So I spent way too much money on iTunes today, tracking down artists from the "K12" radio station in Saints Row and buying the songs in the game (and generally the albums they came on).  I was pleasantly surprised how much of it I was able to find there online.  I'm quite an addict for game soundtracks, but the quality of the music on the K12 station in SR was really impressive to me, and I often listen to that kind of drum and bass electronica when I program, so I was quite pleased with the results.

I've never worked on a game with licensed soundtracks, so I kind of wonder how that financial arrangement works.  For older licensed music like in Vice City Stories, I imagine there are non-trivial fees to include "real" period music from very popular artists.  But for a game like Saints Row or Need for Speed Most Wanted, I imagine that the exposure to modern bands in a video game format is actually quite useful -- I could see it eventually becoming something that record labels pay for placement of their bands, rather than the other way around.

I know that I'm in the minority, Saints Row probably doesn't sell a lot of copies of music in the big scheme of things.  But I definitely find it a fascinating trend the way more music from outside the game industry is finding its way in.

Unrelated to music, I almost had a heart attack when I loaded my Saints Row save game to find that all of my mission indicators had been cleared (and I'd saved after a bugged mission completion, or lack thereof, the previous evening).  While lockups have me paranoid about saving in that game my previous save in a different slot was quite a ways back.  Fortunately another reload fixed it, but it certainly shows how important and difficult QA is as these games just escalate in complexity.

Hooray, Relic's fix for the SLI bug is out, though it still is slower than I'd expect on my beefy machine... I should probably spend some time benchmarking and see if I'm getting the performance I should be.  But hey, I can at least get a totally playable framerate.  I'm only through the tutorials and first mission or so, but wow, very nice stuff.  Definitely looking forward to spending more time with this over the weekend, maybe try my hand at getting annihilated in multiplayer.

I play a lot of WW2 games and I've often mused about how I'd do a WW2 RTS.  Company of Heroes goes in a different direction than I would, but it really nails adapting their Dawn of War style of gameplay (which was quite fun) into the WW2 trappings.  It's no Combat Mission, certainly, but it's a darn sight truer to the setting than most RTSes set in this period that I play.

Nice job, Relic folks.  Definitely raising the bar.

Ah, for the days of semi-comprehensible electronic device names... MS announced the Zune, and Nintendo gave us some details about the Wii. 

While I love my iPod I've always felt that it is technically a somewhat inferior product, relying on it's powerful aspects of design and brand identity to do well.  While that is a strong position to be in against no-name technically superior products (which is the only competition it's faced so far), if MS has a quality product on their hands with the Zune, there is certainly a lot to be gained by putting serious marketing dollars behind it.  In any event I'm certainly going to be looking closely to see if we get an employee discount for it...

Meanwhile, the Wii.  I'm still so torn on the Wii.  I've loved a lot of what Nintendo has done in the past, and a lot of devs I know say that once I get my hands on the Wii Remote in practice, I'll be a convert.  But it still mostly seems like a gimmick to me.  I'm sure I'll pick one up for a new Metroid game, but I honestly am not even sure whether I'll be getting the Zelda game for the Wii or the original Gamecube.  It may depend a lot on how readily available the hardware is.  That decision just boggles my mind -- if you have a next-generation Zelda game ready to go, why confuse the market and dilute your primary platform sales motivation (among that demographic anyways) by sim-shipping a previous gen game?  I cannot fathom it unless they really do not have a lot of faith in the Wii's appeal to the current gaming market, and are basically writing that market off in favor of their mystery new Nintendogs and Brain Age demographic.

Meanwhile, my copy of Company of Heroes is still mocking me, and no sight of a patch to make it usable for SLI machines yet.  I guess that's one good reason why consoles will always have the upper hand...

As we look towards the imminent wrapup of the War Chiefs expansion, we are naturally juggling people around to the various other projects.  My project is absorbing some people but we're also changing spaces... relocating within the Ensemble offices to reposition ourselves for a better layout, more room for expansion, etc.  This yearly or bi-yearly ritual is just part of life at a game developer, as we move people around to maintain coherency and communication between the teams.  It is always a little creepy when we start poking around our peers' offices, plotting and planning where we will all wind up.

Of course, figuring out who goes where is a puzzle game all by itself.  Everyone has their own, often mutually exclusive, interests and despite our best efforts there are never enough of the super nice offices to go around, leaving a few people with merely nice offices.  It's an overconstrained problem, a classic sort of example of resource allocation algorithms. 

It is fun to move offices though... despite a few days of displacement it always feels like a bit of a fresh start in an new environment. 

My brand-spanking new copy of Company of Heroes arrived!  Yay! 

I installed it, and find that it is getting 10 fps even on medium-to-low graphics settings.  Boo!

Some forum searching makes it appear that SLI is at fault but I can't exactly disable SLI from my GeForce 7950 with two GPUs built in.  So I guess I'm stuck waiting for the patch, which is hopefully later this week, so not too long to wait.

All for the best really, I'm still in a food coma from eating out at a very, very nice restaurant with Elise tonight for our 9th wedding anniversiary...

Some initial impressions from AGDC 2006... overall it felt like a 1 or 2 day conference stretched out into 3 days.  This wasn't too bad, since it left plenty of time for wandering the expo, catching up with other folks in the industry, and taking long lunches discussing tech.

Some highlights for me:

-- Having dinner with Vernor Vinge and enjoying some fantastic conversation.  Same dinner included the best cornbread I have ever eaten in my life (at Roaring Forks).

-- Going into Damion Schubert's "Beyond Men in Tights" talk, expecting the typical talking-head screen about innovation and instead getting an excellent deconstruction about why leveling, fantasy, and other cliches of modern MMOs work so well.

-- Meeting lots of new people from places like Cheyenne Mountain and Bioware Austin... I'm now much more excited about their games!

I may post a few more detailed notes on some of the talks later this week.  I'm glad I went, but it's clear to me every time I go to one of these conferences that I'd get more out of them if I were less introverted and better at networking.

Oh, and I did eventually get my luggage back.  Next time I'm definitely driving.

Figures.  I try to always avoid checking any baggage, and doing everything carry-on.  Sadly due to the useless new "no liquids" rule it was basically check luggage or buy my toiletries in Austin.  So the one time I check luggage, I run into luggage trouble.  You see, my flight home was delayed by an hour or two, and since it's a 30 minute flight this seemed rather silly to me.  I went standby on another flight that got me into Dallas closer to when I was originally supposed to get in, though at DFW instead of Love Field, (two local but sizable airports).  While I had some concerns about my luggage getting to the right place, I was assured in Austin they would deliver my luggage to me at home.  At DFW, after landing, I got the same assurance and filled out some paperwork.  I've flown with American Airlines numerous times in the past and gotten fine service, so I figure all is kosher.

Only now the next day, long after the window of time where they said they would deliver my luggage has come and gone, I call their customer support line and find out I was apparently lied to multiple times, in multiple locations, in my choice.  There is no luggage delivery, in fact I have to drive back out to the airport.  Not ultimately a huge deal, just another couple of hours lost on top of the couple of hours they delayed me in the first place.  Sigh.  I'm certainly strongly considering not taking my business to American Airlines any more, although I imagine the other airlines are probably just as bad.  I can deal with a snafu, but being actively lied to is more than I can take.  I know I should chalk it up to incompetence instead of malice but at some point, what's the difference when it comes to large organizations?

And they wonder why they are losing money and going bankrupt...

... anyways, finally back from Austin!  I'll try and write up some impressions from the conference in the next few days.

Apparently it's the time of year when all my hardware breaks and needs replacing, but my cell phone (which has been spotty at best for a while) has finally given up the ghost.  Elise got sick of me not having one, so... I'm now the proud owner of a new Treo 700p.  A much better camera in it than my old camera phone...

Speaking of taking pictures, I'll be off at the Austin GDC all week so unless I can figure out this whole "moblogging" thing there may not be a lot of updates.  I'll try and take a few pictures though...

Ever since having kids, I've had to categorize my games into those I can play while the boys are awake, and those I can only play after they're down for the night.  Usually the horror / M-rated games I want to play come out paced about right for me to finish them with an hour or two a night before the next hits.  But this past month has been rough -- the release of both Dead Rising and Saints Row has really put a crunch on my evening play!  I'm barely 4-5 hours into Saints Row and loving it, but I still feel the pull of wanting to get back to Dead Rising for more of that zombie bashing goodness.

In this QT3 poll thread between the two, Gary Whitta suggested the ultimate crossover game, where zombies attack Stilwater and the gangs fight them off.  I'd certainly buy that game.  :)