www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZpD0btOZx8

Here’s another good one…. its funny though, not so much about talent but more so about acting and performing parodies… lol

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JpBGRA6HHtY

While I was playing and getting the shit scared out of me, I came across this awesome reference to one of my favorite bands: Fear Factory.

I love you Bethesda Softworks, from one metal head to another… I love you man/woman/corporation/studio.

So, I spent all day yesterday and already a little bit this morning working on Angel. Angel went from a service-only proof-of-concept to a server and client proof of concept in just under 12 hours. I’ve been stress-testing it a little bit this morning and it ran 10,000 “AddUser” commands in just under 3 minutes. Sounds slow? Well, let me explain everything that goes on in a single “AddUser” command (subject to change):

1. Build the SOAP request (translate Angel data objects to SOAP-compatible objects). Request contains user information (Name, Alias, etc.)
2. Connect to the Angel web service
3. Send the command parameters to the web service
4. Service writes a log entry to a text file (very verbosely)
5. Service executes a database statement, storing the data
6. Service checks for errors, if none, grab the user ID back out of the database (room for optimization here). If errors occured, put error description into the response object.
7. Service builds a response object and sends it over the wire back to the client
8. Client converts the SOAP-compatible object back to Angel data object types
9. Client checks  the response object for success/failure from the server
10. Client tears down SOAP connection

Now do that 10,000 times. 

This is my first time building a C++ SOAP client and I must say, with the help of gSOAP, it works great. It is the first time I’ve gotten a C# web service and a C++ client to play nicely together. We initially tried this with raw sockets, but it proved to be WAY too much of a hassle and there’s too much that could go wrong. This has worked 1000% more reliably than anything else I’ve tried. I’ve sort of been having that “mad scientist” feel about me the last few days since I’ve gotten this work–talking to myself, mumbling, swearing at my code, and then screaming “IT’S ALIVE!!!!!” when it finally worked.

Back when I worked on Firearms (for Half-Life 1), I remember having a short email conversation with someone at Valve. I don’t remember who it was though. I want to say it was Robin Walker, but I might be wrong. At that time, the news about Steam was that “No mods will be put on Steam.” I was trying to get Firearms up on Steam so it would get some more exposure. At the time, it was still a fairly popular mod so I didn’t figure it would be too big of a deal.

So I’m jealous now that other mods, like Age of Chivalry and Insurgency get to be placed on Steam and exposed to millions of people world-wide with very little effort on the mod-team’s part. Its great because it gives the games more exposure yes, but this could be a double edged sword here. I mean now it brings more of a “glam” incentive to creating mods when the whole purpose to write them was to build a portfolio, gain experience, and then ultimately apply for a job. Game development studios could face a lot more “riff-raff” than before because now there’s just a serious “glam” factor with making games and mods.

This might sound brash, but I have little respect for game developers who develop only for the glam of making games. I mean yes, glam does come with the territory, but it should NEVER be the sole motivation factor for amateur game developers trying to make it to the big-time. Me personally, I like writing games because it is challenging, complex, fun, exciting, educational, and it lets the creativity juices run wild; it has little to do with the “glam of writing games.” When a game programmer/developer is motivated by grandeur, he/she starts to think less of the game and their role in the grand scheme of things and more about themselves and how they can just get rich and maintain their position on their “high horse.”

So my advice to any new mod team, indie game studio, or hobbyist game developer: Do it for the love of what you do. Even if you don’t make money or gain status because of it, you’ve learned something. You have the rest of your life to figure out how to capitalize on what you’ve learned. As the old adage says: “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again.” With a little twist to reflect what I just said: “If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again because you love what you do.”

Well, about a week ago I walked into a GameStop in the mall since my girlfriend decided she was going to head over to Forever 21… needless to say I didn’t want go with. I chatted with the manager for bit, asking him if he had any Wii’s in stock. He said “No, check back next week. Here’s our number.” Thats the third time I’ve been in that store looking for a Wii, I was beginning to beleive that they NEVER had Wii’s and used the empty boxes just to piss people off.

Well, following that short conversation, he attempted to sell me a PS3 and an XBox 360. Honestly, I don’t think I’d play them. If I’m going to pay nearly $400 for a PS3, it better at least make me breakfast the following morning. When I asked him if it did, he replied with “No, its a selfish lover.” Ok, I’m kidding about that part. After some conversation about upcoming games and other random stuff, he interjected with “You know what, I think I have a used Wii in the back if you’re interested. I’ll sell it to you for $230.” I said “I’ll buy it right now if its in good condition.”

Long story short, here’s my Wii number: 7122 4915 1735 0996. Success!

And now for the bad stuff: I’m about to poke holes all over the place here… How can a game that was “three years in development” get released with SO MANY OBVIOUS BUGS?!?! I’m amazed at how this kind of stuff gets in the game. Is it the lack of a QA department, crappy development teams, or just deadline pressure that allowed for so many bugs to find their way into the game? I’d expect a few, yes, games are very complex pieces of software–I understand that. But the fact that so many highly-visible and “obvious to the player” bugs has me concerned. If their front-ends have bugs like this, I wonder what the back-end systems look like, hmm?

Now, the concepts of WH are great, and I love the gameplay. None of the bugs have completely turned me off of the game (yet), or maybe thats just my $50 talking. The bugs that I’ve found (and reported) are not necessarily show-stoppers, but they should have been addressed before release, they’re way too visible.

So far here’s what I’ve found:

1. At first login, or after a patch, the UI displays windows one by one on top of each other in very rapid succession. This breaks focus numerous times while the player is trying to school through the numerous terms pages to agree to the terms. This one is minor, but frustrating and annoying.
2. The cursor’s position doesn’t seem to be correlating to the cursor icon in some menus–namely the server selection menu. I clicked “Phoenix Throne” like 3 times but ended up getting different servers each time. This may have been an attempt to get me to go somewhere else because PT was getting really full. If so, there should have been a message about that, I got frustrated as hell.
3. The AI can walk through a f@&king stone wall when in a foot-chase with you. The wall was only about half-height of the character, but the character walked straight through it and chased me down. I sure can’t walk through it, why should he be able to.
4. On first spawn, I encountered a couple of cases where my character window wasn’t drawing correct colors for the hair, tattoo, and skin. It simply appeared default until I actually changed my equipment.
5. Throwing a weapon (like an axe) won’t render the axe in the air roughly 80% of the time. The character plays the “throw” animation, but the weapon won’t appear to go flying through the air. The target still takes damage, but it looks like they took damage from some phantom force.
6. I don’t know if this happens to anybody else, but this one was a bad one. I was using an item in the world, near heavy agro. I was interrupted by battle during the use process, which took the progress bar away; which was normal. However, I couldn’t draw my weapon, I couldn’t attack, I really couldn’t do anything but run and hope for the best. My character even continued to play the “using” animation (which was reading a book). When I’d move, the legs would stay still so it looked like I was sort of just gliding around. Then when I finally was able to draw my weapon, it drew my weapon and shield but kept the book there too. So my character magically gained another hand to hold a sword, shield, and a book at the same time. This one pissed me off heavily because it was completely not fair to the player. I had to run near some NPCs and let them take care of the mob of 10 following me because I couldn’t attack.
7. The “Social Menu” button doesn’t capture mouse events roughly 50% of the time. It takes some serious effort to bring up the social menu. Sometimes when I scroll over it, the tooltip won’t popup and the button won’t highlight. It takes a couple of tries of mousing over until you see those visual cues before the menu will actually come up when you click.