Back Home & Max 9 Arrives!

I have actually been back from Ohio since late Tuesday evening. The trip was fun and very productive overall (2 days of business meetings plotting out the next year, which include 3 new games), but I have to admit that it's nice to be home.

I have spent the past few days doing some back end management stuff with Adrian, plotting the next game that will be wrapped up soon, as well as give my input on all the killer new features that we are putting into the Lore Sequel (the features are already developed, they just need to be integrated). The Xbox 360 also got some love with the addition of Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, Oblivion and Lego Star Wars 2 to the list of game.

As an added bonus, one of my copies of 3DS Max 9 arrived (thanks Autodesk team for sending this over so quick) as well. I have been working with Max 9 for a while now and I honestly have to say this build rules! It doesn't look strong when you view a features list overview, but just ignore that, sit down with the application and tear around it for a bit, you will not be disappointed by the changes that have been made (all of which make you an even more productive 3D artist).

The only negative thing of this past week has been the need to rebuild this Pentium 3 machine that I use for junk collection (ie. internet & email). I just now have it back up to a normal state and I think its pretty stable after rolling back my ATI Catalyst drivers to version 5.1 for this Radeon VE graphics card that runs in the machine.

Is SGI The New Intergraph?

Hot off the presses today is word that SGI plans to sue ATI over potential patent infringements with regards to the way that ATI's Radeon brand of graphics cards work(Links).

Normally I don't care about patent infringement since companies are always suing one another all the time over this type of crap. What intreges me however about this particular instance is that SGI for all intents and purposes is a dead company that's lasting on life support. Most of their revenue today has come from selling what little assets they still own, for example a few years back they sold Alias (a graphics company that hand in hand helped sell workstations for SGI before PCs became powerful and capable enough to rivle what SGI offered) for about 80 million dollars, back when the Xbox came out they sold a bunch of OpenGL patents to Microsoft for about 20 million (most of this was due to nVidia fucking the pooch and not realizing that they couldn't transfer a bunch of pantents SGI licensed to them). What this has left SGI with is a server and workstation market and a barrel full of patents (most of them relating to graphics and graphics hardware), so when the going gets tough and you need to boost your bottom line, what do you do? Option 1 is to sell more patents and Option 2 is to sue the hell out of everyone to get revenue from patents.

What is particularily interesting is the parallels SGIs current path has to an old PC vendor known as Intergraph. Like SGI, Intergraph also made workstations but they were PC based. In the few years that Intergraph sold machines they developed a plethora of patents for hardware design, but when the going got tough they got out of the hardware sales market, downsized the company and are now for all intents and purposes a holding company that sues the crap out of anyone that they feel infringes on their patents (you can find numerous articles of this if you like). Its sad to see a previous market and industry leader go down in flames, but its even more sad to see them following the Intergraph route.

Finally in Ohio

I finally arrived in Ohio, only a mere 16 hours later than I had intended to. Apparently the weather over Chicago O'hare airport (which most people tell me is one of the worst in the world) wasn't too great so it caused a delay in the landing and a delay in the departure of the planes.

To make matters worse this delay meant that most of the flight crews couldn't do all their trips yesterday. The result of which is after delaying my flight for 3.5 hours, United proceeded to cancel it outright till the next day. Sadly since United blamed the FAA (flight crews can only work so many hours so that fatigue doesn't affect their work), United did not feel as though they needed to give out any comps (ie. rooms, food, etc.) to accomodate all the passengers that were delayed by this.

Yours truely ended up crashing on a bench by my gate in the Airport all evening before catching the next flight to Ohio. Sadly although I arrived, my baggage hasn't, its still at O'hare, ETA unknown (ARGGGG, this is just like E3 2004 all over again).

Off to Ohio

In a few minutes I am off to Ohio for about a week to meet with the Max Gaming team of Adrian, Ed, Tim and Sebastien to talk about our goals for the next couple of years, zero in our next project ("Metal Carnage") into our scopes and do some general team building.

As for why Ohio? Well we had originally planned to do this down in Eugene, Oregon during IndieGamesCon (like we have done for the past few years now) but unfortunately GarageGames somewhat dropped the ball on that one due to various things and well the show didn't take place (sorry but that not-IGC thing is a sick, sick joke).

I still have access to my email while I am down there (and my World of Warcrack account too), so feel free to drop me a line still if you need to get in contact with me.

Battlefield WTF

So in case you missed the big news, EA plans on delivering in-game advertising of various products into their forthcoming product Battlefield 2142. Apparently the game will know which products to show you by installing some spyware on your system to watch your browser history and computer usage.

What the Fuck!

So not only do you make EA a nice profit off buying the $60 game, but we also get to further line the coffers of a multi-billion dollar company by allowing them to profit off of each ad impression that we get delivered to us in-game while playing. What a great deal! EA has you bent over the table already paying $60 for their game, they might as well go in for another round or two on your ass while you are still bent over.

Honestly this is just sick and unless they are going to give the game away for free (as FunCom has done with Anarchy Online, where you can play the full version for free, but suffer through in-game ads) there is simply no justification for in-game advertisements in a major mainstream product as Battlefield 2142. Especially not when the publisher will make a few hundred million already off of the initial sales to begin with.

I guess I shouldn't be too hard on EA though, after all they are the company that devised the yearly release strategy for game, recycling the same old crap from last year with a smidge of new content and sell it to us as a whole new product. So this whole strategy of theirs profiting off of games who legitmatitely spent their hard earned cash to buy this game via in-game advertising is nothing really shocking. Just sickening that a healthy multi-billion dollar company needs to resort to cheeseball tactics like this to make an even bigger profit to satisfy their greed and executive bonuses (because you god dammed know the hard working developers who make the games for EA won't make shit).

So Long Norton AV!

Norton Anti-Virus has long been a thorn in my side. Its invasive, scan the fuck out of everything it sees, eat up memory, flag apps as viruses when they aren't, fight with my Autodesk copy protection system (cDilla) so that it fails and kill my systems performance operations were annoying enough, but now that my 1 year access is over and done with, its now decided to nag the fuck out of me in an attempt to squeeze more money out of me for this useless application.

Like a crack dealer trying to push his wares down onto the addicted, Norton AntiVirus popup reminders always come the most inopportune time (ie. Last night playing WoW while I was tanking the Baron for my group, it popped up and the delay that it caused resulted in my death and the near wipe of the group). Seriously I want to know who the hell was the crack monkey that decided that instead of popping up this warning when the PC loads, that hey should wait a random number of minutes and then nag the fuck out of you while you are doing your work or playing games.

I fully understand that I am paying for the knowledge that in theory my PC is protected from malicious shit, provided that Norton isn't weeks behind on ensuring that the latest virus definitions are up to date to whats out there in the wild (which they usually aren't). But c'mon, you honestly cannot tell me that Norton and McAfee haven't turned this into a profitable racket, so much so that they are bitching and whining about Microsoft actually wanting to overprotect Vista.

Sorry Norton, but I have had enough of your shit. Your Anti Virus is off of my system and I have switched to a better alternative, AVG.

Added My Xbox Live Gamer Profile

As you can see I have added my Xbox Live gamer profile to the screen. My almighty 5 points that I have accumulated thus far reflects a serious lack of time I have had to play too many games (plus creating a whole new profile that I can use on Live).

Finally got the Xbox 360

After waiting almost 10 months for this long overdue Christmas gift (for various reasons, most of them relating to expensive car repairs) I finally got to go out and get my Xbox 360 console yesterday!

WalMart Canada has a special anniversary sale going on this week and because of that they put the Xbox 360 premium bundle (Xbox 360 unit, 20gb hard drive, wireless controller, PGR 3 and NHL 2K7, 1250 Live points and 3 months Gold access) at $50 off, bringing the price down to $450.00.

I haven't had too much time to play with the console just yet but I will get my Live Gamer Profile going sometime soon.

Open Season - In Imax 3D!

My wife and I took in the new animated flick "Open Season" this weekend at the ultimate in big screens : IMax! Aside from the in your face screen and incredible sound, the IMax threatres also offered the bonus of seeing the whole film in 3D (which I must say is a first for me).

Overall I was pretty floored by the whole experiance, which is saying a lot because usually I am pretty picky about this medium since it's right up my alley. Open Season is an excellent film that reminds me a lot of the classic Disney movies with their unique and charming art styles and presentations and simple and yet complex stories that can be enjoyed by both children and adults alike. I definately recommend checking it out.