Rick Hoskinson's Blog : Ranting and Raving

Game Design Post Delay

RickHos — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 23:31:00 GMT

Hello, for anyone looking at my recent posts on game design, there will be a bit of a delay before the next one. It has nothing to do with the content -- I'm going through a bit of a family emergency right now. My polan was to post a discussion Domain Interaction up sometime in April. The interactions are the part of the model that makes predictions, making them one of the most important aspects of the model. However, this is the most volitile and (currently) subjective area, so I might go with Standard Domains first, which are easier to scope, but are largely a toolset for quickly describing systems in your game.

GameFest 2007: Mission Complete

RickHos — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 01:53:00 GMT

I’m back from GameFest 2007 and I can start to take back parts of my life. The last 3 months have possibly been the busiest and most stressful of my entire life. The rewards have been incredible though, and I’m still glowing about the fantastic reception to the XNA Game Studio track.

For those of you unfamiliar with the GameFest conference, the details can be found at http://www.xnagamefest.com/ . True to the XNA branding of all Microsoft gaming development, XNA GameFest is primarily an event for seasoned industry professionals that want to get the most out of Microsoft platforms. I like to think of it as a “Game Programming Gems for Microsoft Platforms”.

I volunteered to be the XNA Game Studio content coordinator for GameFest 2007. As a result I’ve managed to add about 50% more responsibilities to my usual engineering support workload. Couple that with the unprecedented lineup of holiday Windows and Xbox 360 titles, and I haven’t had a lot of “outside time” this summer. I managed to get Shader Series 4 our the door as well, which is an exciting landmark in a series of whitepapers and samples I've wanted to do since last summer. Back then the CGP team was working hard to get http://creators.xna.com off the ground and there were no Game Studio samples at all. The XNA CGP team has come a long way, and they have produced a marvelous community developer portal.

I have probably 50 man-hours of post-GameFest responsibilities, but these will be distributed over the next few weeks. I should be getting back to a normal schedule just in time for the Seattle Rainy Season. And that means I’ll be back to working on my leasure game projects.

River’s End has been stalled all summer for the above reasons. During that time I’ve also managed to shift my support responsibilities so that I’m now a primary source for Xbox 360 GPU support. I’ve learned an incredible amount in a very short time, and I have nothing but new ideas for how to convert River’s End from a pretty game into a jaw dropping graphics showcase.

Not that I’ve forgotten the gameplay. I’ve been jotting notes about level ideas and new gameplay mechanics all summer. I’ve also taken inspiration from the incredible work done by the top Dream-Build-Play entries which we displayed at GameFest. These games are stunning, and many times they’ve been completed entirely by one talented developer. They’ve given me the confidence to persue very aggressive design goals for my hobby game projects.

I’ve also got some great ideas for more developer education content. Things that have come to mind recently have been about project management and scaling for teams. The upcoming Game Studio 2.0 features should enable some really interesting project management techniques that will make working with artists, managing content builds, and dealing with multiple platform targets into a highly streamlined experience. It’ll take some research though, so I’m going to factor in these techniques into my leisure-time work on River’s End.

Be sure to check out the games at http://www.dreambuildplay.com/main/default.aspx . They’re all awesome in their own way. I probably shouldn’t say this, but my fave was Shuggy. I love 2D gameplay concepts and Shuggy helped convince me that we’ve still only scratched the surface of what great gameplay can be had on a 2D plane.

MDX, XNA, My Book, and My Job

RickHos — Thu, 24 Aug 2006 03:51:00 GMT

Well, it's been a while, hasn't it? It's been many moons since my last inane post about problems I had with PC games. Well, I set out many years ago to try to fix some of these issues, and lately I've had some success.

Before I say anything else though, I want to address the topic of my book. Yes, it is on Indefinite Hold, at least with me at the helm. The reasons were many-fold, but the primary reason is that MDX 2.0 never shipped. The API on which I'd based my entire book is deprecated, which obviously made the book somewhat irrelevant. Perhaps someday I'll return to it and finish what I started, using a technology that might be called MDX's Conspicuous Successor.

I am very sorry for everyone who was looking forward to this book. Nobody is as disappointed as I am, but there's really nobody to blame. The Managed Game Development world has take a very radical turn, which is, of course, the XNA Game Studio.

For years I was a test developer working on the original MDX 1.0 and 1.1 products. A few strange years later I took over a new (on Windows) tool called PIX. For those of you unfamiliar with the tool, I highly recommend giving it a whirl if you do any D3D9 development at all. Later I'd take on test for all of PIX for Xbox 360. The combination gave me a great opportunity to learn about the inner workings of Windows graphics and XBox performance. The knowledge domain is immense, and I am a far better graphics developer for the experience.

However, just a few weeks ago, I passed the PIX torch, and I took on a new position. I am now a developer with the Games Technology Group and I'm specializing in the XNA Game Studio products. For me, this is like coming home. This means I'll once again be interacting professionally with the very community we've been building for 5 years with MDX. The XNA Game Studio product is like a dream come true for me. It's the realization of a dream shared by very few back when we started this Managed game programming business. Back then we'd already figured that managed had the potential to be a cross-platform framework for making games on PCs and Consoles. It wasn't until lately that that dream has been realized, and in grand fashion.

I know many of you are excited about the opportunity to create games on your XBox 360. I have friends who went out and bought a 360 in anticipation of the XNA Framework. I can't wait to see what you come up with! As new XNA products and services come online, the potential for new ideas, new talent, and new technology grows exponentially.

These are very exciting times to be a managed developer. With the XNA Cat out of the Bag, I'll be back on my blog, and I'll be surfing the XNA forums on MSDN as much as I can. It's great to be back, and I'll be on the front lines trying to make the XNA developer experience a good one.

PC Gaming - Entropy Death?

RickHos — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 10:36:00 GMT

I suppose we all get to do this once in a while. I need to rant and this seems as good as place as any. Allow me to regale you with my tale of woe (such as it is) and you may ignore it at your leisure.

Tonight I decided it was high time I started playing videogames again after a brief hiatus to build my new computer and tinker with some new music production toys. I had about 4 titles in mind that I wanted to spend some quality time with.

First, Black & White 2. Gorgeous game -- the little bit I've played was entertaining enough, but the eye candy and production values make it something of a novelty for a PC title. The game does not appear to have an incremental game save feature, but I was undeterred. The game seems easy and forgiving enough that I don't feel I should have to save every 10 minutes for fear of my in-game animal avatar accidentally getting less evil. What a mistake that was. After 45 minutes of play, the game froze on me. Hard lock, and on my current PC, not a damn thing I could do to get any useful debugging information from it. 45 minutes of game I don't really wish to play again. And so, I'm done with this game, probably for good.

Game 2: Battlefield 2. Good old Battlefield, you've never let me down. Seems there's a new patch available. A 170MB download, but well worth it -- there's a whole new map. Patch installed, game started, multiplayer servers enumerated. I join my first server, wait through 30 seconds of loading, 2 minutes of waiting for something that is "validating my client files" to prevent me from cheating somehow. I guess they don't know how you can just turn the lighting effects to low to remove dark areas from the game and make players in buildings into sitting ducks. But I can live with a little load time, this is one of the best games I've ever played. Not 15 seconds into the level, I'm uncerimoniously dropped back the game menu UI with the message "connection to server is lost". No worries, I'll try a different server. Same problem. The time for panic has come.

This marks the start of a two hour quest to configure my router, my NIC, and my firewall software; each test requires me to sit though unskippable EA logos and 2 to 3 minutes of anti-cheating software downtime. After trying a number of connection variations including a direct line fro my PC to the internet modem without any semblence of a firewall, I remain defeated. All this for a game I've been playing successfully two months ago.

At this point, I'm tired. I don't want to play PC games anymore. I dread the thought of dealing with an online anything. So I play Katamari Damacy 2, which is a very good game and has not crashed once on me. Sure it lacks the depth of gameplay I've been craving, but it gets my mind off of router settings.

This is why everyone says PC gaming is dying. If a software developer with years of experience in multimedia APIs, network programming, and realtime graphics development can't get any of his favorite games to work, what chance does the average user have?

Allow myself to introduce... ...myself.

RickHos — Tue, 01 Jun 2004 22:06:00 GMT

I'm probably not a name you'll recognize, but I've been around behind-the-scenes of DirectX SDK releases for the past 3 years. I've been looking for new ways to get in touch with developers and the MSDN blogs sounded like a natural course. I'm a Software Development Engineer in Test with Microsoft DirectX, which is a fancy way of saying that I write test automation and develop test scenarios for DirectX components. Right now I work on an upcoming tool called PIX (Performance Investigator) for Windows, Managed DirectX, and some new debugging functionality that's been added to the Direct3D 9 debug runtimes.

I've been working with Managed DirectX for close to three years now. I showed up at Microsoft as a new hire from college in just enough time to ship Windows XP. Immediately following the XP launch, I became a tester for Managed DirectPlay and Managed DirectInput. My position eventually evolved, and I now own test for all managed runtime components (though I do work with other test developers on some of the larger areas like D3DX). I also own test for PIX for Windows. For those of you unfamiliar with PIX on the XBox, PIX for Windows is a stand-alone application that ships as part of the SDK. It is designed to capture data about Direct3D 9 applications and allow developers to analyze the results. That's a pretty thin explanation for a very powerful and involved tool, but you'll get to play with PIX yourself when the DirectX Summer 2004 SDK Update ships.

Sometimes I have a life outside of work, and that life also has a lot to do with games. I'm a MOD developer and I'm taking my first stab as a MOD team leader this Summer. I dabble in electronic music production and original game development. Oh yeah, and I play games too sometimes :)