Prototyping is SCRUMptious?

Something that has been floating in and out of my awareness for a while now was driven home recently during a round table after a viewing of Kent Hudson's 2010 GDC presentation The AI of BioShock 2: Methods for Innovation and Iteration. It is primarily a process talk - and the process is, roughly speaking, prototyping with SCRUM.

Thoughts on Scripting - You Can't Always Get What You Want

After looking at motivations for scripting, visual vs code, and a few script archetypes, I am going to look at some considerations you might have if you were going to start on a new script system tomorrow.

Thoughts on Scripting - The shape of script and other stuff

So far I have looked at motivations for scripting and the visual vs code approaches to scripting. Now I am going to talk about some of the specific formulations I have seen. Most of these can work either as visual or code implementations, and I have seen functional versions both ways.

Merging! Git thee behind me!

Okay, obviously I like Git enough to be talking about it. However there is one thing that I hate about Git. It's GUI tools are ugly. Seriously, seriously, eyes-bleedingly ugly. And this I don't understand. For love of Mike, git is the official CM system for Qt, the goto GUI api people. I ask the interwebs: can some happy Qt guru make a lovely Git GUI? Please? Really.

In the meantime, probably the first this you'll want to do after installing Git is to set up your merge and diff tools of choice. At least diff-ing will look the way you want it to.

To commit, Perforce, to Git

"ZOMG! Not another git for noobs!" you say.

Well, yes. But mine is special.

I think most people get to git through svn, whereas I have been using Perforce for yonks. While I fell for git pretty quick, there were somethings that took me a silly amount of time to adjust to. So here is a flying introduction to git, through the lens of Perforce.

Thoughts on Scripting - To see, or not to see

Last time, I talked about some motivations for using script in games. For at least the next two posts, I'm going to talk about some of the possible representations for script that I have seen, and about some of the pros and cons with each.

Thoughts on Scripting - What's my motivation for this scene?

Scripting is something that nearly everybody does, and rarely do I hear someone say "yeah, we got that completely, totally right" -- in fact rather the reverse. You probably don't hate your scripting system, but I doubt it gives you warm fuzzy feelings.

Something that I have observed is that the requirements and motivations for scripting systems are often very broad, or very vague. We know we need scripting, but we're often not sure what we need it for. Not exactly. And there is where we can run into problems. With a poorly defined goal, we can miss a lot of the benefit we are trying to obtain.