There’s been a few stories out there lately concerning all the junk being released for the Nintendo Wii. I jumped out to the Nintendo website and went to the this page. There are 439 games listed and a majority of them seem to be licensed properties either from tv, toys or movies. Apparently this stuff must sell to someone, but I can’t imagine there are this many companies full of game developers all siting around having conversations like this.

“You know what would be awesome to make?”

“A World War II first person shooter?”

“No”

“Something new and inventive? Something that stretches our skills and imagination?”

“Ummm, no, will you shut up a minute? Jillian Michale’s Fitness Ultimatum 2009!”

“Omg, are you serious?! That would be amazing. I can’t wait to tell my family and my friends”

It can’t possibly go like this? It has to be more like this.

“I’ve brought you all together here today to let you know that our dreams of making a go at this game dev thing are falling apart. We can either close up shop now and not eat or we can sell our souls and swallow our pride to make Jillian Michael’s Fitness Ultimatum 2009. Now I know we’ll be laughed out of the game development community and this isn’t exactly art, but it will pay the bills. Now I’ll take some questions.”

“Jillian who?”

“Michaels…”

“Umm, still not helping. And there are people willing to pay for this?

“Well, there’s people willing to pay to have it developed. ”

“Will people buy it?”

“That’s not our problem.”

“I’m so not putting this job on my resume.”

So many companies are going the safe path, or try to use some licensed IP to build up enough money so they can create something new a bit down the road. Unfortunately, most of these companies get caught in the evil cycle of constantly needing to pull in new licenses, tossing together just something that meets the minimum criteria of the contract and going on to the next one, that they never get the chance to create. Now, I’m not saying that they don’t want to create something new. Most people you find at game companies all have their own ideas as to what would make a great game or some idea they’ve been thinking of for years, but very few will ever get the green light to actually make it into a product. Instead, they’ll spend years creating other people’s licensed games and finally get burnt out enough to leave the industry never fulfilling their dreams they had when they got in. The company will continue, flooding the market will games that no self respecting gamer would ever buy; hoping some unsuspecting parent come Christmas will pick up their game giving them enough sales to make a profit.

As an industry, I would love to see more chances taken on new ideas or more companies giving their employees a chance to take some time out of their hellish production schedule to code up a demo. Who knows, stuck inside the mind of a developer knee deep in Barbie code, might be the big original hit idea they’ve been looking for.

Working on an updated version of one of my iPhone applications. The more I code with the iPhone SDK and objective-C, the more I really am finding it lacking. Maybe I’m just used to a mature dev language and sdk coming from the Windows and game programming side of things.

My job currently involves me teaching students the ways of DirectX. The current version of the class covers the fixed pipeline which is not the most useful for those going into game development. I’ve already started rewriting the class to focus on the programmable pipeline and shaders. The first day of this new class is pretty much complete and I’m creating the second day of shader class. The first day includes an introduction to shaders, loading, and applying constant variables. Also included are vertex transforms and vertex colors. The second day of shaders focuses on the different types of texture mapping as well as vertex animation. After the second day is complete there will be a final third day of shaders to include things I haven’t thought of yet.

Luckily, it’ll be a few weeks before the new topics are introduced.

More geeking out about iPhone game programming and textures. The version of the texture tool provided with the iPhone sdk outputs a compressed texture with absolutely no header information. The lack of header forces your code to know the details like width, height, bitdepth, and pixel format instead of it being nicely encapsulated in the file itself. This causes you to have to hardcode this data into your texture load calls and just makes for all around ugliness. I’ve since tossed out Apple’s version of the tool and started using the version that comes with the PowerVR sdk. While I have to do my conversions under Windows, it allows my code to be more generic in the way that it handles textures. I read in the first 52 bytes of the file to get all the information I need and then pass along the rest to OpenGL to drop into VRAM.

Here’s a small code snippet of what I’m now doing in my texture code.

struct PVR_Texture_Header
{
unsigned int dwHeaderSize;            /*!< size of the structure */
unsigned int dwHeight;                /*!< height of surface to be created */
unsigned int dwWidth;                /*!< width of input surface */
unsigned int dwMipMapCount;            /*!< number of mip-map levels requested */
unsigned int dwpfFlags;                /*!< pixel format flags */
unsigned int dwTextureDataSize;        /*!< Total size in bytes */
unsigned int dwBitCount;            /*!< number of bits per pixel  */
unsigned int dwRBitMask;            /*!< mask for red bit */
unsigned int dwGBitMask;            /*!< mask for green bits */
unsigned int dwBBitMask;            /*!< mask for blue bits */
unsigned int dwAlphaBitMask;        /*!< mask for alpha channel */
unsigned int dwPVR;                    /*!< magic number identifying pvr file */
unsigned int dwNumSurfs;            /*!< the number of surfaces present in the pvr */
} ;

NSData *fileContents = [[NSData dataWithContentsOfFile:[NSString stringWithUTF8String:filename]] retain];
if (fileContents == nil)
{
return false;
}

// pointer to the actual pvr image data, skip the header
char *pvrData = (char*)[fileContents bytes] + sizeof(PVR_Texture_Header);

// create the header and copy in the data from the file
memcpy(&textureInfo, [fileContents bytes], sizeof(PVR_Texture_Header));

The definition for the PVR_Texture_Header was found in the PowerVR SDK.