The Brad Hole

Today I'd like to take you all behind the scenes of a particular part of Mac game development. As reported on IMG earlier today, LucasArts/Raven released a new multiplayer map for Jedi Academy that allows you to use vehicles in siege mode. When I read that article on IMG, it was the first time I'd heard about this - that was around 11:30 am my time.

The map was distributed as a PC .exe, so I downloaded it on my PC and installed it, then copied it over to my Mac. I spoke to Glenda about it, and she mentioned that it would be cool if we made a true Mac installer out of it instead of just a "drag it and put it here" type of thing. It took about 10 minutes, and suddenly I had a working installer that put things in their right place. After a few minutes tweaking the readme, it was on its way to Aspyr World Headquarters, just a hair over 30 minutes after I first found out about it.

It then spent some time in QA to make sure it actually worked on the Mac. After that, it was off to MacGameFiles, where it was prepared for distribution. Finally, it was released, roughly 90 minutes after "first contact." Some days you're the windshield, some days you're the bug. Today seems to be a windshield day. :-)

Posted by bradman at 01:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Last year, I bought a $99 M-Audio Revolution 7.1 audio card for my Mac. It's essentially the main (only?) working consumer-level audio card for OSX. Unfortunately, when I last used it, the drivers had a bad habit of causing kernel panics once in a while and it had a tendency to blast out static in certain situations, so I eventually yanked it.

Fast forward to today. I downloaded the latest driver (1.2.9 from last December) and have re-enabled the card. I'm still getting the random static blasts, but so far after a whopping 15 minutes, no kernel panics.

So here's my public prayer to the OSX audio gods - please let these drivers be stable for me. :-)

Posted by bradman at 04:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

About a year ago, I "won" a free year's subscription to MacFixit Pro because (IIRC) I contributed a bit of advice and it was used on the site. I like MacFixit, and I have a great deal of respect for Ted Landau, so when he informed me of this, I basically felt it was more appropriate for me to pony up the $20 myself and let him give it away to someone more worthy. After all, I'd used his site for years as a reference and I felt he deserved the dough.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago. I got an e-mail to my throwaway address telling me my subscription was running out and that I needed to renew. As it happens, I stopped going to MacFixit on a regular basis several months back, and I didn't want to renew, so I blithely ignored this e-mail, and the several that followed.

Yesterday while I was checking my bank for my tax refund, I noticed a charge from TechTracker for $20 - a renewal fee for my MacFixit subscription, which I didn't want. As it happens, those e-mails I ignored informed me that if I did exactly nothing, my subscription would be automatically renewed - a policy which enrages me. I had similar trouble with GigaNews a few years back, except it was a $100 automatic renewal fee. Anyway, after contacting the TechTracker folks, I was able to get a refund, so at least they are responsive.

I like having my bills and subscriptions paid out automatically, but what I don't like is when this process requires me to opt-out of it, rather than opt-in. I shouldn't have to read the fine print to avoid getting charged. I think it's great that these companies offer the ability to have these charges paid automatically, but the opt-out method must cause them more grief in customer service than they gain. If someone forgot to renew, they'd likely notice if they used it and if the service was worth it, would renew anyway.

Posted by bradman at 02:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I was googling this afternoon for differences between Mac and PC floating point operation, and I entered "Mac PC float".

Beth happened to wander in when I was doing this and she asked "is that for a parade?"

Oy.

Posted by bradman at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Breakthrough is winding down at work, so that means that new projects are starting to take a higher priority. Aside from Breakthrough, I'm currently scheduled to do some work on Call of Duty with Duane, as well as starting on a new, unannounced game.

One of the most interesting parts of a game port is the initial bring-up, which I talked about before for the (still unannounced) "Russell" project. This is the time when you spend a few days fighting with the PC code, tweaking it so that it finally compiles, and then fighting again with the linker so that you can eventually run and debug it.

With Quake-3-based games, this process isn't very involved. For Q3 titles, it can take as short as a day or as long as a week to get up and running. Most other games take a week or two, since they're really not meant to be portable and are usually very PC-centric.

The unannounced project I'm working on isn't a Quake 3-based game by any stretch, and it's fairly involved, code-wise. However, the code has been a joy to work with so far. I've managed to get it from absolutely nothing to compiling and linking in less than 24 hours, bypassing entirely the Land of 101 Linker Errors. Naturally it doesn't run for very long, but now I'm to the most exciting part of the porting process. Hopefully this bodes well for the rest of the development cycle. :-)

Posted by bradman at 03:29 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

It seems that if I leave my blog without new posts for a while, MovableType gradually shifts things off the front page as they age. When this happens, things start to look pretty funky.

I'm pretty busy at work trying to put Breakthrough to bed, so I can't think of anything other than dedicated servers, World War 2 and lots of screen dumps of Shark. Seriously, I'm wiped.

But anyway, here's a blog entry to help realign the cosmos, or at least fill up space.

Posted by bradman at 12:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

You wanna know why? One word - Beth. She and I are of a like mind on the topic of Valentine's Day. It's a holiday created by greeting card companies to guilt you into spending money on your significant other. The thing is, if you need one specific day a year to do it, then you're doing something wrong. You shouldn't wait for this one day to do something special - you should do it when the mood strikes you. Otherwise, it seems a bit artificial to say "this is the day I'll be extra nice and extra romantic" - because to me it seems as if you're compensating for not doing so the other days of the year.

In other news, my little brother is engaged to be married!

Posted by bradman at 03:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Yesterday, I went on my chair hunt and on a tip from Jason, checked out the office chairs at Costco. It was $100 - twice the price of my Wal-Mart special, but it's pretty comfortable and adjustable in just about any way you could want, so I went for it. So far, my ass hasn't complained. I've spent more time than I'd care to admit trying to find a link online to a picture of the chair, but so far no luck.

I mentioned before how Ian liked to sleep in my old chair. Interestingly, moments after I moved the old chair into the hall, Ian jumped up into it and promptly fell asleep. He's probably spent the bulk of the last 24 hours snoozing in that chair. While this hopefully will mean no more fights with him, it also means that I may have to keep that thing around as a sleeping spot for him.

Posted by bradman at 09:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)

you find that you prefer Lindsey Buckingham's guitar work to Joe Satriani's.

Posted by bradman at 09:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

One of the last things I did at Westlake was work on cleaning up Centipede for modern OSX systems. As it shipped back in 2001, there was a very rough OSX version that attempted to work with 10.0.0, but eventually broke with later OSX revisions.

When I was at MacWorld, I talked with some of the folks involved with supporting Centipede, and there are some ownership/support issues that aren't yet resolved. This complicates the ability to provide an official patch, so you have to swear to me that you won't ask anyone at MacSoft, Infogrames or Atari for support, because none of them will be able to help you. :-) And similarly, since I no longer work for Westlake, the odds are slim that I'll be able to fix any issues that crop up, so it's definitely provided as-is. Still, it's better than nothing.

Without further ado, here it is.

Posted by bradman at 05:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)

This past week, Apple held a "Games Summit" on their campus in Cupertino and invited a bunch of game developers to join in. They provided a bunch of sessions, tips and access to engineers to help us optimize our games. They also gave us some NDA-level peeks at upcoming stuff which we could prepare for in the gaming space.

The thing I took away from all this that I can share is this: the guys at Apple who put this together really, really care about games on the Mac. "We" (Mac game companies in general) got some feedback about previous issues that we were able to change a few things inside Apple that will benefit gamers, and there's nothing better than getting feedback like that.

While I was there, I managed to apply a few optimizations to Breakthrough that helped some - particularly on G5s, and I was able to prepare a few other apps for upcoming changes from Apple that'll allow them to "rock". What I liked most about this event was that it was more or less all substance - it wasn't a "rah-rah" conference about how games on the Mac kick ass, it was a quantifiable and invaluable amount of help, provided by Apple.

Posted by bradman at 01:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Sometime around the middle of last week, my chair broke. This is the chair that cradles my ass at least 8 hours a day, so it's an important part of my life. The welding underneath came undone on one seam, so if I do anything other than sit on the front edge, it lists precariously to the left, threatening to dump me on the floor. That it's broken shouldn't come as too much of a surprise - I got it for around $40 at Wal-Mart back in 1999 or 2000, so I basically got what I paid for. Still, it's been a pretty comfortable chair, and I'm going to miss it. I should also point out, for those who haven't met me, that I weigh, depending on the phase of the moon, somewhere between 150 and 160 pounds, so this isn't really a case of "Fat Man Abuses Chair, Charges Pending" as it is one of "Cheap-Ass Chair Dies, Loved By All".

I've been holding off getting a new one as I'm going out of town this week for a Game Developer's Kitchen at Apple, where hopefully they can help us eke some speed out of our games. When I get back though, the search for a Perfect Ass Holder will kick into high gear - one that comforts my ass, perhaps has a headrest in the back, and has high enough armrests that I can type in comfort. A cupholder might be nice, but the cats have a habit of doing surprise jumps into my lap, so I fear that wouldn't work out.

Edit: added link to my current chair at Wal-Mart.com.

Posted by bradman at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

I wrote my last entry in a bit of a rush, and Alex caught me on a glaring hole that I left uncovered in my mad dash to convince people to put more boobies on TV. :-)

There are really two points worth mentioning here. The first relates to how calculated a plot this was to unleash an Evil Tit on an unsuspecting public. As Alex pointed out in the comments, surprising people with a boobie (particularly when it's the last thing you'd expect to see) definitely not kosher. It's one thing to be offended by a tit, it's another entirely to try to practice Safe Parenting when one bursts onto your TV during the SuperBowl unannounced. For what it's worth, I suspect it was a calculated move on the part of MTV (and perhaps CBS) and their denial of this doesn't ring true to me. In recent years, I've always viewed MTV as a whore of a network, willing to do whatever it takes to be seen as "fresh" and "hip" and "buzzworthy" without any thought for artistic license. That they would put Sean "Puffy/Puff Daddy/P-Diddy/No-Talent Attention Whore" in the halftime festivities underscores that. So a big middle finger to MTV.

The other point was the one I was vainly trying to illustrate - the innocuousness of the boob. Leaving the other issues aside, boobs, sex and nudity are viewed with a much more prudish eye in America than violence, and this bothers me quite a bit. I suspect a large part of this comes from America having a big "Bible belt" going right through the middle of it, and these folks still view nudity and sex as more evil than violence. I hope that someday soon things will change in this regard, but I'm afraid it won't.

So to get to the point: if ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox want to put boobs, penises, and hot sex on free TV (with the appropriate disclaimers and perhaps a late-night time slot if it's more than simple nudity, of course), I'm here for you, network whores!

Posted by bradman at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

I was reading an article online about how the FCC is looking to fine people because Janet Jackson's nipple was viewed by millions of people.

Censorship in the media is something that's bothered me for a while now, and this seems a perfect example of what is wrong with the current state of censorship in American media. As a general rule, the FCC is anti-boobies, pro-violence, and this strikes me as backwards. By my reckoning, it should be the other way around. After all, when you weight the two (violence vs. boobies), which is the more dangerous to society? Personally, I'd rather stare at boobs all day than violent crime shows. While I can't make the claim that boobies alone make me a better person, when weighed with the alternatives that are on TV, I just don't see that nudity is even in the same league of indecency as the stuff you'd see on, say, CSI. And even so, I view it as mainly the parents' responsibility to police rather than the government.

Of course that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.

Posted by bradman at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (8)