Alexis Bauchu - On est pas des machines

The TF2 team at Valve posted a curious message on their blog today. I think they are teasing us in the funniest way about the next update, which could more than probably be the engineer's: a Cannon-appended canine unit? Wait Wait Wait... So there will be "pets" in TF2??

EDIT: In fact I've been horribly fooled. This is not teasing for an incoming update, this is Valve's way to acknolewdge the quality and the humor of this fake update giving access to a 10th class. This is great work, the website looks like an official one and the class is described with its strengths and weaknesses, the achievements you can unlock, etc. Good prank!

A while back I said that I'd talk about what I do during my internship at Wizarbox. It was in April, so it's been 5 months. Ok ok, I'm late, but when I post, I like to be REALLY sure! Seriously, if I haven't talked much about it, it's simply because there's not much I'm allowed to say. Game developers (and even more the publishers) like secrets.

What I'm allowed to say for the moment is that I'm scripter on Gray Matter, the new and greatly expected game by Jane Jensen. If you don't know her, she's the one behind the classical Point-and-click game series Gabriel Knight. I'm in charge of integrating the backgrounds of the scenes, the dialogs, but mainly to create the script of the game, which means the interactions with the world, between the characters, with your inventory, and to create the animated cut-scenes.

Here's the official trailer (in german) presented at Gamescom 2009:

I like tools. I think it's what I want my job to be about: making better tools. Tools are what stands in between of people and their work, and the better the tools are, the better the work can be. Good tools make your life easier, thus making you happier, thus making you more efficient. So it's good to invest in tools: everybody needs them, they always need to be improved, and people are grateful to you for making them.

Jonathan Blow revealed a bit more about his next game. And when I say a bit, it's a really little bit. Check-it out (you need only 12 seconds): The Witness

Pretty cool huh? Well that's really not much, but if this is as great as braid was, well, this is gonna be a master piece (don't be fooled by the cheesy teaser, the game is AWESOME! I'll talk about it again). All we know for the moment is that the game will be An exploration-puzzle game on an uninhabited island in full 3D and that it won't ship before 2011. Blow hired 2 visual artists to assist him on the job (Job Offer 1 and job offer 2)

Checkout the incredible Google Wave project. This is gonna change everything. If you don't wanna go through the whole video, go visit the Google Wave Preview Page.

I'm really putting a lot of hopes in this, since I think Wave is a solution to so many issues with today's communication tools.

• You just received an e-mail with no subject. What previous e-mail is it answering? Where's that e-mail?
• If you start a "conversation" in an e-mail, and have several people join after a while, how can then know about the beginning of the conversation?
• When you follow a newsgroups, forums, or worse, a mailing list using a web interface, what's the order in which people answered? What exact question are they answering?
• Forums: which topics have I read, which have I not?
• Instant messaging: how can store what has been said? How can I access it anywhere in the world? Why can't I see what the other is typing? What protocol should I use?
• Blogs: why can't I post a comment by "answering" to the RSS feed?
• What standard tool can you use to organize an event? Simply trying to know who's coming and who's not can be a nightmare unless you use some social network apps, but not everybody is in Facebook
• Why can' t I follow my e-mail, forums, blogs, newsgroup in a single interface? (actually you can with Thunderbird!) From any computer in the world? (ok that you can't)
• I've put a lot of efforts to sort my e-mails and my RSS feeds using tags. How can it benefit my friends?

Lately at work, I've been working on optimizing a bash script that was used to build the data of a game. Its role is to parse the game directory and for each file, match it with a building rule. If there's no rule for a file, well, then nothing happens. If there's a rule, then dates of the source file and the built file are compared, and if the source file is more recent, then the file is rebuilt. Yes, that's pretty much the basics of a configuration manager, but in this precise case Make wasn't an option.

What really bothered me in that tool, was its extreme slowness. Rebuilding modified data lacked a bit of punch, but more importantly, parsing data that hadn't been modified was slow to death. Even when a single value was modified in a file, it was taking at least 15 seconds to rebuild the script. I know this isn't too bad, but let's put this into perspective: doing nothing on about 300 files with a quad-core processor at 2Ghz was taking 15 seconds. This was already pretty frustrating as it was. Now, consider that the game contains at least 7400 files, which means when someone changes a file, you can't always know which one, so you have to rebuild the whole directory. Do the math: this blocks your machine for at least 6 minutes, just to do nothing. And that's a minimum! Because many files are rebuilt anyway. And you do this many many times a day. Fast iterating is key to success in game development, and that was nothing like it. Here is a chart with approximative time I benchmarked:

At first, I thought that the problem was Bash. Browsing every file in the directory recursively was maybe slow in shell script. But it wasn't. So I thought maybe comparing the dates was long. But it wasn't. And then I saw function that was matching file extensions with rules. It was looking up extension files in an array, but had to do string manipulations because each element was of the form "extension ruleName". And it was checking the whole array for every single file you had to build! So I made improvements there.

The array looked like this:

ACTIONS=( 
"txt DoStuffForTxt"
"avi EncodeVideo"
"lua PreCompileLua"
"etc"
)

It didn't go has I expected because the building time got longer. My solution was to replace the "extension rule" array with an associative array. But associative arrays are not supported in Bash! (even though the manual says so). So I did some hacking to circumvent that (I'll talk about it in another post). I finally understood that my solution was using to much "echo"s, and removing them improved the building time. But not much. I couln't think of anything else slowing the thing, because the rest was pretty trivial, so started a hunt for "echo"s. And there it was.

In each build rule, the second line was:

echo "Extension: $ext" >> log.txt

This seems harmless of course, nevertheless, this can eat a lot of time if log.txt is actually a big file. My intuition was right and I discovered that the file was about 8Mo big. After all this investigation, the real solution to the problem was to add

echo "" > log.txt

somewhere at the beginning of the script. Then the building time improved a lot:

In fact now, trying to rebuild even a 1000 files with no changes takes less than 5 seconds. So mark my words: when you do optimisation of code, any type of code, first get a real good overview of the performances and track the lines creating bottlenecks. Unlike me, you'll end up saving a lot of time! Plus, if you're doing some bash scripting, remember that echo is quite greedy and avoid it as much as you can!

I've just been prompted with a funny dialog window from Perforce. Here it is

I accepted to "merge" and then clicked "revert if unchanged". And of course it did revert. Can someone tell me WHY this is even happening??

Recently I've tried the Resident Evil 5 (RE 5) demo. I'm a fan of the previous episodes. Not a HUGE fan, but I know the subject: I played to RE 1, 2, Code Veronica, Rebirth, 0, and RE 4. And I have to say that this 5th episode doesn't quite convince me...

What I like in the games prior to the 4th episode are the atmosphere, the strong feeling of vulnerability and the puzzles. Your avatar only had 4 health points and ammunitions were rare so you really had to avoid fighting, your inventory was quite small so you had to choose carefully what stuff you'd take with you (more health kits or more ammo?), your sense of orientation was challenged, that kind of stuff. Those ingredients created a new genre that can legitimely be called survival / horror. This all disappeared in RE 4 which flushed the frustrating camera and inventory away, but with it, many of the things that made the Resident Evil series what it was: out the evil company Umbrella, out the puzzles, out the zombies (the enemies are infected by a horrible parasite) and so on. To me, RE 4 was an excellent action game, but a terrible Resident Evil. Capcom certainly hoped to capitalize on the brand, but the idea is a bit weird: the gap with the first games is so important that old fans were disappointed and I guess that old haters were still repeled by the only sound of the name.

RE 5 is the direct descendant of RE 4: fast pace, hordes of infected, ammo and money popping out of dead bodies, camera located above the shoulder of the avatar. The new thing is that the hero is now followed in his mission by a sexy partner. And I think that there was many other places for improvement, but the devs blew it. The controls are horrible: while the game is loading, the key mapping is displayed on screen, but before you've read everything (or anything) the game starts. And it fails to tell you that you can use the cross to quickly switch weapons. Suddenly, your gun runs out of ammo, and you swear, trying to switch to your shotgun using the menu while the infected kiss you in the neck. You reload the level, this time you manage to keep the enemy at distance but eventually some big guy breaks in the house you were hinding in and smash your partner with a giant axe. Game over. AAArr!

Every time you restart, you come to a new sad realization: this big-manly-sweating character you control is obviously motor impaired because he can't fire a gun or reload or use his arm-long knife without his two feet stongly anchored in the ground. The two partners can't exchange a couple clips of ammo, instead they have to pass the whole stock, leaving the other one defenseless. The big guy with the big axe seems invincible and the mission ends only if you survive long enough, meaning you can run around the level and still win. In fact that the best way to stay alive. Doors can be kicked, but you can't close them (they automatically close after some time), you can't jump off a roof or even run (RUN!) without pressing a button... At this point, you're so frustrated that the coop mode is not able to save the experience. I remember thinking "this makes me wanna play Left 4 Dead right now".

To conclude, it took me at least 7 times to finish the first level of the demo. The true spirit of Resident Evil died with RE4, and now RE 5 is probably gonna kill a decent action gameplay with silly usability issues. The game is not out yet, but I'm not hopeful.

Hi there, it's been a while. I got many things cooking lately and it made me procastinate a lot writing on that blog. I had started a series of articles about the video games workshop happening here at Enjmin, Angoulême, and I have a few notes about it, but I'm gonna sum it up.

Casual gaming was the major concern this year. It's important to note that there's no definitive separation between "casual" and "hardcode", it's more a state of mind regarding a certain game. Some people can spend hundred of hours playing Bejewled and then wander in Liberty City for half an hour. So maybe instead of calling them "casual games", it would be more appropriate to call them "mass games" because they're aimed to a wide audience and to people of any age. So these days, it seems that mass games are the only games selling, which isn't exactly true. On the contrary, what is true is that you do WAY more money with mass games than traditional games. They are easy and cheap to produce, they fit a load of business models, and their players are easy.

What bothered me is that it felt like quite some mass-games developers don't respect their customers, in the sense that they think of them as sheep. They are so easily satisfied than you can make them buy anything at any price. It's sad to realize that they get hooked to a game with very poor content or interactivity thanks to massive subterfuges (have you ever played a game on Facebook?). Digital Chocolate released 24 games in 2008! And many won awards and made excellent sales. My hope is: someday, people will realize that they are treated like idiots and that they're just wasting their time. They'll get tired of these empty games and ask for more.

Don't worry, this wasn't all bad. Other talks focused more on understanding why games like Wii Sports, Wii Fit or Mario Kart Wii worked so well. "Games are physical and social". Kids make up games by just imagining they are cops and thieves and cops and run after each other. Sports are based on really simple rules but get you exhausted and provide really important interactions with your team-mates or opponents. People also like to mimic gestures: the wiimote allow the player to hit, swing, steer, a plastic guitar can make the player feel like a rocker, etc. That was very interesting and we even experienced a nice game of Massively Multiplayer Rock Paper and Scissors! The next step is ubiquitous gaming, with interactions in the game and in real life. I'm curious to see that.

This is just a reminder: how to make a command out of a bookmarklet. For example, a command that embed a Flickr photo (the example is taken from Aza Raskin's blog).

CmdUtils.makeBookmarkletCommand({
name: "Embed Flickr Photo",
url: "javascript:(function(){if(window.page_p)window.open('http://www.elsewhere.org/mbedr/?p='+window.page_p.id);%20else%20alert('No%20Flickr%20photo%20found.');})()"
});

Replace the url by your bookmarklet code.