/dev/klog

So, to be blunt, I screwed up the 0.7d1 release by not reading all the relevant documentation and switching to the new LLVM-GCC 4.2 compiler available in Xcode 3.1. Unfortunately, that compiler will produce applications that will not launch on systems earlier than Leopard (10.5).

I pulled out 0.7d1 from the appcast feed as soon as I found out, but unfortunately, anyone on Tiger who has updated to that release will not be able to use Sparkle to update to 0.7d2, since Riven X won’t launch at all for them. I am terribly sorry for the inconvenience.

Riven X 0.7d2 is available now from the sidebar and the appcast, and should work on Tiger and later.

Download Riven X 0.7d2 (5.29 MB)

C0DE517E has a very nice 3 part introduction to how GPU work, both from a logical point of view and from an implementation, how-it-works-in-the-real-world point of view. It’s a good read for anyone unfamiliar with graphics hardware.

• http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2008/04/gpu-part-1.html
• http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-gpu-works-part-2.html
• http://c0de517e.blogspot.com/2008/04/how-gpu-works-part-3.html

Gustavo Duarte wrote a neat entry on the simple joys of writing software. As a software engineering bachelor, I couldn’t agree more with his sentiments. There is something about designing a system, sometimes with a fair amount of complexity, and seeing it come to life and perform as designed after much blood, sweat and debugging.

But beyond the act of creating software, Gustavo goes further by giving several examples of how software has had and continues to have a huge impact in a large number of other industries and disciplines, from medicine to engineering and business. That, of course, is because software is part of the computer revolution, which I prefer to call the “information sharing and processing” revolution.

Indeed, modern telecommunications (the ability to send large amounts of information most anywhere on the globe at very high speeds) and computers coupled with software (the ability to process received information and send the result of that processing to others) is perhaps the greatest achievement of humankind, if our metric is based on the impact something has had on civilization. It really gives one pause to realize none of that existed only a hundred years ago.

There is perhaps one more thought of interest concerning where software design is heading: ubiquity. Indeed, it’s reasonable to assume humanity will continue to computerize systems over the course of the next several hundred years. It then becomes obvious that knowing how to write software will be as basic of a tool as knowing how to read and write. Much like today, there will be professional software writers, those people who have studied the methods and techniques of software engineering and perform such acts for a living, and there will be the rest of the population with various degrees of proficiency. But everyone will at least be able to write software; that much is a certainty to me.

I felt it was time to change the pixels of /dev/klog, and after browsing my way through the many themes available for WordPress, I have decided on Tarski.

In addition to providing a much nicer look than the previous one, Tarski also supports WordPress widgets, which has enabled me to add the tags cloud on the left. I expect to see what’s available and add a few new things as necessary. In particular, I’d like to provide better searching.

I have also added OpenID support for comments. OpenID is a pretty neat protocol for authentication on the web, and I highly recommend you get yourself one. I chose myOpenID as my provider, and setting everything up took only a few minutes.

In addition, for those of you using iPhones or iPod Touches, I have enabled the WPtouch theme plug-in, which should give you a much nicer experience on those devices.

Finally, not everything is quite done yet. In particular, there are style problems remaining in the project pages and a few others. I will be working on those last few kinks over the week.

So enjoy, and have a pleasant time reading /dev/klog!

I’m releasing Riven X 0.7d1 today with basic support for saving and loading games. This should make testing a little bit easier.

Enjoy!

Download Riven X 0.7d1 (5.05 MB)

The following is quoted from Gamasutra’s Paris GDC interview with Rob Pardo:

Finally, Jamil asked an extremely relevant question, given the state of the web game market - is it possible to get an ‘AAA game experience’ through the web interface?

Pardo was blunt: “I dunno, not until Microsoft, Intel, and Apple get their shit together. There’s such a dichotomy with hardware these days. With Microsoft, I think they have a bit of lip service with PC gaming. They have their own game system now, so I don’t think it’s really in their best interest to support [PC].”

However, he noted: “There’s been some Apple resurgence, so maybe Dell and Apple will get together and make a consumer box that has a decent graphics card in it, who knows? I do think it’s going to happen, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t happen with Microsoft.”

Without commenting at all about Apple’s stance on this, it is obvious to me that if Apple continues to increase their market share as current public data indicates, there’s going to be a shift of mentality in game studios still interested in developing for the PC platform. They’re going to seriously start looking at those millions of Mac customers who may have an available budget for the games they make. Of course, part of those customers are already buying those games thanks to Boot Camp, but there is an economic and psychological argument to be made that Mac versions of those games would get you an even larger share of that growing market.

It’s also interesting to note that Apple’s market is closer to that of consoles, in the sense that hardware diversity is much lower and there is greater integration between the OS, the software that runs on that OS and the hardware on which those two run, while retaining some of the advantages of the PC, such as less control from the hardware manufacturer (which Pardo cites as a problem for WoW content patches), the ubiquity of a pointing device and keyboard, more storage space, more mature development tools and the ability to develop and test on the same hardware.

I have now created a project on Launchpad for Riven X and MPQKit, and pushed the Subversion trunk to Bazaar branches in each project. More on that later, but for now the links:

Riven X in Launchpad
MPQKit in Launchpad

I am moving to California next week, and therefore I have now taken down the home.devklog.net server in order to have it shipped down there. Trac and Subversion will therefore not be available for 4 to 6 weeks. However, I am planning to migrate most of my important projects to Launchpad, so stay tuned for details.

Firefox 3 is annoyingly picky about SSL certificates, which has been an issue for people trying to access my Trac wiki or Subversion repository. I finally had enough and decided to nail the problem. So here are clear steps for generating SSL certificates that will make Firefox 3 happy. I will be using Leopard’s Certificate Assistant for most of the certificate work, with a bit of openssl at the end. The primary source of information I used to determine the requirements for SSL server certificates and signing certificates up in the chain is Mozilla’s All About Certificate Extensions technote.

Read the rest of this entry »

Riven X 0.6 is now available and is a significant update from 0.5. Major new features include:

• Water animation
• Cursors
• Transitions

In addition, all the important Riven script commands have been implemented, which means most of the engine is now functional, besides what is implemented by external functions (which includes most of the complex puzzles). Of course, a large number of bugs have been fixed since the previous release as well.

The next release is scheduled for the end of the summer and will focus on implementing a portion of the complex puzzles, as well as saving and loading games.

Download Riven X 0.6.