You never know what you’re going to find on the internet. I was searching for screenshots of games I worked on and I found someone has played through Robocop Vs Terminator, an NES game I wrote that was never released. It actually looks better than I remember it.
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Or, doing things “on your own time”. First let me make it clear “I AM NOT A LAWYER”. But…my understanding of the law in California is that if you create something related to the business of the company you work for, EVEN ON YOUR OWN TIME, it belongs to the company, not you. That may sound shocking to you. Let me try to explain why it’s probably got to be that way. Several years ago I wrote a TGA Thumbnail plugin for Windows 2000 / XP. I skipped having a Vista machine and just recently upgraded to Windows7 64bit. I thought that now that I finally have a 64bit machine to do development on I’d try upgrading the plugin to work there. I started researching how to do it and found out Microsoft added this subsystem they call the Windows Imaging Component. It basically lets developers make plugins to both read and / or write any image format, plug it into Windows and then any app which uses that system can start loading and/or saving those formats. The cool thing is Vista and Windows7 use it for both thumbnails AND for viewing images. Is there a best design for an API? I don’t know but I do have my own guidelines for good vs bad design. One guideline I try to follow is that it’s good to design an API to make it hard to use incorrectly. Here’s a couple of examples I’ve run into recently. If you are using Perforce (p4), sometimes you need a way to reconcile a folder. Both P4WIN and P4V have this feature to some degree. The command line p4 does not so here’s a small program to do just that. This is the story of how I spent $345 for a video game, Space Channel 5 part 2. I suppose technically this isn’t the first O3D game since there are a few in our samples but this is the first O3D game created by a 3d party. I gave a presentation at Google I/O about O3D. In it I show getting started creating a small game in about 20 minutes. (the sound cuts out for 30 seconds at 16:48) You want to know what I’ve been working on for the last year? This is it! You can learn the details and try some of the demos at http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/ I think it’s incredibly awesome but then I’m bias. For me what makes it awesome: I skimmed this post on Brainy Gamer about Little Big Planet and Creativity. That and some of JC Barnett’s comments got me thinking, …. As amazingly cool as LBP’s level editing is, does anyone except game creators and game creator wannabes care? |
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Everything here is © me except those things which are not. |
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