cigdevelopment
A Day in the Life of Unknown Worlds Pt. ...
2007-09-10 1:45 PM PDT
11:00 AM
Max: Between writing the first blog entry, checking e-mail, eating breakfast and getting to the “office” (i.e. my partner Charlie's apartment) it's already time to update again – and I haven't done anything! That's not bad though. At my last game company, where where we had 30 people, I'd often spend the first few hours of the day dealing with unexpected issues that would be waiting for me in my inbox when I got to work.
Now it's time to dig into that debugger feature. When doing tools work, there's often two pieces to any job -- building the front-end graphical user interface, and hooking that up to the back-end functionality. Last night I created the user interface, so today I'm ready to dive into the back-end part. I read an article on productivity once that suggested always ending the day in the middle of a task so you know exactly where to start the next day. That helps you get right down to business without giving you much opportunity to procrastinate. I don't consciously do that often, but when I have to work on something really nasty, like this particular feature, I find it helps.
Charlie: Called our angel group that we're waiting to hear from on their due diligence. “Due diligence” is the phase where investors are looking at your records to make sure everything you've told them is true and that there are no hidden legal or financial roadblocks that could crash the company later.
I got some nice advice from him regarding our potential investment deal and he advised us to take it. It was great that he was willing to help on a different deal then the one he was involved with. They are still interested in investing money and lending the expertise. We would like to work with them because they've helped make many other game companies successful and seem to be quite experienced. They are also down to earth and very nice (something you don't find every day when looking for money!).
Max: Between writing the first blog entry, checking e-mail, eating breakfast and getting to the “office” (i.e. my partner Charlie's apartment) it's already time to update again – and I haven't done anything! That's not bad though. At my last game company, where where we had 30 people, I'd often spend the first few hours of the day dealing with unexpected issues that would be waiting for me in my inbox when I got to work.
Now it's time to dig into that debugger feature. When doing tools work, there's often two pieces to any job -- building the front-end graphical user interface, and hooking that up to the back-end functionality. Last night I created the user interface, so today I'm ready to dive into the back-end part. I read an article on productivity once that suggested always ending the day in the middle of a task so you know exactly where to start the next day. That helps you get right down to business without giving you much opportunity to procrastinate. I don't consciously do that often, but when I have to work on something really nasty, like this particular feature, I find it helps.
Charlie: Called our angel group that we're waiting to hear from on their due diligence. “Due diligence” is the phase where investors are looking at your records to make sure everything you've told them is true and that there are no hidden legal or financial roadblocks that could crash the company later.
I got some nice advice from him regarding our potential investment deal and he advised us to take it. It was great that he was willing to help on a different deal then the one he was involved with. They are still interested in investing money and lending the expertise. We would like to work with them because they've helped make many other game companies successful and seem to be quite experienced. They are also down to earth and very nice (something you don't find every day when looking for money!).
A Day in the Life of Unknown Worlds
2007-09-10 1:44 PM PDT
10:00 AM
Max: Time to get the day started. Today I'm primarily going to be doing development on our in-house Lua debugger. Lua is a scripting language that we're using for Natural Selection 2 to help us quickly code up and modify the game logic – even while the game is running – so that we can iterate over design ideas and maintain a super agile development process. We've also adopted Lua as a platform for allowing our players to create “mods” and interesting new content for the game.
Lua is a popular choice game games because it's fast and a lightweight. Some recent games that use Lua include World of Warcraft, Far Cry, Company of Heroes, Psychonauts and Garry's Mod, and it has a long history going back to games like Grim Fandango, Baldur's Gate and MDK. Even with such a strong history in the game industry, there isn't a really solid tool available for debugging code written in Lua. A few months ago we decided to create a debugger for our own use on Natural Selection 2, and later realized we could package it up as middleware and sell it to other developers.
Right now we're in the beta testing stage for the debugger and we've sent evaluation copies to a few game companies to get their feedback. Typically when you're beta testing a product you're in “feature freeze.” This means the only code that's going in are bug fixes,since any new feature has the potential to introduce a lot of new bugs and set you back. However, one particular feature has been requested multiple times during this evaluation period and I've decided it's important enough to put in for the first release. You want to make a good impression after all!
The feature I'm going to be working on today is the ability to attach the debugger to an already running game. Right now you can only debug a game if you launch it through the debugger, but a common case is you'll be testing something, realize there's a bug and want to hop into the debugger and see what's going on. This sounds simple on the surface, but adding it is going to be...
Max: Time to get the day started. Today I'm primarily going to be doing development on our in-house Lua debugger. Lua is a scripting language that we're using for Natural Selection 2 to help us quickly code up and modify the game logic – even while the game is running – so that we can iterate over design ideas and maintain a super agile development process. We've also adopted Lua as a platform for allowing our players to create “mods” and interesting new content for the game.
Lua is a popular choice game games because it's fast and a lightweight. Some recent games that use Lua include World of Warcraft, Far Cry, Company of Heroes, Psychonauts and Garry's Mod, and it has a long history going back to games like Grim Fandango, Baldur's Gate and MDK. Even with such a strong history in the game industry, there isn't a really solid tool available for debugging code written in Lua. A few months ago we decided to create a debugger for our own use on Natural Selection 2, and later realized we could package it up as middleware and sell it to other developers.
Right now we're in the beta testing stage for the debugger and we've sent evaluation copies to a few game companies to get their feedback. Typically when you're beta testing a product you're in “feature freeze.” This means the only code that's going in are bug fixes,since any new feature has the potential to introduce a lot of new bugs and set you back. However, one particular feature has been requested multiple times during this evaluation period and I've decided it's important enough to put in for the first release. You want to make a good impression after all!
The feature I'm going to be working on today is the ability to attach the debugger to an already running game. Right now you can only debug a game if you launch it through the debugger, but a common case is you'll be testing something, realize there's a bug and want to hop into the debugger and see what's going on. This sounds simple on the surface, but adding it is going to be...
Xfire CIG Development Blog Part 2
2007-09-10 1:28 PM PDT
As time went on, I began working on a new program, the Music Plugin. It started as just a personal program, to detect the music I was listening to, and put it in my status of Xfire. As I was using it, people kept asking me how I did it, and I would explain to them. They urged me to let them have a copy, so I went ahead and put it on the site. At this point, the site was very bland. I recruited Steve (phpj0ck) to help out with the site. Thus, the new website was taking form. With the help of Neal (uul) and then eventually Robert (severythingn3123), we dressed up the site and made some flash content. Our site was gaining popularity and people had all these cool ideas that we tried to implement. Our programs at this time were just manipulating what we could, without any real effort to get our stuff into Xfire.
more to come...
more to come...
Xfire CIG Development Blog
2007-09-10 11:01 AM PDT
Hello everyone! My name is Jordan Toor, and I am the founder and head developer of Xfire Plus. It is a great honor to be invited for Development day this week. I will be able to show you some insight into a developer's standpoint in the modding community. I will go into what my responsibilities are, and how Xfire Plus became what it is today.
When Xfire Plus first began, it was just me and a bunch of ideas for things I would have liked to see in Xfire. I had started writing little scripts to do various things in a scripting language called AutoIt. The first thing I made, and had been released, was a script that would input a username, and open up the add users dialog and enter it in. This made it convenient to be able to add buddies through a web page. I set up a webpage for this program and offered it for download. During this time, Joonas (godjonez), had made his own program to fix various settings in Xfire. I figured that we could package it together and start a project for this. After contacting him, and he jumped onboard, we basically started what was to become Xfire Plus.
more to come...
When Xfire Plus first began, it was just me and a bunch of ideas for things I would have liked to see in Xfire. I had started writing little scripts to do various things in a scripting language called AutoIt. The first thing I made, and had been released, was a script that would input a username, and open up the add users dialog and enter it in. This made it convenient to be able to add buddies through a web page. I set up a webpage for this program and offered it for download. During this time, Joonas (godjonez), had made his own program to fix various settings in Xfire. I figured that we could package it together and start a project for this. After contacting him, and he jumped onboard, we basically started what was to become Xfire Plus.
more to come...
