First, check whether I can actually render Korean characters. I know that Unicode supports nearly all of the glyphs (or, more correctly it seems, “ideographs”) needed for Chinese, Japanese, Korean (typically abbreviated as “CJK”) – but I also know that MS Windows fonts are infamous for missing some/most/all of the […]
Monthly Archives: March 2008
12 posts
Thinking about the B-word recently … it seems that Bureaucracy doesn’t solve any problems; all it does is organize the solutions you already have, to make them more effective. Which I think is why bureaucratic procedures MUST be updated, changed, revised, and replaced on a regular (almost frequent) basis. I […]
…according to Ed Castranova’s snippet that Scott J posted from the MDY vs Blizzard trial notes. Courtesy of Scott, here’s a hosted copy of the source documents. Ed writes a nice little explanation of why / how bots damage an in-game economy. I liked that. Good stuff – go read […]
As a quick followup to this article (how to workaround the bug in Microsoft Office 2007 that breaks your fonts in Windows), I had to show someone today what I meant when I said that their laptop was set to “blurry” mode, and realised there was a quick way of […]
I finally realized the answer to something that had been bothering me for years: why is it that so many “good” companies pay such small referral bonuses (the cash payed to an employee when they successfully find a friend/ex-colleague/etc to fill an open position at the company) ?
a.k.a. how some Publishers view independent Developers This is a quote found buried in the middle of the otherwise completely unrelated, but sometimes highly amusing, “rant to end all rants” about the rise and fall of the talent and skill of the people within the Ruby on Rails development community: […]
Massively Multiplayer Entity Systems: Introduction So, what’s the connection between ES and MMO, that I’ve so tantalisingly been dangling in the title of the last three posts? (start here if you haven’t read them yet). The short answer is: it’s all about data. And data is a lot harder than […]
Web 2.0 strategies often say “we can’t compete with our users, there’s too many hundreds of millions of them, and actually – collectively – they outmatch us in almost everything we do. So we’re going to bring them into our company, we’re going to let them develop the products, we’re […]
There’s no such thing as a digital computer. Except in extremely controlled or constrained environments. I suspect those exist … somewhere … but I don’t work in hardware development, so I’m pretty ignorant of that area. This is something I didn’t realise until I was studying Computer Science at university, […]
Bruce had a smart idea: a regular roundup of blogs written by games-industry professionals. Not players, not retailers, not journalists – no, the people who actually make the games. And then asked everyone to copy/paste repeat the post. So, here we go, Bruce’s list from http://www.bruceongames.com/2008/02/27/some-great-game-development-blogs/ * Mainly About Games. […]
Summary Speakers: Karen Chelini, SCEA; Jason Pankow, Microsoft; Matthew Jeffrey, EA I didn’t stay more than about half the session – my laptop battery ran out, so I couldn’t take any more notes. I’m writing this up really only because there was one key point that came up which illustrates […]
(As spotted in last month’s Game Developer magazine’s Inner Product column. Good enough that I wanted to draw some attention to it, and hopefully add a bunch more of these good ideas as I come across them / remember them) Most games, when they crash hard enough, memory dump. The […]