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The Daily GameDev.Net

Posted by: Tiffany_Smith at April 29, 2009 4:15:58 PM

Hello there my fellow game devvers and/or otherwise GDNet enthusiasts! its Wednesday again and... wow, its Wednesday again already? Where did the other days of the week go?

There wasn't much going on around the internets yesterday or at least nothing that Promit didn't already cover, but one of things that caught my attention was Square Enix president and CEO Yoichi Wada, saying that the Japanese videogames industry needs to find ways to bring new blood and new ideas into the business in order to get out of the current slump it finds itself in. "From the developer side, the Japanese games industry became so successful that we didn't recruit new people," he said. "So today, if you look at the main creators of games, they're already in their late thirties. "When you look at the industry in the US, the industry has attracted some very talented people from, say, computer science and the film industries - so people from different sectors came into the industry and that kept the market vital, succeeding in creating new products. "But in Japan the old people are doing the same old job - and even the so-called new people... there are some people that you'd call 'game geeks' but it was a very closed world". I can't quite tell whether he is concerned about the general age of the game developer or an apparent lack of innovation?

A little nugget for indie devs is that Eightbyte founder Gerry Tucker recently unveiled the company's offering of professional business services for independent developers. Key services include cash flow management, business planning, financial mentoring, as well as other services such as payroll, due diligence on sales, and book keeping. "I believe that the industry, survives and evolves by bringing new creative ideas to market, and independents are best positioned to generate that innovation... if they survive and thrive," said Tucker. "Eightbyte will work with companies who want to survive, and who want to be profitable." I want to thrive and be profitable, where do I sign? ;)

Yesterday the internets were abuzz with arguments and bickering about BioWare changing its mind about letting users of the Old Republic forum post terms referring to homosexuality. I had no idea about this before yesterday, but apparently until yesterday, words such as "gay" and "lesbian" were banned on the forum. Community manager Sean Dahlberg posted that this was because "these are terms that do not exist in Star Wars". People were not happy with the initial filter list for the forum, and BioWare has since decided to stop filtering the words and has since issued an apology. Ok, so it was *almost* news. Phew!

And now for some linkification, I thought I would point you to Sessler's Soapbox because he makes some interesting observations about Japanese developers seemingly changing their style a little bit. Would love to hear your thoughts?

Oooh and talking of love, I wanted to let you know that I've got Love for you!

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"The Daily GameDev.Net" Discussion

Ezbez Member since: 5/10/2005

Posted - 4/29/2009 8:54:47 PM

As usual, Love is absolutely stunning and quite inspiring.

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hymerman Member since: 12/18/2004 From: Loughborough, Leicestershire

Posted - 4/30/2009 7:58:01 AM

'Tis a beautiful and technically impressive game, as are his tools, but did you read his blog? Sounds like he's one of those terrible programmers that somehow manages to get things done well.

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swiftcoder Member since: 7/3/2003 From: Boston, MA

Posted - 4/30/2009 10:04:44 AM

Quote:
Original post by hymerman
'Tis a beautiful and technically impressive game, as are his tools, but did you read his blog? Sounds like he's one of those terrible programmers that somehow manages to get things done well.

I would tend to disagree with you there - he is a different type of programmer to the general trend on this forum: he eschews high-level languages in favour of C. But his work is very decent - check out the source code to his tools.

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Ezbez Member since: 5/10/2005

Posted - 4/30/2009 1:14:35 PM

I read it, and it had some of the most interesting pieces of coding advice I've heard in a while. This site has tended to give me a higher-level-the-better view, which I still stick to, but it is beneficial to hear what intelligent, productive proponents of the "other side" say.

His productivity is not a function of his coding skills but rather of his determination, effort, and willingness to dive right in. I think that is a lesson well worth learning (and one which I need considerable work on) regardless of programming style.

His arguments were very clear, with the exception of his use of C which he justified with a "most games use it" answer. I found that justification particularly incongruous with his mentality on making verse and other tools; for the tools he's saving time by being smarter than big companies, while with C he's saying that the big companies must know best.

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Tiffany_Smith Staff Member since: 4/22/2002 From: United Kingdom

Posted - 4/30/2009 2:10:45 PM

I think it all depends on the job you want to do. No sense in reimplementing the wheel if there's a tool that provides everything you need. However, for those times when you need that much more control, going lower level and creating something that is going to be robust enough for your needs makes much more sense.

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Oluseyi Staff Member since: 5/14/2001 From: New York, NY

Posted - 4/30/2009 5:16:46 PM

He uses VS6.

Game developers: proving my axiom that "good programs can result from bad code" every day!

More seriously, though, good design will overcome marginal bad code aspects. It's clear that Eskil has a good architectural design for his game. He can use VS6 because while it was a flawed C++ compiler, it was - and remains - an excellent C89 compiler. I took a look at some of his source, and it appears clean from my superficial assessment.

There's nothing wrong with C as a choice of implementation language, but don't get religious about it. Besides, he apparently uses Python, too (based on his defunct CVS repo), so "so much for the 'eschews high-level languages' argument."

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Codeka Member since: 10/19/2008 From: Sydney, New South Wales

Posted - 4/30/2009 8:14:19 PM

I think the "higher-level-the-better view" is good general advice, but once you've got experience, you'll know when to do something at a lower-level. Experience is the key.

Though his I am adding and subtracting post seems to be a mish-mash of good advice vs. what looks like cargo cult programming. Stuff like:

Quote:
"Some people will tell you you need C++ because it is newer and has more stuff, but in my opinion it just complicates things and tries to force you to program a specific way, rather then using the best practice for the problem at hand. Anyhow C++ is a super set of C so you will need to learn C to learn C++ anyway."

"I almost never use linked lists, and instead I try to use arrays, they are faster, smaller and more cash (sic) coherent."

"On occasion i use reallocate, reallocate has got a bad rep but it is actually very fast. If you make a big reallocate the MMU will actually make sure to avoid any big memory copies, and while it can be slow to preform it will be faster in the long run"

Are examples of what I would consider strange advice. Also the fact that he spells "cache" as "cash" is funny :-)

I do agree with his assessment that you should learn how a computer actually works (in terms of how the CPU works and how memory works and so on) in order to become a better programmer, but I don't agree that you need to know that stuff right from the beginning.

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Ezbez Member since: 5/10/2005

Posted - 5/1/2009 6:49:21 PM

Yeah, he does have some odd advice. This is his all-encompassing advice from the Jedi master and he chooses to tell us his preferred (and pretty standard/basic) random number generator? Surely there's some more generally applicable advice he could have doled out. I just find it funny that his approach to using C seems to be directly opposite to much of his other work (streamlining the development process). I would have bet a lot after watching those videos of his tech that he was a Python or Lisp or something fanatic.

Note: he is a non-native speaker of English, so if his biggest mistake is mixing up a couple homophones, I'm impressed.

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swiftcoder Member since: 7/3/2003 From: Boston, MA

Posted - 5/3/2009 6:54:31 AM

Quote:
Original post by Ezbez
I just find it funny that his approach to using C seems to be directly opposite to much of his other work (streamlining the development process). I would have bet a lot after watching those videos of his tech that he was a Python or Lisp or something fanatic.

I think that is an idea this forum tends to artificially engender - around here, a C89 fanatic would be given far shorter thrift than a LISP/Haskell fanatic.

I would label myself as something of a python fanatic, but my secondary language is typically straight C - it interfaces very cleanly with python, and it is a simple enough language that I can know most of the ins and outs of writing high-performance code. Sometimes I will use C++ instead, but to be honest, this is mostly for the std::containers, and the number of pitfalls is vastly increased over C...

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