Month: August 2007

Categories
conferences games design games industry web 2.0

AGDC 2007: Web 2.0 + Games meetup

I’m talking at Austin GDC on “Caching for Web 2.0”, and I’ll be having a small dig at the games industry and the obsession some people have with “game 1.0/2.0/3.0” on the side, but I’d really like to meet up with anyone interested in how best we can capitalize on the lessons from Web 2.0.

I think the vast majority of people in games still don’t “get it” when it comes to understanding web 2.0, and are going to make some really stupid egg-on-face mistakes and miss a few more big opportunities. But’s that just my opinion… :)

What’s yours?

UPDATE:
Venue: Halcyon
Time: 19:00
Day: Wednesday 5th

UPDATE 2: a couple of photos here

Categories
computer games games industry networking

How to Become a Great Network Programmer

An article I wrote for Gamasutra’s Game Career Guide:

Part 1 – What to study
Part 2 – Practice and Experience

…hopefully this will be useful to some of the many people interested in network programming but not sure where to start.

Also, you might want to have a look at my post on Career Progression for Games Programmers

Categories
Uncategorized

Re-install complete; blog should be OK

Someone brute-forced their way into the server last week, my fault for not disabling all logins to the server.

Normally, this isn’t a problem, as the default firewall setup I always use prevents any remote logins except from known-good hosts. However, this server was accidentally provided with partially missing firewall code by the hosting company, and so I couldn’t run my firewall without first upgrading the kernel. And I’d been “too busy to get around to” doing that…

Continue reading “Re-install complete; blog should be OK”
Categories
Uncategorized

Server got hacked; has now been wiped

Sorry, the entire blog is temporarily offline whilst I re-install the server. Will be restoring from backup imminently.

Adam

Categories
facebook java tutorials

How to Make Facebook Apps Using Java – part 2

In the first part, I covered a very high-level, idiot-guide to getting started with writing a Facebook app in java. This part will cover the details of how to architect your own code for basic Facebook authentication, and include code samples you can use to get up and running more quickly. It will also explain in more detail precisely how Facebook’s servers interact with your code, and what you can expect (and what their servers expect of you!).

NB: if the quoted source code is unreadable because it disappears off the edge of the screen, select it and copy/paste (or view source of the page to see it). The most useful stuff is put together into one class you can download here – source code for FacebookLoginServlet.java.

Continue reading “How to Make Facebook Apps Using Java – part 2”
Categories
games industry

Computer Games Industry Careers – Programmers

I’ve been in the games industry for some years now, and one of the things I find slightly annoying is that there’s very little discussion of “career progression”, and that what little there is typically focusses on “how to get your first job in the industry”.

Career Charts

Many years ago, I used to work at IBM’s R&D labs, and discovered that they had whole tables of “possible career paths” that you could download internally and consult when trying to decide what to do with yourself. They pressed hard on everyone to take some time out every 3-6 months to evaluate how their personal career was progressing, think about what they wanted to be doing in the future, and decide what long-term decisions they should be making in the present and near-future to help them get there.

The emphasis was on the individual, and of taking control of (and responsibility for!) your own future. The guides were there to help you find out what a potential future boss would expect of you if you wanted to apply for a job years in the future – when you’re a junior programmer, you may have no idea what a senior manager is supposed to do. No problem – except if you wanted to become one, in which case you wouldn’t know what to concentrate on learning for the next 10 years.

Big companies in the games industry, like EA, certainly do a similar thing internally. But I’ve so far failed to find any decent external, public, guides. So, for the benefit of anyone else who’s ever wondered what they should be doing to further their games-industry career, I’m going to start publishing my own take on this. I’d really really like input and feedback from other people, although there are big problems with conflicting definitions e.g. of what, exactly, a “development director” is. But at least I can start…

Chart 1: Programmers

Typical career progression for Programmers

This is a basic chart showing the main flow of career progression for programmers.

The most important thing to point out is that it only shows internal progression – later posts will show how you can easily move sideways from some of these positions into different disciplines, especially Design and Production. But I’ll be covering each core discipline in it’s “plain” form first, and showing the links between them later.

Programmer levels

Junior – recent graduates and/or people with no games industry experience and not enough years of hard-core C++ coding to jump straight to the Programmer level. Note that most Juniors pick up some specialism – not enough to become an expert, but enough that later they can re-specialise in that role as a Senior.

Programmer (normal) – anyone who’s passed their apprenticeship as a junior, typically with 1-3 years of experience programming on games projects, and credited on 1-2 published titles.

Senior – a programmer who has decided to specialize in an area of programming, becoming an “expert” over and above a normal programmer. Usually someone who chose to avoid a managerial position – although note that on larger teams most Senior’s end up managing Juniors in their area of expertise. However, the management is mostly mentoring, as opposed to Lead’s who do much more project-management-esque roles. Seniors typically start off as a Junior in the same area of expertise, and refine their skills and gain lots more experience whilst a normal Programmer.

Lead – a programmer who manages a team of programmers. There are two types of Lead: the mentoring lead who still programs day to day, who is an expert programmer who could have been a Senior, and the project-managing lead who hardly ever programs (if at all) and spends more time arranging the workload for all the other programmers and helping out the Project Manager(s) / Producer(s) with scheduling and delivery. Both types act primarily as go-between, interfacing between the entire programming team and the rest of the world (design team, art team, and producer). Most Leads are experimenting to see how much they like project management, and may switch to being a Producer or Project Manager later on.

Technical Director – ultra-experienced / skilled experts, usually troubleshooters floating amongst all dev teams, or attached to a particularly large team. They take on all the non-direct-programming tasks that require substantial technical expertise. This often means a big role in hiring, solving long-term problems, and architecting large systems for complex games.

Development Director – this one’s very vague, because more than any other Programming role there’s huge variety in the actual responsibilities of this role from company to company. I’m defining it here as “the person who is in overall charge of all direct creation of all games: programming, art, and design”. Their role is entirely strategic – they may be a skilled technical person (there are many other routes to this role – see upcoming charts in future posts), but they delegate ALL technical issues to their one or more Technical Directors. However, they typically make the final decision on anything affecting the development process or the overall studio and how it develops.

Next … Design (probably. Or maybe Production…)

Categories
facebook java tutorials

How to Make Facebook Apps Using Java – part 1

I wrote a game last weekend, for Facebook. Writing the entire multiplayer persistent game took a day and a half; getting it to integrate with Facebook is taking several days. Mostly, the problem is that Facebook hasn’t – yet – provided user-guide documentation, and there are plenty of bugs in their system. Without docs, you have to guess whether a “nothing happens” is due to your mistaken guesswork, a bug in FB, or … a bug in your own code. That’s fine, but it takes time, lots of time.

Google kept giving me zero hits for any of the problems, or even any java-focussed docs (just one link to a FAQ on an issue that seems to be a bug that was fixed a while ago. That’s all). So, as I solve the various problems that come up, I’m writing about them.

Platform

First thing to be clear about: if you want to write FB apps using java, you’ll be using Enterprise Edition (J2EE). The way FB works *requires* you to provide a webserver for your app. Whilst its true that java can run in the web browser, that’s a completely different way of using java – for this, you’re going to have to find a server, and install J2EE (it’s the same as standard java, just has lots of extra libraries, only a few of which you’ll need to use).

Facebook Apps: how they work

This diagram shows a very simplistic summary of the different URL’s you are asked for when registering a Facebook application, or are used when serving an App. Note that FBML is served entirely internally in the FB server, it does NOT make a request to your web server.

NB: this image got deleted in the server crash last month; WordPress is rather badly designed with images, and doesnt save them. But it’s been stolen and copied widely all over the web, so you can probably find it relatively easily
Basic explanation of facebook servers

First step: Registering your Facebook Application

Assuming you can find yourself a webserver/J2EE server to run your app on, and have a domain name for it (or the hosting provider gives you a default domain-name – you don’t HAVE to buy one just for your app), the first thing to do is register the app with Facebook. This just reserves the name of your app, and gets you the login details you’ll need before you can do ANY testing or development.

This process is actually nicely documented (and is also very simple – although the huge scary forms they ask you to fill in are very poorly explained, there’s a only a few fields you actually *need* to fill in). Don’t follow the list of things on that page literally, see the differences below that you want to make.

For the URL’s you need to fill-in, you’ll be making a servlet for each. So, work out the URL for each of the servlets (depends on how you setup your J2EE server), and have them ready to give to FB.

So, to summarise:

  1. Create a Facebook account if you don’t have one, and login
  2. Add the “Developer” app to your account (link is here)
  3. Go to your Home page on FB
  4. Click on the Developer app in the sidebar to go to the main centre for all your Developer activity
  5. Make a new application, and fill in the form it presents you with (make sure you do at least:
    1. App name
    2. Callback URL (see the example app)
    3. Canvas page (see the example app)
    4. iFrame (not FBML)
    5. Post-add URL (see the example app)
  6. Save the api-key and the session-key that it now displays for the newly-created app – you’ll need them to do any coding

First test: Can Facebook display your Application?

Create the various servlets on your server (callback, postadd, and canvas) and make each of them return basic HTML that just says “callback servlet”, “postadd servlet”, or “canvas servlet”).

Open a new browser window, and type in the canvas page URL from FB, something like: http://apps.facebook.com/yourApplicationName

You might be asked some security stuff by FB, but once you’ve got past that you should then see a Facebook page with the navbars etc, but just a big empty space in the middle with the test “callback servlet”. If so, congratulations, you’ve got your app basically working. Now comes all the hard stuff…

If not, first check that your servlet is even working, by copy/pasting the callback URL from your FB application setttings (click Edit Settings to re-load the form you submitted) into a browser window, and seeing if you can get the page. You’ve probably got a typo in the URL you gave FB. If the “callback servlet” text doesn’t come up on its own, without all the FB stuff, then your J2EE server is misconfigured or broken. Time for you to go find some Tomcat / jBoss / etc tutorials and get your J2EE working…

Part two…

Now you can move on to part 2 of this series, covering the details of how to authenticate with Facebook and start doing interesting work, including sample source code.