Aurora

Undoing the effects of editing your entire repository

2010-06-02T06:42:46Z

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.

Development Tools

2009-11-30T01:58:41Z

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...

Is quality going out of fashion?

2009-11-29T05:09:56Z

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.

NiftyPlugins updated.

2009-05-27T06:59:03Z

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!

GDC 2009, aftermath

2009-04-01T03:58:49Z

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 2009

2009-03-20T04:34:04Z

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.

NiftyPlugins update

2009-02-08T04:21:03Z

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

The only game in town

2008-09-29T00:29:06Z

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.

p4branch

2008-09-13T08:31:23Z

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.

Finding the right license

2008-08-31T22:22:38Z

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.

Tales of Vesperia

2008-08-29T06:44:29Z

I got really excited that Tales of Vesperia was finally coming out (come on, a wolf with a pipe that fights with a sword, what more can you need?). I played Tales of Symphonia on my Wii, since it was listed as one of the all time best GameCube games and I really liked it, apart from it's obvious dated graphics. So when the news were that there was to be an HD version of that game coming out, I was all excited. Oh, foolish me.

Usercontrols in C#

2008-08-18T05:55:43Z

So once again the curse of non trivial toy examples strikes. After spending about an hour trying to place a custom usercontrol onto a simple windows form in Visual Studio and C# I give up. In the most trivial example that I came up with it works fine, but as soon as I try to do this in my own little project (niftysolution plugin) visual studio does nothing but crash every time I try to drag my wizard generated empty user control onto the canvas of my slightly modified form.

More perforce tips

2008-08-02T19:50:34Z

The source control history is a precious asset. How your source code evolved over time, what and who made the changes (and why) are questions that can all be answered by the history. It's important to try to preserve the history, but it's also very easy to forget and not do it. It is very frustrating to do some detective work only to find out that the trails end cold when someone copied the file without telling perforce. Best of all, the person who did this might have quit and you have now no clue as to where that file originated.

p4v for the lose

2008-08-02T08:05:44Z

I guess I made the last post a little bit of a holy crusade and while I guess that is just fine for a blog like this I did just throw it out there that I hate the non windows look and feel of the p4v application without any motivations, so I decided to just download the thing and rediscover how crappy it still is and write it down this time.

p4win for the win

2008-08-01T08:55:57Z

Perforce have had a strange development over the last couple of years with their UI clients. Perhaps not so strange from a manager's perspective or even a marketing perspective...