Feeling Particularly Autumnal This Morning

And looky at the date...

Crouching Test, Hidden Defect

QA gets better all the time because you can turn your methods against your own processes. At the core it is database, and the use of database to track bugs, through their life cycle.

Then, when you decide to build tools to help you do your job better, you won't get overwhelmed, because the role of the computer is to remember for you. You don't have to remember all those bugs. The wisdom of it is straightforward and can be summarized in the words of Joel Spolsky,

It's pretty easy to remember the rule for a good bug report. Every good bug report needs exactly three things.

1. Steps to reproduce,


2. What you expected to see, and


3. What you saw instead.

Continuing specifically in regard to the steps one takes to do bug reports, we find a blanket statement from Simon Tatham, that, "More information is almost always better than less." which today I also discovered to be the testimony of a professional. Today, I had trouble at home with iPassConnect -- a service that I had 'supported' at Connexion by Boeing, but never really used first hand. The request for help was filed via a web-based request service. Not only did I get to describe the problem, I could even provide an attachment. But only one. So I zipped all the screen shots I had made. Before the end of day it actually became very important that I be able to use that VPN, so I called tech support, and the tech that opened my ticket looked at my description and attachments and said, "I have never seen a ticket that had all the information in it." I said, "Well, they're training me." By they, I surely meant the very organization on who's phones we were speaking. So for a number of reasons, I can say in all honesty that it has been a good two weeks.

I can't type or spell, but that's a different story.

Our Lives Are Being Controlled By Megalomaniacs On The West Coast

Neither is the East Coast acceptable. it is time for control from the Great Lakes. Those Great and Pure and Perfect Lakes. Reading the Apple license, they promise you nothing. Not merchantability, not even 'quiet enjoyment'. In the short time we have left, I wonder if we could change the world, by guaranteeing, even warranting, a computer experience. It is an idea so insane, it just might work. Let's hope we get to find out.





In the mean time, its ROCK AND ROLL IN 3D! As is. No warranties. It may crash, but until then, it should be fun enough to bring you back for more. Notice the Google ads. Where is Google located, anyway? I should find out before I give those megalomaniacs another inch of control. I know: I'll google it.

Mountain View. West Coast. Oh well.

An Objective Measurement of Quality

Today I began work as an IT QA tester for Glaxo SmithKline. It is an information technology quality assurance culture informed by nearly one hundred fifty years of pharmaceutical quality assurance. The development environment is Siebel, the testing tool is Mercury Quality Center, and the document of choice is the Excel spreadsheet.



I am happy to say that things ended at Visual Sports on a fairly good note. They still have a pressing need for interactive content to drive system sales, and I still have a pressing need to produce commercially successful video games. For my part, the primary organizational vehicle for doing so will be the Toronto chapter of the Independent Game Developers Association. (When doing a web search, be sure and get the order of the letters igda right, or you will end up with defense contractors with the acronym igda.)

Games for Georgians

The flow of new games from the Unity sector is approaching a steady clip. One new example of physics based fun is "Open Fire" by BlueTorch Studios and BlueGill Flame Game Studios. This game has actually been on the market for a while, as it was deployed c. Unity 1.1. Yet, this little game has that thing games so desperately need: fun in playing it.

I just discovered this game recently, and in light of current political events, I thought I would send one up for those willing to defend their homeland against foreign incursion, yet again.

Disunderstanding

Today I coin a new word: disunderstanding.

Cite disunderstanding when the other party not only does not understand the subject, but also the logic of it scares them, so that they are always forgetting even after you explain it to them.

Example sentence: Most Californians disunderstand the Spanish language. They know Spanish words, but the living language is like a cifer to them.

Our New Anthem

Cheetah3D Rocks

Those words deserve their own period. Cheetah3D Rocks. Between all the new software toys and all the new hardware toys, I don't mind going without the other for the summer.

Cheetah3D is a deceptively straight forward, deceptively fast 3D modeling application... once you know how to use it. The same goes for Autodesk Maya, which I have been PLE'ing of late. But Maya PLE does not (readily) support FBX or OBJ export, so it is back to the Max-lineage Cheetah3D for now. And Cheetah is cool. Now, as far movie file formats, I will leave you to decide.

Here is my movie.


_After_ rendering it, I was able to save it into a number of movie file formats. I chose these four, and was surprised at the file size differences for this four second animation.

Hello_World.avi
984 KB

Hello_World.mov
860 KB

Hello_World.mp4
128 KB

Hello_World.wmv

The AVI worked well for uploading to U2B; the mp4 played without problems on the HTC. So now I am fiddling with "Super" to convert the best of our video library to mp4 format.
238 KB

Back to Blogging?

Things are moving fast enough that there is a pressing need to keep some type of record of progress, regardless of unlikelihood that the record will be complete. There are a number of things coming up on the horizon, and there are a number of things going on right now.

Going on right now, Unity Pro is a saviour at work. The corporate process is sufficiently inefficient that tools of remarkable efficiency are required to keep things moving forward. Unity has not only allowed us to build a number of publishable games in a matter of weeks, it has also allowed us to build a number of in-house technical prototypes to settle perennial technical issues.

My birthday is coming up. This year, everyone who wants to is going to buy me a Mac so that I can Unity Indie at home. To participate, contribute any amount of money large or small, designated for the "Mac for Shannon's Birthday". At this point, even contributions of moral support would be appreciated.

Which leads us to what is coming up on the horizon. Once I get my Mac, I will be able to publish SHANNONWARE GAME LAB-made games on the Web and Mac. If that is successful as a business endeavour, I will get Unity Pro myself some time early next year and move on to publishing games for PC. In other news, yesterday I ordered a new phone yesterday from my medieval telecom provider Rogers, the HTC Touch. Basically, as a member of the Microsoft Developer Network (oooh, I feel so special), I can develop an XNA Game Studio game for the HTC right out of the box. And that point leads us to the mosts significant discussion of the day: Unity versus XNA.

Background: Unity 3D is a level editor/game engine/publishing platform all in one. It makes the rapid development of games really easy, especially compared to many of the other game engines available today. If that is not enough, the Game Engine Royalty imposed by Unity is the best possible: $0, i.e. 0%. If you build a game with Unreal or Virtools, expect them to ask for a piece of every copy that you sell. Not so with Unity, and this is perhaps the best part of all. And this is where XNA comes in. In an ongoing effort to dominate the video games industry, and to provide a larger development community for its Xbox 360 console than it had for its Xbox console, Microsoft has made XNA available for free. Which means that you can build imersive 3D (or 2D) video games for the PC for no additional outlay for middleware. The caveat here is that (in my humble opinion) XNA requires real programming expertise in order to adeptly manipulate the C# code required. Unity also uses C#; however the 'UnityEngine' takes care of most of the boiler-plate operations that would be required by a game application, especially relating to the manipulation of visual and audio assets. At the end of the day, Unity Pro and XNA can produce comparable PC executables; however, under the hood, they are quite different.

So, provided that

Time = Money

we can understand that

Time spent doing technically demanding programming in XNA on the PC I already have >= Cost of Mac + Cost of Unity

And no matter how little money we have, it seems we always have even less time.

Now, going back to the HTC, it seems I will be able to at least embark on building my first game for it using XNA Game Studio as soon as it arrives. But ultimately (and this is where the horizon comes back in), I would like to somehow extend Unity to publish games not just for iPod and iPhone, but for Windows Mobile as well. It is a lofty goal, I will admit, but with the power of Mono, we are closer than we have ever been.

In Unity with Wii Development

Short Story: Unity can be used to develop games for Wii. To do so, one will need to: (1) be a licensed Nintendo developer and/or have a Wii Dev Kit, (2) have special Wii Dev license from Unity.

Long Story:
On The Nintendo Side
The process of becoming a licensed developer is the same as it has been for the major consoles for many years: (1) if one can demonstrate the ability of one's company to properly handle the license and bring a product to market, one is eligible for a developer license; (2) the console developer remains fairly involved in the development process (they require that the requisite bug reports be submitted to them, etc.); and (3) the cost of obtaining a license is not disclosed, and one finds out only if/when one qualifies.

An Nintendo statement to this effect can be found here:
http://www.warioworld.com/licensing/becomelicensee/

Here is some of the key text from that page:

"Please send a corporate portfolio consisting of the following information:

1. A detailed description of your company...
2. A detailed introduction to your key personnel...
3. A marketing plan for your proposed products...
4. Any market study information on consumer demand for your proposed
product...
5. A written description of your proposed software product;
6. A complete summary and at least three samples of software you have
previously published...

"Nintendo will then undertake to make a determination if your qualifications would support your selection as an authorized licensee..."

On The Unity Side
If one is a licensed Wii developer, one can approach Unity about obtaining the necessary code (controller class, etc.) for publishing directly to the dev kit. Like the Nintendo license, the cost is not publically disclosed, and one finds out only if/when one qualifies.

The Unity "Nintendo Wii port of the runtime has now been in development for well over a year."Unity has been working with certain developers doing beta testing of their Wii API, "several months". The announcement of official "Wii Middleware" status was made just yesterday. In his announcment, the president of Unity directed interested developers to the official Nintendo "Software Development Support Group" web site at http://warioworld.com/

Website announcement:
http://unity3d.com/company/news/wii-press
http://unity3d.com/unity/features/wii-publishing

Community forum announcement:
http://forum.unity3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=11835

The Other World of Word Processors

I was doing a search for an alternative to MS Word -- in my case, on the Mac, but I found PC related info as well.

http://microsoft.toddverbeek.com/wp.html



It is a list of 18 alternatives to MS Word, most of them are fairly up to date with modern data interchange protocol support. The word processor selections are rated as follows:

- Close match or substitute for Microsoft's project
- Especially high quality alternative
- Inexpensive or free alternative
- Strong challenge to Microsoft's influence
- Personal selection

Software is listed that runs on Windows, MacOS, Unix-like systems, Java-compatible systems, Symbian OS, PalmOS, Netware, OpenVMS, BeOS, OS/S, Amiga, RISC OS and DOS.

I am using Unity 3D as a game development engine. I guess that makes me a game developer. Woo Hoo!!! Anyway, the Unity development editor is Mac only for the time being. As part of our burgeoning game development efforts at work, we got a new iMac as a production PC. ("iMac as a production PC?" That's what I said. Granted, this is not your grandmother's iMac.) In addition to the slew of starter software that Apple provides, this iMac comes with "Office 2004 for Mac Test Drive". Between the big watermark that it prints on every page, and the fact that I cannot print from the demo, (it says, "Printing is not available in the Microsoft Office 2004 Test Drive, but printing is available in the purchased version of Office 2004. To order your copy of Office 2004, click Buy Now"), I am afraid that this test drive is over. (Printing is available in Google docs, OpenOffice and Word Viewer, so why should I bother?)

So, as an alternative to making a purchase of software from the corporation Microsoft, today's task is the download, installation and evaluation of AbiWord by Dom Lachowicz.

Chumps in Space

There is something to be said for new and interesting video game ideas. There is also something to be said for old and interesting game ideas, which is to say: "something" regarding the recycling of old game ideas that have not been seen in a while. Once such game, worth mentioning, is Mayhem Intergalactic.

For those two or three of you left in the world who remember the old WWIII message board system, you may remember a space battle game where once generated ships on planets, and played against other WWIII posters in a "one day equals one turn" type fashion. (Actually, now that I think about it, there were several great multi-player games deployed on that entirely text-based 3600 baud modem-bound platform.)

So for those who remember, todays find Mayhem Intergalactic is a great blast from the common gamer unconscious-past.

Games So Good You Play Them

This is getting staggering. Check out this list at http://www.freeverse.com/games/ Most of the games are both Mac and PC; a few are just Mac. Nonetheless your type of game is there. Be prepared to spend some time. These games are by and large made with Unity, and are a strong demonstration of the game building tool.

The opportunity to be a game developer seems so manifest that the consideration of any other course of action seems painfully hostile. The amount of power given to an individual to combine assets and publish games is almost overwhelming -- as I said, staggering. This tool is better in the hands of a team, especially a small one. Yet an individual can master it, and apart from legions of 'just modelers', 'just animators', 'just coders', 'just artists'. For the developer, everything, even project management, sales and technical writing, are at some point required. Excel or Quicken or whatever on the back in, but flat files and visual asset-centered development on what amounts to our lethal front end. (Or, in the words of Homer Simpson, "Suck it all, losers!")

Anyway, check out that list of games, and tell me if you don't find one that you like.

A New Approach

If you were to receive a response of "Swell" from Jimmy Stewart as "The Gay Divorcee", you would in no wise expect him to rapidly expand. But one century over another, and the way things change so quickly, the young ones can't keep up, and the common understanding of a word will be the singularly simplest one. Thus, when I respond, "swell", the young ones step back.

Check out the forums at OverTheEdge home page for contact with the OverTheEdge team and other Unity users.

These forums currently exist as the Unity game development tool environment and community; the whole of which are poised to be a winning caste in the game industry.

I was reminded of the metaphor of the space ship, on board which one is required to be when that ship makes it rapid transition _past_ the speed of light so as to get there in reasonable time. If you're not on board, we'll send messages, and we'll certainly be back, provided we don't die; yet whether or not you'll be around when we make it back is one for the physies and the mathies. The captains, the pilots, and their ready crew, once they get their coordinates, they go.