But I digress.

The first mock exam I did from the DVD I managed to score 28 out of 35. That would have been a Fail and was a bit of a wake up call.

My mistake was that I assumed the Theory would be similar to those I've helped friends and family revise for in the past. I've known that little Highway Code booklet verbatim for a while now and I'd wager it would be enough if the exam was still taken verbally at the side of the road with the examiner, or hand-written and hand-marked.

The new CBT style exams requires a different approach to revision than simple memorisation, especially because they're so inflexible as to what the right answer is, so I've rearranged a bit of work, swapped some overtime around and settled down to do this thing properly.

The last two mocks I've taken have each scored 32 and 33 out of 35 respectively. Hopefully I can maintain at least that average when I practice tonight.

As for why I have an end-of-September deadline? I'm landing States-side of The Pond for my wife's 30th birthday and there's a nice Mustang GT available as an upgrade to our Rental.

It's a red one.

Rewriting history

2007-05-18T15:45:00Z

Press release from the SWG team:

"Mastering the Wild is due to go live in Star Wars Galaxies this week, and will introduce the new Beast Master system to the game. This feature gives players the ability to harvest DNA from creatures all over the galaxy, and use it to create new beasts they can then keep or trade, train, and ultimately adventure with."

I would like to highlight to any Star Wars: Galaxies players who might be reading and who may be unaware of the fact, but this is not a new system.

This is a conglemeration of two skill trees from the old system, namely that of Bio Engineer and Creature Handler and categorised as one class.

Trying to pass off old systems as new content is Bad Form(TM) in my book.

Incidentally, these old skill trees were ditched in the New Game Engine release as they were considered "not Star Warsy enough"...

Where's our snow?

2007-02-08T08:08:00Z

The email turned up yesterday with all the gaudy subject line decoration that people seem to think are necessary to get our attention.

####### SEVERE WEATHER WARNING########

Not only did the weather service I subscribed to miss out the space after the word "warning", but they also seem to have insisted on writing in upper case while slapping more hashes (Sharps? Gates?) than I care to pay for on my packet radio service.

What ever happened to nice straight forward subject lines? A simple "Severe weather warning" would have sufficed.

I woke up this morning to find no snow as I had been warned of so severely. In fact there wasn't even a frost, despite the fact that all week I've been covering my car in progressively more toxic chemicals in order to shift the layers upon layers of ice which threatened to keep me out of the office.

On the way home the wife and I stopped to pick up some more of said chemicals only to find that several petrol stations, the local Tesco superstore and even B&Q had sold out completely of all stocked brands.

"...up to eight inches of snow have fallen across the Midlands, Wales, the North West and Northern Ireland..." claimed the news broadcaster of a certain national radio station as I struggled to stop making a fuss of one of our new kittens and crawl out from under the duvet.

Really, blizzards are descending in every region surrounding the little Island that I live on. Traffic is grinding to a halt apparently. I imagine kids are praying that school gets cancelled. Meanwhile I'm in the office blinking the bright sunshine out of my eyes and looking at the near tropical 2 degrees Celcius that Google Weather is telling me the local Met Station at Ronaldsway is reporting.

Severe weather warning. Hah! It's all a conspiracy by the chemical giants in order to lift the flagging sales of de-icer due to Global Warming.

Of scanning, archiving, workflow and money

2006-09-21T11:39:00Z

If you work in a medium to large sized business, and you're implementing a workflow system for the first time, including imaging or not, I can give you a piece of advice that could save you upwards of £1m worth of work if you follow it.

I'm going to be generous and give this one away for free.

My advice is based on the actual implementation and support of two successful workflow and imaging systems, and the practical knowledge of the implementation of another three in the same industry. All of this is over the last 6 years.

All of the companies involved are multinational, finance sector based, employ a minimum of a couple of thousand employees each and operate out of at least two different countries.

Big business huh?

For those that don't know, a workflow system is basically a production line. At their most basic they pass work between members of staff. They typically keep an eye on how long work is taking and report on how much work is around.

When you write to your Bank for example, your letter is often scanned into an electronic format and someone classifies your letter depending on what type of work you've asked to be done on your account.

The workflow system then makes sure the image of the letter is passed to the right department that performs the type of work your letter has been classed under. Some workflow systems accept instructions from web pages, others telephone calls. Odds are you've encountered a workflow system of some description in your life.

Businesses introducing a workflow system for the first time often look at which type of work would benefit most from an automated production line. Where finance is concerned, an insurance/assurance/banking company wants to keep the amount of work done on a policy or account beyond set up and closing down to an absolute minimum if at all possible. Work on a life assurance policy in the middle of it's life is often costly the company involved.

Now, I know what some of you are thinking, the banks are trying to be lazy or just want to make money out of you. They want to earn some cash too, but their clients investments isn't just a cash cow to them. The investments represent someone's real life savings. The money could be a college fund for a their kids, a pension or money put aside for a wedding. This is real money and almost everyone I've worked with in the finance sector doesn't even question how important it is to keep that money as safe as possible.

These companies need to keep their costs down so that they earn a profit which keeps them in business which makes sure their clients are looked after. Win-win?

As we're on the topic of investments, we'll take an example of work from the Life Assurance industry.

A very common piece of work that a client will ask for during the middle of their policies term will be a "switch", that is moving money from one investment into a another such as taking your pension money out of a risky investment you plumped for when you were younger and and placing it into a safer fund as your retirement approaches.

A switch can be expensive to perform, several members of staff may be involved and their time costs money. The company may need to be partnered with fund managers who often charge fees. Maybe they pay for a service from the likes of Reuters or Bloomberg to keep an eye on funds so that the company can step in to avert problems. There's a lot of paperwork, faxing and other legally required actions that the company has to perform.

Quite often the client will be charged a fee to perform a Switch or the company will build the fee into the plan allowing a few "free" switches. But this fee doesn't always cover the costs that the company incurs to actually do the work. Here's where companies may think about introducing a workflow system to reduce the costs.

So back to real world experience.

In the last 6 years, all of the systems I've been involved with or learned about have happened to start with Switches as the first "type" of work they would use the new system for. Well all but one company, who decided to start with "Application Forms", but the end result was the same.

To be honest, for their circumstances, switches (or application forms) are a good choice of a type of work to start with. The point being they could have started with any type of work and still made the same error.

Ahh, the error. So what has cost each of these companies in the long run?

For various reasons, be it project demands, deadlines, resource, a dodgy design decision or something in the water, each of the companies managed to develop a Switch-flow system instead of a Work-flow system.

Huh? Switch-flow?

The reasons may have been legitimate however in the push to make sure that the process of handling a switch was as efficient as possible the development teams focussed on the process of handling switches and not what the switch represented.

To a workflow system, "Work" follows a "Path". It just keeps track of where in the path a certain piece of "Work" is and moves it on when each stage is completed.

So a switch should just be another piece of work following another path. Which path the workflow system should send the switch down compared to another type of work is a configuration issue.

Unfortunately in each case, when the companies involved came to add different types of work to what their workflow systems handled they discovered they would have to perform more development to handle work items more generically.

Don't over customise your workflow system to handle the first type of "work" you are intending the system to handle. If you do, it will cost you more money than what you were expecting when you want to expand what work the system can look after for you.

So that's how to save a lot of money when implementing a workflow and/or imaging system in the finance sector, especially when dealing with switches.

But I want you to take this advice and apply it to whatever you are working on.

Don't lose sight of what you're creating.

Fairness

2006-09-06T11:07:00Z

Wow, life is fair and everyone gets the same chances if they seize them.

I completely, utterly and absolutely disagree with this statement. Vehemently. And this isn't the opinion of a bitter man.

I've mentioned this before, but my argument is this. I consider myself to be reasonably intelligent. Not a genius, but I'm armed with some decent qualifications. I know I am physically very strong, weights training gives a very simple measurement. My personal best over a 100m sprint is 10.8 seocnd. That's pretty fast. I can speak three languages, including English, to a degree where I can hold at least basic conversations and ask where the bathroom is. Maybe four if you count my mangling of the French language.

However, there is someone out there who has a higher IQ, is physically stronger, is a faster sprinter and speaks more languages and all of them fluently. I don't mean several people, I mean one person. What hurts even more is this person was probably born into money and is currently sunbathing on their yacht berthed in Monaco as we speak. Bastard.

This person is, well, just *better* than I am. Full stop. No arguments.

Now I've come to accept this and the knowledge doesn't hinder me, it helps to know my own limits. It's now down to me to take what skills and talents I *do* have and make something with them.

The whole "everyone has a strongpoint" line is only true to an extent. Almost everyone has a talent that they are stronger in, however unless you really are the cream of the crop there will be someone who can exercise that same talent better.

Please break out of the Classroom mentality. Teacher is not going to make sure you get a fair bite of the cherry. You are not starting from the same position as everyone else.

Realise it, accept it, use this knowledge to your advantage. I know you *want* to be best at something. I do too, truly. But don't kid yourself if you're not.

Having said that if anyone out there does want to hand me fortune on a plate then feel free to PM me. I'll work hard for what you've got on offer.

Stretching your comfort zones

2006-07-14T11:36:00Z

Whew!

As many of you know already I'm not from a front end 3d uber graphical quake tournament background. I'm not even from the build-your-own mobile game business.

Where do I come from? Well, you know when you receive a standard letter from your bank or insurance company telling you how much you've been charged in maintenance fees last quarter?

That's me.

I'm the guy that writes the new business entry system, links this with the AML and Underwriting systems. The guy who scripts the storage methods, writes the business logic to handle your interest.

When you pay the Life Assurance premium this month to fulfill the mortgage requirements on your house, the money doesn't get added into a field called MyPolicy.MoneyIn. No no no no no. I've got to determine if your policy is Unit Linked, create a new Policy Slice and issue details to systems like Investment Dealing so that your money can be invested into a fund.

I hope you pay your premiums in your plan or account currency, but it's not a big deal. The Foreign Exchange system will make sure you don't lose a penny.

So when it comes to writing a test harness for the Economy Proof of Concept, I'm not going to use Windows Forms. Or an iSeries green screen. This is a 3d world we're building so I'm going to push myself, learn some new skills, and work with 3d for the test client.

As 3d is largely new ground for me, the last graphical interface I built was a 2d GDI+ interface, I'm going to use an existing Graphics API.. To start with I've selected the Ogre engine. It's an engine intended for C++ developers, however I have some ulterior motives.

I'm working on wrappers for some C and C++ classes in another project at the moment and working with Ogre will be a good exercise. Ogre also works pretty well with CEGUI, a GUI interface that allows scripting and form designing through LUA and XML.

Should be interesting.

It's important to keep learning, don't sit on your laurels just because it's easy.

Are we 1,500 years behind schedule?

2006-07-04T11:53:00Z

I'm interested to know the opinion of some historians and sociologists on this topic.

From a game perspective technology levels, albeit in a simplified form, are one measure of a civilisations advancement. When you look at many universes that are out there, in particular Millers Traveller genre, technolgy levels normally follow the main era's of development.

Namely:

Stone Age
Bronze Age
Iron Age
Fall/Diaspora
Dark Age
Medieval
Renaissance
Industrial Age
Atomic Age
Information Age (presumablly our current level of development)

I'm going to go through a "what if" scenarios now.

Namely, "what if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed when it did"? What if it hadn't collapsed at all? Would we have avoided the Dark Ages? If so, would we have then avoided having to have a Renaissance to "get us back on track" so to speak? There's a reason why Renaissance folks were so interested in the Classical Era...

A lot of blame for the collapse of Rome has been chalked down to the size of the Roman Empire. The difficulty in administering and controlling it. The difference in cultures from one region to the next. That sort of thing.

But if you could have solved the communications issues, and by that I mean sending orders and moving things around a little faster, could the Romans have kept it togther?

You see, shortly after the birth of Jesus Christ, an historically noted event whether you believe in him as the son of God or one of the Prophets or just as a man, a chap called Hero (that's his real name by the way) who lived in Alexandria invented the Steam Engine around 100 A.D ish.

Really. I'm not kidding. A steam engine. Grecko-Egyptian technology was more than up to the task.

Only he called it an Aeolipile and unfortunately it was chalked down as an amusement.

Hero, being a genius, was an Alexandrian state secret. It's one of the reasons why some of you probably haven't heard of him. Whereas the likes of Heroditus and Pythagoras were also genius thinkers in their own right, what they came up wasn't a huge military advantage to a nation. Hero of Alexandria also wrote books like "Cheirobalistra", which was about making really good catapults. The Alexandrians wanted to keep that sort of information to themselves.

Hero was a bit like Q is in the James Bond universe, and so a lot of his inventions were kept under wraps limiting the number of others who could have taken Hero's ideas further.

Now, the Greeks already knew about rails. The folks back in Corinth had invented them some 600 years before Hero twigged that steam was a pretty cool thing.

If Hero's steam engine had been stuck on rails and managed to move a carriage, how long would it have been until the very practically minded Romans thought "Hmm, these railways, they're pretty nifty, we're impressed. They're like our roads, but a bit better..."?

So, I ask of you all, is a Dark Age a common Era for a burgeoning civilisation or have we humans been set back 1,500 years in our development?

Is the Dark Age and the Renaissance that followed an exception to the rule in the development of civilisations that we humans have, typically for us, stumbled over?

Should we really have jumped from the Bronze/Iron Age directly to the Industrial Revolution thanks to some nifty Classical inventions and skipped all of the pogroms in the middle?

Oh, and by the way, Hero was believed to be an Atomist. That was a group of thinkers who were theorising that everything was made of these incredibly tiny building blocks called Atoms. It was only another 2000 years until Einstein came up with E=MC2...

Contracts

2006-06-08T15:27:00Z

Some people will be aware of this already, but until today I wasn't. I love learning new things.

You know when you hear about some multi-national company or a plot of land being sold in the UK for a measly £1? I've always wondered about this, if you're taking on a debt laden company why do you also pay the previous owner for the pleasure?

The reason for that is down to Contract Law. Apparently a contract is not valid in the UK unless all parties benefit tangibly. The easiest way to benefit someone without argument or comeback is to give them something like £1.

Anyway, Chris is looking at Contract Law and Company Ownership? Hmm, interesting eh? Wonder what he could be working on now huh?

The path back to finding Faith

2006-06-06T10:32:00Z

Well, my hiatus is nearly over and this means I can begin to turn my thoughts back to game design, simulations and all things economic.

It's interesting returning to your designs after a brief spell away, it gives you an opportunity to double check your thoughts and reasoning for one. For the most part I'm happy with the way the architecture of the economy system is going, there are a few tweaks needed here and there.

More importantly than the architecture at this point though is the "feel" of the economy system. There's no point in introducing an advanced stock broking simulation into a world set in Bronze Age Greece for example and similarly we need to make sure that the economy in Faith fits the Faith Universe else it will stand out like a sore thumb or, worse, break the immersion for our players.

The world for Faith is being settled upon and is being defined more each day. This return from my break is an ideal opportunity to check that the direction the economy system is going in matches the Faith setting.

More soon.

What are Virtual World designers trying to achieve?

2006-04-05T07:22:00Z

Are they buidling a Virtual World, a Community, a Video Game? How do events in the Real World affect what happens in the system?

I don't normally like to pick on sites, however this recent blog post caught my eye.

In a nutshell, a World of Warcraft player tragically died in the Real World, his online friends held a memorial service in-game which was promptly attacked by a PvP guild. The attack was recorded and released for public consumption. Deliberately.

This story alone was enough to get me riled, however after reading through the comments after the Blog post I was even more disheartened.

Stripping out the obvious Trolls and Flamers in the Blogs comments which are purely designed to inflame (they're easy to spot as usually one liners), there are a couple of disturbing posts.

They are indicative of the sort of people that write them, but also of the perception of what a Virtual World is and the distinctions not only between reality and game but also between Virtual World and Online Games.

To the people arranging and attending the service, they were in touch with the reality of the real-world death of their friend. It can be argued that they used the World of Warcraft community system as a form of Video Conference system to bring together geographically seperate people.

To the people raiding the service, if we give them the benefit of the doubt they were stuck in the delusion of the World of Warcraft "world". If not then are they instead truly sick people?

I would love to know whether the individual members of the raid fully understood the significance of the service and the reality of it all.

Some snippets from that Blogs comments:

"...people do something so stupid and ridiculous as to have a virtual funeral for someone IN A VIDEO GAME, they leave themselves open..."

"...I'm not familiar with this WOW so it took some time to fully understand ... Am I correct in assuming that same people sank so pathetically low that they have "funerals" in some online game..."

"...What was the final body count on both sides?..."

(sic)

Personally I would rather have the sort of people who arranged the service come and experience the Faith Virtual World, if I had the choice. I've been called a "Carebear" already for this preference, as if it were a derogatory term.

Well, pardon me for being Human.

Progress and how the mind wanders

2006-03-20T19:06:00Z

Wow! I'm a Games Developer! Soon I'll have my lights up in, er, some Gaming Hall of, er, Legends alongside photographs and wax sculpture of the mighty Bartle, Koster, Braben and Green (oh come on you guys, people who have never met you know who you are, that's fame!).

Thunk! Ouch. But that's the sound of reality hitting me like a celebrity who's had their photo taken by one too many times by the Paparazzi while on a drunken binge in TriBeCa.

It's great to dream, and it's certainly an aspiration of mine, as it is with most of the team, to achieve industry recognition. However there's this small matter of actually producing a product.

Our economy system is progressing well, with work concentrating on a proof of concept that is intended to also serve as a prototyping tool for the team to continue brainstorm with. Kind of like Rapid Prototyping on a longer timescale. Coding around the core components is remaining tight so that we can lift elements out and into the production code base at a later
stage in order to cut development time.

What has always fascinated me at this early point in a long-term development are the thoughts that fly through your head about how the portion of the system you're working on will interact with other portions of the system.

A lot of the time, some of those portions exist only on paper or in the likes of UML Diagrams, requiring you to make a number of assumptions. The problem is that it's a rare battle plan that survives contact with the enemy.

As a result I'm largely in the middle of writing a number of layers and interfaces to handle the interactions between the Economy system and a few other systems that currently exist as concepts on paper. The lines between the box marked Economy and the other boxes.

Hardly glamorous work, eh?

But this is development, a long term development. These small lines between the boxes need this investment in time. If I want to achieve my dream I need to put in the grunt work.

I wonder whether Cael wants to be a photograph or a waxwork in the Hall of, er, Legends. I've always liked the idea of a bronze bust personally...

The danger of Buyouts

2006-03-16T15:26:00Z

The first time I ever noticed, truly acknowledged the existence, of something known as the "Buyout" was while searching for an item on eBay. I'm not sure if the concept of a "Buyout" existed before eBay, I'll research that at some point or ask someone who is more knowledgeable than me in the field of auctioneering.

Now, I'm not going to tell you what the item was, you're all imaginitive individuals so conjure something suitably geeky that you would imagine I would buy (answers on a postcard or in the comments section below please).

However as soon I saw the Buyout price I clicked the button. Instantly the item was mine, no if's or but's.

This is great from a marketing point of view, people are either cautious or impatient meaning that they either can't wait for an auction to end or they don't want to run the risk of not winning an auction.

The seller capitalises here, by pushing the Buyout price beyond market values they tempt the impatient and cautious buyers into spending more money than they otherwise would have saved by bidding ordinarily.

Flipping this around to the buyers point of view, they may have the goods immediately, however how much fun have they had?

If they enjoy immediate purchases and can avoid buyers remorse, that's fair enough, though is an Auction the right place for them to shop to get their kicks?

By allowing a purchaser to end an auction immediately, have you removed the fun element from that Auction?

Should an Auction be just that, a straight increase of bids up until either a time limit or no increase in bids have been received for a while?

Should the Buyout crowd be pointed in the direction of the High Street in order to allow the Auction purists to enjoy themselves? By introducing "Buyouts" have eBay lost that certain something that drew people to their service initially?

Of course, eBay and their customers are typically businesses, and fun isn't as important as the bottom line...

Possible meme?

2006-02-24T00:38:00Z

Has anyone else come across Street Fighter II whether in conversation, articles or in any of it's guises this week?

The game seems to be cropping up quite a bit.

Are we witnessing another meme spread across the globe?