Month: May 2008

I’ve been using FF3 and FF2 in parallel for the last month, and FF3 has some cool features that definitely make life better. The most noticeable so far is the new address-bar, which has finally been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Until now, it was still using the very very basic (and > 15 years old) system of when you start typing a URL, a plain list of potential textual matches comes up with rather arbitrary sorting AND only matching if the URL starts with IDENTICAL letters as you’ve typed.

NB: this post is mainly to give a kick up the ass to those of you who “haven’t noticed” yet that Firefox 3 is available and that it kicks ass, and that you should switch to using it ASAP ;).

e.g. if you type “t-mac” into the address bar, http://t-machine.org would show up in the list of potential matches, but http://server.t-machine.org would not. Argh!

I’ve created a new category/page for all JNLP Creator stuff.

Almost complete now, still has a few missing features (e.g. no way to add the JAR files for your app yet; e.g. although it can add extensions, if you try to edit an existing JNLP file, then it doesn’t load them from the source JNLP) and a few bugs (requires Java 1.6 to run, sorry).

But the core stuff is there, and it has some nifty stuff e.g. with one click you can test your file locally using the actual data, which mostly works (although c.f. the lack of resources issue above! This is definitely still an alpha build).

Files to download (you need ALL of them):

1. Main file – jnlpcreator-bin1.jar
2. log4j
3. tmachine-basics-bin

Edward Hunter, comScore

Summary

Some useful stats, and some interesting issues raised in terms of privacy and practicalities of gathering stats.

A lot of good advice on how to select a target market for an online game that’s better than “any hardcore RPG players” – both better as in more precise and usable, and also better as in bigger and worth more money.

LOTS of questions afterwards; read to the bottom to see them all.

Nicole Lazzaro

Summary

I think Nicole is wonderfully off the wall, and this lecture underlined that. At the very dull GDC “roundtable” (where less than 10% of the audience opened their mouths) this year on Free to play, Pay for Items, she came out with the idea that we should be looking at making buying things in online games as enjoyable as shopping is in real life, and wondered why this inherently addictive real-world activity was so dull in almost all online games.

Unfortunately, I found the lecture a bit too off-the-wall, and very hard to follow, even having briefly looked at her proprietary “language of fun” docs before.

Slides from my second ION talk are here (this was the last session on the last day, so very few people made it along – slides for the first talk (which are probably what you’re looking for) are here). I don’t think anyone blogged this talk – sorry!

I’m helping out with a student game-programming competition at the moment – Dare 2 Be Digital – and we’ve just had a day of judging pitches from teams, trying to decide which ones to allow into the full competition. During the pitch process, a few pieces of recurring advice came to mind. We were allowed to advise, but since the day was mostly about deciding who to let through to the next round, there was very little time left over to give each team any specific comments (we had to focus instead on asking searching questions :)). For those that get through to the next round, they’ll get properly and intensively mentored, so it should be fine but I thought I’d throw my thoughts up here (and maybe some readers will want to add to them?)

Robert Mitchell, Sony Online Entertainment

Summary

Interesting to see what they’re doing, we’ve been looking at a lot of similar stuff recently. If I were in their position I’d want to try hacking the IDE to make it integrate with their build system directly – the speaker said that highly integrated build systems are a must for this stuff, but that doing everything inside the IDE with no external clicks or actions (like a “check in to perforce” action) was also essential. You can’t do both 100% without modifying the IDE; I’ve done that before for stuff we did for PXC, and it works like a dream, ONCE you’ve got it working ;).

I’ve been nagging game developers to writeup every game-conference session they go to, and blog it. I think this will serve a bunch of extremely valuable purposes, including:

• make sure that good talks and speakers get their work indexed by google; google isn’t great at finding stuff inside Powerpoint slides, and conferences only have a 30%-60% hit rate on managing to get the slides online anyway!
• provide rich, public, feedback on what’s both good and bad in talks, making it easier for ALL speakers to improve their technique and content choices in future.
• get the honest feedback of industry insiders on what people are saying and doing at conferences, instead of only getting the opinions of journalists and players. Most of us in the industry have lots of extra non-public information about the context of what people are or should be doing. We can’t necessarily say that explicitly, but we can let it inform our judgements and intrepretations of what people say and present.