Cities in the Sky

Allo!

Well, I figure I should probably get back into the swing of things now. I should probably also explain why I haven’t been in the swing of things too.

A month and a bit ago I thought it’d be a great idea to reformat my main computer to install a couple more operating systems and to clean out the crap that always seems to have accumulated in Windows after about half a year or so. It should have been dead straight-forward, but instead resulted in hair-pulling frustration and a lot of CDs in the bin. After several nearly-working installations of XP and Vista I discovered (through use of the helpful little tool memtest86+) that my RAM had somehow become broken, at the exact same time that my DVD drive broke. This wiped out about two weeks through experimenting, waiting for things to arrive, experimenting again, waiting for more things to arrive, and finally setting up four (yup) operating systems.

Then once I’d gotten my development environment all up and running with the latest versions of my dependencies (Ogre, UnitTest++ etc.) I found out that, in a nutshell, Ant is rubbish for C++ projects. I already suspected this since after making the build scripts work cross-platform they looked quite grotesque (XML doesn’t express logic well…), but the final nail in the coffin was the ridiculous bug that causes builds to continually slow down until they eventually stop. After asking on the project’s forum, I was directed to a patch written in 2003 that would fix it. Having to apply a patch from half a decade ago to get things back to their previous level of slowness is just stupid, so I spent a while setting up some different MSVC project files and rejigging the way CITS is built. That all took about a week (spare time only, remember).

Then the new version of Dwarf Fortress came out.

Then my lovely girlfriend and I went on holiday to Vienna for four days, which was nice.

Now we’re back though, and I’m ready to get on with things. Since in the plane I saw a lot of clouds and decided they were awesome, I may well go about revamping the sky a bit since it still looks rubbish to me. I know it’s not very important, but you guys have been deprived of screenshots for so long!

Great, I’ve got a completely free weekend with my girlfriend away, perfect chance to get some work done on CITS… but I’m not in the mood, so I’ve only done some minor tidying work (programmers like me love making code pretty) and finished up some bits to do with people falling off the island that I should have done before (they get ‘tidied up’ like the buildings do now). The rest of the day was taken up cleaning my bike, sorting out insurance, calling estate agents and other boring but necessary things like that. Tomorrow will be better, I promise!

Now I’m relaxing with a bottle of Tanglefoot, listening to some Frank Zappa (I’m trying new musics… can be quite good if you listen to the right albums. Lumpy Gravy, Hot Rats and Apostrophe are my favourites so far), and probably playing some more GTA4 and Trackmania.

Note: Trackmania is great with retro red-and-blue 3D glasses. Cheers Joe

The little cuboid people now have something to fear. If they get hit by a building, they fall off the island to their doom. By “doom” I mean “negative infinity in the Y axis”, and by “fall” I mean “get launched upwards for comedy effect”.

In other news I’ve been out and about in Loughborough looking for a new place to live. Seems like a lovely place, if you ignore the North and the South and the East of it.

Well, I just made myself laugh. I went to see the new Indiana Jones film with my girlfriend today (it was pretty good). We had to get there very early since Odeon’s online booking system broke whilst I was using it (refusing to load any pages at all just after I’d tapped in my credit card details, my favourite kind of broken), so we didn’t have seats reserved.

So we were sat there watching the ads and one came on for the new Mini Clubman - a little ’short’ entitled procrastination. It was this charming hand-drawn animation about a guy wanting to get his ‘things’ done, but who keeps finding other things to do. It ends up with him noticing his chair is squeaky, and going to buy some oil to stop it squeaking and distracting him from doing his things.

I hadn’t thought about it much until a few minutes ago, when I caught myself kneeling by my upside-down deskchair with a can of WD40. I guess it’s made even more ironic by the fact that I’m now writing a blog post about it.

Anyway, progress has been roughly zero these past few weeks, but I have plenty of excuses - getting wrongly sued for copyright infringement and having to write a series of cheeky but serious letters to very non-technical lawyer-types, dealing with a car company that went bust after we handed over £8000 of our hard-earned cash then having to travel to somewhere north of Manchester to rough them up, a week-long trip to France, recovering from a dislocated shoulder gained doing something you should just assume is very manly and heroic, and of course major internal deadlines at work. And GTA4.

I shall get back to working on CITS as soon as I’ve reformatted my PC and reinstalled everything - I’m telling myself it’s so I can get the game compiling and running on 64 bit platforms and on Vista, but you and I both know it’s just another bout of severe procrastination.

Well, what a fantastic year 2007 was. I passed my bike test, graduated, traveled around Europe, got a fab-tastic job making computer games and moved into a flat with my girlfriend. 2008 is going to have to try very hard to top that.

So, excuses; I’ve more or less only just got my computer(s) set up at home after yet more hardware failures, which means that I haven’t been working on CITS, I haven’t been able to update this blog, and I haven’t even been able to play games (except on my shiny new 360). Things are starting to get back to normal now though (well, they’re finding a new normal). As such, I’ll start posting up some more of our travel journal over the coming weeks, and once I’ve got SVN working on my new fileserver I’ll do some more on CITS so I can show you more shiny pictures. Huzzah!

A lot has happened since my last update! Firstly, after receiving numerous very good offers up and down the country, I finally accepted a position as Graduate Software Engineer at Rare in Twycross. It was a tough decision since there were three offers that stood out as being absolutely excellent, but I settled for Rare since they take care of their employees well (being owned by Microsoft…) and it seems like a fun place to work, which is the most important thing I guess. It just seems like such a shame turning down such good offers

Anyway, after the weeks of constant phone conversations, interviews, emails and so on, I thought it’d be nice to have a break. This didn’t happen of course, since I need somewhere to live. The very day they sent through the contracts to sign, me and my girlfriend rocketed off up North to find a new pad. We looked around Nuneaton (yuck…), Hinckley (eww…), Coalville (oh dear god) and Atherstone (yay!), and long story short ended up finding the perfect flat; it’s in the lovely town of Atherstone, it has a balcony overlooking a canal lock, it’s spacious and well-presented, and it has a garage for our bikes. We’re both dead chuffed Unfortunately the current occupants don’t move out until after I’ve started work so I’ll have to spend a couple of weeks living in a B&B, but it’s all paid for by them so no worries I suppose.

Right, those are the exciting bits… what else have I done?… I polished my bike the other day, and… ate… some cheese…

Ok, that’s about it I suppose, stay tuned for updates on CITS, more travel journal stuff, and more of me bleating on about how sickeningly successful I’m being at the moment.

Well, I’ve managed to find a few minutes to upload some more of our travel journal. I also found a few more minutes to Geotag the photos and re-upload them with the new data. Now, when you click on one and go to Google Web Albums you’ll see exactly where it was taken, and if you look at the album view you’ll get a nice overview of the route. Very swish!

In other news, it turns out I’m very desirable. I put my CV on Monster.co.uk just over a week ago, and have been on the phone almost constantly since then - everybody wants to get me a job! I’ve had two interviews now, and both of them have come back (the next morning) with very generous offers. I won’t say how much, but I will say it’s more than Tim I’ve got a bunch more interviews with many more interesting companies in the coming week, so it looks like I’ll be employed very soon indeed!

The upshot of all this for you guys is that these companies want to see sample code and demos, so I’ve been working on CITS a little more recently. I’m mostly just refactoring stuff behind the scenes to give employers some pretty code to look at, but the bits that I’m refactoring will make it much easier to add more buildings in future, and will hopefully fix some of the problems I’m having with getting buildings to knock each other over. I’m also working on prettifying the interface and adding a special ‘tweaking’ GUI to make balancing the game that bit easier for me. Isn’t making games fun?

Well, I’m now back from my travels, fed, watered and rested. I suppose many of you didn’t even know that I went on holiday since I forgot to post about it I spent the last 30 days riding round Europe (on my Bandit) with my girlfriend (on her dad’s Revere), camping, adventuring and generally having a smashingly good time. In total we managed a little over 3000 miles, in 7 different countries, not including England! I’ll have a bunch of other useless statistics on the journey once I’ve had a play with Google Maps and Excel a little

Anyway, I shan’t go into detail about the journey in this post; we kept a travel journal on the way round, which due to shoddy workmanship at the notepad factory will be being typed up over the next couple of days to be posted on this blog. I’m also in the process of sorting out the photos using Google Picasa (those guys really do have a tool for everything), which will probably involve getting them online at some point. So, you’ll be able to find out all about the trip very shortly!

If you really don’t care though, and are just here for CITS news, you can filter out all the other stuff using this URL. I’ll be cracking on with it as soon as I’ve worked through all the super-important stuff on my todo list, don’t worry!

Also, it’s my birthday! It’s short notice, I know, so I’ll give you until noon, Friday (not a minute later!) to get presents and cards to me.

Well, I’m now graduated! I’m now Ben Hymers MEng, and after being made to wear a ridiculous hat and listen to apocalyptic organ music for several hours, I feel I deserve it. It feels great, but at the same time I’m a little sad; university has been my life for four years and now it’s all over. This also means I’m now unemployed rather than a student (there is a difference!), so any game companies looking for a new recruit, I’m very available!

On to the CITS side of things; the task I set myself in my last post took all of 10 minutes to complete! I was going to make another post about it, but my site curiously disappeared for a day or so. So, there is now a point to the game, though it’s not very hard - you really have to try to lose! I’m going to fiddle a bit with some parameters to get it to be slightly more interesting. But first, I’m going to do a load of tidying up of the internals of the game. My work on Stereoshift increased my knowledge of C++ massively, and as uninteresting as it sounds, I can’t wait to get refactoring my terrible old code What this does mean, though, is that adding new features will take less time - at the moment, there’d be an awful lot of horrible duplicated code were I to add a new type of building, for example.

The next actual feature to be implemented will be the proper breaking of buildings - when something crashes into them or they lean too far, they’ll break off from the island. With a bit of refactoring it should end up much nicer than it has in my previous attempts

Things have been a little crazy since my last post here, as I hinted at previously. The group project is long finished now, and was (moderately) successful. The project is/was ‘Stereoshift’, an open-source cross-platform networked extensible/lightweight music player. It turned out the project was stupidly ambitious, but it’s all done now and you can read a little more at stereoshift.net. Unfortunately, you may notice that there isn’t a download link or link to any code right now… there were some problems with licenses that none of us could be bothered to sort out. As such, you can just poke around the forum, the two wikis (developer and user) and Trac for now

The project was only half the work though; I also had a fair few exams on some terrible, badly taught subjects. They went alright-ish.

After all that, I went on a search for a motorbike, and as a result am now the proud owner of a Suzuki GSF600S Bandit (2000 model). It’s been very bloody time consuming, but I’m happy with the result! That was the last big thing I had to do, and now I’ve got some free time to get working on things… Not for too long though, as I’m off on a trip around Europe on the bike as soon as I graduate!

Now, on to business: I’m starting a new game. I haven’t totally lost interest in CITS, I just feel like taking a break to develop something else. Hopefully the new code and design will be beneficial to CITS later, and the ‘diversity’ of two projects will look good on my portfolio The new project is an interesting one. It’s a simplified multiplayer RPG, concentrating on the theme of ‘adventure’.

The ’simplified’ part of that relates to the interface and game mechanics; rather than your normal RPG ’stats and skills’ system, where you work your arse off for another 2 points of dexterity and a level in lockpicking, there’ll be… well, none of that. Think Gauntlet rather than Baldur’s Gate. As for the controls, I’m aiming for a Zelda-ish system - directions and two buttons.

When I say ‘multiplayer’, I don’t mean ‘massively multiplayer’ at all; I want this to be a 4 player game, in which you adventure with your friends rather than complete strangers. Part of the reason MMORPGs annoy me is the presence of idiots. I want to completely sidestep that issue. I’m undecided on split-screen at the moment, it’s certainly an option though.

The main point of the game (and certainly the biggest design headache) is the ‘adventure’ aspect. I don’t want it to be a goblin-killing-fest, I don’t even want it to be totally story-driven. I’m aiming to give players an interesting and rich enough world that they want to explore it, and to have the quests and world generated around them to ensure an enjoyable experience. This will involve a lot of procedural generation of content (the world, characters, quests, plot etc…), which is something I’ve been interested in for a long time.

There are a couple of other design decisions I’ve made, which I’ll cover when I get round to ironing out their details.

Another point that may be of interest to you is that I’ll be programming the game using Test-Driven Development. Hopefully this will be enough to keep me interested, to push development forward constantly, and to ensure very high quality.

Now, off I go to get started!