Jonathan S. Harbour

According to this Bloomberg article, another 467,000 jobs were lost in June, with unemployment at 9.5%, the highest since 1983. I’m no Obama fan. But what angers me is the stupidity of most Americans. George W. Bush got us into this mess, with his illegal war and out of control spending. Obama inherited a huge mess. He’ll do his own kind of damage to the country, but let’s be honest, he probably couldn’t try to do more damage than Bush has done. And, had Bush remained in office another term, we would be having these same economic problems. In my opinion, this very fact shows how illegitimate the Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and other radio personalities are, stupidly blaming Obama for all of our woes. They know better.

Do you realize that we’re now living in a police state, which we were warned about by the founding fathers? Oh, we don’t see it because the news media gives us watered-down stories, but the real truth is, we as citizens have lost most of the freedoms that the founding fathers wanted us to fight for, to guarantee freedom. Thomas Jefferson and George Washington would recognize our federal government in their time–they knew it as King George III and his oppression. (They would find the name “George” curious, in fact).  The problem is, while we Americans watch our freedoms being lost, we’re lulled into compliance with comforts and entertainment so much so that we collectively do not dare rise up for fear of losing our comforts. Well, to that I say, a padded cell is also comfortable!

There are no terrorists that we need protection from. What we need protection from is our own out-of-control monstrocity of a federal government. The various states were supposed to hold power in this “united states”, not a monstrous central government. The states sold out their freedoms in return for federal money, just as people are selling out their freedoms in return for false comforts. I live in the nation of Arizona, which is chartered and retains it’s own elected senate, assembly, and president (i.e. “governor”). What most Americans don’t realize is, they do not have a “president” in Washington, D.C.; he does not answer to the “people”, he answers to the various states of the union. We do not elect a federal president, we elect our governors. Most Americans don’t even realize this, because the presidency is so sensationalized. Over the last three decades, the importance of state laws and state elections has been marginalized next to the ludicrous presidential campaigns every 4 years. What we the people need to start doing is paying attention to the states in which we live, paying attention to whom we are electing into office as governor and the state assemblies, not to mention the U.S. congress and senate.

These are the real positions of power! When we lose sight of the importance of these local positions, and keep our eyes solely on the president (who does not report to the people!), we lose track of what is really important–namely, what is our governor and assembly doing? The federal government should not concern us at all, frankly. It’s primary purpose is to defend the collective states against insurrection and invasion. Not to rule every aspect of citizens’ lives, not to provide national healthcare, not to own nationalized corporations, not to maintain a persistent and dangerous standing military.

Today I received an email from Erik Prusch, President and CEO of Borland, to announce “exciting news.” I’m just as skeptical of corporate spin as I am of government spin, so I had a hard time reading the words in this announcement at face value. I have been critical of Borland for many years, because I’m a disgruntled former customer–or rather, fan–of Borland’s language products from a bygone era (Google “Turbo Pascal”; you’ll find it in the software fossil record). About two years ago, Borland announced the sell off of their development tools division to Embarcadero. Okay, I can live with that, I guess. So will Borland Delphi and C++Builder be called “Embarcadero Delphi” and “Embarcadero C++Builder”? That just doesn’t work for me (besides what’s the deal with this completely forgettable company name?).

Last year, I spent some time with Turbo C++ 2006, the free version of C++Builder which is no longer maintained (i.e. no Turbo C++ 2009, only C++Builder 2009). Quite simply, I loved it. After much digging, I found some fans who had gotten DirectX 9.0c code to compile with Turbo C++, which is my preferred tool but one that is ultimately not supported. I can’t very well ask my students to download this obscure product and use it for their assignments, nor can I provide only Turbo C++ projects with any textbook I’m writing.

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This spring term has been very time consuming so I haven’t posted here in a long while. I’m spending quite a bit of time on Facebook lately so look me up! Latest news on the programming front: Beginning Game Programming, Third Edition will be done in about two weeks for an early summer printing. I’ve also begun work on my next work entitled Multi-Threaded Game Engine Design. Unlike Advanced 2D last year, this one will be driven entirely by programmable shaders; I’m leaving behind the fixed function pipeline, but still using DirectX 9.0c–not ready to move up to Vista or DX10 yet.
I bought an indie game called The Tales of Bingwood (www.bugfactory.fi) because it was programmed by author Carl Granberg who wrote the awesome books Programming and RTS Game and Character Animation with Direct3D. I’m using his books in my DirectX classes. This is a great little indie game in the vein of the old Sierra games. It is well worth the $12. My kids have been playing it all morning.

Which got me waxing nostalgic. I don’t know why, but lately I’ve been feeling that way. I dug up my old box of paperback sci-fi novels, Asimov, Heinlein, Bear, and all the old Star Trek novels. I decided that this would be a good way to spend quality time with the kids, while reliving joyful moments from my childhood. The Space Quest collection is only $11 on amazon. Vivendi licensed a special edition of DosBox that plays correctly on new PCs. this includes the special voiceover CD-ROM versions and the VGA update of SQ1, which I remember ordering direct from Sierra in 1991 for $25. at the time the VGA version was so amazing with a mouse interface. And remember Space Quest III? the best version ever!  I don’t think i ever played the last one, VI.

For the price you cant go wrong and we’re talking about 100 hours of gameplay here. I will try to play with the kids without looking up any solutions online–so it will be like the old days. And after this i’m looking forward to doing this with the Kings Quest Collection too. I want to introduce my kids to what real game storytelling is about. Bingwood reminded me of how fond I was of story-driven games. When video games began to see big budgets about ten years ago, these types of games fell out of favor. I hope Bingwood is the beginning of a new trend, and I will be buying new episodes as they are released by Bug Factory.

Ray Kurzweil–world renowned inventor and futurist–is coming to speak at UAT’s graduation ceremony in April as our keynote speaker. To honor his visit, I’ve penned some speculation of my own…

I predict that small boxes will replace our large tower computers, and when you want more power, you’ll add more boxes rather than opening up a large case and modifying it. The little boxes will have class designations representing the box’s processing power and memory. There will be no more any difference between CPU and GPU, but only a single massively threaded architecture that can handle all types of processing. Vertex and pixel shaders, which will have been replaced with ray shading, will simply run on available threads. No more video cards.

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My son Jeremiah, who is 10 years old, is already showing promise as a talented game designer! He has already started creating custom units for Memoir 44, and now he’s created a completely unique board game. He calls it “War of Anthropology: Americans vs France”. As you can see, this unique new game features a game board that supports open-ended gameplay. The instructions promise an upcoming expansion! I’m looking forward to the new campaigns.

Halleluia!! OpenOffice 3, which I just upgraded to, can read Word 2007 .docx files!! I’ve been waiting for this for a year, ever since UAT adopted Office 2007 (to my great dismay). Now I don’t need to worry about it any more. I was pondering the possibility of buying Office 2007 so I wouldn’t have to keep asking people to export files to .doc and .xls so I can read them. OO3 can also open Excel 2007 .xlsx files. There’s no way to save to these formats, but at least it’s possible to open them so that when someone sends you one of these annoying files, you can convert it to a proper industry-standard format such as .doc and .xls. I’m extremely impressed with the new features and performance of OO3, and have yet to really explore it completely. It definitely seems to run faster.

Here’s the deal. I’m an alpha computer geek. The whole sack of potatoes. I carry USB flash drives on my person, I have a portable hard drive in my pocket most of the time (no jokes please–not in the mood!), I read the magazines and review blogs, and I browse newegg.com for fun. In my home are no fewer than five PCs. I have a quad-core PC with a gamer’s dream video card, SATA hard drives, an expensive three-rail power supply, a groovy dark aluminum case–the whole works.

And you know what? I’m fed up with all of it. From an objective point of view, it’s all junk. You read that right–I called it “junk”, because that’s what all of this computer stuff really is. I’m fed up with computer technology. In my opinion, in the last decade, this industry (hardware and software) has progressed backward not just a few, but many steps. Today, warranties are all the rage, and are pushed heavily by employees at stores like Fry’s Electronics and up on newegg.com’s site–and don’t even get me started with Circuit City or Best Buy because I can’t even stand to walk into those places any more. (Don’t call me a noob or any other word from the dictionary of 1337 for this rant–I’ve earned it with hard time, plus I have four C++ compilers on my PC, and I can port the game of Breakout from DirectX to GBA to GameCube in a single day–so there!).

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Jump over to www.starflightgame.com and join the forum to download the latest beta of The Lost Colony, the game I’m currently working putting the final touches on (not solo, of course, with the help of others…). This new build is a dramatic improvement over the last release back in October, seeing the gameplay pretty much balanced and the game is finished aside from a few bugs. The next beta, addressing the reported bugs and gameplay glitches, is due for release in another two weeks or so.

I’ve continued working on the game engine featured in my book Advanced 2D Game Development, using it as an example in my courses and hobby work, so it’s evolved quite a bit from the original Advanced2D engine in the book–and I’ve called the new engine Octane to differentiate it from the book version. The latest feature is a script language called OctaneScript which can tap into the engine via LUA script code. The language consists of C++ functions that can be called from LUA script. That isn’t anything revolutionary, since most game engines have scripting support. But my intent is to build games entirely in script code, rather than just enhancing them with LUA.

The first example is available on the forum: a remake of a Pocket PC game I created with an artist friend a few years ago. This game was pretty challenging for the newbie script engine, which had no features to speak of when it was started. Next I’ll be creating demos that show how the various features of the script language work, such as keyboard and mouse input, sprites, meshes, lighting, camera control, math, physics, and so on, with a few small games thrown in for good measure. Check the forum for more details.

Piracy is a subject that I’m still very concerned about, and I’m old enough to be able to recall all of the techniques over the years, starting in the 80s with copy protected floppies and the various hacking tools people used to duplicate them. In those days, floppies were created with bad sectors that the game would magically avoid to get around read errors, but if you tried to copy the disk, the copy would fail. It was pretty ingenious, until someone wrote a tool called Copy2PC that skipped bad sectors rather than stopping.

Today, in my opinion, the best form of copy protection is via the online registration. I don’t think retail will ever go away because many people like to have the physical box and DVD in their hands, and getting a Christmas gift that’s just a card with a download link will never be as fun as opening the real box. But times are changing. If you look at downloadable games like on Xbox Live Arcade, you might notice that most of them are crap, and the good stuff is still sold at retail stores. I personally think Blizzard is cutting edge right now in licensing.

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Shred Nebula is a new space sci-fi game by James Goddard’s company Crunchtime Games, located in Chandler, Arizona. Goddard (famed designer of such games as Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Alien vs Predator, and many other coin-op games) has gone indie with this game and worked very hard to get it released on Xbox Live Arcade. I was present during some of his phone calls with Microsoft and can tell you this game is like his child. Not your average big-studio game among dozens in development, Shred Nebula received 100% of Goddard’s attention for the nearly two years it was in development.

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PRESS RELEASE
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Contact:
Jonathan S. Harbour
University of Advancing Technology
2625 W. Baseline Road, Tempe, AZ 85283
http://www.jharbour.com
jsharbour@gmail.com

Software Engineering Professor Teaches Game Engine Development From The Ground Up

Tempe, AZ — July 1, 2008 — Game engines like Doom III, GameBryo, and Unreal 3 push the graphics and networking technology to the limits of computer hardware and promote the development of dozens of award-winning games by industry-leading studios like Firaxis (makers of Civilization Revolutions). But before these games hit store shelves, they were in development for many years. How did they get started? What is the technology behind such games? These questions and more are answered in the latest book by Jonathan S. Harbour, Advanced 2D Game Development.

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FREE BOOK DRAWING! Sign up for the bi-monthly free book drawing HERE. No purchase necessary. I will give away two free books every month by random selection, and five copies of Advanced 2D during June-July! Congrats to the winners so far:

May 1 : Andrew Hood (Andrew77)
May 15 : Chris Saik (Mentalist)
June 1 : Robert Palmer (Robert1352)
June 15 : Chris Moeller (doomtwo)
June 23 : Jaime Moreno (daviangel)
July 1 : Daniel Baird (eagle11)
July 7 : Mike Neiheisel (mikeysfan)
July 15 : Randy Brown (randyabrown)
July 23 : Austin Watson (nintendo4life)
July 31 : Steve Meyer (Arrowofdarkness)

The drawings will still take place every month or so!

I have been experimenting with FPS Creator X9 this week and must admit that it’s addictive and an hugely fun thing to do in the evenings after work. It took about 2 hours from install to first “real” game run, because the tool does have a minor learning curve. The toolset is really easy once you get the hang of it, but it’s not immediately obvious how those tools are used.

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Last night I listened to a very special interview with Dr. Michio Kaku by Art Bell on Coast to Coast AM. Dr. Kaku will be the guest of honor at UAT’s graduation ceremony in April 2008 in Phoenix, AZ, at which time he will be admitted to the Da Vinci Society for Thinking. Dr. Kaku is fascinating because he believes we as a civilization will develop, within 20 years, many of the advanced technologies featured in science fiction.

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Do you remember what it feels like when you’re riding on a roller coaster and it’s climbing the hill, then levels off and begins to tilt downward over the precipice? I remember as a child feeling torture for those long pregnant seconds, believing I would give anything to escape the coaster at that very instant. Then, the drop… The United States at the macro level is at the level point now and just beginning to tip, and we’re facing a deep fall down the precipice.

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Originally posted in Sept 2006 when the game was announced, I’m now pleased to update this news item to reflect the project’s current status–at 90% complete. Starflight - The Lost Colony will be taken to the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco in February by a team of UAT students who have been working steadily on the game for the last five months, continuing the hard work put into the initial game engine and early modules by the all-volunteer team up through mid-2007. The game is scheduled for release on Jan 31, but the initial release will only be “mostly complete”.

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Christmas is upon us rather suddenly this year. The fall semester has just ended, and I’m enjoying a long break, spending time with the family and working on Starflight: The Lost Colony.

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If human civilization survives the trials of the next three decades and manages to develop an engine that will make interstellar space travel a reality, our children may be in for a fascinating event. Rigil Kentauris (popularly known, incorrectly, as “Alpha Centauri”) is a trinary star system, meaning three stars orbit each other, and is the closest “star” to our sun. Alpha Centauri B orbits A in a highly elliptical orbit at a range equivalent to Saturn in our solar system (which is quite close for a star!). Proxima is a red dwarf that orbits the two at a much greater distance, going out almost a quarter light year. But amazingly, in the year 2036 or so, Proxima will intersect with Alpha Centauri B! Or, at least, come close to it!

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I’ve discovered a wonderfully relaxing pasttime for my Friday evenings–reading comic books. I had a small collection (two boxes) from my teen years, most of which were in bad shape from sitting in the garage and being moved so many times. Every Friday night for the last three months I’ve picked up a new mini-box, cards, and bags from a local comic shop and have been re-bagging and boarding my collection, which is now beginning to grow again.

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“In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” -George Orwell

“I sincerely believe the banking institutions having the issuing power of money, are more dangerous to liberty than standing armies.” -Thomas Jefferson

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Beginning Java Game Programming, 2nd Edition, is finished and will be in print in late November, most likely. This new edition has undergone significant changes, but the core code for Galactic War remains the same (for consistency with the previous edition). The previous “bitmaps and sprites” chapter has been split into two, and a new chapters just on sprite animation has been added because that was sorely lacking before.

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Microsoft is incapable of maintaining standard file formats within it’s own organization, so why would anyone want to approve of a global ISO standard fabricated and lobbied by Microsoft?

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VB for Teens, 2E is finished and should be available in stores by October. The screenshot image here shows the final version of the game as presented in the last chapter of the book. The final content took quite a different direction than I had originally planned. This new edition includes a complete chapter introducing the beginner to VB.NET programming, and another whole chapter just on the basics of Managed DirectX. We then quickly delve into the Celtic Crusader game engine and begin building the game, step by step, chapter by chapter. Although I’d wanted to include projectile weapons and questing, the game became more of a hack-n-slash like Diablo.

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I just saw Solid State Society and it was fantastic! Incredible animated film based on the Stand Alone Complex animated series. The visuals are stunning, the story deep and complex, with some old references and characters from the original film. This is easily the most beautiful animation I have ever seen.

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I dislike politics with a passion but I just can’t keep quiet about the disasters being wrought upon our nation by the puppet president, George W. Bush. He is fulfilling the will of globalists, the heads of international corporations who want a global political entity to eliminate all national borders and open every market in the world to trade. George W. Bush will be remembered by historians as the most destructive president this republic has ever elected to power. He is a globalist, whose double talk about the ”War on Terror” and Iraq is a thinly veiled disguise for his true ambitions: the establishment of a one world government.

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When I was a child I made curious assumptions about the world. I assumed that everyone envisioned the same future that I did: a future in which our cars (and homes) were powered by reactors of some sort; that space travel would be safe, frequent, and common; and that people would continue to push the boundaries of progress in every field. I am now living in the future that I imagined as a child, and it is utterly disappointing.

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It seems that the larger an organization becomes, the less it is able to coordinate it’s activities and falls under the ”left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing” syndrome. This is certainly the case with Microsoft in recent years. The world’s largest software company seems to be teetering under it’s own massive weight, unable to create working software without massive piles of bugs–along with leaves, dirt, rodent droppings, twigs, and rusty scrap metal.

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I’m busily working on the 2nd Edition of Visual Basic Game Programming for Teens, with the full Managed DirectX and VB.NET conversion from the old VB6 sources. This subject is very enjoyable to me so it has been fun working on Celtic Crusader again. The demand for a .NET version of this book has been high since it’s first release in late 2004.

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Most people believe that the Bible was written late in Jewish history so that it’s contents may be without conflict or contradiction. Those who have never read the Bible are prone to believe whatever they read or hear, that supposedly the Bible is filled with contradictions and errors. In fact, the more we learn from archaeology and cosmology, the more science begins to move in the direction of events and facts found in the Bible.

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I live four miles from PIR (Phoenix International Raceway). I live so close I can hear races going on every other weekend. This particular weekend of April 21, I finally made it to NASCAR, thanks to my buddy Kevin and his free Navy tickets. We had great seats right at the apex of turn one, where the first crash of the evening occurred when ”25″ Casey Mears broadsided ”10″ Scott Riggs.

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Ford Motor Company is going bankrupt, and not even Mark Fields can pull it out of the quagmire of debt and sinking sales because Ford just doesn’t get it. What compells a person to purchase one product over another? Ford believes that the car business is about fooling customers into buying a new car (by any means necessary), without concern for their repeat business. In the vein of Ford’s marketing slogan “Job One”, I submit three problems that Ford must overcome in order to survive: Problem One, Two, and Three.

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I have started working on a revision to Visual Basic Game Programming For Teens, originally published in late 2004. The second edition is updated to Visual Basic 2005 (with full support for the free Express Edition).

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I bought a tune from Evolution Performance that gave my 06 GT another 30 horses over stock…and it feels like 110%. I read an article about this company in Hot Rod and wanted them to handle my engine’s first tune. This was a fun upgrade after the Eibach springs and Hurst shifter I installed last fall. The stock 4.6 does 320 torque; it’s now up in the 350 lb-ft range.

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I’ve been struggling for the last few months to organize the mountain of data associated with, well, my life…I guess that’s the best way to describe it. I have a lot of data backed up on discs, but it’s the data I regularly use that is piling up like so many boxes of stuff.

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I tend to put compilers through their paces while teaching a variety of game programming courses at UAT. One of the most irritating bugs I’ve found with Visual C++ 2005 is related to the way Microsoft’s manifest files are handled. If you are working on a game using Allegro or DirectX with this compiler, and you get the following error message: 

“This application has failed to start because MSVCR80.dll was not found”

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The Starflight team is making huge strides of progress with the indie game Starflight: The Lost Colony. We are nearly complete with phase 1, which calls for a functional interstellar and interplanetary scrolling engine, with a galaxy database and editor, a starmap, and title screen. The ultimate goal is to complete the game by fall in time to submit it to the IGF.

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I’ve been patient for a long time, but I must say something about DarkBasic Pro. Having just completed DarkBasic Pro Game Programming, 2nd Edition, I have reason to believe that my opinion regarding this tool is valuable to others. To cut to the chase…DBPro is a buggy mess, and The Game Creators are in denial. I’ve been making excuses for The Game Creators for two years now, and have been following their suggested workarounds, but I’m simply tired of jumping through hoops with this product. I’ve communicated these issues with the owner and business manager at The Game Creators, and they are not working to fix the problems.

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I’ve been wanting to build a MAME arcade cabinet for many years, but like most original arcade fans, I haven’t had the time to look into building a custom model, and was never quite satisfied with the commercial offerings. Now, it seems, one company has stepped up with a true enthusiast kit for building a MAME cabinet by providing the most important components–the joysticks and buttons.

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This article was published in The Journal of Advancing Technology, Volume Two, Summer 2005.

As a teenager, I was a huge fan of the TV show, MacGyver, starring Richard Dean Anderson. MacGyver was produced by Henry Winkler, John Rich and Paramount Pictures, and aired on ABC for seven seasons between 1985 and 1992.

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