ViNull Records

"Quest" Post Mortem - Ludum Dare #26

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Thu, 02 May 2013 01:48:27 GMT

This past weekend I took part in my first ever Ludum Dare, a competition to complete a game in 48 hours. There is no prize for first place, there are no long lists of lawyer requirements to sign, and there are no restrictions on tools, platform, languages, or ever what counts as a "game". The Ludum Dare is hardcore indie, and people do it for the love of creating games. How many people? This weekend saw over 2300 games created, 1600 of which entered into the competition and the rest into what is called the "Jam".

The competition rules are few and straight forward. Work solo, create all code, art, and sound for your game in 48 hours. You can use any tool, but any code libraries must be available to all (if you want to use your own code library then you must post it publicly for anyone to use before the competition starts). You must also share your code for review though this is just incase any questions come up about the other rules, you retain all rights. If you want to break one of the rules and also take an extra day you can enter the jam which is judged separately. Judging is done by those who submit games.

Getting Ready

For the LD48 (short hand for the competition) I decided to use Unity. I need to move away from my beloved XNA since Microsoft already has. Unity allows scripting with C# and Mono plus it supports every major platform and has a free version. To get ready I worked though a 3D Buzz Unity video tutorial and if you're really curious you can see the result here.

I also spent time getting to know the LD48 process. A week before the contest people submit ideas for the theme, which then get collected and voted on. During the voting, one of the suggestions became very divisive: "potato". Some felt that this was a joke theme that should have never made it to the final list. Others felt this was a great theme. Someone made a comic. Someone made another comic. Someone made a video. Things escalated on twitter. I made a decision to take a side. I don't claim it was a wise decision, but I stand by it.

Theme Announced

My first snag what the theme. Potato didn't make the top 50 and "minimalism" was the theme. I don't feel the game I created, a simple action RPG inspired by the classic Adventure on Atari 2600, meets the theme well. Yes, I can say it's a minimal RPG stripped to its core, but guess what? All games in the LD48 are stripped to the core! If you have only 48 hours you are not going to make a very deep and complex game.

I spent an hour brainstorming ideas and then decided I didn't have more time to waste and went with the idea for "Quest".

What Went Right

I finished the game! It has about 15 minutes of gameplay, sounds, music, special effects even! This may not sound like much but this was my true goal. LD48 is filled with tales of designers who start but didn't finish. I had only two weeks of experience with Unity but luckily didn't get stuck too bad at any one spot.

I made all the 3D models in Unity from either the basic cube or sphere. This saved a lot of time as I'm not experienced with Blender and don't have access to any pro level 3D modeling tools.

No tutorial. I only put the keys used on the start screen, and had the player face the castle. If you entered the castle, a message said "Retrieve the Chalice" giving you your quest and letting you know to come back here when done. This may sound like a small thing but to a game developer it's a very big thing. Tutorials talk down to the player, but a player who discovers the game goals and rules feels a sense of accomplishment. I had my wife and two oldest daughters play the game with no guidance from me and they all got the goal, so I put this in the win column. (My wife and oldest also beat the game with no guidance too).

The music - I'm pretty happy with the theme song. I mean, it basic song writing 101 and I'm not going to win a Grammy or even get work as a freelance composer from it, but 6 years of band plus 1 year of music theory paid off! I posted the song to my soundcloud account:

What Went Wrong

This is the interesting part, right?

Collision detection - I have no idea how this really works in Unity. Three different times I had to stop and completely rewrite all my collision detection because a door wouldn't work or the player would walk over a monster. To make matters worse, there have been changes to Unity regarding collision detection so many times I found Google gave me a link to an old article and there was a new, better method.

Sound effects - I used BFXR to generate all my sound effects, which is an excellent tool. The problem is it generates mostly 8-bit era sounds and none of these fit well with the sound I wanted. If it wasn't against the rules I could have busted out my collection of purchased effects, but since it is against the rules I found sounds I could tolerate and moved on.

No mouse look - yea, wtf was I thinking? A first person game with no mouse look? Really!? Honestly, until I got comments about it I never noticed this. Since I'm also the one who made the decision to swap the common use of thumbsticks (move/look) on Incablocks I think there is a pattern here.

Difficulty - the game isn't hard, but it's not clear that the best way to fight enemies is to hit them, then step back before they can hit you. If you stand in place they will tear you apart. This is the main reason most people don't finish and I probably should have come up with a way to let the player know to move back after attacking.

Summary

Overall I really enjoyed taking part in LD48 and will try to do again in the next one. I've learned I really like Unity even though it means I cannot deploy to my favorite platform Xbox (Unity supports Xbox, but not Xbox Live Indie Games which only allow XNA titles).

So if you've read all this and have 15 minutes, why not play Quest?

Here Comes CodeStock 2013!

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 17:43:40 GMT

If you were at CodeStock 2012 you know there is a pretty big change for me in 2013. I’m no longer organizing the event.

In 2012, I stepped down from my self-titled role as Lead Conference Organizer to focus on other several things, but the main reason was to dedicate more time to The Technology Cooperative. I really believe that getting kids involved with STEM subjects now is critical for this nation and our school system is not filling this need. You don’t have to hear it from me though, just listen to Will.I.Am.

This was not an easy choice to make. With help, I built CodeStock from a one day 75 person event to a two day 500 person conference. I feel I was able to make CodeStock stand out with its own feel and vibe. I have deep pride in what CodeStock has become to the point where I’ve walked out of an interview when my “project management” experience was dismissed because running CodeStock “wasn’t relevant”.

But the goal has never been “Mike’s” CodeStock. I’ve said before if I have to step down and that means CodeStock dies, I’ve not really created a community. That’s why it’s so exciting to watch Andrew May, Nathan Blevins, and Don Den Uyl (and others!) put together CodeStock 2013. (And I am available to these guys when/if needed at a very reasonable consulting rate).

Keynote Speaker, Julie Lerman

Julie is going to be an excellent Keynote at CodeStock! I’ve known Julie for years through ASP Insiders, INETA, MVP, and just hanging out with awesome people. Julie is very active in the community from blogging, speaking, running user groups, books, magazines, videos, and more. Her presence is like lightning, and her knowledge of the .NET data stack is freighting. Her style though is soothing, and everyone one there will start grooving. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah yeah.

Call For Speakers

This will be the first year I will speak at CodeStock! Well, I’ve submitted to speak and will need everyone’s votes to be selected (no special treatment!). I’ve always wanted to speak at CodeStock but running the event leaves no time to give a presentation. Okay, that’s not 100% true as I have made sure to always be at the CodeStock Annual WIT panel discussion, another of those things I’m really proud of.

The call for Speakers is open to EVERYONE. That’s worth repeating so I will: The call for speakers is open to EVERYONE.

As a larger developer community we need to move past this notion of who is “qualified” to speak, blog, comment, etc. You write code? Then your experience is relevant. Your thoughts are worth sharing. I want to hear the things your are passionate about because passion is more import than perfect code. Code can be learned but passion must be shared!

If you’re thinking of speaking for the first time I know what the fear is – “do I have a topic worth presenting?” My recommendation is to take one of your code projects and turn it into a “this is the problem I had, and this is how I solved it” talk. You can be open with audience to suggestions so you need not fear that “person who knows more than me”. That person is always there; Embrace it, don’t sweat it!

One you have an idea, submit your talk and then find ways to practice. Give the talk to your coworkers, friends, cat (or dog if you’re that kind of person). Attend your local Toastmasters club. Give the talk at your user group or a group nearby. Set up a webcam and give the talk on G+ (seriously, they need you – all of you).

Getting comfortable with public speaking will come back ten fold for your career. I’d bet the bulk of IT issues can be attributed to communication problems. Developers that can present ideas and solutions to other developers and non-developers alike are a scare resource. Oh, and there might be more money it but we do this because we love it right? Not that I’m saying turn down the money!

I’m looking forward to hanging out with everyone at CodeStock 2013!

Yes Virginia, XNA is Really Dead

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 22:03:21 GMT

If you're not up on the latest XNA news, Microsoft has confirmed (though via leaked email) that XNA and the XNA Game Studio is no longer in active development. You can read the email at (soon to be former) XNA MVP Promit's Ventspace:

The XNA/DirectX expertise was created to recognize community leaders who focused on XNA Game Studio and/or DirectX development. Presently the XNA Game Studio is not in active development and DirectX is no longer evolving as a technology. Given the status within each technology, further value and engagement cannot be offered to the MVP community. As a result, effective April 1, 2014 XNA/DirectX will be fully retired from the MVP Award Program.

I'm just going to address one point, something I think gets lost at times on twitter - does this mean XNA is "dead"? Microsoft is not going to deactivate XNA games with a mothership kill signal. The MonoGame project continues to work on an XNA-compatible implementation, and looks very promising. XNA will still run on Windows 8 PC in Desktop Mode and you can still download XNA Game Studio and create a game (though you need to use Visual Studio 2010 and not 2012).

XNA however is dead. To understand why, you need to understand what it is that makes software live. Many years ago (more than I'd like to admit) I read Eric Raymond's book The Cathedral and The Bazaar, and I think much of it holds true still today. Here is an excerpt from his essay Homesteading the Noosphere:

Second, the theory that the sale value of software is coupled to its development or replacement costs is even more easily demolished by examining the actual behavior of consumers. There are many goods for which a proportion of this kind actually holds (before depreciation)—food, cars, machine tools. There are even many intangible goods for which sale value couples strongly to development and replacement cost—rights to reproduce music or maps or databases, for example. Such goods may retain or even increase their sale value after their original vendor is gone.

By contrast, when a software product's vendor goes out of business (or if the product is merely discontinued), the maximum price consumers will pay for it rapidly falls to near zero regardless of its theoretical use value or the development cost of a functional equivalent. (To check this assertion, examine the remainder bins at any software store near you.)

The behavior of retailers when a vendor folds is very revealing. It tells us that they know something the vendors don't. What they know is this: the price a consumer will pay is effectively capped by the expected future value of vendor service (where `service' is here construed broadly to include enhancements, upgrades, and follow-on projects).

In other words, software is largely a service industry operating under the persistent but unfounded delusion that it is a manufacturing industry.

What I have taken from this is that the value of software is the support behind it, not the bits on your hard drive. I can add a more examples, such as when a new version of software is released, the prior version becomes worthless and goes to the bargain bin. Some companies like AutoDesk actively remove from circulation old copies from sale when a new version is released to protect the (debatably) inflated prices they charge and keep their software out of bins. This can also explain why so many software vendors are claiming you only own a non-transferable license, and not a copy of the software.

Another example is the case we have with XNA, when "no new updates" will be provided and there is no longer a support team behind the software. Its value is falling to zero, and it is dead. XNA is known to have issues with performance on certain PC configurations and fullscreen mode can sometimes slow down a game for no real reason. These issues will not be addressed. At some point new hardware and standards will emerge that XNA will not take advantage of. I would hope that in the worst case - a security exploit is found - Microsoft would at issue a patch, but there is no guarantee. The patch could just disable whatever feature cause the problem and leave developers with no workaround.

On a related note, I think this same logic demonstrates games are art. The value and enjoyment of a game is irrelevant to the status of the support behind it. (Well, MMOs may be an exception - I'll have to think on them more.) Games are still played and loved even though the companies behind them no longer exist.

So XNA is dead, MonoGame is alive, and games are art. Glad we settled this.

Kickstarter talk at Hackerspace

2013-01-04T17:50:50.000Z

I will be attending Kickstarter talk at Hackerspace! When: Tue Jan 29, 2013 6pm to Tue Jan 29, 2013 9pm EST

2013 6pm to Tue Jan 29, 2013 9pm
EST

Where: Oak Ridge

Event Status: confirmed

ViNull Photos for Tuesday, December 04, 2012

Wed, 05 Dec 2012 04:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
(Hover over photos for title)

I'm Game Coding for Charity this Weekend!

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:12:00 GMT

Today (Friday November 30th, 2012) and through Sunday I (Mike) will be coding a game from scratch live at twitch.tv/vinull! I'm doing this to help raise $1000 for the Technology Cooperative. You can read all the details and donate at gamemarx.chipin.com, and there is also a ChipIn widget on the live stream page. Everyone is also welcome to just hang on in chat and encourage/mock me live!

At the TechCo I organize the Knoxville Game Design meetup group, held the second Sunday of each month. I also run sessions teaching kids of all ages game programming using Python, Scratch, and GameMaker. You can read up on some of our other programs and learn about a chance to win a Raspberry Pi here.

All funds from this fundraiser go directly to the Technology Cooperative!

About the Technology Cooperative

The Technology Cooperative (aka TechCo) is non-profit (501c3) organization with a mission to offer hands-on technology to middle and high school age students regardless of race, gender or ability to pay. The TechCo also offers meeting space to technology focused meet up groups.

Most job opportunities in the future will be only available to those who have adequate understanding of computer related technologies. Those without the exposure and access to technology will fall into the widening gap between the technology "have" and "have-not". Studies have shown that by using computers and the Internet in the classroom helps to equalize students of all socioeconomic backgrounds. It allows students to be more involved academically and professionally in their futures. They may even become as technologically literate as their more economically advantaged peers.

We believe that exposure to technology in an environment that encourages creativity and exploration will give a child the motivation to build the necessary skills to peruse technology careers.

What’s Happening at the Technology Cooperative

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 17:58:31 GMT

A lot has been happening the past few months at the Technology Cooperative, and we have a lot more planned (read below for information on how to win a Raspberry Pi).

This weekend we will be completing the first run of the “Earn a Computer” programmer. Launched in collaboration with the Knoxville Makerspace and Big Brothers Big Sisters of East Tennessee (which is actually located in Oak Ridge but I think they are working on a TARDIS setup so it won’t matter) this program takes kids without easy access to a computer and teaches a six class course covering intro to graphics, audio, and programming as well as productivity software and basic internet/computer and safety. At the end of the program each kid will get to take home the computer.

The Knoxville Game Design meetup group is also going strong. The group meets the second Sunday of every month and opens with a “Show and Tell” portion where everyone can show off their game development progress, a new favorite tool, or just a gameplay mechanic they found and are interested in implementing. The second half of the meeting is then a topic given by a member of the group or guest speaker. If you’re at all interested in game development join us!

Just arrived at the Technology Cooperative is a 3D printer! The 3D printer is a Solidoodle we have connected to a Ubuntu workstation. In the coming months we will be holding classes on 3D modeling for 3D printing, covering the tools and methods available. (I’ve personally ordered an Ultra-bot and will be very involved in this program).

The Knoxville Wordpress Meetup group meets every second Tuesday of the month at the Technology Cooperative. This group is for Wordpress users and developers alike (or people who want to become a Wordpress user or developer) to discuss the latest in the Wordpress ecosystem. There is also a formal topic each month and is lead by Daryl Houston, a member of the Automattic team (the people who make Wordpress).

Fundraising Drive / Win a Raspberry Pi

To raise awareness and support for the programs at Technology Cooperative we are giving away two Raspberry Pi credit-card sized computers. Your can read the details and enter on the Technology Cooperative contest page.

I’ve just listed some of the programs going on at the Technology Cooperative. This summer we had a great program for kids to explore electronics through Junkbotz. We are building a core group of volunteers as well and constantly have ideas to launch new programs (expect to hear of a Raspberry Pi meetup soon – I almost have mine working inside of a tabletop MAME cabinet!). What we need most is financial support to run these programs. Every little bit helps!

While on the Technology Cooperative website be sure to sign up for the mailing list. This is a low volume newsletter of what’s happening at the Technology Cooperative so you can stay up to date on events and programs. We will also be announcing shortly a “Game Night” on December 8th (mark your calendars) where we will choose the Raspberry Pi winners and play a few analog games for charity. If you can’t stay the whole night, just drop by and say hi!

ViNull Photos for Thursday, November 01, 2012

Fri, 02 Nov 2012 03:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
(Hover over photos for title)

Windows Store: The Worst Possible Thing

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 20:52:05 GMT

Next week is a big one for Microsoft. They will launch the next Windows desktop, a new tablet, and new version of Office for both. Much has been made of the new "Don't Call Me Metro" UI, the price point of the tablet hardware, and the interest of consumers in anything not made by Apple. I'm not interested in disusing the validity of those concerns, but I will say as a developer I see no need to support anything new coming from Redmond. And in my view all problems stem from the Windows Store.

Windows Fragmentation

Crazy to think Microsoft would copy the worst feature of Android, but not only have they copied it, they embraced and extended it.

For over a decade Microsoft has been pushing .Net as the platform independent development framework. "Platform" means "Microsoft Platforms" but if you are in the ecosystem .Net has your back. The Developer Division has done an excellent job of evolving .Net - for all the gripes I may have I must thank them for this. Dynamic language features have been added, several development models are supported, and many pieces have been released as open source. But then, like King Solomon, we decided to split things up...

There are currently 3 Microsoft run stores reaching across 4 platforms. The options are Xbox Live Indie Games, Windows Phone Store, and Windows Desktop and Tablet store. All of these are digital distribution platforms for consumer software.

Xbox Live Indies Games have been around a while, and is the oldest. On the Xbox you may use one version of C# and XNA. You may only use one version of C# and XNA. You may not use any popular engines like Unity or Unreal. You may price you game at $1, $3, or $5. You may not connect to the internet, have achievements, or leaderboards that intergrate with the gamer's profile of other achievements and leaderboards. If you choose to implement your own achievements and leaderboard (the latter by peer-to-peer networking Xboxes as cannot connect to the internet), you may not use the terms "achievement" or "leaderboard". You also may not use the Kinect SDK on the Xbox.

You might excuse the draconian limitations of the Xbox store because it's a game console, a different market, or that Microsoft has never been conformable leading innovation and prefers to follow others. It's hard though to understand why this limitation mindset followed to the Windows Phone. The phone does let you use a few more language options and you can use SilverLight or XNA, but are still blocked third party frameworks like Unity and Unreal. Crazy API limitations were also enforced, such as you may not use the phone's camera directly. Thus, no Instagram on WP7. The one good thing I can say for the phone platform is that it's easy to port XNA PC/XNA games to. Sadly, to make this possible Microsoft released XNA 4.0 which is 90% a dumbing down of XNA 3.1 so it can run on the phone while making the Xbox use 4.0 as well.

The new store launching this week will only sell apps that use Windows RT. RT is a new runtime that is not .Net based. There is no support for XNA or Silverlight. There is some support for C#, but it is limited and you may find you need to use C++ (this is mostly true for games that more than the simplest of graphics requirements). There is a promise of 100% feature parity between JavaScript, C#, and C++ but its just a promise. RT is in its infancy and many system libraries that make development easy do not exist.

With Windows 8, Windows Surface (tablet), and Windows Phone 8 Microsoft has opened up to allow 3rd party frameworks like Unity and Unreal. This is great, because as a game developer this is the best way to reach these new platforms. Windows 8 and Surface will run RT, Windows Phone 8 will not, and instead still use SilverLight and XNA. XNA isn't currently supported by Visual Studio 2012 and there is no announced plans to add it, SilverLight 4 & 5 are supported. Windows 8 desktop will support "desktop mode" apps, but these will not be sold in the Windows Store.

While you might get your head around this for development, there is one other piece of fragmentation. All of these stores are run by different divisions and do not over lap. There is a site for Xbox, another for Phone, and another for Desktop and Tablet. There is a support process for Xbox, another for Phone, and another for Desktop and Tablet. There is a developer payment system Xbox, another for Phone, and another for Desktop and Tablet. There is a registration system Xbox, another for Phone, and another for Desktop and Tablet. Not all stores are available in all regions, both for consumers and for developers. Each one has a different payment, micropayment, and fee setup. Each one has a different certification process. Each one requires different documentation for tax purposes.

Publishers not Developers

The limitations of all these stores can be lifted - if you're a publisher. A publisher can work with Microsoft behind closed doors and get access to APIs not available to the independent developer.

Microsoft separates publishers from the lowly commoners in the marketplace. Games created by independent developers are branded as "indie" and forced to wear a scarlet letter reminder to consumers that these are not full games, and will not support features like leaderboards and achievements in your profile.

Favoring publishers has not only been bad for developers, but consumers as well. Titles that launched on iOS and Android launched on Windows Phone with a higher price. In some cases games that were free elsewhere charged $5 or $8 dollars in the Windows Phone Marketplace. Xbox games stay at full price long after they hit the bargain bin on Steam.

Why?

Probably the best question to ask is why any company would do this. Why abandon a phone marketplace with over 100,000 apps for a desktop and tablet marketplace struggling to reach 5,000? Why continue to give favor to publishers who are lazy at best and abusive at worst? I have a theory on this, though its just a theory.

Microsoft is a competitive work environment. From department heads battling for control to employee's competing for a share in the bonus pool. Many employees are ranked within their department best to worst, then given a bonus based on position. This means to get a bigger bonus it's not enough to be better at your job, you must also be better than your peers. I believe this creates a tense work environment that encourages employees to work against each.

The second factor is Microsoft is a B2B company, and does not understand consumer marketing. It can be argued that Windows and Office dominate because that is the standard for business and many home PCs are used for doing some work remotely. The Xbox 360 stands out, but much of its success can be attributed to exclusive publisher deals, Sony screwing up the PS3 in every possible way, and Nintendo leaving behind hardcore gamers for... waggling. Timing... is... everything.

The last factor is a result of the other two: Microsoft's problems with commitment. Xbox Indie Games had a few years before resources were diverted. The Windows Phone managed to get a year of spotlight. The Zune... did you know the Zune was planned to have a store as well? The Zune HD had an SDK, supported SilverLight and XNA, and even had a few apps. I remember carrying my Zune HD to an MVP summit when it was just over 6 months old. At the announcement of the new Windows Phone 7 someone asked, "since it will be a while before there is hardware, can the WP7 SDK run on my Zune HD?". I wondered the same thing. Then the Zune HD was declared dead: "we are not supporting legacy devices with WP7".

Legacy. Six months old. Legacy. It could run SilverLight and XNA, same as WP7 but was marked as Legacy. All talk and plans to open up a Zune marketplace were stopped.

Anyone remember the Games for Windows Store? Didn't think so...

How to Fix It

The fix is pretty easy, but takes a commitment from the top that isn't there.

First, all developers are equal. No more partner-only APIs. As "evil" as Apple may be, even they don't do this. I have access to the same API and SDK as Activision. Let the consumers decide which apps are best. The store UI should not artificially segregate apps by size of developer or label some as "indie". Having a "recommend" list is fine and can be beneficial, but don't make partnership a prerequisite for being on that list.

Second, have a single process for all stores. Unify and simplify the payment system. Microsoft is the only company to insist paying international developers in the US. Apple and Google pay developers in local currency from local offices making tax issues much simpler. The basics of the certification process and requirements should also be the same across all marketplaces, and there should be a single point of contact for developer support.

Last, and this isn't even as important as the first two, support the same development technologies on all platforms. Consumers expect to be able to run the same apps on their tablet and phone and should not have to hear from developers it requires a complete rewrite. To do this I think the first step is to support Silverlight and XNA in the Windows Store and on the Surface tablet. I see no reason except politics why this cannot be done. Both have been ported to less powerful devices and will be supported for Windows Phone 8. If WinRT is the future, then start by rolling out WinRT to all devices as an option and slowly phase it into the ecosystem. Once its stable, announce a sunset date for SilverLight, XNA, .Net, etc. that gives developers time to migrate.

Bonus, support Windows Store and Windows RT on Windows 7. Again, no technical reason this cannot be, just politics and possible a reality warped marketing department. Giving developers easy distribution to the massive install base of Windows 7 will rocket the number of apps available in the Windows Store. I'm talking Earth to Alpha Centauri in less than a day rocket power.

Happy to be Wrong

It doesn't really matter to me if you think I'm right or wrong. The market will decide. The Windows Store will either be a revenue source for developers or not. I'd love to see Ballmer bragging about how they blew away Apple's $5 Billion paid to developers from the AppStore. I'd love a tablet and phone market not so heavily dominated by a single company. (I know, Android is trying but that's another post.)

You might also think I have a games bias, and that this isn't relevant to the Windows Store as a whole. In 2009 Apple claimed 50,000 Apps in the AppStore. In 2010 Apple claimed 50,000 Games and Entertainment apps in the AppStore. We now have approximately 125,000 Games (Entertainment is another 65,000) in an AppStore of just under 700,000 total apps. Games are the largest category, and while I cannot find official statistics, I would assume its also the largest category by revenue as well.

Games are key - they keep users coming back and users are always willing to buy new games. You might buy a financial management app, but you won't be checking the store weekly for new financial management apps. Games on the other hand are disposable apps. After playing a game for a while, you're ready for a new one. People spend an average of 7.8 hours a month gaming on their iPhones. Angry Birds makes $6 Million per month just from ads. There is an Angry Birds Star Wars game due out November 8th - I'm not sure which franchise is the getting the boost by this.

Its going to be a rough year for Microsoft. Critics will declare the Windows Store DOA and that may be unfair, but perception is reality. The desktop OS will move units, but in a world that is using the desktop less and less that is not enough. The question in my mind is can Microsoft pivot when things aren't working?

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to get back to deciding if I want to learn Unity or MonoGame...

Ada Lovelace Day: Mary Everest Boole and Beautiful Math

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 23:44:14 GMT

October 16th, 2012 is technically Ada Lovelace Day, a day for celebrating women in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM), but as long as it's October 16th *somewhere* you can celebrate the day. Ada Lovelace is known as the first computer programmer, and possibly the first person to have a code review, finding bugs in Charles Babbage's code:

So also was the algebraic working out of the different problems, except, indeed, that relating to the numbers of Bernoulli, which I had offered to do to save Lady Lovelace the trouble. This she sent back to me for an amendment, having detected a grave mistake which I had made in the process.

-- Charles Babbage in his Passages from the Life of a Philosopher

I can only hope Ada's letter started out in the traditional code review lexicon "WTF Charles!?"

Though as a programmer Ada's impact on me is great, I'd have to say Mary Everest Boole had an earlier impact on my, though I didn't know it was her at the time. In 5th grade I was shown a method of creating line art with algebra, commonly known as curve stitching or string art. It's an unfortunate label, as it hides the fact its really a method for constructing quadratic Bézier curves.

The process is simple. Draw to lines connected at one point, and then draw a series of lines connecting two lines offsetting a little bit each time. Here is a video of the process:

As someone who has never been talented at graphic design and art I loved filling notebooks with curve stich designs. Mostly faces, spaceships, and futuristic landscapes. You can really get interesting patterns as you vary the line lengths, angles, or use arcs in place of the lines.

Curve stitching was invented by Mary Boole (yes, wife of that Boole) as a way to engage children in mathematics. Mary actually spent quite a bit of time working on ways to improve mathematical education by making it more approachable. Some of her books like the Philosophy and Fun of Algebra and The Preparation of the Child for Science are still around, though searching it looks like many may have been lost to time. That's unfortunate, because getting children interested in mathematics is a problem we have yet to solve over 100 years later.

A few years ago, in one of those odd moments when you start a new program just to works something out, I created a little WPF app that does curve stitching. It's basic, and I've not touched it since, but all the user has to do is click three points on the screen to render a pattern. Repeat as often as you like and press escape to clear the screen. You can get the code in my Google Code project.

The code to draw a curve stich is pretty simple. The method below takes in the 3 points that define the two lines, the number of lines to draw connecting them, and a WPF Canvas object to render them on.

public void DrawLineArt(Point start, Point center, Point end, Int32 steps, Canvas graph) {
    Line source = new Line() { X1 = center.X, Y1 = center.Y, X2 = start.X, Y2 = start.Y, Stroke = Brushes.Black, StrokeThickness = 1 };
    Line target = new Line() { X1 = center.X, Y1 = center.Y, X2 = end.X, Y2 = end.Y, Stroke = Brushes.Black, StrokeThickness = 1 };

    graph.Children.Add(source);
    graph.Children.Add(target);

    for (Int32 i = 1; i <= steps; i++) {
        Line connection = new Line() { Stroke = Brushes.Black, StrokeThickness = 1 };
        connection.X1 = source.X1 + (source.X2 - source.X1) / (Double)steps * i;
        connection.Y1 = source.Y1 + (source.Y2 - source.Y1) / (Double)steps * i;
        connection.X2 = target.X1 + (target.X2 - target.X1) / (Double)steps * ((Double)steps - i);
        connection.Y2 = target.Y1 + (target.Y2 - target.Y1) / (Double)steps * ((Double)steps - i);
        graph.Children.Add(connection);
    }
}

I've toyed around with ideas to make a game using only this style of line art for the graphics. It's a shame we no longer have vector rendering CRTs as we did in the days of Tempest. I think the part of this game that appeals most to me wouldn't be the game itself, but making the modeling program for creating the game assets!

Can't you just see this guy as a boss battle?

Announcing XTiled - XNA Library for Tiled (TMX) Map

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Sun, 16 Sep 2012 16:32:37 GMT

A few moments ago I posted the first binary release of XTiled, making it officially ready for use!

XTiled is an XNA library reading and rendering TMX maps created in Tiled Map Editor. The library supports orthogonal and isometric map formats as well as all TMX 0.8.1 map features and has runtime components for PC and Xbox 360.

There are a few TMX libraries available, so why create another? The main reason is Nick Gravelyn of TiledLib (the library I did use) announced going forward the project won't provide the runtime components. The XNA map loader project by Kevin Gadd doesn't use the XNA content pipeline features and loads the maps at runtime. I wanted to have runtime components and use the content pipeline.

Since we were looking at starting a new project, there were a few things I wanted to change in TiledLib. I didn't want object names to be required, since they are optional in the Tiled Map Editor, and I wanted access to all custom properties for all the supported types. The big difference though is in my approach - I front load all the tile position calculations at build time and just use a lookup tables at runtime. This hides a lot of the intricacies of the TMX map format from the game logic.

The work doesn't stop here though. Tiled is close to a 0.9.0 release that will add support for object property sheets making it easier to put metadata into a map. We also want to expand on the runtime features with more helper methods. Our isometric support is possibly not as helpful as it could be; I've never made a game that used isometric perspective, so I'm only guessing at what I think would be desirable.

We've setup a discussion list at Google Groups, have documentation in the Wiki, and will be using the Issues section of BitBucket to track bugs and features. If you use XTiled, let us know how it worked for you and if you release a game using it tell us that too, I've love to keep a page on the Wiki of games released using XTiled!

Kickstarter Stats You Can Use

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Wed, 25 Jul 2012 21:15:12 GMT

If you follow the GameMarx podcast, you know I’m pretty big on watching Kickstarter projects. You might also know I like to play with data. So it should come as no surprise I’ve built a database of Kickstarter project stats – 58,671 projects to be exact.

I recently gave a presentation using this data at the Technology Cooperative and will probably be doing this talk a few more times (it’s more than just stats). Initially I planned on keeping the data semi-private out of concerns on how Kickstarter might react. Recent articles such as this infographic and sites like KickTraq have so far been left alone by Kickstarter, so I feel comfortable in publishing my own efforts.

Kickstarter’s Hidden Data

Before I get to the details I need to point out that Kickstarter does not make it easy to get a complete picture. Search results and project listings on Kickstarter are biased toward live and successful projects. Some projects will not turn up in Kickstarter search results at all – for example no combination of keywords will reveal this project. Further, liberal use of meta “no index” tags on the site tell honest webcrawlers (like Google) not to index their content.

What does this mean? It means while I know about 58K of the 64K projects on Kickstarter, my results are biased to the positive. The net effect is I show 48% of projects are successful, while the true rate published by Kickstarter is 44%. The charts below are not exact, but can be used to get a general idea of what is a “best practice” for a Kickstarter project.

My efforts so far have been focused on how someone should structure a Kickstarter project to increase the chances for success. The basic approach is to take a question, like “does a video improve the chance of being funded?”, and compare it to the average success rate (in my case, 48%). If the new success rate is above 48%, then we have a winner! So the video question above looks like:

Projects with a video have a 52% success rate, while those without have a 35% success rate. Compared to the baseline 48%, I’d say you want to have video. Keep in mind this does not account for the subjective quality of the video, just if the project has a video or not.

The next question is “Does Project Length have an effect on success rate?”. When you launch a project you can choose to keep it open as long as 90 days. Here are the results:

There is clearly a trend in project length. After 45 days or so you start to do worse than the baseline, but there is a real sweet spot in the 8 – 34 day range. You may note I‘ve used a polynomial regression here instead of the more common linear. Everyone has the preferences, and I like a poly in this case to highlight the sweet spot that would be lost in a straight line. I use a linear when I want to forecast new values along the Y or X axis – and that doesn’t make sense in this case.

Next question: “Does Funding Goal have an effect on success rate?”

This is almost a perfect linear relationship – the more you ask for, the less likely you are to get it. Note on this chart I did my own amount grouping, as I wanted to see more detail in the lower goal tiers. Below 5,000 is grouped by 500, 5,000 – 10,000 by 1,000, 10K – 30K by 5K, etc. I played with a few other patterens, but the overall shape never changed. Bottom line, asking for more that $5,000 drops you below the baseline.

Next Question: “Do the number of Reward Levels have an effect on success rate?”

I was surprised by this one – I didn’t expect such a strong relationship. The take home here is you want to have 7 or more reward levels!

Next Question: “Does Description Length have an effect on success rate?”

I expected to see projects with short descriptions do poorly, but I was curious if long descriptions hurt a project. I’m glad to see they don’t, so be verbose! The counts are not character counts, but rather HTML counts, so they are a little inflated. The crossover point is 2000 HTML characters (let’s say 1500 real characters) or a few paragraphs.

Next Question: “Does FAQ Length have an effect on success rate?”

Kickstarter has an option for a project FAQ at the bottom of the description. The chart shows just having an FAQ helps, but most (48K) projects have no FAQ at all. Because of this, I’m going to say while it’s good to put some content in FAQ form, I’m not going to count it in my stats.

Okay, now to the real question based on the above – What is the success rate of a project that has a video, is 8 – 34 days in length, has a goal of $5,000 or less, has at least 7 reward levels, and contains at least 2,000 HTML characters in the description (again,keep in mind the positive bias)? 73%!

Now some caveats! These stats are for all project categories. I’ve already played with the data enough to know that the sweet spots will vary between categories, and between subcategories. As mentioned several times before, the dataset is biased and it’s not looking likely that will change unless Kickstarter releases the data themselves. Finally there are several ways to slice the data and while I feel pretty good in my approach others will disagree.

If you are planning to launch a project my advice is to consider the data above, but to then do your own reasearch. Find similar projects and get a feel for why some worked and others didn’t. Many aspects of a successful project cannot be queried easily from website data, so this is just one bit of information to consider and all of this is probably trumped by a good social media campaign promoting the project.

Oh, one bonus chart below. Here are the funding levels for the successful “ideal” projects as defined above:

Most of those projects raised 150% of their goal (I left off the sub $500 level because the numbers are wacky when you have a $20 goal). It’s not a guarantee, but it’s nice to know when you’re loved, you’re really loved.

Finally, if you wish to take a crack at analyzing the data (or verifying this post!) please contact me (you can find my contact info on the site). The data format is an MS SQL database (works with the free Express edition) and sorry, I’m not going to convert it for you, it’s a lot of data. I ask that you be willing to share anything you find, and I’ll update this post with a link to yours below.

Update: I've posted a Video Game specific version of these stats over on GameMarx.

Friday Night Tech Talk: What is Fun?

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Tue, 24 Jul 2012 23:42:12 GMT

This Friday night (July 27th, 2012) I will be giving a talk on What is Fun? at the Technology Cooperative (RSVP).

As game designers we spend a great deal of effort laying out levels, creating a consistent art style, and telling a story. As game developers we focus on smooth gameplay, intuitive controls, and building tools. We rely on play testing to tell us if the game is fun or not. While play testing is essential, wouldn’t it be easier if we could design and develop fun?

Before we can create fun, we must understand what fun is. What are the emotions experienced when the player has fun? Why is something frustrating to one person fun to someone else? Most importantly, can we as game designers and developers create fun on command?

This talk will look into the reasons we play games, and how we experience fun. We will break down the components to fun and see how to use them in our game designs. Finally, we will look at how players express fun, common complaints in games, and ways to address them.

Mike Speaks: Crowdfunding with Kickstarter

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 19:03:24 GMT

Friday June 29th at 7PM I will be speaking at the Technology Cooperative on Kickstarter. Please come out and join me, and also learn a little about the mission of the Technology Cooperative!

Friday Night Tech Talks – Crowdfunding with Kickstarter

Since the launch of Kickstarter, many projects have raised millions of dollars in funding. Beneath the headlines though lives a vibrant community of smaller projects getting the funds they need every day. Kickstarter’s all-or-nothing approach has unlocked a source of crowdfunding that anyone can use. Over 24,000 projects have been funded and the project success rate is above 40%. The question isn’t “can” I raise money on Kickstarter, but “how.”

Since February of 2011 I have been watching, tracking, and supporting projects on Kickstarter. I’ve noticed patterns in both successful and unsuccessful projects. In this session we’ll look at the lessons to be learned from previous projects, and cover:

Figuring out if a project is a good Kickstarter fit
Creating a welcoming pitch video
Choosing the right pledge levels and rewards
Raising awareness of your project
A deeper look at Kickstarter statistics

Please RSVP

About Michael C. Neel

Michael is a passionate developer who has written code for web, desktop, mobile, and games. With his co-founders at FuncWorks he hosts GameMarx, a weekly podcast for indie and hobby level game developers. In the past GameMarx covered news and reviews of Xbox Live Indie Games (XBLIG) and continues to support XBLIG by running XboxIndies - a central source for XBLIG news and reviews from more than 10 gaming websites and a full database of all XBLIG games. FuncWorks is currently working on games targeting the Xbox and PC platforms.

Michael is a regular speaker at developer conferences and has been awarded Microsoft MVP twice. He is the founder of CodeStock, an annual developers conference in Knoxville, TN and a co-founder of the Technology Cooperative to create a technology-focused community providing technology access and awareness to all. Proud father of three amazing daughters, Rachel, Hannah, and Jasmine. Loving husband to Cicelie who inflates and pops his ego as necessary.

375 Minutes of Mike at DevLINK 2012

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Mon, 21 May 2012 14:13:00 GMT

In addition to giving a keynote this summer, I will also be speaking at DevLINK 2012!

Speaking at DevLINK is always an honor. The first DevLINK was the first community conference I attended, and the following year it became the first conference I spoke at. John Kellar and crew have always been very helpful, and John personally inspired and helped me start CodeStock (Only ~50 tickets left, register soon!).

I will be giving 4 talks this year, mostly on game development. These first two are talks I’ve given before, and are always fun:

XNA 3d Primer

You may have heard of and even checked out Microsoft's XNA Framework, the managed game development framework built with .Net that let's you write games for a Window PC, Windows Phone 7, and the Xbox 360. Even for the experienced developer stepping into the world of 3D game development can be like Alice visiting Wonderland. It can be hard to ask questions when you don’t even understand the terms used! This session focuses on fundamental 3D game programming concepts assuming one is new to game programming and XNA, but has a good background of general programming.

XNA Invaders from Space!

What better way to learn how games are made for the PC and Xbox 360 than to watch one being created? That is exactly what you’ll see in this session! Michael C. Neel will guide you through writing a full game, explaining the XNA framework as we go. At the end we will have a working clone of the 1978 classic Space Invaders! The game will be written in C# using the XNA 4.0 Framework.

The second talk is in two parts. In the past I have tried to fit this talk into an hour and it has always been rushed. Having the extra hour will allow a better pace and more time for discussion, as well as expanding a few key areas with more details.

Two of my talks will be debuts. The first is an analysis of a game FuncWorks launched on the Xbox, IncaBlocks:

IncaBlocks Postmortem: Dissecting an XNA Game

In the fall of 2009 FuncWorks released IncaBlocks. It flopped (hard), so we did the only thing we could: we opensourced the code. This session will slice open the code of IncaBlocks and analyze a commercial game built with XNA. While the game may not be very fun, it is complete and stable. IncaBlocks is also an interesting subject, using 2D and 3D elements, Xbox Live Avatars, local multiplayer and an A.I. computer opponent.

I’ve talked a lot in one-on-one and on the GameMarx podcast about the lessons learned from IncaBlocks. With this talk I get to formalize these lessons and hopefully inspire a few people to check out the code.

Finally, my last talk will be Business Intelligence focused. Over the last year I’ve been playing with a system for modeling behaviors. Not surprisingly it can be hard to find information on details of building a system – those who develop such a system often sell or license it. With this session I will show applying my method to a database of customers and orders. I also hope to start more public discussion on implementation of these system so that they become accessible to everyone.

Finding your Customer DNA

The phrase "Customer DNA" is a bit of a Business Intelligence buzzword, but do not dismiss the concept. Knowing your customer DNA is a powerful edge in a world of increasingly demanding customers. In this session we will look at a method for profiling your customers using datasources you already have (if you have an orders table, you have a datasource for DNA). We will also discuss ways to analyze DNA data, and how to use this analysis. This session is very practical, with liberal code examples to go along with abstract concepts.

Achievement Unlocked: Keynote Speaker

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Wed, 09 May 2012 16:00:01 GMT

I've held off on making this post for a bit because I keep expecting an email that starts off with "I'm sorry, but we don't know what we were thinking...". Assuming that email never comes, I will be a keynote speaker at the CGamesUSA 2012 Conference.

This will be the conference's 17th year, and will be held at the Galt House Hotel in Louisville, Kentucky. The conference focuses on bringing together "researchers, games developers, sound, graphics, video, and animation developers, education and training industry, and students from around the world to exchange ideas on design methods, research and development, and programming techniques that are beneficial to the computer games industry and academia." I am as excited to attend as I am to speak!

This next line is just for google. And my ego. But mostly google.

Keynote Speaker: Michael Neel

The Technology Cooperative Needs Your Support (and by support we mean money)

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:06:44 GMT

TL;DR version – click the link below and make a donation to the Technology Cooperative (a non-profit helping children and adults with several STEM focused programs). Any amount – $25 would be great, $50 amazing, $100 and you are an Awesome human being I would gladly send to represent us all when the aliens make contact.

A year ago I along with other like minded individuals “founded” the Technology Cooperative (TechCo). I put founded in quotes because what really happened is we wrote some big personal checks to secure space. We did this because we believe exposing youth to technology is critical to our future, and it is not happening enough. If we help a few adults along the way find new careers in technology, even better.

Our first year has been successful by almost every measure. The TechCo has become home for several groups including game programming, wordpress meetups, youth leadership, robotic exploration, and a makerspace. We are currently planning a “Summer of Tech” program made up of independent half-day workshops targeting kids off from school.

Personally, I have been leading the game programming group Knoxna (soon to become Knoxville Game Design). Last summer I held a 3 part workshop on creating Space Invaders from scratch in C# and XNA. The group has attracted game designers of all ages and is a excellent way for children to apply the physics and math concepts learned in school.

I’ve also had great fun working with kids in the JunkBotz program. This simple idea has become one of the most popular – we take donated old printers and electronics with motors (laptops aren’t very interesting inside) and let the children take them apart. It’s not destruction, they have to figure out how to properly disassemble the device. Motors, gears, switches and more are salvaged to be built into something else later. So fundamental to learning is seeing how something it works; the fun involved is just a side benefit.

We have been covered in the local paper, and have received our 501-c-3 status (making us non-profit and tax deductible). We find more and more people every week willing to get involved, lead a group, and help out. The one thing we have not had success with is funding.

Technology Cooperative has to date been funded by the personal checking accounts of the founders. We have been applying for sponsorship and STEM grants as quickly as we can, but are finding that many of these programs require the organization to exist for 3-5 years before becoming eligible, and the process slow. We need help to make it through the time between now and the time we become eligible.

Any donation you can make will help. We are in that phase Seth would call “A Dip”. With your help we can reach the other side, and together create the scientists and engineers of tomorrow!

ViNull Photos for Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 03:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
(Hover over photos for title)

ViNull Photos for Saturday, March 17, 2012

Sun, 18 Mar 2012 03:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
(Hover over photos for title)

ViNull Photos for Sunday, February 26, 2012

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 04:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
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Will The Real GoDaddy SOPA Numbers Please Stand Up?

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 18:41:49 GMT

So Ars Technica just ran a story titled “GoDaddy wins, and loses, Move Your Domain Day over SOPA”. Well, that’s the story title now, but you can see from the URL the original title was “Move your domain day only a blip, but GoDaddy officially opposes SOPA”. Which set me off because the entire article is around one day of data. Shame on you Ars, this is lazy at best!

Ars linked to a source from DomainTools that shows daily changes for registrars. With a few minutes of effort I compiled stats for GoDaddy for the month of December. This chart tells a better picture of the SOPA impact on GoDaddy:

December 23rd is the day GoDaddy announced support for SOPA. Doesn’t look like the GoDaddy Girls had a very merry Christmas this year as many did not wait on the “official” boycot day. Since I often work on Business Intelligence projects however, I don’t put too much faith in aggregated numbers without looking underneath them. Here is a chart showing Domains In vs Out, what the Net change is based on:

I can see that GoDaddy has a weekly rhythm to it’s domain business, and because the bulk of the Out domains came on a weekend, the impact is probably exaggerated a bit. Still I can’t imagine any corporate getting excited at these charts.

Before I would really say what the impact was, I need more data. I’d like to see these charts for the last 6 months, and also compare to year-over-year numbers. I need to get a handle on what is typical for this time of year, and what an average week looks like. What do GoDaddy’s numbers look like compared to the other top 5 registers?

Some other questions are what happened on the 15th? If I had to guess I’d say it was a reporting or system error that was fixed a few days later, but how common is this occurrence? The numbers for the boycott day also look high compared to the others. There are many reports that GoDaddy is stalling on transfers and even registering domains itself to make the numbers look good. This dataset is no smoking barrel, but it does hint at something out of the norm is happening and following these numbers for the next month may reveal a different picture.

Incase you want to do more digging, here is my data from DomainTools used in the charts above. It will only be up for a week or so, so after then this will be a broken link.

More than enough time for Ars to do some real journalism, and cover the whole story.

Central Ohio Day of .Net

2011-11-07T19:39:09.000Z

I will be attending Central Ohio Day of .Net! When: Sat Dec 10, 2011

XNA Invaders from Space

What better way to learn how games are made for the PC and Xbox 360 than to watch one being created? That is exactly what you’ll see in this session! Michael C. Neel will guide you through writing a full
game, explaining the XNA framework as we go. At the end we will have a working clone of the 1978 classic Space Invaders! The game will be written in C# using the XNA 4.0 Framework.

Central Ohio Day of .Net: http://cododn.wordpress.com/

ViNull Photos for Sunday, October 30, 2011

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 03:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
(Hover over photos for title)

ViNull Photos for Saturday, October 29, 2011

Sun, 30 Oct 2011 03:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
(Hover over photos for title)

Moving to Azure: Worker Roles for Nothing and Tasks for Free

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 03:12:45 GMT

If you’ve been to at least one Azure presentation you’ve probably heard Azure has two primary roles: Web Roles and Worker Roles. Web Roles run websites, and Worker Roles run tasks. The two sites I’m moving, XboxIndies.com (which is moved, yay!) and GameMarx.com, use a few automation scripts to update the database and aggregate news feeds. This sounds like a perfect excuse for a Worker Role, but there is a draw back to spinning up another server: cost. There is a cheaper alternative though…

Roles in Azure are really customized VMs running some flavor of Windows Server 2008. This means there is a Task Scheduler we can use to run automation tasks!

The easy way to setup a scheduled task in an Azure Web Role is to enable Remote Desktop, log in and add a task. I won’t cover details, but setting up Remote Desktop access with the Azure SDK 1.5 is simple and 100% GUI supported. You will have to start the Task Scheduler service as by default the service is set to start up “Manual”.

Setting up the task manually is good for development, but you’ll probably want to automate the process to simplify deployments. Note: Any startup scripts will be run per instance of your Web Role, so make sure there is no harm in the application by having multiple servers run the same script.

Now, before I show you my solution, I want to say I tried to use PowerShell like the cool kids. An hour into to trying to figure how the Task Scheduler API works inside of PowerShell I decided to scrap that approach and go with what I know works without fuss – Windows Shell Scripts!

Here is my startup script:

net start "task scheduler"
net user autoguy n0t@RF45$_ /add
net localgroup Administrators autoguy /add
schtasks /create /SC DAILY /MO 1 /ST 08:00 /TN DBUpdate /TR %~dp0XBLIGUpdate.exe /F /RU autoguy /RP n0t@RF45$_ /RL HIGHEST
schtasks /create /SC MINUTE /MO 15 /ST 00:00 /TN StoryUpdate /TR "%~dp0SitePing.exe http://www.xboxindies.com/hiddenupdateurl" /F /RU autoguy /RP n0t@RF45$_ /RL HIGHEST

I saved this script as “startup.cmd” in a folder called “ServerScripts” in the root of my WebRole. I also placed a web.config file in this folder set to deny all access from the web. </>

A quick rundown of the commands in the script:

“net start” starts the task scheduler service.
”net user” creates a new user on the server. The arguments are the username and password.
“net localgroup” adds the new user to a local group on the server. I am adding the new “autoguy” user to the Administrators group.
The last two lines add the scheduled tasks.

You can get help on the various task creation switches by running “schtasks /create /?” at your local command prompt. The only magic in these line is the command script variable %~dp0 which is the folder the script is in. I added the programs XBLIGUpdate.exe and SitePing.exe to the same folder so it would be easy to reference in the script, since I can’t make full path assumptions in Azure.

To run this script when the role is instanced, add the following to the <WebRole> section of your ServiceDefinition.csdef file:

<Startup>
  <Task taskType="background" commandLine="ServerScripts\startup.cmd" executionContext="elevated"/>      
</Startup>

I chose to place the task in the background so that it doesn’t block the startup of the Web Role. If you set the script to “simple” and it fails, your Web Role could fail to start.

ViNull Photos for Saturday, October 22, 2011

Sun, 23 Oct 2011 03:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
(Hover over photos for title)

ViNull Photos for Sunday, October 16, 2011

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:59:59 GMT

Check out all my photos links at http://www.flickr.com/photos/scoregasm/
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Moving to Azure: Static Assets

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 03:37:38 GMT

You may not have noticed, but this image came from the cloud!

The next stage in migrating GameMarx.com and XboxIndies.com to Azure is moving the static assets website static.gamemarx.com. This site hosts game boxart, screenshots, video thumbnails, and the podcast. In a traditional web hosting scenario, it’s common to create a static site for performance. On the server side all dynamic content and script plugins can be disabled, resulting in a faster turnaround for content. On the client side, most browsers will limit the number of concurrent connections to a single server. By using a second server for the same page, the number of concurrent connections will increase, resulting in a faster load time.

With Azure there is another good reason to add a static site – it’s cheap! Currently Azure Storage is $0.15/GB sent (uploads are free) + $0.15/GB stored per month. 20 GB of transfer per month would be a decently busy site, and would only cost $3! Running a website out of Azure Storage does not require any WebRoles or VMs, so you’re only paying for data.

Cloud URLs

When you store a file as a blob in Azure Blob Storage, the URI is created using the blob name, storage container, and storage account. The structure is:

http://<account>/<container>/<blob>

Within the Azure control panel, you can map a custom domain name to the account. In my case I’ve setup a CNAME of static.gamemarx.com pointing to gamemarxstatic.blob.core.windows.net. The container can only include letters, numbers, and dashes. The blob name can contain pretty much anything, but special characters need to be URL escaped. My example image above has the following URI:

http://static.gamemarx.com/games/images/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550998/lg_screen2.jpg

Where did the extra folders come from? Well, they don’t exist – like the Matrix they are just a construct of the mind. In my example, the blob is named “images/66acd000-77fe-1000-9115-d80258550998/lg_screen2.jpg”. “/” is a legal character in a blob name.

File Management

The blob name trick may be nice for the browser, but you will have to deal with reality when managing files on the server. In the Azure SDK Microsoft includes a class CloudBlobDirectory to make things easier. When you call ListBlobs() on the container, the result will (by default) will include CloudBlob and CloudBlobDirectory objects. The directory objects use the blob names to create a virtual hierarchy, and have their own ListBlobs() method plus a GetSubdirectory() method for walking the tree.

If you need to create a file in the root of the site, such as a clientaccesspolicy.xml file, you can setup a special container named “$root”. Blobs in “$root” can be accessed with or without the container name in the URL.

Be sure all the containers you create are set to public read access to avoid clients getting 403 – Forbidden errors.

Storage Issues

Azure does not compress content automatically when requested by a client (i.e. GZip the document and send a “Content-Encoding: gzip” header). For me, this is not a big deal – I’m only serving jpegs and mp3s, which are already compressed. If however you have text documents stored, you will want to compress these not only for the Data Out savings, but to increase the page load time as well.

To enable content compression, you will need to compress the content before uploading, and set the ContentEncoding blob property to the method used. Sriram Krishnan has a good write up on sending gzip content from Azure storage. There is a downside – the content will always be served compressed, no matter the client’s AcceptEncoding headers. All modern browsers accept compressed content, but if you are supporting some non-standard clients they will not be able to read the content.

Update: Adding another gotcha that bit me today. The URLs to the static website are really URIs to the content in blob storage. According to spec, only the scheme and host are considered case-insensitive. This means you will need to be consistent when uploading and linking to the blobs, as an incorrect case match will mean a 404 error.

Finally, there is no default document feature in Azure Blob Storage. If you publish a fully static website to Azure Blob Storage, no one could load the homepage!

Going Web Scale!

Negatives aside, there is still another advantage for using Azure Storage beyond cost: the Azure Content Deliver Network. With a simple configuration change in the azure control panel I can send my content out to 24 datacenters around the world, speeding delivery and providing alternate routes during internet outages.

To active the CDN once you have your content in blob storage, log into the control panel and click “Create CDN”. Then point the CDN at the storage account as the “master” server, and setup a DNS CNAME and you are done.

I did not do this with my site however, because I do not have the traffic levels to warrant the need. The CDN rates are similar to Storage (nodes outside Europe and North America are $0.20/GB data out) but there is a “double charge” for content as it’s loaded into a CDN node.

When a user in London requests an image, they will first try the Europe CDN node. If the node hasn’t already cached the image, the node will request it from the Master Blob Storage Account. Then the London CDN node will send the image to the user. There will be a Data Out charge from the Master server, and again from the CDN node. Subsequent requests to the same CDN node will only have a single charge, as they will be served from cache.

Content is cached at a CDN node based upon request traffic. Since I don’t have that much traffic, it’s likely most of my content will expire before I see a real benefit. (and to be 100% honest, I cannot find anywhere that states CDN is included in the Bizspark Azure package – sorry London!).

I’d like to thank…

Once again I’d like to thank Brian H. Prince and Chris Hay for writing Azure In Action – which has a section on running a static website from blob storage.

The screenshot is from Pixel Animator 3D – an Xbox Indie Game that let’s you create animations using those Minecraft blocks (aka voxels).

Moving to Azure: The Database

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 21:54:46 GMT

Azure has two main services for persistent data storage for application: Azure Table Storage and SQL Azure. The really boil down to a normal SQL relational database, and an document based database. Initially Azure had only Table Storage, but it appears Microsoft was ahead of the NoSQL movement that has become popular of late and they were met with a strong cry for SQL. The good news is both options are robust and well supported, though in many cases its likely Table Storage will be cheaper than SQL.

GameMarx.com and XboxIndies.com share a single database. The database is running on MS SQL Express 2008. The sites are a good candidate for Table Storage. Under the hood, all of the content is cached to disk in document format. A game page on either site gets data from a single file that will contain all the data needed to render that page. This simplifies the site down to pretty much applying a template to a data file for more requests and is quite speedy. It was probably a premature optimization, as neither site does enough traffic to stress a modern database, but we built it for web scale.

Even though Table Storage is an option, time is a factor. Since I can migrate the sites to Table Storage any time, I will start off using SQL Azure. Thanks to reading Azure in Action I learned of the SQL Azure Migration Wizard. This tool makes it easy to export from an MS SQL database and import the structure and data to SQL Azure. SQL Azure is similar to MS SQL, but not a 100% match and requires several small tweaks to DDL statements. The Wizard will make all of these tweaks, and alert you to any structures that are not SQL Azure ready (SQL Azure does not like tables without a primary key for example).

In our sites we are using the ASP.NET Membership Provider and I was concerned that database structures needed to support this would not import cleanly into SQL Azure. I was glad to be wrong. Our entire database imported cleanly and after changing my connections strings a local dev instance of the sites were running smoothly against SQL Azure.

There was one bump in the road, and that was I did not have SQL 2008 R2 SP1 installed locally, only SQL 2008 R2. The Wizard requires SP1 to be installed, and if it’s not you’ll get some odd errors when you attempt to connect to SQL Azure. The good news is the latest Management Studio includes support for SQL Azure, so many things you can do via GUI instead of command line now. The support isn’t prefect though, the add user option for example just launches a query window with an template for adding a user via SQL.

Can I be so lucky the rest of the move goes this smoothly?

Moving to Azure: The Plan and Start

michael.neel@gmail.com (Michael C. Neel) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:31:48 GMT

After a conversation with my former webhost about the meaning of "Recurring Annual Discount" (we have different definitions of the word "Recurring"), I decided it was time once again to consider hosting options.

I was hosting around 15 websites on a Windows 2008 VPS server. This server was running MS SQL Express and IIS for the ASP.NET websites, MySQL for several WordPress websites, and Apache for VisualSVN server. Oh, the server is also running DNS for the sites. All this ran smoothly even though the server only had 512 Mb of RAM.

Getting all this in one place is expensive, but if I split up the hosting things become cheaper. The first move I made was moving all the DNS hosting to Zonomi.com. It's possible I could have skipped this step, since most hosting accounts will include some DNS, but I don't like having the two coupled. On some webhosts, pointing the DNS at servers not controlled by the webhost can cause problems or is not supported, and sometimes they number and types of DNS records you can create are limited. For $15/yr Zonomi can host all my domains, and I've been really impressed with how quickly changes propagate from their servers.

The next move was moving all of our SVN source controlled projects to Bitbucket.org. It was time to move to DVCS anyway and keep up with the times. Bitbucket provides free Mercurial hosting for both public and private repositories. There are some limits on private repositories for the number of users, but it's plenty for small teams like ours.

With DNS and source control handled, the next item was the websites. FuncWorks had not yet joined BizSpark, which now includes a generous amount of Azure hosting. I googled a bit on running WordPress in Azure, and though its been done my experience running WordPress on Windows taught me it is not really 100% platform agnostic. I asked around on twitter and emailed a few friends, which lead me to Bluehost.

For $5.95/mo Bluehost has an excellent shared LAMP hosting offer. I spoke with a representative for about an hour in chat, running down all the sites I had to move and making sure they would be covered in a single plan. The rep was even nice enough to point out their pricing policy so I wouldn't have a surprise at the end of my introductory price. Worst case is I pay $8.95/mo, but I could pay for 3 years at once and get a $6.95/mo rate. This is so awesomely cheap I'm not sweating it!

Side story on Bluehost: Shortly after moving all my WordPress sites over, I received an email from them at some of my sites had a php file with a known security hole. It seems this file is popular in WordPress themes, but not used in WordPress iteself. Bluehost reminded me it is my job to keep things patched and safe, but in this case they patched the file for me with the new version, closing the security hole. Some hyper sensitive geeks may over react with a "how dare they!", but from my view saying "we saw a problem on your sites and fixed it before it was exploited" is great. Also knowing that they are keeping an eye out for me by monitoring the other account (it is shared hosting) makes me feel like Bluehost is getting hosting right.

Finally we are down to just the ASP.NET sites, which are the sites that run GameMarx.com and XboxIndies.com. To buy myself some time, and so I could do things the right way, I setup temporary WordPress sites for each of these. The sites are pretty stock ASP.NET WebForms applications, with enough interesting bits that porting to Azure won't be straight ahead. My next few blog posts will document the journey and hopefully be of use to someone else who is looking at Azure for the existing applications.

PS. If you're in the Knoxville, TN area and are also a WordPress fan, come hang with us at the Knoxville WordPress Meetup on Tuesday Oct 11, 2011. This will be the group's first meeting and is hosted by Daryl Houston who recently joined Automattic (the company behind WordPress, WordPress.com, Akismet, Gravatar, and many other cool sites and widgets).