Paul Mendoza C# blog
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Accepted to CSUSM
A few days ago, maybe a week ago now, I got my letter of acceptance to California State University of San Marcos or CSUSM. I was pretty sure I was going to be accepted to the college so I wasn't too worried and I unoffically found out online but it's still very cool to have the letter in hand that I was accepted.
I did a search though to find out a little about the school and found a bunch of blogs of people that go there. This girl even says she's having to interview. I have no idea why she'd have to do interviews for the college though since I didn't have to do any. Maybe my major, computer science, just wasn't that competative or something. Oh, idea! Maybe she's a graduate student.
I was also read somewhere that the school is made up of 64% females. ¶ 6:59 PM 1 Comments
I did a search though to find out a little about the school and found a bunch of blogs of people that go there. This girl even says she's having to interview. I have no idea why she'd have to do interviews for the college though since I didn't have to do any. Maybe my major, computer science, just wasn't that competative or something. Oh, idea! Maybe she's a graduate student.
I was also read somewhere that the school is made up of 64% females. ¶ 6:59 PM 1 Comments
Friday, April 28, 2006
Internship searching
So the search has started for an internship for the summer. Since school doesn't end until May 18th, I've got some time but I've been searching around for the last few days and have found some interesting positions that seem to fit my skillset well.
From the blog of Diane-d, here is an interesting article she pointed to regarding software that lets programmers code without their hands. This is exactly what I think I need because my mind will never forget semi-colons. They just get lost on the way to the keyboard most of the time I think.
I'm continually amazed by the lengths that media companies are going to protect their media from piracy. From the blog "Inside the Mind of a Nerd"...
Does it seem like they're going too far with this? ¶ 8:39 PM 1 Comments
From the blog of Diane-d, here is an interesting article she pointed to regarding software that lets programmers code without their hands. This is exactly what I think I need because my mind will never forget semi-colons. They just get lost on the way to the keyboard most of the time I think.
I'm continually amazed by the lengths that media companies are going to protect their media from piracy. From the blog "Inside the Mind of a Nerd"...
There's new legislation going to Congress very soon to expand the DMCA that would make the maximum penalty ten years for software and music piracy, which is worse than for child pornographers or assaulting a cop. What's worse is that if you even have the ability to circumvent their anti-copyright protection mechanisms, you could face this prison sentence, and they're allowed to use wiretapping to track you down.
Does it seem like they're going too far with this? ¶ 8:39 PM 1 Comments
Tuesday, April 25, 2006
Earth Day
I just got the pictures of Earth day from Candice. Earth Day was an event in Balboa Park in San Diego which is kind of like a nature/vegetarian event. It was pretty interesting to walk around it for the day and see a lot of the stuff. I thought there would be more free stuff but all we wound up with was a free Rockstar Energy drink.
In the picture is Carolann on the left, Candice at the bottom right, Chris at the top left and of course, me on the right. We were on the trolley coming back from the event. It was actually all of our first time riding the trolley so we really had no idea what we were doing when we first got to the trolley station and took us about 15 minutes to figure out how to get our tickets which we later realized that no one else probably gets because there wasn't anyone checking for tickets.
¶ 12:00 PM 0 Comments
In the picture is Carolann on the left, Candice at the bottom right, Chris at the top left and of course, me on the right. We were on the trolley coming back from the event. It was actually all of our first time riding the trolley so we really had no idea what we were doing when we first got to the trolley station and took us about 15 minutes to figure out how to get our tickets which we later realized that no one else probably gets because there wasn't anyone checking for tickets.
¶ 12:00 PM 0 Comments
Monday, April 24, 2006
Quad core processors and beyond!
Dual core processors are fairly recent additions to the market but if we're lucky, we might even see a true quad core processor released from Intel in Q1 of 2007. Currently Intel has a 4 core processor but what it actually is is two dual cores stacked on top of each other so it's not a "true" quad core.
Tim Sweeney of Epic games discusses in a presentation he gave many of the problems that Epic has had while trying to develop their latest graphics engine and many of the time problems that have arisen because of having to program for multiple cores. Tim predicts near the end of his presentation that by 2009 we'll see 20+ cores on a processor.
Since Intel and AMD gave up the speed war in the last couple of years, the core count will be the new battleground for power. I was joking with my friend the other day that eventually we could just have one core dedicated to handling spyware tasks because there would just be so many cores it's not really going to slow anything down much.
I was recently buying a new processor and it's actually not very obvious which processor is more powerful based on packaging. The AMD 4200+ runs at 2.2 GHz but the Intel Core Duo processors are running around 2.8 for a similar price or faster. With both being dual cores, the AMD is faster with games than the Intel. It will be much easier to decide which processor to get I think once games can take better advantage of the multiple cores and AMD and Intel are creating more than two cores per chip.
But Tim also points out the development costs, time and hazards of developing a multicore/process application are high.
I'd like to see a guide on creating multiprocess applications. Does anyone know of any good tutorials or documentation for doing so? ¶ 11:15 PM 0 Comments
Dual core processors are fairly recent additions to the market but if we're lucky, we might even see a true quad core processor released from Intel in Q1 of 2007. Currently Intel has a 4 core processor but what it actually is is two dual cores stacked on top of each other so it's not a "true" quad core.
Tim Sweeney of Epic games discusses in a presentation he gave many of the problems that Epic has had while trying to develop their latest graphics engine and many of the time problems that have arisen because of having to program for multiple cores. Tim predicts near the end of his presentation that by 2009 we'll see 20+ cores on a processor.
Since Intel and AMD gave up the speed war in the last couple of years, the core count will be the new battleground for power. I was joking with my friend the other day that eventually we could just have one core dedicated to handling spyware tasks because there would just be so many cores it's not really going to slow anything down much.
I was recently buying a new processor and it's actually not very obvious which processor is more powerful based on packaging. The AMD 4200+ runs at 2.2 GHz but the Intel Core Duo processors are running around 2.8 for a similar price or faster. With both being dual cores, the AMD is faster with games than the Intel. It will be much easier to decide which processor to get I think once games can take better advantage of the multiple cores and AMD and Intel are creating more than two cores per chip.
But Tim also points out the development costs, time and hazards of developing a multicore/process application are high.
I'd like to see a guide on creating multiprocess applications. Does anyone know of any good tutorials or documentation for doing so? ¶ 11:15 PM 0 Comments
Sunday, April 23, 2006
Shocking lack of Agile/XP/ Scrum awareness
Recently at career day for the computer science department at Palomar while sitting in various sessions listening to the speakers giving presentations, I asked a couple of the speakers about their experiences with any development methods such as Agile, SCRUM or XP and what they thought of them.
What surprised me was not that they hadn't done any development in them but that they had no idea what I was talking about. It was shocking. I just assumed that every person in the industry would at least have heard of them. Maybe not SCRUM but at least agile and XP.
I really wonder how many other programmers there are that aren't using these methods or aren't aware of them. Here are some interesting links for development.
Agile Game Development
Scrum Development
Scrum Case Studies ¶ 5:13 PM 1 Comments
Recently at career day for the computer science department at Palomar while sitting in various sessions listening to the speakers giving presentations, I asked a couple of the speakers about their experiences with any development methods such as Agile, SCRUM or XP and what they thought of them.
What surprised me was not that they hadn't done any development in them but that they had no idea what I was talking about. It was shocking. I just assumed that every person in the industry would at least have heard of them. Maybe not SCRUM but at least agile and XP.
I really wonder how many other programmers there are that aren't using these methods or aren't aware of them. Here are some interesting links for development.
Agile Game Development
Scrum Development
Scrum Case Studies ¶ 5:13 PM 1 Comments
Thursday, April 20, 2006
50% game developer theory
Here is my theory. I think that 50% of all CS majors would like to make games. Very few will professionally I believe but for the most part, I think its a pretty good guess. Today was career day at Palomar and they had some speakers coming in and talking in some sessions. At the business applications and web development talks, the rooms had about 10 people in them each.
Then there was the talk for video game programming. All 40 seats were full and there were people standing at the back of the room to hear the two programmers from Rockstar talk. What I found amazing was that it was made pretty clear that being a programmer in the games industry doesn't get you squat when it comes to pay compared to what the other speakers today had said they were making and what we should be making. The other speakers also were working 40 hour weeks on average with the occasional crunch period every few months that lasted a couple weeks at most. The game programmers said 80 hour weeks were pretty common.
And then they said that if you wanted to work on a specific game really bad or for a certain studio, sometimes you'd have to take a paycut to get onto the team to do it.
The two guys that came from Rockstar games, Alex Erath and Wolfgang Engle, had some interesting things to say about the development and it sounded like interesting projects they were working on. I was really amazed though at how many students showed up for their talk. They did give out some free Rockstar stuff and talked about a table tennis game they've been working on but more from a programming standpoint than from a gameplay aspect. I really think some of the people were there thinking it was for designing games instead of programming because when they asked who was interested in game programming, myself and four other people in the room raised their hands.
Okay, back to my C++ homework project.... ¶ 7:16 PM 0 Comments
Here is my theory. I think that 50% of all CS majors would like to make games. Very few will professionally I believe but for the most part, I think its a pretty good guess. Today was career day at Palomar and they had some speakers coming in and talking in some sessions. At the business applications and web development talks, the rooms had about 10 people in them each.
Then there was the talk for video game programming. All 40 seats were full and there were people standing at the back of the room to hear the two programmers from Rockstar talk. What I found amazing was that it was made pretty clear that being a programmer in the games industry doesn't get you squat when it comes to pay compared to what the other speakers today had said they were making and what we should be making. The other speakers also were working 40 hour weeks on average with the occasional crunch period every few months that lasted a couple weeks at most. The game programmers said 80 hour weeks were pretty common.
And then they said that if you wanted to work on a specific game really bad or for a certain studio, sometimes you'd have to take a paycut to get onto the team to do it.
The two guys that came from Rockstar games, Alex Erath and Wolfgang Engle, had some interesting things to say about the development and it sounded like interesting projects they were working on. I was really amazed though at how many students showed up for their talk. They did give out some free Rockstar stuff and talked about a table tennis game they've been working on but more from a programming standpoint than from a gameplay aspect. I really think some of the people were there thinking it was for designing games instead of programming because when they asked who was interested in game programming, myself and four other people in the room raised their hands.
Okay, back to my C++ homework project.... ¶ 7:16 PM 0 Comments
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
32,000 current / 50,000 former game developers
The author of the Lost Garden blog writes about why he left the game industry and brings up an interesting point.
I find that to be amazing. He then also says that thats not including the smaller shops that have a much higher turnover rate. He's a programmer so I'm not sure if this is more talking about programmers or if this counts for artists as well.
But here is really why I think game companies are such horrible places to work 95% of the time. It's because many games and game companies are started by people that don't understand the business. They know how to make a fun game but they don't understand the business. I've thought this for a long time and that is that EA is full of smart people who understand games better than anyone else. There is a reason why 40% of my game collection are EA published games. It's not that I love all the stuff EA puts out but it's that the best stuff EA has. Game creators hate EA because EA doesn't take huge risks. You wont see EA publishing some fringe game. Why? It's way, way too risky. EA knows how to pick winners for games and understands the business of games.
From GDC, Seamus Blackley says in a panel...
Most major games are only successful if they sell one million copies or more. It doesn't matter if they have a great story line or if they involve the player well. If it doesn't sell that many copies, it failed and the investors will lose money, the publishers will lose money and many other people will lose their jobs.
Any investor who puts his money into the development of a multimillion dollar game is well aware of the risks typically and will remain paranoid all during development, ready to jump ship as soon as anything starts to go wrong. This cramps the developers of the games who are no longer able to create games that will perform to their potential. ¶ 8:06 PM 1 Comments
The author of the Lost Garden blog writes about why he left the game industry and brings up an interesting point.
In fact there are more lapsed game developers in the world than there are current game developers. LetÂs look at some back of the napkin numbers. The average career in the game industry is 5 years. With 800 mainstream games a year and an average team size of 40 developers, we have a rough population of 32,000. If 20% leave a year, thatÂs roughly 6,000 new lapsed game developers every year. Over the past decade, that rapidly adds up to 50,000 or more lapsed game developers.
I find that to be amazing. He then also says that thats not including the smaller shops that have a much higher turnover rate. He's a programmer so I'm not sure if this is more talking about programmers or if this counts for artists as well.
But here is really why I think game companies are such horrible places to work 95% of the time. It's because many games and game companies are started by people that don't understand the business. They know how to make a fun game but they don't understand the business. I've thought this for a long time and that is that EA is full of smart people who understand games better than anyone else. There is a reason why 40% of my game collection are EA published games. It's not that I love all the stuff EA puts out but it's that the best stuff EA has. Game creators hate EA because EA doesn't take huge risks. You wont see EA publishing some fringe game. Why? It's way, way too risky. EA knows how to pick winners for games and understands the business of games.
From GDC, Seamus Blackley says in a panel...
You go to the Fairmont. You hang out, have a coupla 9 dollar beers. Pretend that you like the guys who screwed you 6 years ago at some other company. And you hear a whole bunch of people bitching and moaning about how their awesome games arenÂt getting published by those jackass publishers who wouldnÂt know a good game if it smacked them in the head. I used to really be into this.
Now all I can say is letÂs just stop fucking ourselves and realise whatÂs happening here. We donÂt HAVE a good business around most of the ideas we wanna make. We canÂt go to guys like EA who, incidentally, are really smart - and present them a business case for some of these ideas. I made a decision about 2 years ago to wear a suit and tie every day. I guarantee you that you can feel the IQ flowing from your body down the tie. ItÂs all down to sacrifice. But I went there because I thought we might be able to hack into Hollywood a bit, help the game biz. In fact, Ted Price can give a talk at DiCE about finance, and IÂm talking about off balancesheet financing. That was a great moment in my career but IÂm not bitter about it.
Most major games are only successful if they sell one million copies or more. It doesn't matter if they have a great story line or if they involve the player well. If it doesn't sell that many copies, it failed and the investors will lose money, the publishers will lose money and many other people will lose their jobs.
Any investor who puts his money into the development of a multimillion dollar game is well aware of the risks typically and will remain paranoid all during development, ready to jump ship as soon as anything starts to go wrong. This cramps the developers of the games who are no longer able to create games that will perform to their potential. ¶ 8:06 PM 1 Comments
I'm a comic superhero!
Carolann just drew this picture today of myself, her, and Chris from left to right. She says she just sketched it out real quick but I think it's a pretty awesome job at capturing each of us well enough to totally tell who we are. The scan she has on her site is the scan from a paper but what I've got posted here is just run through Illustrator with the tracing feature. Most of the artwork I see from her is of elfs and other fantasy things so it's very cool to see her draw something like this.
I'm just floored by how awesome the drawing looks. Tomorrow I think I'm going to actually learn a few things in Illustrator so that I can color this pic and maybe make a print for my room or something.
I'm very much looking forward to her comic strip she's going to create. I mean, how awesome is it to be in a comic! ¶ 12:19 AM 0 Comments
I'm just floored by how awesome the drawing looks. Tomorrow I think I'm going to actually learn a few things in Illustrator so that I can color this pic and maybe make a print for my room or something.
I'm very much looking forward to her comic strip she's going to create. I mean, how awesome is it to be in a comic! ¶ 12:19 AM 0 Comments
Friday, April 07, 2006
I need a break
You know when you compile a program out of despiration while trying to fix a bug and and all you'd changed is some small thing that shouldn't have made a difference and it works but you have no idea why? Yeah, I know that feeling. I used to get that so often. Now though, those lucky saves happen less often. Maybe it's that I'm a better programmer though so I make less noob mistakes. Since I'm so much better at programming now, I make much harder to locate mistakes in much much larger programs which become so much harder to find.
Okay, I need a break from this program I've been writing for the last couple days for a class so I'll make a blog post. The program is for my data structures class and it involves using linked lists to solve massive factorials like 9999! which turns out to be a pretty big factorial. I'm writing it in Java so it goes pretty fast but I'm on my second rewrite of the program. Originally it looked like a really simple program and I thought I'd just try and write it in only a couple methods. From past projects, I know this is just horrible and I totally wasn't concerned with OO practices when I started this because I don't think I'm going to have to touch the program once I'm done with it. So after working on it for about 3 or 4 hours, I quickly realized I was going to need to start breaking things into pieces so now I've broken my whole project into a massive amount of tiny methods inside of my objects. Well, I've got a class but I dont know if you'd call it an object since it doesn't really act like an object or fit the definition very well.
I really sometimes believe object oriented programming is just about writing better looking sphagetti code. It's not like it runs any better. It was weird though. Last spring I took a Java class which was my first expierence with programming and I didn't learn a whole lot. I was an Electrical engineering major at that point. Then I got this software development internship with a company for the summer and was programming tons of stuff in C#. I learned a massive amount but I never really understood object oriented programming. It wasn't until this semester that I'm sitting in a class and it just clicks. I don't know why but it just clicked. I totally understood why it was good and all the scary things that come along with it. Here are some of my opinions on it.
- Operator overloading is an amazing feature in C++. I don't know who thought it was a bad idea to not put it in Java but I think it's great for small projects. I think it could get very confusing on larger projects.
- OO promotes way way too many bad programming practices. It promotes some nice organiaztion features though
- Code is very rarely reusable outside of the class unless it's designed to be used by an outside class at the outset.
- You can never plan enough with OO programming to get a structure thats flexible so that your code can be reused.
Well, now that I'm done with that little rant about coding. I guess I better get back to it. And to think that this assignment isn't even required but extra credit. ¶ 9:38 PM 0 Comments
Okay, I need a break from this program I've been writing for the last couple days for a class so I'll make a blog post. The program is for my data structures class and it involves using linked lists to solve massive factorials like 9999! which turns out to be a pretty big factorial. I'm writing it in Java so it goes pretty fast but I'm on my second rewrite of the program. Originally it looked like a really simple program and I thought I'd just try and write it in only a couple methods. From past projects, I know this is just horrible and I totally wasn't concerned with OO practices when I started this because I don't think I'm going to have to touch the program once I'm done with it. So after working on it for about 3 or 4 hours, I quickly realized I was going to need to start breaking things into pieces so now I've broken my whole project into a massive amount of tiny methods inside of my objects. Well, I've got a class but I dont know if you'd call it an object since it doesn't really act like an object or fit the definition very well.
I really sometimes believe object oriented programming is just about writing better looking sphagetti code. It's not like it runs any better. It was weird though. Last spring I took a Java class which was my first expierence with programming and I didn't learn a whole lot. I was an Electrical engineering major at that point. Then I got this software development internship with a company for the summer and was programming tons of stuff in C#. I learned a massive amount but I never really understood object oriented programming. It wasn't until this semester that I'm sitting in a class and it just clicks. I don't know why but it just clicked. I totally understood why it was good and all the scary things that come along with it. Here are some of my opinions on it.
- Operator overloading is an amazing feature in C++. I don't know who thought it was a bad idea to not put it in Java but I think it's great for small projects. I think it could get very confusing on larger projects.
- OO promotes way way too many bad programming practices. It promotes some nice organiaztion features though
- Code is very rarely reusable outside of the class unless it's designed to be used by an outside class at the outset.
- You can never plan enough with OO programming to get a structure thats flexible so that your code can be reused.
Well, now that I'm done with that little rant about coding. I guess I better get back to it. And to think that this assignment isn't even required but extra credit. ¶ 9:38 PM 0 Comments
Monday, April 03, 2006
E3 pass
I've just received my confirmation email that I was accepted to E3 so I should get my badge in a week or so. If any of you are going, let me know. I'll be there on the first day.
¶ 12:26 PM 0 Comments
