I’ve always been a fanatic over good tool design. I picked at YoYo games last month for ignoring the visual scheme of their UI for GameMaker last month at GameInScotland. They told me they had been working on it, and showed me some screenshots of their Pro varient. It’s black, black always looks good.

Good tools really are worth their weight in gold, and I think with a lot of game engines now playing on the same turf, making the tools easier to get a grasp of will let them become a cut above the rest. Working on the Chroma Project, one of the most annoying things that were made apparent quite quickly was not being able to group objects in the object list. I remember from my Source Engine modding days VisGroups made editing complex levels much simpler. Being able to group areas of terrain into one group and toggling visibility on or off, it’s a simple feature, but makes a world of difference when trying to build a complex scene. Unity doesn’t make anything like that apparent. the closest thing you have is “tagging,” but it’s not as intuitive as I’d like it to be.

Of course the hard learned truth about Unity is that as a gameplay programmer you spend the majority of your time crafting tools to go into the inspector IN CODE. I like the flexibility of bein able to make GUIs to support your scripts, it’s essential really, but hows about a graphical editor? That way we can link GUI components to the actual code we want to manipulate with them. Xcode 4 does this, and Visual Studio has a similar linkage workflow. I think that’s the next step for Unity 4.

I’m paying close attention to tools right now because I’m interested in building my own DCPU-16 compiler. It’ll be seeing a large amount of popularity in the coming months with it’s inclusion in Markus Perrson’s next game. The spec sheet has already been released, and allowing people to write programs in a C-like manner would be advantageous. Of course, it’s not just being able to code in a high level language that would be important; all the other areas of a good IDE could come into play.

It’ll also be a good way of understanding more how code works. People wet themselves when they were told to look at assembly instructions for the Game Boy Advance, it was hilarious, but at the same time we didn’t really know how everything fit in at the time. This will be a voyage into the unknown, rather like the premise of Notch’s upcoming alpha.

I wasn’t exactly ogling with excitement when I saw the unveil of Google’s Project Glass. My appologise for sounding pessamistic on the subject, but it’s actually been something on my radar for almost a couple of years now.

When I was starting out in Dundee I ended up in the same room as Ken Perlin, renowned for his contribution in the visual effects field – bestowing us with the likes of Perlin Noise, procedural animation systems (play Spore’s creature creator to view his handiwork) and other methodologies, algorithms and practices that are now being adopted and taken for granted across the tech world.

I guess my claim to fame was offering him a marshmallow beef burger on me at a party in a multi story carpark; unaware Mr Perlin is a vegan by choice.

I was also wearing a Tron-esque hoody at the time. My bad.

Why is Perlin relevant to Project Glass? Because it was he who first introduced me to the field of Eccescopy - the field of eye centred computing environments. Perlin did a lot of study into the technological implementation of such devices, his series of blogged prophecies seeming not too far off of Google’s conceptualised reality. I was more interested in the ethics, and aspects of user interface design. It’s all very well being able to see digital stuff in your eye, but what exactly should you see, and more importantly when?

It’s all fun and games until someone gets hit by a car while they’re crossing the street, updating their Facebook status. There’s a morale dilemma that we are perhaps looking over when a situation like this occurs. If a legal challenge were to occur between the struck pedestrian and the driver of the car, if appropriate measures aren’t being taken, it could be impossible to reach a fair conclusion.

By placing a user interface in our vision it’ll likely be very difficult to tell if a user is actually using it. In the same way an iPhone user may be listening to music on their iPod one minute on the bus, and then suddenly engage in a hands free call with their headphones on the next, giving no warning to the passengers around him/her. In past times, one would be diagnosed with schizophrenia for such things, but today’s modern commuters have an unspoken rule of holding back any reaction towards their fellow passengers behaviour.

Back to the car crash. In current tech, if a pedestrian walked out in front of a car or subway track accidentally while browsing on their phone, there are physical tells towards that conclusion, mainly the fact that they’re looking at a physical device. With project glass, it’s going to be much harder to tell if a person is being distracted by such activities. By creating this device, Google solves a lot of the issues it had with it’s inclusion of Google Goggles in Andriod (the fact that everyone feels like an ass waving their phone about in broad daylight in public) and opened up new ones; when the user becomes cocooned in their own personal space when reality requires them to be aware of their surroundings.

To solve the problem we may need to fit these devices with some sort of black box logging facility. It would be the only way to tell if a user could be distracted or not by something only they can see. At the same time, this also opens up a kettle of his regarding privacy and confidentiality. Should devices that you own hold data on you that you can’t access, that may be used against you in a court of law. Currently Facebook is getting done over because of it’s current ability to be able to hand over only 22 of 86 required data point types to users on request. And what if this “secure” data gets accessed by the wrong people? Google’s mobile platform is after all Android, caked with security vulnerabilities and privacy concerns. It only takes one smart coder to look into the source, find an exploitable flaw that’s bound to be found, and gain access to people’s lives, possibly even in a Being John Malkovich manner.

These matters will need to be addressed. And I do worry, with the pace and woefully poor grasp the world’s legal systems have on the world of technology, we might be staring through a glass ceiling for quite a while before we can read our text messages on our spectacles.

I’d really love to be able to write a book over the summer. Not a novel or work of fiction, but a proper, educational book. In the past two years of studying I’ve come up against all manners of volumes, essays, manuals and academic publishings that – to be quite honest – are dry as hell.

You can’t really blame the people who right these texts. The academic world demands specificity, so I forgive them for that, but when lengthy books waffle on about subjects without really providing a solution to the issues it claims to resolve, that’s when I get ticked off.

About a month ago I offered to do a talk on getting people set up with the git version control system and github.com. I planned it out and practiced it, and it seemed to be quite possible to get people going in about an hour and a half. On the night of course it went disastrously. I got less time than what was really required, lost my place on more than one occasion, and even lost internet connection while trying to push things to the remote github servers.

Needless to say teaching git to a room full of game and art students, is really difficult.

So it must be a mountainous task to try and learn it.

People have asked me if I’ll do another talk, even a series, and honestly I don’t know. It was done in partnership with Abertay’s Game Development Society – it got it’s own poster campaign and everything, and it really did feel like a one off. I think it did manage to achieve it’s goal though of getting people interested in something that’s usually glossed over by the University courses, and it can turn into a really big issue for studios when their new juniors don’t understand how to check in  and out.

So I’d like to write a book on Git, one intended for students. Computer science and IT concepts are required by more and more people now, and I’d say the mix of people we have at Abertay have a highly creative streak running through them now in comparison to ten or fifteen years ago. A text needs to be able to appeal to the sort of lifestyle that’s lived by these students. Though I may not be a great role model for that lifestyle, I can certainly relate to it, and feel the anxiety and stresses of a generation that has to catch up with decades of innovation just to be on par with the bottom of the industry.

I propose we go back to primary school, where colouring in is encouraged, pages are illustrated with characters, not just inspiration photographs or diagrams at the beginning of each chapter. I think we were really too young to appreciated these little nuances of learning in school, and they were taken away from us the minute society demanded that we “grow up.”

I’ve always perceived that I’m part of an ageless generation – one of the first to be born without inhibitions over race, gender, culture or sexuality. You can see that more than ever in the types of content being consumed. More and more people are taking video games into adulthood, reading comic books, and on the reverse scale more and more kids are taking up classical music at a young age.

It’s a project I can’t really do right now, not with coursework and other people requiring me for work and stuff, but maybe when I get my long promised break in the summer. The new breed of interactive textbooks fascinates me, though I wouldn’t mind still being able to hold a physical copy in my hand. But who knows; maybe by the next semester I’ll have a publication to my name…

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Right now I’m knee deep in coursework, a typical student excuse these days. The catch is that I want to have it all done and submitted by the end of next week. Before the university officially goes on vacation.

It’s an ambitious goal, not without it’s reasons. I’d like to be able to get away from constantly thinking about developing new stuff all the time. Easier said than done – can’t go through a single day without a new idea for a business, product or brand. Some creative downtime can only be good for the soul however, and perhaps allowing some excess energy still niggling around to be put to good use on some personal project might lead to good things.

Should all go well, work for two modules will be completely submitted by the end of the week, with work being well underway on an OpenGL and PS2 Linux game.

What a lame update. Things aren’t usually this lame. Even the weather is now lame…