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.

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.

Interesting post here from Hypnos at Puzzle Pirates about the increasing dependency we have on our internet connections. I certainly know this one – every time I have to uproot and wait for a new DSL line to be installed I go a little bit stir crazy from the fact that I can’t check my email or do all of the things that normally make up my day to day work and life. Luckily this time round (less than a month away now), I have a laptop with wi-fi, and will most likely be haunting one of the free wi-fi coffee shops around Edinburgh to get my daily fix of Internet goodness.

So, I decided to add a bit of PHP to the bottom of the web site pages that displays when the particular page was last updated, and the About page hadn’t been updated since August 2006! That’s pretty bad on my part, so I must apologise. It annoys me when other people let their website go stale, but it’s a bit hypocritical to expect it of others when we don’t do it ourselves. So henceforth I pledge to keep the site more up to date and freshen things more regularly. That goes on the pledge list, probably somewhere around 600th or something. But I’ll try. In addition, I’ve added a Jobs page for the future, although it is empty at the moment, I thought I should have one. We certainly get enough CVs and people fishing for jobs, at least now I can filter out the ones who don’t read past the front page and just spam email everyone.

A little hint for anyone thinking of contacting us about a job: those who show that they’ve actually read the site and done at least some research into the Company are immediately rated above those who just have a list of emails and send off a form mail to all of them

We’re transitioning between projects this week, so Pete and I have been going over what we’ve done for the last few months, how things have gone, what we’ve got and where we’re going. And things are looking pretty good – we’re quite proud of the work we did with Add Knowledge; while there was the usual mad rush to wedge things in, looking back on it we can do some quick re-factoring to turn it into something maintainable and re-usable. Our internal code-base is looking reasonably plump with functionality for making games with, and we’re happy with the style and content. Unit-testing could be more wide-spread and thorough, but that will have to be a long term goal. All in all, I’d rate our performance probably a B for the last project – good, but room for improvement.

Coming up in the near future – well, starting our next project hopefully. Also I’ll probably be looking around for some small cheap office space for us to set up in – a more permanent base from which to grow. And grow we shall – there’s lots for us to do, and only so much time in the day.

Well, looks like we’ve been outed by the folks over at scottishgames.biz. I think most of the people who find their way to us either knew us in our past lives at VIS, or have been referred to us by word of mouth. There are a few brave and hardy souls who stumble on us via search engines, but they are quickly dispatched and their bodies pillaged for games consoles and cash.

Anyway, I’ve been keeping a relatively low profile until we were more firmly established, but I think there is probably no good time to make a big entrance into the industry, so we might as well stick our heads above the parapet a little. There will be pictures of Pete and I forth-coming, and I will finally get around to updating our About page! The Scottish games industry has seen some high profile losses over recent years, but the blood letting appears to have subsided, and I’m confident we’re on the way back up. Now if we could just persuade the journalists who write for the Scotsman not to keep telling the public how it’s all gone to pot, we might get somewhere.

Aside from that, I’ll be taking advantage of the discount available to Scottish-based developers for the EIF this year (thankfully it’s lost the cumbersome title, although I still preferred just ‘Edinburgh Games Festival’); but we’re a little busy so I’ve decided to miss out on Develop in Brighton this year.

So I get the feeling that the amount of spam comments that come into the blog is actually increasing at an exponential rate. Since I last checked a few weeks ago, more spam has received than Akismet had processed in total prior to this lot. I guess this is an inevitability as the blog is around for longer and appears in more spam-bot lists. Anyway, Akismet is doing its job nicely, and only 9 of the several thousand comments slipped through, and since I have moderation on, none of those made it onto the live site.

Busy week last week – approval meeting for milestone 2 of the current project, and a meeting up in Dundee with 4J as to our next one. One of the things discussed was how much I would say on this blog about it, and for obvious reasons I’ll be keeping shtoom about most of the detail; however its looking pretty likely that we’ll be working with 4J for a few months, on an unannounced title, on unannounced platforms. So that will mean that my blog entries for the next while will be tending towards rants on software and the games industry in general, and commentary on the gaming news.

Well that’s milestone 2 about wrapped up, on schedule and no dropped features. I’d be hopelessly naïve if I thought that two successful sprints in a row was down to fantastic management or process, or even down to Pete and I and our amazing skills; rather more likely is that these first two milestones have consisted of things that we knew we could deliver without fuss. Next sprint is a bit more meaty – two sub-games, with all of the design ambiguity and art bottlenecks associated with content generation. We’ve dealt with the engine functionality needed to deliver the content, now we have to deliver the content itself.

Looking over all of the legacy code though, I am having to resist the temptation to write it all again from scratch. Yes, the code is tested in fire, and exceptionally functional, but in many places it is ugly, unmaintainable, and downright hard to use. Combine that with the fact that it came from a team who were constrained to work in straight C in most places, and the code isn’t exactly clean and easy to read. So with that in mind I’m inclined to use it as a reference point rather than a base to work from, and pare it down to the essentials. But then the businessman in me kicks in, and reminds me that we’re not here to make good code, but rather good games. So the decision is really – what will help us make better games, faster and more reliably. Decisions, decisions…