Really, Matthew?
“I live in the browser most of the day, and every time I have to leave that to run something that’s not browser-based, that’s actually more annoying than positive. So our current thinking is to keep it in tabs.”—
Matthew Papakipos, Engineering Director at Chrom OS, Google talks Chrome OS, HTML5, and the future of software
Slightly concerned that the Chrome OS Engineering Director apparently spends all day surfing the web, and gets annoyed on the rare occasions he has to run pesky development tools.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for browser-based productivity software (Google’s suite saves me a lot of to-ing and fro-ing with docs and emails), but Google’s party line gets a bit tiring when we’re expected to believe that Google’s software engineers spend “most of the day” in a browser. The day I can run Dreamweaver, Photoshop, Flash, Lightwave, Eclipse, Visual Studio, WinSCP and iTunes in a browser is the day that Google’s developers spend most of the day working on the web.
Normally, I hate it when people take stuff from one thing, and mash some audio over it from something else, and then put it on YouTube and say “HAY LOOK WHAT I MADE!”. However, I was watching an episode of Deep Space Nine the other day, because I’m a nerd, and because it’s brilliant, and because I’ve never really rewatched it. Aside from the fact that the last two seasons really kicked it up a notch, Foundation Imaging were at the top of their game after being ditched by Babylon 5, and produced some great effects sequences. Combined with Angry Sisko, it was pretty compelling stuff.
I was tootling around YouTube, and came across a video that fits my Rage Criteria above. Except, this one actually sort of works. Particularly the bit at 2m54s, which should be where the above video starts. The look on Sisko’s face says it all.
I really ought to get the BSG soundtracks.
Worklog: Drop Fighter
Ah, Drop Fighter. A sad tale.
I love the very specific genre of futuristic flying 3d shooty games. The first one I really got into was Star Fighter 3000 on the Acorn A3010 (from the Archimedes family of computers used in schools).
At the time, the fast 3d and texture mapped ground, combined with being able to blow up every single item on the map made for a compelling experience. Steady upgrades for your ship and a fun variety of missions kept me playing this for years.
The only game that really equalled it for me was the might Gunmetal on Xbox, about ten years later.
Gunmetal upped the ante by allowing me to transform into a robot and shoot at things with twin machine guns and backpack-mounted rockets. Other notable entries for me around this genre are Freespace 2, Hellbender and, narrowly, Future Cop.
So, I wanted to write my own. I started in late 2003, and a couple of months later I had the basic flying around, landscapes, weapons, collisions and a mothership in place. It grew and grew, and went through several upgrades and partial rewrites as I reacquired all my defunct programming skills from the 90s.
After working on it on and off until around 2006, I began to listen to other people’s opinions about it. The game had reached the stage where it was quite playable: mission structure was in place, allowing objectives to be completed. I took the game to an Indie developers meet, and left it running on a laptop to see what people thought. Everyone seemed to find the controls difficult. After some cornering, a publisher expressed a degree of interest in seeing the finished product. Talking with one of their programmers in the following weeks rammed the point home: I needed to change the controls so the ship righted itself, and couldn’t roll or pitch more than 45 degrees. I dutifully did so, and immediately it became no fun whatsoever to fly this fighter. And there it was: I was writing this game purely for myself, no one was going to enjoy flying this thing as much as I did, because this kind of arcade-y simulator was just too niche.
Part of the problem was keyboards. I was quite happy playing the game on a keyboard, but it’s simply not the kind of thing PC keyboards were used for. And PCs don’t come with a gamepad. Mouse control for these games always seemed horribly woolly.
In the end, I just let the project die, because in everyone’s eyes it just wasn’t much good. For me, swooping low and fast through exploding buildings never gets old, but I can see how it might for other people.
Every now and again, I keep thinking about doing a little bit on it, just for fun, but it needs so much work to bring it up to standard. A few things can slot in fairly easily, like the latest version of my super awesome blowing-thing-up effects, but in other areas the code just needs completely re-organising. I’m a far better programmer and designer now than I was then, but that’s always the way.
For the record, this is Drop Fighter circa 2006:
