The software designer then makes a decision on whether or not to honor the request … trying to balance the customer’s whims against the developer’s resources, contractual obligations, and customer satisfaction. Its then that you’ll then hear software developers spending their lunches complaining about scope creep.

However, I believe that often issues appear that can not simply be blamed on scope creep. What I’m referring to is something I call ‘Emergent Functional Requirements’.

For example, I’m currently building a level editor for use by the game players. There is a specific game design document that lists all the functional requirements for the level editor. However, now that they have been implemented, there are a variety of new tasks that I feel I must address. These are functional issues that could not have anticipated until actually working with the finished product.

While I could simply return the editor in its current state to the designers and say it was built as designed, I feel (through purely personal feelings) it necessary to increase the scope of the project to address these new issues.

Fortunately, I work in a company where I have the flexibility to do this. However, not everyone does. Thats why I believe, in order to the ensure quality of the end product, project managers, developers, and designers should all ensure they have given themselves a bit of room for the types of software features that are not in the design documents simply because nobody could have predicted them. This could be considered the first step toward iterative design… or it could simply offer a bit less whining about scope creep when it really isn’t (scope creep).

The two books that happened to catch my recent attention have nothing to do with game design, but never-the-less my mind keeps twisting the things I read into ‘ooh that would be cool in a game’.

The first is a book about the Great Wall of China, and is written by John Man. He has a definite ‘pro-Mongolian’ agenda, but he is honest about that from the beginning. He briefly covers the details of Chinese and Mongolian histories individually, and in detail describes the current state of the Great Wall and debunks the popular myths about the wall.

I’ve learned a great deal (had my myths debunked) … and developed an appreciation for a history I never really knew anything about. Now I’m ready to make a 10th century Mongol video game. :)

The other book has more to do with my Master’s project (Using Genetic Algorithms to create personality in minor NPCs). Its a bit ridiculous, because it is a text book about the prehistory of humans (everything until about 4000 BC). I found it for about £4 at a local store, and while flipping through the pages found that I couldn’t put it down … so I bought it. I only make it through 5-10 pages a day, but even so, I’ve put a big dent in it… and I’m already up to 40,000 years ago. :)

That book is called something like, “The History of Man” and was written by a variety of experts in Anthropology and was published with-in the last 5 years. The editor claims that this is the first book on the topic that is not written from the perspective of a single researcher … and instead represents a comprehensive and unbiased account of what we know (and what we don’t know) about the prehistory of humans.

Its actually far more interesting than it sounds… and for the price of a Venti Mocha at Starbucks, how could I pass it up?

Finally, I should mention that I’m also reading the classic Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy. Its totally unrelated to game making … and its the first fiction book I’ve read in a while that isn’t Cthulhu related (Cthulhu books are my guilty pleasure). As for Anna Karenina, I’m flying through it as well… but the story is fairly troubling. I’m hoping for a happy ending, but at this point I’m not sure if thats possible. Poor Levin (so far, he’s my favorite).

So our job (after first counting the number of individual plants that exist on the stretch of coast) was to remove the ivy and other ‘garden escapees’ … and replace them with transplanted natural grasses from the surrounding area.

It was a full beautiful sunny Sunday … and I’m sure I’ll be back next month when we’ll be building Scotland style dry stone walls in a park somewhere.

So far, I’ve been mentioned after both submissions I’ve made, which makes me feel that at least I’m on the right track.

The most recent is the Spoken Word game design challenge:
GameCareerGuide: Spoken Word Design Challenge Results
GameCareerGuide: My Entry Mentioned

The most recent is the Spoken Word game design challenge:
GameCareerGuide: The Crate Design Challenge Results
GameCareerGuide: My Entry Mentioned

I’m learning as much on the job, as anywhere else… but it’s all good fun. So, I’ll keep working at it.

I have a summer student programming position at Proper Games here in Dundee, Scotland. We’re working on a game called Flock!, which is a ‘farm animal abduction game’ for the PC, PS3, and XBox360.

What is kind of game is that? Well, you can read all about it here on IGN: Flock! Announced on IGN

So far my completed tasks include:

Building a model viewer which allows the artists and programmers to view 3D models and associated flags to see how they will look in the game … without having to actually start up the game and view them. This includes animated models. You can spin the models around on any axis, zoom in and out, and turn on or off a variety of rendering settings. This has already proved useful in allowing us to debug issues related to collision meshes and animated model bones (which are both viewable in the model viewer).

My next task was to build an interface to the game ‘tweaker’. There are a variety of settings that the programmers, artists, and level designers can change while playing the game to see how the game mechanics will react. For example, you can change the camera distance … or increase the power of the catapults… or whatever. Well, before you had to enter ‘console mode’ and type the command: “camdist 50” or “catapultradius 100“. This had a number of disadvantages… you couldn’t use it without a keyboard on the Xbox360 or PS3 … you had to remember what the approximately 250 possible commands are … and you couldn’t reset the values or save them. But now… all that is possible to do in the graphical interface I built! :)

So, after that I started working on some minor changes including most recently making the end of level scoreboard easier to understand, and adding some animation to some of the on-screen icons to make them stand out.

Next week I’ll spend some time cleaning up the game code (removing the 300 or so compiler warnings)… and I have a list of a couple more game interface tweaks to fix.

Anyway… not too bad for my first 3 weeks.

The game company is small (only about 12 employees total). The programmers are brilliant, and the artists are extremely talented. The designers really know their stuff… and the management is easy going. All together, it makes a great place to learn and contribute … and as I mentioned to someone the other day… it feels more like a club house than an office.

Everyone here is pretty excited about the big unveiling of the game that happened last night and will continue to get press through out next week during the E3 game industry event. I think the plan is to have the guys who are headed to LA show up in true Scottish attire… so if and when photos are available, I’ll be sure to post those as well.

There are not that many events in life that you can attend that are fun, free, and you get to make stuff. So as a “poor college student” it was good to actually find something that meets all those criteria.

So, here’s the result of my 90 minute class. We took a break half-way through to have a cup of coffee and a ‘wee chat’.

You can find out more about the teacher and the class on her website: http://www.catrionawhiteford.com

I’ve also been to another class called “Monomania", but I didn’t take pictures of the book I made in our book binding class… so I’ll have to save the blog entry on that for another time…

Monomania

Even worse, between video codecs and general Winodws issues … you can spend hours dealing with program hangs or complete crashes.

Of course, many people have different goals when it comes to video editing, so I will first explain my goals in the hopes that yours are similar, you might find these tips useful. If not, then you may have to head back to Google in order to find something more relevant to your needs… :)

My Goals: Mostly, I’m looking to take pictures and videos with my digital camera … mix them together with pictures from friends cameras and music that I have stored on my hard drive, apply some video effects and transitions that actually enhance what it is I’m trying to convey with the video, and then finally share the final video with friends and family. (See some of my “home movies” on YouTube)

Here’s some links to the software I’ll be talking about:

• Windows Movie Maker
• SUPER
• t@b ZweiStein
• AutoStitch

At first, I was happy with Windows Movie Maker. I could create some cool effects, add some titles, put in a track of music, and upload the final product to YouTube. (I’ll talk about moving beyond Movie Maker a bit later)

Tip 1: Avoiding program crashes with Windows Movie Maker on XP

Experience has shown me that on XP, Windows Movie Maker likes to crash. Having lots of system memory (RAM) helps the situation, but not completely. You’ll be working along and the program will crash, and you’ll loose huge chunks of time and effort.

The solution? SAVE and SAVE often! Not only does it ensure that you won’t loose as much work if it crashes, but regular saving actually seems to help prevent the crashes. My guess is that Movie Maker is storing the history of your actions somewhere (so that you can use “undo”) … saving must move that memory from RAM to the hard disk, effectively freeing up the program’s working memory. Of course if you have really low amounts of system memory (like 256 megs on XP) … then Movie Maker will just crash “less often”.

Tip 2: Avoiding program crashes with Windows Movie Maker on Vista

Vista, ugh. Okay… so sometimes we have to use Vista. And if you are, you’ll notice that Movie Maker got a face lift. And (for me) for a while… it seemed that it didn’t suffer the same crashes. It did other strange things… but not the crashes. Then one day, that changed. Suddenly Vista started crashing all the time… when I’d import an mp3, when I’d import a avi, when I’d try to include the mp3 in my timeline… crash – restart automatically – crash again. SO FRUSTRATING.

Microsoft documentation suggests disabling codecs, trying different codec combinations … I tried all that, but still no luck.

The solution? Only use WMVs and WMAs with Windows Movie Maker on Vista. Who knows if they did this on purpose or not … wouldn’t surprise me if they did … but when the mp3 files started causing Movie Maker to crash I tried converting my mp3s to WMAs (Windows Media Audio files) before importing them and surprise – surprise … no more crashes.

I still refuse to convert my entire audio collection to WMAs… only the ones I’m going to use in a video creation.

Tip 3: Converting video and audio files between formats…

Again, there is a lot of software out there. I started using the “Bink Tools”, but they didn’t support enough formats. I soon found that I was using a variety of different conversion programs for the variety of things that I do from day to day on the computer (not just video editing). Especially frustrating is when digital cameras use MOV files for their videos (talk about a format that just won’t die … I don’t know what’s worse, Real Player or Quicktime) … but I digress.

The Solution? Use SUPER for all your media conversions. It’s powerful, and it has a wonderful set of pre-configured formats (everything from FLVs to WMAs to PSP video!!) It can convert audio, video, and even allows you to resize the output. As a added bonus, I think its batching feature works much better than Bink Tools! Its just “super”.

For Vista users, you’ll need to always select “Run As Administrator” when starting SUPER.

SUPER is not quite as simple to use as Movie Maker, but its learning curve is not too steep. Just be patient and take time to read the options… there are a lot of features. Also, in my version it says you can “drag and drop” media to import. That doesn’t work for me, I have to “Right click” and select “Import Media”. Not a big deal.

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Tip 4: Moving beyond Windows Movie Maker

Okay, so now you’re a big shot, Movie Maker/YouTube star. You’re making cute videos… with cute transitions and cute title screens and cute captions. You’re figured out how to edit your photos in your favourite photo editor before importing them to create other fun effects…

But Windows Movie Maker is a gateway drug! You want something with more kick, but you still can’t afford anything the good stuff.

The Solution: “t@b ZweiStein” Unfortunately, t@b has two serious problems that you’re going to have to get over before you can use it.

First, it has the stupidest name of any piece of software. Or maybe it’s just me?

Second, it has a user interface that could only have been designed by Linux users. Personally, I think they only made it this difficult to use just to frustrate Winodws user.

The point is, don’t get let it get you frustrated! It is a much better program that it initially looks … and it is a great and powerful piece of software (come to think of it, Oz would have been a better name than t@b ZwiStein). But, we can’t complain about the interface or the name or the learning curve … because it was free, remember?

So what can this little program do? Well, try out the zoom and pan features … or the blue screening stuff (chroma-keying).

I find that Windows Movie Maker is good for 80% of what I want to do. It’s very easy to work with files and audio tracks … move clips around through its drag and drop interface … and “undo” really is a handy feature. So I tend to make the really cool video effects in t@b, but then import them as pieces into Movie Maker for the bigger picture stuff.

As for Vista with t@b, once again … “Run As Adminstrator”

Tip 5: Export files in t@b Zwinstein using the default format and codec

There are some good tutorials on the t@b website, and I’m going to assume that after you install t@b you’re going to read through some of them. However, if you have difficulties, one thing you can ignore is the stuff about exporting the file into WMVs.

The Solution: Just remember that you can convert the native export format (avi) using SUPER. It might be an extra step, but it may save you hours of fighting with getting a program that was built on Linux to work perfectly on Windows.

Tip 6: Creating Panoramas for using in t@b Zwinstein

Another incredible tool for photo editing is Auto Stitch. It automatically stitches individual photos together to make panoramic photos. Now, I know that some digital cameras come with software to do this, but Auto Stitch is WAY cooler. Yeah, totally dude!

Why? Because you don’t have to specify the order of the files… it just figures it out. Left to Right? Right to Left? Up and Down … a 10 by 10 grid of photos… whatever… it just figures it out. Okay, so it’s not 100% … but if you give it good data to work with, 90% of the time it creates amazing panoramic photos.

But if you’re like me, you always switch from the default “10% file size” option to “100% filesize” …. creating huge high resolution output photos. Those are great for creating the big wall poster … but here’s my last tip:

Tip 7: Resize Your Photos

Resize your photos to a sensible resolution before sending them to your video editing tools. There’s usually no need for a 6432x5632 pixel image in a video that outputs to 640x480 or 320x240 for web viewing. Even HDTV is nowhere close to the kind of images you can create when you combine today’s high megapixel digital cameras with autostitch software. So, give the video editing software a break by downsizing those images first. You’ll not only save processing power, but you’ll also probably prevent the software from crashing.

I hope that helps… I’ve wasted a lot of hours using other programs and dealing with crashes on these… and you shouldn’t have to repeat it.

If you have other tips that may help others, feel free to leave them as comments.