Wed - July 11, 2007

LWC


LWC development begins

Development has started on the next evolution of our weather software - this time we're playing with real weather stations, the end result of which will be Lightsoft Weather Centre.

I will be writing about the development on our forums - see the LWC Development Blog on the Lightsoft forums for details.

Posted at 09:36 PM    

Sun - January 15, 2006

Zex


A little history of Zex and some of the inner workings of Lightsoft

Music du jour: Camel

Zex is finally in public beta! And no-one is more surprised than me!

Ian, Rob, Claire and more latterly Tony and George have all put in some tremendous work to get it to this stage (not to mention other friends and family that have been supportive over the years). Did I say years? Yup, here's the story... (with thanks to Rob for some dates).

Work on Zex started back in '98. I was pretty much working on it full time (I was full time at Lightsoft at that time) and Rob was looking at getting it going on his 280c (he was stuck in a hotel for a couple of weeks). As we moved into '99 Ian and Rob also started working on the main code set. I continued on it pretty much full time until July '99 when I had to go get a real job (we don't do Lightsoft full time these days).

By December '99 it was pretty much complete (we thought at the time anyway - ha!) but I also had to change jobs and move locations whereupon Zex sat on a disk collecting dust (Rob will correct me if I'm wrong on the dates here).

Now the way we work here at Lightsoft is one person will be the lead and does the majority of the game code and the other guy develops all the support stuff, porting, OS interface, file stuff etc - in a game you really can't have two designers. Now Rob and myself have been working together for a long time and we know each other pretty well - for instance the other day Rob said he'd added an animated cursor to Zex and I thought "Oh God, some kind of Jet Set Willy rainbow colours; I'll have to change it to a nice blue throbbing arrow". When I checked it out, what did I find? A nice blue throbbing arrow.

Anyway, yes, at Lightsoft we always have a lead and the other guy gets to do all the other fun bits and we pull in other people as we can. For instance on Z-Dungeon (can I mention that Rob?) Rob is the lead - it's his design; I just code up whatever he needs at the right time - for instance last year I did the sound and the font system which was genuine fun. Being NOT the lead at Lightsoft is fun. Being the lead is work :(

Anyway if we move forward from '99 to about April 2005. We thought it might be an idea to dig out the old Zex code to see how much work it'd need to get it running on OS X (it was written in the OS 7/8 days). Rob took it and within a few weeks it was running native (with an added bonus I'll come to in a bit). That was pretty much it; we started developing it as a primary project.

Thus this current development cycle has run from April 2005 to Jan 2006 - about 10 months to beta 1 - and we thought it was pretty much finished back in April! We've adopted the CVSTrac bug ticketing scheme which has worked really well for us. With this, at any time day or night we can go in, view the high priority tickets and tick them off when fixed, whereupon they vanish from the report.

SDL is used to provide a layer between the OS and the game itself, one of the offshoots of this was that it'd make it easier to run on Window's. As we had to do the Intel 'port' for the Mac anyway (and this is the added bonus I mentioned above) Rob quickly came up with a make file for GCC to give a Window's build which I'm pleased to report runs just fine. It hasn't had any testing though, which is why it's just the Mac build that's in Beta.

And there we are - finally Zex gets its day as a public beta. Hopefully we won't have too many problems in beta - we're looking for bugs obviously but would like feedback on the game-play as well; we can probably expect some tuning for the next beta.

Either way, I'd just like to show my appreciation for Claire (who managed to get the ships items graphics finished in the last few weeks even with the demands of 8 month old Emily), Ian (did the control panel and radar graphics), Tony and George (dev testers) and Jess for the web pages.

It has been an incredibly hard few weeks for us here, but we hope you enjoy the game and we look forward to your feedback.

Posted at 12:49 AM    

Tue - January 10, 2006

Zex update


A little bit of nostalgia on my part.

Last night we produced version 0.98.1 of Zex - this we hope is our final internal alpha release. On Friday Rob and myself will decide whether to go into beta this weekend or whether it needs to cook for a little longer.

Anyway, I realised tonight that this is rather an historic occasion!

Very few people are going to understand this, but Fantasm was an assembler put together to build our 3D engine on the Mac (at the time only MPW was available and it cost a $1000). Fantasm was called Fantasm because it was the 'FANtasy' ASeMbler. Fantasy was our 3d engine (written originally on the Atari ST™ in 68K with HiSoft's Devpac™).

And it's just dawned on me that Zex is the first thing ever to get completed using many parts of the original Fantasy engine - check out the following header from FPOLY4.cpp

/***********************************************************************
* FANTASY POLYGON DRAWER
* VERSION: M003.004
* PROGRAMMER: ROBERT PROBIN
* LAST MODIFIED: 29/10/98
* PREVIOUS LAST MODIFIED: 26/09/94
* UPDATES:
* V10: FROM ROB AS PLANE PRINT DATE 3/4/92
* M001.000 MODIFIED BY S.B. TO INTERFACE WITH PAINTIT.
* NEEDS I/P ARRAY AS X/Y.W IN DRAW_XY, WITH COORD COUNT IN
* NUMBER_LINES AND THE COLOUR OF THE POLY IN POLY_COL.
* M001.001 MODIFIED CLIPPING TO WORK OF POLY ABOVE SCREEN, OR POLY
* ONLY 1 LINE HIGH.
* M003.003 Turboing again, after the massive window clipping thing.
* SUMMARY: A lot of changes, mainly to do with the way the
* line drawer works. See notes below.
* 4th Dec 93 RP

Yes folks, we are about to publish a game with code dating back to 1992 in it! (This probably means me and Rob have been working together since at least '92 - and I thought it was '94!)

Anyway, there's a little tear in my eye tonight as I toddle off to bed.

(For the interested one of the first objects ever rendered by Fantasy was a Windmill)

Posted at 01:30 AM    

Thu - January 5, 2006

OSXi is coming?


When Apple posted the Airport firmware update yesterday, it was as a Universal Binary

Now forgive me if I'm wrong here (and please do correct me) but is this the first time we've seen any publicly posted code from Apple as a universal binary?

Is this important and if so, why?
Yes, it's important. One of the changes between Intel 10.4.1 and 10.4.3 was some kernel threading structures changed, thus making most 10.4.1 Intel binaries incompatible. Lots of people put this down to Apple 'locking out' old binaries. Nonsense, this is just normal development.

Apple are now sufficiently confident to post binaries meaning they are happy the OS is at least as stable as far as core structures go, and, maybe, even happy the OS is final.

Taking that line a little further, maybe they've been forced to post the updater because the OS has already been pressed and installed on machines?

Or maybe they just mandated that everything from a certain date would be posted as a universal binary?

I don't know, but it's very probably the strongest indicator yet that Intel machines are just days away...

Oh, and did notice it was a security update? This lends a little more credence in my mind that the OS is already installed on machines.

Posted at 11:19 PM    

Drive update


Raptor works!

I am knackered! Was up 'till 3 this morning working; really can't do anything tonight apart from a blog entry...

Well, Tuesday morning found me back up East Kilbride with the second dead Raptor. The guys at Maplin gave me a refund no problems then I haired it across to Glasgow. Parking was a nightmare - 2.5 hours to get parked! Anyway, into Maplin, plonked down the dosh and got my third Raptor. Back home and ran the quick test - IT ALL PASSED! Thank you God! Ran the full sector check - all passed. Hurrah!

Right, boot back into OS X and CCC my boot drive across - no problems. Reboot. Reasonable amount of time passes then my desktop appears. Slight dissapointment; thought it might be a bit faster than that :( Then it dawned on me that all the caches had been deleted. OK, reboot.

'Grunt'... pause... 'grunt' and there's my desktop - boy when they said this drive was fast they weren't kidding. I rebooted again. And again, And again. All in I rebooted ten times just to see the speed of it. Very impressed. I'll never buy another 7200RPM hard drive again.

But of course on the very day I actually get a serviceable one, what do they do? Only release a new version double the size! Bugger.



Posted at 09:33 PM    

Mon - January 2, 2006

My First Ever Missed Release


Or how Maplin's couriers conspired to prevent the release of Zex Beta 1

Right about now I should be writing up the release of Zex public beta 1 on Version Tracker. But I'm not.

"Why's that Stu?"

I'll tell you why not dear reader.....

Last night we were looking pretty good for the release; final graphics were coming together, internal test was underway (we'd done an alpha over the weekend), the web site was functional, the manual presentable; we had some testing to do and it'd be good to go.

I'd got some money for Christmas ("Holidays" if you're American) and promised myself a nice new Western Digital Raptor disk drive. I thought I'd do all the release stuff on the new, speedy, ultra sexy (IMO) hard drive. According to all reports (and my own experience) this drive isn't to be sniffed at. And Maplin had a New Year's sale on; they'd knocked 40 quid off the price bringing it down to an almost swallow-able £139 (it's about £124 mail order).

So, crack of dawn today (that's 10AM ish for us coders) I shot up to Maplin in East Kilbride, money and Maplin Newsletter vouchers in hand. Rushed in (only a little bit dramatically - I was on a tight one; I'd spoke to Rob about quarter to 10, told him I was getting the new drive and we'd tie up the release stuff in the P.M.), asked if their sale prices applied to the stores as well as the web; was told it depends, so I blurted out "A21CY" - the guy goes type.. type... type.... and then says "Yes, 139 quid.". Woot. "I'll take it. Ta. Can I use my voucher for it? ". "What voucher?" "Well it's this number 'er" "Where's that from?" "Your newsletter - sign up; you spam me; and I get money off vouchers...." "Hmmm, I'll try it." type.. type... type.... "It's not recognised?" "OK, fuggedaboutit, just give me the drive."

And off I toddled with my Raptor. It's black, it's sexy and it's even got, like, heatsinky fins on it! Excitement city.

Back home, plug it in, boot up and CCC my boot drive across. After about 5 minutes I noticed CCC seemed to be doing nothing. Strange. Reboot and try again. Same. Not good. OK, lets try some diagnostics - natch Windoze only (thank you WD). So, install XP on an old 10 Gig gig that's been around since Fred Flintstone was a lad.

(2 hours later).

OK, try the diagnostics - hmmm, "Quick Test" looks good. I run the quick test.

"FAILED - S.M.A.R.T. status failed to be read."

SHITE!

OK, "Long Test".

Looks better, starts writing and reading sectors - good! Maybe I can just map a few out. Not totally satis but it'd do for now.

"FAILED - S.M.A.R.T. status failed to be read." WTFF?

Bugger.

Drive back in box and Bess and me hair it back to E.K. double quick time (sorry to the guy in the Rover in my blind spot on the roundabout just off J6 of the M.74 - but don't try to overtake on the inside!). Anyway, back into Maplin - rather tedious conversation about how the guy there thought it was their couriers faul deleted - back in the car and home again.

Unwrap second drive, plug it in, straight in to windoze this time. Format the effing thing just to be doubly sure.

And again "Quick Test" from the WD diagnostics.

"FAILED - couldn't read a sector - status 7."

Sheer and absolute bewilderment.

(Although, when the guy told me he thought it was their couriers fault I did wonder....)

Turns out this one has been well bounced - the first few thousand sectors are hairy at best and zeroing seems to be recovering them over multiple passes, but 'round about sector 65000000 there's just nothing for quite a few cylinders which is obviously not repairable.


And so here I am now; it's just gone eleven at night and rather than reveling in the glory of yet another successful release I'm crying into my blog. And of course it means I have to get up before the crack of dawn tomorrow to make it up to Maplin by 9. And I know they haven't got any left, so gonna need a refund and then see if I can find another one.


'Triffic.

(Note: In amongst all of today's angst, I did get to boot off of the first one and it is very fast. Maybe tomorrow I'll get one that works for real).

Posted at 10:47 PM    

Wed - December 28, 2005

Wot's 'appening then?



It's been a while since my last Stuchat - 1999 as a matter of fact. I tend not to post unless we're doing something new. And we are coming up to a New Year, and traditionally we tend to have new stuff ready for a New Year - in 2004 it was Kairos (now deceased). And in 2005 it was Home Weather Center.

Well, this New Year we have a quick maintenance update to Home Weather Center (which should be out shortly; an update for the Wunderground Personal Weather Stations decoder). How exciting is that!?!? Hey, we like to deliver here.

Not very exciting? Oh, OK, how about if I mention..... the 'Z' word?

Long time Lightsoft watchers may know what this means; it all goes back to about 1999 (again, strangely) but that's all I can say for now.... more will follow shortly if all goes to plan.

Slog out.



Posted at 05:58 PM    

Rather bland test entry



Just a test; nothing happening here yet.

Posted at 05:30 PM    

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