Gareth's Weblog

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I had to turn comments off for all entries. I'm sorry about that, but someone somehow used the comment script to bring the server this is hosted on to a halt.

Hi-tech coffee

A friend of mine Sean gave me the URL to his new MrCoffee coffee machine. The feature list is pretty impressive, including the last feature that reads

On/Off Indicator Light lets you know when your coffeemaker is “On” and “Off”

Lucky I do not drink coffee, those high-tech coffee machines would really confuse me!

Computer resources.

I've just come back from Costco, where I bought myself a new HP 1315.

During the installation process, the dialog box you see here appeared. Read it, go on, I'll wait. Yes, it does say that a minimal install that will possibly disable some features and isn't recommended will take up 100 Megabytes!

100 Megabytes! For minimal printer driver? Why? Can someone explain this to me? I bet I could write a full suite of printer software that took up no more than 5mb of disk space!

Coders today really piss me off....
I only have a total of 40gigs of disk space, now I have to waste 1/40 on the install, because obviously I want the full suite for my machine. :(

Screwing up, Israeli style

One would have thought that after 1997, the Mossad would have learnt, but no, in true Israeli style, they fucked up again...

Glad I don't live there anymore...

Security and Firefox

Secuiryt is one of the reasons I prefer FireFox over IE. Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe for one moment that FireFox is any more Secure than IE, I just think that Firefox has two things going for it.

Firstly everyone uses IE, so everyone looks for security flaws in IE. And as the saying goes, if you seek, you shall find.

Secondly, The developers on Firefox respond to problems a lot faster than Microsoft.

For example, yesterday a security flaw was found, today it’s fixed.

Scope

People have asked me what is so good about working at EA, there are numerous reasons, but on my way to work, I realized one of the best reasons: Scope Management.

The reality of game development is that there is always more work than time to do it in, there are many reasons for that, one of the main ones being that it’s very hard to schedule in the work required to make a game “fun” or “smooth” or “responsive”.

So like every other company I’ve worked at, or heard about, we tend to work extra hours (some times a lot) near milestones to hit all the deliverables we promised for the milestone, but the reality is that sometimes we will reach a milestone that just can’t have all the things we wanted on the date we wanted it.

Every other place I have worked at has solved this problem by pushing the date back. Sometimes by a day, some times by weeks. The problem with this theory is that not only do you “crunch” up to the milestone date, but you keep going in crunch mode until everything is done. Not only is this hard on the body and soul, but it also causes sloppy work.

At EA it’s different, here we always hit the milestones on the date we promised, what we do is scope manage. That is not to say that we just hit the end of the milestone, and everything that was not done we just say “hey, we didn’t do it”. It means that during the milestone we evaluate the ability to meet goals, and scope tasks out (or in, in some cases) to achieve a more realistic goal for the milestone.

What this means for the end of products I am not sure, I haven’t been here long enough. The options are: add milestones(delay the release of the software); add people(which basically means spend more money); or scope out features.

Since I’m working on a new game, there aren’t many features we can scope, unlike other sports titles that have a working base. We (like most sports titles) can’t ship late, because we have to meet up with schedules of sports leagues etc. One thing we could do is crunch till the end of the product, but that would let quality slip, one thing I know we can’t do.

But (and this is another one of those things I like about EA) I’m not very worried, for one major reason, management at this company instills a lot of belief in me. I know they know what they are doing, and they keep us up to date and in the loop, so we keep trusting them, and I know that when it’s time, the game will be on the shelf, and I will be to the quality that I’m getting to realize is required here.

For example, has anyone played NCAA yet? A gamerankings.com average of 95% is pretty good for a sports title!

No warning when passing a bool constant as a float param

Sorry to the non-programmers that read this (Hi mom! :)), I really should move this over the programming section, but I’m at work and don’t have time.

So consider the following bit of code (I hope it formats ok…)

void func (float f)
{
	float _f=f;
}
 
int main (int argc,char *argv[])
{
	func (true); // <--
}

You would expect a warning when func is called. But with visual c++ 7.0 and 7.1 there is no warning. I spent a few hours tracking down a bug because I didn’t get a warning, so I wanted to point it out to others.

Even with /Wall there is no warning:

c:\temp>cl /Wall test.cpp
Microsoft (R) 32-bit C/C++ Optimizing Compiler Version 13.10.3077 for 80x86
Copyright (C) Microsoft Corporation 1984-2002. All rights reserved.

test.cpp
test.cpp(3) : warning C4189: '_f' : local variable is initialized but not refere
nced
test.cpp(6) : warning C4100: 'argv' : unreferenced formal parameter
test.cpp(6) : warning C4100: 'argc' : unreferenced formal parameter

I haven’t tried this in gcc, but using sourceforge’s pastebin I tried it with Comeau and got no warning.

*EDIT* I’m sure it’s not an optimization, here is another version of the, code, that actually does ‘something’.

#include 

char func (float f)

{

	return (char)f;

}

 

int main (int argc,char *argv[])

{

	printf ("Testing %c",func (0xFFFFFFFF)); // <--

	printf ("Testing %c",func (true)); // <--

}

The line that takes the unsigned int constant gives the warning “warning C4305: 'argument' : truncation from 'unsigned int' to 'float’” but the line that takes the bool has no warnings.

I think it’s a “feature” of the language, allow you to do things like lightColor = lightColor * IsLightingOn(); where IsLightingOn() returns a bool, which gets converted to either 0 or 1. It’s an implicit conversion that just feels wrong to me.

SSE2 / pentium4 optimized Firefox

I've built an optimized version of FireFox 0.9.1, you can find it here.

Note, that due to it being SSE2 optimised, I don't think it will run on any older hardware!

I’m probably not the first person to do this, but I wanted to try it and it works. It seems a lot more responsive, and pages seem to display a lot quicker, but I can’t tell if it’s my imagination, or really faster.

So I would like the technical minded of my readers (If you don’t know what SSE2 is, or if you don’t know what FireFox is, you probably shouldn’t) to please download the .zip file, unzip it to a clean directory (install FireFox first from the official distribution if you haven’t already) and compare the two.

Sadly due to FireFox being clever about launching new instances, you can’t have them both running side by side. I did build it from the exact same code base that 0.9.1, just with lots of p4 specific optimizations turned on so it should just work. If this proves to be a useful thing I’ll start looking at optimizing the code itself.

I offer no warranty that it will even run, if you don’t know what you are doing, please do not download the zip file.

On a side note, if you haven’t tried FireFox yet, give it a whirl, it’s pretty good.

Again, if you missed it, the zip file can be found here.

The BBC is too good for it's own good.

I miss two things about the UK, a few friends, and the BBC.

See, the BBC is excellent, you pay a license fee every year, and for that you get commercial free television of the highest quality (5 or so channels, original series that are both funny and thought provoking etc), commercial free radio of the highest order (A wide range of diversity, you can listen to stuff that would never succeed on a commercial station, and Radio 5 live, which is by far the best sports/news radio station I have ever listened to, and I’ve lived in a lot of places) and the bbc.co.uk web space, which is the best news, sports and general info webpage bar none.

But now, it seems people think the BBC is too good at what they do. Apparently they have been told to stop being the best out there. It’s a joke, since the stuff that the BBC’s website gives you isn’t stuff that is commercially viable really anyway, that’s why they are so good at it, they can do good stuff that might not sell! When last did you hear of a website that really made money off advertising? Apart from google of course!

Personally I hope they don’t ruin bbc.co.uk, and maybe if I’m lucky they will start broadcasting the BBC television channels (And I don’t mean the stuff like BBC Prime in Israel or BBC Canada here, I mean the actual channels) here. Maybe with a time delay, so that shows would be on at decent times? OH MAN THAT WOULD ROCK.

P.S. Yes, the BBC also makes some crap (like the changing rooms craze), but lots of people like that, so it definitely has a place. It doesn’t change the fact that compared to public broadcasts in the other places I’ve lived (Ireland, Israel, Canada, and because I get lots of American channels, the USA) the BBC is amazingly good.

Sudeki

I watched the Sudeki Combat movie from IGN, the game looks amazing.

When I left, the game was pretty much feature complete, but now, 4 months or so later, the polish is amazingly evident. I knew it would get a lot better, but the people on the team have really come thru it seems. To all my friends from Climax, great work, I can't wait to buy the game!

(At the end of my stuff there I was mainly doing audio stuff, so I didn't wander around the game much. So although I know a lot about it, I don't know the entire story/game so I will pretty much be enjoying it for the first time when it comes out! I can't wait! )