Conferences don’t make these public.

But they should.

So … here are the evaluations (from the audience) for our panel session at AGDC 09.

Judge for yourself whether you want to attend any future sessions featuring us again (Adam Martin, Bill Dalton, Rick Lambright, Joe Ludwig, Marty Poulin).

Head Count: 74; Evaluations: 32 (43% response rate)

• Overall rating of the presentation – 88% (AVG: 86%)
• How relevant was the topic to you? – 86% (AVG: 84%)
• How well did this class meet your expectations? – 94% (AVG: 84%)
• Would you recommend this session to a colleague? – 90% (AVG: 84%)
• Evaluate the speakers’ ability to communicate – 94% (AVG: 86%)
• If there were visual aids (slides) how were they? – 74% (AVG: 60%)

All of those are above average, and I’m glad that a particularly high number would recommend the session to their colleagues.

It seems that we did particularly well on fulfilling the remit (very high number for “met expectations”), and that our speakers had an awesome ability to communicate (almost 10% higher than average for the other speakers at the conference).

Audience Comments

1. The most entertaining session I attended, but didn’t sacrifice information value.
2. Interesting format, I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this, but it is time consuming
3. Good stuff
4. Slow, confused start lost valuable time for Q&A
5. Should have done middleware
6. Only 3 topics covered. Expected others

Comment 4 – yeah, something I’m unhappy about too, (it wasn’t our fault, it was the people running the conference), but there was nothing for it but to grin and carry on. Someone screwed-up the radio microphones, and we lost a lot of time at the start waiting for them to fix it. There was nothing we could do – they had connected the mics from a different room to *our* speakers. We didn’t find out until the person in the other room started talking, and it all came out through our speakers :(.

Comment 6 – we covered 4 topics (oops, audience can’t count :P). We all wanted to do more, but at GDC conferences, the organizers only give us 1-hour slots. With 4 speakers + moderator, I think that was pretty good, especially considering the time we lost at the start.

Perhaps someone will clone this format for a future conference (seems a good idea), and try to get a 2-hour slot for it?

Slides for our panel arehere: “Killing mmo tech sacred cows.pdf”.

Final panel was myself (moderating) and speakers: Bill Dalton (Bioware), Rick Lambright (Gazillion), Joe Ludwig (Valve), Marty Poulin (Shady Logic).

PLEASE NOTE: WE DON’T REALLY ADVOCATE EXTREMIST RESPONSES TO TECHNICAL QUESTIONS; THIS WAS JUST A BIT OF FUN. (Mostly).

Really? O, RLY?

Well, no, probably not – but this is the kind of opening statement I often make at industry-conference parties. In this rare case, at LOGIN this year, I was showing something on my laptop at the time and happened to *type* my opening salvo, rather than just say it.
(more…)

This week, a game service was announced that would stream games to your home TV without you needing to own a console or PC. A lot of people are wondering: are these guys smoking crack?

EDIT: Richard Leadbetter at Eurogamer has an article with some great “side by side compare” video to show theoretical quality you can achieve with off the shelf compressors right now. He comes to a similar conclusion on the issue of latency, although having seen the video I disagree on the quality (he feels it’s unacceptable) – it’s clearly inferior, but it still provides a very nice experience, especially if you’re sitting 6-12 feet away from the screen.
(more…)

http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22528

“It is probably safe to say that, despite decades of ever more spectacular Hollywood visions of extra-terrestial domination, humanity in its worst nightmares never imagined it would have to contend with spawn-camping aliens.”

(also … If that article is accurate, sad but unsurprising to hear that (apparently) the underpowered server tech for TR yet again managed to make a misery of gameplay, even at the very end. If that article is accurate, then well done to the ops for managing to get some instancing sorted out, but note to self: never let this happen with future twitch-based / FPS MMOs)

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 need to do this – although the Eclipse project allows plugin developers to package their plugins in really stupid ways, and doesn’t make it easy for anyone (users, developers, etc) – it’s still the fault of the plugin developer if they ALSO do not make it easy for the users to install).

First problem: get Eclipse

IME, most programmers who would use Eclipse already have it. The PHP plugin website won’t really help you, mostly taking the attitude of “install an extra copy of eclipse, just for doing PHP development; if you already have eclipse … work it out yourself”. I kind of understand why, but still feel that the first duty of every developer is to make their stuff easy to install!

If you don’t have Eclipse, I highly recommend you do NOT follow the PHP instructions (by downloading their pre-made “PHP + Eclipse all in one”) because then you are doomed to having multiple parallel installs if you ever need to use any other programming language; learn how to do it properly instead.

Download eclipse here (you want the latest stable version, currently called “Ganymede” (no, I don’t know why they stopped using Version numbers either – yes, it does make life more difficult for all normal users who haven’t memorized the funny names. Sigh)). You can get “Eclipse with Java” or “Eclipse with C/C++” or whatever you want – they are all identical, some just have extra plugins pre-installed.

NB: the people that run the Eclipse website have some pretty icon-artists, but a cruel sense of humour (or just suck at website design, maybe? I shouldn’t complain – it used to be a LOT worse than this) and don’t provide bookmarkable links to the OS X version (that I could find, at least); you’ll just have to go to that page and scroll till you find it. Right now, the current “standard” Eclipse version is at the VERY BOTTOM OF THE SCREEN (c.f. my previous comment re: sense of humour), and at the right hand edge of that box is a tiny link saying “Mac OS X”)

If you’re new to Eclipse, you will probably find that downloading eclipse is one of the most confusing downloads you’ve ever done; if so, this is part of that same problem mentioned above where the Eclipse project makes plugin installs ridiculously difficult: all those many confusing different Eclipse versions that you cannot tell the difference between are actually the same, but differ only in which plugins are pre-installed.

Yes, this is stupid. Yes, it’s badly documented. Sorry. You’ll learn to live with it – they’ve been doing this for almost ten years now so don’t expect it to be fixed any time soon.

I suggest you run Eclipse once, now, before going on to the next step – if Eclipse doesn’t start at this point, don’t waste time confusing yourself with the PHP plugins until you can get Eclipse working on its own!

Second problem: get PHP IDE (now renamed to “PDT”)

You can try to do the automated-install; Eclipse is bad at handling automated installs, has very poor error-handling if anything goes wrong (it just crashes and doesn’t explain), and plugin developers usually screw-up the auto-install API in ways that can actully render your copy of Eclipse unusable (this happens *a lot*). I would advise never using it if you can avoid it.

This one’s pretty messed-up. According to the website and the list of requirements, if you want to use the latest version (vesion 2.0, not yet “packaged”), then you have to download approx 6 massive files.

I found that if you download the “Eclipse for Java” pacakge then it has some of those built-in already, and even if you don’t, several of those have EACH OTHER built-in (WTF?). I suggest you don’t take any risks, and that you do this the long way (download EVERYTHING).

First, go to this download page.

Decide which version you want; right now you want “2.0.0 Stable Builds”, but soon that will be what you get from “Latest Releases”, so check there too.

Then download ALL the zip files listed under “PDT” AND everything listed under “Build Dependencies”. Right now, there are 3 files for “PDT” (SDK, Runtime, and Tests), and 5 files under “Build Dependencies” (Eclipse gtk, EMF, DTP, GEF, and WTP).

Third problem: OS X can’t unzip the files

If, like most OS X users, you’re using Stuffit Expander to unzip the files, by default it won’t do it, because they all overwrite the same directory name (and StuffIt is designed to “protect” you from that, which is nice).

That’s only slightly annoying to get around, but you are still screwed, because OS X itself is (apparently – I couldn’t find a way around this using Finder) hard-coded to prevent you from copying the contents of the directories into the Eclipse directory. When you try to it says “delete the target directory first, or cancel?” (unlike windows, which says “only overwrite files which are the same, otherwise copy all the missing files … or cancel?” which is 99% of the time what you wanted. I have no idea why Apple uses a “destructive” copy – and gives you no alternative!)

Here’s how to get around both problems: The solution – Manual install via Terminal

Fortunately, if you switch to using the Terminal, and run “unzip” by typing it in manually, by default it’s setup as a unix variant that acts in the same way that Windows works by default.

First, make sure you are in the directory where you saved the ZIP files, e.g. by typing:

cd ~/Downloads

(assuming you saved them to your personal Downloads folder)

Then you just type:

unzip [name of zipfile1]
unzip [name of zipfile2]
…
unzip [name of zipfileN]

…which resolves the incompatibilities in the distro files, and then to install the plugin you type:

cp -Ri eclipse [location of your eclipse folder - usually: /Applications/eclipse]

Note that the “-R” is *required*, and that there is NO trailing slash after “eclipse”. The “i” after the “-R” is optional, it might be good to know if you have problems, but it allows you to get confirmation before overwriting any files. Thankfully, you can just hold down the enter key and it will do the defautl (do not overwrite) as it goes through each file; there are many hundreds of files to copy, and you may already have hundreds of them, so this is handy.

Installation complete

Now start Eclipse – this took 5 minutes for me, where normally it takes 30 seconds, don’t ask me why) – but eventually it worked.

Test it works – go “File -> New Project” and scroll down to the PHP folder, and select “PHP Project”. If there is no PHP folder in the list, then the install has failed. Start again. Good luck.

Otherwise, it should let you create a project, in which case: You now have PDT / PHP-IDE for Eclipse installed and working.

Writing a PHP file

I’m assuming you know how to do this, or can find a tutorial (any PDT tutorials should be fine – it works the same way as the mainstream language plugins for Eclipse, so *any* tutorial on creating a source file and building it ought to work).

Fourth problem: Running your PHP

Oh crap. If you go ahead and create a project, give it a name, and hit OK, you’ll find that the PHP IDE seems designed to not allow you to develop or test PHP on a server; it only supports developing and testing on a local (inside Eclipse) private PHP interpreter. If you’re new to programming, this is fine to get started and learn some basic PHP.

If you’re an experienced programmer, you’ll probably hat that: unless you enjoy tracking down unreproducable bugs and tearing your hair out, you need to develop on the same software + version that runs your production server (in most cases, this will be an Apache2 server running the PHP5 module). Since OS X comes with Apache2 *and* PHP5 built-in, you *already* have a server on your machine that is probably 98% the same as the live server you would use (so far Apache2 + PHP5 on OS X seems to act almost identically to the same versions on Linux, FreeBSD, etc – as you would expect).

(98% is annoyingly short of 100%, but it’s a lot closer than using the bulit-in interpreter)

I can’t find any options in the Run Dialogs to control how it invokes the running of the code from a remote server (or even a local one!) – if you go digging through all the config options, they’re just missing.

NB: there IS something that looks like it might do the trick, where it has a list of “Server” and lets you choose a “PHP Server” – but THIS IS A LIE (there is no cake), do not believe it, this is for something else entirely; it’s just that someone made a poor choice of name for those labels).

Instead, what you have to do is be a lot more careful when creating new projects. Do this:

• File -> New… -> PHP Project
• Fill in project name as per normal with Eclipse
• UNcheck the “default” option for “Project Contents”
• Click the Browse button under “Project Contents” and navigate to wherever you keep your source DIRECTORIES for all your projects (see more on this below – and you may end up crying when you see what has to be done)
• Click Finish
• …NB: BE CAREFUL: it asks you a sneaky extra question, and your answer depends on how you manage source control (see below)

Special Note: where do you keep your PHP?

If:

• you are just developing locally for now on OS X

• AND you want to use the Sites directory to save your PHP files in
• AND you want to use your Apache2/PHP server instead of the “fake” one that comes with eclipse

Then:

• select your personal Sites folder as the Project Contents above
• AND answer “Create project in /Users/[your name]/Sites/[project name]” when you press Finish above

This will:

• automatically create a new sub-directory in Sites with the same name as your project
• mean that the address of your project is “http://localhost/[projectname]/”
• mean that if you delete the project in Eclipse, and select “delete from disk as well” when you do, Eclipse will delete ONLY the “[projectname]” subdirectory from your Sites folder, and leave everything else intact

…ALTERNATIVELY…

If:

• you use proper source control which has a unique root directory for each source project

Then:
EITHER:

• select the folder for that project as the Project Contents above

• AND answer “Create project in [source root folder]. (Deleting the project will delete the entire [source root folder])

OR:

• select the PARENT folder that contains the project-specific source folder as the Project Contents above
• AND answer “Create project in [PARENT folder of source root folder]” when you press Finish above

I actually strongly recommend the first option, since this will ensure that Eclipse doesn’t mess with your source control’s PARENT folder (which in most source control systems will either screwup the system (happens with crappy source control like CVS) or just be ignored because you won’t have write-access (happens with the more high quality source control) – but this can upset Eclipse if you do some other things wrong in the future.

FINALLY!

After all that, I finally had a working PHP IDE on OS X. Yes!

I haven’t tried debugging yet, but I found the following links that look pretty sound for setting it up. Bear in mind that the first one tells you to setup your Project Contents differently – just adapt what it tells you depending upon what you did above – the author doesn’t seem to fully understand Eclipse’s arcane approach to projects (given the name he uses for his Project!), which is fine, but IMHO not recommended.

http://robsnotebook.com/php_debugger_pdt_xdebug

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 are updated so infrequently few people track them).

So it’s time to call-out some of the interesting things to be found in the blogging world of MMO people.

By the way … you can tell who’s working on uber-secret or personally exciting projects these days because they’ve suspiciously stopped blogging for months at a time. Lazy slackers, the lot of them. The more you do, the more you should blog! :P

There are some that should be on the blogroll but aren’t (yet), and some other bloggers I should mention (but I’m sticking to the blogroll only for this post – I’ll go through others next time). Feel free to add your own recommended reading in the comments.

Blogs to read:
Brinking (Nabeel Hyatt)
* Who? serial entrepreneur, raised funding and sold companies
* What? currently running a funk-tastic social / music / games company with a bunch of Harmonix guys
* Why? big commentator on the games/apps/making money/predictions parts of All Things Facebook

Broken Toys (Scott Jennings / LTM)
* Who? became infamous in the early days of MMOs as a player of Ultima Online who ranted publically, amusingly, and sometimes even insightfully
* What? ex-NCsoft, now doing intriguing web games at John Galt Games
* Why? In his heart Scott’s still a player, and more than anyone else I’ve seen he interprets the world of MMO design, development, and playing through the players’ eyes. Interesting point: he’s mostly concerned with life-after-launch. Funny that. Players kind of find that bit the most interesting. Also keeps a close eye on community-management screw-ups, and WoW generally

Bruce Everiss
* Who? ex-head of marketing for Codemasters
* What? um, I’m not sure what he’s doing these days, apart from becoming a “professional blogger”
* Why? he aims to comment on every single interesting piece of news in the mainstream games industry. That’s a lot of commentary. Always something to read! IMHO he is often completely wrong about anything online-games, and a lot of business and “future of industry” stuff – Bruce is from an older age of the industry. But … he says a lot of interesting things and sparks a lot of interesting debates in the process. Worth reading. Just remember he is extremely (deliberately, I’m sure) provocative, and don’t take it too seriously.

Coke and Code (Kevin Glass)
* Who? A programmer working in mainstream IT
* What? An insanely prolific author of casual games “in his free time, as a hobby”
* Why? Because he’s better at making games than many professionals I’ve met, and he is very very prolific, making new libraries, toolsets, editors, games, game engines – and commenting on it all as he goes, and throwing up new games for you to play all the time

Erik Bethke
* Who? ex-Producer for Interplay
* What? CEO of GoPets, an online casual virtual world that’s especially big in Asia (and based in South Korea)
* Why? A hardcore WoW player who analyses the game-design as he goes, and relates very honestly a stream of both emotional experiences and seminal events in the game that should give you lots of things to be thinking about, especially if you’re a designer, business person, or product manager.

Extenuating Circumstances (Dan Hon)
* Who? ex-MindCandy, current CEO of SixToStart
* What? one of the first Bloggers (on the whole of the internet!) in the UK, and an awe-inspiring assimilator of “everything happening on the internet, with technology, with media, with entertainment and the future of the world” for all of the ten years I’ve known him.
* Why? He’s still an excellent tracker of all those things, and finds memes very quickly. Nowadays he just auto-posts links (lots of them, every day) with a few words of commentary scattered here and there (del.icio.us descriptions) – making his blog a ready-made news filter for you :)

Fishpool (Osma Ahvenlampi)
* Who? CTO of Sulake (makers of Habbo Hotel)
* What? a very technical commentator, often in great detail, on the issues of running a 100-million user virtual world, with observations about Habbo’s community, business, and culture thrown in
* Why? He posts very rarely, but when he does, they’re usually full of yummy detail

Futuristic Play (Andrew Chen)
* Who? ex-VC (Mohr-Davidow Ventures)
* What? entrepreneur with a web-background who’s come into the games industry and bringing lots of useful stuff with him
* Why? blogs a LOT on advertising (and how to make money out of it in games and web and casual), and on metrics, and how you can use them to run you games or web business better. Also has a long fascination with what are the best parts of the games industry, and the best of the web industry, and how we can each put those best bits together to be even better

Off the Record – Scott Hartsman
* Who? ex-Everquest, ex-Simutronics
* What? Senior Producer for MMOs – but previously an MMO lead developer, and once (apparently) a Game Designer.
* Why? he’s funny, he knows his stuff, and he’s worked on some of the most important MMO projects outside Asia, so he’s got an interesting perspective going there.

Orbus Gameworks (Darius Kazemi)
* Who? ex-Turbine, now CEO of Orbus (a games-metrics middleware company)
* What? Likes the colour orange *a lot*, infamous for networking his ass off at games conferences (*everyone* knows Darius), very friendly, generous – and mildly obssessed with the use of metrics and stats to improve the creativity and success of game design (in a good way)
* Why? If you liked the Halo heatmaps when they came out, you’ll love some of the stuff they post on the Orbus company blog. A year ago they were posting heatmaps-on-steroids. If you thought “metrics” equalled “spreadsheets of data” then prepare to have your view changed pretty thoroughly.

Prospect Magazine/First Drafts (Tom Chatfield)
* Who? section-editor of the highly respected socio-political print magaine Prospect
* What? a highly-accomplished English Literature post-grad (bear with me here) … who also happens to have been a lifelong hardcore game player, I think the only person I know who got a hardcore character to level 99 on Diablo2, and now plays WoW a lot.
* Why? although Prospect only very rarely (like, only a few times ever) covers games, it’s very interesting to see what the rest of the world – especially the highly educated and highly intelligent but non-technical, older generations – thinks of us. And a bit of culture in your blog reading is probably good for you, too.

Psychochild (Brian Green)
* Who? ex-3DO/M-59, now the owner and designer of the revamped, relaunched, more modern Meridian-59
* What? an MMO game designer who disingenuously describes himself as an indie MMO designer but like most of the others has probably spent too long doing this and knows too much (compared to many of the modern “mainstream” MMO designers) for that to be true any more
* Why? lots and lots of great design ideas and commentary here for anyone wanting to do MMO design

Scott Bilas
* Who? programmer on Duneon Siege
* What? …in particular, responsible for the Entity System (one of my main areas of interest)
* Why? Scott’s phased in and out of blogging, but when he does blog he tends to do good meaty programming posts that contain lots of source code and some useful lesson or algorithm.

Sulka’s Game (Sulka Haro)
* Who? lead designer for Sulake (Habbo Hotel)
* What? more of a Creative Director than game designer, more of a web background than games, but above all a community/product/creative person who knows his stuff. Also a big player of MMORPGs
* Why? are you cloning Club Penguin or Habbo Hotel and want some pointers about revenue models, community management, and how to be successful with virtual-item sales? You might want to read his posts ;)

The Creation Engine No.2 (Jim Purbrick)
* Who? ex-Codemasters, ex-Climax (both times working on MMO projects)
* What? originally a network / MMO academic researcher, then a network coder, and now the person who runs Linden Lab (Second Life) in the UK. Very big proponent of all things open-source, always doing interesting and innovative things with technology
* Why? Keep an eye on the more innovative technology things that are done with Second Life (stuff you don’t tend to read about in the news but – to a tech or games person – is a heck of a lot more interesting by a long long way), and get some insight into the life of serious open-source programmers who succeed in living and breathing this stuff inside commercial environments

The Forge (Matt Mihaly)
* Who? developer of one of the earliest commercially successful text MUDs, now CEO of Sparkplay Media
* What? spent many years running Achaea, a text-only MUD that made a healthy profit from pioneering the use of itemsales (virtual goods) – and the things weren’t even graphical – and has now finally (finally!) moved into graphical games with the MMO he’s developing
* Why? one of the few MMO professionals who talks a lot about his experiences playing on consoles (especially Xbox), which makes for a refreshing alternate view – especially from the perspective of an MMO person talking about social and community issues in those games. Just like Brian Green, claims to be an indie MMO designer, but probably knows far far too much for that to be even vaguely justifiable

Vex Appeal (Guy Parsons)
* Who? ex-MindCandy
* What? Guy is an extremely creative … guy … who had a small job title but a big part in inventing and rolling out a lot of the viral marketing stuff we did for Perplex City (online game / ARG from a couple of years ago)
* Why? Awesome place to go for ideas and info on the cutting edge of doing games stuff with social networks. Usually. Also … just makes for a fun blog to read

We Can Fix That with Data (Sara Jensen Schubert)
* Who? ex-Spacetime, currently SOE
* What? MMO designer, but like Lum / Scott Jennings, comes from a long background as player and commentator, and shorter background as actually in the industry. Like Darius Kazemi, spent a lot of time in doing metrics / data-mining for MMOs
* Why? Take Darius’s insight into metrics for MMOs, and Scott’s knowledge of what players like, don’t like, and ARE like, and you get a whole bunch of interesting posts wandering around the world of metrics-supported-game-design-and-community-management. Good stuff.

Zen of Design (Damion Schubert)
* Who? ex-EA (Ultima Online), currently at Bioware (MMO)
* What? MMO designer who’s been around for a long time (c.f. UO)
* Why? Damion writes long detailed posts about MMO design, what works, what doesn’t, practicalities of geting MMO development teams to work together, how the playerbase will react to things, etc. He also rather likes raiding in MMORPGs – which is fascinating to see (given his heavy background as a pro MMO *designer*)

[NC] Anson (Matthew Wiegel)
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? Dungeon Runners team
* Why? was doing lots of interesting and exciting things with data-mining/metrics in the free-to-play low-budget NCsoft casual MMO. Watch this space…

People with nothing to do with games, but you might want to watch just because they’re interesting:
Bard’s World (Joshua Slack)
* ex-NCsoft
* Josh is one of the key people behind Java’s free, hardware-accelearted, game engine (JME)
Janus Anderson
* Who? ex-NCsoft
* What? um, he’s been taking a lot of photos recently
* Why? watch this space
Mark Grant
* Who? non-Games industry
* What? an entrepreneur, web-developer, and Cambridge Engineer
* Why? very smart guy, and interesting posts on web development (no games tie-in)

“The first thing to realize is that encryption of the data stream isn’t going to stop anyone serious.” – this page lists half a dozen conceptual ways that people will try to hack your MMO. It’s nothing like as exhaustive as the title suggests, but given it’s on Raph’s blog, the comments section is likely to pile up with many different additional concepts and information from world + dog.