Aurora

Towards the end of God of War III, we were spending time in the office at odd hours, often coming in late due to midnight oil debugging sessions. It's always somewhat unsettling when you've got people standing at your desk when you arrive in the morning and want help before you even had your first cup of coffee (I know, they do this at their own peril, coffee mellows me out). This particular day apparently someone had managed to check out the entire repository for edit and since we've got a exclusive lock policy in place for our maya binary files [1], this caused the entire studio to grind to a halt.

In your day to day usage of the computer you might find yourself wishing for that one tool that can help you do this particular task at hand. Chances are that it has already been written and the only reason why you are not using it is that you have not found out about it yet! I find this particularly annoying, since my Google-Fu is not that strong (luckily I work with people with strong Fu). But anyhow, this is a short list of tools that you absolutely have to check out, if not use. I'm going to assume that you are a windows shop and a game programmer for this list to apply...

A lot of times it's very useful to have your users drive whenever you are looking for bugs or problems at their computers. Even though I'm a very inpatient person when I look at somebody else searching for the key 'A' on their keyboard or moving the mouse slowly to cut and paste through the menu, you have to preserve and look at what they are doing since often what they are saying that they are doing and what they are actually doing can be very different. So every now and then I'm standing behind someone watching what they are doing and my jaw drops. Once someone were in the middle of doing things and the application just crashed. Very quickly the user clicked on the dialog box that said it crashed and relaunched the application, ready to continue with whatever we were in the middle of. Without batting an eye! This happens on occasion and I see it more and more. I call it the windows syndrome.

E3 is coming up around the mountain and since we're showing at the show this year it's naturally a little bit stressful. It will soon be over though and looking at the swine flu, perhaps not that many attending in person this year. Amidst all this, I realize that I have several projects in the pipe, in my "spare" time, one of which is this blog. Most of these projects have been neglected of late, even the weekly online gaming session. Which just frankly stinks a little bit, but let's do something about it!

I've gotten numerous requests for the slides for the talk me and Vassily gave at GDC 2009. Here they are for interested parties.

GDC is around the corner again and people are starting to get excited about getting together and get some new ideas and share knowledge. I on the other hand have started to get increasingly nervous about this year’s GDC since I for some reason decided to give a talk. The reasoning behind it eludes me as the stage-fright is starting to increase.

It's been a good while since I posted last. I wish I could have made a similar ...

There has been a little bit of resurgence for functional languages, I myself have on occasion spoken for functional languages, as have Christer Ericson and severalothers. Functional languages just makes sense in a way that you really can't appreciate until you've dabbled a little bit with them. The elegance of it all takes my breath away.

Oh no! Not another perforce post. Spare us. We're not even using perforce anyways. Uhm. Have those guys left? Ok, well then for the rest of us that are left, I'm going to assume that you either use perforce happily at work or you are forced by some guy to use it. If you're the latter, then you might look envily at other modern source control systems that literally run circles around this old beast. I'm not kidding, running circles really means that you in other systems have adopted branching as the most basic operation you do.

Recently I've been forced to look more and more at licenses for third party software that I use. This is in my opinion a complete waste of time and just a justification for more lawyers. Reading any license text is like reading the most boring end dense textbook you could possibly find on a trivial subject, and manages to make the subject incredibly complicated and hard to understand.