Ubuntu Desktop part 3: Hardware support and development

I’m going to make this my last post on Ubuntu on the desktop (read the previous ones here and here), as I’ll soon be getting a new ‘toy’ that I’ll be putting through it’s paces and blogging about. I’ll also be trying to keep future tech related posts to Tuesday, henceforth to be known as (drumroll..)  Tech Tuesday.

In this post I’ll discuss my experiences with Ubuntu’s hardware support, and touch on using it as a dev platform.

Hardware ups and downs

As mentioned in my first post, my home machine is a P4 notebook with 1Gig ram and an ATi 9700 mobility video card. It’s a Mecer branded machine which I’m assuming uses fairly standard components. With no built in WiFi, Bluetooth, Webcam or any such gadgets, Ubuntu really didn’t have much to deal with.

What it did have (and continues to have) problems with is my video card. Strangely enough when I tried an older Ubuntu version (6.x) on it many moons ago, I seem to remember the hardware acceleration working fine. Somewhere along the development path to 8.4 something went terribly wrong though. I have done a lot of research and fiddling, and what it seems to come down to is that ATi (now part of AMD) has not kept up with it’s Linux drivers and there are a large number of unhappy owners of older mobile ATi graphics cards who run into compatibility issues on Ubuntu. AMD have promised that updated drivers will be available soon, but for now I am without video acceleration in Ubuntu. 

On the other side of the coin is Ubuntu’s incredible printer support. I have wasted many hours getting a wide assortment of printers to play nicely in both home and business contexts, and I would have loved Ubuntu’s awesome printer support in those situations. We have a fairly obscure Brother printer/fax/scanner combo hooked up to our ADSL router and accessed by our PCs over the LAN. Setting this up in Windows XP is fairly tedious (though admittedly much easier in Vista) and Ubuntu detected everything pretty much automatically. No messing with driver downloads or custom ports, everything just worked.

Other than the video card issue I would have to say Ubuntu has hardware compatibility and ease of setup nailed.

Ubuntu as a development OS

I’m working on a web development project at home at the moment (sorry, no details just yet) using PHP and MySQL, and it’s the first such project I have done. I’ve been using the excellent XAMPP package to run my web and database servers, and NetBeans 6.5 for coding and debugging. Like much of the software I’ve ended up using in Ubuntu, getting it all set up was definitely not as simple as it could (or should) have been, with a number of strange issues between XAMPP’s MySQL server and the settings expected by the default tools. As with the video card issue, this is a third party problem, not so much a Linux problem, but it does illustrate that there seems to be a serious lack of consistency in the way things are done from developer to developer when implementing software. This can be an absolute nightmare for users.

That said, now that my environment is up and running, it’s a pleasure to develop in, with NetBeans running significantly faster in Ubuntu than it ever did (on the same hardware) in Windows XP. I could honestly recommend the Ubuntu/XAMPP/Netbeans combo to those who want to fiddle with web development at home.

 

That’s it for my musings on Ubuntu. Next week I’ll introduce my new toy :)

Indy FTW

For many long time gamers and game developers, one of the biggest concerns about the size and success of the industry today is the effect such success has on creativity. With video game teams these days consisting of dozens of full time workers and more than a handful of contractors, and development budgets in the tens of millions of dollars (or more) taking risky chances on new ideas is not always possible. This sort of experimentation has typically been the domain of hobbyist programmers, and their (often great) projects have very seldom been enjoyed my more than a couple of people.

Microsoft took the first steps towards changing that with the release of XNA Game Studio Express in 2006. This allowed hobbyist developers not only to rapidly develop games with a toolset that saved a lot of time and hassle, but also to experience multiplatform development by deploying their creations to their Xbox 360 and share it with the rest of the Creator's Club community.  In this week's keynote at the GDC, Microsoft's John Schappert announced the next step in this 'democratization' of game development: XNA Game creators will now be able to share their games with the 10 million plus strong Xbox 360 owning public through a service on Xbox Live. Games will be filtered by peer review, with Microsoft keeping their distance as much as possible.

This amazing move will undoubtedly expose gamers to great new game ideas that otherwise may have disappeared into obscurity, and will allow fledgling developers to get some great experience in the process.

The first couple of community games is already available for download, including Dishwasher, the winner of the “Dream. Build. Play.” competition held last year. Besides being a really fun game, it has a level of polish that only a handful of XBLA have thus far achieved. It's unique visual style is a testament to the kind of freedom independent development offers developers. Another visually unique title is Jelly Car, a driving puzzle game that reminds me of a LocoRoco/GripShift hybrid, but rendered as if it is a children's drawing.

After playing these demos, I can honestly say I'm excited to see what else the community will come up with next and I'm certain that recruiting developers will be keeping a close eye on the service to see what prime talent they can pick up. Kudos Microsoft!

Input rant..

In coding -probably more so than most desk jockey jobs- speedy movement around a document without interfering with keyboard flow is essential. As such being able to move the cursor or document focus around without lifting your hands off the keyboard to use the mouse makes a big difference in efficiency terms. I am one of those wierdos that actually likes the integrated trackball in server rack keyboards, and as such I'd love to find a keyboard that includes a trackball and chuck my mouse once and for all. There's just one tiny problem, there doesn't seem to be anything out there that includes this feature and the other essential feature-a natural layout. I grudgingly started using a natural layout earlier this year on suggestion/insistence from one of my coworkers and I wouldn't go back for anything.Unfortunately it seems as if these two features are mutually exclusive. An integrated scrollwheel (present in some of the top end MS natural keyboards) is better than nothing.. but I want a frigging trackball. Grr.

PlikPla!

Our new game PlikPla is finally available! The files have actually been good to go for ages, but since OP wanted to wait a while to release in time for Easter (check the screenshot to the right, you’ll see why :) ), I dragged my feet about getting it up on ClickGamer as well. Anyway, we now have the demo and the full version available from them. This game is pretty much 100% Krusty’s doing, I did little more than help with the look and feel decisions and a few gameplay suggestions. Check out the links and try it!

 

In other news, I am about ready to throw my ‘360 controller at something or someone.. preferably causing major bodily harm in the process. I got the Gears of War collectors edition last year at the press launch as a freebie, and just before my 360 packed up and had to be swapped out, the disk started giving issues. It took me until January to take the thing in for resurfacing, after which I restarted the game on hardcore. Well, it turns out the problem is more serious than just some scratches that could be solved by resurfacing (which makes sense since I treat my disks like gold, and I just don’t understand how it could have become scratched). I have now reached a point in the game where I simply can’t progress because the 360 keeps complaining that the disk is unreadable. It really is frustrating since I so badly want to finish the game. Out of sheer desperation yesterday I gave up and decided to play some Perfect Dark instead-bad idea. PDZ was never the best looking 360 launch title, and after playing Gears of War it is simply horrendous by comparison, not just in the looks department, but in terms of sound, gameplay, voice acting, presentation, everything. Grrr. Freaking GRRRRRR!

Rebuilding All Projects..

Well it’s Monday, and I’m sitting here waiting for a massive solution to build after getting latest from Source(un)Safe for the first time in over a week (for fear of someone changing something that would break the build of my app that was working fine for client testing). Needless to say it’s quite a long wait, so I thought a blog post might be in order.

 

Please Mr. Google Man

The PortableApps obsession I mentioned last week led me to try SunBird for the first time. Sunbird is, in a way, the calendar equivalent of FireFox and ThunderBird in that it is the free and open source Mozilla answer to time management. Besides being able to locally manage your schedule and appointments, Sunbird allows you to subscribe to external calendar feeds in the iCal format. I thought this would be pretty nifty, since Google Calendars allows you to publish both your public and private calendar views as an iCal feed (among other formats). I was quite disappointed to discover that an iCal feed is exactly that-a one way feed. For me this limits the usability of Sunbird’s usability somewhat, as it’s all good and well to be able to use it to view my google calendar(s), but I can’t use it to add or edit events, so I still end up having to visit the website.

Now I realize that this is no fault of Sunbird’s authors, nor necessarily of the creators of the iCal format.. but I’d really like to see the ability to use the app as more than just a viewer for my online calendars. After doing a small amount of digging it seems that there is a bit of a hacky way to get this kind of behavior out of the latest version of Sunbird, but unfortunately the PortableApps version isn’t quite so recent, so for now it would appear I’m out of luck.

 

Whack that piñata

No, this isn’t another Viva Piñata obsessed rant.. ok so maybe it is a little. I had the interesting experience of playing Samurai Warriors 2 last week for review, and damn it makes the enemy AI in just about every other title in the long history of games look good. That includes the ghosts in Pac-Man and the slowly strafing spacecraft in Space Invaders-they at least managed to dodge your attacks on occasion by means of their slow sideways crawl. Except for the commander characters in SW2, the enemy AI (and for that matter,  the ally AI as well) is basically nonexistent. They pretty much just stand there and let you hit them over and over and over again. Hence the piñata reference-in fact I suspect a piñata might just give up more of a fight-and I’m not even talking about the animated ones created by Rare. The game is pretty damned ugly too. It would appear that it is a direct PS2 port though, so I’m not entirely surprised. EA and some of the other publishers have come under fire for some of their earlier games of this generation being cheap ports from the PS2 and Xbox with some shinier graphics and a few extra features (or even fewer features in some cases), however at least they bothered to add to the graphics. SW2 has, at best, some upgraded textures on the character models. It doesn’t even manage to look like a modern PS2 game.. it appears to be a few generations old. Very sad, and to top it all off, it plays about as well as it looks..

(yup, still building..)

Mind Quiz also doesn’t look like much, but it does the job considering it’s basically just a PSP IQ test. It’s actually quite fun in small doses (which is what it is intended for anyway) and daily Brain Age tests have quickly become a part of my and Natz’ routines.

 

Ok, the build is finally done, that’s it for today.. go on, nothing more to see here..

How could I forget!?

Wow, I'm so stressed I forgot to mention some really exciting news! An 'interview' with me about Smallfry appeared in the latest edition of the DevMag e-zine. We even made the cover with BBQT's promo image!

The magazine itself is really packed with great stuff, it's hard to believe that with such a huge amount of high quality content it's just a community compiled mag! Check it out, and don't miss the mobile dev tutorial series by yours truly ;)

Smallfry site tweaks, new games and more rAge

This post is a little overdue. Two developers left 5DT last week, and with Friday being their last day we went out for a lunch at Baobab in Menlyn, so I didn't get a chance to post anything new then.

Smallfry stuff
We made some changes to www.smallfrymobile.com to put more emphasis on the games, as well as better organize the information for each game. This also conincides with the 'official' release of BubbleBee QuickType and Brik-Link.






I was hoping to have added ClickGamer try/buy links for both games as well as for abYss by the time I posted about the changes, but unfortunately they haven't got around to adding our content yet so that will have to wait. For now, check out the new streamlined game pages and especially the BBQT and Brik-Link hiscore tables on their respective pages. You can also download demos of both games from wap.smallfrymobile.com and see if you can beat the scores already up there.
We are (or should I say Chris is) already working on our next title, and if the early prototype is anything to go by it's going to be super addictive! We've also got something commercial in the works, but I'll keep that under wraps until it's all confirmed ;)




rAge
rAge is now a month away, and I can hardly wait. It's now official that the Xbox 360 will be unveiled there on September 29, and along with the impending release there has been a flurry activity on forums, retailers sites and even on www.xbox.com, which now has a South African page (and a dedicated SA forum as well).
The Game.Dev stuff is also shaping up well, it looks like it's going to be far more prominant than last year's lectures hidden away in a dark little office, and it looks as if the prize money on offer has resulted in a huge number of entries for the Game.Dev management game compo.
The last of the Nag LAN tickets sold out yesterday, so there will definitely be 1200 smelly, groggy-eyed gamers wandering around the venue bitching about flat pin plugs, harassing booth babes and playing the odd game :)
More important than the main LAN (for me, anyway), is the informal PSP/DS WiFi LAN that we're organizing in the Dome foodcourt on Saturday. The closer we get to the event, the more players it seems we'll have. Conservatively, I expect we'll have a steady attendance over the five hours of at least 20 gamers-and I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people that just happen to have their handhelds there as well sit down and join us for the hell of it. I really hope this does well so we can try and organize something official next year. It'll be tough keeping the DS and PSP players from slitting each other's throats, but that's half the fun ;)

Women forging cubicles

This Wednesday was women's day in South Africa, so we had a day off in the middle of the week :) I definitely think that we should always have a four day week, and apparently quite a lot of people agree. A recent UK survey revealed that approximately 60% of respondants would rather have one less working day a week than have more money. Results were similar when News24.co.za asked it's readers the same question. We can all dream.

To snap back to reality, here is a hilarious parody of James Blunt's Beautiful. Just be warned, it might just strike a little close to home ;)



Forging on
On a more serious note, thanks to the wonderful service provided by GetMyIP.com we have been able to circumvent Telkom's evil IP resetting policy on ADSL (always on broadband my ass!) and now have a permanently available server using Krusty's ADSL connection at home. He made good use of that by setting up a SourceForge server to host our Smallfry development. This is already turning out to be a great move, thanks to the SourceForge CVS server, and the excellent CVS integration in NetBeans, we now have a really robust and useful collaberative source control system. Another fantastic (and really useful) feature of the server is task management. no more silly little scraps of paper that get lost of obscure emails that take forever to search for, we now have a proper task, issue and bug tracking system (that has great email update options as well). There are loads of other useful features as well.

rAge, the new E3 and Game.DEv

It looks like the PSP/DS LAN at rAge is going to be a hell of a lot of fun. Some of the guys from Rebound (who organize WiFi gaming tournaments) will be joining us while they're up here attending the expo, which will just add to the fun. The more the merrier! I really hope that I meet up with some folks that would be interested in making this a regular event!

E3 Refocuses
The big news of the week in the gaming world is undoubtedly the announcement that E3 will be changing formats. Contrary to doomsday reports last week claiming the show has been cancelled, it is simply undergoing a (massive) overhaul. Prompted by skyrocketing exhibitor costs and diminishing percieved value, show organizers (the Entertainment Software Association) have announced that the show will be renamed the E3 Media Festival , moved later in the year and become more 'intimate'.
Reactions to this announcement have of course been mixed. While larger industry players and journalists are applauding the move towards an event that will focus more on getting business done, fans have expressed less positive reactions.
The reality of the situation is that E3 is supposed to be a trade show first and formost, and while it's great for fans that somehow manage to wrangle tickets to ogle booth babes and demos of unreleased games, that doesn't really contribute to the event's goals. I can understand the desire for a more business oriented event that will allow developers, publishers, buyers and media to get their jobs done without having to spend a fortune on fluff. It also allows focus to be spread across multiple events.
That's not to say I won't miss the insane excitement that each year's (traditional) E3 usually generates online, with too many videos and articles available for any one person to process..


Game.Dev competition 10 offers big prizes
As Justin blitzed in the comments to my last post (thanks dude :p), the latest competition being run by the Game.Dev community on the NAG forums has been announced, and for this incarnation NAG have sponsored a total of R10000 worth of prizes! The competition challenges entrants to come up with a management game, which is already resulting in some really interesting ideas.
In addition to this, Game.Dev now has it's own webspace, independant of NAG, to be found HERE.

Mom, coding, linux and happy stuff

Mom
My Mom's still in hospital, she finally went in for a gastroscopy (sp) procedure yesterday morning, and we haven't had feedback from the docter yet, so at this stage it's back to the waiting game. She did say this morning that she felt like she'd been beaten up, but apparently that is a reaction to the anaesthetic.

Smallfry
I have started digging back into smallfry stuff, as it's basically slowed down to a crawl since the beginning of the year thanks to wedding planning. The first task I'm undertaking is upgrading the preprocessor stuff in our engine (and game) code to use the Antenna compliant preprocessor in NetBeans 5.0. When we started using Netbeans 4.0 (giving up the old SunOne which didn't have anywhere near the same level of support for mobile development) we had to switch over to their dodgy, unwieldy preprocessor syntax. I raised the fact on the NetBeans website that there was actually an accepted preprocessor 'standard' in mobile Java dev in the form of Antenna, and they resolved to migrate to it in their next version. They delivered in fine form, and besides having a proper antenna-compliant preprocessor, 5.0 adds a couple of nice preprocessor related bonuses such as a debug level controlled from the project properties, and semi-automatic upgrading of existing preprocessor code. The new version obviously has many other new features that are not necessarily confined to mobile dev, including a much more usable settings dialog, editor enhancements, and lots more.

The next task I'll be looking at is to remove our high score code which makes use of our own MySQL database on our site, and replace it with the free RumbleX API. Besides relieving us of the burdon of maintaining the data ourselves, RumbleX provides us with a 'prebuilt' community site that displays high scores and achievements, and allows us to display RumbleX scores on our own website with a bit of provided JavaScript. To top all this off, the only requirement is that we use RumbleX as one of our distribution outlets-what a pleasure, we get another outlet thrown into the deal, awesome :)
Besides the forums and per game high score groupings available to RumbleX users, they have the option of using a system-generated profile image that shows their achievements, score and avatar, not unlike what is possible with Xbox 360 Live's Gamercards.

Ubuntu
One of the guys at work finally recieved the pack of Ubuntu 6.06 CDs he ordered a while ago, and I took one home to have a look.



The Live CD is great, just pop it into your CD drive and the machine boots to a Linux installation-without ever actually having to install the OS. Because everything gets loaded off the CD, it takes some time to start up the OS as well as individual applications, but that little inconvenience is obviously removed when you actually install it. Natz PC is so vrot with viruses and stuff at this stage that I need to totally reinstall it (and this time it'll have antivirus, antiadware and firewall software thank you very much!), but until then she can use the Ubuntu CD, which is great. As an aside, why in the hell, in this day and age, do PCs from big chan stores not come with all that protection preinstalld? An antivirus package alone is bloody useless, and so is the windows firewall! Something free like Kerio would do the trick nicely.

And finally..
Some happy, shiny Internet goodness news. Yaaaaay! The guy who started a site a year ago with the dream of trading up a single red paperclip for a house has finally achieved that dream. Seriously, this guy started with just a paperclip, and he now has a lovely renovated 1920s home in Kipling Saskatchewan, Canada. Some guys have all the luck-and great ideas.

Hot Java Beans

The new version of NetBeans (5.0), the award-winning Java IDE that we use for our J2ME development at smallfry mobile is available from the NetBeans website. NetBeans is an awesome free IDE, including all the good stuff you'd expect from an industry-standard development environment, such as code completion, library based compilation, integrated help, source control integration, a good project system and lots, lots more. When combined with the optional Mobility Pack, it becomes one of the most powerful, fully functional mobile (J2ME) development environments available, with a preprocessor (yes.. a preprocessor in Java, if you need to ask why, you've obviously never tried to develop for the massive variety of resource-limited J2ME devices out there :P), project configuration support for everything from code versions to resources and even a WYSIWYG editor for MIDP2 program flow.
As I said the IDE is free, and you can either download it directly from the NetBeans site or order a CD with the IDE and all the optional components (the Mobility pack, as well as a profiler and application server).

XNA Studio

This week at the Game Developer's Conference (GDC) Microsoft announced XNA Studio, a full toolset for game development built around Visual Studio and the XNA platform (announced at last year's GDC). The product suite promises to provide not only programming tools, but workflow and asset and build management tools as well. Anyone who has worked on a modern game development project will immediately realise how useful such an environement would be. Unlike most corporate development projects, game dev projects involve a huge number of non-code assets that are a pain to manage, as well as many different builds to cater for different platforms and configurations (and you thought keeping your debug and reatail builds in synch was tough ;-) ).

With game development becoming increasingly complex, middleware and prebuilt tools are fast becoming the preferred way to develop. With XNA's aim to become a common development platform for multimedia development on PC, Xbox and even Windows mobile platforms, MS is obviously looking to cash in on that trend.

For more info on XNA and XNA studio (and I mean just a tiny bit more, there's not really a heck of a lot of info available) visit the XNA website.

Subvert 'em all!!

I have been on the lookout for a decent version control system for some time now. Yes, I realise there are loads out there, CVS and Ms VSS being the most prolific, however I had some pretty specific requirements. I work on projects that involve remote collaboration with team members, and we do not have luxuries like always-on servers that we can use to install a version control server on. Also, since we're doing commercial projects, and we don't want to give everyone else access to our code, we couldn't really go the source forge route (well, not the free one, anyway).

Well, we saw a (conceptual) solution to this problem: google. More specifically, google's gmail, in tandem with the brilliant gmailfs shell extension that allows windows users to use their gmail account as a remote file system. We figured that if we could find an entirely client-driven source control system that could make use of a local drive, we would be able to fool it into using gmail through gmailfs.

Well, it would appear we have found such a system. It is an open-source source control system called Subversion. Besides having all the functionality of CVS, it is really flexible in it's implementation. Historically it could only use a BerkleyDB database for it's repository, but an update in mid-2004 enabled the use of standard (remote or local) file systems. The repository does not specifically require any sort of server process to run, everything is controlled by lock files, making it totally client-centric.

In addition to the standard command-line driven interface, there are a number of third party clients available for the system, including a Visual Studio .Net plugin and a windows shell extension called TortoiseSVN.

Unfortunately I have not been able to get gmailfs to behave today (apparently google have made a change to the gmail API again..), so I have not been able to test Subversion on gmail, but as soon as it's up again I'll do that. Even if that does not work out, however, the nature of subversion means we should be able to zip up the repository and send it back and forth to achieve what we need to if push comes to shove..

Enough now

OK, there are more than enough whiney emotional blogs on the web. I don't need to become part of that trend.. and besides it's bad for my karma. So here's the first of (hopefully) many useful posts. The subject matter will most often be related to the games industry, development in general and other good. old fashioned geeky tech stuff.

So, what's so useful in this post? Two things:

Microsoft has thrown together a new DVD full of useful .Net goodies available to developers. It includes productivity tools and components from a number of their partner companies. You can check it out at:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/vstudio/extend/partnerdvd/

Just a note though, I tried ordering it and they do seem to be out of stock at the moment.. But that can't last forever, right? Free stuff, free delivery. What are you waiting for. If nothing else you'll get a snazzy new MS coaster!

The other useful bit is Microsoft's new Anti-Spyware tool called (not very creatively) MS AntiSpyware. It's currently in Beta, but is rumoured to be due for official release soon. It is a free download that includes a pretty standard scanner that can be run once-off or enabled to check for runtime intrusions. In addition, it connects to a pier-to-pier anti spyware network called SpyNet. The idea here is that if one machine running AntiSpyWare picks up a new infection, it warns other machines and they automatically protect themselves.. Pretty nifty as long as someone doesn't find a weakness and use it to infect all machines running it with some nasty new bug..

Anyway you can get it from MS at:

http://www.microsoft.com/athome/security/spyware/software/default.mspx