Viral - Post Development Analysis

Its 4.44pm on Monday the 24^th of January, and Noisy Badger is bang on target for submitting its first game at 6pm. Excitement doesn’t cover it.

With Alex finalising some last minute tweaks I’m going to take a chance to go over some of the more obvious development peaks and troughs I encountered on the design side of things, in a similar way to Alex’s last post.

POLY COUNT. I have no idea what I was thinking on my first build of the earth in this game, but I ended up spending possibly two weeks building a detailed, 3d map of the earth, following the outline of the countries as accurately as possible. I then bevelled the edges of each of the countries to provide a nice little “groove” where all the borders met, further upping the poly count. It ended up containing about 80,000 polygons, the on-screen limit for an iPhone being 10,000.

So to break it down financially, as a self-employed/freelancer type, a general rule of thumb when you’re starting out is to charge around £25 an hour for your services. If I apply that figure to the ten working days I spent on this world map, working eight hours a day, I basically cost Noisy Badger £2000 through my own idiocy. And that figure doesn’t take into account the other work that I could have been getting done in that time, or a multitude of other factors that I really don’t want to think of. That’s the first time I’ve worked out that figure, and I just told Alex. He shot me a look that said “I’m not angry, I’m just disappointed.”

It’s not realistically that much of a financial disaster obviously, but it goes to show how easy it is to mess up. We knew this being our first release that there would be plenty of errors as we tried as fast as we could to establish good communication between ourselves, learning new tools, and getting our development pipelines in order. I’d still say that we’re not bang on in any of these areas, and I don’t think that anyone ever could be. It’s a constantly changing industry and as such our flexibility to adapt to anything new that comes our way is the greatest asset we have, not necessarily an intricate knowledge of every new piece of software that comes our way.

Edit – The game has now been uploaded to the app store and is awaiting apple’s quality assurance stuff. I’m currently wearing out my blackberry from constantly checking to see if it’s been ok’d J

A costly mistake.

So I've recently had a major problem which has halted our progress slightly. I claim some responsiblity for not doing my research properly, but I think Apple could have made things slightly more clear.

Now, I don't know if I'm alone in this, but I always associated the PowerMac (the big, professional looking one) with serious things like software development. So, with this in mind I bought one to work on our iOS titles, unfortunately for me I bought one that was a few years old which caused me some unexpected problems.

I downloaded a copy of XCode (Apple's development environment) and the iPhone SDK. No problems so far.

The issue came when trying to install the above software. The installer package had a list of components that could be installed, puzzlingly for me all the iPhone options were greyed out.

I went online to find out what was going on. It turns out that the iPhone SDK requires an Intel based processor. The PowerMac I'd bought runs on PowerPC architecture as it was made before 2006.

There is a way to work around this problem, but it involves a lot of fiddling with config files and there isn't a guarantee that the app you compile will actually even run on the iPhone hardware. You may recall from my earlier blog post "What are we using?" that the whole reason I was buying a Mac was to avoid complexity that I didn't need, so much for that.

In conclusion, the Mac I bought is completely unsuitable for our needs, so I'm having to resell it and buy a Mac with an Intel processor. If there's anything I've learned from this somewhat costly mistake it's to do proper research on the hardware you're buying before you invest.

What are we using?

With the company's purchase of a Mac yesterday, I thought it might be of interest to some people to briefly outline the technology we're using.

On the coding side I'm using a PC built around the AMD Athlon64 X2 5600 (~2.8GHz) processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM and an nVidia GeForce 8800GTS graphics card.

I built it mid-2007 and its definitely starting to show it's age now. Having said that, it still performs well on code compilation and doesn't slow me down in any development work I'm doing. Unfortunately it does mean that playing the latest releases at a decent framerate is difficult.

Oliver doesn't suffer from framerate performance with new games because he took the phrase 'future-proof' and ran with it when building his PC last year. He built it (well he bought the parts and I built it, because he is technologically inferior to me) around an Intel I5 quad core (~2.4GHz) processor, 4GB DDR2 RAM and an nVidia Geforce GTX 295 graphics card. He uses this mighty machine for various design tasks, from 3D modelling to image manipulation.

Our newest addition to the family is a PowerMac, this had to be bought as Apple's iPhone SDK can only be run on an Apple. Well, there are ways to emulate a Mac on a PC but it requires an Intel processor, which I don't have, and a lot of messing around which I quite frankly couldn't be bothered with. The end result would also run a lot slower than on actual Apple hardware so the decision was made to bite the bullet and buy one.

The machine is a PowerMac G5 with a 2GHz dual core processor, 2GB RAM (considering upping to 4) and an ATI Radeon 9600 graphics card. It's quite an old machine, but we considered the merits of buying a brand new one and we simply don't need the extra speed. The iPhone/iPad hardware is still inferior to the Mac we bought, so we won't have a problem with the iPhone simulator running slowly.

You now have an insight into the hardware that we're working with, in future posts I'll discuss the many software packages we use. I'll also keep you updated with any programming related news while Oliver keeps you up to date on the design side.