Until now, this stuff has been scattered all over four different defunct websites in a mess of broken links. This new page fixes all of that for good.

I worked at Gas Powered Games between November 1999 and October 2003, back when it was a fresh startup. In that time, I lectured and wrote about some of the technology we used to build Dungeon Siege and later projects. I also released specifications for some of the internals of the engine to help the mod community.

This page collects all of my published Dungeon Siege work.

…continued here

…and I got a new job.

Moving On

I’ve moved on from Loose Cannon and am now working at Bungie. The reasons are personal and private, and were due to circumstances beyond anyone’s control. It was the most difficult, painful choice I’ve ever had to make about anything.

So I’ve been laying low while all the emotion passes..it’s felt a lot like breaking up with a girl, I think. Similar feelings, similar lost personal investment, similar broken ties. Similar number of depressing hangovers.

The Loose Cannon crew is a great bunch of intensely creative and smart people, and I wish them all the best. They always treated me very well and I miss them.

Enter The Bungie

So now I’m at Bungie. First off, let me make it clear that I don’t speak for the company in any way. But further than that: just because I talk about something on my blog here doesn’t mean it has anything to do with what I’m working on at Bungie, so please don’t make any assumptions to that effect. I’ve been writing and lecturing for a long time now, and have a lot of personal projects and research that I do. This will continue as before.

Now, a lot of the writing that I’ve done has in fact been based directly on my ongoing work on a particular game. Previous companies I’ve worked for have been supportive of, or at least indifferent to, my talking about technical details of our setup or research I’m doing. That doesn’t necessarily have to stop now that I’ve joined Bungie, where they have recently started sharing quite a lot of information. But it does mean I have to be more careful and get things cleared before saying “this is in our upcoming Halo match-3 game”.

For the moment though, it’s a moot point. I just started and don’t know anything yet.

On the other side of the coin, there are some loose ends I never tied off from previous posts. Now that I’m no longer part of Loose Cannon, I can’t talk about work I did there, or reference code, which I no longer have access to. I think I can speak in generalities, though, about some high level concepts that wouldn’t be specific to the work I did there. We’ll see!

Shutting down my Wordpress-hosted blog…now!

And after playing around on BlueHost for a bit, I realized how insanely out of touch I have been with the low-end web hosting world. It’s cheap as hell to host your stuff, and they give you ridiculous amounts of resources and free software to pile on.

Why was I putting up with a pile of disconnected free sites?

Stuff involved in the move:

• My scottbilas.com will point at the new site, so nothing should appear to change on the outside, especially RSS readers.
• Bye-bye old Blogger account (scottbilas.blogger.com). It’s been a year and a half since I moved to WordPress and there’s no reason to keep it around any more.
• All the stuff on Google Pages is going to be moving (*). Well, that was a bad experiment.
• I’m finally going to move my really old stuff off of Drizzle. I’ve had that site on $5/month life support for a long time now. I know, ridiculous, just to host a few pages. But I’ve had Drizzle since ‘96, and it’s hard to give them up. End of July I say goodbye!

Incidentally, the email I just got from Google saying they’re shutting down Google Pages is what finally got my ass in gear. They’re migrating it to Google Sites, which I assume is what happened to the JotSpot they bought years ago. But it turns out that I have some files (they don’t say which) that won’t migrate over and will be lost.

Well, screw all of that.

This isn’t the first time some free site has shut down and I’ve had to scramble. With a hosted site, I control everything myself. And as a fun bonus I’ll get to use WordPress plugins that their free hosted site doesn’t support.

Please welcome me to the 21st century.

Now, I have to research whether to use WordPress ‘pages’ for my publications and so on, or if I should install Drupal. I’m thinking…WordPress. I love them.

Back in October!

Now Scrubbles is up on Facebook and MySpace and blowing the doors off. Sounds like Jon’s going to post about the sordid history of this poor game. Should be a good story, I’d tune in.

Anyway! Dungeon Siege material. I’ll add a link on the right pane of this blog to the stuff as well.

So I’m firing this thing up again, with usually game developer related posts. My intention is to use it for a few purposes:

• As a sort of developer’s journal for myself. Can’t think of how many times I’ve spent a few hours debugging some crazy problem only to realize at the end that I had solved that exact same thing a couple years earlier. I should take notes like scientists do in the lab but I don’t so a journal may get me halfway there.
• As a place to refer people to for more info on a subject I cover frequently. I have had so many conversations about how developer feedback systems ought to work (assert, info, error, warn, fatal, logging, gameplay data harvesting, etc.) that it really would save time to just write it up here.
• As a place to post summaries of conversations I have with people who email me privately about something I’ve written or published, or a lecture I’ve done.

Hopefully I can get the discipline to post here regularly and rejoin the game developer community. Lately I’ve just not been feeling it, but my new gig at Loose Cannon is drawing me back in to start participating again.

Some topics I want to cover:

• Developer feedback systems. Assert, fatal, profiling, reports, etc. The philosophy behind when to use an assert vs. an error, as well as discussions of how to get content developers on your side.
• Object messaging systems. Broadcasting, listening, hooking, processing, routing, etc. Generic events with custom payloads.
• Memory management tricks for consoles. Timely, as I just built the memory manager on my current game. Some of this is pretty new to me so I’m learning as I go here.
• Flash conversations from my past. I’ve had a lot of these privately.
• Subversion vs. Perforce. Yeah. Never thought I’d be a Subversion “believer” but the price tag on P4 is forcing me to adapt or die.
• Office layout stuff. At Loose Cannon there’s a stark contrast to everywhere I’ve ever worked, and it’s awesome.
• Free software vs. pay software for some of the major tools I use.
• Why I left the casual game industry.

I’ll start posting serious articles once a week minimum. Setting a reminder in my calendar…