• Windows Live launches SkyDrive today.  It appears to be a full fledged product with a UI compared to Amazon's S3 which is soley an API others use to develop applications such as Elephant Drive and JungleDisk.  It features an amazing 5GB of free storage and I hope I can find an API to hook into...
• Havok (owned now by Intel) is making their physics engine and animation packages available for free on the PC May 2008.  This is great stuff!  Now there are two choices for that big black box within your hobby game you work on at night.  We use Havok at work and I'd love to dabble more with it at home.
• Commodore 64 titles are coming to the Wii Virtual Console.  Commodore rocks!

Yesterday, I found a couple of useful debugging tools within VS 2005, the Immediate Window and Tracepoints.

Immediate Window

Have you ever gotten an assert in your own code from an invalid operation in a Win32 API?  How do you know what the failure inside the API was?  You put in a GetLastError(), right?  What if the function is called from a library that you either can't change or don't want to recompile?  Answer: the Immediate Window (Ctrl-Alt-I).

I was recently debugging a threaded application that was failing inside of CreateThread().  Instead of rebuilding the library calling the API, I simply brought up the Immediate Window and typed in:

It immediately responded with the error, 1450.

You can call your own methods, print out variables and even create new objects.  Read the documentation for all the details, but this is a nice way to get yourself quick answers about your code.

Tracepoints

A tracepoint is a great way to quickly generate trace messages without inserting code.  This is intended for temporary debugging only as they aren't included in any shared source.

I've found this very useful in tracing multithreaded code.  It can be a pain in the rear to get print messages that is sync'd up with the execution of a line.  I haven't been able to confirm this yet, but I believe tracepoints execute and print in an automic manner.  This obviously makes it slow, but I'm suspecting that it's output would be the same as locking around execution and print without the side effect of altering the synchronization of your non-traced code.

Creating tracepoints is a two step process.  You first set a breakpoint on a line, then you convert the breakpoint to a tracepoint by adding the condition, "When hit...".  If using Visual Assist, you must convert via the Breakpoints window directly, a right click on the breakpoint will not suffice.

These were written from the context of game development, but they are still very applicable outside the industry.

• Simple is Beautiful, reminds me of class design sections from Code Complete.
• The Care and Feeding of Pre-Compiled Headers
• Physical Structure and C++ Part 1
• Physical Structure and C++ Part 2

Paradigm just gave us our own retail copy!  Choice of 360 or PS2...looks like I'll be playing it tonight!  Sweet!

We have an auto-quote dispatcher when anyone kicks off a build on our server.  A recent one struck me as particularly poignant for debugging code.

"Only those who have the patience to do simple things perfectly will acquire the skill to do difficult things easily." - Johann Christoph Von Schiller

When you have to resort too much to trial-and-error debugging, you have a tendency to start relying on that approach.  If on the other hand, you try to clearly understand the root of the problem, future and potentially more difficult problems may be much simpler because you already took the time to understand the system.

A near final version of the Stuntman trailer has surfaced on EBGames.  It's an amazing game trailer THQ execs have said is the best THQ has ever done.  Watch out world, here we come!  Look for a huge marketing blitz weeks prior to our August 28th street date...  Everyone here at Paradigm is extremely pumped about the amount of support we're receiving from THQ.  Look for us at the Taurus Awards on Spike TV May 18-19.

This is what I left.  So true, so funny...  There was even a corporate software app that would chime the Intel Bong at specific intervals during the day to remind you to get up and stretch.  Even the CEO has a cube.  I saw it, I saw Andy Grove's too.  At least their buildings could withstand earthquakes like the one we had in Washington.  If the wind blows too hard in my current office building, I'm afraid the whole place could crack apart.

Conan is so funny, and that's totally me with the pens.  I'd go around different areas and snag the best pens and pencils from other groups.  It all comes from the same place, right?

Update: YouTube took the Conan video down. So sorry, it was so funny.

I never had an Amiga, but it was always a dream of mine to own one.  I think I had every other Commodore computer except for the PET.  We owned a Vic-20, 2 C64s (why two?  well, I had a accident with a paper clip), and a C128.  Saving my money and purchasing an amazing Vic-20 from the BX at Hickam AFB when I was 10 was a turning point in my life. 

Top 10 Most Influential Amiga Games: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingreviews/multimedia/2007/04/gallery_amiga0411?slide=1&slideView=2

I remember playing several of these back in the day, Defender of the Crown on the C64.  That, The Bard's Tale 1-3 and pretty much all of EPYX's games still stick in my mind as some of the best games of all time.  Remember when EA was EOA?  Man, I wasted a ton of graph paper with The Bard's Tale.

I played Another World (US: Out of this World) on my first IBM 386sx.  My friend Will brought it over and we had to much around with various memory conifgurations just to get it to run. 

Remember config.sys and himem.sys?  What was it, Dos 6.2 that finally had a memory configuration tool that would muck around with your autoexec.bat and config.sys and through trial and error get an optimal configuration for your system?

Earlier this year, I bought a C64 retro gamepack that hooks directly to your TV.  It has Jumpman, Summer Games, Mission Impossible, Pitstop, and many others.  I remember enjoying Pitstop more than I do now, but Jumpman is still awesome.

What about Lode Runner?  I still have the Win95 box of the update to the game Steve M and I played quite a bit.  I can't seem to find the floppies, but the box is still cool.

Stuntman Ignition, the current game I'm working on is getting a lot of press recently. It's currently top spot on IGN's main page. It is also on the PS3 and Xbox 360 pages:

http://www.ign.com/
http://ps3.ign.com/
http://xbox360.ign.com/

This week's feature focuses on stunt stringing in the movie Aftershock.

It's a pretty fun game, kind of addictive really. And without all of the language!