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).

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.

You know, I never realised shredding could be so much fun. Its a very satisfying noise, feeding your confidential documents into a shredder, and hearing them get slashed into ribbons. Plus it generates enough paper shreds to give about a gajillion hamsters warm and comfortable beds. I’m thinking perhaps we should get a hamster as a company mascot. Then, if we miss any milestones, we can simply claim that ‘the hamster ate the code’. That’ll fly, right?

On a less whimsical note, I’m looking forward to developing an script to automate an off-site backup process, so we can have at least a basic reliable backup mechanism to protect us against the worst ravages of hardware failures and/or arson attacks. Not that I’m expecting arson attacks mind, at least, not for the first few months.

Also on the cards – writing up various coding guideline items in the wiki. Probably I won’t give it any coherent structure just yet, I’ll just write it as individual items which can be given a better layout in the future.

Well, Monday and Tuesday were spent at the TIGA conference for outsourcing. Very interesting, great chance to meet people in the industry and make Black Company’s face known around the block. It also opened my eyes to just how the Company can go in the near future to cement its place in the industry and get a good financial basis for pushing along our own plans.

On an unrelated note, I’ve finished a first draft of the Company coding standards and made it available as a public wiki. Coding guidelines (as in, good ways to code, but not things which everyone’s code will be judged on) are still to come, and will be the fruition of many of the thoughtful scribblings done on the train to Dundee last month.

Things happening in the near future: going through some of the showreels and other various bumf collected from the conference (to assess potential outsourcing of art for the Assault demo), sorting out a TIGA application, buying myself a shredder (as I now have quite a pile of confidential documents that I can’t throw out), and sorting the details of a possible new contract in Dundee.

At last, I have returned from exile in Dundee, and rest easy in my regular office chair back in the enlightened city: Edinburgh. Much to do, including integrating our logo with the website, finishing up the coding standards (probably to be hosted as a publicly viewable wiki on the Company site), finishing up the basic project plan for the demo, and cracking on with the coding itself. I’ve poked and prodded a couple of artist friends, so hopefully we’ll be able to get some concept art up for the project – that always helps give projects shape.

Onwards!