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Looks like a bug has been discovered in Rock Band 2 that can randomly reset your band’s progress under a certain set of curcumstances. So far it appears that it only happens if you play the career mode with a certain combination of accounts - notably a player with a Live-enabled account, and a player with a non-Live-enabled account.

Here’s hoping they fix it before the UK release, although I actually don’t think I’d suffer from it anyway, since Marie & I both have Live accounts, and when other people play they don’t use their own accounts, they just jump in as ‘Player 3′ or whatever; so far those combinations sound like they’re immune to this bug.

The moral of the story would seem to be not to use non-Live accounts with Rock Band 2. I’m not sure why you would anyway, if your machine is connected to the internet, since a ’silver’ Live account is free anyway (and it’s still a ‘Live-enabled account’ - you get leaderboards & gamerscore tracking but not multiplayer). Still, a nasty bug if you happened to get caught by it.

Looks like the new Rock Band site is going live as we speak, they have a placeholder page up right now. The new site will allegedly let you take photos of your band to share online, get (real) T-shirts branded with your bands logo and other fun (yet entirely pointless) things. Obviously I’m looking forward to seeing that.

Since I’ve been taking a rare weekend off, I took the time to download the latest batch of XBLA demos to check out the latest slices of (hopefully) juicy bite-sized gameplay. The results were mixed.

Braid

I’d actually downloaded the demo for this a while ago, but at that stage I’d been pretty short of time, and on getting frustrated with a particular section I had tossed it aside and gone with the far more immediate Geometry Wars 2 instead. But, I came back to it, and when you’re in a more relaxed state and can take the time to ponder the game, it’s actually very good. An interesting platform-puzzler with a nice central idea (the manipulation of time), very solid game design, and a nice art style. Personally I’ve yet to appreciate the genius of the narrative, which seems a little overly self-indulgent to me right now, but people have been applauding it for where it ultimately culminates so I’ll just reserve judgement on that for now. We’ve bought it anyway; it’s certainly interesting enough to justify the purchase.

Mega Man 9

I’ve never actually played a Mega Man before, and 10 minutes with this convinced me I hadn’t been missing much. Quite why Capcom would choose, in 2008 with the full glories of modern technology at their fingertips, to replicate the graphics and sound (and I use that term in the broadest possible sense, ‘poorly modulated noise’ would be more accurate) of the NES with quite so much authenticity I don’t know. I really don’t see the point of creating a new product and making it look and sound like the emulation of an old one - surely if the gameplay is that good, smoothing off a few rough edges and making the sound not shred my eardrums would not be a heresy? Next, you discover that the difficulty level is such that it makes Ghosts and Goblins look like a cake walk. I didn’t even get to the end of the first level before grinding my teeth to powder. Maybe if you grew up with the NES and Mega Man (I didn’t, the NES was never officially released in the UK and I don’t remember even the later ports of MM being very  popular), maybe you’ll find this nostalgia captivating. Although to be honest, my experience of going back to old games (such as through the Wii Virtual Console) has been profound disappointment and shattered memories; it’s generally best to just remember your old games as fantastic, rather than to re-experience them, IMO. However, many reviews have said MM9 is great, so I will have to assume that someone out there likes this game. I personally found it to be a stupidly hard, annoying platform game with some of the worst graphics and sound I’ve sat through in a long time, and about as entertaining as paying someone to randomly stick a fork in my leg. But I guess there are people who are into that kind of thing too.

War World

Oh dear. The first thing I noticed is that it makes what I thought was a fundamental set of incredibly basic demo errors, which in themselves would make me toss it away. Firstly, although the full game allows you to choose from around 10 mechs, the demo only lets you use one. Assuming there are differences that would nuance the gameplay, any developer with half a brain would imbue the demo with 2 mechs to test at least, to allow the player to see what the kind of differences might be. Secondly, the demo is limited by time - you can play for no more than about a minute before you’re kicked out, making any kind of evaluation of the game almost impossible. If this was a quality game, hobbling the demo like this would be absolute stupidity on the part of the game developer. However from what I read, the game is a bit rubbish so perhaps not letting you see much of it in the demo is a blessing. What struck me most of all in the tiny slice of time I got to experience it was that they got the scale all wrong. If you’re going to make a game about robots, they have to be big robots. The smallest one should be as big as tall as a 2-storey house, minimum. Instead, they’ve taken the bizarre decision to make the robots only slightly taller than Bob Hope, meaning that it comes across as just a poor UT3 knock-off with robot skins. Inexplicable.

Duke Nukem 3D

Talking of nostalgia, this was fun to put on for about 10 minutes. Duke is of course basically Doom with a sense of humour, some more interesting weapons & environments, copious one-liners stolen from Evil Dead and They Live, and strippers. Certainly entertaining in short bursts, and it provoked fond memories of the deathmatch games we used to have in our youth (there were a number of hilarious pipe-bomb incidents in particular that resurfaced in my memory on seeing familiar parts of maps). But, the world has moved on - it best serves like an old family album, reminding you of the good times - so much of this kind of game relied on the technology (wow, we can look up and down, sort of!), it’s not really enough anymore to hold your interest for very long.

So, Braid is recommended, everything else only if you’re a masochist or have nothing better to do with your time and money

I’m the kind of person who likes to keep busy; not in a ‘mad about DIY / the garden’ kind of way that tends to be the most socially acceptable form of being a ‘project oriented person’, but I always have a bunch of things on the go and never seem to have enough time to do them all. I’m always ‘working’ evenings & weekends, but a lot of the time I really don’t think of it as work, because a large portion of the time I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

If you’re anything like me you’ve had difficulty explaining to your wife / significant other that in our kind of world, there’s really no discrete black-and-white transition between ‘work’ and ‘not work’ that starts at 9am and ends at 5pm every day like clockwork. In fact there are a multitude of subtle levels ranging from ‘definitely work’ (e.g. something I don’t particularly want to do but someone has paid me to do it), to ‘not really work at all’ (e.g. having fun with technology that as a spin-off might help make a living now or later). Unfortunately these subtle graduations are invisible to the casual observer, often leading to discussions which begin with ‘You’re working again!’, ‘Not really…’, and from then on get complicated.

In the end, it’s probably not a solvable problem, but one thing that does help is taking the odd break, where you at least pretend not to think about what others would deem ‘work’ for a while. Holidays are obvious candidates, but also a good trigger for maybe taking a weekend off or something is recognising a milestone, or a cluster of milestones.

OgreSpeedTree and OgreSpeedGrass emerged from beta this morning, with official 1.0 versions being released. I’m pretty damn pleased with the result, and that’s a fairly unusual situation; I normally have a list of things as long as my arm that I consider ‘unfinished’, but in this case I’m very content with stamping a 1.0 badge on them. My attention can now switch to finalising Ogre 1.6, which is currently at the Release Candidate stage.

It’s also 2 years since I made the decision to give up having a regular day job and try my luck as a free agent / start-up. My initial measure of success was not to go broke (either personally or bankrupting the company) in the first 2 years, and I’m pleased to say that hasn’t happened. It’s certainly had ups and downs, and probably given my prior senior tech position I’ve undoubtedly earned less personally as a result, but the company has still grown, I’m still paying myself a wage that isn’t too insulting, and the benefits have easily compensated for that. Besides the flexibility and the satisfaction of knowing I’ve found and earned every penny I’ve made (which somehow makes the money feel more valuable than a guaranteed monthly paycheck), it’s been good for my personal development to mix it up a bit. And most importantly, I’m not bored

It’s also almost 8 years ago that I wrote this fateful message in my (very old, very manual) blog:

“18th October 2000: Exam done! Work on OGRE will restart soon. First, web site revamp to be done.”

Inauspicious, but that was the seed - the time when OGRE as we know it swung into full development and started this whole crazy sequence of events off; if I’d known the significance of it at the time, I wonder whether it would have affected how I did things?

Laozi was right when he said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”. Those words motivate me to this day - that no matter how big or challenging something looks, the most important thing is to start. My experience certainly tells me that genius and raw talent / ability is often not the most important factor when it comes to achieving things, it’s usually more about taking that first step, and having the tenacity or pure bloody-mindedness to keep going for as long as it takes. That’s particularly good for me since even if I might not be as smart as some, I’m probably more stubborn. And that in turn feeds back into what I was talking about at the start of this post.

But, stopping occasionally to admire the view is good too Maybe I’ll do that this weekend.

One of the things I like about Rock Band is that the DLC is regular, reasonably priced and à la carte - you can pick just the tracks you want and it doesn’t break the bank. Guitar Hero conversely has so far not released very much DLC, generally charges more for it (500 points for a 3-song pack compared to 80-120 points per track in Rock Band), and doesn’t give you the option of just purchasing the tracks you want - it’s the whole pack or nothing, making it much less convenient.

Worse are the ‘band branded’ retail supplements like GH: Aerosmith which are the ultimate in forced bulk purchasing, and something I’ve always looked on with derision. They’re chronically expensive, they’re all-or-nothing, you’re no doubt paying for stuff you don’t really want or need (like the modelling of Steve Tyler’s frankly shocking visage, which I imagine took every ounce of normal mapping skill on the part of the artist to capture its craggy terrain) - they’re the antethesis of the self-service, customer-pleasing DLC that Rock Band offers. You could say that Rock Band 2 is the same, but there’s 2 differences: 1) you’re getting a refined play experience, and 2) you get 106 varied tracks for your money, a massive saving over regular DLC. Together those are enough to justify it, so long as it’s a rare occurrence.

All was well until this week, when MTV announced that they would be releasing Rock Band : AC/DC (exclusively through Wal-Mart in the US) - a band-branded physical media add-on precisely in the vein of GH: Aerosmith, and that it wouldn’t be made available as DLC. Worse, it’s even more of a rip off than GH:A, costing a whopping £30 for a paltry 18 tracks. What the hell are they thinking?

If there’s a tissue-thin silver lining to this story, it’s that at least you can transfer all the songs from the disc into Rock Band 2 as pseudo-DLC, just like you can with the Rock Band 1 tracks; so at least you’re not condemned to disc-swapping. But still, you can’t buy it any other way than all in one shrink-wrapped package, and the price is daylight robbery - who forgot to tell them that when you bulk-buy, you should get goods at a lower price? Beyond the price, I fundamentally disagree with the forced packaging, and the exclusive arrangement they’re taking with this one, it’s an entirely retrograde step and entirely at odds with everything Harmonix have been doing so far.

Harmonix have stated that they don’t like exclusive content, that they dislike restricting music choice, and I completely agree with that. One of the reasons I like Rock Band is that you really do get the sense it’s made by people who know and love music more than anything else. My guess (hope?) is that it’s not them who made this call - maybe the business guys at MTV overruled them, seeing the dollar signs lighting up. Or, maybe it was AC/DC’s management who refused to allow the piecemeal DLC route; they’re one of the few remaining bands who don’t allow track downloads via iTunes (either because of greed, snobbery, luddite tendencies, who knows). Or maybe Wal-Mart dangled a fat juicy bribe in front of the MTV biz guys and led them down the dark path. I don’t know - but I’d really rather not believe that Harmonix have lost their way here, given how in touch with the customer they’ve been so far. I hope it’s a one-off special case; if MTV start doing this for other bands the way Activision has openly said it plans to, it will seriously erode my respect for the Rock Band franchise. Given the goodwill Harmonix have built up so far doing things the ‘right’ customer-friendly way with DLC, contrasting markedly with the way Activision have been doing things, the very last thing they should be doing is tossing all that down the crapper switching to an overtly corporate approach.

I don’t much care for AC / DC anyway so I can happily ignore this; had they released it via the normal DLC channels I might have purchased a couple of signature tracks, such as Back in Black, but there’s no way I’m going to buy an entire disc full; so they’ve lost a sale or two there, and I would expect that applies to others who have merely a passing acquaintance with the band. In essence, which band it is doesn’t matter; it’s the precedent that it sets which is very concerning.

Note to Baz: I wrote the majority of this post before you accused me of ignoring the story because of my raging Rock Band bias

Thanks John for the reminder to investigate S3 as a business media hosting service, it works like a charm!

Now that I have far fewer bandwidth worries (max $0.17 per GB), the Torus Knot site includes a nifty dynamic selector so you can pick low, medium or high quality - the latter is at a higher resolution too, clocking in at about 100Mb. I may well use S3 for future public commercial downloads in the future too. It’s altogether more convenient than the block bandwidth allocations you get with regular hosting packages, since it scales dynamically at a very fine level of detail depending on demand. And don’t be fooled by ‘unlimited’ bandwidth offers, all hosting companies have to pay for bandwidth and there’s no such thing as ‘unlimited’ resources; you’ll actually find your bandwidth being throttled or cut off via a ‘reasonable use’ clause in the small-print; ‘unlimited’ is simply a marketing lure. If you want truly scalable guaranteed bandwidth, you have to pay for it.

Getting S3 media hosting working wasn’t that hard, but did require a few discrete steps. Firstly, you need to create a bucket in your S3 account which is all in lower case, is globally unique and is DNS-compatible; so for example I created a bucket called ‘media.torusknot.com’.

Then to make it all look nice you need to create a DNS CNAME entry to map a sub-domain of your site to that S3 bucket; in my case I mapped ‘media.torusknot.com’ to ‘media.torusknot.com.s3.amazonaws.com’. That allows me to access any files I upload to that S3 bucket via ‘http://media.torusknot.com/somefile.jpg’. You do just need to set the ACLs on the files & the bucket to make sure public access is allowed.

Finally, if you want to stream video files via a Flash player from S3 to another domain, you also have to tell Flash that it’s ok for the content to be pulled in from a different domain. Create a file called ‘crossdomain.xml’ in the bucket, with these contents:

<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="all"/>
</cross>

That allows the media to be accessed from anywhere - you can be more specific if you want but this is the simplest approach.

Once again I’m using the excellent FlowPlayer; my only issue with it is that the ‘buffering’ animation seems to not work all the time (so be patient if you’re viewing the high quality version).

Gotta love this cloud computing business

Looks like I could be getting my wish and Rock band 2 will be out in the UK before the end of the year:

Yep, that’s a UK official Microsoft ad saying it, so I think that’s pretty certain (for 360 at least). So it’s November - unsurprisingly the very time that GH:WT comes out - makes sense.

Woohoo - looks like we can look forward to having 500 tracks to choose from this side of the pond too, instead of a just the measly 400 (!) we’d have with RB1 + DLC. All the refinements to the little niggles should be great too (like drum fills that use the samples from the song, better quickplay etc) We still don’t know what the 20 free DLC tracks are in RB2 yet, my guess is they’ll wait until the GH:WT marketing machine starts up in the USA (which I think is next month), and use that as an extra card.

I’m actually getting better at Won’t Get Fooled Again on Hard on the drums. Every time I play it I can’t help but admire Keith Moon; his drum parts are just so far out there in comparison to almost any other. He might have been a nutter, but he was a genius with a pair of drumsticks.

Oh, Love Spreads is as good as I hoped too, huge fun on guitar and drums and definitely one of my new favourites. And we have a full album of Chili Peppers next week - in a way it’s a shame they chose Blood Sugar Sex Magick, By The Way or Californication would have been my personal choice, but still, it should be good.

A few people asked for an OgreSpeedTree video with more varied scenes, and I’ve now uploaded one to the OgreSpeedTree section of the Torus Knot site. Just scroll down below the screenshots if you want to view the video.

I have a higher resolution & better quality version (this one is H.264 at 1Kb/s) but I’ve kept this one small for now to keep my bandwidth under control. Places like Vimeo don’t allow commercial advertising, and while before I could get away with claiming it was just in-development test output shared with enthusiasts only, this is really an advertisement video so I’m hosting it myself. I have enough bandwidth to spare unless something really goes bonkers (I think) - in case it does, does anyone know of any reasonably priced business media hosts (UK only), should I need something more than just upping my bandwidth allowance? I’ve seen a few dedicated streaming media hosts around but don’t have a view on how good they are.

OgreSpeedTree 1.0 entered RC1 a week ago and I haven’t had any reports of any issues, so I’m pretty much ready to stick a fork in it & declare it done for now. I’ve been improving OgreSpeedGrass this week, such as making the grass paging re-entrant so that new cells can be filled gradually to spread the buffer update overhead over many frames, that seems to have helped in busier scenes. That just needs a couple more utility functions for loading in grass distributions from tools, then that will be done too. Then, it’ll be time to get the marketing wheels moving…

I blogged a few months ago about my concern regarding the precedents being set by the Northern Rock and Bear Stearns debacles - that investment bankers and city executives can take outrageous risks, bag huge bonuses and get into a situation that for the sake of the economy, the government has to step in and sort it out.

If only that had been the end of it; I don’t think anyone really thought it was, but since then things have really gone south. In the USA we’ve had the state effectively re-nationalising Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, and they’re now debating a $700bn rescue package to buy bad assets from a host of financial institutions in order to ‘extract the poison’ from the markets.

Now, as before I completely understand that, in the immediate aftermath of a train-wreck such as this, you have to concentrate on damage limitation and short-term recovery. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should stop asking searching questions - the world has been placed in a woeful position thanks to a comparatively small group of people who benefitted from continuously feeding the insatiable credit monster, no matter what the realistic repayment prospects were for those debts. It’s typical commission-based salesman behaviour - close the sale, let the accounts department worry about the rest.

I’m glad to see that the US congress haven’t just rubber-stamped the rescue bill, and are asking serious questions about future guidance & regulation on the market and its operators. The Wall Street guys will tell you that interference and regulation just inhibit the market and make everything worse, but I believe that recent events rubbish that claim; if the market was truly self-sufficient and self-regulating, it wouldn’t have gotten itself into the position where it needed a handout from regular people’s tax dollars to avert a total meltdown. Clearly short-term greed overwhelmed good sense, and those in this market acted like children who didn’t know when to stop eating junk food - except in this case, everyone ends up with a stomachache. Like children, if they can’t figure out for themselves how to behave, then they need a responsible adult to make those decisions for them. Trust is earned, and the financial sector essentially frittered all that trust away having a giant party, and there must be consequences.

Some people will blame the culture of credit and say that the market was just responding to that, and so it shouldn’t be held entirely accountable, and I say hogwash. Sure you can blame the people who took out loans they couldn’t afford to a degree, but come on - these were unlikely to be financially savvy people, and at the end of the day it’s up to the lender to evaluate repayment prospects rationally. After all, if they don’t get their money back, they’ll go out of business. In this case though, the financial wizards concocted another one of their ‘vehicles’ which magically allowed dubious debt to be repackaged and resold, effectively becoming somebody elses problem. What a marvellous invention! We can take all the risks we want, collect our fat bonuses and just keep hiding all our crap under a giant rug in the spare room. No-one will ever find it, right?

This is not responsible behaviour, it’s reprehensible. The vast majority of regular people work hard, are prudent with their money, think hard about lending or borrowing money, and don’t make the kinds of basic affordability errors these so-called financial experts were making. After all, regular people have to live with the results of their actions, so prudence is a wise stance. Mistakes in the financial sector, however, result in damage mostly to the lower echelons of their workforce, crippling problems for the rest of the public, desperate measures from government; yet the execs still get to keep their huge bonuses earned during the previous years.

After all the mess is cleaned up, I hope those that benefitted from the years leading up to this situation are held to account. Enron, Nick Leeson - they were nothing compared to this. The culture in the upper echelons of corporate banking is clearly fundamentally broken, and both governments and the industry owe it to regular people to resolve it, not just with short-term bail-outs, but with fundamental change. Something is badly wrong in the financial sector, and they’ve proven themselves incapable or unwilling to sort it out before it resulted in pain for everyone else. Because of that, they’ve forfeited their right to decide what happens next - behave like a greedy child, and you deserve to be treated like one.

I just watched the Little Big Planet beta video that VG247 posted, and I have to say well done to Media Molecule for creating a game with a definite British feel to it (as well as it still looking damn interesting). I complained a while back about the overt Americanisation in so much of the output of British studios in recent years, losing a lot of the regional quirkiness that I think enhances content from any country, so I’m glad to see the spirit is not dead. In particular I liked the use of the ‘gallery’ music from Take Hart, which is hugely appropriate. Great way to get the credits actually watched too. LBP remains the one exclusive that piques my interest on PS3 and I’m looking forward to having a play with it on a friends machine.

I’ve read that Fable 2 has a definite British slant to it too, I’m looking forward to seeing how that turns out next month.

It’s an eternal truth that no matter how much hard drive space you have, you always manage to fill it with something.

In my case, it’s mostly tools, SDKs and most importantly build environments. I have to maintain at least 3 active development copies of OGRE at any one time (the previous stable branch, the current stable branch and the development branch), plus clean build environments for at least 3 compilers in order to do releases. Add to that the occasional backport scenario for clients, plus build variants (static linking, multiple threading options, double precision mode), plus project builds for customers and my own spin-offs like OgreSpeedTree and it all starts to mount up, particularly as a full build of OGRE will creep up to about 3-4GB of data (mostly intermediate files).

To be fair, hard drives do tend to last longer and longer every time. I bought a 250GB hard drive about 4 years ago and was amazed at the amount of space I had free (with my secondary backup drive, I had 330GB at my disposal). However, over the last month or two I’ve been pushing at the limits and so I decided to upgrade.

Terabyte hard drives are getting quite cheap these days, although the cheaper ones (like the Seagate Barracuda) have been getting some poorish reviews, so given I do some pretty HDD intensive work I looked for something with decent performance (barring going OTT with an array of Velociraptors) . The Western Digital Caviar Black was getting some good reviews, so I went with that - the only one that seemed to compete at this size was the Samsung Spinpoint F1, but according to the reviews I read, while it did very well at bulk sustained transfer rates, its performance didn’t scale well to lots of random I/O requests, something that’s pretty important when doing compilations with lots of small files being accessed in many threads. Thus, I chose the Caviar Black which is a touch slower than the Spinpoint on bulk transfers, but is a clear winner in the kind of random access workloads I do most.

They come in 750GB and 1TB variants; I decided to go with the 750GB since the Caviar Black is a more expensive drive (£80 for the 750GB, £110 for the 1TB), and I intend to keep my 250GB as a secondary drive anyway, so together they push me over the magic psychological 1TB barrier (in theory, of course you never see all that space in reality).

It feels like moving into a new house with loads more room - you just want to do cartwheels on the empty space (metaphorically). It’s great not to have to worry about disk space again as I fire off a new build, and I don’t personally notice the noise that the reviews mentioned as a downside of the Caviar Black, but then my existing drives were 4+ years old and probably noisy by comparison to modern equivalents anyway. In a way, I find the slight noise reassuring, particularly as I don’t have a HDD light on the front of my machine (it’s behind the door panel, in a rather odd design choice by ThermalTake).

I wonder if it will be another 4 years before I fill this one up…