Check this post on Joystiq:

http://feeds.joystiq.com/~r/weblogsinc/joystiq/~3/91677544/

Check this quote:

" In short, the single- and multi-player elements of the game are merged, so those heretofore mindless enemies -- yup, they're your fellow carbon-based mammals."

Now, that's kid of an interesting idea.  I picutre either playing as the Hero with actual smart enemies but otherwise being mostly like any other game, or putting yourself in the "bad guy peon" queue.  In this queue you would play different bad guys with their own moves/powers/weapons/whatever but ultimately far weaker than the Hero since in all games the hero must kill 343,999,777 weaker peons before he can get teh powar up win teh game!  You would play for a short deathmatch-ish time then wait in line until the system needs to spawn another bad guy, possibly jumping from game to game depending on a centralized server sending bad guys to whatever system they are needed.  A cool idea, and one more to add to my list if they bring out an Xbox360 with HDMI.

News about UAC in Vista is all over the web.  As a developer of shrink-wrap desktop software I thought I’d continue my string of “comments” (ok, bitching) about Vista now that I’m in a better place.

The most obvious places where UAC “helps you be more secure” are:

·         Writing to the registry requires elevation

·         Assumes any setup program needs to be run with Admin privileges

·         Writing to the \windows folder requires elevation

·         Writing to the \program files\ folder (and all folders below it) requires elevation

Another interesting tidbit is that Vista ships with .NET 2.0 installed.  That’s good news.  However MSI files built in VS 2003 will demand that .NET 1.1.4322 is installed despite the fact that .NET 2 should run those apps just fine.  Oddly enough, navigating to \windows\Microsoft.Net\Framework\ on a Vista install will show the following directories:

1)      V1.0

2)      V1.1

3)      V2.0

4)      V3.0

However the v1 directories do not have the full install, just some GAC tools presumably for sort of tool compatibility, so tests detecting a specific  1.x version will fail.

One interesting thing I tried but ultimately did not go with was marking my application so Vista knows it needs to run with Admin permissions by embedding a manifest in the .exe.  I found instructions for what the manifest should look like and a made a post-build event that would embed the resource in the assembly.  This worked well and Vista displayed my .exe with a nice “shield” overlay letting the users know they’d be prompted to elevate.  Sticking this .exe inside an MSI seems to clobber the manifest however, using dumpbin.exe confirms this.  Rather than dig for the answer to this I made some code changes as indicated below.

For this software developer, here are the changes I had to make to get a product running on Vista as painless for the user as possible:

1)      Created a .NET v2 version of our product.  Granted, I’d rather use 2.0 across the board but some of our customers won’t upgrade and we sometimes distribute via http so a bootstrap including the 2.0 install is a little bigger than where I’d like to be.  I did this by sharing the individual files across two VSS projects and just creating separate project/solution files for 2.0 in a different location.  Thanks to Matt Terski for the tip.  This feels evil for some reason but it works.

2)      Re-wrote the installers.  The .NET 1.1 installers accomplish some of the installation tasks with Custom Actions written in .NET.  Some of these actions do things like registering a device with a WIA event using the WIA automation layer and therefore require admin permissions.   While I would think the MSI would spawn my .net EXE with the same security tokens  (already elevated and using the admin token) as the parent process this did not seem to be the case as the custom actions reliably crashed the install every time.  I set up the MSI to write the same registry keys that the WIA code would have done and worked around the other custom actions so that everything is part of the MSI.  Since the installer writes to the registry, it must still install with elevated permissions.

3)      Non-Admin Logging Mode.  Previously the application did innocuous things like Write a log file in the same directory as the .exe using log4net.  I had to do some digging to find how to change a DOM configurated FileAppender location at runtime (http://insario.com/blog/jfk/archive/2004/11/30/164.aspx) and change this from \Program Files\MyProgram\ to a user-specific location if the code runs on Vista. (OS version = NT 6.0blahblah)

4)      Non-Admin App settings.  Written in .NET 1.1 initially the app used some dynamic windows forms properties: GUI features bound to an App.config setting.  Since App.config lives in \Program Files\MyProgram updating these properties also wasn’t going to be non-admin friendly.  Somewhat loathingly, I added a “Settings” file to the .NET 2 project.  And set the code to use settings vs. writing to app.config with some conditional compilation.  Hooray for #if NET2.  The Settings feature wasn’t trumpeted like MASTER PAGES AND GENERICS when .NET 2 was rolling out but it’s worth looking into if you are not familiar with it.  Settings can be marked with a UserScopedSettingAttribute()  or regular old Application Scope.  User scope settings are stored in a User specific location (although I’m damned if I could find the file itself but it works) and therefore no elevation needed.  Nice of .NET 2 to handle that for me.  This is probably a better design choice anyway but again it’s mainly a 1.1 app.

Now my code installs as Admin and then happily does all its Camera/WIA/Exif/Internet hooha without requiring elevation.  Digging through the UAC documentation to see where I was going wrong was frustrating at first, and if anyone knows how I can keep an MSI created in VS2005 from clobbering my manifest (at install time or packaging time, I’m not sure which) that will probably come in handy at some point.

I love this article on Ars today

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070214-8849.html

A quote:

... "

First and foremost, ratings based on partial game footage would become a thing of the past. Currently, the ESRB hands out ratings after viewing a reel with representative content prepared by the developers. Sen. Brownback thinks that's not enough: "Video game reviewers should be required to review the entire content of a game to ensure the accuracy of the rating," he said. "The current video game ratings system is not as accurate as it could be because reviewers do not see the full content of games and do not even play the games they rate."

"...

Good call, Mr. Out of Touch With Reality.  Does that mean all 80 hours of Final Fantasy XII should be "watched" before the game can be reviewed?  Maybe just a slide show of every model, texture, and environment and a dump of all sound used in the game?

http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/news/8211

Yes, they are looking to make movies or a TV Series about the Dark Tower books.  I'm pretty sure there's no way this can turn out well, and so I'm sad.  I'd rather stick with my book and audio book versions of this 7 novel story.  I have a signed Michael Whelan print of Roland outside the Tower in my office and have read these more than anything except The Hobbit.   Why don't I think it can turn out well?

-Who would play Roland?  Roland IS Clint Eastwood, but Clint is past his time with parts like this I think.  My 2nd pick for middle-aged Roland: Christian Bale.  Think about it.  Jada Pinket Smith as Susannah?  Sean Penn as Eddie?  Tobin Bell as Walter?  James Earl Jones narrating?

-A TV Series?  The material in the books absolutely require an R rating meaning meaning the only way they can not suck is to air on Showtime (Like the Masters or Horror series) or HBO (like Sopranos, Weeds, Deadwood)

-I can't think of any King adaptations that have turned out well on film.  The Green Mile and Shawshank Redeption were not bad, but both dealt with much simpler subject matter.

Sigh.  Between shit like this and the horrible flood of re-makes-of-films-that-aren't-even-that-old and sequels to films involving none of the origial cast, crew, directors, or authors, it appears that I am doomed to see every single movie and literary icon of my life ruined.

Congratulations to my lovely Fiancé for passing her NCLEX board exams on the first try.  The NCLEX is like the BAR exam to be allowed to practice as an RN.

http://drl.wi.gov/drl/drllookup/LicenseLookupServlet?page=health_details&crednum=156879&credtype=30

I took a friend and former client TV shopping this weekend at their request: people have gotten the idea that I keep up with audio/video stuff or something.

Anyway, at a certain local TV/Home Theater shop I walked in and confirmed my opinion that the Sony SXRD rear projection TVs have a fantastic picture and are very reasonably priced for a 1080p TV.  Of course as we walked around and discussed different things we were seeing on the unavoidable sales guy encounter happened.  The sales guy tried to give me a lecture on the TV including several horribly incorrect facts including "SXRD is Sony's image processing enhancements" and such.  My response that SXRD stands for Silicon Xtal Reflective Display and that it is Sony's proprietery implementation of the Liquid Crystal on Silicon (LCOS) idea and that it didn't include any "picture processing" that I was aware of was met with momentary disorientation and then more arguments on his part. 

I can understand that most consumers are dumb and the industry hasn't made the adoption of HD related technologies easy and its probably safe to start out with the assumption of an uneducated buyer, but when someone clearly knows what they are talking about the salesperson's role switches from "educating about the product" mode to relationship building or "here's why you should buy this from us instead of somewhere else" mode.  The salesperson saw me getting ready to attack and left us alone before I could ask if this particular model had HDMI 1.3 support. 

Shut up TV man, see if I bring another potential customer to your store any time soon.  I almost never meet a salesperson who knows more than I do or is more up to date (than you RSS) on audio/video than I am.  I don't mean that to be an arrogant challenge, because really its somewhat disappointing.  If I had more time selling home theater stuff would be a fun part time job, or perhaps I should get into contract Crestron programming to get an employee discount at one of these shops to subsidise my frequent upgrading habit.

After the huge user uproar that happened when the Compact Framework 2.0 initially did not support CE 4.2 devices, one would think MSFT would have taken the point, instead, today I get another fun Vista Fact.

ActiveSync 4.2 and before will not run on Vista.  It's blocked, and tells you so when you try to run it;  Nice of them to let me install it first though.  The Vista solution is the Windows Mobile Device Center, which sounds very swell.  However it explicitly does not support CE 4.2.  Old version won't run, new version won't talk to my devices.  Of course I tried anyway and on my hardware any attempt to connect reliably crashes the Service Host over and over again.  So, for now, we can't sell our most expensive product on Vista.  Granted, I mostly blame this on the OEM who has refused to upgrade to CE 5 for over two years now.

So, I have already had one customer complaint about this or that not working on Vista.  That didn't take long.  So far I can see that:

-Vista does not ship with .net 1.1, only 2.0.  This wouldn't bother me as 2.0 is overwhelmingly backward compatible with 1.1 assemblies with very few breaking changes.  However my MSIs created with VS2003 demand 1.1.4blahblah explicitly, so I need to build new installers or include a 1.1 bootstrap.

-With 1.1 installed, my .net custom actions for registering my camera software with wia and doing some custom regsvr32 bombs and aborts the install.  Copying the files and assemblies needed and running the registration manually does not complain, however my 1.1 assembly will not start, giving an evil looking runtime error before a single line of .net is executed.  That's nice.

-My Camera software that uses the WIA automation layer seems to be able to register WIA events properly, at least I've got that going for me.

-Seemingly EVERYTHING requires me to confirm changes to my computer.  Manually Creating a folder under \program files requires two confirmations?  What the hell is that?  If that's security, I'll take my chances, thanks.

So, you can probably tell I didn't follow Vista very closely before launch, maybe some of these are known issues with simple solutions.  I'll be working on getting my company's most successful app installing and running under Vista now...

Due to some comments about incompleteness of the "Studio support" section of my diatribe on BluRay, I spent some research time over on the BluRay official site, solicited feedback from a couple locations, and built a more accurate Studio Org Chart over at http://www.klipschcorner.com/.  It does not include every single tiny little indy arm of every studio (like Fox Searchlight) but is farily complete.  Who owns what rights to what is fairly complicated it seems.

Its cold in Wisconsin, real cold.

The weather service is telling me frostbite can occur in as little as 10 minutes with exposed skin, and to keep my gas tank at least half full.  Its -32 with the windchill today and I walk 10 minutes to my car.  In my office I sit near a window, and although the thermostat says 72deg, I've been wearing my wool top coat and shivering all day.  I've been afraid to visit the bathroom for fear that my ass would freeze to the toilet seat.

{edit: replaced sd with cf in last paragraph}

{edit: added Phillips as a BD hardware MFG and fixed typo of Toshiba model # and price}

I've taken a bit of punishment and head shaking for my decision to support BluRay for high definition optical storage.  The first such "silly Damon" conversation was two "deeper in .Net" events ago at a user group dinner where I got an earful.  My decision was based on careful research and thoughtful analysis.  You could call me an audiophile, videophile, Sony fanboy or whatever else you want, but right now BluRay is outselling HD-DVD by very large margins (3:1 and trending upwards) according to any and all metrics we have available to check.  These metrics are:

• 20th Century Fox's proprietary market research (taken with a grain of salt since they are a BD supporter)
• DVDEmpire.com tracks how much of each format they sell
• Amazon.com makes sales data available through the AWS developer program (see http://www.eproductwars.com/dvd)
• Neilson VideoScan (3rd party market research firm)

BluRay is selling great compared to HD-DVD and trending upwards.  Will this continue?  My magic 8 ball says yes.  So, for the people who think I am insane, let me summarize again.  I am a home theater person 1st, audio person second, gaming person next, "fanboy" last, and I happen to be somewhat technical.  These roles are the filters through which I studied the competing format data starting in early '05.

1. Studio support:  I don't know what the BluRay Disc Association (BDA) promised to the studios (the Sony owned ones never had a choice) to get them to commit to being BD only, but it worked.   This may not be an exhaustive list but is just what comes to mind, I also don’t claim to be up on who owns who and which of these are just sub-studios, I’m tracking the # of distinct names I’ve seen on releases and in the news.  More exclusive content means more people picking BD when their favorite movies show up on BD only.
   1. Neutral Studios supporting both formats:
      1. Warner
      2. Paramount
      3. Vivid (porn)
   2. HD-DVD only studios
      1. Universal
      2. Some porn studios
   3. BluRay only Studios
      1. MGM
      2. Disney
      3. Lionsgate
      4. Sony Pictures
      5. Colubmia
      6. Tri-Star
      7. ScreenGems
      8. Fox
2. Consumer Electronics Manufacturer support.  More choice means, well, more choices.  It also means CE manufacturers competing with each other which as a Capitalist I view as a good way to get better products sooner.
   1. Neutral MFGs:
      1. None, unless you count LG’s dual format player
      2. HD-DVD only
         1. Toshiba is essentially going it alone, with rumours that Onkyo will release a player in late 2007 or 2008
      3. BluRay only
         1. Sony
         2. Panasonic
         3. Apple
         4. HP
         5. Pioneer
         6. Samsung
         7. Phillips
3. The features of the specs themselves.  This is what initially made the decision for me.  Let me hit the highlights.  The same video codecs are mandatory on both formats, despite HD-DVD fanboys trying to spread rumors that BD only supports MPEG-2. I own several stunning MPEG-4/AVC/VC-1 etc. titles on BD. Both support DTS-HD and DolbyDigital+, with uncompressed sound being optional on BD.  I have not heard of any uncompressed sound on HD-DVD.

Feature	BluRay	HD-DVD
Disc space	25GB single layer/50GB dual layer	15GB single layer/30GB dual layer
Maximum Bitrates for video	40mb/s	28mb/s
Total Video+Audio Rate	54mb/s	36.55mb/s
Interactivity	BD-J	iHD

Ignore any larger numbers you’ve seen announced from either format group.  If you want to get into a prick waving contest BD has announced up to 200GB and HD-DVD up to 51GB.  These specs require more than two layers, are targeted at data archival and certainly won’t work on your home players.

Now, if you do research on the HD audio and video codecs supported you’ll see this is a problem.  The maximum video bitrate supported by things like VC-1 for 1080p/60 ends up being 20GB of storage per hour of HD video.  That’s 40GB for a 2 hour video.  Then add the max bitrate for DolbyDigital Plus sound, which is perfect sound identical to the studio master, that’s 18mb/s which means another 8.1GB per hour of high definition sound with eight discreet channels or 7.1 if you prefer that nomenclature.  Now, if we need maximum bitrates for video and sound, we are looking at 58GB for a two hour movie.  This is before extras(interviews, audio commentery, deleted scenes, whatever), this is before we get The Fellowship of the Ring coming it at 3.5 hours.  How do they fit?  How does King Kong look and sound great on HD-DVD despite being a 3 hour movie and only having 30GB to work with.

The truth is that even if you are trying to use the maximum bitrate for video you probably won’t.  The video codecs are all using compression with a variable bitrate.  Some scenes will be easier to compress than others.  The PS3 has a neat feature that allows you to watch the audio and video bitrate on the fly.  Some scenes will look great at 8mb/s video, and some scenes will jump to much higher numbers and look no better.  Obviously not all scenes are going to compress equally well, and things like amount of film grain in the picture will greatly affect the rate of compression. 

My BD copy of The Descent averages something like 36mb/s for video and is obviously stored on a dual layer 50GB disc.  Add the DTS-HD audio and the various “extras” and disc is close to being full.  The Descent contains a lot of dark-lit scenes which is difficult to encode.  I watch movies in my home theater on a 106” projection screen so any flaws are going to show themselves quickly and more apparently than on a smaller display.  I cared about the studios having the maximum amount of space to give me the highest quality audio and sound and not script to fit it on disc, and not have to store long movies with lots of special features on two discs.  Besides the space, the higher max-video and max-total bitrates mandated by the spec obviously allows the extra space to be used “for real”.  The extra space matters for higher quality audio, video, less disc switching and more HD extra features.  To me The Descent in my home theater is the first example of video and audio that would not be possible without the storage space and higher bit rate of BluRay.

Interactive features: from what I’ve seen, HD-DVD currently has better interactive features, and from what I read from format neutral studios like Warner, iHD is far easier to program for (or at least as better tool support, which I count as the same thing) than BD-J.  HD-DVD also has a PIP thing that’s harder to do on BD; Plus one Point for HD-DVD. However, I can count on my fingers the # of times I have watched any kind of commentary or anything so this does not matter for me personally and I suspect  no t for  most other home theater people either.  The only feature I care about is the “pop up menu” that allows me to pick a new scene or change audio options or turn on/off commentaries while the movie is playing without going back to the main menu.  Both formats have this.  Bring on the good movies with high quality audio and video.

4.    Marketing strategy, position, etc.

1.    But HD-DVD is cheaper!  A little, yes, however this often matters little when selling to the early adopter crowd.  Keep in mind also that when the first few players were out the Toshiba HD-A1 was $499 and compared to the $999 Panasonic BD-P1000 that did look like a major price difference.  They forgot to mention that the HD-A1 did not support 1080p/24 or 1080p/60 output, but 1080i only.  To get 1080p you needed to buy the HD-XA2, at $999, which is what the Samsung has been selling for since a few months after launch.

2.    But the BluRay physical media will cost tons more!  Well, with the average cost per disc (using Amazon.com data) fluctuates in the plus or minus $2.50 range vs. HD-DVD, I think we can safely call this theory debunked.

3.    The PS3: Obviously putting BD on the PS3 was a huge risk but it seems to be paying off.  Skepticism ran far and wide as to what the attach rate would be for people watching movies on the PS3.  The market seems to have spoken.  Anecdotally: I would have waited until late Feb to buy a PS3 except that I was eager to watch BD in my home theater.  I own 6 BD movies, 0 BD games now and have watched many more via Netflix.  Virtua Fighter 5, MotorStorm, and Lair will be my first game purchases starting Feb 20^th.

4.    Studio support: in addition to the PS3 effect, the fact that huge movies like Spider Man and Casino Royale are coming out on BD only can’t hurt.  Fox owns the distribution rights to some huge franchises like Aliens and Star Wars, Disney is releasing some huge films like Pirates of the Caribbean and Cars in the coming months.  The only films that are arguable bigger like The Matrix and Lord of the Rings franchises are pledged for simultaneous release on both formats by Warner.

5.    Finally, is BluRay important to gaming?  The first major PS3 title, “Resistance: Fall of Man” took up 17GB on disc.  If you install the new Splinter Cell on the PC it takes 14GB.  Hint: that won’t fit on DVD.  I think Gears of War shows us the space is not necessarily needed to look better but developers are finding cool uses for the space.  The developer of “The Darkness”, an upcoming shooter says: “Yeah, well Blu-ray offers us around 25GB to play with, so we're looking to license old TV shows, adverts, and cartoons to build entire TV channels in the game. You can actually turn on the TVs in the game and watch a film, watch a TV series, anything you want really. It's a little bit gimmicky, but at the same time, it's a really cool feature. Also, we tell mission-specific information through the TVs where it's needed.”

Are both optical formats doomed by content downloads?  Maybe in the long run, but right now most home people do not have the bandwidth or the patience to download an equivalent quality movie.  A friend of mine even suggested that optical formats are doomed because CF is becoming fast and cheap and ubiquitous and we’ll be purchasing movies on CF cards in five years.  Many HD-DVD fanboys are so dedicated that cruising some forums I see lots of “If BD wins I’ll stay on regular DVD forever I’m never buying Poo-Ray Sony sucks blah blah”.  For my part, I did my best research and guesswork to pick the winner, but I am a home theater nut and HD-DVD looks so much better than standard DVD of course I’ll jump on HD-DVD if it wins.

But it doesn’t look like it’s going to.

Hard to believe it, but my little girl turned four today. Happy Birthday Brooke.

I am currently hard at work teaching her much needed skills like how to type and play video games.