The submission deadline for GDC 2008 is coming up in a matter of days. I’ve been wondering what to submit… If you have any ideas what you’d like me to cover, please leave a note here or send email and chances are I’ll submit that! :D
Haha, blogging about Facebook again… Anyway, it seems the Finnish Facebook usage has totally exploded during the last couple weeks. I’m getting a massive amount of invites from people who’ve just signed up. Interesting to see where it goes.
On another note, I’ve noticed the Apps in FB are starting to have serious scaling issues. Most of the apps in my profile have ceased to update themselves or update with extreme delays and a couple have completely broken due to the load. I’ve been playing Warbook (which is really plagued by cheating multis) but it seems the game’s now just gone. The site was spewing out Internal Server errors a few days ago and this morning the server was first down and now it’s just showing a blank page.
To me this indicates that Facebook actually needs to start hosting the apps to provide high quality experiences. And they seem to be considering this, too, as I saw news of an experimental framework for apps storing data on their servers.
Of yet another note, Aaron Miller commented on my previous post on the terms of use on Facebook. They basically claim ownership to everything you put there – what does this mean in case of you putting a Metaplace world up on your profile? I think there’ll be quite a clash of usage terms, especially if you start billing players within your world (as Raph’s indicated you can).
Interesting. I posted the following link to Facebook and the next day it’s gone without a trace.
Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?
It’s an expose about FB getting funding a board members from US intelligence agencies. I don’t even know if it’s true but if they deemed it’s worth censoring, I guess there might be something to it. At least the fact that some of the money they’ve received is a big dodgy.
Makes me wonder if I want to put any data there anymore, though.
I had the opportunity to talk to a couple “old school” game developers in AGDC which was nice but turns up I was pretty horrified by a couple things they said. The biggest no-no was that people thought it’s impossible to create a game without a long crunch period. The mentality seemed to be that the game can’t be fun without crunch.
I call that BS. Having to crunch is a sign of two things:
a) Overselling at the point of doing a contract (impossible schedule given time and resources) and,
b) Bad project management.
I’ve been working for 13 years or so in IT projects (games, websites etc) and crunch always came back to either one of those two things, or both. For someone who’s been working on games for longer than that, claiming you can’t complete a project without crunch just means the dude doesn’t know how to improve his way of working or just doesn’t care how people working for him feel. I’ve been to a couple crunch projects and I know it sure was not fun.
We try to avoid crunch and it’s working pretty well. Daniel James from Three Rings has said they never do crunch. And I’m sure there’s other companies in the gaming industry trying to do the same.
If given the opportunity to pick, would you choose a company which claimed they avoid crunch or one that said they’ll make your life a living hell every now and then? Maybe I value my life too much but I’m pretty sure I’d turn down even pretty lucrative offers if it entailed 10-12 hours days, 7 days a week for months because someone else screwed up.
Whoa, keynote is over and done with. Went pretty well apparently, at least getting positive feedback. Will be interesting to see what the actual evaluation score is. :)
Some of the coverage here:
Austin GDC: Trust the users
AGDC ’07: Habbo Hotel manager checks in
AGDC: Checking Into the Habbo Hotel
Austin GDC: Sulka Haro Keynote
AGDC: Haro On Making Habbo A Success
Update, the file is here: AGDC_keynote_Sulka_Haro.pdf. I had to delete a couple slides, sorry. If you’re interested in getting the actual research report we have, please contact “marketinsight (at) sulake.com”.
I’ve always wanted to get a graphic visualization on where I’m spending my precious hard drive space. There’s now a small cool utility for OS X that does just the thing. After spending 15 minutes with the tool, I’d cleaned away a massive amount of old crap I had sitting on my drive.
Uh oh. I almost got a heart-attack when Matt sent me an email congratulating on the speech in August.
Time to start preparing, I guess.
If you were in my GDC lecture, I’m probably not going to cover the same material in Austin. GDC was business track presentation, Austin will be a lot more about player creativity.
I’ve been toying around with a Bluetooth GPS and Nokia N95’s built in GPS for a while. I’ve been surprised by how bad and/or expensive most of the available software is for GPS use. The trend seems to be that software is either
For map vendors, the amount of money charged for useful maps is just ridiculous from consumer perspective and I’m sure it’s slowing down the adoption of location based services.
Nokia’s Maps software is nice but frankly I’d like a lot more detail to the maps in rural areas. I’ve checked the maps a couple times when I’ve been somewhere in the wilderness and the maps are next to useless outside the city. Making the algorithm the chooses how much detail is shown at the different zoom levels smarter would improve the usefulness of the software immensely.
On the hardware side, the external Bluetooth GPS with SIRFstar 3 chipset is very accurate and fast. The battery capacity could use an improvement – I’d expect at least 15 hours of use with one charge. The GPS inside the N95 on the other hand seems to be next to useless. The Time to First Fix takes so long that it seems to me the GPS always does a Factory fix. I’ve only managed to get my location on the device a couple times and it’s taken up to fifteen minutes for the phone to find the location under an open sky.
One surprise I’ve had is that the Bluetooth GPS only allows one software to connect to it at the same time. This imposes severe limitations on what can be done with the GPS – for example I can’t record my track while at the same time using a mapping application for navigation. Obviously this would be solved by having both features in the same app but sadly I have no software where both features work to the level I’d like them to. Apparently if all the software used Nokia’s Location API, that’d solve the problem but unfortunately there’s no third party software that supports using the API yet.
But here’s the reason for this post: I’ve been trying to look for a piece of software that’d read the coordinates off from the GPS and send them to a web page using a GET parameter with the phone’s built in browser. Mystically, an application that does this doesn’t seem to exist!
Such an app would allow me to send my location to any web application in world. I already have one small app waiting for this to happen and I can see myself creating a small app to “bookmark” locations when I have this capability. I’ve already sent this idea to a number of people developing GPS apps for series 60 and the general response has been that the developer doesn’t get what I’m driving at…
Anyway, if you develop stuff compatible with Series 60 Symbian v3 phones and know something about GPS’s, please create this application. Feature spec here:
That’s all, thanks. :D
I spent a week in Catalonia on holiday. First a couple days in Barcelona and then driving around the Pyrenees on a Prius from Hertz. What a car! The fuel economy really was pretty good, especially considering we drove up & down the hills quite a bit. I’d love to get a hybrid for my next vehicle so there’s hoping Toyota gets the next Prius done by the end of next year when my lease runs out.
Going to the mountains was definitely the best part of the holiday. Barcelona was packed full of people even though it’s not the tourist season. In the mountains the weather was excellent and the nature was just amazing – flowers were blooming everywhere and the medieval villages were incredibly beautiful. The photo is taken on a wooden bridge under Castillo de La Roca, a medieval village built on top of a lava surge from the last volcano eruptions in Garrotxa some 11 000 years ago.
Shots of Catalonian dragonflies are now posted to Flickr, of course.
I guess I’m a sucker too for personality tests, as confessed by Damion in his blog. My daemon’s Olyandra, interesting to see how that changes if someone submits his opinions.
Oh, and the movie looks beautiful as well. ;)