This is just me ranting about nothing at all on a Sunday night, so ignore it if you don’t have time.

I’m currently doing some work with the Unity game engine (great engine, only a few annoyances) and I had to have two copies of Unity open at once.

Unity, when you open the application, will attempt to load the previously opened project. You can stop it from doing this, and pop up the project browser window by holding down a key, which happens to be the ALT key on Windows.

Only problem is, I’m also running with a bunch of 128GB SSD drives in a RAID 0 configuration. I click on the Unity icon on the start menu and before I even touch the key, Unity has loaded and complained about the previous project already being open.

Luckily for me, I can just run the Unity application from the command line and use the “-openfile” option to specify the project to use.

That said, opening up Maya 2010, Max 2010, a couple of copies of Unity, two copies of Visual Studio 2010, and Photoshop CS5 all in a matter of seconds… very nice.

SSDs in RAID 0.

I recommend them.

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Just a quick note to say that this week I am in Las Vegas, city of sin, for of all things Microsoft. I will be at the DevConnections Developer Conference and the launch of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010.

Should be an interesting time with all of the fantastic new features that are being promoted. I’m especially looking forward to the new parallelisation features of LINQ (PLINQ) and the 4.0 .NET Framework.

Also, DevExpress (amongst others) will be there, so I can find out what Mark Miller and his crew will be showing off for the new Visual Studio 2010. SyncFusion, telerik, ComponentOne. So many vendors I can strong arm to find out what’s new.

Silverlight 4 is being shown off, which is great if you are building game user interfaces, or just want to do silly fancy animations in your applications.

See you there if you are attending.

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I read today over on Engadget that InstantAction announced their new technology for streaming games to any web browser and I feel sickened.

For me, this is the third time in my life that I have created a technology, showed it to companies and people,and had them be disinterested in it. It really is disheartening at times.

The first time was in 1990, developing technology for the creation of fruit machines for the European market, reducing the development time from over three months (and that was fast) to less than two weeks, with less testing and Q/A. Nobody was interested. I showed it to a number of companies. Not a single nibble.

The second time was back in 1994/1995 when demonstrating a peer-to-peer file-sharing system, the original was coded in C, which was later re-written in Java, which at that time was utterly brand new and still in Beta, because I wanted the system to be instantly cross-platform. I remember standing in a nightclub in Hollywood around 1995, drunk off my arse, explaining the technology to the lead guitarist of Aerosmith. That technology formed the basis of what later became many of the peer-to-peer technologies today.

In the middle of 2007 I demonstrated a game streaming technology, oddly enough called “GameStream” that I had created, to Activision, that streamed the game, at that time Shrek the Third, to your local machine. It broke the game up in to chunks, analysing the file access pattern of the game to get the pieces used first to you as quickly as possible. The software ran in any web browser that had Java installed, which is about 95% of every web browser out there. In 2008 I stood in the THQ offices and the Take-Two Offices and demonstrated Crysis streamned over my 3G cellphone in real-time. Click the link in the browser, and within 3 minutes, the Crysis game starts up. Instant dismissal of the technology and the concept of streaming games to player’s computers in real-time.

In 2008 I also showed the technology to a major MMORPG publisher (mentioning no names *cough* rhymes with Wizard *cough*) and I got the impression I was speaking an alien language. “Why would we want to stream the game to them when we can just have them buy a retail box?” was the response from the Executive Producer.

I even talked to my company attorney about patenting this technology, but because we felt it was so obvious, and because nobody showed the slightest bit of interest, we let it fall by the wayside, moving on to other projects to work on.

So frustrating.

If any company out there feels like taking a look at this technology, feel free to drop me a line. I’ve still got the technology demo, which works on 95% of all web browsers on all desktops, still on my laptop. Crysis streamed over a cellphone, to your local machine? Fucking brilliant idea!

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