Tom Miller's Blog : Ramblings

My blog is a constant source of new and exciting information…

tmiller — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 09:33:13 GMT

It’s been over a year since my last post, and despite my many promises to myself (and anyone who still reads this thing), I never seem to find time to post here. Well, other than right now, since I obviously am doing it now.

A lot has happened since my last post. We shipped Game Studio 3.0 and opened up the Indie Games on Xbox Live, although it was so long ago, it wasn’t even *called* Indie Games back then, it was called Community Games. I’m sure everyone has heard about it by now, and I still think it’s awesome that you can sell games you’ve created. Then again, we also shipped a completely new version since then as well in Game Studio 3.1! Wow, I really am behind aren’t I? We added cool new stuff like Avatar support in that version.

I even completely forgot about my annual Aprils Fools post! Of course, I didn’t really come up with a cool topic for that anyway. I’d make up something outlandish now, but that wouldn’t be nearly as effective since it’s September.

Speaking of Indie Games though, I think I’ve finally decided the game I’m going to write to ship there. Of course, my idea is way too ambitious for my artistic talent (read; zero), and I have no idea where I’m going to find the time to actually write it, but no matter. I will finish it and ship it and suffer the ridicule of the masses!

Maybe that will even give me the impetus for writing more here. We can hope… If not, lets hope I’ll remember to write something sooner than the next two versions of Game Studio.

Introducing XNA Game Studio Mind Edition...

tmiller — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:24:00 GMT

I'm probably going to get in trouble for announcing this before any press release has went out publicly, but I find it hard to hold back my excitement! The next version of the XNA Game Studio product line will be the "XNA Game Studio Mind Edition".

I suspect everyone will want to upgrade to Game Studio ME as soon as possible because it will revolutionize game development as we know it today. Gone will be the days of having to actually write code for the games you want to do create. We decided to take our contest theme extremely literally and use that to build our next project. Dream. Build. Play.

With the release of Game Studio ME, developers, hobbyists, pianists, small children, Nobel Prize physicists, and even Maytag repair people will be able to bring their dreams to life. With our new Game Studio ME Brain Wave Actuator (patent pending) writing games is as simple as donning the new apparatus and taking a nap. Shortly after you fall asleep soothing music will be played in the ear plugs that come with the device, and a series of electrical jolts will be given to stimulate your brain and activate REM sleep. Once you wake up a few hours later, you can simply go to your computer and click the "Build" button in Game Studio ME (it will be easy to find, it is the only option available) and your dream will now be packaged up as a ready to play game!

I know what you're thinking though. Is this safe? Here at Microsoft safety is our number one concern for our customers. We've only had a handful of people die while using the device, and the number of people still suffering from serious mental defects from the electrical charges has shrunk by dozens! By the time we have finished our beta testing, we fully expect the odds of serious injury to be less than 10%. Speaking of beta testing, we're actively looking for volunteers. You'll have to sign a waiver though.

I must also add that we've ran into one minor problem with our implementation however. It seems in our zest to follow our contest theme no one took the time to realize that the majority of people don't really dream about things that translate well into games. As a matter of fact, some of the so called games we've seen have been down-right demented. To help protect our interests (and your own) we've decided to upload a copy of everyone's dreams to our servers locally. Here at Microsoft though, we take privacy almost as seriously as we do safety, and you can rest assured that your private intimate thoughts from your dreams will be seen only by those who have a very real need to. These people will include local law enforcement, Joe from accounting, and we will randomly play some of them during regularly scheduled team meetings. You know how they say everyone has that dream where they go to school/work in their underwear? If our team meeting videos prove anything it's that this is a very real statement.

Since we know our customers want and need the new Game Studio ME as soon as possible, but we discovered this "problem" with the games being produced a bit too late for this product cycle, we've decided to release on schedule in the fall, and follow up with a service release next spring. This service release will be a prescription you can fill at your local pharmacy, and we've dubbed it the eXactPill release. You will be able to use Game Studio XP once it is released to control what you're dreaming about by simply taking a pill before putting on the device, and thinking about whatever you want your game to be about.

While that is the latest and greatest news from my team, I also need to get a little personal in this space as well. If there's one thing I'm pretty sure of it is that people are desparate for information on what is going on in my life. I'm pleased to announce that I was selected as one of the finalists for the prestigious National Award Given to Young Origami Understudies (NAGYOU). With any luck my rendition of the two-toed sloth will bring home the prize. I'm really hoping I win, because if I do I plan on taking the opportunity the prize money will give me to pursue my real dream in life, which I'm sure you are all aware is bringing back Boo Berries all year round, not just around Halloween. Unfortunately though, the contest will pull me away from my every day workings, so I'll be taking a leave of absence from Microsoft for a few years preparing by folding many pieces of paper, then unfolding them, and folding them again. If my blog posts start to dwindle, this is why.

I have to admit, I feel excited to get all of this off of my chest now. I haven't felt this good in at least a year. Must be something in the air.

Why CornflowerBlue?

tmiller — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 02:55:00 GMT

This post will be purely speculation by me!

Take a time travel machine back in time to early 2003. It might have even been late 2002, but I think it was 2003. I was coming up with the concepts and code that would eventually be my first kick start book, and was rendering everything on a bland black background. For some things, black makes sense, but it's hard to see shaded objects (and particular shadows, etc) on black objects. Black in general is a horrible color to use as a clear color. If you clear your scene to black, then render a model and see nothing but black, what went wrong? Was the model not drawn because your camera is facing the wrong way? Was the model drawn, but not colored because your pixel shader wasn't set? You could tell the difference if your background wasn't black.

I needed something brighter, and white was out of the question. I can stare at a white screen all day as I type text, but a white background with a single 3D object on it is just too contrasting and is ugly in my opinion. So i needed a color that was light, but not too light, dark, but not too dark, and it needed to be something that I would feel comfortable using for just about anything.

So, as I was inside visual studio, I typed "System.Drawing.Color" then hit the extra period and started scrolling through intellisense, stopping at ones that sounded promising and trying them out. I eventually narrowed it down to a light shade of blue. I had narrowed my choice down to "LightBlue" "DodgerBlue" "PowderedBlue" "RoyalBlue" and "CornflowerBlue". For various reasons I eliminated a couple more and came down to a list of three left.

I had to choose between CornflowerBlue, RoyalBlue, and DodgerBlue. I tried various models on each of the background colors, and finally decided that RoyalBlue and DodgerBlue were too "bold" and contrasted too much, but CornflowerBlue was a much more "calm" color, and everything I tried looked good against it. Plus who wants to use a color called "RoyalBlue" or "DodgerBlue" when "CornflowerBlue" is such a cooler name.

If you've read my Kickstart book, the vast majority of sample code in there clears all of the backgrounds to CornflowerBlue. Every sample I've written since that point in time does as well.

Can I say with any sense of certainty that everyone else uses it because I did way back then? Probably not, I'm sure there are people who haven't even read that book! At times though, I like to delude myself and think I started the craze way back then. =)

Not quite what I had in mind...

tmiller — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:03:00 GMT

Well, so far my promise to myself to write new blog posts more often has been working out well. I've almost written as much this week as I did the entirety of last year (and I have to admit, four blog posts over the course of a year is pretty pathetic, which is what I had last year).

This post though doesn't have any interesting anecdotes from our latest release, and in fact isn't even about XNA Game Studio or game development at all!

As part of my exercise of "writing more" one of the things I had to do was go back and see what I was writing about back in the day when I was enjoying my blog posting, so over the course of today I went back and re-read every post I ever made. It was an interesting experiment to say the least, I'm surprised at the number of things I read that I just had completely forgotten.

A couple of the posts I found were related to World of Warcraft, which is what this post will be about. They were about a year apart, and they were each essentially scathing reviews of the state of the game. While I most likely really did feel so annoyed when I wrote them (and had cancelled my account each time), the fact remains I still play the game to this day. While many people bemoaned the expansion and how much it "changed the game", I for one, enjoyed the changes. There is much less of a brick wall when you hit the level cap than there was before, and there are plenty of things to do regardless of what type of player you are or were.

In my original WoW life, I was a "hardcore raider". We raided every day from 6:30 until 11,12, whenever we felt finished for the night. We cleared Molten Core, Onyxia, Blackwing Lair, ZG, AQ20/40, and Naxxramus (although to be fair, I left the guild after BWL). My schedule became to the point where I couldn't meet those demands and amongst other reasons I left that guild.

That began my second WoW life, where I decided to start over on a PvP server. I won't get into my philosophies on the pvp servers because I don't want to be inundated with a series of "l33t speak" that I don't understand telling me how much I suck. I maxed out multiple characters on the pvp server, killed thousands upon thousands of my "enemies" (there were no cross server battle grounds back then), and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the pvp ruleset isn't for me. I am a carebear through and through apparently.

Around the time I was realizing this and getting frustrated though, my original "hardcore" characters had the option to move. My old server was too big and had queue's every night, and all characters were invited to move to another new server. Sensing this was a great time to see if I still enjoyed the game without the pvp annoyance and removing myself from the pressure of raiding constantly, I moved all of my characters to the new server and started playing again. I joined a little guild, had a bit of fun.. They merged with a huge guild and I considered that a big mistake for a variety of reasons. Shortly after that merge, I left the big guild, and reformed the old little guild, bringing most of the original members back.

So now I'm the guild leader of some random guild on a brand new server. We were the definition of casual, and happy that way. Well, most of us were. Some were annoyed we weren't doing the big 40man raids (I'd already seen so much of Molten Core i never wanted to step foot in it again), and they left. The beta for the expansion was just around the corner though, and that's where we all started playing more again. Everyone in the "core" of the guild was in the expansion beta as well.

Once the expansion came out, I decided the name of the old guild was stupid, and we needed to find a much more stupid name to call ourselves, so I kicked everyone out of <Dark Crusade> and created the guild <Less Than Three>. For those who are "unaware" Less Than Three is <3, which is an emoticon for a heart. Naturally, our guild tabard is pink with a heart. That still annoys some people, but eh, I get a kick out of it. So anyways, the expansion came out, and we were invigorated, so many new quests, so many new dungeons, so much to do!

So we all leveled up with varying levels of speed, and ran all kinds of dungeons along the way. It was good fun. Eventually we got to the point where we decided we were ready, we were going to run a "heroic". We were going to collect epic loots and slaughter the place. We decided we would try heroic Slave Pens because at the time you needed revered reputation to run a heroic and that was the easiest faction to get rep with, and on top of that was supposedly one of the easiest heroics in the game. We gathered at the entrance, we walked in, we were ready to do great things.

We wiped on the first pull. Twice. We wiped on the second pull. We were all red before we got to the first boss. We did kill that first boss though before we decided we weren't ready for heroics yet.

Looking back at it now, it's pretty funny, but at the time, the thoughts were "Holy crap, this is impossible." We yawn through most of them nowadays, but I always look back at that first wipe fest with fond memories..

Anyway, finally around November of last year I decided as a guild we needed to start doing more, and that meant Karazhan. As I stated earlier, we are an extremely small casual guild, but I figured that doesn't mean we were bad players (half of us came from the hardcore raids back in the day), we were just not focused on being #1 anymore. When I say small though, I mean not even large enough to run Karazhan (ie, less than 10 players keyed). We had all the core classes covered though. We had enough tanks and healers, all we needed was DPS classes. I figured we could just find random pick up group (PUG) members to fill out our DPS slots, and that's what we started doing.

We had some success too. Soon we were killing multiple bosses and things were going well, when we eventually hit a brick wall. We had gotten to the point where we could take just about any random PUG and clear through Curator. When I say any random PUG, i mean just that as well. We've had a PUG who did half the damage I did (I'm the main tank). We've had a PUG who went out of his way to break any crowd control that existed. We've had a PUG who decided to use his pet to pull a group of mobs that weren't even in the same room as us. Actually, that was all the same guy. He didn't understand why I didn't invite him back next week because of how awesome he was. Where was I? Oh yeah, brick wall. Shade of Aran was our brick wall.

This is what Shade of Aran had taught me. At the time, the majority of our raids were made up with 8-9 guild members and 1-2 PUGs. I learned that we could 8 man every boss up until Curator, and that we could 9man Curator. I also learned that a random pug in all greens who doesn't understand the need to stand still during Flame Wreath is a recipe for disaster. Unlike any boss before it, Aran punishes players for doing things wrong, and if there is one thing you can count on a pug doing, it's "something wrong".

So, I started trying to recruit players to help us out. I talked to all of the PUG members we had with us that went well, but most of them were in established guilds and were with us on an alt for easy/free badges and loot. The ones interested in joining were the ones who were horrible. This is where I learned that I am a horrible recruiter. I simply cannot do it at all!

Which brings us to this extremely long winded post! Consider this my last lame attempt at recruitement. Our raid times are pretty inflexible (given our small size and the schedule requirements of some of our members), but our normal raid nights are Friday and Saturday nights, from 8pm to Midnight pacific time. We have killed all of the bosses in Karazhan with the exception of Prince, Nightbane and Netherspite (see my note on pugs above), but hope to have those done soon.

So, if you're interested in raiding Karazhan (and eventually Zul'Aman soon) on those days, and random other dungeons throughout the week (all in the evenings, we're all at work during the day you know), you should contact me! If you're a warlock, even better, since all our current warlocks are alts of characters already in Kara and some bosses (I'm looking at you Illhoof) could really use a warlock. I really don't care what class you are though. Do you want to tank? Awesome, that means I could bring an alt sometimes. Want to heal? I'm sure our healers would like to bring an alt sometimes too! Got DPS, that's awesome, we always need DPS.

Now, we're a pretty accomodating guild for the most part. I'm entirely too helpful for my own good most times. Given the extremely public nature of this post though, I'm going to have to be a little more particular on the things I am looking for. I understand the concept that beggars can't be choosers, but I don't feel like being taken advantage of and helping someone get ready for raids with us just to have them disappear. If you want to create a new character on the server, we'll help you level up when it's convenient for us, but it won't be all that often. I'd much rather if you were already level 70 and keyed. If you want to tank in Kara, you'll need to be uncrittable, and have a minimum of 12k hps and 12k armor (20k if druid). If you want to heal, you'll need at least 1000 +heal, and preferably more, along with a decent mana regen and mana pool. If you want to DPS, I hope you can sustain 400+ the entire run.

To be honest, I hate putting any kind of preconditions on it at all. However, i think what i have is pretty reasonable. I don't care what class you are, what spec you are, so long as you are a good player, you'd be welcome. So after all that, if you're still interested, you should contact me, either here on these boards, or in game. We play on the Eitrigg server as Alliance, and you can contact any character that starts with "Miller" in the guild <Less Than Three>.

We have a web site as well at http://lt3.darkcrusade.org (as you can see our old guild name remnants still exist), but it's been flaky the last few days to say the least. Hopefully it is resolved soon.

P.S. How sad is it that I'm posting a recruiting post on my blog? I almost feel dirty.

Why purple?

tmiller — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 06:00:00 GMT

One of the things I'm going to try to do this year is write more on my blog. The publisher for my books is hoping I'll write something new for them this year as well, although at the moment I don't know if I'd have the time, or what I'd write about anyway.. Anyone have suggestions on topics they'd like me to cover in a book or a blog post? Shawn normally goes a great job staying ahead of the curve so the possibilties of topics diminishes some. =)

So for now I'm just going to post a random anecdote that was asked in our internal alias one day.. Why does the framework clear the targets (render targets, back buffer) to purple when RenderTargetUsage.DiscardContents is turned on?

When I originally implemented that feature, I wanted something that jumped out at me and was extremely noticeable. I picked the brightest, most obnoxious shade of neon green I could. It did the trick, it was instantly noticeable when it was there. As time went on though, I kept seeing it all the time, day in, day out, over and over again. It irritated me something fierce and eventually I decided I just had to change it to something much less obnoxious, so I picked a dark purple. The intention was to switch it back to the bright neon green before we shipped to ensure everyone got to experience the joy that was that color.

As time went on though, we all got used to the purple. It was pretty quickly and easily recognized and that was the goal for the clear to begin with. Why torture everyone's eyes and have them all hate me when everyone is soothed by the purple?

So, why purple? To avoid the hate mail that would have come from the original neon green!

Reflection

tmiller — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 10:35:00 GMT

With a title like that I’m bound to start discussing the intricacies of one of the CLR features am I not? Well given the day, I have to say of course not. I’m going to take this time to remind myself of the things that have happened over the last year.

Have you heard? We shipped the Xna Game Studio Express! Honestly, I thought I had written a short post stating that, but apparently I’m losing my memory in my old age, because it certainly doesn’t appear to be here! For that, I apologize, but it wasn’t a secret that it was coming out, so hopefully this isn’t a surprise to anyone!

As I insinuated in a post a few months ago, this release has been quite ‘special’ for me.

This time a year ago I was still in the DirectX team. Such a thing as “Xna Game Studio Express” didn’t exist, and the amount of people even aware such a thing was being considered was very small. This team has gone from essentially nothing to having a product out that will changes the rules in this industry. This was all done in the space of a single year’s time (really in just a few short months). This is an absolutely remarkable achievement, and I hope every single person who helped make this possible feels the same sense of pride that I do. The hard work shown by this team and how we pulled everything together to allow all of our anxious customers to start using Xna was a sight to behold.

When I see things such as Xna Racer and various other games being created in the community that prove all the people who were telling me how impossible it would be to create such things using managed code, it makes all the long hours I’ve put in over these years to help make this happen worth it.

It’s not often in life you get to be a part of something that not only can change the industry you work in, but can spawn an entirely new one as well. What this team has accomplished in such a short time speaks volumes about the passion and dedication they have and bodes well for the future of this product.

We’ve accomplished all my original goals for managed code in gaming. We’ve released a product with plenty of support. We’ve opened up the Xbox 360 for development using managed code. We even have a contest going for you to enter to win great prizes. I’ve been trying to set up a contest for a very long time.

Knowing some of the features we have planned, and seeing what the community already has done in such a short time, I couldn’t be more proud of where we’ve ended up. The excitement is just beginning. The rest is up to you!

Random XNA thoughts and links..

tmiller — Sat, 26 Aug 2006 01:50:00 GMT

Well, maybe not so random.

First, ever wonder what the XNA Framework was? Look at Mitch's latest post on the Xna Team Blog..

Second, a coworker has recently started a blog, and he has a number of interesting posts, including explaining why he joined the Xna team.

Which makes me get quite nostalgic myself. Shortly after we announced I sent out an email internally, which i'll now include here (albeit slightly modified for the public)..

---- Insert Sentimental Thoughts.

I can't decide if it seems like yesterday or a lifetime ago, but GDC in 2002 was the first public showing of what became known as Managed DirectX. Since that date I've listened to countless people telling me how and why managed code could never be a viable game development platform. Actually, I guess that's a lie. It started before then since it was an uphill battle in the DirectX team just to get it to ship in the first place.

Yet here we are today, and listen to the buzz. It was almost instantaneous. Gone are the cries of impossible, replaced with the excitement of "when can I get it" and "omg, are you serious?" Just wait until later this year when they're actually using it. I can't wait.

I'm sure everyone gets up and comes to work for their own personal reasons, and I doubt everyone shares mine, but what gets me going (and keeps me going) is a combination of two things. One, the ability to make a difference, and I'd be lying if I didn't say there was a certain egotistical aspect as well.

Not only am I no longer alone, there's an entire team focusing on much larger issues, bringing an entire end to end solution. This team is fulfilling not only my original goal with Managed DirectX -- opening up game development; but going so far beyond what I had hoped it's hard to describe. It's been a long time since I've been so excited about a project, and it's a feeling I've missed. Not only do we have the "egotistical" aspects intact, but we have the opportunity to change an entire industry for the better. If that isn't making a difference, I'm not sure what is.

Truth be told, this is probably one of the most sincerely "proudest" moments I've been able to achieve in my career, although I'm sure it will be surpassed later this year when we've actually shipped and people are using our stuff. We're not only pushing people towards the next age of game development, we're defining what that means. I couldn't be more excited.

Cornucopia of topics, redux...

tmiller — Tue, 01 Aug 2006 00:22:00 GMT

So much has been going on, it's hard to believe that it's been since April since I made my last post. Well, aside from being quite busy I was pretty annoyed at the spam I was getting before, so I guess a break was a good thing.

It's been a while since i've posted though, and heck, Gamefest is right around the corner! There are a number of presentations there covering Xna, and I've personally been hard at work getting ready for the conference.

In the meantime lots of other things have been happening. David posted an entry that started a buzz thinking we were removing a lot of functionality. I enjoy seeing the passion people display when talking about these things. We're trying real hard to develop a framework you'll enjoy using.

Then you have people like the folks at Garage Games (they make the Torque engine) who are doing a session at gamefest. They key quote from that one?

"GarageGames, in collaboration with the Microsoft XNA group, recently ported its full-featured game engine to managed code for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and Xbox 360."

Pretty exciting stuff there too. Plus, maybe we'll have new announcements. That's always exciting.

Then you have other randomness going on just in the world. The other day I went out to Olive Garden for dinner. The first 15minutes were spent waiting for a table, which wasn't that bad. It was pretty fast for Olive Garden, plus the most attractive woman I think i've seen was there waiting as well. Everything went down hill from there. While we were being seated a party of 9 showed up and were told they'd have approximately a 20minute wait. That becomes important later in the story.

After 15 minutes of sitting down looking at the menu (really, it's not that big), our waiter finally arrived to get our drink order (we already had our entire dinner planned out by then).. So we order everything. 10 minutes later our drinks arrive, one of them wrong. 5 minutes after that, our appetizers arrive. Those are wrong as well. Oh, and one of them is missing completely. So, it's been 30 minutes, half our orders have been wrong, and we haven't even gotten our main meal yet. Good times!

15 minutes later the wait comes back and informs us that he had just left the kitchen and our food would be right out. Good thing, we're getting pretty hungry.. 15 minutes later, he stopped back by the table. He apologized profusely, but they are short two cooks, and the food will be right out. He also asked if he could get us some more breadsticks. We were pretty hungry, so we said sure.

15 minutes after that, he stopped by the table again. He apologized some more. It's his first day, he's overwhelmed (wait, I thought there cooks missing?).. He doesn't have our breadsticks, but we're in luck. Our food will be right out. 15 minutes after that, the manager comes to our table (he doesn't have the breadsticks either) and apologizes. But our food will be right out.

10 minutes later (100 minutes since we've arrived if you're keepign track) our food finally arrives. Yay! Out of the four entrees we ordered only three show up, and two of them are wrong. Another 10 minutes goes by before our final entree shows up. It's also wrong. As our last entree arrives what do we see? The party of 9, leaving. They had already been seated, ordered, served, eaten, and were leaving.

After two hours of some of the worst service I've ever had the manager apologized a lot. They gave us the meal for free and added a $50 gift card, but even then I wasn't overly happy about it. Crappy service is bad enough, but when the waiter is directly lying to us? We never did get those breadsticks either.

ZMan also made sure people knew that he'll cover the Xna Framework on his site once we go live as well.

I also noticed that Dave is "slowing down" his playing of World of Warcraft. I had done the same thing due to a variety of factors, namely frustration with the end game, and the extreme amount of work I have to do. I've been playing again more recently, and although I only have a small amount of time a day I can actually play, i've been enjoying myself again. My current guild isn't looking to do any big 40man raids, but we're working our way into 20man content soon, and that's good enough for us for now. I've been playing on the Eitrigg server, and while I'll probably regret this, feel free to stop by and say hi sometime.. You can see our guild forums @ http://www.darkcrusade.org

I must say.. I typed a lot more than I expected.. Now I guess I'll crawl back into my hole and write some more code.. =)

Exciting new announcements!

tmiller — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 21:51:00 GMT

Well I have to admit, I've been anxiously awaiting the opportunity where I could finally get out and let the public know some of these things, and now the reigns have been taken off and I've never felt better about the opportunity to write a blog post.

First and foremost, myself. After almost 8 long years I've decided to leave Microsoft because I've gotten an offer that is simply too good to pass up. Starting Monday I begin my new career being the guy on the other end of the phone when that Verizon Wireless employee is asking "Can you hear me now?" continously. Can you imagine the endless joy that can be obtained by sitting on the phone saying "Yes." all day? Sure, I have to take a little pay cut, and lose my benefits, and move into a cardboard box downtown, but if you ask me, it's a small price to pay for doing something you love.

Now, I know you're probably worried about what my leaving will do to either Managed DirectX and/or the XNA Framework. Unfortunately with this announcement they've taken my secret decoder ring, so I'm no longer able to translate the secret messages I get. However, based on my last few meetings before they stole my ring, this is the most likely direction they are going.

The XNA Framework will still be cross-platform, but Windows and Xbox 360 have been removed from the list. That's just "too hard".. Every abacus platform has been added though. This should allow us to get the results we're hoping for.

We've decided that the choice of languages was entirely too large. From now on, all managed games will be written in COBOL.

Due to these two changes, that should lower the development time of the framework, and it looks like it will be finished well before our current June 2017 release date (of course, if we run into problems with those two changes it still might slip).

As you can see, there's a lot of great stuff going on. I for one haven't been this excited since.. Well, this time last year!!!!!!

So many topics today..

tmiller — Thu, 23 Feb 2006 00:53:00 GMT

This will be the first of a number of posts today.. It seems today is just the 'news' day for me I guess..

First topic today, nothing to do with MDX at all, but a link to a great article on Gamasutra by David Sirlin on World of Warcraft. The article is quite accurate in my opinion and a great read.

The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide

tmiller — Tue, 07 Feb 2006 02:14:00 GMT

I just recently acquired a copy of "The COMPLETE Effect and HLSL Guide" and I must say, it delivers *exactly* what the title implies. It also included a little 'abbreviated version' that is a few pages long and the size of two credit cards that makes an excellent quick reference.. I'm not entirely sure if the little quick reference is included with the book or not (it appears to be a separate companion piece), but the addition is welcome.

My only complaint about the book would be it's all unmanaged code (for the non-HLSL parts). Considering that's a relatively small portion of the book (and the 'port' of that code to C# is pretty straight-forward), it's a very minor complaint.

I wouldn't want people to go get the book expecting to see lots of cool demos and samples of these awesome shaders you can write, because that's not what you should expect (and based on the title, how could you?) What this book gives you is the down and dirty details of the Effects system and HLSL.

I've noticed a lot of people that bought some of the ShaderX books because they have all the cool samples of 'awesome' shaders, and after getting the book realizing they have no idea what these 'awesome shaders' do, or how to make them do anything else. If you're in that boat, or simply want/need to know more about HLSL, I'd highly recommend this book.

World of Warcraft - Redux

tmiller — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 05:03:00 GMT

Aside from this one sentence here, this entire post will be completely devoid of any information about Managed DirectX. Instead today, I'm going to discuss World of Warcraft. I'd put a link to the site here, but gee, it happens to be down right now.

Anyway, i've played the game for a significant period of time. I had a level 60 character in the closed beta, and since release I now have 4 more level 60 characters, plus a spattering of non-level 60s (including a number higher than level 40). Every one of my characters has 'PH4T LEWTS' (ie, epics), and the most played of them even has the full epic armor set. I've been involved in killing all of the major 'bosses' in the games, have slept through runs of Molten core, been involved in the 'server first' kills of the Blackwing lair bosses, etc etc etc. Once bored with all the PVE stuff, I started from scratch over on a PVP server and levelled to characters to 60 there. I've done the faction grind for the battle grounds and gotten my 'uber epics' for the exalted reputation there.

In short (or in long depending on how you look at it), i've done just about everything there is in the game. I've done it on a PVE server, i've done it on a PVP server. I've played the game since it was released, and for almost a year before that. Perhaps I'm speaking since things aren't 'new' anymore, but it's this man's opinion that the game has digressed dramatically since the release.

If people remember my first post on this subject 6 months or so ago, I was exceedingly frustrated. I was about to quit the game. The only reason I didn't was because I had formed some great relationships with some of the people I played with. While the game itself was lacking in the 'fun' department, I had a vested interested in maintaining the relationships that had formed, and that kept me in the game. Due to circumstances that I wish were different, those relationships were no longer allowed to continue a few months ago. Thus, the only reason I was playing the game was now gone.

I decided the best course of action would be to try to re-invigorate my excitement for the game, which was the catalyst for the move to the PVP server. I have to admit, for some time, the added excitement from the PVP server did serve it's purpose. The game was exciting again, and I was having fun. However, once I hit 60 again, I hit that wall that I described in my last post. Sure, I could find another raiding guild and relive the content i've already experienced again, but why? So, in one of the more ironic decisions, I decided to relive all the *beginning* content again, and re-rolled another character on that server and levelled him to 60.

I was at a dead end. I could re-roll yet again, or I could continue to play one of my many level 60 characters who had nothing to do. This was right around Christmas, and I had decided to most likely just stop paying, little did I realize Blizzard would help cement that decision for me.

Imagine you're a big company. You've just developed the most successful MMO ever to be released. You have upwards of 5million accounts. Christmas is 3 days away. What do you do? Well, if you were the *real* Blizzard, naturally the best answer is to open a few new servers and then *LOWER* the population cap across all the rest of your servers forcing every single person to wait in a queue to simply play your game.

I could go on and re-iterate many of the points i made in the previous post, but as much as I can't believe it, the majority of them are still valid, and if anything worse. Constant nerfs, hot-fixes for player-helping bugs, player-hurting bugs ignored, queues, server instability, communication, etc. With the sheer amount of money they make a month, I can't fathom how over a year after release this isn't fixed. Why release new content when the content you have doens't work?

Did you hear?!? Medivh opened the gates!! And to think, the server only crashed 7-8 times to make it happen. Oh, and they had to stop people from creating new accounts to go watch it. And people still couldn't watch it when it happened.

My account expired (and wasn't renewed) on January 20th. There's no doubt that the time I played, it was a great game. However, was is the keyword in that sentence if you ask me. For myself, I've lost all respect for Blizzard as a service unit. It's sad, because if they ever do a Starcraft 2, I'll actually have to think twice before buying it. Ah, who am I kidding, i'll buy it. Any type of business that requires them to provide a service to me though? Forget about it.

Oh, and since my account is canclled, no, you can't have my stuff.. Honestly, if it wasn't against the rules, I'd probably just sell my account. I'm sure I could get a decent price for my level 60s split across PVE and PVP servers all with epics. That's not even considering they all have epic mounts and i have somewhere around 2k gold..

360

tmiller — Fri, 06 Jan 2006 02:08:00 GMT

Although it is probably a mistake, I've put my Xbox Live Gamertag on my blog page. Despite my potentially obvious bias, I'm quite pleased with the new console. For all of you still waiting to get theirs, if it makes you feel any better, I just got mine yesterday, and I've been trying hard since launch. So don't just assume that all of us here have them, because we have to wait in line just like everyone else.

Geometry wars is entirely too addicting. I haven't even gotten a chance to try out the other arcade titles, nor many of the other games I have because of it. Although I did pick up DOA4 today, and will try to get some more time in with PGR3 and Tiger Woods later tonight. That doesn't even consider I still need to try the rest of the arcade games, and NFS:MW and Ridge Racer and Tony Hawk and Call of Duty and Kameo and ... oh man.. too many games...

Probably not quite what he intended..

tmiller — Wed, 28 Dec 2005 03:13:00 GMT

I got an email recently from Phil Vaira about a new RPG he was working on.. So, like I normally do, I went and checked out the link. What I found though was a new post detailing his 'advice' on native DX vs Managed DX. Naturally, I read that as well. What i've found is that it contains many misconceptions that seem to have been perpetuated throughout the last few years.

I agree with his sentiment that you use the right tool for the job. It is (or should be) a no-brainer, but that goes well beyond game development, or even software development. That should just be a 'given' in any facet of life. I don't agree with his implication that if you want game development to be a career you should stick to native code (while he didn't directly say that, it was the implication I read with his 'beneficial in the future' comment). The fact is, a large number of 'professional' game developers began their 'career' as a tools developer for a 'real game'. Care to guess what a large number of tools are written in?

He then goes on to 'compare' native Directx and Managed DirectX by using Call of Duty 2 (a brand new PC game) and Arena Wars (which doesn't even use DirectX, much less Managed DirectX). Now, the comparison here is wrong in so many ways, it's hard to count. First, the API's aren't even the same, which seems relatively important for comparing.. you know.. the APIs. Second, he's comparing a brand new game with one a couple years old. Newer games invariably 'look better' as developers 'mature'. Thirdly, he's comparing a game that has a multi-million dollar budget and a dedicated team of artists against one that was essentially done by a couple hobbyists (with no offense made to any hobbyists). Lastly, he's taken the assumption that because the one "looks better" it must "be better". Call of Duty 2 is a good game, I agree with that, but you know a game I think is better? Katamari Damacy.. Find screenshots and I think most people will agree Call of Duty 2 "looks better", but 'looks' doesn't always mean better.

He then uses these assumptions to ascertain that Managed DirectX simply isn't capable of creating something so 'visually stunning'. No basis for this conclusion other than the fact that he hasn't seen it done. He hasn't seen a managed version of Call of Duty 2. He then goes and mentions other games that have been released in the past, wondering why he's never seen managed versions of those (nevermind the fact that Managed DX didn't even *exist* when those games started development). It should be plainly obvious that no development company who wants to make money would 'waste' so much resources by simultaneously developing two versions of their game *for the same platform*. I also got a kick out of how he lets everyone know that you couldn't make Morrowind in managed because "can't get FPS where it should be" which implies that a) there is/was a managed version of Morrowind somewhere (how else would they know that) and b) he was involved in the development of that version. Since I know a) isn't true, i can infer that b) isn't as well.

So anyway. For my conclusion, I'm not going to give any 'advice' on which is better. Both native and managed versions of our API are fully capable of developing 'modern' games. Both versions have pros and cons, and I agree with him that you should weigh these before making any decisions. For myself? I'd be happier if the majority of developers concentrated on making *good* games rather than 'pretty' games.. Regardless of what API they use.

BTW: I've been (am on) vacation for the holidays. Thus my lack of activity here (even though there will be a series of posts today).

Las Vegas.. Without the driving...

tmiller — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 04:22:00 GMT

Like i said the last time i was blogging about trips to Vegas, next time I wouldn't be driving.. Prophetic, since i'm leaving for Vegas and (imagine this) flying this time..

These Vegas trips have been happening every year for a while now.. Hopefully i'm not addicted!