Day: May 15, 2008

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.