Category Archives: Uncategorised

Uncategorised.

Battling WordPress and Gallery Software

I’m still looking at Gallery2 replacements, I suspect I’ll be summarising what I think of the ones I’m checking out (since I need it to work on this webserver setup, I do do some of the testing live, so hooray for random links appearing 😉 ). I’ve got some links to follow up from my hosts’ forums, and specifically am looking for 3 things – automatic page creation and allowing gallery subpages, thumbnails available for WordPress posts and that it works properly with WordPress 2.8. If anyone does use one, give me a shout which it is. I’m going to retest NextGEN which is the most well known WordPress one (despite its, to me, seemingly highly beta status), then move onto other solutions. The battle began with me basically reinstalling the latest WordPress and fixing it’s own internal gallery upload system (the flash bit failed to work until I used the internal SSL admin side, rather then the AdminSSL plugin for instance). I won’t back down now, even though this is taking forever. In the mean time I’ll use Gallery2 to upload bits and pieces, and wait to get around to my notes from Brighton with associated pictures.

It’s never easy, is it? Hopefully this might help someone else who wants a good bit of gallery software so they don’t have to use the admittedly-nice-looking Flickr or somesuch, since I do certainly want to self-host these images, and not rely on things like “term of use” and “ownership rights”, sigh.

Brighton Develop Conference 2009

The Develop Conference is on again next week, so in preparation for my volunteer work we were asked what we’d want to cover, or not cover if you wanted to roam. I might as well post the list, and my reasons for choosing things. This year I should finish my notes off (last year, they were pretty terrible, so I didn’t bother!). It might be I am a roaming volunteer, in which case I’ll be looking out for notes for these sessions – none of them scream “must see” (from a game I wholly enjoyed, or a concept that is amazing or new – nothing on Natal here it seems!).

Monday evening before it all begins has the Guardian Pub Quiz, which should be good 🙂

Tuesday

Games:EDU should be good, hosted by David Hayward and crew and Pixel-Lab 🙂 Some nice people talking, should be neat.

It ends with Never Mind the Polygons too, which is great 🙂

Wednesday

09:30-10:30 CONFERENCE KEYNOTE: David Jones, Realtime Worlds – Realtime Worlds did the immensely fun Crackdown (which I’ve played a good few hours of, shame I can’t finish it since I don’t have an xbox!), this might be interesting, but I am not bothered if I’m passing out bags during it.
11:00-12:00 Preparing for Larrabee – Coding talk, Larrabee is something I should get interested in, and I missed a chance at GDC to learn more first hand.
13:30-14:30 Open Software for Closed Hardware – Having already seen the other coding talk at that time in Paris, this seemed like a excellent one to go to. I’m all for using free stuff as a hobbyist after all so it’ll be nice to see what is said 🙂
15:00-16:00 The Edge Panel: Architecture and Games – Lack of coding sessions eh? Well, Architecture is amazing in videogames (more so then the NPC’s right now anyway), and as my photos reveal I’m happy to look at it rather then go to art galleries.
16:30-17:30 From Light Bulb to Console: The Writing Process – Writing is fascinating for me, a programmer, also because I envy those who can write moving things, and also since AI deals with the use of dialogue more then people think.

Thursday

09:30-10:30 The Wizards of OS: I Don’t Think We’re in C++ Anymore – Using the scripting language of an engine to run the games logic isn’t entirely new, but I wonder just how much they did script compared to pure coding.
12:00-13:00 Lunch and One Life Left, woo!
13:00-14:00 Games, Designs and Lessons Learned at the Global Game Jam – I never kept up with the Game Jam’s outcomes, so this should be interesting. I also need to get in contact with Susan over the Students SIG revamp proposal I’m doing, coincidentally.
14:30-15:30 Making Videogames History: Starting the National Videogames Archive – I might have heard it all before, but this is still my mainsay, so I hopefully can get to it.
16:00-17:00 Rethinking Challenges in Games and Stories – I’ve not read all of Earnest Adam’s talks, so this might be cool for me to see. Nothing else much on at the slot, I must say.
17:15-18:00 The Develop Den Opinion Jam 2009Karaoke open mic night!

Hopefully, even if I don’t get around to any sessions (who knows? 🙂 ) I’ll be seeing some interesting things (with my camera too) and talking to many a fine person, even if it appears it’ll be a lot less busy this year. If you’re going and read my site, give me a shout so we can meet up either at the 106 bar in the evening or some time during the day 😀

Online…OnLive…Please, no!

A quick counterpoint to “The future is online video delivered game experiences”, or even “Has to be logged into to an online service to authenticate”.

Online is not ubiquitous, nor is it a service like a phone network, nor is it reliable. It costs the customers money if there are active caps (Games can be upwards of 10GB. Better make sure you spread out reinstalls or deletions).

For video on demand versions like OnLive, the constant streaming will be interrupted, choppy, and only really available local to the right server, which means having server farms basically in your city for the latency problems to be removed.

For the “Has to be logged in to an online service to authenticate”, I’m looking at YOU Game For Windows Live and Dawn of War 2, there are a ton of times when the internet is unavailable. Making it mandatory for saves to be linked to an account on a PC is rather silly, even more so that you need to specially make the account offline by being online first to get offline functionality (which keeps it offline…or something…egad it’s so badly made!)

Even Steam doesn’t get off lightly – look, fine, make games choose to patch themselves, but having a huge patch released which slowly drip feeds even though you want to play the singleplayer is ridiculous.

The services for singleplayer are going to require the kind of service that ISP’s can never hope to provide, and I for one will soon dread it. That and not being able to sell on games, sigh. Or archive them (or their patches), or install anything offline, or play anything offline (say goodbye to portable laptop gaming or LAN parties).

It’s seriously getting silly, urg…I don’t want to be tied down to such a single point of failure for singleplayer, just do not want! 🙁 I hate to imagine what It’ll be like if the services are shut down – I guess Bioshock will be stuck not installing, and no more patches for Dawn of War 2, if I can even get it to run in the first place. Sigh. The current deals are all very one sided, for shame.