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Arizona will once again be host to a football game that doesn't suck: Super Bowl XLII is coming back to Phoenix in 2008. This was no doubt helped by the fact that the Cardinals are unlikely to ever be there as the home team. :-)
We've only hosted it once before and that was the "porno" Super Bowl, XXX. XLII doesn't have quite the same ring to it. C'est la vie.
Imagine that you bought a lottery ticket with the expectation that you've got a 1 in 100 million chance of winning the jackpot of, oh, $100 million. Now imagine if the folks running the lottery told you out of the blue that hey, you've really got a 1 in 2 chance of winning that huge jackpot. What would you do? Granted there's a 50% chance you're out of luck, but you'd probably be in an advanced state of "freaking out" over the thought that your odds are incredibly good that you've won.
This is kinda like my mental state at the moment. The details aren't yet fit for this blog, but I found out that something I wanted really, really badly and that I'd dismissed as not in the realm of possibility has suddenly had the odds narrowed by a major amount, enough to place it well within the realm of "could very easily happen." And now I find myself trying not to think about it too hard, but unable to avoid it. It's not something anywhere near as major as winning a huge jackpot, but it is something that I've wanted that means a great deal to me personally for many years. It's the kind of thing that wipes off some of the layers of pessimism that gradually build up over the course of a lifetime, and I think if it happens, it'll rank easily in my Top 10 Greatest Instantaneous Life Moments, if not the Top 5. To qualify that, I consider an instantaneous life moment something like getting my first Apple II, having a girl say "yes" to a date (or a marriage proposal), seeing that Santa had delivered an assload of Empire Strikes Back figures on Christmas morning, winning a large sum of money on a gamble/lottery ticket etc. Other joyous moments are not quite so sudden (getting married, graduating, etc) and so wouldn't quite fit into this category.
Waiting to find out is going to be hard and difficult. I hope that if it happens, it happens soon so that I can sleep at night again. :-) I promise to update this blog the second I find out if it happens (even if I can't reveal the details). Feel free to guess in the comments as to what this event might be. I bet one or more of you might actually get it. :-)
I returned from Austin Tuesday evening and am back on terra firma for now. The flights were uneventful, almost pleasant. Turbulence was sparse and didn't last more than 10 seconds tops in any form, so that helped a lot. It's always nice flying into Phoenix in the evening - the darkness lessens the sense of height, and it's a pretty-lookiing city from the air, at least to me.
I found out that I missed a free NFL football game in Phoenix on Monday. San Diego played here in Sun Devil Stadium (home of the Cardinals) because of the wildfires that are screwing with the air quality over there. I was a bit baffled when I turned on the TV Monday night during the fourth quarter and saw them playing in Tempe, but Amy from Aspyr clued me in the next day as to what was going on. That was kinda neat. I used to have season tickets for the Cardinals but, well, they're the Cardinals. ;-)
I had a pretty good time in Austin, and it was good to see Glenda, Suellen, Mark and the other folks at Aspyr old and new. We laid out some good strategy for the future, and I got to hear a lot of interesting things about the "business" side of Mac porting from Aspyr's perspective that wasn't part of my focus or interest as a programmer when I was with Westlake. It helped explain a lot of things that weren't clear to me, and why some business decisions are made and others aren't. Turns out it's not voodoo, magic or guesswork after all! :-)
I'm quickly getting to the point where there's not going to be a whole lot more to say about progress on Angus. He's in pretty good shape now - all my byte-swapping issues appear to be behind me and the game seems to be running nearly bug-free. Of course, "seems to be" and "is" are two very different things when it comes to programming, and I hope to spend a lot more time playing it in the near future to ensure that there aren't any bugs lurking and get it prepped for QA. So call it mid-alpha if you will. :)
And in the realm of things that give me night terrors, I'll be flying out to Austin this afternoon for a quick "orientation" meeting at Aspyr, and flying back to Phoenix tomorrow afternoon. Going to Aspyr isn't the terror part...
I'll be blunt - I hate flying, and I'm a big baby about it. Glenda was nice enough to schedule me on a non-stop flight (which isn't too hard from Phoenix since it's a major hub for Southwest and America West). What I didn't notice until today is that both legs of the trip are on a "regional" jet. Maybe you know the type - 19 rows, 2 seats on each side, and your head can almost touch the ceiling when standing in the aisle. What makes flying uncomfortable for me (aside from the notion of plummeting to earth at supersonic speeds in a ball of fire) is all the "stuff" that happens in mid air: turbulence, the sensation of turning, being up high, and the whine of engines as they rev up and down, up and down throughout the flight.
To me, these things are amplified considerably on these smaller jets. One thing I hate in particular is the engine revving noise - it makes me wonder just what's going on out there, if the engine is getting ready to stall, why is it getting louder, those kinds of things. I like flying on Boeing 737 planes because the engines are out on the wings and it's harder to hear the engine noise (plus, that seems to be a good place for them - away from me!) I don't like the MD-80 class planes or these small regional jets for that same reason.
But the biggest concern I have is air turbulence, or "chop" as the pilots like to call it. This causes in me what you could charitably call discomfort, and while I have no scientific evidence to back it up, it always seems worse to me in a small plane. I've found that if I do word-search puzzles (particularly 'number' word searches) and drink red wine in-flight, I can mostly distract myself. The wine helps the most, but I'm not sure I want my co-workers to pick me up from the airport in a drunken state. :)
I've done the drive from Phoenix to Austin three times now, and it's 1000 miles and 14 hours of the most desolate landscape you can imagine. It's OK from Arizona to just south of Tucson ("The Thing? What is it?") but El Paso is a complete dump and there must be 500 miles of nothing between El Paso and Austin, with barely a truck stop to line the way. So perhaps 2 hours of extreme discomfort beats 14 hours of absolute boredom. Now if there were a train that ran between the two, I could take my laptop and get some work done... :)
Beth and I were at the Chandler Apple Store for the "Night of the Panther." We weren't quite sure what to expect, this being our first Apple Store Event and all. We arrived at the mall for dinner around 5:15pm and saw two older guys (I'm guessing 50+) with fold-out chairs staked out and ready, while business as usual was being conducted inside the store.
We ate at BJ's Brewery, site of a recent waiter-based debacle, to see if perhaps our prior experience there was a fluke. I'm pleased to say that it was, and I'm even more pleased to say that the waiter we had tonight was in fact one of the better waiters I've ever had in a restaurant. Quick, professional and got us our food while it was still hot. It's the simple things in life, like a lollipop in your mouth and a...well, you probably know the rest. ;-)
So after that we browsed the mall for a while and stopped at Barnes & Noble. I picked up the paperback version of "Dawn of Amber", the book that apparently has some hardcore Zelazny fans in a twist. While I loved pretty much everything Zelazny touched, I've never had an issue when other authors come in and do wacky stuff, so hopefully I'll enjoy this for what it is.
Then it was on to the Apple store...
We got there around 7:20 and a considerable line had formed, stretching down several storefronts past the Apple Store. After a few minutes in line, a kid behind us started counting folks, and the tally at that time was 92. While Beth was away peeing, some guy in line was handing out MacSlash stickers. It's like slashdot, only there a score of "2" is considered high. :-)
At one point while standing in line, a passerby shouted "Macs suck!" but fortunately no geek violence resulted. We still had some store credit for Williams-Sonoma from our wedding last year, so since we were standing directly in front of it, I went inside to buy some Pumpkin Spice Pancake/Waffle mix. Oh man, I love everything pumpkin. They were giving out pumpkin spice bread samples inside the store as well, so I brought some back for Beth, who doesn't like pumpkin but likes spice. I don't know that I saw any other Apple geeks making tracks for that, which surprised me because, hey, free food.
By the time 8pm rolled around, the line had just about doubled, so roughly 200 people were waiting to get in. We spied one guy with a laptop sporting Lord of the Rings desktops on what appeared to be a 10 second rotation. I think Beth was a little scared by that, and frankly so was I. ;-) Luckily, no one was dressed like a Klingon. As a side note, I've decided from here on out that I'm going to wear an inappropriate shirt for special events like this. Not the opposite, mind you, just the wrong one. While Beth was styling in her Aspyr t-shirt, I opted to skip my unfortunately-vast collection of Mac-related shirts that I wear all too often for special trips to Wendy's and go with one of those cheap Tucson Beer Fest shirts I picked up a while back. When I told Beth of this plan, she threatened to "out" me. Witchy woman.
So we made it inside on the first wave and got our dog tags. (Note to Apple: WTF?) It was at this point that they announced the 10% off bonus on any purchase made with Panther, and this is when we had to make some hard decisions. You see, we didn't need Panther - I get it free as an ADC Select member. We decided that since Beth is a student, we'd go for the $69 student discount price to get the 10% discount and perhaps add some other purchases to the mix.
After filling out a form each for a free iMac, we started gathering stones together: a copy of Panther, a copy of Another War[1], an iCurve for Beth's new PowerBook and at the last moment, an impulse buy of a 20GB iPod. The Power of Steve compels me!
It took us about 20 minutes waiting in the checkout line, but we made it to the front. Then the bad news strikes: no educational discount on Panther at the store. I seem to dimly recall that Apple Stores honored edu discounts on software but not hardware, so we were taken aback. Now we'd be paying $130 for Panther and we honestly didn't need to. What to do when you're at the front of the line with credit card in hand? Suck it in and buy it anyway. The Power of Steve compels me!
In retrospect, it was kinda neat, but I don't know that I'd do it again unless I had better plans for that 10% discount and wanted to win a free Mac. :-) I didn't really get The Vibe that you do from, say, a MacWorld or WWDC event. it'd probably be more fun if we knew other people there.
[1] Why Another war, you ask? Well, it's kinda simple really. Since I work for Aspyr, I can pretty much get their games for free, and the same holds true for MacSoft. I haven't worked directly for MacPlay, so their games are the ones I usually buy, and usually when cheap. AvP2 and NOLF2 hadn't hit that magic price level yet, and I had the rest of their titles, so Another War it was.
"Angus" (see my last entry) is coming along, but I've hit a snag. It's not running certain script events. This causes all sorts of unusual and funny behavior, like parts of the world being missing and events that should happen which aren't. I suspect that like most things in Mac porting, this is just another byte-swapping issue, so it'll likely be gone soon. The port itself has been a veritable pleasure cruise to work on otherwise, like a three-hour tour, so far without the big, unexpected storm.
And speaking of unscripted behavior, the season finale of the Joe Schmo Show (say that 5 times fast!) is coming up this Tuesday on Spike. I guess there's a marathon on this weekend with the first 7 episodes, so I intend to get caught up then. I only started watching with episode 6. It's a pretty amusing show that appeals to the low-brow humor lover in me ("I respected her. I respected all over her back!") so it'll be a shame to see it end.
I'm getting ready to post a minor blog update on work activities, but I realized that I need to come up with a better way of describing the game I'm working on than "the unannounced Aspyr game that I'm working on." I talked to Glenda and she gave me the go-ahead to use a codename that I'd come up with - "Angus." It's an unofficial codename, and I don't think you'll see it listed on the Aspyr site. I'm not even sure yet if Aspyr is going to list our internal projects on their status page, but I need to refer to it somehow until it's announced.
The reason why Westlake used codenames originally was mainly one of practicality (someone from Westlake correct me if I'm wrong here). I'm not sure if the practice started before I joined or not, but the rationale behind it was that the company felt the need to say "we're alive and working on stuff!" even if the publishers hadn't announced the games in an official way yet. Westlake certainly couldn't legally let the cat out of the bag before the publisher, so the codenames were used instead. Everything else that came out of the process was more a side-effect of that than any planned intent, although I know we frequently were amused by some of the guesses and enjoyed the process. There were more than a few times when someone would guess the game outright very quickly, but had trouble connecting the codename to the project. We didn't really count those, since anyone can blanket-guess a popular game and have a fairly good chance of getting it eventually. :-)
Some of the few codenames I came up with were "Booty Call" and "Russell", mainly because I was assigned to those towards the end of my term at Westlake. I think the rationale behind Russell is fairly witty, and I don't think anyone's guessed it yet. For now, "Angus" continues the real-name trend started by "Russell".
This week is my second at Aspyr. So far, so good. The new and as-yet unannounced project I'm working on is moving faster than I'd hoped, which is good. I probably can't get into many more details than that yet, but I'm definitely pleased so far and I believe most Mac gamers will be as well. :-)
The Alice patch is out there and some gamers have noted that it sounds like ass when set to 44kHz. I'm not sure why that is (it doesn't do it for me), but it's on my TODO list. For what it's worth, we remastered Alice for the upcoming Aspyr "Leave the Lights On" bundle, so if you buy the bundle, you get a new Alice CD with the 1.1.1 patch already there. ¡Que ganga!
Likewise, Galactic Battlegrounds and Clone Campaigns have seen their patches released into the wild. Clone Campaigns seems to be fine, but SWGB apparently doesn't load old saved games, and doesn't do well when creating new ones. I'm not sure yet why that is, but it's very annoying.
I broke down and picked up a new Logitech TrackMan Wheel for $30 at CompUSA. (Side note: CompUSA's Apple section is shrinking at a noticeable pace from even last week.) I tried out the mouse in the store and, although the floor unit was a eunuch, it seemed to be the best bang for the buck. I almost caved and got the latest incarnation of the Kensington ExpertMouse but I figured for $30 vs. $100, the Logitech was almost a no-lose situation. Don't worry Kensington, we can still be friends. I'll call you - I promise!
All the heavy petting in the store didn't prepare me for what I discovered when I got home. I've used the ExpertMouse almost exclusively for nearly 10 years now, so old habits die hard. In particular, whereas before my thumb clicked the mouse button and first 2 fingers moved ball, now my thumb moves the ball and my fingers click the buttons. This takes a little getting used to, and I'm finding myself trying to press the ball in with my thumb when I mean to click. I'm sure in time I'll get used to it. The only other thing I miss is the Kensington software had pretty exhaustive controls to set the mouse speed and acceleration curves, whereas the Logitech stuff relies entirely on the OS settings. Luckily, the defaults seem to suit me just fine.
The other struggle I've been facing started yesterday when I needed to print a FedEx shipping label. My printer, an HP OfficeJet d135, was being quite uncooperative...
It had been warning me over the past week that it was running low on color ink, but I'd been ignoring it, since I never print in color. That was unwise - it turns out that if it runs out of color ink entirely, it'll refuse to print anything at all, even something that's strictly black and white like a FedEx shipping label. ;-)
It took me a while to reach that conclusion though - longer than I had time for to make the FedEx dropoff time - so I had to use Beth's HP in the interim. It was only after searching HP's web page support that it was spelled out for me in, well, black and white. :-) So a trip to OfficeMax was made and a new color cartridge procured for $30. Considering I barely used the old one and now knowing that they simply dry out over time, I was a bit put off by HP inkjets versus to the Epson that I had used for years and never refilled.
Got home, dropped the new color cartridge in and discovered a new annoyance - the color ink was coming out in faded streaks and there was no magenta anywhere, which, after more googling, meant that the printer heads were either clogged or needed cleaning. I saved that task for today, and now it prints out much better than before, although still with some streaks.
The real problem is, I discovered, that I don't print often enough to keep these things from happening. I gather from what I read that extremely sporadic use of the inkjet will cause these problems (ink evaporation and dirty/clogged printheads) to reoccur. I'll have to do better about that, but with Beth sharing this printer over the net now, hopefully it won't be as much of an issue.
Oh for the days of my Okidata m92!
I just installed Panther on my main desktop Mac, and so far so good. There were some minor casualties - Menu Calendar acts oddly now, and there was the usual inconvenience of having my httpd.conf blasted, but nothing major. I had to update a few haxies from Unsanity, and all appears to be well now. I say that, not having run CodeWarrior yet. Hopefully it'll still work, but I'm prepared to do a clean install of Jaguar on a clean partition for testing anyway, so that's no biggie.
That's really all to report so far. Within the next few days, I'll start experimenting with Mail.app to see if I can migrate to it from Entourage without sacrificing any usability in the process. I really like the new look of the Panther controls. The tab groups and image wells look fantastic. I'm going to try and change my habits to include Expose. It looks pretty sweet so far, and I hope it'll help when I have a bajillion windows open in the Finder and CodeWarrior and I'm searching for the right window. The new fonts in Panther are taking a little getting used to. Everything looks slightly off now. I'm sure that's just a matter of time though.
I've only got two gripes so far. The Finder has a habit of spawning metal windows even though I don't want that. Also, the new file picker dialogs no longer let you type in a path name at the bottom. For Unix system paths, I'd gotten into the habit of typing /etc/httpd/ to get to those special folders. Now it seems I have to select them manually. It's not a big deal since that's what I was used to doing under the classic MacOS.
Sometime very soon, I'll be reworking MacMAME to build under XCode now that it supports CodeWarrior-style assembly syntax. That should make a lot of folks happy.
...which is ironic, considering how my livelihood involves working intimately with it. ;-)
Today's offender is my mouse, or rather, mice. I'm a big fan of the Kensington TurboMouse Pro, or Expert Mouse Pro. The main difference between the 2 is that one is more expensive because it's, ostensibly, Mac-only. Truth is they're identical in every way except the box. But that's not where my hate is directed.
My TurboMouse which I hold so dear has died. It refuses to consistently register up/down motions. I've cleaned it to within an inch of its life to no avail, so it's not likely to improve. About a week ago, I pulled out my backup, a Kensington Orbit. It's nice, but it has a flaw - it gets dirty very easily, and very quickly. Little dust bunnies build up on the optical sensors in the trackball, forcing me to clean them with regularity. It's absolutely maddening to be moving your mouse and suddenly have the cursor stop moving while you grind away at the trackball.
So in a very short time, I'll be heading over to CompUSA to procure a decent replacement before I tear all my hair out. I'm leery of Logitech, because their Mac drivers blow compared to Kensington's, judging by what I saw of them on Beth's Mac. I don't know what I'll come back with, all I know is that I miss my TurboMouse. :-(
Beth and I are considering going to the "Night of the Panther" Friday at the Apple Store in Chandler, AZ, mainly in an attempt to win an iMac :-) I could definitely use a low-end desktop Mac now that the Blue & White has gone back to Westlake. I don't think the 15" iMac they're giving away boots into MacOS 9 though, which is mainly what I need at the moment. I hate rebooting my main Mac to test an app under 9 - that pretty much kills my productivity.
I'm looking forward to Panther. Expose sounds like it rocks, the speed increase on my lowly iBook is noticeable (but not overwhelming), and I've promised myself that I'll give Mail.app a shot instead of Entourage. On the downside, I recall all the little things that went wrong when I upgraded in the past. The printer drivers for my HP OfficeJet d135 stopped working with either 10.1 or 10.2 and required an update from HP (whose Mac support is abysmal), I had to reconfigure Apache each time, and invariably, some of the Unsanity haxies that I love so much stop working. I'm pretty sure that on the first and last fronts, I'm good to go, so I may just go ahead and install Panther. That'll leave me without a 10.2.x install though, so I may wait until I can get a cheap low-end Mac instead.
Yesterday was our first wedding anniversary. All told, it's been a fantastic year, and it's gone by very, very quickly. I guess that's what happens when you have a wife and partner who is also your best friend.
We celebrated with dinner at Ruth's Chris. I'm not a huge fan of Expensive Restaurants (it's contrary to my pragmatic and cheap-ass nature), but when the moment calls for it, I won't turn it down. :-) It's nice to splurge once in a while.
Interestingly, one of the gifts Beth got me (I guess traditional year one is "paper") were gift certificates from Wendy's. Yes, Wendy's. That's a sign of just how well Beth knows me. As fast food places go, Wendy's can do no wrong in my book, and I go there more than I should. Tasty 5 piece chicken nuggets. Dr. Pepper that tastes like ambrosia. $.99 Double Stack with cheese. The blissful spicy chicken sandwich. The very fulfilling $.99 sour cream and chive potato,which is sometimes monstrously large. Fries that aren't loaded with salt (I hate salty fries, I'm looking at you McDonald's) and of course the greasy and oh-so-unhealthy double. Damn you, Dave Thomas.
We also had a bite off the top of our wedding cake which had been sitting first in my parents' and lately our freezer. Time was not kind to it, and it won't darken our doorstep any longer. I don't know how that crazy tradition got started, but it's just nasty.
So yeah, one year. It's been great and I look forward to many, many more. :-)
Yesterday (Wednesday) was my first full day at Aspyr, and it started off (and ended with) a bang. I can't really go into details about the new project I'm working on since it's unannounced, so let's just say that things went really well. :-)
I'd also like to thank everyone for the sentiments about leaving Westlake and joining Aspyr. It's a nerve-wracking experience to switch jobs, and it's nice to get support and positive feedback to help ease the transition.
Now it's time to kick some ass. :-)
Beth and I went to Costco tonight to do a little shopping. (Side note: Costco as a name seems contrary to me. It seems like it's gonna cost me to shop there rather than the true intent of saving by buying bulk.) While there, we took a gander over their DVD selection just for kicks. Normally, I've found that you can't beat Deep Discount DVD for prices (theirs include shipping), and as such I buy most of my DVDs through them.
However, we found an incredible bargain tonight. Seasons 3 and 4 of Stargate for $39.99 each (1 and 2 as well, but we already had those). What's more, if we bought both, we got an additional $10 off, so that's $70 for both seasons. That blows away the best price I've seen by quite a large margin. I've stated before my preference to SG-1 over newer Star Trek, so the price-per-season on this compared to, say, DS9 is incredible to me.
Anyway, I just wanted to pass the savings on to you, the reader. :-)
Today marks the last 24 hours I'll spend as a Westlake employee. It's been a great 5 year run, and I wouldn't trade it in for anything. That's partly why it's also a kind of depressing day - this marks the end of a pretty big and fun part of my career. Working with Glenda, Suellen, Ken, Phil, Mark, Duane, Cary, Jesse and of course John has been a blast.
When I awake later this morning, I'll start packing up that old loaner Blue and White G3 that I've had since I started work on Alpha Centauri back in 1999. It's long since been retired from day-to-day use, but I did keep it around as a way to test games on MacOS 8.6. Now that duty will fall to my iBook.
Sometime after that, I'll do one last check-in for EverQuest. Once I commit that, then my time at Westlake will be at an end, and maintenance for all the non-Aspyr projects I did (EverQuest, Civ3, Centipede and Monopoly Casino) will fall into someone else's hands.
So anyway, thanks for all the memories guys, and best of luck to you and Westlake in the future. If I ever have a job and coworkers that were as much fun as at Westlake, I'll be one of the luckiest guys alive. (Yeah, that sounded a little Lou Gehrig-like. Sue me.)
One of the Unsanity guys wrote a good article about what it means to be a developer who pays for access to Panther seeds.
For what it's worth, I'd love to know if Panther is really GM as the rumors suggest. I'm somewhat skeptical (given Apple's past behavior of seeding us with the GM once it happens), but I haven't asked my own "inside sources" if this is true or not.
If Panther is GM, then it's a bit unusual that pretty much any Mac user with half-decent warez skillz can grab the GM while developers who pay real money for this privilege are left waiting. I'd love nothing more than to QA my projects against the Panther GM...
Some of the more...fanatical...members of the Mac user base have been known to freak out over some interesting things. Take, for example, this recent story on Wired. It's generated an impressive amount of press and speculation amongst the various Mac news and rumor sites.
Crazy Apple Rumors has finally put to words my exact feelings on the matter.
As I was reading Wil Wheaton's website today, I was reminded of something that's been nagging at me for a while - I'm not very good at donating time to local user groups. I haven't ever participated in any as a member.
When I was in Austin, I did give a presentation on MacMAME to a bunch of the folks at Apple (they have a fairly large campus there), and that was a lot of fun. I got to geek out about MacMAME and get a lot of valuable feedback on the app itself, as well as help some folks learn some of the ins and outs of the app that aren't immediately apparent. There was a fairly large turnout (by my expectation, at least) - around 40 folks if I recall, all employees.
So after reading about how Wil was going to give a speech at a Linux user group, I wondered - should I be doing anything here locally in Phoenix? If I gave a talk, should I pimp all the games I've worked on, or MacMAME, or open-source development? I dunno, but it seems like I should be doing more than I currently am.
I just want to thank everyone for the kind words and well wishes for my new job at Aspyr. The feedback both here on my blog and at the various forums across the net has been overwhelming. I hope we don't let you guys down. :-)
Semi-related to that, the Alice 1.1.1 patch was finally posted earlier today. Grab it here. (The URL on the Aspyr web page is currently pointing to the wrong place - d'oh!)
Expect to see updates for Galactic Battlegrounds, Clone Campaigns and Jedi Knight 2 shoot out soon. I've also tried to finalize the Civ3 1.29 update for MacSoft, and I should be able to squeak out an update to one of my all-time favorite ports, Centipede, before I leave.
You wanna know why Centipede was one of my faves? First, I thought the game was a surprising amount of fun. For the price you pay (now even more so) it packs quite a lot in. Second, it was the first OSX-native game I did - it went gold back in April of 2001, under a month after OSX was introduced. Third, John Butler and I knocked this port out of the ballpark. We added OpenGL support and particle effects and re-sampled the movies from the original art assets so that they looked a ton better than on the PC. The Mac port also had a real emulator for the arcade mode (written by yours truly). And we had an extra world (6 extra levels) not in the PC version for a total of 6 worlds and 36 levels. (Most of the online specs and documentation incorrectly list 5 worlds and 30 levels.) There was an interesting twist to this - the guy that did the version for the PC is actually a hardcore Mac fan. He was quite supportive of us throughout the entire porting process.
The manual for the Mac version sucked though - it had screenshots that were from the PC version and were completely different from the Mac (which we based off the Dreamcast build) and as such not only looked like ass, but got a lot of the information completely wrong. Well, you can't win them all. :-) It's unlikely I'll ever see a penny in royalties from the Mac version, but if you see a copy for cheap, do yourself a favor and pick it up.
Well, here it is Wednesday, Oct 8 (by a few minutes) and I suppose it's time to let the cat out of the bag, mainly because keeping it in the bag is somewhat exhausting. :-)
Starting Wednesday, October 15, 2003, I'll be an employee of Aspyr Media, working as a senior programmer something-or-other in their Mac/PC Development group. In other words, doing the exact same thing I was at Westlake, and working once again under Glenda Adams. :-)
It's both a hard move to make and an easy one. I've worked at Westlake since May of 99, and it's been the one job I've truly loved. I loved the work, and the people were all great. In many ways, it was a lot like working for a very loving family. I'm really going to miss that and working alongside Ken and Phil and the rest of the Westlake gang. It also means that I won't get to work with MacSoft any more, and I'll miss that too. They're truly a first-class, professional organization, and Peter Tamte and Al Schilling of MacSoft have always treated me fairly, and I respect them immensely for that.
But now I get to earn a nice, regular salary (instead of the current milestone stuff) and I get excellent benefits. I also get to work on some very exciting (and as of yet, unannounced) projects. I get to team up with Glenda and a few other familiar faces. And I still get to work from home. Woo-hoo! But what does this mean for the Mac gamer?
As far as I can figure it (and I've done a lot of figuring), this should mean nothing but good things. Being on salary at Aspyr means that patches, the odd large project, and everything else that didn't easily fit into the Westlake milestone payment scheme can be done much easier. I don't have to skip working on a new game to do a patch and have to worry about not getting paid in time. If Aspyr wanted us to work on, say, writing an installer that didn't suck, we could. If they wanted to throw a few of us on the task of reverse-engineering DirectPlay (legal issues aside), they could. If they wanted us to design a new killer porting framework based on the latest and greatest Mac technologies, they could. I have the opportunity to stretch my legs with non-Mac titles if the mood strikes me (and honestly, I don't think it will, but it's nice to have options). There's a degree of freedom that I'm really quite excited about, and did I mention the exciting unannounced projects? :-)
There's more news along this front in the near future, so keep your eyes and ears open. Some pretty cool things are going to be happening!
I think karma has come around and bit me. After ranting about the sorry state of Mac development tools, I took some time out this evening to work on a MacMAME update using CodeWarrior 9.
It did not go well.
First off, the new preprocessor in CWDS 9 totally chokes on inlined assembly that includes macros. It simply fails to resolve the macro at all. The weird thing is you can "preprocess" the file and use that, and it all works fine.
But that was just a minor bump compared to the next bug. MacMAME has a huge number of global variables, and it's a Mach-O app. This worked fine for Pro 8, but in Pro 9 all kinds of hell breaks loose. If you have lines of code like so:
Machine->uifont->colortable[0] = Machine->uifont->colortable[3] = total_colors_with_ui++;
CodeWarrior 9 will screw up the first assignment (in this case, colortable[0]), even at optimization level 0, if there are enough global variables in the app. It'll do the right thing if you split the lines up:
Machine->uifont->colortable[0] = total_colors_with_ui;
Machine->uifont->colortable[3] = total_colors_with_ui++;
The MAME code is completely littered with the former. It would be a Herculean effort to change the code to work around CodeWarrior 9's bug, so the only feasible solution is to go back to using Pro 8.
Please XCode, don't let me down.
Another weekend has entered the history books, and all told, not a bad one at that. According to My Yahoo!'s weather, Phoenix has most likely seen the last 100+ degree day. We're looking at highs in the low-to-mid 90's this week. I spent some time today breaking down tree branches for bulk pickup tomorrow, and it was quite pleasant out. In short time, we'll be able to turn off the AC and leave the windows open. I don't think we'll have 4 months of great 75-80 degree weather like we did this spring, but it'll be nice while it lasts.
On Saturday, Ron, Elizabeth, Paul and Maureen made the trek down to Chandler, and we decided to check out the Tempe Oktoberfest. Admission was free, parking was $5, you got 25 tickets for $20 (although Paul lucked out and got 25 for $10) and most beers cost 4-7 tickets for what amounted to a bottle's worth.
You might think I go to beerfests all the time, but in reality, this is only the second one for me (if you don't count the Scottsdale Culinary Festival we went to in late spring). Compared to the beerfest in Tucson, this one positively sucked. The selection of beer was much smaller, the crowd was significantly larger, and the organization was poor. They had double-decker buses that shuttled between the parking area and the festival. We sat in our completely full, non-air-conditioned bus for close to 10 minutes, while our driver went to chat with the driver of another incoming bus. At the festival, we discovered that there were essentially 2 beer booths, and it took us close to 20 minutes to work our way from the back of the line to the front. Waiting is, in fact, the hardest part. We were able to order two beers at a time, so Beth and I used 20 of our 25 tickets right there.
We quickly decided to burn through the remainder of the tickets (and beer) as fast as reasonably possible, just so we could leave for eats on Mill Avenue. We made our way to My Big Fat Greek Restaurant, a place which is one of our favorite places to eat in Tempe. Excellent Greek food and excellent ambiance. We had the very tasty saganaki for an appetizer (flaming salty cheese served on pita bread), and I had the "award winning" gyro dinner and the Marathon beer. I honestly don't recall what the others had, only that it was generally good as well.
Their menu advertises the "Meat Lovers for Two" - a "symposium of ecstasy", "definitely a couple pleaser." The jokes practically write themselves. :-)
Fresh off my rant on Stuffit InstallerMaker, it turns out that Stuffit 8 for the Mac doesn't properly tag apps as executable. CFM-based apps are fine, Mach-O based apps are screwed.
What that means in plain English is that people who download the latest (and coincidentally Mach-O) MacMAME and decompress it with Stuffit 8 can not launch the app and are e-mailing me, very confused.
Apparently this behavior is a "fix" made by Aladdin at Apple's request, but honestly, how could they not have seen this coming? As if I didn't have reason enough to dislike Aladdin Systems before, I certainly do now. I swear to you - I'll make every effort to avoid their products from here on out. It'll be difficult, given how monopolistically widespread the .sit format is on the Mac, but by God, I'll seize on every opportunity to avoid it when practical.
I'd like to state for the record that Stuffit InstallerMaker 7 is a raging piece of crap. It's not OSX-native (in fact, it's the only app I ever have to start Classic to use), it doesn't support any decent or modern installer options (but it does support checks for B&W and 32-bit QuickDraw - circa 1990), the updaters/installers it produces look like junk (check out the pinstriped backgrounds to the readme text dialog in the upcoming Alice updater) and up until the latest patch, it had serious issues drawing and updating the progress bar under OSX. When you have to add a "don't panic" note to your app's readme about installer bugs, you know you've bet on the wrong horse.
Aladdin Systems just released a beta of InstallerMaker 8 that is OSX native. Hey, it's only been two and a half years, right? They're a company that heavily relies on the fact that they've got the Mac "compression" market locked up, and they use that to charge annually for "updates" to their products that add no real value aside from what most companies would consider bug fixes, while simultaneously providing developers with one of the oldest, creakiest, buggiest and slowest installer/updater apps that mankind has ever seen.
Truthfully, most of the third-party development tools on the Mac suffer from this to a similar extent. Metrowerks' CodeWarrrior is essentially a $250-year bug-fix tax, although it's seeing increased competition from XCode. The folks at Metrowerks may even someday add G5 and dual-processor support to their compiler, although I would hope they do so before they're driven out of business. CodeWarrior doesn't really suck, per se, but it's clearly stagnating. All of the dialog boxes in the IDE look like junk on OSX (and have since 10.0). They don't draw the backgrounds for any of the controls properly, so all the pinstriping is misaligned all over the place. I honestly think you have to try to get this to not look right. There's a lot of other fit and finish that needs work, and makes CodeWarrior start to pale by comparison to XCode. The one thing it still has in its favor is compile-time performance, but even that is narrowing rapidly.
And Resorcerer? Check out some of those "glowing reviews" - from 1992 and 1994. Now to be fair, Resorcerer isn't really as relevant today, what with the move towards NIB-based data in OSX. Having said that, Resorcerer was frustratingly behind the times even before OSX. It lacked support for the Appearance Manager and it's new controls for several years after the Appearance Manager was first introduced in MacOS 8.0. If you read the release notes for the app, you'll note that a lot of effort was expended on bizarre features like a hard-drive file browser, odd zooming rectangle support and about-box fractal generators, because we all know how much more important that is than having a resource editor that edits resources well and doesn't look like ass.
Normally, I don't get overly excited when Apple treads on the feet of third-party developers (like with Watson and Sherlock), but I can't help but wish for them to do so in these cases. It's in Apple's best interest to have world-class development tools on the Mac if they want to have any hope of getting new developers on board. The current state of third-party developer tools is pretty shaky, so it is from that perspective that I cheer Apple on every time they release new or updated tools. Software survival of the fittest!
I got clearance from the Powers That Be to announce my Big News this upcoming Wednesday, October 8th.
In other news, I handed off the Alice 1.1.1 Updater to Aspyr this week, so it should work its way out to the web before too long!
In a move I don't quite understand, I've finally finished work on an updated version of GOB Viewer. You can find the new work - GOB VIewer 2.0 - here.. Source is also available here.
So if you've had the urge to un-GOB Dark Forces and/or Jedi Knight 1 GOB and GOO files on the Mac under MacOS X, then your day has finally come!
If you're like most people, however, the usefulness of such a thing probably ended back in 1996, when OSX was but a mere twinkle in Gil Amelio's eye.
It should run under MacOS 8.6 (with CarbonLib) but I didn't test that. I hope it's not broken there, because I'm not really in the mood to fix it. ;-)
In related news, I finally got Dark Forge in a usable state, although plenty of rough edges remain from the transition to Carbon. Dusting off GOB Viewer was kinda fun, but I don't know if I have enough gas left in the tank to finish an update to the level editor. We'll see.