Good work day on Sunday

I had a very good working day on Sunday with my game development partner. On Thursday we agreed the scope of our previous project was too large for our tastes, and decided to go in a new direction. So far that decision has been a good one, the new idea we're running with is much smaller scope, and we're able to reuse a lot of content and code from the last project.

Last night I mocked up the movement for our main entity and it feels pretty good. The other cool thing we did was build and publish a test build to an iPhone and an Android device. So far there's no content or real gameplay yet, but it's looking much less daunting now.

Sweet Borderlands sale on Steam

Steam is currently hosting a pretty sweet sale for Borderlands and associated DLC content; for ~$20 you can grab the game and all 3 DLC packs.

I decided to pick it up seeing as one of my co-workers is currently playing Borderlands and has been trying to convince me to play. It looks pretty interesting, I've had my eye on it for awhile but never got around to trying it out because of other games and such. I'm still working as much as I can on my Unity3d project, it's coming along but not as fast as I would like it to.

On the server front, I haven't made any decisions yet. I still want to get a server of some sort, but I've been putting off on it for the past few weeks.

Looking at new server hardware

I was talking to my boss today as I drove him to the airport, and we got on the topic of home servers. I've been kicking around the idea of buying a server for awhile now, and now I'm really tempted to get one.

One of the biggest reasons I want a dedicated server box is so I can move my Perforce server off my desktop. For some reason I always hate having to leave my desktop running so I can have Perforce access when I'm away from home; it feels like such a waste. The idea of hosting my Perforce server on a dedicated server box really makes my nerd side happy :). In addition to that though, my boss pointed out I could run backups through that server as well, which is another big priority for me since I don't have any backup systems running for my home network.

I've been looking at the HP EX495 MediaSmart Home Server. It has some pretty good spec's on it, and the price is pretty good. Guess we'll see what happens

Update on things

Been pretty busy lately. Had to travel to a conference for work in the beginning of May, been bouncing around different projects at work, and my buddy and I have been putting in a lot of time on our new game idea.

Things at work have been especially interesting the past week when I got moved over back fill on a project for my boss. We have a piece of software we're upgrading and preparing to license; however while the functionality the software provides is pretty good, the underlying code is pretty messy and old. The past week I've been getting oriented in this new code-base, and doing a lot of clean-ups and improvements. The MS C++ compiler (VS 2008) has been pretty handy in this regard, it spits out a lot of good info regarding deprecated or dangerous functionality. Working on this has been an interesting diversion and challenge, so I'm pretty happy doing it.

iPad release day today

Apple's new iPad comes out today, that's pretty cool. I've been debating the pros and cons of getting one myself; and for now I'm leaning to not getting one for the immediate future. I'd love to have an iPad to play with and to develop games on, however right now those 2 reasons aren't quite enough to justify dropping $5-600. I'm still working on an iPhone project, and the iPad would easily distract me because I'd want to play with it.

Speaking of which, Unity3D just came out with an update to their iPhone SDK, Unity iPhone 1.7. I'm pretty stoked about that update, especially being able to play your game in the iPad simulator. That'll let developers without an iPad get a feeling for how their game will look running on the iPad device (not a perfect example though). I already downloaded and installed the update, however now I'm waiting to finish downloading the most recent iPhone/iPad SDK from Apple. Once that's finished and installed, I'm going to rebuild my current test project and upload it to my phone to check for problems. The Unity folks do a fantastic job with their updates, but every now and then a problem slips in, so it's always good practice to do some regression tests.

Annoyances with C#'s DirectoryInfo.Delete()

Taking a small break from writing up a game design doc for my iPhone game. It's interesting being the one actually writing a doc for a game, rather than reading one made by someone else. It does make me appreciate the amount of thought and work our designers put in.

Anyway, last week at work I was writing a new C# console utility to automate directory clean-up tasks on our build server. Things went pretty well until I hit a snag with DirectoryInfo.Delete(Boolean) not working properly and throwing a constant stream of exceptions. It ends up it was error'ing out because the directories I was trying to delete (which contain a good number of sub-directories of arbitrary depths, and several thousand files), contained a number of read-only files. After looking around a bit, it appears this is intended behavior, as it follows the idea of the pop-up notification users get when they try to manually delete directories.

To get around this, I ended up creating a simple method to iterate through all directories and files under a particular directory, and set all their Attributes to normal. Sorry for the formatting.

// Set attributes on all dirs and files in the passed in directory to 'Normal'
void SetDirectoryContentsToNormal ( DirectoryInfo Dir )
{
if ( Dir.Exists )
{
Dir.Attributes = FileAttributes.Normal;
DirectoryInfo[] SubDirs = Dir.GetDirectories("*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

foreach ( DirectoryInfo SubDir in SubDirs )
{
SubDir.Attributes = FileAttributes.Normal;
}

FileInfo[] FilesInDir = Dir.GetFiles("*", SearchOption.AllDirectories);

foreach ( FileInfo file in FilesInDir )
{
file.Attributes = FileAttributes.Normal;
}
}
}

This does cause a little pause when running, however for our particular circumstance it's perfectly fine because the tool runs only once a day in the early morning.

2010 Census

Finally got around to filling out my 2010 Census. If you received one make sure to fill it out as well. I will say I was surprised how short it was, I thought it would have a lot more questions. There are so many instructions and help hints and clarifications on the form I expected it to be more complex, I thought I did something wrong when I finished in about 10 minutes. Funnily enough, there was a note at the bottom of the form saying on average it would take about 10 minutes.

Thinking about it though, I can see why they had that much help embedded on the form. The Census is done by the Gov. to help determine the distribution of the population; and the results are used as the basis for policy decisions, budgetary allocations and government representation for the next decade. Making sure it's as clear and precise as possible is extremely important.

I do wonder how many iterations, focus tests, expert reviews and God knows what else was done to test the usability of the final Census form. Just the fact they had the 10 minute estimation means some of their testers had the same anxiety as I did...