markbetz.net

I installed a new main system drive last week, a Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB to replace the aging SATA 1.0 74GB Raptor that has been in my development box since 2005. The new drive is three times faster, and lots bigger. So, to celebrate all that empty space I started dragging out old games to see if I could get them to install and run. Just to set the stage: my main development system is a Core 2 E8500 with 8GB of DDR3 RAM, on an Asus motherboard. The graphics card is an NVidia GTS-250. Audio-wise I use the onboard Realtek for Skype, and an Audigy 4 Pro for games/movies/etc. The operating system is Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit.

I had some successes and some failures. Rise of Nations, circa 2003, ran fine in widescreen with a little hacking. Age of Empires II, circa 1999, worked but the graphics were messed up, and widescreen/hi-res modes were unavailable. Railroad Tycoon 3, circa 2003, worked fine, including widescreen with a hack to the engine.cfg file, but when patched with the Coast-to-coast expansion it broke. But the backward compatibility award of the day goes to Empire Earth, designed by Rick Goodman of Age of Empires, developed by Stainless Steel Studios and released in 2001 by publisher Sierra. Empire Earth installed and ran flawlessly in 1920 x 1200 widescreen mode. Here’s a shot: The game ran perfectly in version 1.0 right out of the box. Worked perfectly after patching to 1.04 and then 2.0 as well. Sound worked, all available resolutions were supported, the graphics looked great, the game play was as I remembered. This is quite a feat for a nine year-old title. When Empire Earth was released the minimum system requirements included a Pentium II running at 350 Mhz., and at least 64MB of RAM. If you wanted to enjoy the game’s visuals you were requested to have at least 1024 x 768 pixels available. I think I have more pixels in some of my desktop icons now. Windows XP had just been released, and the hot video cards were the GeForce3 and the original Radeon. The other supported chipsets read like the walls in a technology mausoleum: 3dfx, Savage, Matrox, PowerVR. Network play? You’ll need a 28.8 kbps modem, pal.

As a developer myself I am thoroughly impressed anytime something this old installs and runs the way it was originally designed to. Microsoft gets slapped around a lot these days for being stodgy and unhip, not to mention monopolistic. But they don’t often get the compliments they deserve for getting the big picture right, establishing sensible and well-designed APIs, and then managing them well over the decades. The developers who worked on Empire Earth should be proud of themselves as well. It’s got to feel good to know that someone can take your nine year-old efforts, pop them onto a modern 64-bit DirectX 11 platform, and just have it all work. Well done, guys.

I finally completed and deployed the Silverlight 2 game I have been working on for the last few days. I don’t think it will win any awards for game design, but it allowed me to explore a pretty wide swath of Microsoft’s second generation Flash competitor. I like the idea of Silverlight, for the simple reason that I want to do rich Internet apps, but I don’t want to learn ActionScript. I have nothing against Flash: it’s an amazing product with huge market share. Hell, its market share is so huge you really can’t call it a “share.” They have the whole market.

But… Silverlight is built on the .NET technology stack, which makes it immediately accessible to any developer with experience writing Windows Forms or ASP.NET applications. It leverages the concepts introduced with Windows Presentation Foundation in .NET 3.0 to essentially run sandboxed WPF apps in a web browser. It does what Flash does, more or less, on the .NET stack. Will it take off? I have no idea. I suspect that if people write cool stuff for it then it will. I doubt it will ever knock Flash off its pedestal, but it might garner a fair chunk of the market.

The game, which you can play here or by clicking the screenshot above, accepts a query term or terms, then searches Google Images on those terms and arranges the resulting images into a classic “memory” game grid. You play by clicking the tiles to reveal the images, and trying to match them up. In the process of writing it I worked with animations and storyboards, asynchronous calls to RESTful web services, json data serialization, and other interesting areas of the SL2 framework that I will write about in future posts. I also ran into numerous quirks and curiosities in the framework, as well as in the Silverlight Live Streaming service that I chose to host this game. The technology is not without warts, but it is very early in the development cycle, and I’m excited to see what the Silverlight team will be bringing us down the road.

Download the GMemory source code and project files.

This post is about an online fantasy role playing game called Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning. It is developed and operated by Mythic, now a division of Electronic Arts. I’ve been playing it for about a month now, on the Iron Rock server, with a bunch of former Dark Age gaming buddies. You would think I am too old to be wasting time on something like that, and, in the end, the point of this essay may be that you’re right. At least, it may be that online role playing games have moved on, and I haven’t. In any case, this isn’t going to be a very positive post, and I’m sorry about that. Mythic got monthly subscription dollars from me for Dark Age of Camelot for years. I wanted Marc Jacobs to succeed with Warhammer Online, and it may well be that he will, but it doesn’t look good from here.

Continue Reading »