Blog posts:
Stockholm syndrome in the games industry.
In Games Industry - posted on Sun 5th February 2012 8. 36PM
Two days ago, I made a list.
It was a list of games where no money from a sale goes to the souls who created them.
As I have learnt, expressing my opinions openly is ill advised, so this time I abstained and just presented the facts. I expressed no agenda, other than to encourage thought and discussion over some interesting data. Yet, despite my neutrality, I received yet another violent backlash from the AAA development community.
It confounds me that developers, creating million pound products, sometimes for below ...[Read Blog]
(5) comments : Nicholas Lovell Nicholas Lovell Stephen James Parker Ivan
Games that no longer support their creators
In Games Industry - posted on Fri 3rd February 2012 6. 23PM
While the debate around piracy is often nuanced and riddled with moral complexities, many people will agree that the developers of a game should receive payment for their work. Below I present an incomplete list of PC games where the developers no longer receive payment for their creations. I wont offer an editorial, think of it what you will.
Ion Storm:
Anachronox
Daikatana
Deus Ex
Deus Ex: Invisible War
Dominion
Thief: Deadly Shadows
Looking Glass Studios:
Thief: The Dark Project
Thief II: The Metal Age
System Shock
System Shock 2
Flight Unlimited Series
...[Read Blog]
(67) comments : Manasés Gudiño John Evans Simon Roth ? Simon Roth Nick Wheeler Nick Wheeler wondering Johnny Cooper Nick Wheeler Andrew Haining Alcarendor Johnny Cooper V Random Passerby su Faiter119 Jo Marth su Faiter119 Andrew Barker Maffia Jacob Phoenix Anon22 qptain Nemo qptain Nemo qptain Nemo Chris Carver Mike Mike Chris Carver Chronium explosivose Tseug SkyboxWriter Kevin Kevin Simon Roth Louis Gascoigne Blah Revkaine Ralph Barry Kelly Josh Chess Chess Missingpoint Rodrigo Adam Vandenberg Bender reality Felewin durocelis Jon Abraxas Gun metal fan Driftwood Hoff mozoa imright Dave Prophet a third guy WTF Alrik Fassbauer Alrik Fassbauer Wondering
Announcement
In Work - posted on Wed 23rd November 2011 8. 35PM
Now that VVVVVV is out the door and the patches in beta, I've decided its time to break my big news:
I am now working with Mode 7 Games, the developers of critically acclaimed Frozen Synapse . I will be continuing my doctorate with them to help them deliver some truly ground breaking graphics and the tools for their artists to create them.
Mode 7 were my first choice in joining an independent studio, as they create the P...[Read Blog]
(1) comments : pitman
Explay 2011 in Plymouth
In Work - posted on Tue 15th November 2011 10. 53PM
Last weekend I attended the Explay interactive festival, conference and game jam in Plymouth. It was exciting to finally have a games event down in the South West. I've often bemoaned the lack of formalised development community down here, despite the industry leading hubs of Bournemouth, Bristol and Plymouth.
The Venue, The National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, was a particularly excellent choice. With its massive open areas, great views and best of all jellyfishes, it sure beats the stuffy old hotels that other industry events often opt for. I do however question setting the keynotes in...[Read Blog]
No Comments.
Faces of the Games industry
In Fun - posted on Sun 9th October 2011 5. 45PM
Post removed as the images were eating all my bandwidth. Sorry....[Read Blog]
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Building a Rig for games development, gaming and VFX, what parts to choose.
In Technical Guides - posted on Mon 13th June 2011 11. 41PM
I have an article on this blog that is rather out of date about how to choose components for a high end game development or VFX rig. I've decided to do a little update based on the experience of researching and building several new machines lately. This advice may also be useful for gamers, although few games will require such power.
Graphics card
Currently there are a lot of decent cards out on the market and even a middle to bottom range offering from Nvidia or AMD will give you all the performance you need for most applications or games. Indeed a venerable 8800gtx from 2008 will still...[Read Blog]
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Website compliance
In Coding - posted on Sun 8th May 2011 3. 59PM
I've updated my website to be a bit easier on the eye and to fix some of the nasty Css I had thrown together.
Its scratch built and looking a lot better now. Its simpler, but I'll be adding graphics back in over time. Also simplifying my blog to actually make it readable.
One thing that is still annoying me is Internet Explorer standards compliance. Internet explorer 8 fails to render my site in anyway near correctly. So 15% of my website visitors get a broken experience.
I'm not going to fix it though. If you are running a browser that is out of date, you are irresponsible.
I w...[Read Blog]
(1) comments : Rob
My letter to Julian Huppert MP regarding network neutrality.
In 3d - posted on Wed 17th November 2010 8. 46PM
Dear Julian,
I'm am writing to you to express my concern at Ed Vaizey's proposed changes to the way the internet service provider industry is regulated. I am currently researching for my engineering doctorate at Frontier Developments in the Cambridge Science Park. I've worked over the internet for nearly a decade now and have been employed by many content producers(film/games/websites) and also several ISP's.
I was immediately alarmed by the way he mixed discussion of traffic shaping/management (as you know, a legitimate way of managing an overloaded network), and the very, very differen...[Read Blog]
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Develop Part 1
In Fun - posted on Sat 17th July 2010 5. 49PM
Develop 2010
The beginning to the conference was marred for me, by the slight inconvenience of me not actually possessing a pass to it. Upon phoning the Develop organisers explaining that they had probably lost my pass, they told me to turn up on the day and pay a fee for a new one. I asked how much the fee was, and was entertained to find I would need to pay the cost of the entire ticket.
I trundled down to Brighton none the less and got set up in my somewhat less than luxury Travellodge suite. After unsuccessfully trying to tunnel into their paid-for Wi-Fi, I went for a jaunt around to...[Read Blog]
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GLSL Compiler optimisations.
In Coding - posted on Thu 20th May 2010 8. 59PM
Since I made this post on gamedev: I still haven't had any luck on the topic. So to repeat with a few additions...
Since the other (proprietary)languages have different levels of compiler optimisation I looked into finding some for GLSL.
I found the following for Nvidias compiler (These are pretty much direct from the NVidias CG compiler's command line options.):
#pragma optionNV(fastmath on)
#pragma optionNV(fastprecision on)
// Replaces ifs with conditional assignments.
#pragma optionNV(ifcvt ...[Read Blog]
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Turkish hackers are fun
In Fun - posted on Wed 21st October 2009 9. 29PM
So this blog has been inundated with random spam attacks. I never thought my blog would be very good target for hackers (I've disabled most things that would allow them to use my site for anything good), I never invested heavily on security.
Like any arms race, it started small, in this case a badly validated $_GET allowed them to post blogs by inserting into a database. (Infact it was a "==" instead of a "=", oh the shame!)
Having fixed that they started brute forcing me. So I added a captcha. Took them 3 days but they cracked that. I blocked their IP-range... they started some proxies....[Read Blog]
No Comments.
'Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM' fix.
In Fun - posted on Wed 18th March 2009 1. 08AM
This is a pretty catastrophic error on a windows machine. Not really the thing you want to see first thing in the morning 1 week before the deadline on a critical piece of coursework on your degree.
What has happened is your registry is corrupted. As most windows users know the registry is a critical component of the windows OS that stores data on applications, settings and drivers.
Heres the steps I took to fix it.
When windows installs itself, it actually makes a folder called recovery in your windows folder. So what you should try to do is copy over these old registry folders to a...[Read Blog]
Black skies prototype engine.
In Coding - posted on Mon 24th November 2008 1. 24AM
This was a to do list way back on my BA. Removed as its just confusing to read now....[Read Blog]
(1) comments : Matt Carter
Free software!
In Fun - posted on Fri 8th August 2008 11. 40AM
3D Graphics:
Maya Personal Learning Ed. - http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525
Endorphin learning Ed - http://www.naturalmotion.com/ele.htm
Houdini Apprentice - http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?Itemid=89&option=com_download&task=apprentice
Now3D - http://digilander.libero.it/giulios/Eng/homepage.htm
SOFTIMAGE|XSI EXP - http://www.softimage.com/products/exp/v3/
Wings 3D - http://www.wings3d.com/
Anim8or - http://www.anim8or.com/
Blender - http://www.blender3d.org/
gmax - http://www.turbosquid.com/GameTools
Anti-Virus:
AntiVir - http://www.free-av.com/
...[Read Blog]
(1) comments : johnny
Building your own rig or buying a new computer.
In Hardware - posted on Sun 1st June 2008 5. 39PM
Extract from an email I sent out to the NCCA after getting several similar emails asking about what hardware to buy for their new machines. It was an internal email so please ignore my language. :)
Note: these are opinions, but informed ones.
CPU:
First thing is ignore GHZ. It isn't anything to do with the performance of a processor and should be ignored. If someone starts going on about GHZ then kick them, because they work for pcworld.
The current line of Intel quad cores are the best value for money, in terms of processing power, that you can get. Look out for the energy efficie...[Read Blog]
No Comments.
Maya command line notes.
In Coding - posted on Mon 19th May 2008 11. 48PM
Maya command line notes.
Since I recently got totally bitten on a project rendering with the maya command line heres some tips.
First of all, always render on the command line. Not the Maya default batch renderer. If you render from the maya GUI you are wasting precious resources. All you need to do to render from the command line is type.
render filename.ma
Don't rely on your render globals to set the renderer! It never works.
Specify your renderer with the following command (for example with mental ray):
"-r mr" ...eg "render -r mr filename.ma"
If your have a lot of file...[Read Blog]
Making a site
In Work - posted on Thu 21st February 2008 10. 33PM
I'm currently building my site from the ground up after having put it off for so long.
I'm trying to keep to a K.I.S.S (keep it simple stupid!) design. Just clean properly validated html, fast php and sql where I need it and maybe some new graphics and AJAX soon.
Currently I'm babysitting some Maya command line renders and they are driving me nuts. The more I automate a system with scripting the more confusing it gets when things give unexpected results. I also think that the documentation for the maya command line is bloody rubbish, no wonder no one uses it!
Other than that, today I...[Read Blog]
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