Brussells Development Blog

Since leaving Valve Software back in 2003, I have found myself longing to get back into game programming. For me it was an awesome experience to be not only a programmer, but a game designer with a voice over how the game flowed and molded. Working for a game company to me would be very cool, but too much like where I work now in working for the man up the ladder in the coporate office. No I can’t have that. For me, game development is like the best of all worlds in my book. I can get technical and program to my hearts content, be a film director or writer to help the story along, or put on my art hat and beef up the visuals and sound. Finally, in the end you get to feel your sense of accomplishment when the fans start crowding the forums, or sending emails talking all about your game ( good and the bad ). It’s then you get to put on your PR (public Relations ) hat and deal with the public. When release ( sell ) time comes, if you plan on selling your work, you get to play coporate professional in advertising, selling your game. There is so many hats to wear in Game Development for those who choose to go alone or on a small team that it keeps it fun and interesting.

I thought I found my new home with a local company here in Bham, AL called ClownKeep. I actually worked with the owner ( head artist / 3d guru ) and another scripter / artist at my full-time job. Oh the plans we had in motion for taking over the world … it was such fun. You can actually search Garage Games for clownkeep and see one of the projects we had going. Unfortunately, life isn’t always perfect … people move on to other jobs, life, kids, and house improvements take away from the joys of spare time Game Development as did with our team. After Dave, the owner of clownkeep, left for another job up north in Huntsville, the team decided to take a short recess, but I knew what that meant and it came true unfortunately. That recess has turned into nearly a 6 month silence for our team, one that I’ve seen far too much in the past.

So now, back on my own in this lonely world of Game Development in AL I find myself asking the one question all solo developers find theirself asking. Is there really any hope for my game development obsession ? Will my futile solo work mean anything in the end ? Or will it just be time wasted ? I geuss the only true answer is never give up, always keep your head up, and your code flowing.

With all that back story out of the way, I now get on to the good news. I am continueing my solo work in my spare time. I need to narrow my 2 platform choices down though before things get too complicated. I’m currently implementing a XNA engine and game, and a C++ engine and game. This is bad and leads to slow progression. My first reaction is to dump the XNA one and go with the tried and true method of C++, but for some reason that naggin voice in the back of my head keeps me hanging on to the XNA. Could it in fact be the future for game development ? One thing is for sure, .Net development makes life so much easier with the facts of built in memory managment, cross platform implementations, and the backing of Microsoft as possibly the “future” pick of programming platforms. Unfortunately, being on the frontline of a work in progress such as .Net and XNA comes with a price. No matter what people say, writing a game for it such as a normal FPS, or normal RPG style game with cutting edge graphics has it’s performance hits vs. C++. But unlike others, with PCs quickly overpowering in specs, and video cards ramping up the onboard memory and processing power, and now having physics hardware cards, the future is looking alot brighter for XNA. I have much faith that Microsoft will only continue to make the .Net language more stream lined in future releases, and even more so for game development in XNA.

So chasing this rabbit down the hole and returning back out, I find myself asking the all to important question still. Should my project stay with XNA and .Net and hope the future improvements and my work join paths in the near future ? So many possibilities and questions, and not enough facts and answers.

Well today I put the finishing touches on our reports to be used on the company website here at work. I must say after doing my first rounds with SSRS 2005 I have quite a few gripes about some features, or should I say “missing” features.

First off, basically you have 3 modes of reports when you break it down. The view you get rendered in a winapp, website, in viewer control. Next you have the exported version. And finally you have the printed version. To me, it would have been almost common sense to allow a property for components in reports that controls ifwhen they can be viewed in each mode. For instance, I needed to show a friendly info message on some of the top level reports that basically says “Hey, you click such-and-such and drilldown to more detailed reports.”. However, I didn’t intend for this to be displayed when printed out, it’s not necessary there. Well, there is no way to toggle visibility for what ever mode your about to render to though. *sigh* Sometimes it’s the most simpliest things in life that turn out to be the big bumps in the road =/.

Another gripe is not having an easier, more functional, way to restrictallow export functions for eachall report(s). For now I had to manually go into the rs*.config file on the Reports Web Server and manually turn off all the options the company does not want to allow users to have when exporting their reports. I’m sure there is a better way, I have yet to track it down though. I cought wind of allowing export options based on privilages, whether this is accurate I don’t know yet. I did however see other nodes in the XML config file just above the … tags though that may shed some light on this.

And yet one more gripe thats still pending on my mind is the fact that when exporting a report with drill-down(s) or subreports to EXCEL it gives error messages inside the EXCEL file for where the sub-reports are suppose to be instead of the actual report. I would rather have it not even render the error msg area at all and just show the report as it is rendered on screen. But I will have to research this bug some more for work arounds tomorrow.

My work for today is done …. there’s always tomorrow =).