Crafty Thinker's Notes

“You’re back! You’re not dead… You look good.”

With E3 on the horizon, everyone is excited to see what’s new an exciting in the upcoming year in gaming.

We are fast approaching the 4 year mark of this generation in gaming which, for those of you who don’t tend to follow the trend of video game advancement, this is generally the time we start peering towards the next generation of video games. As most hardcore gamers know, a console’s 4th year tends to mean the beginning its mid-life crisis. In the past we have seen this time in a console’s life is a time of weird peripherals and half-hearted attempts at “innovative game play.”  Granted these innovations rarely take a firm hold, but they do tend to lay way for bigger and better things. But what happens when the innovations become an age-old marketing tactic that’s been around for over 50 years? What will happen when games go 3D?

Yeah, that’s right.  I called “3D” a marketing tactic.

The use of the third dimension in video entertainment has been around for decades. Giving audiences around the globe an “immersive “ experience that blows away regular 2D picture. Up until the turn of the century, 3D films were primarily exclusive to special theaters with space helmets and terrible prime time television events we watched through paper with red-blue plastic pasted onto it.

The way I see it, the third dimension is usually brought out when technology starts to plateau. If you look at the trend of 3D, you’ll notice that it is often used when the technology of a given medium has reached it’s peak.

If you have read into the goings on of GDC this year, or had the chance to go to the conference, there was a very large theme that seemed to permeate the entire conference. That, of course, was bringing the players into the immersive world of 3D. Suffice to say that the word “stereoscopic” was used liberally.

What I’m trying to get at here is this:

Are video games ready to be given the 3D push?
Has 3D technology come far enough for it to be enjoyable for video games?
Is there anything else the industry could/should be working on instead of 3D integration?

“Hit the the road, and hope it doesn’t hit back”

Today me and several other of my colleagues embarked on an adventure to the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We have been planning this trip for quite some time now and are now going to the nerd summit to end all nerd summits.

We checked into our hotel, “The Mosser”, in the afternoon. A friend and I will sharing a studio-sized room. Since there were no more rooms with twin beds, we booked one with just a queen bed. Guess who’s sleeping on the floor? It’s okay though, I’m used to it.

Tomorrow we go to the first day that our EXPO passes allow. The 5 complimentary panels this year don’t seem to be as good as last years,  but what else can we expect from the non-1k passes? One thing that I am really looking forward to is the IGF/GDC awards ceremony, that and all of swag that I plan on collecting throughout this trip.

Well, that’s all for today. More to come whenever.

“Runtime Error! You cannot view this page because it has to terminate in an unusual way.”

When it comes right down to it, runtime errors are just a huge pain. Not just for the user, but for everyone; your mom, your dad, your sister, and even that guy in apartment 2B that insists on playing smooth jazz until the wee hours in the morning.

Even though it means headaches and woe for most, and “Get cousin Tony to fix it for you” for the rest, it can prove deadly for developers…
Well not deadly, just complicated. And even more-so with this crazy economy and whatnot.

Runtime errors are what keep most developers up at night at post-production time:
“We want to play your games!’ shout the people still running WinXP.

When developing software, mostly games, the programmers need to make it so that everyone can enjoy the fruits of their labors. It’s hard working on state-of-the-art developing equipment to pull back and make a game accessible by all. So this is where developers have to make a decision: How much can we cut away from the game to still make it playable?

In recent years, with the economic recession and all that jazz, we are starting to see a larger gap between top-of-the-line systems and those still running Pentium 4s. Developers try and made their games accessible to as many people as possible but sometimes it just isn’t. The more the technology evolves, the more complicated and extensive games are getting. So then the people running older system are phased out.

This usually is the normal cycle of all things. Out with the old and in with the new.

My question is, since the gap IS widening: Will the bullet train that is technological advancement slow down as well, in order to meet the demands of those who can no longer upgrade every time Intel adds another core to their processors?

I was asked recently why game programming is some of the sloppiest programming known to man. And I thought of a pretty clever analogy to answer this question.

Game programming is like a boat:

First you build it.
Then you test it.
If the boat springs a leak, you patch the hole.
Then you take it out for another test.
If it springs a leak, you patch it again.
Then you take it out for another test.
If it springs a leak, you patch it again.
Then you take it out for another test.
If it springs a leak, you… Get the idea.

At the end of it all, the boat could be as ugly as can be from all of those patches, but the main thing is that it still floats.

Welcome to my blog!

In the near future, I should have everything up and running!

I will be using this website to document all of my endeavors and ideas.

Some things that will be covered; game development, photography, concept art, and abstract ideas of almost anything I can think of.

Stay tuned for more.