RedBeard’s Curious Life

Before I had WordPress all set up, I was still ranting away. Please take a moment to reflect on those old rantings. Back then my primitive php skills, combined with massive spambot attacks, meant you could not comment on them, but this fancy blog system suffers less from those problems and you should post any commentary here. Some of those rants have lost their lustre, but the essence of some still survives. I’ll give a brief rundown of how I view each of them now after a couple years have passed:

Installshield and its ilk aren’t quite so bad anymore, but I am still constantly aggravated by various installer quirks. Some installers have to run as admin and then don’t set their target up for all users. Not too many dump files all over the place without cleaning up.

Software-as-service seems to have taken on a new meaning now, with Web Apps and such proving themselves as a worthwhile distribution model (if not a lucrative business model). Google especially has been pioneering this realm, with a variety of Office-like web applications and various other novelties. Data portability seems to be the strongest selling point of these items, as their interface is generally a bit slow and clunky, and their support for advanced features is somewhat lacking.

My increased income has made the value of quick delivery even more important than a few dollars, and I’ve actually signed up for Amazon Prime so I get free 2-day shipping on any order with no minimum purchase… pretty neat, although it still takes 4 real days if a weekend intervenes.

I found that WinAmp does in fact have a mini-playlist, aka the queue, available through a plugin. It’s quite handy, although not exactly what I was hoping for. I’ve also since discovered MP3Gain, which can normalize an entire library of music to avoid volume knob twiddling.

Windows Vista has brought some niceties to the table of system & user settings. UAC and registry redirection have encouraged developers to conform more closely to sane design principles (in this area at least) while not slapping users too hard on the wrist when a program behaves badly.

Splinter Cell has since seen a couple more sequels, and it seems that a broad principle can be discerned from games that are released on both PC and console: they are designed primarily for console, while the PC port is usually buggy and tries to treat the PC as just another console. Ubisoft still hasn’t learned their lesson about online matchmaking, and nobody else has yet to adopt the Halo 2 model (even recent AAA Xbox 360 titles with strong multiplayer components). To make matters worse, EA has taken the same path as Ubisoft, with possibly worse results.

Adobe Reader still sucks; use Foxit. Cell-phone interfaces are still sluggish and ugly.

PC Gamer has continued to decline, with a stint of horribly-rearranged content, a new lead editor, and ever-waning page count. Online reviews are still fickle, but sites like gamerankings.com help to average out the noise.

Focus stealing still sucks – I still argue that focus should not be steal-able but instead give-able. The kernel in Windows Vista is apparently tuned a little better to avoid thrashing the page file, and SuperFetch (using a USB flash drive as intermediate cache) can apparently improve things a bit. I found a program, Taskbar Shuffle, which allows you to drag the buttons on the taskbar around at will. Another handy app is allSnap, which allows you to arrange adjacent windows precisely and quickly.

I had to give up on development work on my 3D engine when I started working full-time for real money. There are a number of things I would do differently if given the same opportunity, but the first would still be to tie the engine to a game concept.