July 2009 Archives

Continuing the description of the DEVELOP conference, I went to the following sessions:

Online Functionality for Your Nex Game? Why Not Go 100% Online!

This talk was given David Jones, CEO of Realtime Worlds. His talk was focused on giving a description of what he has done before, and how this has lead up to the creative vision of Realtime Worlds and what they are working on today (APB).

Except for talking with different HR people looking for programmers at a couple of conferences, I don't really konw much about Realtime Worlds. For those of you who are like me, here is a trailer for APB:

 Dave Jones has previously worked on several big titles, including GTA. Even though this inspiration and background can be clearly seen in Realtime World's previous game, Crackdown, as well as APB, Dave Jones was a real inspiration in that he seemed to have a genuine wish to move the industry forward.

• Attention to detail
• Simple building blocks, compound effects
• Great training, keep it contemporary
• Humour
• Innovate, Forge a genre

Playstation@Home - First Term Report

I don't know why a keep going to Sony sessions, as they continue to disappoint me. The ever so friendly Sony guys are never really able to divulge any information of real use. Don't misunderstand me, I really think that Sony has a cool brand, I appreciate their continuing support of innovative and cross-genre titles and as a programmer and old-time demo coder I have a special appreciation of the PS3 architecture. Though I must say that as long as I can remember, they have been botching up their PR with developers, and especially in this time of user-generated content (both in the sense of gamers creating content, and of small developers creating content for aggregators) I am fearing that Sony's persistent insistence on control may cause them to get so far behind that it will take generations to get ahead again.

In the face of all this adversity I do think Peter Edward, the Home Platform Director did an admirable job. Basically Home seems to be just a promotional platform for the big players, cleverly disguised as a social network. With more ambition Home could become the Facebook of the consoles and gain the popularity and cross-demographic profile of the modern social networks on the internet (which is also seem to profile Sony seem to want for the PS3). However, I don't think it can be done unless Sony agrees to give up an unprecedented amount of control as well as give out free access to their software development suites. 

• 7 million users
• 3 million of them in Europe
• only(hi!) 80% of the users are 18 - 35 years old.  

When a creative director attacks! or What I learned this year with EA!

Dollars, vegetables, ceci n'est pas une pipe (ed - reminds me of one of my textbooks on archaeology), games as art are twaddle - they must make a profit but can be artful, creative director as a muppet hell bent on design, creative director as number cruncher, creative director as bond-super-villain, EA course for designers, 3 things things that inspire you, to get inspired you think of the Eiffel Tower?, inspiration from office with walls painted green, green is the color of creativity and madness, old ideas can be great if exposed to people who don't know them, golden ages, games on socks, The Empire Strikes Back, you are defined by culture, creativity works better under constratins, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, police with big sticks, tapes, floppy disks, bank of England, no-one cares about history, Richard Wiseman, draw Q on head, be suspicious of people who has theories with several levels, be suspicious of people who do not name their theories after themselves, all managers are Captain Picard and Kirk who either see the tree or the forest, Confessions of a Madman, game design is compilicated because people make it complicated, EA has come to its senses,

You wouldn't know from the jumble of words above, but this was probably one of the best sessions I attended.

The first day of the DEVELOP conference was called Evolve, and focused on developing games for emerging platforms like mobile, iPhone, Facebook, XBLA, etc.

Here a summary of the sessions I went to.

If you haven't guessed it by now, Project Prometheus is about setting up a minimal game engine, with an internal lisp interpreter / compiler running. None of the game engines I have seen, has offered the possibilty to do the live editing and coding that you can experience with most functional languages and a basic REPL. 

Project Prometheus is about writing a lisp interpreter that will sit inside my game engine (engine might be the wrong word to use here, as it is rather tiny). As the interpreter sits inside the engine, the goal is to have a live development environment, where the game/application will be programmed in lisp while the game/application is running.

So far, I have thought about several core components that must be part of the whole system:

1. The interpreter itself, with all the necessary compiler stages. It must accept valid lisp syntax and transform it into a form that the system can interpret at runtime.

2. The idea is to have most of the core components running in lisp, but I still need a very tiny interop layer for doing basic interaction with the underlying system.

3. A live development environment must be setup. Maybe I can see if I can hook emacs directly into the system somehow. In this regard,

4. I am also thinking that perhaps I should do away with files as well as the concept of a compilation unit entirely. If I work at function level, then the engine can store an internal database with the textual representation of all functions. Functions will then be injected into the engine and database when they are saved, and can be retrieved live as well. This is still very much a brainstorming stage, though having a big directory of files to compile seem very clunky to me, and goes against the idea of live development.