Coding, gaming, and Dara O'Briain

I had the pleasure of going to the Cheltenham Science Festival today to listen to Dara O'Briain talk about coding, gaming, and neuroscience. It was brilliant, and nerdy, and interesting, and informative, and all the other good things one of these things should be.

The session was called Coding the Game, and also featured Alex McLean, Chris Cummings, and Luke Clark. Though it was only an hour long, it covered an awful lot of territory. The topic for most of the first half of the session was purely programming. They talked about how many programmers they used in one of their games, how the hundreds of thousands of lines of code are divided up and then put back together, and how you can follow all the rules of good coding right up until a few weeks before release - and then you're breaking every programming rule in the book just to get the game out and working on time!

The second half of the session looked at neuroscience, and how the brain responds to playing games. This was where I found myself only vaguely aware of the things talked about. Risk and reward systems in games I understand, but how those specifically relate to the dopamine effect was completely new to me. There was some very interesting info here, particularly on how the dopamine effect is just as present when a player nearly fails as it is when they simply succeed. It made me realise that, as a player, I feel a greater sense of achievement when I succeed after nearly failing then I do when I simply win. This is, in turn, something I feel like I could include in my own games quite frequently - but not so frequently that playing the game becomes to tense to continue!

In the last bit of the session, there were some questions which led to a variety of different topics being very briefly touched on. There was talk of women and gaming (which was very well handled, in my opinion), PS4 versus X-Box One, Raspberry Pi, getting into the industry without qualifications, fractals in game development (that one kinda went over my head), and so on. There were several other things discussed, but I can't remember them all off the top of my head.

While some of what I heard I already had guessed at, or already knew, there was a lot that I didn't. I came out of the session feeling more positive about game development in general, and my own hope of eventually working in this industry as well. And I got to hear Dara pop a few well-timed jokes as well. Major win for me!

I'm a tech genius!

It's amazing. It's awesome. I've done the impossible. I've done something I never in my wildest dreams imagined I'd be able to do.

I've installed xampp and Wordpress on my desktop.

Okay, okay, so I'm not REALLY a tech genius. I know that, as far as genius goes, putting Wordpress on my desktop is... well, nowhere on the list. But to me, who uses Blogger at the moment purely because Wordpress is still a tiny bit scary, being able to actually use it without being online is nothing short of awe-inspiring. To me.

So. At some point in the future, there will be one or two Wordpress blogs appearing by yours truly! At least one of them will be a baking blog, so I'll be moving all the baking stuff to that. (If I'm making particularly geeky cookies - such as the Wheatley ones I'm hoping to do soon - they'll be posted here as well.) It may be awhile - I'm learning how to make my own Wordpress themes from scratch - but eventually, it will be awesome.

Almost as awesome as me installing Wordpress on my desktop. Yes, I will stop going on about it now.

Lion. No tiger, no bear, just Lion.

I discovered an interesting thing the other day. Apparently, if you want to program games for current Mac or iOS platforms, you have to be running a currently supported Apple OS. Right now, that means either Lion or the newer Mountain Lion. Which sucks for us happy Snow Leopard users, but what can you do?

So yesterday I updated my Mac to Lion. And I noticed two things: one, a drop in speed, which is to be expected. Two, my trackpad was scrolling the wrong direction. Not to be expected.

There I was, trying to view a webpage, my fingers on the trackpad to scroll down. My fingers moved, and nothing happened. Curious, I tried again - nothing. Now I was starting to get worried. Had I screwed something up? Had the installation gone wrong? I dived into the user settings, checking everything for the trackpad was as it should be - and it was. Now rapidly approaching irritated, I went back to the webpage and starting scrubbing my fingers up and down on the trackpad.

And it moved.

Surprised, I stopped and tried again. As I pulled my fingers downward, nothing happened. As I pushed them up, the page moved - down. And then, when I moved my fingers down again, the page went up. It was backwards!

Now, in the preferences there is a checkbox for one preference that says "move content in the direction of finger movement". Now, in my mind, that means down for down and up for up, but apparently my Mac is not happy with that. I unchecked the box - and suddenly everything was fine. Being the curious person I am, I rechecked and unchecked the box several times, and successfully determined that somewhere along the way, the trackpad had a tantrum and turned itself around. (No, not really, but it's what I'm going with.) So now the box is unchecked and I'm happily scrolling again.

And Lion, to be honest, doesn't seem all that different from Snow Leopard. But hey, I'm not all that familiar with it, so I'm sure eventually I'll have one of those "Ohhhhhhh" moments.

Too many engines!

There are a lot of game developers out there that insist that there is no point in reinventing the wheel. In other words, when making a game, if there's an engine that makes the work easier, use it. You don't have to build your engine from scratch.

And I agree with that, wholeheartedly. If there is an engine that works for the games I want to make, I use it. The problem, of course, comes in when you have to try to decide what engine to use.

You see, there are literally dozens of game engines out there. They range from the small and rather useless to the huge, professional examples of game middleware. They also range in price from free to very expensive. There are plenty of engines that fall somewhere in between, and a fair few that have made my short list for potential engines for several things.

So how does one choose? 2D or 3D? What platforms does the IDE run on, if it has one at all? What scripting language does it use? What platforms can it create games for? What is the license like if I decide to take things commercial? What kind of support is there for learning how to use it? Is it accessible for someone who does not have much experience making full games?

It's a lot to take in, and I'm still wavering. Hopefully I'll come to a decision sometime this year.

Coding on paper

(I have no proper introduction to this post, so please insert a perfectly clever and enticing post opening here.)

I'm loving C#! (For non-programmers, C# is a programming language. If that doesn't float your boat, this post will be a bit more nonsensical than usual.) It's proving to be an easy language to learn so far, for the most part. What basics I know about general programming logic (variables, loops, input/output, methods, etc.) is proving to be a great help with getting me through the book I'm using to learn. I'm working my way through Rob Miles' C# Yellow Book 2011, and I think the only thing so far I really don't get is try/catch stuff.*

I'm using Visual Express c~ 2010 for my programming, and also mostly enjoying using it. The Intellisense actually really, really irritates me. For whatever reason, it keeps thinking if I type "i", I really mean "if". But you know what? Using "if" in a "for" loop really causes problems. So I turned it off. SO much easier now.

But, I've noticed it's a bit difficult to sit down to a blank screen and just write a program, even if I know exactly what I want it to do. A few days ago, I sat down and decided to write a mad lib. I was able to hash something together on the screen, but the coding was downright messy. It wasn't organised well, and I didn't make use of the many other things I had at my disposal to do it right. Largely, I imagine, because I expected to be able to just rough it up quickly, like I do a rough draft of a novel.

However, like when I write fiction, I found it much easier to write in on paper. I was able to first write down all the stuff (variables) I needed, then what I needed that stuff to do (methods). Looking at it written down on a piece of paper like a recipe was so much easier. I was able to sit and recode my mad lib from scratch, and as a result it is much more readable and adaptable. I'm quite happy with it, for now. I'm sure I'll find something to add to it later.

Also, I bought a notebook specifically for coding notes and references. Looks like it will become my "program rough draft" notebook, as well.**

*Seriously, it looks like try/catch is only there to catch things you think might cause an error. Surely it's more logical to simply make sure that you're thorough in your coding to make sure such an error doesn't occur? I just plain don't get this, and can't see where I would need to use it.

**As well as lacking a good intro, I'm also lacking a good closing to this post. So, insert a good closing paragraph somewhere. I'm too tired, and I'm going to bed.

Blue Screen of Death!

I'm pretty sure anyone with a Windows computer has, at some point, come across the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). In the moment, it is the scariest thing in the world, especially if you were in the middle of something important. Say, while writing your final essay three hours before it's due. Or after a long session of important work stuff and just before you were about to save. Or while you're in the middle of a brand new game and you're trying your best to kill the evil Son Of Something-Or-Other before it kills you.

Or, you know, something equally important. (Though I think the last one just about tops the list, really.)

Anyway. I got the BSOD yesterday, while playing the amazing newly-released MMO, Guild Wars 2. (Yes, I can already hear some of you rolling your eyes. Yes, I know that sentence doesn't make sense.) Say what you like, I'm loving it. Everything is beautiful, the gameplay feels great, and it doesn't have that endless, needless pressure to get to the highest level you can as fast as you possibly can. There is so much to see and do that you truly get to enjoy levelling up, rather than rushing through it.

Of course, as I said, it was only recently released. And it's still having, shall we say, teething problems. Thankfully the problems aren't as bad as those from Diablo III (where I had to spend three hours just trying to connect to a massively overloaded server, and by the time I got in, I had to turn it off after just twenty minutes of play time. Massive. Fail.). But one of those is the BSOD. Thankfully, this appears to be a fairly rare occurrence, and mostly happens when people try to overclock their computers.*

So I'm going to go play for another hour. Or two. And then I'll finish my blog design, honest! Really! Maybe...

* I don't know how to do this. I'm not even entirely sure what it means. Hope I wasn't doing it by accident.

In other news, I accidentally erased my old blog layout

Yeah, looks a little different. Sooner than I intended. See, I have a secondary blog - a test blog purely for design purposes. I thought I was toying around with that when changing the template around. But, actually, I was on my real blog. Stupid me. So, my old blog layout is gone, my old edits and custom stuff I did for it vanished.

So, that redesign I mentioned? Looks like I'll be doing it a little sooner than I meant to. Oops.

The day I discovered I'm an idiot with computer hardware

I've been fretting - yes, fretting - about my computer for at least a week now. I suddenly noticed it has been making an awful lot of noise. Considerably more noise than it used to, at any rate. I have no idea when it started. For all I know, it could have been present for weeks, and I was just too far into my own world to hear it. Or care. Either way, I didn't know.

It sounds as if the hard drive was being accessed continuously, without end. In a fit of curiosity and concern for my poor computer, I took a peek at the Task Manager. (Yes, I have Windows. Yes, I have certain others trying to convince me to make a break and convert to Mac. Yes, it is slowly working.) The task manager and I... well, we're not friends. And since I so rarely engage in any activity with the task manager, the first thing I noticed were some numbers that looked wrong to me. Largely because I don't know what those numbers are supposed to be, so they looked large.

I noticed that, while my CPU usage was extremely low, my physical memory usage seemed awfully high. I have a pretty good rig, it was designed with high-spec gaming in mind. So, as people who don't know hardware very well tend to do, I got worried. I started ending every process that could be ended without crashing the computer. I uninstalled absolutely everything I don't actively use. I turned off Indexing. I increased the virtual RAM available. I reduced every possible program from starting up as soon as the computer switches on. I did a bunch of other things that online sources recommended I try, all to no avail. I can't even remember some of the things I did, or how I accomplished them. It was all for nothing. The computer is still making noise that it shouldn't.

Fast forward to the other day, when I was sitting on the floor doing something else entirely, and I glanced over at my computer tower. Now, I have the X-Blade gaming tower - some parts of the sides are transparent, and the fans attached to the side of the tower have blue LED lights on them. It looks cool (my opinion, don't judge me). As I was sitting there looking at it, I noticed one of the fan lights wasn't lit up.

Can you see where I'm going with this?

I came closer and, experimentally, pressed inward slightly on the fan. The LED light flickered. I pressed a little harder. The light came on, and the noise got quieter.

I am a hardware idiot. I've known that for a long time; it's the reason I never open my computer case. (Which, incidentally, explains why it gets so dusty in there.) But this has just truly hit it home for me. In all the time I was panicking about the hard drive getting worn down by being accessed too much, it never occurred to me to check the rest of the tower to see if it could be anything else. I am now thoroughly convinced that the noise is being caused by nothing more than a fan that is giving up the fight to keep my computer from overheating.

On the upside, I'll be much happier to replace a broken fan than a broken hard drive.