My copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney arrived today, just in time for my trip to Austin over the weekend.  I haven't even booted it up yet, but my favorite fearure so far from reading the manual is actually shouting "objection" into the microphone.  Of course that might be problematic if I'm ever trying to play it on the airplane...

Meanwhile I should have some good games to look forward to playing when I arrive back in town... I ordered my copies of Titan Quest and Glory of the Roman Empire today.  I'm not really expecting them to be here in time for the latter part of the 4-day weekend, but hope springs eternal...

Hm, my traffic on the site has tripled in the past few days.  If you're a new reader, welcome!  Feel free to post a comment or ask a question.

However, I think there's at least as good a chance it's some new sort of bot crawling my site or other variety of shenanigans.  If you're a new blog-reading, bot, welcome!  0100100001000101010011000100110001001111!

It's definitely been a week of meetings for me... today in addition to more Redmond visitors, we had a company-wide meeting to present some of the features of the project I'm on.  I can't wait until we announce it and I can talk a lot more about what I'm working on day to day, but for now suffice it to say we're very excited about all the cool stuff we have planned.  Getting an opportunity to share it with the rest of the company and get their feedback is always exciting, though as a company full of game developers we are pretty ruthless about making sure our own ideas can withstand heavy scrutiny. 

The meeting went well, and I even found a little time to squeeze in some coding, much to my amazement!  So a good day all around, if a little tiring.  I don't know why sitting down in a meeting all day is tiring, but it is...

We had a visit today from one of the Redmond teams that facilitates technology sharing between the various internal game studios.  Microsoft Gaming Studios has done a good job growing and learning how to find a good balance between fostering communication and tech between the studios, and making sure they feel empowered to make the right choices for themselves without having random "initiatives" foisted off on them. 

Anyways, it was interesting to see some of the other tools and technologies being promoted as shared tech.  Often we developing our own games exactly as we did when we were an independent studio, so I find it very interesting to note the changes.  Having a separate team charged with supporting and extending this tech is absolutely the right choice, since it frees up the contributing teams from having to make an unlimited commitment to maintenance.  Without that, there would be a disincentive to sharing tech outwards from any individual studio, since they would then be burdened with support issues they aren't organized to deal with.

On the other hand, not to be too entirely Pollyanna-ish about it, we are always sure to be cautious when using any external technology (third party and internal), since it can be a risk exposure for the ultimate quality of the game.  If features aren't delivered or there are unexpected problems, the fact that there is less in-house knowledge about how to handle it can be tricky. 

But overall, I'm always glad when I can effectively add "free" resources to the project by smart leveraging of external systems or tools.  One just has to do it aware of the risks...

I completed my first Tomb Raider Legend time trial this evening.  Normally I only do time trials and the like for games I really love and TRL, while good, isn't quite there.  But I'm addicted to achievements, and it draws me to things like this and playing Call of Duty 2 on Veteran that I would otherwise never do.

It's a fascinating dynamic.

I don't know if my recent postings on the site have not be very comment-worthy, or whether I accidentlally bollixed some settings to make it impossible to comment anymore.

In the event that it was the latter, I've tweaked a few settings to try and re-enable commeting... though I'm certainly not ruling out the likelihood of it being the former.

First day back after vacation... always hectic.  This week is even worse, as it is the confluence of both a number of regularly scheduled monthly meetings and we have multiple visitors from external teams coming in this week for meetings about the project.  It's definitely going to be a week with a pretty low amount of actual time at keyboard.

A few years ago, I found weeks like that very frustrating, as I measured my productivity in the most direct way possible, in terms of the bugs fixed, systems built, and features added to the game.  There would typically be a direct correlation between time at keyboard and the quantity of that coding contribution.  But as I've gotten more involved as someone who is not just a programmer, but responsible for coordinating and planning project issues (primarily programming), I've had to make a shift in that mindset.

Now I try to best measure the productivity of the team as a whole... as long as my fellow programmers on the team are cranking away then I consider that we are in the "green" state and things are good.  Helping remove obstacles, promote coordination, and do longer term planning is just the stuff I do to try and keep us in that state for as long as possible. 

Of course, I still really enjoy my actual time at keyboard.  For every week like this one there is usually a week where we are all heads down and hammering away at our tasks.  Programming is something I deeply enjoy, and I think I'd be worse off if I moved away from it entirely.  So now the real trick is making sure I don't put myself on the critical path, but that I stay flexible and can take on all the annoying tasks that otherwise would fall through the cracks.

I finished my first playthrough of Hitman: Blood Money on the 360.  Overall, a fantastic experience.  I've enjoyed the others in the Hitman series but this is the first one I've really gotten into.  I say my "first" playthrough because the way the missions and Achievements are structured, you really have to do multiple playthroughs. 

On most games, there's no way I'd find the energy to do that.  But the Hitman missions have an interesting and flexible structure, with two big gameplay incentives for replay.  The most straightforward is that they are simply designed for a variety of approaches.  This fosters a kind of exploratory play that I really like, and I'm constantly still noticing new things about the levels.  A more elusive property though is the way the game requires (and rewards) continual forward progress towards a perfect hit.  One colleague of mine likened it to playing a piece on the piano; there is always room for improvement even if you get it "right", and the repetition is an enjoyable part of achieving mastery.

Unfortunately I am finding a few things lacking in their implementation of this process -- most notably a lack of feedback.  A lot of times I have gotten the next-to-perfect rating in ways that you get very poor feedback for (like a witness when none seemingly are around).  Ending the mission and finding out your rating also removes all your saves for the mission, so the trial and error of figuring out why you did not get the perfect rating can be a bit frustrating.  Also the somewhat lengthy load times that are a blemish on the game are much more annoying when you are continually replaying or restarting. 

Still though, those are minor points and for at least a while longer, I'm staying in 47's shoes even after I would usually call the game finished.

I went to install the Movies expansion pack today, and when I clicked "install" from the autoplay menu, I merely got the ominous Windows(tm) Error Tone(tm), with no other feedback.  Now, fortunately I was able to get it working by rooting around on the disc for the setup.exe, old school style, and that worked fine.  But wow, what a point of failure.  If you can't even install the game, with no error message, you have no possibility of tweaking your options, or even applying a patch.

Sadly, installation programs are also a common point of failure.  We had a huge number of problems with all the corner cases we had to deal with for AOM's installer, many of them revolving around having the right version of XML installed, or the right version of IE installed.  The IE issues were particularly thorny because they were different on the various flavors of older versions of Windows... Windows 98 "first edition" is different than the later releases of Windows 98.  Crazy stuff (and one of the reasons that it certainly simplifies things to support only more modern OSes now).

Nice installs are a huge reason that I find console gaming just plain easier than PC gaming.  I'm cautiously optimistic that Windows Vista will help that some; I know it's something that they are trying to focus on...

Interesting to see that EA has bought Mythic.  EA certainly has a rather troubled past when it comes to acquiring online game developers, but their continued investment in it shows that they still see the importance of competing in that market sector.  I'd like to think they are going to buy Mythic to acquire their expertise; I don't think it would be necessarily just to acquire their IP or Warhammer Online.  But will EA listen?

Successfully integrating an acquired company is an art, not a science.  I like the folks I've met from Mythic, and I certainly wish them the best.  It would also be nice to see one of the other big publishers be able to compete on even footing with Vivendi / Blizzard, just because a competitive environment always spurs faster advancement in the genre.  EA's track record isn't great but the optimist in me hopes that means they've learned lessons from the past that they can learn not to repeat. 

So over the weekend, I was jamming out on Guitar Hero, "School of Rock" style.  That game remains incredibly fun, though now I've 3-starred every song on Expert except the last 3 (and I have to practice Cowboys from Hell in multiplayer mode just so that I don't fail out at 7% almost instantly).

Anyhow, my guitar antics perhaps got a little... pronounced, and the controller was yanked out of the PS2.  The following error message appeared on screen:

"You Are Rocking Out A Little Too Hard"

I nearly fell down laughing.  Sadly my guitar controller wound up a little worse for it and appears to have developer a loose connection.  Thankfully I have a spare that was at work.  :)