Just back from Glasgow, after attending a seminar from OfCom about their Public Service Publishing work. Yes, I know, PSP. Confusing, and unwieldy to say the full version. Here’s hoping they change it before long. I’d suggest British Media Office, but that probably wouldn’t get past committee.

Anyway, the goal of the PSP is, as far as I can tell, to provide a vehicle for financing public service content, in the same manner that content like the BBC, ITV and C4 currently provide. I believe the remit goes something like “content that informs and entertains, and enriches our cultural heritage”.  The consensus is that the traditional TV broadcasters and producers are unsuited to finance new types of content, such as websites (interactive and regular) and games.

Of course, it is the games part that interests me. There is, I believe, huge scope for producing games which both inform and entertain. Specifically I object to the fact that we have to Americanise our games in order to target the largest possible audience. Even when set in fantastical or science fiction environments, we still get American voice actors to play our roles. Our children can readily identify many American cultural references, at the expense of our own. We don’t have fire-hydrants, our taxis are black, and our postal carriers drive red vans.

I think there are many games to be made that use British culture, settings and characters. Be that an adventure game based on Inspector Rebus, or a modification to a real-time strategy game to put it in a British historical setting. We invest much in British programming, for the education of our children or the entertainment of us all. For E.R. we have Casualty, for the Bold and the Beautiful we have Eastenders. But where is GTA: Liverchester? Okay, bad example.

Anyway, the seminar itself was informative, but not entirely heartening. The games industry moves very quickly. Project life-spans are measured in the order of months, not years – and I’m not convinced that the PSP would be able to move quickly enough to operate successfully in games. It was clear from the turn-out (a couple of dozen TV industry types, and only myself and someone from Realtime Worlds representing the games sector). Apparently in the London version of this seminar, games weren’t represented at all. And yet the shift in people’s habits, especially in the young, is clearly moving away from TV and towards games and the internet. While the PSP is a good step towards allowing new content creators access to public money to make worthwhile public content, it still feels like the traditional TV producers, who have little to no games experience (and I’d venture ability) are lining themselves up to be the ones to continue to recieve that public funding.

OfCom are still in the process of a ‘review’ stage that is feeling out the remit of the PSP, and from talk at the seminar, is more than a year away from even really getting going. With the rate at which technology is developing and public attitudes towards how they use media are changing, I can’t help but think that this is moving too slowly.

So in summary, I think the PSP is a laudable idea, but it needs to stop worrying about the bickering about what exactly the PSP should do (primarily by TV producers and broadcasters who feel their financing is being threatened), and get down and dirty and actually get to encouraging more public ‘new media’ content. Whether that be by financing, or simply by facilitating existing projects, whatever – as long as what they do results in publicly valuable content being produced that otherwise would not have been. Getting mired in an extended ‘consultation period’ where people argue back and forth is not only inefficient, it may mean that any action they take is just too late, and the free market will have replaced valuable public service content with commercialised pap (Beauty and the Geek anyone?), and may never get the public’s attention back.

Speaking strictly from a games industry point of view – unless the PSP is a responsive and fast moving entity, it will never be able to engage the help of the dedicated games sector, and may find itself quickly outpaced. That would relegate public service games to being second rate, pale imitations of their commercial counterparts, and so never gain the attention of the public they are supposed to serve.

Almost a month without posting – that’s very bad of me. We’ve been going all out to meet varying deadlines for Add Knowledge – most notably some demonstrations to senior politicians to enthuse them about the project. All has seemingly gone well, but not without a serious amount of effort for all concerned! Hopefully we’ll start to see some movement on the project proper soon as a result. We seem to have tamed the worst of the PSP, and although the debugger we’re using is horrible, it’s not been too traumatic to get our previous work converted over to the PSP and add some more features.

We’ve also been in the new office for a month now as well – it’s working out better than I had hoped. I was pretty productive working from home before, but something about being in an office environment focuses the mind somewhat, which is good. Having a space where Pete and I can collaborate when he’s working on our stuff is a good thing too. I’m determined to get a white-board soon though, as it’s really hard to communicate structure concepts when you’re drawing on paper or post-its.

Anyway, today I came back early, as I have two new cats that I went to pick up today. Lots of mewling and meowing, but they’ve settled quickly in the flat. Cats seem to be scarily good at making themselves at home wherever they feel like, so hopefully they’ll not mind too much when I leave them on their own tomorrow. Breakables hidden away in drawers first I think though.

It occurred to me while watching a re-run of a pilot for a particular popular sci-fi show, that perhaps people worry too much about the plot for their sci-fi games. Sure, the Phl’aarg forces might have strong and compelling reasons for attacking the Kerflump home-world, but let’s be honest, your average game player really doesn’t care.

In my view, the job of a back story for a game is to allow willing suspension of disbelief for long enough that the player can enjoy the game itself. If the game is fun, the player will remember the story with fondness, even if it does follow closely the plot of some more famous film or book. The key factor is that the story shouldn’t make the player cringe, and shouldn’t contain the kind of horrible glaring inconsistencies that they can’t ignore. Some of the most effective game back stories are the simplest. Mario has to rescue Princess Peach. Sonic has to free little animals from the evil Dr. Robotnik.

If you are going for a more complex story, consistency is more important than fleshing out details. Once you’ve persuaded the reader/player to make the first jump to your story, try not to force them to make any more. You might persuade them to accept that magic is real, or that technology allows you to move instantaneously between points, but don’t change the rules afterwards to suit some awkward bit of plot development. Choose your universe rules at the start, keep them consistent and simple, and then base your story around those rules. The player then has a nice consistent world view, they understand what’s going on, and they’re happy because there aren’t constant surprises.

If you omit details, the player will happily imagine the rest of the universe according to the basic world rules that you’ve established. Take Star Wars for example – you are shown a very small section of the universe, and the rest is simply implied. By not fleshing out endless irrelevant details, you avoid accidentally introducing glaring inconsistencies, and also avoid boring the player. Take it from the point of view of a character in your world. They don’t care about the mechanics of inter-stellar travel, they’ve been living in a world with it for a long time. It is mundane to them – they wouldn’t dwell on the details, they dwell on how it affects them. So don’t follow the Star Trek model of baffling the viewer with science details, instead show them the parts which affect them – e.g. travelling between point X and Y will involve hyperspace, and will take Z amount of time.

Well, BT have (finally) managed to sort themselves out and install a phone line into the new office, which was the only thing holding up us moving in. As such, I popped along yesterday to have a look again at it properly, and I’ve now got the keys! Very exciting, and I much enjoyed just sitting in the big leather chair and trying to think of all the things that I’d need to sort out to properly imagine working there. I think most notably the place needs some coffee! Can’t think straight without coffee. Here are some pictures so you can judge for yourself – it’s bare just now, but I’m sure I’ll manage to get some character in there soon enough.

Our lovely view (it’s 3 floors up)

Nice big leather chair for my desk. A bit ratty, but hey, furniture that’s free you can’t complain about.

Pete gets the littler desk (have to enforce my dominance over the proles somehow)

And room for “employee number 3” when they turn up.

So, once there’s an obligatory Lara Croft poster up, PCs with cables trailing all over the floor, and a whiteboard or two covered with cryptic programmer like notes, I’ll post some more pictures for you to compare. I’ve also got to update the website with the new address and directions to us, but I think I’ll wait until we’re all properly installed. Have to make the move go pretty smoothly though, as we’ve got lots of work on in the next month, and not too much time to do it. So I should get back to it!

You know, it’s days like this I’m glad I don’t have to go outside to work. Miserably cold, damp and grey. But for me it’s almost a good thing – no glare in my eyes making it hard to see the monitor, no stiflingly hot room once the PSP kit and both PCs have been on for a while.

Most of the performance optimisations have been done now – turns out the horrible slowness was almost entirely down to the big textures, which far exceeded the texture cache the PSP has. So trimming colour depth, dropping the resolution a little, and swizzling the textures have all combined to get us back to a healthy normal frame-rate again. Not the 60fps we get on the PC, but certainly playable. So it’s time to put the optimisation bat back down again, and wade into new features (animation and audio next).

On balance though, the PSP hasn’t really impressed me so far. I realise that hand-helds are supposed to be underpowered, but I just groan whenever I have to try and read something on the low-resolution screen. We haven’t ventured into using UMD for loading yet, but I suspect that would irritate me even more – the load times are already over 10 seconds, and that’s loading a tiny amount of assets. I’d be interested to get our hands on a Nintendo DS for comparison – it’s probably got similar issues, but I’ve got “grass is always greener” issues right now.

So as I’m waiting for a nearly full rebuild to complete, I thought I should write up a blog entry. Previously I’ve not been writing much because of the upheaval due to moving and generally been busy sorting out a whole bunch of things. This last few days however, I’ve not been writing much because I’ve had my head deep in coding work, which is much more enjoyable! Of course, from your end-user perspective, it doesn’t really matter why.

Anyway, this week has been particularly busy with coding, because we’ve finally got things visible and running properly on the PSP, almost as well as they were on the PC, which is immensely satisfying. Unfortunately, it has highlighted all of the things that we need to fix because the PC let us get a way with a lot, performance wise, and still ran well. But that in itself is good, because it means we get to wade in and tackle some nice solid problems like “the texture format is too fat”, or “we’re making too many state changes”; for which we can see solutions, apply them and instantly see results in the form of improved performance. It’s a standing rule that you shouldn’t optimise too early, because you’ll end up wasting effort. However, when optimisation is appropriate, it’s definitely a satisfying task. As problems go, those are the ones programmers like the best.

Although we should have moved into our new office by now (by last week in fact), BT have been dragging their heels sorting out getting a phone line installed, and while my new landlords have been very understanding about it all, it’s been quite frustrating. I would have liked to have been in and set up by now, so that it was no longer nagging at the back of my head that we have to move in the future. Still, I’m sure the wait will be worth it, and instead I code away here, surrounded by still packed boxes of kit, all still waiting to move to the new office before I unpack them.

Right, build’s done – back to palletisation.

There are few things worse as a programmer than to know that you shouldn’t do something, know all the reasons why you shouldn’t, but yet you do it anyway. You tell yourself that it’s more important to get things in quickly, that the code is only preliminary or temporary. You tell yourself that it’s better to get things in so you can see whether or not the whole approach will work, and that taking time on the details now would be premature optimisation.

Of course you know, deep down, that the code that is supposed to be temporary will stay, because it works. Any bad things you put in there will be left with a @todo comment next to them, and shuffled down the priority list. Which might seem like a good thing on the run-up to a deadline, but is so many times more irritating when it comes back to bite you later on.

In this particular case, the standing rule we have at the Company about programming for a fixed memory environment, even on PC, was the one I was ignoring. We were initially developing for PC, and memory handling there can be handed off to the operating system heap management and forgotten about. On every other platform though (especially PSP for which we are now porting things), you don’t have that luxury – every drop of memory has to come from the single small fixed arena, any allocations from outside of that will just fail.

So I had to spend a couple of days, going through all the allocations in the code and plumbing through proper fixed heaps so that it was clear where all the memory was coming from. Two days, and probably that in itself wiped out any gains we made in the original PC development by working fast and loose.

In summary then, no lying to yourself when it comes to weighing up pros and cons of doing something in a way that you know isn’t going to be good enough in the long term. Oh, and work to a fixed memory environment. Even on the PC. It will make your code tighter and faster, give you a clear idea of what your memory footprint is, and help reign in the inevitable problems when your memory usage runs away with you and you have to spend time tracking down who is wasting memory and where.

Virtual memory hides a lot of sins from you as a developer, but it is a crutch which you can all too easily become addicted too. It doesn’t take much to engineer systems to avoid memory fragmentation and waste, but re-engineering them once they are embedded is difficult and problematic.

Well, you’d think that being isolated from the many distractions the Internet has to offer would make me more productive, right? Not a chance. Source control access over dial-up is excruciating, and I very much live by the policy of many small commits rather than few big ones. So when Eclipse managed to get my broadband back to me on Tuesday (a whole week ahead of their worst-case installation date), I breathed a big sigh of relief. And downloaded about 3.5GB of stuff in the first 24 hours!

Anyway, I’ve learned my lesson, and the phone line for the new office is being installed in advance of us going in, and I won’t be shifting operations there until we have net access up and stable. Oh, and yes – new office! Admittedly it’s just a room, but it’s proper office space, with room for 3 or 4 of us, central Edinburgh, nice street. Pictures and more details will come closer to the time, but suffice to say I’m quite excited. This will give us the chance to hire additional people (not just those I can trust to work from home), and aside from anything else should satisfy Nintendo’s strict policy for developer status. Add to that the fact that Nintendo development kits are really quite cheap, and we’ll be seriously considering getting one or two to work on our own stuff in addition to any work for hire jobs we take on.

So the last week has almost entirely been lost for me due to moving, with only Pete holding the fort and continuing working. Most frustratingly of all though, the broadband order was (inevitably) delayed, and so I’m stuck with only dial-up access until the end of the month. It’s maddeningly slow, and all of the normal work operations I take for granted are next to impossible to do with such slow internet speed. Still, it’s only a temporary thing, so I’m sure I can manage.

We’ve just switched to developing on PSP again, and now both have functional PSP dev-kits – time to get some of our own stuff on there, and not just the samples that come with it.

Another rewarding experience this year, some interesting talks. A couple of turkeys on the first day, but on average certainly worthwhile. The most obvious emerging theme was, again, convergence of games with television, films, books and the Web. However while I think there is some evidence to back it up, I don’t think it is nearly as important as is being implied here. It feels like there is a need amongst the high level executives in the games industry to be seen to be thinking about something, and that convergence of the different media types is a convenient topic. Not so vague that it can’t be talked about, but not as embarassing as “we’re committed to making games so expensive that they rarely make their cost back”.

It seems like in all of the conferences, there is a lot of back-slapping and self-congratulation, but little self-examination. Yes, there has been massive growth in the last couple of years, and the transition to the new generation of consoles has gone pretty well (as long as you’re not Sony). But it has done well on the back of innovative titles, which push away from the hard-core gamers, and the ridiculously over-specced hardware, and back to what it should be: making fun games, that people like to play.

I’d like to see a conference where we look at the issues that are important to the average game developer, not just the EAs and Ubisofts (and companies who wish they were that size) – about what we can do about the recruitment crisis, about what we can do to make better games, more polished games. I’d like a conference that addresses issues like why we keep re-inventing the wheel every time we make a game, and why we don’t collaborate on technology and sharing of knowledge to benefit the industry as a whole.

Above all, I’d like to see a conference that dwells on the success stories, and how we can learn from those developers/publishers and emulate that success. With that in mind, I’d rate Hilmar Petursson’s talk on EVE as the talk of the show for me, not because I learned a whole lot from it, but because it was good to see a developer that stuck to their guns and made a game they were proud of, and have been proved right by the game-playing public.