Some anonymous person asked in the comments what languages we program in these days (presumably in the context of Ensemble).  Primarily we still use C++, though a variety of scripting languages (such as XS and HLSL) are becoming a bigger part of our technical work.  A few years ago we started doing some tool development in C#, and I'd say almost all of our tool development is in C# and ASP.NET currently.   The version of ESO used in Age of Empires 3 is almost entirely built in C#.

C is the first language I did any real professional programming in, so it will always have a soft spot in my heart but we use very little of pure old-school C (if any at all) these days.  C++ is a long time standby in the industry and I imagine it will be quite some time before it goes away altogether, but now that I've done more development in C#, it is quite alluring to stay there.  While I don't think the stars have quite aligned for us to build our game clients in C# yet I wouldn't be surprised if we get there someday.  Certainly if I were going to do some development on prototype games on my own, I would absoutely be doing it in C# -- there's quite a lot of good stuff there.

I admit I'm a little on the upper edge of the age range to get caught up in MySpace mania (as evidenced by the the fact that I only just recently got a MySpace page and have done about jack-all with it).  But slowly people I actually care about (old friends, etc.) are finding me there and I admit it's stupid fun to go browsing around...  maybe there's something to this whole "web 2.0" thing after all...

I picked up the Immortal Throne expansion for Titan Quest today, even though I'm nowhere near finishing the original.  They made a smart choice in making that expansion (like the Diablo 2 expansion), in that it adds additional core mechanics, some of which help address key flaws in the original.  Since I wasn't all that far in I started over from the beginning again with the new "Dream" mastery, and so far I'm quite enjoying it.  I just sort of got interrupted from playing TQ the first time, and it has been a good long while since something has scratched that Diablo 2 itch for me.  Titan Quest is the closest so far I've seen anyone get.

I see that Tactical Gamer (my absolutely favorite site for playing team-based shooters such as the Battlefield series) is hosting a "rally" this weekend in support of a mod they are promoting, "Project Reality".  Project Reality itself is fairly interesting, an ambitious mod to make a sweeping set of gameplay and content changes to Battlefield 2 to make it closer to reality, sometimes in ways that would be not very fun in a traditional sense -- limited class selection, more lethal damage, longer respawn times, and fewer UI tools like name tag ID, to name a few.  But in this particular context there is a self-selecting user base that is interested in taking the gameplay in different directions.

It is fascinating to me the way in which mods can fundamentally rebalance the game, especially in such a community driven game like BF2.  While only 0.1% of the audience (to be generous) is capable of making good content for your game, a much broader audience is proficient enough to find and use that content.  That's why we always viewed releasing our editing tools for the Age games a key strategic move.

Game development has come a long way in terms of the power that users have to change the experience, and I think we are just at the beginning of a very long road. 

So PS3 Home confirmed... I dunno, I'm of mixed mind on it.

On the one hand, it could be pretty cool ... having the "OS" of your console be more of a shared 3d space has a lot of interesting possibilities and I like the idea of casual exposure to activities going on in the PS3 space.  The Halo 2 party system (which the actual matchmaking component seems most reminiscent of) is still the high-water mark for matchmaking and I've always wanted to see it become a more widely used metaphor.  Free is a hard price point to beat, and it seems like a very smooth platform for integrating advertisement.

On the other hand, it seems fraught with problems.  I'm sure various smart people are solving all of these but:

-- Physical spaces are inconvenient for some things that are just better done with a UI.  If all the core features of online presences (finding friends, communicating, launching games) are more cumbersome I think it is going to get stale fast.

-- Letting people send video and pictures from their machines to others, even in a private space, just seems like begging for lawsuits ranging from indecent exposure of their kids to pornography to people having "viewings" of ripped movies.

-- Without some amazing technical wizardry it's pretty unclear to me how the promise of this is going to be actually realized, just from a physical bandwidth and memory perspective.

-- Do people really want to spend time being in a virtual space rather than playing games?  That is to say, while this is cool I'm not sure it's going to move many $600 consoles...

Should be interesting to see the real reaction among consumers and not just game developers / game press later this year.

Picked up my copy of GTA: Vice City Stories for the PS2 today.  While the GTA "Stories" gaidens are not nearly as compelling as the mainline franchises, they still contain just enough of that GTA magic to really compel me to play them.  Unfortunately the PSP is just not a platform I find myself really finishing games on.  While I did play the first 5-10 hrs of VCS on the handheld, knowing it was coming on the PS2 was the last nail in the coffin for it. 

The PS2 versions certainly aren't perfect either -- the game definitely looks worse than GTA: San Andreas or the original Vice City.  But I'll take what I can get to tide me over until GTA 4...  22 days to trailer...

I broke down over the weekend and picked up the Xbox 360 version of Dance Dance Revolution (aka, DDR Universe).  This makes my 9th version of DDR I've bought... 4 import PS1 versions, 2 PS2 versions, 1 Gamecube version, 1 Xbox version, and now the latest and greatest for the Xbox 360.  My wife gets a bit irked at the pile of dance mats that has collected over the years, though in my defense I do periodically go through and throw away the ones that are no longer in any kind of active use.  My favorite is still the Red Octane pad with the stiff foam inserts -- going back to a flimsy fold up floor mat for DDR Universe offends me.

I'm not ashamed to admit that one of the main reasons I got the 360 iteration of DDR was for Achivements.  When I first was playing the import versions of it I was compelled to get A ratings on all the songs, but I'll admit I only screwed around with my favorite few songs in the latest several DDRs.  Achievements provide a nice meta structure to encourage me to more fully explore the content in DDR Universe, so that's a nice bonus. 

Plus, I discovered that it has a track ("Slam") by Pendulum, my current favorite source of music to code to.  Xavier loves watching me do that track since it has a big robot in it, and it makes an excellent song to DDR to...

This little tidbit made my evening....

Yeah, it's pathetic that my GTA fanboyishness can be so easily stoked, but there you have it...