06 Jun 2009
It has been quite a while since my last post. 39 days to be precise.
I could blame it on work, which has been ramping up as we head toward our milestone on Tuesday. I could blame it on the NHL Stanley Cup Playoffs and how they have consumed my evenings and weekends. I could even just blame it on being busy.
But I’ll be honest here, that just isn’t the case. In fact I have started several, but just like a goal scorer going through a drought in hockey, I’m lacking finish. This one is going to get done.
E3 has come and gone. For those who don’t know, E3 is the most hyped part of the video game industry. Everyone saves up all of their big announcements, gathers together all of the gaming press and a few industry insiders, throws some crazy parties, and then in a rush announces everything. The big theme this year was motion.
Nintendo broke open the motion market, and with it the casual gamer market, a couple of years ago. I’ll admit I thought it was kind of cool at the time. To me though, the Wii is more of a novelty than anything. I have yet to find any consistently compelling gameplay on the Wii. I feel that it lacks good titles because the Wiimote is so gimicky. If I were a kid the Wii would be my favourite console. It would be an excuse to leap around and act crazy. As an adult (with a downstairs neighbour who complains about the cats running across the floor) it isn’t really an option, even if I wanted it to be.
This year both Sony and Microsoft announced their motion solutions. Sony with their higher resolution controller similar to the Wiimote(althoug the Wiimote is pretty good with the Wiimotion Plus add-on) and Microsoft with their controllerless Project Natal.
I have to say that this current direction in video games while cool from one vantage point is also concerning from another. Part of the reason I play video games is to relax. Like on a hot day like today, I just want to sit there infront of the fan and kill zombies, do parkour, play some professional hockey and maybe, just maybe, take on the roll of a Gear and kill some Locust. I don’t want to run in place, dodge and weave, hack and slash. That’s too much work!
While sometimes that might be fun to do, I just can’t see doing it for a marathon 3-5 hour gaming session. Can you imagine playing Zelda when you had to be standing up swinging a sword for 27 hours? Not to mention the fact that there isn’t really enough room in my living room to play most of the games as they were demoed.
I do see the good in it. I see that one day my children could stay in shape by playing video games. If those kids were anything like me though; they’ll stop playing games and go read a book.
As a friend of mine put it the other day “If I’m going to be active, running around the room, waving the controllers, throwing elbows and hip-checks; I might as well just go play real hockey.”
The other impractical side of it, and I mean this seriously, is that I could never develop a Project Natal game in my 6’ x 8’ cube. Especially a multiplayer game.
There is still one other thing about this whole shift that sort of bothers me. Personally, I don’t want to be tied any closer to my avatar in most of the games I play. I don’t want to be that character in the game world. I don’t want to be tied so closely that the swinging of my arms performs a decapitation. That the 1:1 motion mapping and trigger action results in me killing people in the game world. It’s a game, not reality. Games are currently about as real as I ever want them to be. I would never want to play a photorealistic WWII game, or a photorealistic operation game. At that point it starts to become the real thing. It starts to become something that I don’t want to be desensitized to, and it most certainly becomes something that I don’t want to feel that I am really doing.
Once again I have to stress, there is some great potential for games here. Tennis and Boxing are great fits for this type of motion control. Personal trainers and exercise games are another great example. Games that are quick and don’t have to be played for hours to get to a save point.
Don’t forget people, games are meant to be an escape. They are meant to be fun. Just like movies, music and books. Once something starts to become too much work, it tends to stop being fun.
Now to bring things to a conclusion I would just like to say that it will not take 39 days for my next post, and Go Wings Go!
28 Apr 2009
We have moved around at work; making room for the other studio full of people that will be moving in soon.
My view is still spectacular, but my desk is much smaller. We have all been reduced to 6’ x 8’ “cubes”. I use quotes, since we really only have two walls. Heck, I only have one, because the second one is the window. (6’ x 8’ is not a lot of space for someone from the prairie)
My nearest cube-mate and I can’t both push our chairs back at the same time without threat of bumping into each other.
This is quite a big shift from what we had just a few days ago. Those few days ago we had probably the largest “cubes” in the studio.
None of that really matters. The job is still the same. The good and the bad.
Performance reviews are over. I’m still waiting for the final word in which we will work out what I need to do for career advancement. The craziness of how advancement is measured may actually require me to spend at least one year doing something that is outside of my field of expertise. This seems like an odd path for advancement. It seems to me it will hurt the company more than it will hurt me for that time. Wouldn’t you always want your experts working in the area they are experts in?
I’m sure that someday when I end up being driven insane by the politics of daily business life I will end up trying to start my own company. Just what kind of company that might be still remains to be seen.
I have a lot of crazy ideas, driven by a lot of different desires. I enjoy way too many things. From high level design to low level bit twiddling optimization. I like making games and software. I even enjoy web programming to a certain extent. Ultimately I just enjoy making things that appeal to me. Things that I consider to be fun, useful or interesting.
In other news the lady that lives directly beneath us is the bane of our existence. She complains about how loudly we walk around on our floor in our sock feet, and she complains about the noise the cats make when they chase eachother around.
Then again, she is also the reason that our building gets frequent notices posted requesting that people walk more quietly down the stairwells. I think the Strata should chip in and get her a pair of really good ear plugs.
Now it appears that our bathroom might be leaking (we don’t know where or how or if she is just as I mentioned crazy) down into her unit. We actually went down and looked at the tiny spot on the ceiling above her shower and we were like (Wow, how the hell would anyone ever even notice that?) So yay… more money needs to be spent that we don’t have.
I’m not sure that there is ever enough money, which is too bad. Hopefully my side project will take off and generate a little bit of extra money. I’m not expecting anything from it, but I do like to hope.
I want to go home for a visit sometime. I want to take a vacation. I want a new computer. I want a new TV.
***
I’ve been tracking down a bug at work for over a week now. A crazy bug driven by an amazing intersection of systems and intermittent events within them. The end result is what is commonly referred to as an off by one error.
The trick here is that it is only an off by one error, some times. When crunching raw numbers it should happen 50% of the time. Due to the actual way in which events occur it happens more like 10% of the time in practice.
I think I have now figured out how to detect when all of the events that need to take place actually take place and compensate for it, but seriously, it is just crazy.
This is all a result of taking what is a fuzzy system designed to be the source data for doing a lot of approximations; and then asking it to provide incredibly precise and accurate results.
I can’t wait until this is sorted out and I can get back to some real work. The work I enjoy.
07 Apr 2009
I’m tired. So tired. So very tired.
I don’t want to be sick anymore. It just isn’t fun. Over the weekend I transitioned from “recovering from seasonal allergies” to “full blown cold and bright red eyes”.
Work on my side project, from this point on referred to as Tiqr, is continuing. Slowly I might add. The scope of it has drastically increased and the more time I have spent with it, as cool as I think it already is, the more I thought it needed a couple of more things to really make it useful.
In my head I’m aiming for an early September release. Hopefully I’ll be opening it up to some beta testing in early August.
It is definitely something I will use, and I hope that others might find a use for it as well.
I do need to rework my plan a little bit. Just to help order the remaining tasks and build up a timeline.
I have also been thinking about keeping sort of a development diary for the whole project, and making all of the posts public when I finally finish it. In fact I will do that. I’ll have to add that to my list of things to do.
Sometimes work is flat out unbelievable. I miss my old manager(s) who didn’t throw infinite amounts of work at me. I am tasked at probably 150% capacity right now, with rumours that even more work is going to come my way. Enough to put me at 180% or worse. Needless to say, it won’t all get done. It just can’t. I can do 110%, maybe even up to 120%, but not this much.
I don’t want to live at the office.
27 Mar 2009
It isn’t often that I read something and a little light bulb goes ding over my head. It did happen today though.
I was a reading a blog entry titled I drive a car the way most people use a computer and pretty much palm-smacked my forehead exclaiming “That’s exactly how I feel!”
19 Mar 2009
Have you ever heard of a six word novel? I hadn’t until a couple of days ago.
It turns out that McGill University is trying to bring them back. The story goes that Hemingway was once asked in an interview to write a story in just six words that would tell a complete story. After he wrote, supposedly he referred to it as his greatest work.
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
- Hemingway
There was also a challenge to do the same thing that went out to a lot of science fiction and fantasy authors. Since I know that many of you who read this blog are fans of Joss Whedon, here is his effort:
Gown removed carelessly. Head, less so.
- Joss Whedon
I took a few minutes and came up with a few of my own.
End of the Universe. Bring popcorn.
He lifted the cup; a champion.
They wanted peace. They got war.
And last but not least, poking a little fun at the whole thing:
Six words. One too many.
You should post some of your own creations in the comments!