Browsing Category: Miscellaneous

This article is part of the ProBlogger group writing project “Reviews and Predictions“. Instead of predicting the future directly, I decided to predict things in the form of a retrospective of 2007. Talk about forward planning…

As 2007 draws to a close, it’s time to pour a glass of brandy and take a look at what the year brought us.

1] A surge in online game sales

With the PS3, XBox 360 and Wii becoming more integrated into homes around the World, there was a surge in the amount of people buying games online. New gamers who wouldn’t normally buy online were more confident with the idea of downloading games instead of buying them in a regular store.

2] Indies experimenting with subscription services

None of the big three consoles display prices in a regular currency, but use “points” instead. Several large indie publishers experimented with this method with varying degrees of success.

3] More success for indie developers

Despite the continuing myth that indie developers can’t be as successful as they once were, the full time indie club had plenty of new additions. There are still plenty of developers that don’t quite make the cut, but the overall picture was much more positive.

4] More diverse games

Although clones were still produced by the bucket-load, there was a glimmer of hope as more original games were high sellers. Games like Grimm’s Hatchery helped to show that developers could follow their creativity and still be rewarded for it.

5] Production values rise

This has always been the case, but thankfully it’s nowhere near the commercial scene of million dollar titles.

Developers started to realise that they could no longer rely on “programmer art” for their projects, and 2007 saw a large increase in developers outsourcing their art. The overall standard of indie games rose as indies moved away from the programming mindset and towards a more general “game producer” one.

Consequently, it was a good year for freelance artists.

6] Less programming, more design

Game development toolkits such as Ogre, RPG Maker start to become more popular as developers realise they must move away from re-inventing the wheel. This rise in toolkits really springs from the need to spend more time on production and less time on coding the perfect 3D engine.

7] The World didn’t end

Vista was released to the public, using consoles to purchase games online became more popular and development costs continued to rise. Despite all of this, the indie game scene failed to die the horrible death that has been predicted since time began…

Here’s to an even more prosperous 2008!

This article is part of the ProBlogger group writing project “Reviews and Predictions“.

If you read blogs regularly, you might have noticed the “5 things you didn’t know about me” posts that are springing up all over the place.

If you haven’t seen one of these posts before, it’s a very simple idea. You must write five things about yourself that not many people know, and then nominate five other bloggers. I’m not really one for chain letters, but apparently it’s the season to be jolly. Humbug.

Katy Whitton over at Flipping Heck! has recently been tagged, and has passed on the virus to yours truly. Brace yourself for five of the least fascinating facts you’re ever likely to read.

1. I had my appendix removed when I was 5 years old. This was an important life lesson for me, as I found at that eating nothing but cream crackers is not as healthy as it sounds.
2. Despite being quite an analytically minded individual, I studied art for two years at high school (14 – 16). Unsurprisingly, it was my poorest subject, as you can probably tell by the stunning piece of artwork that adorns this page.
3. I run a local Scout Troop. I’ve been a uniformed leader for nearly six years, and before that I was a member of the same troop since the age of 12.
4. The first game I ever wrote was a text adventure called “Sonic’s Adventure”. It had 100 locations, each with a stunningly detailed description such as “you are in a field”. Perhaps one day I’ll re-release it as a “director’s cut”…
5. I’ve served on a jury. I’m always surprised at people who want to skip jury duty, because I found it to be a very unique and rewarding experience. You’re guaranteed to leave with a different perspective on things, and I know from my experience that you will see the best and worst that society has to offer.

So there we have it. For those of you that are still awake, it’s time to nominate the people I shall be tagging. 99% of people on the blogs I read have already been tagged. If you’re reading this and haven’t had one of these messages, consider yourself tagged.

Here’s a few indie developer blogs that I subscribe to:

• An Independent Game Developer’s Diary — One of the most interesting things about this blog is that it also describes the business side of things, such as deciding which business structure to use and basic accounting. 
• Cliffski’s Mumblings — The blog of Cliffski, the developer of Starship Tycoon, Democracy and Kudos. I definitely recommend checking out the Kudos Design Post-Mortem.
• The Dark Moon Blog — I first found out about this from reading a GameProducer article about “text-link-ads”, and it was nice to see a fellow developer earning some cash from the programme. Jochen recently quit his job to become a full-time indie developer, so wish him luck!
• GameProducer.net — Juuso’s blog on game development, which covers most of the areas involved in developing and producing games. Most people will find the indie sales stats of interest, especially those just starting out and wondering “how much can I make?” The site is regularly updated, and the archives have a lot of useful information stored within.

I promise not to write another list post for a while!

It’s a none software development related post today. Hurrah!

Over the weekend, I created a new template for my brother’s blog, “The Collected Writings of James Newton“. I’m rather pleased with how it turned out, especially considering the fact that I’m not much of a designer.

It wasn’t exactly how I’d imagined it, but I think I got the overall “feel” of the site right, and that’s what matters. Creating a good atmosphere for a blog is important, and something I should probably take into account with my own blogs.

There are a few things about the design that I quite enjoyed:

• Wooden Background — My designs are usually quite clinical, and although it’s not real wood, I think it gives the design a more “organic” feel.
• Rich Footer — They’re all over the place, but I’ve never used one in a design before. Now I have. Grabbing random photos from TinyWebGallery was very simple, and they add colour to the site.
• Sidebar — It’s not too different from most sidebars, but I still like it. I like the highlighted images in the RSS and article links, and also the “About” section.

If you’re interested in video games, writing or a host of other things (including Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon), then hop on over.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m currently running the Office 2007 beta. Recently I’ve been getting the error “The document could not be registered” every time I create a new document, change the style set and at other times.

Apparently the problem is due to the “DCOM Server Process Launcher” service not starting. I was unable to start it manually, but after setting it to start automatically I was able to repair the Office installation and get things running as normal. It also fixed a problem I was having with the MSI installer service, which had stopped me from updating Windows as well as running most installers.

Fixing the DCOM Server Process Launcher

First of all, you need to open the “Services” manager. You can do this either by selecting “run” in the start menu and typing “services.msc”, or going to “Control Panel”, then “Administrative Tools” and selecting “Services”.

You should see a window similar to the following:

Select the item named “DCOM Server Process Launcher”, right click and select “Properties”. This should bring up the following dialog:

Select “Automatic” from the “Startup type” drop down, and then select “OK”. Close the service manager, and then you’ll need to reboot.

Repairing the Office 2007 Installation

Once you’ve rebooted, you should be able to repair your Office installation. Go to the control panel, select “Add or Remove Programs” and select the entry named “Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2007 (Beta)”. Click the button called “change”, and then select “repair” from the options. This should then start the repair process. It took quite a while for me, so you might want to make a cup of tea or knit a jumper whilst you’re waiting.

Once it’s finished, it’ll ask you to reset. Once you’re reset your machine, everything should be back to normal. Phew!

Update: Jack and Mike have both found that giving the document file a shorter name can solve this problem too. Cheers!

Updated 2: Al Simon also encountered this problem, which was caused by a corrupted file. You can view his solution in the comments below.

Today marks the 15th birthday of everybody’s favourite blue hedgehog, Sonic!

Although his more recent games haven’t been so great, the original Sonic games still stand out because of their speed, appearance and general “pick up and play” style gameplay. He’s spawned countless games, TV shows and plenty of merchandise too. He’s even had a gene named after him!

Happy birthday, you spikey ball of fun!

In case anyone’s wondering why it’s been a little quiet here, it’s because I’m currently on holiday in sunny Florida. A lot of interesting things have happened in the last few weeks, including the release of plenty of screenshots of the new Office 2007 user interface, which has certainly attracted a lot of feedback. David Seah also links to a Ruby on Rails implementation of the Printable CEO.

My brother’s recent post, “Death of an Idealist“, got me thinking about how perfectionism is often more of a hindrance than a help.

Perfectionism is a major block for me, and it was highlighted this weekend whilst I was working on my current project. I’ve been stuck in “Analysis Paralysis” for a few weeks, because there’s always that feeling that it “has to be perfect”. I decided to write some code, but as part of a “sandbox” so that I could tweak things and then copy the code to the main project when it was ready. Almost immediately I felt a boost, and wrote some pretty good non-perfect code.

Writing software is difficult, and it’s not made any easier when you are afraid of “getting it wrong”. Just giving myself the safety of a “sandbox” removed this barrier, and made programming a lot more fun than it has been for a while.

I’ve happily used Windows XP for the past four years, but I’d heard good things about Linux so I decided to give it a try last year. I now use Linux for a lot of my non-programming tasks, and although I feel parts could be improved, it’s a very pleasant environment to use.

Getting Started

The first thing to do was to grab a Linux distro. I use Mepis, because it’s the only LiveCD I could get working on my laptop. I highly advise using a LiveCD to start with, as it allows you to try everything out without installing anything on your hard-drive.

After clearing roughly half of my hard-drive of unused programs and Windows files, I defragmented and partitioned it. The Mepis OS centre makes partitioning your drive a straightforward affair, and the install process was quick and simple. It guides you through installing a boot loader if you want to keep your existing OS (which I did), so now when my laptop boots I get a quick menu to choose between Mepis and WinXP. The whole process took a few hours, but it was a lot simpler than I had imagined. The Mepis installer does a good job of guiding you through the steps to install.

My favourite apps

I wasn’t really sure what to expect with Linux, but I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the applications. My most used programs:

amaroK

I’ve used Winamp for years, and amaroK was a bit of a change for me. It’s got plenty of great features for organising your tracks and albums, such as downloading track information and album covers. There’s support for last.FM, dynamic playlists and a host of other rather nifty features.

KOffice

I don’t like it as much as Office 2003, but I prefer it to OpenOffice.org. It does have an “autocomplete” feature similar to OpenOffice.org which I’m rather fond of, as it can speed up typing long words.

Gaim

Gaim is a great IM client that works on multiple platforms. It handles the popular protocols (MSN, Yahoo!, AIM/ICQ) very well, and also supports IRC and Jabber.

TaskJuggler

TaskJuggler is a project management application which moves away from the standard Gantt editor. Tasks are entered using a text editor, which can be daunting at first. It takes a while to learn the syntax, but once that’s out of the way it’s really quite powerful. It can generate HTML and XML reports, as well as our trusty friend the Gantt chart.

Other bits and pieces

The one thing that really convinced me to give Linux a try was the LiveCD. It’s a really nice idea, and meant I could play around with all the features before clearing space and partitioning my drive. I really expected things to be a lot harder than they were, and despite a few crashes I’ve found the whole thing easy to install and use. It’s certainly worth a look if you want to try something new. Mepis has a good community of very helpful people, and you can generally find the answer to any problems quickly.

I recently completed two weeks of jury duty, and it was certainly an eye opener. I’ll admit to being a fan of CSI, so seeing how evidence is used in real court was fascinating. Naturally I didn’t get a cryptic murder mystery, but what I saw was still very different to what I’m used to.

One thing I wasn’t prepared for was the amount of sitting around. I brought a book, but I’d read it before the day was even halfway through. Thankfully, once you’re assigned to a case things get more interesting, but it’s still a pain to be sat in the lobby for six hours waiting for your name to be called.

It’s definately an experience, and even though I didn’t relish the idea of being locked in a room with eleven strangers to debate matters of law, it was actually quite enjoyable.

I’ll admit, I’m not particularly keen on using telephones. Whilst searching for help on the problem, I found the rather amusing text above.

It’s pretty obvious to me that the page has been created from a standard template, and that they replace a few phrases with whichever fear they’re claiming to help you with. It doesn’t give a good impression of the company that they overlooked something that would easily have been spotted by a proof reader.

There’s an important lesson there.

Incidentally, this reminds me of one of the first programs I ever wrote. It was a short BASIC program on my old Atari ST that generated thank-you notes for Christmas presents. You simply entered who it was to, what they gave you and it would generate a sentence. Naturally it made plenty of mistakes, but it was certainly amusing.