8 October 2011
Massively on "MMObility: The rise of the browser"
I like this article's argument that the browser will dominate as the MMO game distribution platform of the future. I like it, but I don't know if I agree with it. The browser game business is booming, but so is the mobile app business. No surprise that the two are growing in parallel. And I think that's the point the article misses. Devices are changing, and so are the methods of delivery. Maybe the browser completely wins out, or maybe it just wins some piece of the pie. Only time will tell.
25 September 2011
Glitch Developers Site
Glitch is a great browser-based 2D platformer MMO I've been watching closely, and playing in both alpha and beta as time has allowed. One of the things I like about Glitch's approach is to blend MMO gameplay with things that I love about the web. For example, there is a web resource (URL) for every object in the game. Now Glitch takes it a step further by publishing an API and a full developer site with iOS and Android SDKs. This is an MMO inviting mashups of its game. Pretty cool stuff. Actually makes me want to play the game even more.
15 August 2011
Check Out The Raid Documentary
This weekend I watched The Raid. It's a documentary about a raid group in World of Warcraft. Now for some, this alone is enough to draw you in. I can see some of you, though, need more convincing.
Read the rest of this post | Add a comment
6 July 2011
Corey Goldberg: Taking Browser Screenshots With No Display
I've drunk the Selenium2/WebDriver kool-aid since the week I spent at Velocity Conf. The stability compared to the Selenium1/Windmill approach is reason enough, but I especially like the Python bindings. This short post shows some of the power and flexibility of the web driver bindings, and demonstrates taking screenshots via the virtual display.
5 July 2011
Chop: Paste code snippets, add notes. Send to nerds.
I found out about this great little pastebin tool from an internal Launchpad mailing list. It really is an awesome tool. The coolest bit is that you can do inline comments on pastes. All in all, a very nice social code snippet sharing tool.
24 June 2011
Looking back at last week's Velocity Conference
I spent last week at O'Reilly's Velocity Conference. This was my first year to attend Velocity, and I was there as part of a group of us from Canonical's Core Dev Ops group. The conference is about all things web performance and web operations and since the Core Dev Ops group at Canonical deals in these areas, it made sense for some of us to attend. Also, we on the Launchpad team have been doing a lot of work to bring Launchpad development forward in terms of performance and operations -- making Launchpad faster, continuous deployment, etc. -- so I was curious about how the work we're doing fits into the larger performance/ops culture.
Rather than go talk by talk through the highlights of the conference, I'll mention the things that consistently struck me as I sat through all the plenaries and sessions, as I got to know other attendees over lunch and after hours.
Read the rest of this post | Add a comment
20 June 2011
O'Reilly Radar: The iPhone, the Angry Bird and the Pink Elephant
I like the idea of the race to the bottom that the iOS app store is creating. This article explains that well and also explains why this might be bad for the mobile app store craze currently underway.
15 June 2011
Don't Play Games With Me! Promises and Pitfalls of Gameful Design
I love this set of slides. Beautiful, inspiring, and a really nice look into the pros and cons of everything going gameful on the web. These slides are easy to follow on their own and are packed with great thinking and research on how (and how not) to make user interactions better with gameful design.
7 June 2011
Hands On: With Wii U’s Touchscreen Controller, Nintendo Could Radically Change Games | GameLife |
Nintendo's new high-end graphics game console and controller Wii U has caught my attention. I love the idea of toggling from display on the TV to controller. And Batman Arkham City in this environment sounds amazing. I'm sensing another game console joining the over-crowded game cabinet at my house in 2012.
23 May 2011
Doing My Maintenance Rotation Lately
I just finished a call with Curtis to figure out how to fix these pesky ShortListTooBig errors that crop up from time to time (like bug 680131). When I finished the call, I had that "a ha!" moment where I thought, "yes! this is why I like the new squad system in Launchpad!"
Read the rest of this post | Add a comment
19 May 2011
Superhero Hype: Grant Revealed in X-Men Destiny
I just tweeted that X-Men Destiny looks great. It was a link to this passing across my screen that caused that reaction. I really like the idea of a true character-progression driven X-Men game. If the graphics and mechanics are good, I could see this being a great game.
17 May 2011
FavBrowser.com: WebGL running iOS RAGE
This is an impressive demo getting the iOS app RAGE running in a browser via WebGL. Be sure to click through and watch the video. It's impressive and also goes into some of the limitations of WebGL's texture rendering and particle handling.
Cory Doctorow: My new Ubuntu-flavoured ThinkPad is computing heaven
Cory Doctorow has glowing praise for Ubuntu on a Lenovo ThinkPad X220, which he describes as "undramatic, yet graceful."
16 May 2011
FunctionSource: WebGL Inspector; The rich debugger you need for WebGL
Pretty cool looking Firebug-like tool for debugging WebGL. I shall have to take a closer look at this soon.
4 May 2011
Kottke on Why Stan Lee is the Shakespeare of the 20th century
Kottke draws attention to the similarities between Shakespeare and Stan Lee via comments from Thor director Kenneth Branagh. I was a fan of Thor growing up, especially Walt Simonson's work, but I was skeptical about this movie at first. Only because it's the sort of concept that's so easy to mess up. The more I hear like this, though, the more I really, really, really want to see this film come Friday.
29 April 2011
Massively on: Marvel Universe Online will be free-to-play, penned by Bendis
Massively has a great overview of the news from Marvel and Secret Identity Studios' live stream announcements last night concerning the new Marvel Universe MMO. I am very excited about this game. I've made no secret of my love for DCUO, but I was always a Marvel kid growing up, except for my mad Batman love. Just get my folks to cough up those long buried pics of me in superhero costumes as a kid and you'll see where my fan loyalty lies.
I'm glad to see the folks at Secret ID are trying to differentiate themselves from the superhero MMO crowd with F2P and playing as the iconic heroes themselves. Sure, I'm curious as others are about how this will work, but as Jeff Lind notes in the interview, either choice -- play as iconic heroes or as your own -- leaves questions and game design issues. But I'm glad to see someone doing a hero MMO and tackling this side for once. I guess my love for Marvel makes me more excited about playing as the heroes, too.
27 April 2011
PS blog on: Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity
All the cries of "when is PSN gonna be back up" have died down in this cold light of lost user info. Sony is still being extremely ambiguous about whether or not credit card info was gained. And it looks as if we'll be another week without networked PS3 games like DCUO.
4 April 2011
Kyle Neath on Product design at GitHub
This is a great piece on how product is developed at GitHub. A nice quote: "We only hire smart people we trust to make our product better. We don't have managers dictating what to work on." Couple that with: "Aren't you hiring smart people who use your product? [...] Doesn't everyone at your company want to make your product better?" and I think you have a bit of the GitHub secret sauce.
21 March 2011
Shantanu's Technophilic Musings on Making Kinect Work With PS3
Pretty cool to see a PS3 hooked up to a Kinect sensor. I've never been one to hack on my gaming devices, but being that I have so many now, this makes me want to cross-combine them in interesting ways like this. Maybe one day. (Via Slashdot.)
18 March 2011
Finally Got a Windmill Hang
I got my first Windmill hang using the for loop test runs I mentioned yesterday. I also managed to get another one this morning. Both seem to indicate the same thing -- we're getting stuck waiting inside client.open calls. Looks to be something smelly in Windmill's JSONRPCTransport.request call. (btw, doesn't that class name frighten you! It should!)
Read the rest of this post | Add a comment
17 March 2011
Windmill Never Hangs When You Want It To
I've been making slow progress on getting our Windmill tests re-enabled on Launchpad. We've got a lot of people digging into JavaScript on Launchpad now, which is nice, but we have relatively few JavaScript experts on Launchpad, so I've been fielding a fair amount of questions lately on good JavaScript patterns, YUI 3, testing, and especially on how to divide testing between YUI tests and Windmill. I'm thrilled about these interruptions, don't get me wrong. It means more of us are becoming proficient with JavaScript hacking in Launchpad. We're also getting close to finishing our first feature on my squad. So yesterday was largely voice calls and IRC chats. The queue to speak to me was longer than than the PvP arena queue in DC Universe Online.
Read the rest of this post | Add a comment
