November 26th, 2008 by adam

Your possible answers include:
1. Because … Apple engineers have never heard of the concept of a “patch”, and require you to re-download the *entire IDE*, with all libraries, all documentation, all binary code – everything – when they release an update? So the current “SDK” for iPhone (hint for Apple: when most people say “SDK” [...]

November 24th, 2008 by adam

Because WordPress is so poor at handling file uploads (AND because the new WP versions introduced incompatibilities somewhere that make some of the original blog pages 404 even though they are in the WordPress folder), I’ve created a SourceForge project for this (http://javanioserver.sourceforge.net/), and uploaded all the files there.
For those of you who wanted the [...]

November 24th, 2008 by adam

(”embarrassing, empty, yet still really dirty”)
Courtesy of The Register.
(and some real information here)

November 23rd, 2008 by adam

Now that I no longer work for a large MMO publisher, I no longer have access to all the juicy numerical goodness, research, and stats that they had on their games and everyone else’s. A chance email recently suggesting I take a look at Xfire’s gamestats led to some quick experiments that came out surprisingly [...]

November 22nd, 2008 by adam

Please stop spamming the blog, not for me, but for yourself. There are multiple layers of spam filter (you may have noticed that none of your fake posts has got through so far), so I have the luxury of having the few “uncertain” hits emailed to me, because there’s so few. If that changes, I’ll [...]

November 21st, 2008 by adam

Education is one of the most important drivers of mankind, after oxygen, food, and sex. You would think we took it seriously, as a society. Sadly, we continue to perpetuate insanely stupid myths when it comes to education. Here’s one of those that often annoys me which I was just reminded of:
Seen this graph? Believe [...]

November 21st, 2008 by adam

Just wanted to say: I detest “cron” more than mere words have the power to convey. I suspect there aren’t many other pieces of fundamental software implemented in so few lines of code that over so many years have caused so much harm and frustration to so many people and systems (surprisingly, cron has often [...]

November 21st, 2008 by adam

Given how much money these agencies charge – and how that SPECIFICALLY reduces the chances of “good but not great” candidates of getting job offers (anyone who says otherwise is a liar or naive) – I’m fed up of their mediocrity and the lack of criticism it gets. So, I’ve decided I’m going to stop [...]

November 20th, 2008 by adam

Lots of ideas and detailed explanation from games industry Producers and production staff on the IGDA Production mailing list here.
Unfortunately, I’m afraid that the people who run the Production SIG don’t believe in allowing you – the public – to read their conversations. So all I can do is tell you that there’s good stuff [...]

November 20th, 2008 by adam

As far as I can tell: no (?). I’m hoping it’s just that my Google-Fu is too weak, and there’s a solution out there that someone has already put together…

November 18th, 2008 by adam

(from Nic Brisbourne’s blog)
NB: I can’t actually try it, of course – Microsoft is still subscribing to the classic anti-Web 2.0 ideal of making it “zero information from our walled-garden until you pass a detailed user-verification process; visitors will be shot; guests are not welcome here”.

The interesting piece for me is that they are inferring [...]

November 18th, 2008 by adam

Someone asked me:
How many people play online games globally in 2008?
A simple answer
…and with a quick mental calculation I estimated 1 billion *unique registered accounts*. (I’ve been tracking and calculating this stuff a lot recently). That wasn’t good enough – they wanted something to put in a press release, so they wanted a methodology and [...]

November 17th, 2008 by adam

NB: Jussi and I have pooled our data, but will be looking at different aspects of it going forwards. Should be interesting…
Background
Roughly a month ago Jussi Laakkonen published a list of $350 million invested in year 2008 into virtual worlds, casual MMOs, and casual & social games. Based on US-centric sites, it missed out the [...]

November 17th, 2008 by adam

1. Ask people to join the closed beta 6 months before the open beta happens
http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/8117
Dinowaurs Beta Testers Wanted
We’re now inviting Kongregate members to sign up to test the Dinowaurs Beta. If you don’t know what Dinowaurs is, go here for more info: http://www.kongregate.com/forums/1/topics/3350.
Simply pop in to this thread and say that you want in and [...]

November 16th, 2008 by adam

I wanted to knock something up for Facebook, and I thought I’d try out PHP development on my shiny macbook air laptop (I usually develop on a much more powerful windows/linux PC).
This is tortuous, painful, and mostly undocumented on the official site. Sigh. After some experimentation, here’s how to make it work (IMHO you shouldn’t [...]

November 14th, 2008 by adam

On this site I have a rather subtly-hidden Blog Roll. When I started blogging, the site had less on it, and the roll was easy to find – and short. Now it’s not. And it’s long. And each link on there has been carefully considered. There’s some gems in there (although a lot of them [...]

November 14th, 2008 by adam

Thanks for everyone who voted in the survey (What topics do you want to read more about?) – very helpful.
You can help by rating the posts from now on whenever you see one that you greatly prefer / greatly dislike (I’ve added a plugin that lets you rate each post from 1 star to 5 [...]

November 12th, 2008 by adam

(a FAIL using web-based meeting tools)
1) Make it look fun and interesting and seemingly inclusive:
“MiniBar is a social evening in East London which offers people a chance to snaffle some free beer while discussing p2p, Creative Commons, web applications, social networking and general Web 2.0 (3.0) mayhem & fandango.”
2) …but require that signup has [...]

November 12th, 2008 by adam

Inspired by Andrew Chen (whose question I’ve copied exactly :)), here’s a poll to find out what YOU, thre readers of this blog, would like to see more of.
(tick all that apply; if you tick the “something else” option, please comment on this post and say what’s missing)
If you believe in metrics, user-interaction, and sampling [...]

November 7th, 2008 by adam

This is a tiny game we made more than 2 years ago as part of Perplex City. Many people are unaware that the tilt-sensors inside the iPhone are also available (or something very similar) inside every apple laptop (all Macbooks/most Powerbooks/some iBooks); we made a game that made use of this.
Unfortunately, this feature of the [...]