http://t-machine.org Internet Gaming, Computer Games, Technology, MMO, and Web 2.0 Tue, 30 Jun 2009 14:51:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Now I've recovered from GDC illness, I've got a little free time again, and I'm starting one of the iPhone games I wanted to write. This is a "for fun and learning" project, so it's deliberately chosen to be low maintenance / easy to make a first version / easy ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/28/want-to-help-write-a-simple-rpg-for-iphone/ (this assumes you are running Debian on your server; if not, I suggest you switch) Mediawiki. One of the world's less secure wikis? Probably. I use and install it a lot, and it's usually "the compromise wiki": it's weak at a lot of things, but it's the "least worst overall" a ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/26/making-mediawiki-secure-and-fixing-some-config-annoyances/ 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 ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/25/everything-you-need-to-know-about-being-an-awesome-mmo-tech-director/ I just discovered something rather annoying: people have been leaving voicemail on my cell phone. Please don't. I can almost guarantee that I'll never receive the message. Normally, this doesn't happen: I have a recorded message explaining: don't leave a message - I won't receive it. No, really. Don't leave one "just ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/24/why-am-i-ignoring-you-sorry-i-didnt-know-youd-called/ Every now and then I scan through my auto-spam folder and see what's in there. Sometimes the subject lines are hilarious. Other times they teach you about new kinds of phishing attack that are being attempted. Mostly, they just say depressing things about what it is to be a human in ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/22/a-spam-a-day-keeps-the-madness-at-bay/ There's 45 million iPhones out there, and tens of thousands of iPhone Apps - we know this, and we know that the top-10 apps make millions of dollars each. But what about the developers, the people *MAKING* these apps - do you have any idea who they are? There is/was no ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/11/may-2009-survey-of-iphone-developers/ Microsoft Office: Costs stupid amounts of money Isn't very good Is only available on windows ...but "usually" works OpenOffice: Is completely free Is an almost exact clone of Microsoft Office circa Office 2000/XP Is open-source (so that sometimes you can easily fix it yourself, quite surprisingly!) ...but apart from the Microsoft Word part, "often doesn't work" I've been using OpenOffice's ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/10/export-spreadsheet-to-plain-xml-with-openoffice-3x-works/ (aka "why do my include/require/include_once/require_once files not work / seem NOT to be included, even though they are?") PHP has a mechanism for including files inside each other. The architects of PHP didn't really think much about what they were doing with a lot of the core language features (witness the ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/06/02/php-include-once-require-once/ Do you live in San Francisco? Or, have you ever been there, for a conference, perhaps, or a holiday? (since the games industry's biggest annual conference takes place in downtown SF, literally adjacent to and physically underneath the memorial) Have you been to the Martin Luther King memorial? No, not the famous ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/05/30/the-audacity-to-believe/ Last week at the LOGIN conference I sat on a panel with three far more smart/successful/famous people than myself entitled "Online Games 2014: Twelve Spoilers for the Future" (I think I was there as "the argumentative one" ;)). The real value of the panel was the four of us arguing^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hdiscussing ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/05/18/5-year-predictions-2009-to-2014-for-the-mmoonline-games-industry/ Richard has often been accused of being "arrogant", "insane", and even, simply, "wrong" for his comments along the lines of: He hasn't "played" an MMO in decades (possibly "ever") ... because he can't stop himself from interpreting as he uses them Surprisingly many MMOs are just WoW by another name He only needs ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/05/18/bartle-explains-himself/ Moderator: Joe Ludwig (JL) Patricio Jutard (PJ), Three Melons Chris Dyl (CD), Turbine Rick Lambright (RL), Gazillion Mitch Ferguson (MF), Carbine Summary A lot of nice little anecdotes about MMO middleware experiences - but it would have been nicer to have had a lot more detail on them (not easy to do in panel format). The ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/05/13/login-2009-middleware-roundup/ Reviewing video games is hard. In some ways, it's an impossible mission: a reviewer has too many conflicting interests: please the publishers or else be denied access to the materials they seek to review please their editor or else don't get paid; but the editor's primary source of capital is often advertising ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/05/10/a-better-way-to-review-video-games/ I've been looking around the web and it seems no-one has any good, FREE stats on who the different iPhone developers are, and what they're doing. So ... I've made a 40-question survey (its all yes/no or multiple-choice-answer questions, hopefully it shouldnt take too long to fill out - sorry), and ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/05/04/free-stats-on-iphone-developers-who-are-they/ Introduction I travel to the USA frequently, both for conferences and for business/meetings. On each occasion, I spend anything from a few hundred dollars to a few thousand (sometimes the hotels are paid in dollars, sometimes part of the airfares, plus all the spending for the duration of the visit). Over the ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/28/getting-paid-in-dollars-with-a-uk-bank-dont-use-paypal/ ...but I'm only just finally recovering from the second chest infection + lost voice from GDC. Also, if you were expecting an email from me at any point in the past 6 weeks and haven't received it yet, that's why. http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/26/normal-service-will-resume-shortly/ The title says it all really; for whatever reason, the Thunderbird developers appear not to have tested TB on OS X. So much of the basic functionality doesn't work in the latest beta - this isn't even alpha-quality code (on OS X). I'm sure it works fine on Windows (or ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/24/thunderbird-on-os-x-i-give-up-this-is-untested-crap/ Good You offer your enterprise software for $5 (renewable!) for a couple of days Bad Your website is so poor it is hard-coded to reject valid email addresses Stupid You've added an error message that explains you "are sorry" for the fact that it's rejecting valid email addresses, and that you intend to "fix this ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/21/web-01-atlassian/ This talk was all about a theory of innovation/finding new markets known as Blue Ocean Strategy, from a book published in 2005. I first came across this book/theory when I joined NCsoft a few years ago (apparently, the CEO and board in Korea were very keen on it), which is ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/12/gdc09-red-ocean-or-blue-ocean/ Wifi and internet at all is a priviledge - but Free Wifi is something that in our modern society, and the society we're set to become, needs to be treated as a right. When I started writing this, I was looking at the benefits we have yet to see (ubiquitous ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/09/will-iphone-save-the-free-internet/ The furore[link] over the IGDA's failure[link] to live up to it's own precepts continues to snowball[link] [link] (as I suggested it would, if the IGDA Board didn't 'fess up and take a stand[link] against the unethical practices they were being implicated in). (I'll do a summary later this week; personally I'm ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/06/what-i-believe-in-for-quality-of-life/ I'm just finishing up a quick PHP project at the moment, which allows anyone to register an account - so as the final step before launching it, I needed to add some form of CAPTCHA system. I tried a couple of 3rd party ones and source code ones and none ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/05/php-anti-spam-captcha-using-photos/ I had to do some iPhone prototyping recently, and we had a trial copy of Unity to hand. I thought this was a great excuse to try using it. First impressions of the editor/IDE/environment - at least on OS X - are not good. NB: In general, in terms of what ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/05/unity-first-impressions/ Sadly, the code snippets on MySQL's main website for PHP are mostly untested and buggy (try running them - half of them don't execute because of silly mistakes). After much trial and error, here's one that *actually works*: // Missing feature (?) from MySQL: find the list of valid ENUM values for ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/04/php-how-to-fetch-all-possible-values-of-an-enum-from-mysql/ Margaret Robertson [ADAM: I missed the first quarter of the talk because I was at a long meeting, and missed the Q&A because I had to rush to another. Sigh] Common Elements No-one is using the game, they're all using the creature-creator Nearly all working with under-12 year-olds (7-12 years) Teaching collaboratively because they can ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/04/01/gdc09-taking-spore-seriously/ I'm interested: do I have this today simply because I happen - for the next few hours - to be physically in the United States of America, and so my IP address passed the iTunes store check and let me have it? I've been hearing that back home no-one can ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/31/stfu-i-have-skype-on-my-iphone/ 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 ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/29/can-onlive-work-technically-if-so-how/ Here are all the liveblogs / transcripts I've found so far for the 2009 Game Developers Conference. If you want your blog posts to be included in the live RSS feed for future games industry conferences, let me or Darius know a week or so before the conference - we ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/29/gdc-2009-all-transcripts-liveblogs/ Thomas Bidaux, ICO Partners Summary Far too much information to be any kind of practical guide (there were at least 5 (maybe 10) slides I don't even mention here, full of facts and figures, that were glossed over too fast to record). Although note that Thomas said he'd be posting the full ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/29/gdc09-online-games-europe-challenges/ Andrew Finch Nik Davidson Summary Seemed very strange that it got killed as a project. It sounded as though WotC had "learnt from the experience" but it also sounded very foolish to have haemmhoraged the newly-trained/experienced personnel. That smells like some kind of political battle that got lost rather than a normal operating ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/29/gdc09-dragonslaying-facebook-lessons-learned-from-dungeons-and-dragons-tiny-adventures/ Adam Martin, (me!) Summary I was giving this talk, so ... no live writeup this time :). The slides are up on slideshare here: http://www.slideshare.net/guest38ac74/how-to-sell-social-networking-to-your-boss-and-publisher-1215019 NB: I lost my voice the morning of the talk, and panicked, and rewrote the slides to include everything in words in case I couldn't get my voice back (or ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/29/gdc09-how-to-sell-social-networking-to-your-publisher/ This is going to be, um, ... interesting. Darius lost his voice this week (some throat infection cominbed with lots of drinking, nonstop talking/networking, and then aggresive partying each night). Poor guy, he was totally inaudible yesterday. And this morning I could hardly talk too, so I'm on a diet of ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/26/i-have-no-voice-and-i-must-speak-tomorrow-at-gdc/ Don Choi, OGPlanet Summary Very little of interest in this talk. I think there is a *lot* more you could say, and it would be a lot valuable and interesting, on the topics covered. I have no idea why the talk was so content-light (mis-guessed the audience? speaker having to give someone ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/25/gdc09-building-and-sustaining-successful-free-to-play-mmos/ Alex Evans, Media Molecule Mark Healey, Media Molecule Summary The MM guys are funny as ever, although Alex's "I made it myself on the way here" presentation tool would perhaps have been more usefully replaced with something like Presi (or whatever it's called - the "interactive" presentation tool that is like Alex's thing, ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/25/gdc09-making-of-little-big-planet-ups-downs-mistakes-successes/ Sulka Haro, Sulake Summary The intersection between social and gaming, and where that should be going, instead of where lots of people are obsessing about taking it. (I have more to add here later, but I've got to run to a meeting; will update the post when I have time) All errors / omissions ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/24/game-mechanics-without-rules/ Raph Koster, Metaplace Summary Raph promised to be nice and not make us depressed this year. It was an elegy on "look how much we progressed as an industry during 2008". EDIT: Alice has a shorter and sweeter summary up on Wonderland. Anniversaries... VW just turned 30. MUD1 was done in 1978. One half of ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/24/gdc09-worlds-in-motion-summit-keynote/ Austin Hill, Akoha Summary Conference organizer introduced this as "during this first talk, think about the platform they've made, as much as you do the game; that could be especially interesting for this audience". I totally support the principles and the ideals. The game looks fun and interesting, and at the same time ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/24/gdc09-meaningful-social-reality-games/ 4 hours sleep or less? Check The main 8 hour event I've come for today "not listed" on conference programme? Check The big posters-sized signs don't list any of the summit locations? Check The map claims that the giant room where the first session takes place "doesn't exist"? Check No coffee and breakfast today? Check (argh!) I guess it must ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/23/a-flying-start/ Lots of news sites and blogs have reported that the recession has affected GDC this year, with lot of cancelled parties and a big drop in attendees. I wouldn't be surprised, given all the redundancies (although ... wouldn't that mean more people looking to recruit / be recruited?), but the ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/23/gdc-2009-parties/ We finally have a mainstream response (as opposed to responses sitting quietly in obscurity in the IGDA.org forums) to the issue of IGDA Board Members pissing all over IGDA's main tenets: http://www.igda.org/newsroom/memo_032209.php (from the IGDA monthly newsletter that just went out to all 15,000+ members) Instances of the following words in that ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/22/igda-chair-responds-to-quality-of-life-debacle/ What's the biggest single challenge to a Studio Director? Or to the VP of Development / Studios who oversees a handful of publisher-owned studios? Recruitment In the games industry there are no raw materials of variable quality, there is no variety of base services to build upon; everything that distinguishes one company ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/22/culture-reputation-and-running-a-game-studio/ For a mere $600 (yes, that *is* going to double the cost of the GDC ticket that you already bought), you can go to this competing event on Tuesday next week: "VentureBeat is teaming with industry heavy-weights." Ah, hubris, how we love you. "You’ll learn how one of the most successful and rapidly ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/22/dont-go-to-gdc-listen-to-industry-heavyweights-instead/ http://www.youhaventlived.com/qblog/2009/QBlog210309B.html Your professor tells you that you can't study them for their own sake. However, if they're as exciting as you say, and all the young people are reading them, then perhaps you could write an educational one? He therefore instructs you to go away and write a novel to teach ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/22/serious-game-researchers-this-is-you/ I'm very tempted to make this: http://gizmodo.com/5172615/iphone-os-30-will-turn-your-phone-into-a-revolutionary-sex-toy?skyline=true&s=x ...with particular emphasis on the social / avatar / chat / networking features. http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/20/iphonesexgame-as-an-mmo/ (seriously - otherwise I'll be phoneless thoughout GDC :( ) I've had no interest in cracking my iPhone, so I haven't. Until I discovered the other day that my incompetent network (O2) won't allow me to make calls in the USA on the agreement I have with them, so I need to ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/18/need-help-anyone-in-sf-next-week-with-an-iphone-hardware-unlock/ ...but if you want to make an MMO on iPhone, one of your first questions is going to be: Am I allowed to sell virtual currency? And the answer is: No. From the "revised" license agreement Apple requires you to agree to: 3.3.17 Only Paid Applications (which require You to enter into a separate agreement ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/17/iphone-os-30-mmo-and-games-issues/ http://www.apple.com/iphone/preview-iphone-os/ Developers will have the tools to enable in-app purchases — like subscriptions, additional game levels, and new content. Strangely enough, this makes things a lot easier for me. Now we can stop treading carefully around the "can't use the revenue models we know and love and have been using for years" ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/17/here-come-the-iphone-mmos/ I just received an "invite" to a pay-for event in London about "smartphone development": an evening in a bar with a couple of speakers and some networking. So ... you can go and listen to an iPhone developer, an ex EA person, and an ex Motorola person, and pay for the ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/13/free-iphone-developer-meetups/ For some reason, Firefox 3.0.7 force disables the KeyConfig extension (itself a workaround for Firefox bugs that have been around for more than 2 years and gone unfixed). The main problem is that on OS X, the keys for editing in a textfield get overridden by firefox re-binding the same controls ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/05/firefox-30os-x-do-not-install-307/ Maxis (part of EA) has a great competition up right now - use the public APIs for the Spore creature / user account databases to make "an interesting widget or app". I had a quick look at the API's - they've got the right idea technically (use REST, provide PHP versions, ... http://t-machine.org/index.php/2009/03/05/web-20-games-creativity-ugc-and-socialising-in-spore/