Happy holidays folks! Here is an appropriate picture of our baby girl, Nella (click to enlarge):

Well, to wrap this post up, here are some pictures of her. The pics are from the oldest to the newest, left to right.

Hi, everybody! (“Hi, doctor Nick!” …sorry.)

Little background on today’s topic: When I first heard of the Google Android-platform some years back, I thought it was interesting but never actually expected to see proper devices (i.e. mobile phones) coming to reality. Now that there is several Android phones from a few manufacturers, I’ve been eyeing out the devices with great interest for a while now, I guess closer to a year actually. Waiting for them to arrive here in Finland. And, as you might have guessed already, they have arrived.

The Hero emerges..

So, I got myself a brand new HTC Hero! Obviously, the main interest for me was the prospect of developing software (ok, games) for the Android-platform. Also, it’s darn good phone as well, who would have thought of it? My previous phone was a few years old Nokia, just a basic model with no bells and/or whistles — so this is all new to me.

Why not iPhone, then? Well, there are several reasons I went with Android:

1. The development environment. It’s free, cross-platform and well integrated into Eclipse. Plus I get to write in Java, which I very much prefer over Objective-C.
2. I don’t need a freaking Mac for developing (as if the phone wasn’t expensive enough..)! I can use my old, cruddy PC instead. 
3. Android Market, while still in its early stages, has great potential. Plus not nearly as much competition as in the iPhones App Store (obviously this also means less customers, but things improve when Android-phones gain more market, I hope).

Developing for Android

What this all means, is that I will be making some Android-games in the future. To get myself familiar with the new platform, I chose to port Jewels over to Android. It’s still in very early stages, as I really started working on it only yesterday. It remains to be seen if the standard software accelerated 2d Canvas API is fast enough for my purposes (should be for Jewels), or if I have to go over the OpenGL ES route. If / when I get it completed, I plan on making it available through the Android Market, for free. Actually, at this time it is not even possible to submit paid apps to the Market from Finland, nor it is possible to purchase apps. Hopefully Finland gets the full Market support in the coming months.

After Jewels, anybody up for Steroids³? Just wondering.

So when I saw that Windows 7 RTM was already available at MSDN AA, I decided to give it a shot, having never seen it in action. I was expecting problems, since this PC is based on components made in 2004, so it is quite old. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it worked quite well, even before installing any drivers manually. Networking worked, sound worked, the spiffy Aero desktop compositioning worked. (My tv-tuner, Terratec Cinergy C PCI, didn’t work, but that’s no biggie — it works in Ubuntu.) Then I tried some OpenGL — oops, no hardware acceleration. No problem, I thought and went to install the latest drivers for my Geforce 7600 GS (AGP).

After the driver update I tried Tomatoes, worked just fine. Great! I went on installing Eclipse and setting up my workspace for the game project going on. And what did I find out: it was running very slowly, barely making 40-50 fps and fluctuating a lot! What the hell, it works solid 60 fps even in Linux (it’s capped to 60 fps, so in reality it would run even faster), not mention Windows XP!

Then I thought, ah, the Aero effects, obviously they would affect the performance on machine this old. Disabled Aero, tried again: same results. I tried plenty of older drivers, plus a new set of drivers released a couple of days ago. Nothing changed. It would sometimes reach 60 fps when there was not much to render, but especially the water shader was killing the performance. This was not acceptable, I mean it does not really motivate me to develop something running too slowly, when I know it works much better on this very piece of hardware I’ve got.. Of course I understand that it will run slower than in XP (on this old PC), since W7 requires more resources to run, but it should not make this big a difference in fps.

After asking about the problem on Windows 7 forums and getting nothing, I decided to admit my defeat.. I guess either the OpenGL drivers just are not what they were before, or this PC is plainly too old for W7. I suspect the first. Of course, OpenGL has always been the ugly step child in Windows world while Direct 3D is receiving the love, so.. Too bad, really, I was starting to like W7.

I went and dropped back XP, and boom, everything runs fast again. Ubuntu dual-boot comes a bit later.

However, I might try W7 on the laptop of mine, that is currently running Vista. Vista seems too bulky for that cheap laptop, starting up very slowly etc., so I suspect W7 might help a bit. Indeed, I will probably see how the install goes on the laptop. Stay tuned for my report!

UPDATE: Writing this from the laptop running W7. Seems to be working fine, except the smart card reader. Better than Vista, that’s for sure.

In other news..

I haven’t progressed on the game project, but I have played games. I finished Saints Row 2, it was a blast. Currently I’m playing InFAMOUS, which I bought recently. Great game! Thinking of buying Red Faction: Guerrilla next. So many great games, so little time..

So what do I think of the game? Well.. It’s a great game – much better than Oblivion, for example – looks great and sounds great. I enjoyed my time on the wastes a great deal. But… how could I put this… It’s not Fallout! :/ While there are plenty of things done right (the VATS system works quite nicely!), it’s still missing much of the good old Fallouty spirit.. The biggest problem is the dialogue: it’s just not that good, especially when compared to FO/FO2. NPCs feel like answering or quest machines. Where’s the humour? Not much of it left. The ending was not very good either, although not as bad as some people claim it to be.

Nevertheless, as I said, I enjoyed the game a lot, and will be playing it again. Perhaps they should’ve called it Fallout: Something something something, though. I had a few problems with the game: three freezes (two of them while approaching Evergreen Mills) where I must restart PS3, one crash and several little (graphical / physics) bugs. Not too bad, I guess. Lots of PS3 players have complained about worse problems.

And after completing FO3, I’ve been playing FO2 again, after many years. As I mentioned in my last post, I never actually finished the game and have held FO1 as the better game. Let’s see if the order changes after I finish the part two. It’s very hard though (at least in the beginning), much harder than I remembered. I think I’ve hit a bug though (I’m using Killaps unofficial patch 1.02.25 – highly recommended, I’ve yet to try the Restoration Project), skip the following paragraph to avoid FO2 spoilers.

*SPOILERS* I cannot seem to be able to give Bishops holotape and the Raider account book to Lynette in Vault City. I wiped out Bishops in New Reno, found the holotape in the safe. On my way to Vault City, I cleaned out the Raiders cave. At Vault City, I can tell several people I’ve neutralized the raider threat, and they say I should tell the First Citizen, but I cannot give the account book to Lynette. Nor the holotape. I tried before doing the Gecko power plant quests and after – doesn’t work. Oh well, I guess I cannot complete those quests then. *END SPOILERS*

Now I just need to plug GOG.com, the Good Old Games! The service is excellent, so far I’ve bought FO1, FO2 and Gothic. The games come prepatched and DRM free, it’s great. Good stuff, highly recommended.

I have played lot of games lately on the PS3, mostly Little Big Planet and in these last few days Fallout 3. Little Big Planet is really fun, especially when played together with others (in my case that means my fiancée Annemari <3). The Little Dead Space level was brilliant.

As for Fallout 3 (got it for Christmas), I’m very enthusiastic about it so far. * Feels a lot like Oblivion in places, but that doesn’t bother me since I like Oblivion. My current Oblivion save has almost 60 hours put into it, and the game isn’t nearly finished (I’m currently on the Shivering Isles expansion). The main quest is a bit dull, I don’t like cleaning the Oblivion gates (hence Shivering Isles).. Fallout 3 on the other hand seems much better and more interesting. Maybe that’s because there are hundreds of games in the generic fantasy world but only a handful (I’m only aware of Wasteland and Fallout 1 & 2) in a post-nuclear environment. This time Bethesda even hired more than three voice actors, wow! The game looks and sounds great, obviously. I guess I’ll comment it more after I’ve finished the game.

After I’m done with Fallout 3 (not too soon, I reckon), there’s a lot of unfinished stuff to play: GTA IV, Oblivion, Lego Batman.. In fact, I might even start Fallout 2 again, as I have never actually finished it(!). The original Fallout I’ve finished with at least three or four characters. Good times.

*) Yes, I’m aware the PS3 version is the worst of the bunch. However, it has trophies now and I haven’t had any problems so far, apart from some minor bugs like a severed molerat head that just couldn’t stop rolling around. The lack of anti-aliasing is a bit distracting, but nevertheless I can recommend the PS3 version… unless you got other options. I didn’t (my PC is a bit too old).

In addition, I managed to wash my cell phone in 40 degrees Celcius two days ago. It doesn’t work any more.

Oh, and PolyAnim now has some Java Web Start demos up at http://code.google.com/p/polyanim/wiki/WebStartDemos..