Don’t Be an Open Source Douchebag

I love open source software. It provides both a neat training ground for programmers, a good place to go scratch that itch. On the other side of things, it provides awesome software for people, including some software that would never come out of a big development house.

Still, there are some issues with free software that don’t really show up to the same degree with commercial software. One such thing is documentation. It’s painfully obvious that documentation is written by people who:

1. Already know the software in and out.
2. Don’t like writing documentation.
3. Know nothing about how people learn.

For instance, when I started a side project a few months back, I was looking for a build system. After settling on CMake, I set about trying to make sense of it. There’s the ever-present getting started example, of course. And then there’s the full reference of everything you could possibly want (almost).

But in between those, there’s nothing. Well, nothing except a book, which just goes to show you that there’s something missing — a professional writer could obviously make some money out of explaining things in a reasonable way.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t match how people learn. Getting started is a good step, but a relatively small one. Most of the time will be spent incrementally expanding the knowledge, moving from beginner to expert. Most time will thus be spend in some kind of zone in between the “getting started” and “reference of everything” levels.

Worse than that, some open source programmers have a tendency to view their full reference documentation as an appropriate resource for everyone. “It’s all in there,” right? But pointing a beginner at a 40-page document detailing all the options of some application when all they want is to run it properly isn’t very helpful. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about if you’ve ever used an open source command line tool.

That ends us up with the really dark side of free software culture. The true douchebags out there will not only be extremely smartass in their RTFM comments, they’ll also be incredibly sensitive and defensive about the software they’re working on.

I ran into a problem with cygwin’s SSHD implementation last week. In searching for the solution, I found this mail list answer:

  Wrong.  That is uninformed speculation and guesswork.  Stop
spreading misinformation.

  Cygwin SSHD has had the support for fully logging in as any
user since 1.7, as you have already been told and completely
ignored.  Go and read the manual.  The link was in the previous
email I sent in this thread.

  freesshd works exactly as Cygwin *used* to before it got
subauth support: when you log in with a key, rather than a
password, you just end up as an admin user.

Wow. This kind of answer is wrong on so many levels. First of all, while he makes it seem like the functionality has been there forever, cygwin 1.7 is still not even out of beta. The chance that an end user has it is about 0. So, with the current version (1.5),  supposedly cygwin sshd works just like freesshd. This is clearly false, because the original poster reports one working and the other not (which is, by the way, exactly the same results that I had).

So, a user reporting a problem about logging in gets pointed to a long documentation about security settings in a beta version, doesn’t understand a word from that document (no surprise there), and as a result gets told to “stop spreading misinformation”. Truth is, simply installed like any normal user installs applications, one works and the other doesn’t, something made quite clear by an answer from the original poster in a different place in the thread:

> Are you talking about password or public key authentication?
> If the latter, Have you tried the LSA authentication package
> in Cygwin 1.7?

I don't know. I'll try to deciper that. Sounds complicated. In
the meantime, friend is using freesshd.

The essence of what he’s saying (which has been completely missed by the cygwin developers) is that the effort required to get cygwin to work like one would reasonably expect of it is much higher than the effort required to just google for something that just works out of the box. The fact that you could potentially make it work is irrelevant, because he’s not getting any help actually making it work.

He might as well just have said, “I don’t care about making it work for you. It works for me.”

Software companies usually compensate for their complete lack of useful technical support with a good (or at least reasonably decent) amount of help documentation. Free software usually has neither.

I encourage any programmer to practice their technical skills on an open source project. But while you do so, take the opportunity to practice your people skills a bit as well, or why not your writing skills? Don’t be an open source douchebag — someone reporting your software’s flaws is not attacking you personally.

What’s a Good Final Year Project?

Here’s a question from the mailbag, coming from a student doing games programming at a university, gearing up for his final-year project:

The degree I’m doing currently has been very much centered around graphical programming, aswell as using various programming languages to bolster our CV’s I would imagine. We’ve not really touched on networking, or AI at all. Our main language in graphical programming has been OpenGL too, we’ve dabbled with DirectX a little, mostly managed directX with XNA.

As a programmer already in the industry, could you give me any advice on the type, and level of project I should aim for, for it to be a suitable demo project to show to prospective employers? It’s difficult enough as students to find our way into the games industry; if we don’t know what employers want, or what is considered worthy in the eyes of the employer, it lowers our odds tenfold.

In a way, the answer to the question depends on what kind of position you’re trying for. I’ll try to answer with regards to as many positions as I know.

For starters, is graphics programming what you want to be doing? If it is, things like what graphics APIs you know become a lot more important. From what I know, most games studios that do windows game development have gravitated towards DirectX. With that in mind, having done a large(ish) project on DirectX could definitely be a plus. If all other things are equal, I’d definitely go for learning DirectX.

Not having experience with networking or AI isn’t all that much of an issue, unless you imagine going specifically for a networking or AI programming position (and even then, it’s more of a bonus than a requirement). One thing is clear however… if you’re looking to get into professional development at a large studio, you should be going for C++.

Now if we look past the technical requirements, there are a few things that can be said about such a project in itself. What you get from a good project is a nice entry into your demo reel — something to show off. This has a few implications, but most importantly something I’ve touched on before, in A Spectacular Failure: your project is going to be judged on emotional first impressions, not how technologically advanced it is or how nicely coded it is.

Your number one enemy is over-scoping the project, ending up with something that does lots of things, but does none of them in a great way. Come up with a good core gameplay for the game, and then polish it to a great shine. Fix all those annoying glitches and bugs, make sure everything looks as impressive as possible. It doesn’t need to be rocket science, as long as it’s well executed. In the end, what a games studio is looking for is a programmer who knows how to finish projects in a good way.

That doesn’t mean your project should be Space Invaders, but in general trying for something too big is more of a problem than overdoing something too small.

Finally, as an entry on your demo reel, make sure you make the game available in an easy manner. Have a page with plenty of screen shots, videos and preferably the game itself easily downloadable. Your coding ability will definitely be tested with some form of work sample as you apply to studios, so the code itself being available is less important. Reading code is hard, so it’s unlikely that someone will have time to read yours. However, having a finished game to show off is worth a lot, as is the experience of going through all the phases in finishing a game.

Other posts you may find interesting, relating to getting into the games industry and getting started with games:

• Getting Into Games
• An Exceptionally Stupid Idea
• Let’s Make a Game Engine

Getting Into Games — A Follow-up

My post from a week or so ago about the differences between working as a software engineer in a games studio and in other places generated a fair number of interesting comments and questions, both here and at various syndication sites. In this post I will try to answer and comment on the most common and interesting ones.

Working at a Games Studio

Getting started with something I intentionally left out:

Low pay. Good luck trying to buy a house.

There’s a well known discrepancy between salary in your average programming gig and your average games programming gig. I left it out of the original post because of two factors:

1. The difference is highly overstated. Salary varies much more within each class of work than between the two. While it is true I could probably get more money by switching to another job, the same is true for many others, and the difference wouldn’t be worth it to me.
2. It’s your choice. I expect you to make a well-informed choice on taking any job when it comes to what you get paid. Don’t just take any job because someone told you you get paid a lot in a certain business — make sure you get what you’re worth.

A second issue from the same commenter (and several others):

Yes, you have to come to work on Saturday and Sunday.

This is an issue in the industry, and I’ve seen pretty bad cases of it. Since I started coding games, the working conditions have improved by far though — and this doesn’t only seem to be my situation but applies to many others I’ve spoken to at other studios (mainly within EA though — would be happy to hear the perspective of other people). At the moment, from where I’m sitting, things are looking pretty good.

I’m not saying crunches don’t happen, I’m just saying they’re reasonably few, have a good purpose and focused time span, and include a time off compensation after the deadline has been passed.

The most problematic part of this is that it’s extremely hard to figure out if this applies to any given studio without actually working there or knowing someone who does.

I wouldn’t want to be the guy working on the next Madden game

Well, I actually know the guy working on the next Madden game and he is incredibly dedicated and seemed to love what he was working with last time I saw him. About the comment, he told me “Well we don’t want that guy anyway,” which is very true — the reason there is a Madden game every year is because there are lots of people interested in a new Madden game every year, and among that crowd there will certainly be people who are interested enough to want to work on the game.

It’s funny, because I sometimes hear the exact opposite of this comment at work. “It’d be so awesome to work on an iterative title where you just got to improve things and do all those cool changes that we have to cut”. Working on Madden is a pretty sweet place to be if you love sports games.

People sometimes seem to think that innovation only means new game franchise. There are lots of interesting developments and innovations within franchises, even within a “plain old sequel”, and working on one of those titles avoids one of the great drawbacks of the games industry: half the time you’re semi-panicking because your game engine isn’t in a shippable state and there’s a whole game team trying to use it to create a game.

That way, working on Battlefield: Bad Company 2 is nicer than working with the first game: the same chance for innovation, but less problems with others not being able to innovate due to the state of the code.

Getting started

A question that keeps popping up is any version on this:

I’m a frustrated web developer who’s always wanted to make the move into game development, but have yet to find the time to train myself and start shifting my skills over.

Any tips for someone looking to start out in that direction?

I’ve touched on this subject before, in An Exceptionally Stupid Idea, which tells the story of what I did. That post may be best applicable if you’re still in college, but there is a certain truth to it regardless of where you are. Time is money however, and with anything in life  you’ll need to do investments… so seeing where you could free up time is a first step.

What do do with the time once you have it? Well, the games industry is looking for a few things:

• Skilled programmers
• … who know the language
• … and with some experience of games

The third is actually somewhat optional, though most recruiters would never admit that. Becoming a good programmer is a hard topic to cover — more than half the stuff on this blog is already devoted to that, so I’m not going to comment further on that one.

Chances are slim you’ll be coding anything but C++ if you code games, so if you’re not already very familiar with the language, you should get familiar with it. It’s often said that good programmers learn new languages quickly, and to a certain extent I agree with this… but if the problem is complicated enough, you need to be a language expert.

Finally, getting some form of portfolio is good, even if it’s “just a side project”. That could also be a good project to use as practice if you’re not too familiar with the language. Further, it helps if you’re a gamer and stay on top of what’s going on in the industry.

This actually ties into another comment, which was the most compact piece of information:

C++

If you dislike C++, turn elsewhere. I personally think it’s an extremely capable language once you learn to harness it properly. It is dangerous without the safety equipment though, and sadly some of that equipment doesn’t work with games.

Other languages are starting to appear when it comes to games coding. I’ve heard examples of LUA, java and C# being used as scripting languages, and of course there’s UnrealScript. These can be extremely beneficial for iteration times and such, but the grunt of the software is still going to be C++.

Update: I should also mention another old post of mine about this: Let’s Make a Game Engine!

Games Programming

I tried to avoid getting into the details of hardware and the coding that goes with it in the previous post, since I love talking about these sort of things and I didn’t want it to become a rant but hey, you asked!

Console hardware (I’m looking at you, PS3) is made for pretty graphics demos, not simulation. If you work on the AI or physics, be prepared to focus your energy on low level optimisation and cache misses, because your AI code is never going to be any more sophisticated than a state machine.

Well… I’m the lead AI coder on Frostbite, and while there are lots of things to be said about the Frostbite AI, “no more sophisticated than a state machine” is not one of them. I agree, some things (especially physics queries) are expensive on the hardware, but that simply means you need to re-think how you do stuff.

SPU code is a vastly different beast from your average code. There are some bad programming habits that can completely destroy your code for SPUs… and among those bad habits are the ones that would lead you to get stuck on low-level optimizations. Once you learn how it works, there is an incredible amount of power in the PS3. I’d dare to say it’s still relatively untapped, and that as time passes we’ll see more sophisticated uses of it.

The limitations of console hardware is different. That doesn’t mean you can’t implement physics or AI, it just means maybe you’ve got to challenge your assumptions about how you implement physics and AI.

I guess the Parallelism approaches are a little different in both worlds. I bet you gamedev guys have been working with Data Parallelism for a while (i.e: programming the Playstation2 Vector units. I don’t think life is getting any easier on you guys with all those Cell SPEs to squeeze!).

In the enterprisey side, task parallelism is an emerging topic with languages like Erlang, Clojure and Haskell offering different abstractions for spreading computations over different hardware threads/cores.

The vectorization units of the PS2 are a quite limited way to do data-parallel work, so I disagree with you here — with the SPUs on the PS3, it actually is easier, because it’s less limited in what you can do with them. Vectorization units and other primitive forms of data-parallelism often work in lockstep, whereas the PS3 actually has a bunch of individual, highly capable although slightly quirky processors.

Games are full of data-parallelisable problems as well. Rendering is the classic example — the reason GPUs have been such a hot development the last few years is that rendering lends itself so well to parallelism. But there are many other things as well — the aforementioned AI is ideal in some ways, as it tends to be made up of lots of separate processes for different actors or entities.

Task parallelism is also something that can be utilized to a great degree in games since there are simply so many orthogonal tasks to complete. Update the UI, do physics simulations, calculate character skinning, play audio… I can’t go into details on that, but we do a whole lot of it in Frostbite. Sadly, you do end up needing to care about many of the details that using an abstracted language would let you ignore though.

Still, it’s one of the most exciting aspects of coding for me, since games are one of those applications that can actually use all the power of parallel computers.

Making Games

I hear from programmers every now and then who are considering trying to get into the games industry. Our projects are strange beasts that are similar to other software projects in some ways, yet vastly different in other ways. Still, if you look at it from outside, most of these differences will be hard to spot.

With this post, I will try to list what I see as the biggest differences between working on a game and working on a different kind of software project. If you have any questions related to it, please post them as comments and I’ll do a follow-up round.

The Passion and Dedication

It sounds like a cliché, but games are made by mostly gamers. In all the teams I’ve worked with spanning maybe a hundred, there’s only a few people that aren’t absolutely passionate about games, and completely dedicated to making kick-ass entertainment.

The enterprise coders I’ve worked with pretty much fall into two categories: the day job coders who don’t care much and the hackers that appreciate technical challenges. As you move into games, not only does just about everyone fall into the second category, but nearly everyone is also excited about the games themselves, regardless of the technical challenges involved.

If you’re looking for a place to work where your colleagues will be really cool, skilled people with a passion, then the games industry is where to look.

On a cynical note related to that, the abuse of this passion and dedication is what has given the games industry something of a bad reputation (and a well deserved one too). My impression is that working conditions have improved quite a lot across the board, even if there are still the occasional horror stories. If I were to give one piece of actual advice, it’d be to be rather thorough in your background checks on companies.

Creativity

Game developers live off creativity. Even the most simple churn-out-sequels factory will attract highly creative people, and studios will tend to cater to creativity to a much higher degree than most other software development companies.

If you’re highly creative, you will probably find it easy to fit in. My experience is that creative suggestions are almost universally appreciated regardless of source.

Cross-discipline, Bleeding Edge Development

Games teams are made up of a number of disciplines that vary depending on what type of game you’re making, but generally speaking you’ll at least have Designers, Graphical Artists, Animators, Sound Designers and Programmers. Our projects have Mission Designers, Environment Artists, Effects Designers and other disciplines as well.

In a way, this is no different than many other types projects where some end-users create some of the data for the system, but there is a major difference in the fact that the hardware platforms are either consoles or PCs with specs so high that they don’t even exist yet. The coders on the team will be creating a game framework, which is then populated with different kinds of content to produce the game.

The problem with this is that they’re using the software tools you’re building (like the editor and data processing pipeline) to create the game while you’re still trying to build the tools, only to run it in a game engine that is also not done yet.

It’s a bit like trying to produce a business application while part of your team is working on creating the source code editor you must use, and a different part of the team is building your compiler. In some magical way, the components must all mesh together so that not only are the tools done when it’s time to ship the product, but that content creators have time to do something useful with them as well.

This creates an extra layer of complexity to the projects that I haven’t seen anywhere else. Inter-discipline dependencies between disciplines that work in very different manners can cause common project management techniques for software development to break down, because most of the team isn’t developing software.

Performance Focus and Hardware Platforms

From a technical point of view, there is a heavy focus on code performance. This creates a different kind of environment, where some modern programming techniques are simply too expensive to use. It also means you tend to get good at optimizations after a while.

The hardware we run on is increasingly becoming paralell. Using all of the power in the PS3, for instance, requires a fairly well developed parallelism, forcing the shift from single-threaded to multi-threaded coding onto game programming long before most applications need to care all that much.

(Note that my view on the state of the industry is rather limited here. DICE is ahead with the Frostbite engine on current console tech, some other engines are hopelessly behind, but it’s always hard to tell what others have in development.)

The hardware platforms themselves can sometimes be immature and cause problems when you have to jump through hoops to get things working (simple example: graphics driver bugs).

The platforms themselves also impose other restrictions on your code, like the low memory cap of current generation consoles and extreme penalties for cache misses and branching.

Playing Games at Work (!)

I couldn’t leave that out, could I? Yes, we playtest our games at work. They’re a lot of fun, most of the time, so getting to play awesome games before anyone else is quite a perk. To be completely honest I must admit that there are times when it’s not much fun at all… but they are quite uncommon. And hey… you get to shoot your boss.

Sunday Link Run

A bit of a rush this weekend so I haven’t been able to finish the blog post I was hoping to post. Here are some links to keep you occupied for a bit though… I hope I’ll be able to post a full post the next few days.

• E3 has come and gone. I could link to a million things from there, but I’ll restrict myself to one: The Star Wars — The Old Republic trailer. That is one serious piece of awesome right there.
• No, one more E3 mention actually: You will burn in hell for pretending to burn in hell.
• In other game news, the new Red Faction seems to be a good game.
• On the subject of MMOs, Jeff Vogel posted an interesting article about addiction-based game design and Eric at Eldergame posted an in-depth article on the health of the MMO industry.
• Sad news: Fantasy author David Eddings is dead.
• Here’s a concept display of a new kind of interface, used entirely without clicking. I’m not sure if that’s the way of the future, but it’s interesting.
• Алёна C++ made this awesome map of C++. Goes pretty nicely with xkcd’s map of the online communities from a while back.
• Speaks for itself: some beautiful world records.
• And the asshole of the week (frightening how easy it is to find these): the guy who thinks he owns the word “edge”, and likes lawsuits about it — Tim Langdell.