Month: August 2009

Categories
dev-process games design iphone

New free iPhone game…

Last night, I had another game approved for the App Store…

ss1

iTunes: click here to open iTunes download page

I started writing this as a real-life demo on how to use the tech for my new company (if any of our early access licensees are reading this, a project ZIP with full source code should appear on your dashboard imminently), but I gave it to a few friends to test, and they liked it so much I thought I’d put it up on the App Store too.

I’ll be updating it over time to add more of the features from our tech. If enough people download it, I might even make a paid version (which would be pretty handy as an example, too :)) with some more features, more powerups, etc.

Categories
amusing recruiting

Games Industry Recruitment: Intel

Things are getting interesting in Recruitment land again…

Received today:

Adam, greetings from the Visual Computing Group at Intel Corporation. We received your contact information from the Siggraph Job Fair.

Please let me know how much discrete or integrated graphics driver development, media software, or debug experience you have and what you are interested in doing. Also let me know about your video codec and debug experience.

Please complete this pre-screen document and return it to me along with your current resume. You can also create a career profile at http://www.intel.com/jobs .

Intel is changing the way the world sees 3D graphics, visualization and games. Our Larrabee architecture will deliver teraflops of performance for high-throughput applications, including scientific computing, gaming and visualization. In addition, our Software and Solutions Group is working to enhance all levels of software that executes on Intel based platforms.

We invite you to consider opportunities with Intel by completing and returning the attached Graphics pre-screen as soon as possible which will let us know if you are available, your area of expertise, where you want to work and salary expectations. As soon as we receive this information, we will be reviewing with the hiring managers. If there is interest, the next contact will be from the hiring manager to conduct a phone screen Additionally, I have attached a copy of a flyer on the work this group is doing and information about Intel.

We look forward to hearing from you soon.

Best regards,
Larry Gonzales
Sr. Recruiting Consultant
Intel Corporation/VCG

My reply:

Hi, Larry!

2009/8/18 Gonzales, Larry Z :
>
> Adam, greetings from the Visual Computing Group at Intel Corporation. We
> received your contact information from the Siggraph Job Fair.

No. You didn’t. You really didn’t. I wasn’t at Siggraph this year.

I’m a serial CTO of online games and MMO companies. My last job involved leading internal PS3 and PC MMO development, and founding a new internal studio, for one of the world’s largest online games publishers.

> Please complete this pre-screen document and return it to me along with your
> current resume. You can also create a career profile at
> http://www.intel.com/jobs .

If you want me to apply to a position, feel free to send me the details.

> We invite you to consider opportunities with Intel by completing and
> returning the attached Graphics pre-screen as soon as possible which will
> let us know if you are available, your area of expertise, where you want to
> work and salary expectations. As soon as we receive this information, we

I’m not interested in anything less than [ommitted] USD per annum (which is slightly below the last round of job offers I turned down).

Apart from that requirement, I’m happy to consider anything you send me.

Regards,
Adam Martin

(working at Intel could be interesting. But I certainly don’t feel in the mood to do all the work of a “pre-screen document”, and to make apologies for the lack of “your video codec and debug experience” for a job I know nothing about, never asked for, and which – a moment’s glance at my public LinkedIn profile would show – I am hopelessly inappropriately qualified for :))

Categories
conferences games industry

What talk do you want from me at GDC? (you have 12 hours to reply!)

A bit late to be asking, I know, but … If you’re (considering) going to GDC next year (the worlds biggest game development conference, in San Francisco), is there any topic in particular you’d like me to speak on?

The deadline for proposals has been extended to today. I’ve submitted something about iPhone development, because its useful and IMHO generally applicable enough to be of interest to much of the GDC audience. but I’ve no idea if they’ll decide to take me up on it. Quite possibly not.

Whatever I speakabout, obviously all slides will be posted here, and the conference organizers will record full audio and let anyone purhase it for a few dollars IIRC.

so… What would YOU like to hear/see?

If its sane and I can actually talk meanIngfully on it, I promise I’ll submit a proposal today, just for you :).

The process requires – amongst other things – a shortlist of what “new skills or knowledge” the audience will gain from the session. Bear that in mind if you reply (either in comments field below or jsut email me directly)

EDIT: OK … it’s done … a talk on Entity Systems for MMO engines. It’ll take a few months to find out what they think, I’ll let you know how it turns out…

Categories
devdiary entrepreneurship games design iphone startup advice

Volunteer project: a simple RPG for iPhone – UPDATE

A lot of people asked me to blog as this volunteer project progressed, share some insight into how things were going. I’ve not had enough time until just now, and it’s a mix: Some good news, some bad news.

Continue reading “Volunteer project: a simple RPG for iPhone – UPDATE”
Categories
computer games design dev-process devdiary games design iphone

Dungeon Master Clone for iPhone – Concept GUI

(c.f. my original post here: http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/28/want-to-help-write-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone/)

I’ve been playing around with GUI setups for DM / EOTB / Wizardry clones on iPhone, and thought I’d post some of the more interesting results here – I’m interested to see what other people think of each of them.

The first three are all assuming a single-character RPG, the fourth is something more like DM / Wizardry (could be 6 chars, could be 3).

Everything is clickable – small maps become full screen map, blue buttons fire spells, character portraits go to the inventory screens.

Screens with no arrow buttons require you to drag your finger forwards/backwards/left/right to move, and allow 360 degree movement. Screens with arrow buttons assume you can only turn 90 degrees at a time (like the original games), although they smoothly animate the rotations (UN-like the original games – because I have access to OpenGL to do the 3D for me).

What do you think?

concept-ss-1

concept-ss-2

concept-ss-3concept-ss-4

Categories
iphone

Uploading iPhone app to App Store fails with CodeSign validation error

I’ll be writing this up in more detail soon, but here’s a bad error message from Apple’s App Store process (summer 2009) that I found zero hits for on a google search, so I thought I’d quickly throw up this page now that I’ve found out what the cause is. Hopefully it will help anyone else who hits the same problem.

If you’re using the new Apple Uploader to send your binary to the App Store (don’t! I’ve discovered it has at least one critical bug where it claims to upload the binary but it actually hasn’t!), you might hit this error before the upload starts:

“Application failed codesign verification. Please see the console log for additional details”

Assuming you know enough about OS X to know how/where to view the Console, at the end of the log you may see something like this pair of entries:

ApplicationLoader[18609] *** Codesign error (please ignore invalid option comments): got requirements(0x805a00, 525)
Executable=/var/folders/0o/0oFmipSKGvqwVZcVZJPOgU+++TI/-Tmp-/starcatcher.app.zip/starcatcher.app/Star Catcher
Identifier=no
Format=bundle with Mach-O thin (armv6)
CodeDirectory v=20001 size=1587 flags=0x0(none) hashes=72+5 location=embedded
Signature size=4274
Authority=iPhone Distribution: Adam Martin
Authority=Apple Worldwide Developer Relations Certification Authority
Authority=Apple Root CA
Signed Time=10 Aug 2009 16:55:51
Info.plist entries=18
Sealed Resources rules=3 files=24
Internal requirements count=0 size=12

Executable=/var/folders/0o/0oFmipSKGvqwVZcVZJPOgU+++TI/-Tmp-/starcatcher.app.zip/starcatcher.app/Star Catcher
got entitlements(0x805e00, 299)
codesign_wrapper-0.7.3: using Apple CA for profile evaluation
AssertMacros: binary, file: /data/conrad/security/codesign_wrapper/codesign.c, line: 205
AssertMacros: code_signatures, file: /data/conrad/security/codesign_wrapper/codesign_wrapper.c, line: 903

ApplicationLoader[18609] *** Error: /Users/adam/Desktop/starcatcher.app.zip: validation failures: (
“Application failed codesign verification. Please see the console log for additional details”
)

What’s the error message?

Ah, well, despite the second entry claiming that the console log will have an error … the error itself is missing (like so much of Apple’s documentation ;)). With a bit of imagination and “creative interpretation”, I spotted that:

Line 1:

ApplicationLoader[18609] *** Codesign error (please ignore invalid option comments): got requirements(0x805a00, 525)

Line 16:

got entitlements(0x805e00, 299)

and inferred that there was a problem with a checksum, whereby it was expecting something that looked like X, but found something that looked like Y.

(NB: Apple’s appallingly bad lack-of-error-message may mean something completely different, but this guess lead to me trying something that ended up fixing the problem)

Looking carefully at my App, looking for signed things not being what were expected, I realised that my app was importing a static library that had been signed by someone else (partly because the new version of Xcode defaults to signing everything, all the time – which it should do, but I hadn’t got used to that new “feature” yet). With bad code-signing implementations, that can often be a problem (although I naively expected Apple to have a sensible implementation of code-signing, and it had never occurred to me this would be a problem with Xcode. Oops).

Speaking to the person who built that library, I found that the build config they’d used had been set to sign using a Developer provisioning profile. I re-built it using my Distribution provisioning profile, re-added the static lib binary it to my project, re-built my app … and the App Store upload finally succeeded.

Anyway … followup post coming soon on how to make static libraries work on iPhone with iPhone OS 3.0 / Xcode 3.1.3 and above (hint: Apple broke some of the things that used to work, and so sometimes you have to do it differently since OS 3.0 came along)

Categories
amusing community social networking Web 0.1

Web 0.1: Apple Customer Support: “please don’t email us, just sue us”

I saw an article recently that described this attitude nicely: certain weak marketing executives believe that the purpose of a “conversation” is for them to have more ways of telling the customer what to do; they are seemingly incapable of understanding the idea that a “conversation” involves listening to the other person.

To them, email is a “one-way broadcast medium for us to tell the customer what to buy”, rather than “a two-way communication medium that allows us to listen and respond to our customers”.

Today, I received a great example. Here’s an email I received one month ago, from Apple:

“Thank you for renewing your iPhone Developer Program membership. New Expiration Date: 10 Aug 2010”

And here’s the email I received today, from Apple:

“your iPhone Developer Program has expired” (sent from address: “noreply-iphonedev@apple.com” )

A triple-whammy on appalling customer support there:

  1. Erroneously (I hope) claiming that they are NOT providing a service they have committed to providing
  2. Taking money from a bank account in return for a service that they then don’t provide (that bit’s illegal)
  3. …and:
  4. Sending all correspondence from an email address that they mark “noreply”; i.e. “if we (Apple) screwed up, we don’t want to hear from you. We don’t want to fix it. Go away”

I especially like the way they put this all together, so you get the implication that:

Apple would prefer me to sue them (Apple), or file a claim against them for fraud, than to let me send them a simple email and spare them the fallout of their stupid mistake.

Using a two-way media to deliberately ignore your customers? That’s Web 0.1.

Categories
Uncategorized

Venues with free wifi in Brighton & Hove

Info correct and checked: Summer 2009.

Scroll down for detailed reviews/explanations of each venue. If you know of others, feel free to add a comment at the bottom of this page. Please use the same format (One line with: name/type/secure/rating/sockets, then your own text review). I’ll try to visit them myself, and add my own reviews to the main article when I get time.

Venues

Note: each place is listed with 5 pieces of info:
– Name of venue
– Type of venue (restaurant, pub, cafe, etc)
– Is their Wifi encrypted? (see this article for why/how this matters)
– Rating (1 = terrible, 5 = perfect)
– Tables that have Electric sockets (either single or double), for recharging your laptop – how many in the venue?

  • The Florist – Pub – Secure 5/5 (E:3)
  • The Eddy – Pub – Secure 4/5 (E: 2)
  • Regency Tavern – Pub – Secure 4/5 (E: 1)
  • Earth and Stars – Pub – Insecure 4/5 (E: 2)
  • Hampton Arms – Pub – Insecure 3/5 (E:?)
  • Windmill – Pub – secure – 3/5 (E: some)
  • The Tin Drum – Restaurant/Pub – Insecure 3/5 (E: 2)
  • The Duke of Wellington – Pub – Secure 3/5 (E: 3)
  • Prince of Wales – Pub – Insecure 2/5 (E:?)
  • Cafe 37 – Internet Cafe – Secure 1/5 (E: 0)
  • Cafe Nero – Cafe – Secure 1/5 (E: ?)
  • Cafe Nia – Restaurant – Secure 1/5 (E: 1 – pay!)

And, the odd one out:

  • Taylor St Barista – Cafe – None 0/5 (E:0)

(read on for details + map links)

Continue reading “Venues with free wifi in Brighton & Hove”