The Brad Hole

Happy Birthday Beth!

She's one year older today! Well, not really - she's just a day older today than yesterday. But she's definitely an older woman! Well, not older in the sense that she's old or anything, but she's older than me! And by older than me, I mean more mature. And she's not really that mature. She's, uh...well, she doesn't have any grey hair yet. That's something, for sure.

Where was I? Oh yeah.

Happy Birthday Beth!

Edit: One of Beth's many charms is that she's a present whore. If you're the type that likes to give gifts, feel free to go to town on her Amazon wish list.

Posted by bradman at 12:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I just saw this link on the front page of CNN.com about the aftermath of the Scott Peterson trial.

A few things grab me about this. First, have we run out of important news to be putting fluff like this on CNN.com's front page? Second, how sad is it that some people are going to "miss" the trial of a now-convicted double-murderer?

Unrelated to that, but equally as important, why didn't Oklahoma blank Nebraska this past weekend? I'll take a "shellacking", but I would have preferred the much easier to spell "shut-out." Sadly, I don't have the means to stuff little yellow post-it notes that read 30-3 throughout Simps' belongings as he did to me back in '92 when we were roommates and OU lost 33-9. C'est la vie.

Posted by bradman at 02:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

We finally released the dedicated server apps for Medal of Honor, Spearhead and Breakthrough the other day. These are command-line apps that you can run from the OSX terminal to set up a server for those 3 games without the overhead of having to run the game itself and use up OpenGL and other intensive resources. In fact, if you were so inclined, you could set them up on an Xserve. Let's be honest - is there any better use of an Xserve than to run game servers? I think not. Virginia Tech, I'm looking at you.

Another cool thing you can do with these is to run a dedicated server on your Mac, then join that same server using the regular game client on the same Mac.

Keep an eye on Martin's Configulator site. He's been chomping at the bit for us to release these, so I'm glad we're finally able to oblige. His new GUI Configulator apps make setting up and administering MOHAA servers a breeze.

Note that they require the most recent Medal of Honor patches, since those contain new DLLs that are used by the dedicated server apps. You also need to take care to put the server apps in the same directory as the game apps, or they won't be able to find their data properly. If you're using the older MOHAA apps or the dedicated server is in the wrong location, you'll probably get lots of errors about an inability to load a DLL or find the game data.

If you're currently administering dedicated servers on Linux or Windows, I'd encourage you to take a look at switching over to OSX for these tasks. So strike another blow for the dominance of OSX as a server platform and give these a shot.

Posted by bradman at 11:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (6)

A while back, Aspyr bought me a 2.5 GHz G5 to replace a loaner G5 that had to go back to Apple. I've been trying to use it as my main development Mac, but I still keep all my personal stuff on my own G4. I don't like the idea of keeping my personal stuff on the G5 since it's not mine.

I have a USB switchbox to move back and forth between the 2 Macs (and my PC), but there's a freaky bug in OSX whereby if I move my mouse or hit the keyboard within 2-3 seconds of switching over, I lose all USB control in OSX and have to restart (it spews out some funky USB message to the console). I had filed a bug with Apple about this a while back, but they gleefully marked it as closed and I haven't been able to make any headway with them on it.

The G5 has been a real boon for Sims2 development, since compile times for the main app are on the order or 20 minutes on that box. I've never bothered to time it on the G4 because it's so long, but it's in excess of 40 minutes. The link time is crazy too - it can be anywhere from 4 to 8 minutes, which makes turnaround in the debugger an absolute killer.

But back to the G5. I've had freaky instances where it would spontaneously go to sleep while I'm doing stuff. At first I checked my screensaver settings and the energy saver settings but no luck. Then I thought perhaps I'm running an app that's attempting to put it to sleep, but that didn't really pan out. After some googling, I discovered what a lot of other G5 owners have experienced - "thermal runaway". It seems that when the CPU temperature hits a certain threshhold in a very short period of time, the system panics and immediately puts the Mac to sleep to cool it down, and it logs an entry into the "system.log" file about a thermal runaway something or other.

Most of the time, I can wake the G5 back up immediately (and of course I have to reconnect to iChat and our VPN as well), but today it went to sleep right as I was preparing to check in some code, and it refused to wake up for more than a few seconds before going back to sleep again. I'll let it sit for a while and hope that I can get it back awake later long enough to complete my check-in.

Unfortunately, it seems like this is an issue that's going to require the Mac to go in for repair, which is going to totally kill me short-term for Sims2 development. I may soon get an opportunity to time the builds on my G4. Anyone want to guess as to how long it'll take to do a full rebuild and link? :-)

Posted by bradman at 11:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (12)

As some eagle-eyed folks have noticed, we released new patches for all 3 Medal of Honor games the other day (Medal of Honor, Spearhead and Breakthrough). There are a few noteworthy things about these patches that deserve further explanation.

First and foremost, the new patches include an updated version of the Miles sound library for both the original Medal of Honor and Spearhead. This is the same version used in Breakthrough. This is notable because users with dual-processor Macs should no longer have random crashes while playing. Woot.

Second, these new builds have a means to auto-configure your settings to give you the best performance on your Mac. However, the process to do this is non-intuitive. Here's how you can make it happen:

1. Go into the "main" and "mainta" folders for Medal of Honor and Spearhead respectively and delete the file "newconfig.cfg" found in them. I would also recommend deleting the file "config/unnamedsoldier.cfg" as well.

2. If you have run the new patches under OSX or you have Breakthrough, you'll need to go into your home directory (press Cmd-Shift-H in the Finder) and navigate to ~/Library/Application Support (the ~ is just Unix shorthand for the path to your home directory - there's no directory with that actual name). Look in the folders "MOHAA", "MOHAA Spearhead" and "MOHAA Breakthrough".

3. In those folders, delete the newconfig.cfg file, and optionally the config/unnamedsolider.cfg file as well.

4. Once you've done this, you've effectively reset all your settings for the games to their default. When you run each game from here on out, it'll see that those files don't exist and attempt to auto-configure the settings based on the CPU in your mac, the quality of your video card and the amount of memory you have. In most cases, this will result in a noticeable performance win over whatever settings you were using before.

Several people had performance issues with Breakthrough when it came out, relative to the same multiplayer maps running inside of Spearhead or MOHAA. This is also solved by following the above steps, as it gives Breakthrough a fresh set of preferences instead of using any old settings it found in MOHAA and/or Spearhead first.

Other than that, there are lots of minor bug fixes and cleanup to bring the first two games to parity with the Mac code used in Breakthrough and our other recent Quake 3-based games. There were one or two other crash fixes as well, so hopefully the games should be pretty solid now. Saved games are also now in a compressed format, which means that they take up 100-500k instead of 1-2 megs each (Breakthrough shipped with this feature already). The first two games are now very OSX-friendly - they save all their data into your home directory, so they work well on a multi-user Mac (this is something that was also already in Breakthrough).

There should be a set of dedicated command-line server apps shortly for all 3 games, so you can run your own server on the Mac just like folks on Linux. Martin's hard at work on new "Configulator" apps that make this process very easy to do - I recommend checking them out. I worked fairly closely with him during the development of these patches and the dedicated servers to make sure that we eliminated as many bugs as possible with regards to server setup and maintenance. Most people probably won't care about these things, but I'm pleased with how it all turned out.

Posted by bradman at 11:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As most Americans know, tomorrow is election day, and it's shaping up to be not only one of the most important in recent history, but one of the closest and most contentious. I know a lot of people are burned out and never want to hear another word about the election, and that this feeling of exhaustion might translate into a missed trip to the polls tomorrow. No matter what, each American owes it to him/herself to suck it up and vote tomorrow - the earlier the better, as I suspect lines may be fairly long.

With that out of the way, I'd like to rant a bit about the broken US electoral process today before the election, so that it doesn't sound like I'm whining about the loser, whoever it is, after tomorrow. :-)

The way the electoral college process currently works means that some people are far more important than others in determining the outcome of the election - notably those in the so-called "battleground" states, mainly because of the winner-takes-all way the electoral college works in most places.

A few states are considering or already have a process whereby they give out their electoral college votes based on the percentage of popular vote in that state. Short of ditching the electoral college altogether, I find this to be a decent compromise for now, and I hope that more states move to do this in the next 4 years. I'd certainly like to see Arizona adopt this.

I don't like the notion of candidates pandering to a few key locations in a desperate attempt to swing the election their way, because frankly the citizens in the rest of the country deserve better. I've heard a few friends say that they're not as interested in voting because they live in states that are effectively already decided. This bothers me, because I think our votes should count for something more substantial than what is offered by a winner-takes-all strategy.

But that's just my opinion - I could be wrong. :-)

Posted by bradman at 10:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (19)