robotsbuildrobots.net

Just got Ableton Live 6 for my mac, and was messing around with it with my Dad this weekend. He plays the accordian very well, so I thought I’d have a go at recording him and giving him a backing band. Since I can only record one track at once, I tried to get him playing to a click track, but this turned out to be a bit of an effort since he has to play with a band to keep time (and I’m useless, I’ve got no rhythm at all). I ended up just letting him play how he wanted and not worrying about tempo etc. This meant that loops were tricky to do, so I gave up on that, stuck the guitar and bass on, and let him tap out the drums on the keyboard himself
It’s all pretty much first take so it’s a bit scrappy, but I’m quite happy with it! Naturally, my Dad is astounded by technology these days. Took about an hour all in all.

Have a listen here

Finally got annoyed with waiting for my Sony Ericsson m600i to start working on OS X, so I’m shifting it on ebay and I’ve got a Blackberry Pearl on the way. It’s a bit of a shame, cos I still think it’s a great phone, but the point of getting such a (s)wanky phone was to be able to sync stuff with my computer, and that obviously not going to happen any time soon. Grr.

The mac/berry combo seems to work a little better from what I’ve read; I found a couple of things on the internet that make them work together. Here they are:

• iSync via bluetooth or USB doesn’t work, you have to use PocketMac for Blackberry
• This modem script lets you use it as a bluetooth modem.
• There’s a forum here full of geeks complaining about a load of stuff that looks like it might useful.

I should get it on tuesday, and I’ve got 14 days to use it and decide whether I like it or not. Hopefully I will, otherwise I’m just going to get the dumbest phone I can, and a file-o-fax from Rymans. Or something.

Arrived in San Francisco last night after fairly 2 fairly boring flights. I amused myself by watching Night at the Museum (twice, it was really good!), and noodling in Live 6; I set myself a challenge to make some music in the two-and-a-bit hours my battery would last, here’s the results:

noodle-y bollocks

Spent this morning complaining about my hotel room not having any windows, eating breakfast, walking about the SoMa area, then down to Fishermans Wharf, and then up Pacific Heights. Was fun. Saw lots and lots of homeless people though, far more than I’ve ever seen in a downtown area. And they were all mental too. I thought all the mental ones lived in New York.

This afternoon I will peruse the Metreon Center, check out where the Moscone Center is, and just generally mince about.

I know taking pictures of homeless people is very very poor form, but in my defense, he’s got SPANK ME written on his hat, and the pretzel guy is clearly very unimpressed.

What’s even better than this is earlier in the day I saw another tramp wearing a hat with SPANK ME hand-written on it, so he must have seen seen this guy and thought ‘hey i like your hat man’…

He’s all blurry because he’s dancing to this very proficient band of funk-buskers, who also attracted the attention of a strange man with a bike:

(embedding isn’t working for some reason so you’ll have to click this link)

Warning: Verbosity.

Bumped into Kevin Strange from ATI/AMD. Noted his ringtone was Still D.R.E., which is only funny as long as he’s being ironic

Met Brian Crecente from Kotaku, complimented him on his baiting of Sony, he complemented us on our game. Seems to be a very nice chap, and has a very distinctive hairdo.

Bumped into James Jen, who was the MGS producer on PGR2, so I haven’t seen him for ages. He moved on to Ubi, worked in their Shanghai studio on Splinter Cell, GRAW etc and now he’s scheming some new independent deal. Tagged along with him to the independent games session, watched Jeff Minter talk about hippy games featuring bovine/cloven hoofed mammals with trippy visualisers. He’s a very amusing man, and should be cherished.

Went over to a dev rel meet up session in the north hall and realised it was for ’serious games’ (ie simulation & education. Snooze.), so left that very quickly and went over to see what the Game Connection thing was all about; it’s like speed dating for developers and publishers.

While getting knocked back from this (I needed to pre-register, but it was kind of pointless anyway, that’s not why I’m here), I met this chap named Dan Marchant, who is essentially a Business Development Consultant - www.obscure.co.uk. He’s been around a very long time (SCi, Ocean, Virgin etc), and seems to know a lot of people. He was very interested to meet someone from Splash Damage, and wants to get in contact about writing something about us for his website; he wants to use us as an example of non-traditional entry methods. Got tipped off on where all the BizDev people are hanging out - the bar at the Marriot on 4th st, so I’ll be popping down there to see what’s going on.

Sat in on an IGA round table about innovation, which was really interesting; The panel included Jenova Chen who made flOw, and some other chaps - I’ll post links when I get their names. They were discussing why games aren’t succeding at being regarded as art (PR and reviews focus on features, not the experience - think NGJ), and why innovation is desirable in games, but isn’t essential to be considered art.

Yu Suzuki sat next to me in the lobby in the west hall. Was excited.

From here I met James Jen again, and ended up following him to a very salubrious looking korean bar populated by icelanders, which happened to be very friendly and amusing. From here we went to a Japanese resturant, where I ate fatty tuna and stuff which was very tasty. I had some uncooked prawn which did not cause barfage and I was very proud of this.

I met a bunch of really cool people (James Jen was the Hub and Facilitator) from places like Red5, CCP, and MGS etc. Met someone who works at Epic China. Very interesting.

I can’t remember getting back to the hotel, and I have a headache.

Severe hangover. I will not be drinking again.

Bumped into Xing from Microsoft, he was out last night and did not have a hang over. I was jealous.

Spent all day in a single tutorial called Deal Making for Developers, which was useful, but mainly all just common sense. There was a panel including the guy who runs Pandemic, the Mumbo Jumbo CEO and a load of lawyers - at times, it was a little bit like the whole point of the session was to sell their services as lawyers. They covered employment law, which while very US centric, pointed out the difficulty of enforcing non-compete clauses. The Pandemic guy suggested just not having one; you can’t enforce it, and not having it makes you an even handed employer. Plus if people want to leave, you should probably just let them leave…

Bumped into Lina and Nathan from CCP, they were out last night and did not have hang overs. I was jealous.

They also discussed ownership of work rights; if someone creates something on their own time, but on the company’s computers in the company’s office etc, then it’s pretty much the company’s (though I don’t think anyone would ever want to enforce something like that). The discussion about deal making was interesting, but again, just common sense; If we’re negotiating a deal and they want us start working on the game without a contract, we shouldn’t do it unless they give us cash first. Talk to more than 1 publisher at a time. Know when to walk away. Establish a term sheet before the contract. Don’t keep sending drafts between lawyers, fix the first draft straight away. Don’t give away your IP rights. Use a lawyer that specialises in games. Etc etc. All common sense stuff.
I went home to bed after this, I was in bits.

Feeling much better today, went to get breakfast at Mel’s dinner near the convention center, bumped into James Jen again. Berrated him for ruining my Tuesday.
First session was IP: Creating it, Using it. It covered the 4 types of IP (trade secrests, patents, trademarks, and copyright), how to use it, and how to protect and defend it. It was generally a good talk, and worth attending. The guy has a book on the subject, which I may pick up if it’s not to heavy/expensive/shit.

From here, went over to the PS3 keynote. Queued up for half an hour, it went right round the convention center, which is a sizable distance. Considered jumping out and doing something else, but I really did’nt have much to do. Keynote was good, got excited about ps3 for the first time ever. Started thinking about buying one.

Saw Reggie Fils-Aime. He has a fat head.

Next, went back over to the west hall to ‘If you’re scared others will find out you don’t know how to be a manager’, which despite being in the form of an ex marine running around with a radio mic telling everyone how much they suck, was pretty useful. The guy obviously normally does this in corporate environments, but it could be applied to games, but again, it’s just about being nice to people. The best part of this talk was that I didn’t need to write anything down, since they have reams of free podcasts and documentation available here: www.manager-tools.com

Lunch time. Walked around the expo halls looking for people to blag hardware off and didn’t find anything useful.

Afternoon: IGDA and “Producing Quality of Life”, which was a load of round table nonsense really. It was half people complaining about getting burned out (WE KNOW), and half useless suggestions from producers like “if staff are working late, we buy them pizza!”. One guy piped up in response to this saying all your staff will be unhealthy and ill if you do that, which is just common sense. Why does no-one have common sense?

Agile/Scrum/XP has been a very popular subject here, it seems most studios are adopting it and loving it, and helps with programmer workloads, and it’s much easier to track productivity and effectiveness. Might be useful for design and art tasks too.
Saw John Romero and his hair, was amused at how short he is.

Talked to some mod guys who have made a combined space shooter/FPS from the source engine, they pretty impressive, I’ll post links when I can find his card. Played Everyday Shooter, which was really impressive; think robotron/rez with a fully guitar based soundtrack. Really pleasant to play, and very accomplished.

Bought a PS3.

Continuing my apparently unfashionable dalliance with the PEE ESS THREE, I’ve spent the last week or so fiddling about with and enjoying WARHAWK.

It’s good for a few reasons:

• It’s (as far as I know), the first online-only, team based combat game on a console. And to their credit, Insomniac did a lot of stuff right; you have a proper server browser that tells you what your actual PING is, and you can see the game rules that are running, you can host a dedicated server of your own if you want. You can play of official ranked servers. It’s like a PC game, and it shows XBL up a little bit (though XBL is better in other ways).
• It can be played just like Crimson Skies, but with actual people to play against. I could never find anyone online with CS after the initial launch period, and this was sad. But in Warhawk, there’s a dog-fight game mode, which ignores the land based vehicles and on foot soldiering, and makes everyone spawn in a plane. This makes it Crimson Skies, and turns the game into something completely different to the BF mode.
• The planes are very satisfying to fly. You can do all sorts of flippery and rolling around in the sky. It’s very pleasing. It also switches into a hover mode so you can camp outside bases and gun down the little men.
• You can download it for half the price of the retail version! This is the future! You can hide game purchases from your other half, cos there’s no physical evidence!

Unfortunately, it does highlight a bunch of things that are wrong with PSN:

• You can’t mute 12 year olds who are shouting abuse at everyone.
• Not everyone has a headset. You can use any bluetooth headset, but giving one away in the PS3 box would have made sense.
• You can’t add people you’re playing with as PSN mates if you’re enjoying their company and would like to play them again
• You can’t jump into a game that your friend is playing.

This is the first proper online game for PS3 though, so I think things will improve on the service side over time. Sony really need to catch up with XBL quickly for the consumers sake; xbox is just much easier to use, and makes sense for the gamer.
From the server side of things, I think Insomniac are insane. They have racks upon racks of PS3s in a number of data centers around the world. This is silly for a number of reasons:

• They should have allowed GSPs to host games, and allowed them to sell dedicated servers to gamers. It wouldn’t have cost Sony anything aside from administration costs, demonstrates the openness of the platform, and opens the GSP market up to any other online PS3 games
• They should have hosted the games on SERVERS, not PS3s. Assuming they’re not utilizing the SPUs (and why would they?), you could get way more instances on a single multicore CPU box that would consume less power than a 380W PS3. And I am assuming that the PS3s had to be paid for; they are apparently still more expensive to build than to buy in the shops
• PS3s in racks is a waste of PS3s. They’re for playing games on.

I do like the open approach Sony have taken with PSN though. If they can marry the unified XBL user experience with the inherent open-ness of PSN (ie allowing the developer to decide how the server side works for their own game, rather than making everyone use the same limited tools), they could be on to a winner. Catching up is a bit of a job though; MS have been doing this for 5 years now, and have done very well.