What the What?
In all honesty this article poses more questions than it answers:
It was hiding in a box of Crackdown 2 swag that the kind meisters at Microsoft rather belatedly sent us today. We got some cool stuff including some quite nicely made orb keyrings.
(Though they also sent us 4 lovely looking Crackdown 2 orb T shirts as well. Unfortunately as well as there being only 4 of them they were also pretty small sized. Given the physical size and shape of most people in the game development community its kind of hard not to interpret this offering as sarcastic in some way. But I digress)
Yeah, this Crackdown 2 branded -thing- I really don’t quite understand what it is or what the thinking behind it. As with most things I don’t understand it makes me feel a bit insecure that I’m too stupid to understand the intricately clever cogitations that have gone into its creation.
Usually it turns out that the thing I don’t understand is actually quite stupid. I’m not sure where we are with this one. Hopefully I’ll work it out soon.
In the meantime it’s sitting on my desk, banana and spatula in hand, beside its mysterious television set and emblazoned with a CD2 logo going “What?”
Nice
Do not steal (unless you are thick)
I read this somewhere:
“There are only 90 miles of road in Greenland and of those only 45 of those are paved”
Now it was on the internet so, of course, it may be complete bollocks but after a week in Greenland I can confirm that general jist of that statement is true: there’s really not much in the way of roads over there.
Life exists across the island in small pockets that aren’t particularly well connected to each other. For example we were staying in Greeland’s 3rd largst town (Ilulissat) and that had a minute population of 5,000 people. (Nuuk is the biggest town with 15,000 people which makes it the capital city with the smallest population in the world) Just like all of Greenland’s towns no roads connect it to any other and the only ways in or out is via air, sea or dog sled.
In fact sea access isn’t at all consistent throughout the year. West of the harbour exit the IIlulissat Icefjord dumps Icebergs into Disko Bay all year long. The fjord is pretty deep until is gets near the exit where it shallows quickly to around 200m. The bigger bergs floating towards the sea slow and bump along the bottom and it’s it not unusual for them to break up choking the harbour with ice. Also during the colder winter months the sea freezes over and renders the harbour useless.
Ilulissat Harbour
Harbour access is pretty important as just about every family owns a boat and a good proportion of the town’s livelihood depend on fishing of the local halibut. Global warming has made winter harbour freezes less lengthy and frequent over the years and gone are the times when the locals could dog sled out onto the sea ice. The upside though is with the harbour free of ice for more of the year the locals can sea fish more. In Ilulissat this seems to be seen as a positive aspect of climate change.
Given the dependence on fishing boat ownership is near universal for the families of Ilulissat while car ownership is relatively rare. The small amount of roads in the town are far from empty but the vehicles are either company owned or are taxis.
With no roads leading out of town it’s a bit like being in The Truman Show. And it’s the smallness of the community coupled with the lack of places to drive to makes Greenlandic car theft the stupidest theft you could commit.
The locals seem aware of this as it’s common to see empty cars on the roadside engines running while the driver has nipped into a shop. Give the bitter cold (-10c for most of the time we were there) it’s also a a good way of avoiding the risk you take every time you have to restart your car in arctic weather.
Social housing with halibut drying
So yeah, a strange and unique place. The town is fairly urban and apart from the stunning scenery provided by ice fjord is pretty recognisable as an everyday small town. What is different is a a good porportion of the families that live here still have a dependency on fishing and hunting as has been the case for centuries. Seeing seal skins and fish hung to dry from the blocks of social housing brought this home.
I also felt a real disonnance between the feeling of freedom and expansiveness from the amazing scenery just out of town versus a claustrophobia from just knowing that if I wanted to take off to the open road the only place you could go was round and round in circles. A weird mix.
This is the Second Thing of the Five Things I Found Out About Greenland. Next time in Part The Third I will tell you why The Worst Smelling Shit Is Sled Dog Shit. You can find pictures from our holiday right here on Flickr.
fig(i) Greenland yesterdayI was surprised by this. My mother isn’t a stupid lady by any means but when I told here where we were off too even she asked:
“Is it a country?”
I didn’t really like the tone of my voice and swottishly explaining that since it was the biggest island ON THE PLANET it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that Greenland is in fact a country.
It wasn’t only her, the bank asked exactly the same question when I called to tell them I was going on holiday. When told it was a country they came back with:
“Where is it then, in Asia innit?”
If you think I’m some sort of sad sack that phones the bank for a chat when I’m lonely you are mostly wrong.
It’s out of necessity as experience has taught me they will freeze my debit card after the minutest deviation from usual spending patterns. They froze it recently because I bought a 59p App from the App store.
“Well sir you have to remember a small purchase like that can be an indication that a bigger fraudulent purchase is about to be made”
Buying a burger in Greenland (a place they’re not even sure is a country) without some sort of forewarning would be like waving a red rag to a bull. A very stupid and capricious bull at that. So I gave them a call.
To be fair to both my mum and the bank I didn’t know very much about Greenland beyond it being a country and not being in Asia. The only thing I knew was the answer to the tricksy pub quiz question of “What is the capital of Greenland?”, the answer being Copenhagen since Greenland is part of the Kingdom of Denmark.
Except it actually turns out that hasn’t been true for years. Nuuk is now Greenland’s capital city. Doh! Curse you and your lies Pub Quiz!
So well done, you actually now know more about Greenland than either Suzey or I did before embarking on a six day holiday there.
Tune in next time for Thing the 2nd in the list of five things I found out about Greenland on my Holidays: Why Stealing A Car In Greenland Is The Stupidest Crime You Could Ever Choose To Commit
There’s also a Flick Gallery of the entire trip you can see here
Something I Am Very Excited About
It’s Minotron 2012
I’m sure there’s a few people looking at this going “Whu?” but for people of a certain age, well my age and therabouts, this is a very exciting thing. It’s the 21st century re-appearance on IoS of a game called Llamatron released by Jeff Minter 20 years ago.
Llamatron encapsulated a number of important gaming firsts for me.
First game I enjoyed on the ST
The 16 bit ST / Amiga era pretty much passed me by. While mates were espousing the excellence of Stunt Car Race or Turrican I’d gone down the console rabbit hole of NES / SNES / Megadrive. Despite doing some coding work on the Amiga nothing I’d played really clicked with me. Until Llamatron. And I think in part that was because of an obsession with a game I’d never played that Llamatron owed a huge debt to.
First twin stick shooter I’d played
I’d loved both Defender and Stargate, two of Williams Electronics and Eugene Jarvis’s masterpiece. I’d also been more than aware of the existence of Robotron, the same team’s twin stick shooter and it’s reputation as the best game those guys had ever made. Unfortunately despite being aware of its existence I’d never played the game. In those where Mame didn’t exist and you couldn’t jump on YouTube to see a play through which meant I didn’t know all that much about Robotron except it was the best thing ever made. That paucity of information was the seed for a huge burgeoning mystique about the game being constructed in my head. So when the Robotron inspired Llamatron became easily accessible I was all over it 
A lovely twist was that Llamatron allowed you plug two joysticks into your ST and play it like a PROPER REAL ARCADE GAME. This is what I did though it wasn’t all I did; having found a fairly rough plank of wood that fit across my lap I also gaffa taped two Kempston Competition Pros on top. Amazing stuff, my very own MacGyver arcade machine and I loved it and have loved twin stick shooters ever since thanks to the accesibility of Llamatron.
And the way that Llamatron was accessible to a lot of people was new to me as well
First encounter with the idea of shareware
Shop bought and piracy were the only two distribution methods I’d encountered previously but Llamatron was shareware. Now I know this wasn’t the first title to do so but it was the first that entered my orbit. The game was easily available for free but you were asked to voluntarily send a cheque for a fiver to Llamasoft if you thought it was worth it.
This really struck a chord with the young and idealistic and particularly so as author Jeff Minter communicated the concept brilliantly through the game’s readme file. If there was a chart for great READMEs from the world of computer games this would be in the top 3. You can read it here:
http://www.dadgum.com/halcyon/BOOK/MISC/LLAMA.HTM
And that’s why I’m excited
Often reminiscences of games past are viewed through rose tinted glasses and revisits can often disappoint. A few years back me and some friends were lucky enough to be allowed to house sit Jeff Minter’s farm over Christmas while he went on holiday and in his house he had a twin sticked Mame cab with a copy of Llamatron on it.
It didn’t disappoint, in the slightest. In fact it was better than I’d ever experienced it, running on a beefier emulated ST than the one I’d spent so much time on. It’s still a great game and I have every digit possible crossed that this IoS revisit will be to.
And on top of that Minter has proved he’s still got the chops to make a fantastic game with his recent (and excellent) Minotaur Space Rescue. All the signs are pointing in the right direction. Day one purchase.
More details here:
http://toucharcade.com/2011/02/11/a-preview-of-jeff-minters-minotron-2112-llamatron-redux/
gDEBugger
Just had a nice lunch time playing with gDEBugger, a free OpenGL analysis tool by Graphic Remedy. I only managed to scrap the surface of what it can do but straight away it helped me identify a pretty horrible bug and also speed up my code quite a bit.
Particularly handy was being able to see the values uniforms have been set to for the active shader. My lighting has been looking more than a bit flat since I put it in a couple of weeks ago. When I paused my game I could see that the light direction vector hadn’t been normalised despite being sure that my code was definitely doing that.
A quick look in the vector class found a routine that copied a Vec3 to a float[3] to be copying the Y element into the Z spot. Ooops! Looks a lot nicer now it’s fixed.
I also speed up my feedback code quite a bit by rationalising the buffers I was using to construct the final frame. V useful.
Gazotron (the highly original home project I’m working on ) looks a lot nice for both of those changes:
I like the feedback on the floor. Next up I need to change it so the feedback is mirroring what’s happening on the level. Right now it’s using objects from the game screen to feed it. I’m hoping it’ll look pretty good when you’ve feedback effects tracking the player, grunts, bullets etc
Git
Never let get actual game development get in the way of fiddling about with new tools This last month has been no exception and seen me swap from SVN for handling source control to git. SVN has been pretty good over the years but I’ve always had a few niggles with it, the main two being the trickiness of branching and the lack of an ability to work nicely offline.
The transition has been fairly painless. There are a few fundamental differences between a distributed SCM and the more traditional client / server model like Subversion and getting over my preconceptions was probably the biggest step. Scott Chacon, both through his excellent Pro Git Book and the below screencast, was an enormous help in making the change.
Overall after just under a month of doing things the Git way I’m pretty happy. I’ve used branching a lot more than usual and during some recent outages to the server I’m set up to push changes too I’ve still be able work with no troubles.
And it’s pretty quick too. Mostly I’m checking into my local repository on whatever machine I’m working on and that’s super nippy. Once a day or so I’ll push changes back to a central server and that’s been about the same speed as SVN used to be. And despite git’s reputation as being awkward and hard core I’ve found the command line to be a lot clearer than SVN in terms of its feedback when I try to do something dumb and self harming
What I haven’t found is a nice GUI front end for git. SVN is pretty well supported on the Mac with apps like the fantastic Versions or the Finder integrated Tortoise. There’s a few (Tower is probably one of the better examples) and XCode4′s git integration is pretty good but they still fall short of the more mature tools for SVN. That said I’m pretty comfortable with the CLI
Though this is working really well for me right now I am not 100% sure it’d be suitable for the type of development we do at Ruffian. Right now we use Perforce for both source code and art assets and it does a really good job. Git’s weakness is it’s not great for lots of binary assets with a long history of changes. Like other distributed SCMs git places a entire copy of the repository (all current files and previous revisions) on your drive. I think for Crackdown2 that was around 500gb of data. You could probably use a separate solution for binary assets and keep just source code in git which would make the repository size a bit more practical and there are a few game devs I know that are doing this. That all said I know our guys are pretty happy with Perforce so I can’t see us changing.
But right now for the noddy home game I am currently making git is more than good enough and a definite step up from SVN.