DogsWithoutWings.com Blog

According to Matt from IGN, speaking to a developer at the GDC some previous Natal showings have been far from impressive. He writes

"Natal, though -- the motion offering from Microsoft -- not so much. The same studio rep calls Natal a big, buggy mess. "It's sh*t," he adds, saying that it just doesn't work as promised. That it's slow and that the camera is imprecise, which he notes, is causing some major development woes."

You can read the rest of the article at IGN.

So at GDC XNA Game Studio 4.0 was announced for the Windows Phone 7 (I think that's what it's called). But it doesn't support Zune HD, wtf. I don't want to get a phone contract to develop apps or games. Fix this Microsoft!

XNA 4.0 FAQ

Cost me $30 but I recycled a computer (Pentium 2), printer, and crt monitor at Staples for $10 each. Closet looks nice and empty now, except for all the notebooks I used in my 6 years of college. Gotta save the planet brahs.

When you find this in it.

So Microsoft is having an event on their cloud computing platform Azure on the 11th in Fort Lauderdale, FL and I will be there to be a part of the cloud 'revolution.' I don't know the gist of storage buckets, but my entire company's web presence could be moved to the cloud except (yes there had to be one) one Visual Basic ActiveX control that needs to be registered on the server. We use it for generating PDFs which may possible be replaced by the Silverlight 4 printing features. It still would require a lot of work though.

I did mention in one of my previous post that software takes 3 rewrites to get right. Maybe this site will be moving to the cloud next. It would certainly reduce my monthly costs since I'm paying for 1.5 terabytes of bandwidth a month but use less than 1 gigabyte. What can I do? Companies oversell.

Unlike most other Securom games listed on Steam, Battlefield Bad Company 2 didn't list its usage on the game info box to the right, but in the middle of a lengthy disclaimer below the description. Learning about this 18 hours before the release I immediately opened a ticket to request a full refund of my preorder, which I had paid for over a month in advance.

Why is this? I remember EA dropping Securom for their Steam releases after the backlash from Spore. Why? It was my most anticipated game this year. Now my only exposure will be a Gamefly rental of the inferior Xbox 360 version. Inferior because of my superior PC specs, and the addition of 8 extra players per map.  How I miss the 64 player games of old. The hours I wasted on Battlefield 1942, Vietnam and 2 were some of my best gaming memories ever.

Isn't Steam in itself enough DRM? I have to log into Steam and also use my Steam issued CD key in order to play online. Why? Why? Why? Just take my money and let me play in peace. In a couple months when Gamefly actually has the game in stock to ship my way I will be cursing at the controller, because the guy just infront of me... turned after getting pierced by my gun... only to end one of my many lives... because the wrist is mightier than the thumb.

In just 2 days, I hacked together the administrative portion of my projects site (a lot of copy/paste). It works but not as elegant as it should be (I wanted everything to be ajax based), but all the features I need are there. I can attach downloads, silverlight applications, images and video to my updates. It is also trivial for me to add additional types. Wondering what the first project should be. Maybe something simple to get the ball rolling. Oh no I got Heavy Rain (PS3) in the mail...

This past week I have made a lot of progress working on the administrative portion of the site. Going through periods with a lack of motivation seems to be the norm for me. At last I can add and edit stories and videos without directly accessing SQL tables, yea! I still think it was a good idea to scrap what I had and jumped on the ASP.NET MVC bandwagon, my code is much cleaner as a result. I once heard that a good programming solution requires 2 complete rewrites, so one more to go. Maybe WCF RIA? The administrative portion of my projects site has yet to be started, which explains the lack of updates.

I expect updates more frequently from now on, not that I even advertise this site. So down the black hole of the internets this goes with the rest of my posts :)

Still haven't played Modern Warfare 2 and my Xbox dies playing Forza 3. If I remember correctly, the last one died playing Forza 2. Hmm. Anyway, video shows what happens when I turn it on. Sent it out today, had to pay $100 because it was over 3 years since I purchased it. Great timing.

What is with otherwise awesome titles having game breaking problems at launch. Yes, I'm looking at you Castle Crashers and 'Splosion Man. Sure there were demos for these, but unfortunately internet multiplayer is not a feature of the trial versions. And what is with the month long testing by Microsoft? I could tell these games were broken from 10 minutes of play. Forums are also filled with unhappy gamers alike displaying their levels of disappointment with having to wait forever for fixes to be implemented. Castle Crashers' was patched nearly 4 months after launch! 'Splosion Man is going a month and a half strong.

If you weren't there for Castle Crashers' launch, the game suffered from constant disconnections when played over the internet. 'Splosion Man has major sync problems, with characters appearing up to 5 seconds behind their current position. Try pressing a button at the same time as your coop buddy when this happens.

With the launch of Battlefield 1943, EA gained a lot of respect from me when their launch problems quickly disappeared in about 3-4 days. Unlike the other mentioned games, this was mainly a capacity problem, so adding servers was enough to erase the underestimate of day 1 sales. This is understandable since there was no preorder data to go by.

Because of the long wait, I was never able to get back into Castle Crashers. I hope by the time they fix the issues in 'Splosion Man I'm still interested in doing some 4 player action. After this, I'm certainly going to hold off on games until they are proven by the community.

Because I like ASP.NET MVC so much I am rewriting the entire website. Bye Web Forms. I was actually in process of redoing the Projects section to make it easier for me to attach files/media, so it will be rolled into this update.

I was an old time ASP.NET 2.0 customer and I recently upgraded my account to IIS7. I tried to get the default MVC project working but it failed with this error:

The view 'Index' or its master could not be found. The following locations were searched:
[Error trimmed]

It seems that no one else was having these errors. I also remember trying to write a custom file handler and could not get the web server to use it. I checked numerous times that the application root was set to integrated (instead of classic). As a last effort, I switched the setting to classic and it worked. But since the links do not have the aspx extension I got the 404 error if I clicked them. I switched back to integrated and everything worked. I'm not sure if this was a byproduct of the upgrade to IIS7 (to keep projects as compatible as possible). Let me know if this works for you.

So this morning I was getting in my car to get to work and I saw the funniest thing. A dog ran at full speed past my house, then a man with a leech in his hand, then another dog, then an SUV with its door open. I eventually caught up with the SUV, which had now pulled over to the side of the road and this was the image I saw. One dog and the man at the side of the lake looking in. They were looking towards a few ducks swimming in a pack, then I noticed something. The dog's head sticking out of the water just behind the school of ducks. I wish I had enough time to watch and see what would have happened, you know, just trying to help. That made my day.

Yes kids, before your time we didn't have this automatic health regeneration stuff. The whole purpose of the game was not to get shot, at all. Now you just run into a room guns blazing, then you rest for 5 seconds to heal your wounds like Wolverine. But back in the Contra days, bullets could be dodged, like the hero had permanent bullet time. So this type of gameplay seemed fair (yes, Contra didn't have health packs). Resistance does a regeneration/health pack hybrid that can be frustrating on the harder difficulty levels.

There are 4 levels of health, regeneration only takes you to the top of that level. Each health pack takes you back up one level. Not so bad? It is. Even on normal difficulty it only takes a few shots to remove 2-3 levels of health. Then you are back to playing hide and seek, taking one shot before waiting 5-6 seconds to recharge. The sequel actually abandoned this for the Gears of War style red screen when you are hurt, which made it a much more enjoyable game to play.

Maybe today's gamers are spoiled, but I don't miss heath packs either. I even returned Prince of Persia because there was too much backtracking to collect orbs, but that is for another article. Easy to learn, hard to master. Do it the Nintendo way.

For some odd reason whenever I try to play a video in Windows 7 RC, WMP would open to a very tiny window. In previous versions, it would remember the size of the last time the program was closed, but this was not working. By accident I found that resizing the window while playing an MP3 would cause it to remember the dimensions. So in summary:

1. Open MP3 file.
2. Resize window.
3. Close.
   

I washed my zune in my pants. I tried my best to get it dry before turning it on, but in the end had to bury it. The good news is that I got another (blue 8 gig).

I added a now playing silverlight app you should see on the left column. I also improved the look of my video player which I actually like now. Also added full screen mode, still need to add seeking. So much to do!

So I rented Project Gotham Racing 4 to get my speed fix on, but I was surprised by the number of races that required me to slide around the track. Yes, they stop the time whenever you drift or do other stunts, and it is impossible to win without doing this on the straights. Yes you must drive slower to win. Forza didn't hold me longterm because the lack of tracks making the races too similar. Gran Turismo is still months (years?) away. Competition should be intense in this genre, Gran Turismo 4 sold over 10 million copies. Noone wants a piece of the action? I guess developmental costs are way above other games since hundreds of cars need to be licensed and modeled. They must pay a large legal team to oversee these deals. I wonder if lawyers in Japan make as much as they do in the US. Hmm. I hope the next game they ship to me is Resident Evil 5, I needs me some coop action.

In trying to test whether Battlefield 2 would eat up my 8 gig system (I think the game itself can only use 2gigs since it is 32 bit), I found out that Punkbuster would not work on Windows 7 beta. And they will not support it until it is released to the public, blah.

Here's what happens. I join a server (usually infantry only), and start to do some major ownage. Right as I am about to own some uber noob the server kicks me with this error message 'unknown api function.' Tried everything, even running as admin (which I did by default).

On a related topic, I just got my Battlefield Heroes beta key Woot! If the gameplay is too fast I will be disappoint (sic).