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Lately I seem to refer to myself a lot as “old-school” when it comes to talking about tech. I don’t feel too old-school in the game industry, but when it comes to web tech I definitely am. I can rock some PHP and MySQL, sure, but when it comes to web apps what I really want to use is C++. Because it’s the language I know best. At Casual Connect this week I went out on a limb and asserted that C++ would be the next great language for the web. And why not? There are so many people out there who know C++, and have code they’ve written in it over the years – why shouldn’t these folks be able to leverage their expertise? I don’t think HTML5, Flash or Java are going anywhere, but enabling C++ on the web is a really interesting thing. Of course, we’re going down that road with the development of Native Client for Chrome. The idea is that you recompile your code using a GCC-based compiler that produced sanitized executables, and then the code runs in a multi-layer sandbox that provides high performance and access to hardware acceleration through libraries like OpenGL ES 2.0. I’m pretty excited about the possibilities… and I’m looking forward to hooking it into all sorts of “new-school” JavaScript APIs to take advantage of what the web has to offer. I think the combination may be hard to beat – hardware acceleration and access to web APIs. FTW! Now I better get back to work – lots to do. I’m heading to Casual Connect Seattle next week with a group of fellow Googlers and we’re looking forward to meeting lots of casual and social game developers. We’re setting up meetings now. We’ll largely be talking about things related to the Chrome Web Store (although admittedly, that’s an awful lot of things We’ll also be in two presentations: One with our friends at Kongregate, Unity, and Adobe… okay, it’s called “Browser Tech Smackdown” so we may not all be friends afterward! Our second presentation is Thursday at 5pm, just before we all go get beers to celebrate the end of a successful conference. In “Games and the Google Chrome Web Store”, we’ll talk about how you can get your game into the store for launch, using Flash, HTML5, or C++-based technologies. We’re really looking forward to the conference. Hope to see you there! Wow, it really has been 12 weeks? Dang. I stopped counting around 10, I had to check the calendar. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so busy! Well maybe when I was working on the first Game Programming Gems book. Today was a nice day, I stayed in the San Francisco office instead of heading down to Mountain View. Most days I take the shuttle down the San Francisco peninsula in the morning, from San Francisco to Mountain View – it takes roughly an hour. The shuttle has wi-fi, which is great, but it is a bit difficult to get serious work done, with the bus bouncing up and down as it does. I have numerous times accidentally deleted messages when the bus has hit a particularly rough patch of road. Makes me very appreciative of UNDO, let me tell ya. But by and large the shuttle is a win, since it makes me more productive than spending an hour cursing at the traffic on the way down and again on the way back. One of the things I’m really excited about at the moment is the Chrome Web Store. Later this year, we’ll put a store within Chrome, to enable developers to more easily distribute and sell web apps. Of course, I’m thinking all about games, I want to make sure we have lots of games in the store for the launch – Flash games, HTML5 (Javascript) games, Native Client (C++) games – so I’ve been talking to a lot of game developers and tool manufacturers. It’s been fun for me to slowly get more up to speed on the world of HTML5, although I do have C++ flowing through my veins. Well I’ll keep this short for now. I’m planning to ramp up the blogging again, for realz this time. So many interesting things going on that I want to talk about Wow has it really been three weeks already? On one hand it feels like it has zoomed by pretty fast – on the other hand it has felt a bit like dog weeks. It has been a very busy time!
A lot of folks have emailed assuming that, or asking if, I’d be completely focused on Android. First off, my apologies for failing to respond to many of you – I’ve been so focused on work that my personal email (and LinkedIn, and Facebook, and Twitter DM) is a cluttered mess. But secondly, you bet, I’m focusing on Android because it is a great games platform, but I am not dedicated to Android. I am dedicated to: GAMES! The Android team is doing really well, and they have engaged with the game developer community more than any other team at Google. Some of you have shared with me ways they can improve, and I really appreciate that! There are also many other interesting things going on at Google that are game-related. Many of them you will hear about over time, and many of them are already available and just not widely used for games yet. Google is a big place, with lots of smart people and interesting tech, and I’m enjoying fascinating conversations.
Of course, Google I/O is coming up in a few weeks, so if you’ll be there and are interested in meeting up for a chat, drop me a line!
On the personal side, I am slowly getting less hectic, although I am still thinking about work 24/7.
 Taking the Google shuttle to work as much as possible is helping my state of mind – an hour on email and news on a comfy bus is much preferrable to an hour focused on crazy traffic in my comfy car. (Though I do like my comfy car!) I won’t always be able to take the shuttle, but when I can it is definitely a win.Last Thursday MB and I took an evening to finish emptying out my old office on New Montgomery Street. While I was sad to leave there since I’d been in that office about two years, I think MB might have been even sadder since now our office is full of boxes and office furniture parts. Part of the weekend was spent reducing that, but if anyone in San Francisco is interested in a big huge Scandinavian Design desk and shelf unit, let me know!
It was the first weekend since starting at Google that I’ve been at home and relaxing, and that helped me clear my brain a bit. I realized I need to spend more time reducing entropy.
Mac and I are becoming friends, and that helps since we are living together pretty tightly now. I still feel like I’m wearing mittens when using the Mac sometimes, but going back to my WinXP laptop I miss the two-finger swipe and the overall MacBook reliability. However, my Win7 desktop still wins out over all. And what’s up with only being able to resize a Mac window with the little doodad in the lower-right corner of the window? Ugh! Anyone know some decent freeware to fix that?Shuttle pulling up to campus. Will sign off for now!
So Steve Jobs has finally told the world why Apple doesn’t want Flash on its platform. And the answer is: cross-platform middleware “…ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform.” REALLY? Haven’t we moved past this as an industry? I imagine there are a bunch of old-school assembly language programmers out there saying “yeah! And compiled code wastes so many cycles!!” At some point, the convenience to the developer needs to triumph. I remember when the game industry went through this middleware conundrum. Back before Grand Theft Auto 3, the common sentiment was “…games that use game engines all look the same!” And arguably, games running on Criterion’s Renderware at that time did LOOK the same, but it wasn’t because of the game engine, it was because of the lack of capabilities of the graphics hardware. Once shaders became available, games suddenly dramatically diverged and looked QUITE different. As a point of fact, what Renderware gave developers was the ability to make their games more quickly and more cheaply, allowing them to experiment more with the game design and create more interesting CROSS-PLATFORM experiences that players loved. See Grand Theft Auto 3, for example. Renderware was a big win for game developers, which is why it quickly became hugely popular and then was purchased by Electronic Arts. Steve’s argument is that cross-platform development tools result in “…developers [being] blocked from using [Apple's] innovations and enhancements because they are not available on [Apple's] competitor’s platforms.” In actuality, Apple’s developers wouldn’t HAVE to use Flash if it’s on the platform. They could still use Apple’s native APIs and would be able to access all the unique features of Apple’s platforms. Or, Apple could work with Adobe to help them enable platform-specific extensions to Flash. These are common practices in the game industry – game developers want to make their titles unique so that they stand out in the market, and one way they can do that is to use platform-specific features well. I imagine there is more to the story than Jobs is able to share, because his argument just doesn’t hold up. Middleware is important to developers. Blocking middleware on your platform is a sure-fire way to alienate many of them. If he really wants to head down this path, I am more than happy to invite those developers to work on Google platforms. We LIKE making the lives of developers easier. |
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