Well, you might have noticed that your old bookmark for this blog takes you to our shiney new front page now – its a bit of a different colour scheme, but I think its nice and crisp and clean. Certainly adds to the professional feel of the site anyway, rather than everyone just happening across my ramblings as their first exposure to the Company. 🙂

Or possibly you haven’t noticed, as you’d subscribed to the RSS feed, which used to be located at https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/rss, but which is now located at https://blackcompanystudios.co.uk/blog/rss. But, if you’re only listening through the rss feed, then you won’t know that this entry is here at all. Um. Let me go hack up an xml file which simply redirects to the new RSS feed.

Anyway, entertaining few hours spent making up the new Home and About pages – certainly it reminded me how to write web-pages. Since I don’t have FrontPage or any other web page editing software, I was doing it by hand editing the HTML/CSS. Not as time-efficient as using a tool, but it really brought back all the nuances of coding HTML that I’d forgotten.

CSS and CSS2 are great things – you can build some really great things with them, but its incredibly frustrating to make a great page which ‘just works’ in Firefox, only to find that Internet Explorer gets it totally and completely wrong. Now these aren’t even really strange things – in terms of CSS I can see exactly what I’m describing in the language, and it makes total sense. Firefox gets it right and does just what I expect; its just that IE’s implementation is just plain wrong. There’s no other way to describe it. Its like the developers heard of CSS and said “oh, that sounds quite good, lets mash something like that in”. Its nominally the same, it has all the right keywords, they just don’t do what they’re supposed to!

So anyway, my lovely clean pure CSS layout which scaled and clipped nicely with whatever size the browser window was got trimmed back and trimmed back until its basically a fixed layout website, with the only cool feature being that the black band that forms part of the logo extends all the way to the right edge of the browser. A little disappointing, but many lessons learned for any other web development work I have to do.

There are few things better in life than being able to get away from things for a nice bank holiday weekend to some quiet, peaceful place where you can forget about all the stress and workload back at the office. I’m a little stiff from walking up a huge hill in Glencoe on Saturday, but probably stiffer from all the drinking done on Sunday with the torrential downpours outside. 🙂

Anyway, much fun was had, and it’s motivated me a bit to get some serious work done on the code, and maybe even to dig Torque back out and try to achieve something with that.

On an unrelated note, we are now a fully paid up Associate Member of TIGA! I’ll be tinkering with the front page of the site soon to show our company logo and blurb about us, rather than having the blog as the front page – to help give us a bit more professional image. 😀 I’ll be putting the TIGA logo on there as well.

Well, its been a bit since the last post – I’ve been taking a few days off to enjoy the Edinburgh Festival (or more accurately the Fringe). I love this time of year – all the comedians and theatre and music. The city becomes a bustling mess of chaos; the kind of place where you walk down the street past a man with an enormous foam painted head and hardly bat an eyelid. Of course, the bustle has its drawbacks, especially when I’m taking the other half out for a nice meal and trying to get around the city, only to be thwarted by masses of tourists who insist on stopping in the middle of the pavement and looking blankly at the buildings around them. After that happens a few times, I think I could be forgiven for laying into the people around me with an umbrella and shouting “Get out of my way, I’M LOCAL!”.

Anyway, some work has been done around that, including more server machine twiddling, web development work for Flame Multimedia, and a little bit more tools coding. On this week: more of the same, as well as some more promotional stuff to find contracts.

On a brighter note, Sony have finally set a release date for Brave (the game which occupied our lives for a good portion of the past few years, for anyone who doesn’t know). I was worried for a while that SCEE were just not going to release it, but it looks like they were just keeping it in wait for some reason. Hopefully we’ll see some higher-profile publicity for it, I’d hate to see it slip past the public. We learned quite a few good lessons from the technology behind Brave, and there are quite a few ideas which we’ll be reusing in future development. I’ll be trying to p
ick up a copy in September, although being a bit stingy, I’ll probably wait till they’ve discounted it a bit first. 🙂

Well, after some tortuous effort and a lot of patience, I’ve finally wrangled the new kit into submission and its now running nice and stable with a brand new and shiney installation of Debian on it. I’ve still to transfer over the Subversion and web repositories, or to get the Samba stuff working properly so that I can do backups simply by copying over the network, but its all looking good. Only slight problem is the volume of the fan, which unfortunately means anyone coming in to talk to me has to speak in a very loud voice. But such is the price to pay for shiney new toys, and it only has to wait until I get a new (quieter) fan delivered soon. Also new is a better printer and a flatbed scanner, meaning I can hook up a PC-based fax machine as well, which should prove useful.

On an unrelated note, we’re actively seeking new contracts to pitch for again, and advertising ourselves to the various games companies in and around the UK; to let them know we’re here, what we can do, and to see what they need done.

Also managed to finish Peopleware and give the Design Patterns bible a good going over as well – both highly recommended, and I think I’ve gotten a lot out of them. I must admit, it was a bit scary to see all of the bad management pitfalls mentioned in Peopleware were represented to some degree in my previous jobs. Still, they’re in the past, and hopefully I can avoid making them for our company in the future. 🙂

Beefy energy has been replaced by sugary tea and chocolate biscuit fueled highs, but that hasn’t stopped me completing the first pass of the file packing tool. Still to be done today are some more tweaks to the coding standards, as well as starting on a script to run doxygen on our code nightly and publish it automatically on our internal development wiki (so that all the documentation is available in one place).

Another couple of days in Dundee are also called for later this week, so I’m going to spend the train journeys boning up on Peopleware (DeMarco, Lister) and Design Patterns (Gamma, et al), both development essentials kindly loaned to me by Pete. Possibly if I devour those two quickly enough, I’ll devote some time to planning out a tools development road-map.

I’m actually feeling quite energetic this morning, oddly enough. I credit it to the lovely roast beef dinner I cooked last night. Can’t beat a huge slab of red meat and enough yorkshire puddings, tatties and veg to feed a whole family.

Onwards today – we have Pete in reviewing the code thats been written so far; since its all very common code, it’ll probably be used as a reference point for the style that we use in the future, so its quite important we’re happy with the way its laid out. Also we’re continuing with the tools development, and I’m going to be looking at the automated build process to see what we want in it to help us develop nice clean, portable code.

We’ve also got some second hand kit being donated soon – over onto which we’ll switch the source control and build processes, and reserving a machine solely for backup purposes (instead of relying solely on off-site backups like we do now).

I’m grinding my teeth at the moment after reading yet another article about the R*/GTA/Hot Coffee repercussions, and I feel I really have to get this off my chest. I should point out I haven’t talked with any of the guys I know at R* about this, because I don’t want to put them in the position of them talking about something their company no doubt wants the official line to be the only line.

But I must say, this is in no way Rockstar North’s fault! People say that they made a mistake putting that content on the disc, but thats rubbish. If I were say, 1 month from beta and Design decided a particular bit of content should be removed from the game, would I:

a) Go through every build asset and code module and remove every trace of the content, then deal with all the bugs and other problems caused by such a major change (missing assets, broken links from other features which reused those assets, code flaws introduced by losing bits of code other modules expected to be there, etc.)?
or b) Flip a toggle in code which stops the user ever seeing the content, a toggle to which a legitimate player has no access, while leaving everything else in place.

I’m sorry, as a software lead, my responsibility is to take option b). If I went to a producer and said, I’ve got two options, one with possibly large and time-consuming consequences, and one with no ramifications which leaves a bit of unused material on the final master; I’d like to choose the first option, they’d laugh at me until they realised I was serious and then tell me I was an idiot.

If someone deliberately sets out to alter the game that we’ve developed and have had signed off, then how in the name of sanity are we responsible for what they do? If I make wooden spoons, and I sell them to a man who snaps one in half and stabs himself with the splintered end, am I responsible for it?

Brave had an unfortunate bug at one point which made him look really like he was humping a dead rabbit, until we added a few lines to fix the problem. If someone hacks our game to bring the bug back, do we deserve an 18 rating for bestiality/necrophelia? Or would such a thing be ridiculous?

This controversy isn’t about sex, or violence (even though GTA has them both in spades), its about responsibility. I refuse to be held responsible for what other people do to themselves using things that I’ve done.

Another good piece from Joel on Software, talking about getting good people and doing good work, rather than trying to be that one company in a thousand that comes up with an idea no-one else has ever thought of. As for hiring staff with good working conditions, what can I say; the Company is based in Edinburgh! What else do you need! 🙂 Oh well, okay then, I’ll buy dinner for the staff. But no dessert. And you fill up on breadsticks or poppadums, right?

Well, there’s quite a bit of debate on-going now about the intricacies of the coding guidelines, so much so that I’ve had to make a new forum to have the discussion in. While wiki’s are great for actually doing the writing and maintaining of documents like these, they’re not so hot for having debates about whats being written (despite having discussion pages, etc. built-in to the system).

We’ve got a pretty decent core set of modules down now (debugging, memory, file system, hash strings), which I’m going to use this week to get a decent set of tools online; the sort of tools you inevitably need to speed up development – file packing tools, asset converters, patch generation, that sort of thing. First up is the file packing tool, which should exercise the modules we’ve written last week and iron out any kinks in them.

Well, its been a busy week so far. Probably most important to note is the addition of our second paid employee (after myself) – PeterM; he’s been keeping me occupied actually developing the groundwork for any code we write for our own tools/games, as well as helping me thrash out the details of the coding standards and guidelines. Its going well so far, and the first real practical exercise for doing things ‘the Company way’ will no doubt help us iron out things that are fine in theory but that just don’t work in practice.

Ongoing this week – more coding; more standards; and negotiations for a future contract or two which should hopefully allow us to set up an office with a third employee and get things on a more solid footing.