I’m out of the office 9-5 for the next 3 weeks or so, working on a client’s site instead – if you need to get in touch better to use email or my mobile. Nothing games related, just a short-term technical contract to get some cash in. On the plus side – getting to play with Dreamweaver and finding out just how much easier it makes HTML/CSS development; there’s a good reason why it costs so much to buy! I did have an interesting discussion with a colleague here about a possible casual game idea that might be worth pursuing, I’ll have to give it some thought when I get a chance and may try to build a design.

I’m also following the articles over on GamePolitics about the Alabama video-games suit (Strickland et al vs Sony et al) – hopefully the judge will be sensible and throw it out on its ear, but you never know 😐

Just a quick note here to let Technorati know this blog is mine…

Technorati Profile

Yay – someone at TIGA has gotten round to updating the members list to include all the recently joined members (including us). We’ve actually been members for months now, but I had been holding off on publicising it on our front page, because with no mention of us on their pages it would look like we were lying. 😉

Anyway, I’ll edit our site later to include their logo and link.

P.S. Eek, just noticed – the link doesn’t even go to us. 🙁 Looks like its a cut and paste of the address above. Well, I’ve prodded them about it being .co.uk instead of .com, hopefully it’ll get fixed soon.

Sorry for the lack of posting the last couple of weeks, a combination of many distractions meant I never quite got round to writing. I’ve shifted gear recently and stopped focusing on the more risky potential contracts; instead I’m trying to concentrate on sorting out more solid things to make sure cash-flow works out. What does that mean for me personally? Well it means I’m learning C# for one thing, as it seems to be the language of choice for the majority of the software houses (in Edinburgh at least). It also means I’ve shelved the projects with less short-term potential (the little experimental games, etc.) to try and make the most productive use of my time. 🙂

I’ve finally got my hands on a couple of copies of Brave (one for my little cousin who I promised my free copy to, one for my own posterity). Of course, I don’t actually have a PlayStation 2 to play it on, but its nice to know that I have a copy and that 4 years of my life weren’t spent on something that I then lost without a trace! 🙂

For anyone who’s interested, I also have a couple of trailers of the game on the website – the official Sony trailer (34.4MB), and an unofficial VIS trailer (20.1MB) that didn’t make it to the public domain. Our internal one doesn’t have the dramatic orchestral theme (straight out of the bin marked ‘epic’ at Sony no doubt), but I think it shows the character and the feel better.

Well, Greg Costikyan seems to have caused quite a stir with the announcement of Manifesto Games (a new independent games portal site). I think he’s hit a common chord with a lot of the disillusioned game developers out there with his articles bemoaning the state of the games industry.

Anyway, I’m glad to say the Company will be helping out in the construction of the site; as I’m keen to see the project succeed. Of course, the fact that it gives us a better avenue to publish any games we develop (which would no doubt be niche market and thus hard to get out to potential customers) is a fringe benefit. 😉

Okay, I’ve now updated the forums to look like the rest of the site also. I must admit, the difference in code quality between WordPress (which the development blog runs on) and phpBB (the forum software) is marked. phpBB is much uglier, with comments and nasty hacks all over the shop. Still, its great at running forums, so I’m glad to stick with it. 🙂

I suppose I should try and do the same for the two wikis as well, although I’ve never looked at the guts of those before. Hopefully it should be as simple as the other two were…

Well, I’ve finally bit the bullet and started to migrate from my old Visual Studio 6.0 install over to the new beta of Visual Studio.NET Express. I stuck by 6.0 until now because all I really need is a decent compiler, none of the other fancy features that .NET tried to introduce. Of course, I could simply have kept 6.0 and switched over to using GCC as a back-end, but I thought that would just introduce unnecessary complications. Its tempting though, just because I wanted to put Jam/SCons through their paces as well. Anyway, while the VS.NET beta is still free, I’ll stick with that, and maybe migrate back to VS6/GCC later.

Immediate thoughts on the beta? Well, the compiler ‘just works’, and doesn’t have the template handling problems that were troubling me with 6.0, the UI is nice if a little sluggish. Learning new terminology and layouts is always tiresome, but it doesn’t seem that there’s anything majorly different. They’ll really have to work on the usability though – it turned out you can’t make standard Win32 applications out of the box, you have to install the MS Platform SDK seperately (another 60MB download and seperate install); that was awful – 20 minutes just to install/copy files (not including download time), plus lots of niggly little hand editing of files to make it integrate with VS. I suppose that’s part of still being in beta, but they’d better get a more integrated solution for the end user. If I buy an IDE, I expect it to be able to make all the applications I need straight out of the box; I don’t expect to need to work just to get to square one.

I’ll probably download and take a look at the Visual Studio C# package as well – it seems a lot of people are d
eveloping with it, and it never hurts to add an extra language to your skill-set. I’m told its quite effective for tool building, and takes a lot of effort out of the basics of making a Windows application (grind that I’m sure we could all live without).

Anyway, now I have VS.NET installed, I can get to playing with IGE (a nice clean middle-ware library written by PeteM) and churn out a simple game or two. I’ve been suffering a little because few of the things I’ve been doing in the last month have had any tangible results – it’ll be nice to make something that I can see I’ve achieved something.

This time to make the development blog page homogenous with the main front page. Its also a fairly radical change in colour scheme. While I liked the black/yellow themes, they didn’t work so well on pages packed with text (e.g. the blog and the forums). I got some complaints about the forums mostly; however the nature of phpBB means that its not nearly so easy to rectify the colour schemes. So for now, the blog and the rest of the site is well integrated, and I’ll work on making the forums fit in with the theme. If you spot any rendering errors or other problems with the new layouts, please let me know.

Oh, and we’re also upgraded to the latest version of WordPress, for anyone who cares about that sort of thing. 🙂

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 http://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.