Viridian Games

Let’s say you’ve downloaded some (perfectly legal!) video from a website – one of the recent E3 conferences, let’s say, and it currently resides in a shared folder on your computer.

Now, being the savvy type, you’ve already set up your PS3 to play videos over your network, and it can see your box just fine.

But let’s say that the PS3 is downstairs and you want to watch the video upstairs.

Woe, woe is you.

Unless you have a PSP.

The PSP has an absolutely incredible feature that few people know about. It’s called Remote Play, and it will allow you to remotely control your PS3 over the internet. You must first link your PSP to your PS3 and then put your PS3 into remote play mode. Then, if both devices have an internet connection, the PSP will connect to it.

Once the connection is made, you will see a cross menu on your PSP. But this isn’t your PSP’s cross menu – it’s your PS3′s. The PS3 will stream its current video across the net to your PSP, meaning that you can watch any content your PS3 can access anywhere you have your PSP. You can even play games that are remote-play ready (though unfortunately, few of them are).

Let me re-emphasize this. Remote Play will allow you to use your PSP to watch or listen to content from your PS3 anywhere you have a wireless internet connection.

Add in a $20 cable that connects your PSP to a TV and things get even more awesome.

Last night I had a video on my computer upstairs. It would only play on the PS3 downstairs. But by streaming the video wirelessly to my PSP using Remote Play and connecting the PSP to my TV, I was able to watch it where I wanted to.

Crazy.

My God, I do not want to come back to this topic, but I don’t really have a choice.

Saturday evening my wife Jamie had a mild heart attack.

She was bringing in the groceries and was carrying too much. The entrance to our apartment goes through the utility space, and she collapsed against the dryer. She had all the classic symptoms: chest pain, tingling in her left arm, dizziness and nausea. Once we got her to the couch I gave her a baby aspirin and called 911.

After doing all the necessary tests on her, the doctors concluded that her heart had blocked 100% for a moment and then cleared itself. If it hadn’t cleared itself she probably wouldn’t have made it out of the utility closet. The damage to her heart appeared to be minor and there were no other major blockages.

In other words, if she had to have a heart attack, it was about the best kind of she could have had. Of course, that’s like saying, “If you have to eat a crap sandwich…”

My wife and I fall under the category of “morbidly obese”. This is our third warning. I’ve had two and now she’s had one. She was lucky it was just a warning; I could easily have been writing her obituary right now.

Expect a renewed instance of Put That Freakin’ Sandwich Down, this one done with a vigor that verges on the frantic. If you want to follow our progess, you can do it over on GameDevDad.

And I’d like to thank everyone who prayed for Jamie and supported me during this time.

I moved some recent posts over to GameDevDad, since they seemed to be more appropriate there.

Yes, once again, I’m coming to this very late. But just in case anyone hasn’t tried it…

Short review: It looks like Vista, but it doesn’t hurt like Vista.

Shorter review: Awesome.

Longer review: I downloaded a copy of Windows 7 Release Candidate version 7600 off of Bittorrent (which is perfectly legal; while Microsoft is no longer providing downloads, they do still want people trying the software and are still handing out free activation keys). I burned the ISO to a DVD with no problems, then restarted and booted from the DVD.

It’s nice that you no longer have to deal with a text screen at all when installing Windows now, but you’re still doing the same thing – waiting for Windows to scan your computer’s hardware and copy the compressed files it’s going to need to install from the DVD to your hard drive. A couple times I thought the install had wedged but it hadn’t; a particular step was just taking a while. When installing Windows, patience is still your watchword.

I figured this was going to be a better experience when Windows 7 detected and installed appropriate drivers for my network card, my sound card and my video card automatically – my computer was fully capable as soon as the setup was finished. This was especially impressive since my network and sound hardware are built into my ABIT motherboard.

So I immediately started installing the most critical programs: Visual C++ Express, TortoiseSVN, Paint.Net, Google Chrome and Google Talk…and World of Warcraft and Left 4 Dead. I also had to get my SVN server linked to a folder on my local computer so I could do an initial pull-down of my repository. All of this went great, I had no problems downloading, installing, updating, etc (though of course it took forever; World of Warcraft is now about a seven gig download).

If you’ve looked at any screenshots of my XP desktop, you may have noticed that I like to keep my taskbar on the left side of the screen. I like lots of vertical space both to view web pages and to view source code. You’ll also notice that I’ve got lots of quicklaunch icons – basically everything I actually use on the computer on a regular basis. Also notice below the quicklaunch toolbar that there are icons for every program I’ve currently got open.

As I mentioned in my Mac post, the Mac doesn’t do this – all the programs on the dock simply get dots next to them when they are running. Microsoft has implemented their own version of this: there’s only one taskbar. You “pin” programs to it that you want quick access to. And when you run one, it gets a box around it. Hovering over the box shows you a small preview of what that program is doing and clicking the box (of course) switches to that program. Because of this I haven’t felt the need to move my taskbar from its default position.

One other thing is that the default ZIP extractor works well…and automatically opens an Explorer window showing you the extracted files when its done (this is another thing the Mac was already doing). This is going to make it much easier for people who sell software over the internet to support it (see the “Behind the Dumb” videos on this channel for an instructive example).

And this may sound stupid, but I like the name. Windows 7. Why? Because it’s the seventh major version of Windows. I’m getting kind of sick of companies naming their software in such a way that you can’t tell which version is more recent than which (and Apple is quite guilty of this). And don’t try to tell me what I’m supposed to think (or worse, feel) when I use the software, just tell me what goddamn version it is.

Things I don’t like? The Search function is too much like Vista’s for my liking, but I can live with it. Um…let’s see…anything else…uh…I can’t think of anything else right now. That’s how good it is – I’ve got exactly one minor gripe so far.

So (sigh) I guess I’ll be upgrading when it comes out.

I swear, I didn’t do it!

Oh, wait…yes I did.

AnthonySalter.com now points to both this blog and the final destination (really!) of my personal blog: GameDevDad.com. I was really pleased to get that URL

I promise that this will be the last rejiggerings of my blogs. For a while.

So I’ve created a personal blog. “But Anthony!” I hear you cry. “We thought this was your personal blog! It even says so on the About Me page!”

That’s the thing…I’ve sort of used this as a hybrid blog – talking about technical subjects when I wanted and then posting cute stories about my kids. The problem is that the two don’t really go together…and I’m trying to customize this blog to be as much use to budding game developers and potential employers as possible. Thus, the personal stuff goes to anthonysalter.com, on a blog which I’ve dubbed GameDevDad.

So what stays?

* Obviously all of my hardcore game development articles like Practical Direct3D Programming and Pix will stay here. You won’t find articles like that on anthonysalter.com.

* All of my games will stay here.

* My professional resume and contact info will stay here.

* Name That Game! stays, because often I use it to make a point about game design or game history.

* Writeups on game developers (like the one I did on Jeff Vogel) will stay here.

On the other hand…

* I won’t be mentioning my family or my various health problems here after this post.

* Let’s Play Starflight will be on GameDevDad hereforth.

* Be aware that I’ll be breaking PSRD much more often on GameDevDad than I did here; heck, that’s one of the reasons I’m making the site. If you’re afraid that by reading about my personal beliefs you might discover something about me that causes you not to like me any more, you should probably stay here.

And it’s entirely possible that some articles will get crossposted.

I swear to God, this has been the worst year of my life.

Yesterday at four PM we were all called in for a company-wide meeting. Now, such a meeting typically does not bode well, and true to form we were told that the slow economy meant that that there would be a round of layoffs at Aspyr.

Then they sent us all home. Without telling us who would be laid off.

Today I arrived at my scheduled meeting to discover that yes, I was being let go.

I guess my plan is to get Planitia looking more professional and see if I can use the fact that I wrote a networked real-time strategy game in my spare time to land me another job.

Yeah, that crunching sound? It denotes crunching.

Which is why I haven’t been posting, why I haven’t been able to do anything with Planitia this week and why Name That Game 50! isn’t done (it’s not going to be a contest, but it is going to be a bit involved).

My apologies. Hopefully things will loosen up within a week or two.

Okay, I’m really sorry guys. My site was having some problems where users were getting the administration panel when they logged in – as you might guess, this was very disconcerting to me because it meant they could edit my blog. I ended up having to remove the ability to create user accounts at all and just use standard comments. That means you won’t be able to create an account on the site that will remember you. I’m really sorry about this. I may be able to change back in the future. We’ll see.

Wynne reported that he was now getting spam…inside my RSS feed. Spam wouldn’t appear on the site, it would only appear in the feed.

I believe I have cleared this up; indeed, this post is testing my fix.

I hope I find a spammer someday. Just one. I just need one…