Cygon’s Blog

Bad luck again.

Whilst playing Medieval II, the game suddenly became unresponsive. I could still move my mouse cursor (which uses D3D’s asynchronous hardware cursor as it seems), but anything else was frozen. No alt-tabbing, either. After rebooting, the BIOS screen showed garbage, the windows boot screen had funny sprinkles all over and then the screen stays black.

I can still boot up (and write dumb blog posts :D) in VGA mode. No visible damage on the card, the fan is still working and heat of the fan’s metallic case directly after the incident is normal. My water cooled CPU is not leaking in any way and the water level is constant.

Well, that’s it for any D3D games development for the rest of the week. Goodbye, Asus EN6800, goodbye money ;..(

I have played the Need for Speed Series since Need for Speed 2 came out. I was able to drive “El Nino” very close to the lap times the Mercedes CLK achieved in the hands of a good driver in Need for Speed 3. I could beat Empire City on highest difficulty and navigate through the dangerous shortcuts in Need for Speed 4. I finished the test driver challenges in Need for Speed 5. I could outrun the McLaren F1 using a Lamborghini Murcielago (I love this car!) in LAN play in Need for Speed 6.

I stopped playing Need for Speed Underground and never saw the ending movie. Instead of impersonating a rich guy challenging other supercar owners, I was meant to be some brainless teenager pushing his rolling prisma-colored junkyard over the finish line. Not my cup of tea. Plus it was frustrating. You often lost just because of bad luck when traffic appeared on your lane directly behind a corner.

I liked Need for Speed Underground 2 good enough again to play it through. There weren’t any supercars and you still had to play some teenage dumbass (supposedly the same jerk that somehow survived Underground 1, how, nobody knows), but at least you weren’t forced to plaster your car with ugly “vinyls” and other crap. The series still had this goddamn rap jabbering everywhere, but this time, I had discovered some mp3 converter which allowed my to put my metal collection in the game

Need for Speed Most Wanted was a turn to the better for me. Finally, daylight returned to the series and I could drive my beloved Lamborghini Murcielago again. Driving physics were arcade style but still allowed you to to some cool moves, the random traffic seemed more ‘fair’ (eg. less cars at higher speeds and I almost believe that special care was taken not to place traffic on my lane behind corners). In overall, a great game.

Now we’ve got Need for Speed Carbon. It feels like a console backport. If you ask me, the graphics have gotten worse since Most Wanted, but still it runs slower. This game is also permanently crashing me back to the desktop. I finished one third of the city on Windows Vista, then the game crashed in any race I chose just before I reached the finish line.

I deleted the game, sometime later did a fresh install of Windows XP, installed the game again, played through about one third of the city, and… it almost always crashes, no matter which race I choose, just before I can cross the finish line. So there we are, daylight has gone again, you’re supposed to team up with some ego-less jerks (at least in the beginning), rap gibberish follows your every step an everything looks less detailed.

If this opinion on the Need for Speed Series sounds rather negative, it’s only because I am so frustrated about the direction the developers took after they finished Need for Speed 6. Probably the next generation of players is happy with the changes. Time for me to go search another racing game series. Any recommendations?

Becoming an independent software developer is the dream of many people doing their daily 9-to-5 slavery. It is mine, too. However, you can’t just decide to do this step, quit your job and tomorrow you’re an independent developer.

If you decide to walk this path, you will first be forced to give up a lot of your precious free time by working on your own projects on the evenings and weekends in addition to your day job. You’ll have to do this for months or even years to come in order to build a portfolio of products that generate enough additional income so you can switch to only working your day job half-time.

That’s exactly the point I’m at now and I feel that just like in a marathon race, there will be a time when you reach the thirty kilometer mark where you’ll ask yourself: “Why am I doing this?”. Then you need a good answer to keeps you going, one that gives you drive. My 5 most important reasons for going indy are:

• I want to set my own times. With a job, I cannot just decide to go out jogging on sunny days or when I feel like it. It’s depressing to get up while it’s dark, work the entire day and drive home in the dark again during the winter months.

• I want to decide what I do, and when. In the corporate environment, you are assigned a task and then that’s what you’re going to do. Yes, I have quite some influence here in my current job, but I still have to help fulfil the company goal. It’s like driving in a bus: You are free to choose your seat, but you have to cope with other passengers and neither the route nor the time is under your control.

• I want to be proud of what I produce. At least for me, things produced in the corporate environment never live up to my standards. There are other developers with other priorities that produce tons of uncommented, badly abstracted code all the time. I’m not free to choose whether I accept these people or not. I have to live with them.

• I want to become rich. Right, call me a dreamer, a heretic even, for thinking I can become rich as an indy developer. But fact is, I do. One thing should be clear: You will not become rich as a corporate working slave. If you want to get the money, you need to be the one in control. Maybe I’ll have to turn my indy business into a startup game development company some day to achieve this goal. So be it.

• I want to be in control. Have a bad feeling about some concept and would rather put it aside to see how it develops before doing the grunt work? Forced to do crunch time but know for sure that the deadline is but an artificial one? It’s not about choosing the easy way out in all these questions, it’s about who decides what to do.

Just two days ago, I installed XNA Game Studio Express Beta 1 on my evaluation copy of Windows Vista RC2. Apart from the project templates, everything worked smoothly. Now Beta 2 is out and makes everything harder

To get XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2 installed in Windows Vista, follow these steps:

• Uninstall XNA Game Studio Express Beta 1 if you had it installed on your system.
• Install Visual C# Express 2005
• Install Visual C# Express 2005 Service Pack 1 Beta 1
• Install the DirectX October 2005 SDK
• Install XNA Game Studio Express Beta 2

VC# Express 2005 SP1 should fix the issue about the setup assistant failing to register the project templates. If it still would fail, after you acknowledge the error message, a rollback would be performed, removing all installed files again.

The next problem will be that you XNA projects will not compile anymore. The workaround here is to create a normal Windows Application project and add references to the XNA assemblies and your code files from the XNA project there.

Today, my trusty Windows XP nuked itself, literally. I’m currently working on a small game for which I decided to post regular progress reports on my XNA developer community site (www.nuclex.org). While uploading a screenshot for todays entry via WebDAV, Windows complained about a missing DLL

I rebooted. From there on, Windows bluescreened on each boot. Using the “last known working configuration” option, windows then decided chkdsk needed to be run. When chkdsk was done, my boot partition was free of errors. Free of all data as well…

So I decided to give Windows Vista RC2 (Build 5744) a go. XNA is not officially working on Windows Vista yet, but there were people in the Microsoft XNA forums that had managed to make it run. So here’s how I did it:

1. Install Windows Vista RC2
2. Install Visual C# Express
3. Install Visual Game Studio Express Beta 1
4. Install the DirectX SDK October 2006

The Visual Game Studio Express Beta 1 will have problems registering the XNA wizards in the Visual C# Express IDE and stop with an error just before finishing the setup assistant. The assistant will not perform a rollback, however, and XNA will be usable. You just won’t have the project and class assistants available.

Also, without the DirectX SDK, Visual Game Studio Express will compile XNA applications just fine, but when you run those applications, you will get an obscure Exception from the EnsureDevice() method in the Game class’ constructor that you can’t do anything about.