Security and Productivity: You may only choose one
Wednesday, August 06 2008 - 0 comments
Between moving things for my mom, moving things into storage from my apartment (*whew!* I can finally walk around this place again!), and getting "Texan-ized" (vehicle inspection and registration and driver's license), I've been twiddling with NHibernate and the ADO.NET Entity Framework. I've decided to write a paper that compares and contrasts the two, just to help people understand the two approaches to ORM mappings (I'll publish that once it's baked).
As part of my exploration of NHibernate, I decided to rebuild it to work with .NET 3.5 (and I'm toying with the notion of removing the Iesi.Collections dependency and replacing them with HashSet operations, but that's a big project). I downloaded the recent source and kicked off NAnt, only to see it quickly come to a halt during an assembly signing operation. It appears this was an obtuse problem that had nothing to do with the source code, but rather the MachineKeys directory buried deep in the directory hierarchy of the "All Users" directory.
The remedy was written up here by Aaron Zupanic almost 3 years ago (thank you, Google!). The apparent culprit: Administrative permission conflicts. What made it so frustrating is that it took me a fair amount of time to isolate the issue. Admittedly, I'm still scratching my head over whether this was an example of my .NET knowledge getting rusty, or that I got "lucky" and hit one of those rare, but annoying, security glitches. Even worse, I'm left with a nagging sensation whether Aaron's advice made sense from a security perspective. Because let's be honest, "Give full control to everybody in the MachineKeys directory" makes my spidey sense tingle. On the other hand, it worked. I've seen similar guidance in the MSDN forums as well, but it still nags at me. Maybe Stephen Strychak will chime in about this :-)
For now though, I'm going to go read the "CLR via C#" book and brush up on the security stuff.
Ripples from a recent post...
Tuesday, July 29 2008 - 3 comments
Well, after one of my recent posts made CVG and Kotaku headlines, it seems that Microsoft felt compelled to respond to my issues. I agree that offering easy ways to select games by top-rated/higests-sellers on the Xbox LIVE Marketplace is a great way to help consumers sort between the gems and the monkey poo. In the end, I think the media picked up on the wrong parts of my blog post. My key point was that there is no consumer-oriented mechanism in place to help consumers rate/comment on the games. You certainly can't do that on the XNA Creator's Club site, nor can you on Xbox.com. My emphasis here is that the community games approach is different from Xbox LIVE Arcade games, and that a new way of enabling developers to publish their games on Xbox LIVE warrants enabling consumers a way to comment on those published games. We will know more when the fall Xbox dashboard update comes out.
trueSpace 7.6 is available for FREE (and why you should care)
Thursday, July 24 2008 - 1 comments
In case you haven't already seen Glenn "Mykre" Wilson's blog post, I'll just blog bout it here:
Caligari's trueSpace 7.6 is available for free download. (trueSpace 7.5 retailed for almost $600. I'd say that's a damn nice discount!)
So what is special about trueSpace? If you're an XNA Game Studio developer looking for a nice 3D modeling tool, this is the best deal you will find (I like the interface more than Blender, personally).
But wait...there's more! Their training videos are now also free, and there is hours and hours of great stuff to soak up!
Most of you probaby already know that Caligari was snatched up by Microsoft's Virtual Earth team (keep an eye on their blog here -- good hints and tips on modeling with trueSpace as well as how to integrate with Virtual Earth)
When the acquisition of Caligari was first announced, there was a lot of speculation that this would lead to some kind of official 3D modeling tool for XNA Game Studio. That (still) isn't the case, but trueSpace will export to .X, so your models can definitely be used with the default content pipeline importer. Hopefully in the future, we will see some special XNA content pipeline importer that will natively handle the full suite of features that you can model in trueSpace.
The real eyebrow-raiser here is that this is another game-changing move by Microsoft, and is likely the first in a series of strategic steps to create a 3D model offering that is robust enough for multiple application uses.
Of course, the XNA team probably doesn't want to step on the toes of the partnersip they already have with Softimage's XSI|MOD tool (and don't get me wrong -- that is an EXCELLENT modeling tool too!), but it will be interesting to see where that partnership goes once the dust settles on this new announcement.
Until then pass me some popcorn, this is gonna be fun to watch!
Making money from your XNA game: The good and not-so-good
Tuesday, July 22 2008 - 6 comments
People are buzzing about today's announcement that developers can start making money soon off their Xbox LIVE Community Games built using XNA Game Studio. Being an ex-XNA member, I can still say, without a shadow of doubt, that Microsoft is offering a groundbreaking game channel, and that some people stand a chance to make great money from the system. It's an exciting opportunity, but the danger for consumers lies in Microsoft's deliberate steps to avoid discussions regarding game quality, even during peer review. I firmly believe that avoiding commentary/ratings on game quality will result in frustrated consumers, who will have no way to discern the quality of a game among (ultimately) thousands. Of course, the game creator has the option of offering a trial game, but it will be interesting to see how many developers take advantage of that path, as it is not required [Edit: Peter Hatch points to a Wired article where Chris Satnchell states that a timed trial will be enabled by default, but my concern about te lck of quality indicators still stands]. I doubt consumers will get a refund for buying a sucky game either.
Before anybody thinks I'm bashing the XNA team, please keep in mind that this is the same approach taken for Xbox LIVE Arcade games -- you're on your own to find genuine game reviews and ratings. The difference is that XBLA games have a higher standard for quality and consistency regarding the gaming experience. XBLA games have a large number of technical conformances to adhere to, which are tested by the XBLA team prior to its approval for release -- the Community Games has no such thing during the peer review (remembe, peer review is a check on the content, not on technical quality or gameplay quality). I think the upcoming plethora of games on the Commuity Games pipeline will only create more consumer confusion without them having a reliable guide [Hint: Great opportunity here to create a consumer-oriented website that helps people find the kind of community games they like!]
Well, that's enough rambling for me -- I'm still unpacking boxes here in toasty San Antonio!
P.S. - Dear XNA Community Team: I know the lead community guy left, but it's STILL no reason to have broken links or stale articles.
Congratulations to Torpex's Schizoid release!
Thursday, July 10 2008 - 3 comments
BIG congrats goes out to Torpex's release yesterday of their fantastic Schizoid game on Xbox LIVE Arcade. It's not only an amazing splash of visual eye candy, it will definitely activate your right and left brain (and hands) in an ever-increasing set of challenges. You also have to admit, any game that can win the PAX 10 has got to be worth investigating!
It's enormously disappointing,however, that the people now running XNA Creator's Club site continue to use the main page feature to promote a "Game ON!" Sweepstakes rather than take a day or two to have a promotional image congratulating Torpex on their accomplishment. So why would I admonish the XNA team about this? Because Schizoid was written entirely using the XNA Framework. The Creator's Club site doesn't even have an interview article in their Spotlight section for it. That's disappointing, because I remember the strong partnership the XNA team had with Torpex and how closely we (ok, not "we" anymore) worked with them. I hinted about their gameplay style back in early 2007, and was thoroughly impressed by the zeal that Bill Dugan and Jamie Fristrom had about Schizoid. They built an amazing demo and showed it to the XNA and XBLA group, and the rest was history. Well, kinda -- turns out that their game was doing some amazing things that pushed the envelope of the XNA Framework, and the XNA Developer Connection Team (the same folks you would work with if you were building a retail Xbox 360 game) went into high gear to work with Torpex and the XNA Game Studio team to get things in top-notch condition. The end result is not only a fun game to play, but also helped the XNA Game Studio team identify and resolve some performance issues.
So...XNA Community team....where is the love for Torpex now? Tell them "Thank you" by promoting ther game for a few days, or run a spotlight article. Do something. XNA Game Studio is nothing without a great partner and customer relationship!
P.S. - Don't forget to follow my painfully expensive relocation trip to San Antonio by following me on twitter!
What's up with me...and a tidbit about Visual Studio...
Friday, June 20 2008 - 2 comments
Well, some logistical delays prevent me from leaving Washington and heading to Texas until July 8th. Basically, a one week delay in early June threw us right into the July 4th holiday rush season, and if we had tried to have our stuff packed/moved, we'd have paid a high premium. Sooo...we decided to wait until after the 4th of July holiday to head to Texas . On the bighter side, that gave me a little time to tinker away at some technical stuff. One thing I've never sharedis my own slightly quirky settings for Visual Studio. There's tons of color schemes and fonts out there, and you can really get lost in that stuff (and wind up not doing your real work :-). You can find several places that talk about color schemes, starting with Scott Henselman's cool overview of VS themes. I personally had two goals in mind when I picked my theme:
- The theme had to have good contrast between different logical parts (comments, string text, and code)
- The theme shouldn't differ too much from the default VS setup. If I needed to work on a system that didn't have my settings, I didn't want the differences to be so severe that it was visually distracting.
I settled with a variation of Jeff "Coding Horror" Atwood's theme, with some small variations and one big one -- the use of the Envy Code R monospaced font (kudos to Damien Guard for putting in the effort to make that font). The nice thing isthat his font uses italics instead of bold, giving a little more visual consistency from my perspective. Here's a simple screen cap to give you an idea. EDIT: Almost forgot to link to the theme so you can import it in VS 2008 -- here you go!
More to come later!
June 2008 DirectX SDK now available...
Saturday, June 07 2008 - 1 comments
I decided to take a little time off from grouting my shower and repainting my house to let you all know that the new June 2008 DirectX SDK is available for download here. I'm not sure who the new Microsoft DirectX and XNA community manager is, but he/she needs to get on the ball and keep people informed of new downloads and news, I can't keep doing this for them :-)
Some thoughts on learning XNA game development...
Tuesday, May 27 2008 - 0 comments
A recent thread on the XNA forums titled "Where does one have to go to major in game development?" reminded me of a recent blog I discovered, written by Josh "Scientific Ninja" Petrie. Some of you may recognize his name from the work he does on SlimDX, but what is REALLY interesting about Josh is his great blog posts that give various bits of advice about the game industry. Take his most recent one on development tools, where he says:
"When it comes to tools in particular, reasoning behind the argument tends to be one of
- you’re considering a career in the industry and want to learn the “correct” tools, or
- you want to use “the tools” that professionals use because you believe it will give what you produce with those tools an edge over what you might produce with some other tool.
Both of these are bad reasons."
He goes on to outline the reasons, all of them good. I would also add that the single best thing you can do as you learn to be a game developer is to take small steps. Seriously, don't get bogged down in doing big things. Make a small thing and make it bigger in small steps (this also has the side benefit that you feel more comfortable going back and fine-tuning parts of the game). It worked for John Carmack, I guarantee it will work for you :-)
P.S. - Check out Josh's del.icio.us tags...great reading in there!
Leaving Microsoft....
Tuesday, May 27 2008 - 47 comments
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” -- Woody Allen
Family issues have come up in my home state of Texas that require my immediate, long-term attention. An unfortunate, if not inevitable, ripple-effect from my father's passing a couple of years ago. I've been frantically packing my house starting this weekend, because I need to be in Texas in a couple of weeks to pack up another one. The next couple of months will be...interesting.
What does this mean for me? Well, obviously I won't be Mr "Inside XNA" anymore, I'll be just like you, writing games for the Xbox LIVE Community Game service in preparation for the RTM of the service. I'll still hang out in the XNA forums as well (plus some more time on Gamedev.Net), but moving and selling two homes (mine and my mom's) will keep me pretty busy for the next month or two. On the other hand, what free time I have will be spent doing what I love the most: writing!
For those that have followed my blog all these years, please accept my apologies for the abruptness of the announcement -- although if you've been monitoring my twitters over the last week, this blog post shouldn't come as much of a surprise. But don't worry too much, as I still fully intend to continue offering insights and commentary on XNA and game development.
I'll blog more about my happenings as time goes along, for now though, I have a house to pack (and now I wish I'd spent more time at the gym!)
P.S. -- If you want to hear more about the new XNA Community Games stuff, be sure to check out my final podcast interview (at least as a Microsoft employee), recorded last week, with Major Nelson and Dax Hawkins.
Use your wee controller...
Monday, May 19 2008 - 1 comments
Ok, that's a novel way to control video games...
