Blog

  • Any C# Game Developers North of Boston?

    January 3, 2008

    I’ve been slugging it out with C# and Managed DirectX for the past couple of months, and haven’t made as much progress as I’d like. My conclusion: I need people to jam with to develop momentum. I am pretty much building my development process up from scratch, as it’s been years since I’ve done this full time, and I miss having other people to talk to about technology, game design, and interactive ass-kicking.

    There possibly is a group already meeting that does this; I should check out the long-running Boston Post Mortem again, our local area game developer social group to see what’s going on. I figure there’s got to be a few people in Southern New Hampshire / Metro Boston North–and it only really takes a few–who are motivated and skilled enough to tackle some game development topics and develop best practices. The ideal candidate already knows one of the following so they can bring some skill to the table:

    • C# / Microsoft Programming Environments
    • Game Development, especially tool chains and workflow
    • Object Oriented Programming
    • DirectX 9 / Win32 Programming

    I used to work in the game industry, so I know something of the second topic though it’s pretty out of date. I’m a decent-though-workmanlike programmer, something of a architectural purist that’s learned to make concessions to just getting things done. I love documenting APIs for some reason. And I dig algorithms, version control tools, debugging, and Joel on Software.

    If you’re interested in forming a local study group, let me know and let’s get together. If long distance is workable through online collaboration tools, then we can try that too. This is related to my main project for 2008 to develop a large-scale museum exhibit, so I will be working on this full time. I’m not out to create the next cutting-edge graphics demo; I just want to have a decent architecture built on some good tools.

    Drop me an email via my contact form or leave a comment here. To maintain high signal-to-noise, I will classify interested parties as either a contributor or a subscriber:

    • Contributors are developers with experience in one of those three areas I mentioned, and are genuinely interested in understanding the technology to apply it to their active projects. We expect results from each other, in other words, though we are all working on our own projects.

    • Subscribers are people who are interested in what we’re doing, but may not have the requisite time or experience to contribute knowledge and code. Nevertheless, they want to know what’s possible, and maybe learn something about how they could start doing what we’re doing. 3D and 2D Artists, interactive developers who use Flash/scripted environments, museum exhibit designers, advertising technologists, and experience designers would probably fall into this category. The input from this group of people is a necessary part of developing anything that has life in it, and communicating how this stuff is technically achieved will provide valuable insight. Or so I hope.

    <

    p>Of course, this presumes that people are actually reading this and care :-) At least I tried :-)

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    DSri Seah

  • Merry Catmas!

    December 25, 2007

    Merry Catmas My sister says this picture reminds her of some kind of European rock album cover.
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    DSri Seah

  • OLPC XO Laptop: First Impressions

    December 20, 2007

    XO Laptop I was pleasantly surprised to receive my XO Laptop, formally known as the $100 Laptop for the One Laptop Per Child non-profit, and I just spent a couple hours playing with it. It is the cutest, coolest piece of gear I have in the house. I would venture to say that it’s WAY cooler than my MacBook Pro 17″ which is, basically, a production workstation. Sure, the XO is not very fast, is made of the type of plastic that’s used for toddler toys, and the “keyboard” is a chicklet-style membrane that is not designed for touch-typing. There isn’t a hard drive, and it doesn’t run Windows or a window system for that matter. So what good is it you ask? It’s good for getting education and computing into the great outdoors, that’s what. It is the most exciting thing I’ve seen in quite some time. Yes, I even think it’s cooler than the iPhone.

    XO Laptop Admittedly, it is designed for smaller hands than mine, and in terms of speed you can practically feel the tiny processor grunting to itself like a jogger huffing I CAN!!! toward the top of a mountain as tourists stare curiously at him from their air-conditioned rental cars. Fast, it isn’t. It reminds me a lot of one of the microcomputers I wanted when I was 12, the Sinclair ZX80. Like the Sinclair, the XO makes thrifty use of its limited memory. And like microcomputers of the early 80s, the XO is open. Open Source, in fact. The guts of the software are accessible, so this is a machine that people just getting introduced to computers will be able to learn on. What’s really exciting, though, is the quality of the I/O. There’s a camera, microphone, speakers, a high-res sunlight-readable display, and self-organizing mesh networking all built in. For expansion, there are USB ports and a memory card slot. You can take this computer on outdoor adventures with you, take pictures and notes, and share your findings with your peers around you. I find this incredibly exciting.

    XO Laptop I haven’t really played with the software at all yet, but I’m looking forward to trying to use this machine quite a bit as my primary “on the go” laptop to see what it’s like. When I’m traveling around I usually just take notes anyway in my reporter-style Moleskine. The wireless networking capabilities of the XO should make this a good coffeehouse companion, though the keyboard is not suitable for touch typing at all.

    XO Laptop Fortunately for me, the XO recognized my treasured IBM Model M 84-Key Space Saver Keyboard, which I plugged through a PS2-to-USB adapter. Seemed to work fine with the machine. When you put the XO into tablet mode, you end up with a very compact word processing station that is high-resolution and usable in direct sunlight. While the XO is supposed to run for quite a while on batteries (especially with the backlight off), the additional current drain of the Model M keyboard might reduce battery life further…I have no idea.

    Anyway, it’s here in time for Christmas, so I’m looking forward to spending a bit of time looking at the development environment. It might be neat to develop some portable tracking tools for the machine, if only for my own amusement.

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    DSri Seah

  • Emergent Task Planner Pre-Order Mailing List “Oopsie”

    December 19, 2007

    A launch isn’t a launch without some kind of hiccup, and ours was that only HALF of the mailing list was actually notified. As is the case with many Microsoft applications, a “helpful” dialog box popped up to warn about a multiple-email field, which stopped the mailing operation dead in its tracks. This dialog box was also bashful, hiding itself behind another window in embarrassment, so we didn’t even see it until we started looking into why some people were not notified just now.

    So if you haven’t been notified by now, it’s for one of the following reasons:

    • We’re not shipping outside the USA yet
    • We don’t have your confirmation email
    • I was planning on emailing you directly, or will hand-deliver next time I see you
    • You canceled your order

    In a way this problem makes the launch process more interesting, because it adds some color to the story :-)

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    DSri Seah

  • Pre-Ordered Emergent Task Planner Pads Now Available!

    December 18, 2007

    Shipping Cartons

    Finally, We Are Shipping!

    A few hours ago an email notification sent from fulfillment * thedavidseahgroup.com went out with instruction on how to pay and arrange for shipping of the pads. We are fulfilling pre-orders first. After that we’ll open up the general ordering for the remaining unsold pads. There will be about 100 of them not spoken for. If you are interested in ordering a pad or three, leave a comment! I’m currently only handling the domestic US, but will be adding other countries as I figure out how it works.

    If you had placed a pre-order by the original cutoff date and did NOT receive the instructions on where to go to make payment, contact me through the contact form. If you are having trouble with the form (the anti-spam measures are fairly harsh), you find my contact email address at the very bottom left of the page.

    I was expecting the fulfillment process to be incredibly difficult and tedious. Or more accurately, I wasn’t looking forward to all the manual labor and accounting. It turned out to not be such a big deal after all.

    Handling Packaging and Shipping

    One of the most daunting tasks to me was handling the receipt of monies and arranging for shipment. Personally I hate shipping stuff, primarily because it seems to take an hour and a half for me to ship a single package. I’ve got to do the following:

    • Find a box, possibly purchase one somewhere
    • Pack the box
    • Pad the box with something
    • Find some packing tape
    • Tape up the box securely
    • Fill out any customs forms
    • Declare values
    • Weigh the box
    • Find the shipping address
    • Find a destination phone number
    • Acquire the right label
    • Transcribe the address information correctly
    • Double check the address for accuracy, redoing it if it’s unclear
    • Drive to the nearest FedEx, or wait for a pickup
    • Wait in line to drop off the package
    • Pay the shipping fees
    • Drive home
    • Email the tracking numbers to the addressee
    • Cross my fingers

    Incredibly tedious. I wasn’t looking forward to doing this for a hundred boxes.

    Thankfully, my buddy Scott figured out the postage options, so we’re using flat rate USPS Priority Mail. So long as you’re using their official flat-rate envelope or flat-rate box (provided for free), you can put as much stuff as you can fit in the package. So that simplified postage calculation. This still left the problem of automating the addressing of the boxes, so we planned on using a mail merge to create the shipping labels.

    It also turns out that order management and shipping is a lot easier with today’s online tools. Read onward.

    Handling Mail Merges

    I wasn’t looking forward to managing the email list. I was maintaining an Excel document with all the addresses in it, to use as the data source for the following:

    • Generating shipping labels with name, address, and number of pads per order. These shipping labels, I imagined, would be used by packers to tell how many pads to put in each box without having to look it up on another sheet, hopefully reducing errors.

    • Generating the email blast to tell individual pre-orders where to pay, and reconfirm their address and # of pads.

    <

    p>Since I wasn’t too keen on doing this, I handed the Excel spreadsheet updating to volleyball buddy Brandy, and then asked The Ultra-Competent Erin to make Outlook talk to Word to talk to Excel to make all that other stuff happen. Whew. Outsourcing rocks :-)

    Handling Payment

    The new website content management system I’m using, Expression Engine 1.6, has a “Simple E-Commerce” module in it that can handle items and so forth. It also integrates with PayPal, so I figured I would use this to build a simple store to handle the transaction. I already have PayPal, so I upgraded to a Business account and proceeded to build a simple store. It didn’t, however, handle quantities and shipping costs by itself, so I gave up and went directly to PayPal to generate purchase buttons.

    It was then I discovered that PayPal actually prints shipping labels and postage. Their simple payment button allows each person placing an order to specify a quantity. The shipper can fill out a template to specify shipping methods AND costs, for both domestic and international shipping. Not only that, but PayPal’s merchant tools track the entire transaction in a simple dashboard. Once a payment is received, you can click a button to buy the postage online through Pitney Bowes, which comes in form of a printable web page that you just tape to the box. The funds are automatically deducted from your PayPal account. You can then print a packing list that can be customized with your own message and logo, and include that in the box. All you have to do then is drop the package off at the Post Office or arrange for a pickup. This did away with the need to print labels too, so there was some work saved there.

    The one drawback of PayPal is that they de-emphasize the credit card payment link to make people think they have to sign up for PayPal to use it. I put instructions regarding how this was NOT necessary in the email, and on the secret order page. Plus there is a transaction fee of about 2% or so, but this isn’t too bad.

    Boiling down the steps, this is how it goes assuming you are using the US Postal Service’s flat rate priority mail packages ($4.60 for envelope, $8.95 for box, no weight limits).

    • Order boxes and envelopes from the US Postal Service website (free, but 5-10 business days to receive)
    • Get a PayPal account, upgrade to Business Account (free)
    • Activate Web Payment Standard (free)
    • Set up your PayPal shipping quantities/costs and preferred shipping vendor as USPS (assuming you’ll be using their flat rate shipping)
    • Create a “Pay Now” button for your individual item, put it on your website.
    • Let PayPal manage the payment, address, shipping labels
    • As orders come in, print postage and pack boxes
    • Drop finished packages off at the post office or arrange for a pickup

    It is all rather remarkable how easy it is. The first package I shipped out with this felt…momentous. The next step after this is to use something like Amazon Fulfillment to handle everything, which includes listing on the Amazon website. There is a $60 monthly cost however, because you have to buy a storefront account I believe…but now I am getting ahead of myself. Gotta sell-through these pads first.

    The Adventure Continues

    So that’s it for now. On December 31st I will open general orders to the public. In the meantime, if you’re interested in how the project got going here’s all the pertinent blog posts.

    I must publicly thank Scott Wright: graphic designer by training, MBA by education, experienced print broker, trusted friend and co-schemer. I wouldn’t have dared try printing anything for real without his encouragement and support. Dude, you rock! Start your blog already!

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    DSri Seah