There are many reasons why I don’t trust localized computer software, and only run the US English version. First and foremost is the inconsistency of translations across applications by different vendors. Luckily, the usual words like “Tools” or “Paste” are almost always correct, but there are still cases that have confused me to no end.

Worse though is when everyday terms get mangled. Really, does anyone say anything other than Copy and Paste? “Lim in”, the Norwegian term for Paste, literally means to glue in. Now, a lot of people who know where the term paste originated from will understand this, but is that really necessary?

And just today, I was discussing BOMs (Byte Order Marks) with a friend who said his editor didn’t support them. Turns out his editor was the same as my editor, except in his, the option to use them was “Ident. Bytes bei UTF-8 hinzufügen” (add ident. bytes to UTF-8). Not only is the editor using a term that none of us had heard before – and we’re both programmers whose native language is German – it managed to abbrevimangle it to the point where even the translation became incomprehensible.

Back in the days of DOS 3.x, this was never a problem. Can I please get my time-machine already? With a big shiny “take me back to the 80s” button. Or “Ich möchte in die achtziger Jahre reisen”, if you have to.

My blogging activities have moved to Tumblr, you’ll find me at http://ennorehling.tumblr.com/. This blog is left online as an archive.

When we made Eressea: the third age, the design took place with four different people in three different countries. I think the development went really well, because of some new technology that hasn’t been around when we made the original game ten years ago. Our main collaboration  tools were Skype, Google Docs, Mediawiki and email, and I find that each of them helped us in its own way.

Skype is wonderful. Even though there is always somebody who cannot get the voice chat to work, you can still conference him in via a landline at almost no cost, and we found speaking way more efficient than typing. Having your hands free also lets you take notes, browse email archives or do other things without losing touch with the conversation because yo’re not constantly looking at the chat window. We ended up with one collective chat every week in the beginning, and I think it really helped get everyone psyched about the project.

The fact that Skype group conversations don’t disappear after everyone logs off, and that they give you logs for what happened in your absence also helps bring both the asynchronous development and synchronized meeting-style chats together.

Google Docs were probably our biggest help. Initially I though of setting up adesign wiki, but it turns out that a lot of game design is easier to present in a spreadsheet, and our master design notes ended up as two-dozen sheetsin a single document. Another advantage over the wiki: Thanks to google gears, I could take the documents with me when I went offline on the plane or in a park. What they lack is change tracking, so you need to communicate a little about that.

Where the Google docs shine is in collaborative editing. We would constantly have the main document open during our chats, and edit them together to suggest something, to tweak it, discuss it. Out of all the electronic whiteboard software I have used, Google’s spreadsheet is hands down the most useful product.

We did not write very many text documents, but we did use the forms a couple of times. Being four designers that worked mostly on consensus, we would for example set up a form where everyone could fill in values for recruitment costs, each fill them out, and then just use our average. We also ended up using them as our signup page, and plan to use them for surveys when the game launches.

Our Wiki became the outward-facing part of the process. When something was decided and implemented, we would add the new rules to a wiki page, and watch as the discussion page generated feedback or questions. It’s a very fasst way to catch oversights, but also to make sure that external communication is as clear as possible. Here, change history was beneficial for both readers and writers. We liked that fact that even though we didn’t want too many voices in the design process, we could still let the players contribute in a meaningful way.

Last but not least, email is not dead. Over 6 weeks of development, we sent more than 300 messages to our mailing list, which served many purposes. As an idea breeding ground, it is better because testing random ideas can derail a chat, but in email it’s cheap to do. As a repository for the results of a chat session, it is easily searchable, and discussion is easy. Over a wiki, it has the distinct advantage of being available when you’re offline or on the plane.

As the implementor of the team, I used tagging of messages a lot. I would use a specific tag telling me that the message contained something that was ready for implementation, and once I had some quiet time I would work them off and untag them when done. It’s a small thing, but it helped me keep track and meant that we avoided any kind of task tracking for the project. I have no idea what we would have used for that either, because I don’t know of any good trackers that work offline.

All in all, the situation was almost perfect. Sometime during development, Google released the plans for Wave, and I immediately realized how awesome that would be for us. If it works offline as well as the documents do, this could let us cut the email list out, and merge it with chat. I’m really looking forward to doing another projectlike this and trying out Wave, but even without it, I’m pleased with how easy it is to work on something so verbal as game design across continents and timezones.

Via GameSetWatch:

It is always weird for me to see users hate protection drivers when the Daemon Tools one also operates in Ring 0, but it is highly appreciated. The difference is that the StarForce driver is fully certified for Windows XP and Vista, passed through numerous tests inside Microsoft testlabs.

You can’t be serious? Users do not care about certification. Users care about one thing: What does this software do for me? In the case of Daemon Tools, that is pretty obious: It lets me mount ISO images and saves me having to root around in my CD collection. Plus, I installed it, so I probably wanted it. In the case of Starforce, it interferes with the software that I have legitimately installed, and I didn’t ask it to install itself. One is a guest in my house that brings flowers, the other is a guy that climbed in through the window and eats all my cake.

How DO you make diff only print out the lines that are common in more than one of two or more textfiles? I can’t figure it out. But I can help myself.

cat emails*.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | while read num email ; do if [ $num -gt 1 ] ; then echo $email ; fi ; done

My name is Enno, and I have a bash problem. This is not my first time here at Bashers Anonymous.

Wichtigster Grund, am Sonntag zur Wahl zu gehen: Jede Stimme für eine andere Partei erhöht die Chance, dass die CSU die 5% Hürde verpasst. Das alleine ist den Weg ins Wahllokal wert.

Wen also wählen? Die CDU, damit auch im Rest von Europa das Internet heimlich zensiert wird? Die SPD, damit Gewalt in Videospielen endlich EU-weit verboten wird? Besser als daheim zu bleiben, aber nicht wirklich befriedigend.

Meine Empfehlung als Spieleentwickler und Internet-User: Wähl die Piraten. Die kommen zwar nicht über die 5% Hürde, aber in der Politik geht es nicht darum, für den Gewinner gestimmt zu haben. Ist nicht wie bei DSDS. Es geht darum, Zeichen zu setzen. In den 80ern hiess das, Grün zu wählen, damit die anderen Parteien merken, dass Umweltschutz ein Thema ist, mit dem man sich ernsthaft befassen muss. Heute heisst es, Piraten zu wählen, um der Politik zu zeigen das neue Medien, Computerspiele und das Grundgesetz Dinge sind, die uns Wählern am Herzen liegen.

Aber auch wenn ihr lieber jemand anders wählt, gilt der anfangs genannte Grund: Wählen gehen ist ungleich besser als daheim zu bleiben.