NOVEMBER 2003 GAME DEVELOPER MAGAZINE www.gdmag.com 600 Harrison Street, San Francisco, CA 94107 t: 415.947.6000 f: 415.947.6090 EDITORIAL GAME✎ PLAN Editor-In-Chief LETTER FROM THE EDITOR Jennifer Olsen [email protected] Managing Editor Everard Strong [email protected] Departments Editor Jamil Moledina [email protected] Product Review Editor Fixing a Leaky Valve Peter Sheerin [email protected] Art Director Audrey Welch [email protected] Editor-At-Large t’s like that archetypal dream will never get it back anyway? It’s Chris Hecker [email protected] where you’re taking a final another case of two wrongs don’t make Contributing Editors Jonathan Blow [email protected] exam for which you’re not pre- a right. Just because something is in Noah Falstein [email protected] pared. And then, as if things your possession doesn’t mean it actually Steve Theodore [email protected] Advisory Board couldn’t get any worse, you belongs to you. Hal Barwood Independent Isuddenly realize that you’re sitting in Don’t download the Half-Life 2 Ellen Guon Beeman Monolith Andy Gavin Naughty Dog class in front of everyone you know, source. Don’t keep it if you already have Joby Otero Luxoflux Dave Pottinger Ensemble Studios stark naked. it. Don’t condone others who do. Don’t George Sanger Big Fat Inc. Or at least, that’s a pale shade of how create the lame excuse that “everyone Harvey Smith Ion Storm I imagine the developers at Valve felt else is doing it” in the name of staying Paul Steed Microsoft Half-Life 2 ADVERTISING SALES when they realized the competitive. Valve’s developers have Director of Sales/Associate Publisher source code had found its way into the already given more than most to the Michele Sweeney e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6217 Senior Account Manager, Eastern Region & Europe wrong hands — many, many wrong game development community, by Afton Thatcher e: [email protected] t: 828.350.9392 hands. As I write this the hacker’s trail speaking at conferences, writing articles, Account Manager, Northern California & Midwest Susan Kirby e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6226 is still warm, and both Valve and Havok and posting to mailing lists on a variety Account Manager, Western Region & Asia (whose physics code was also reportedly of topics surrounding their work. Don’t Craig Perreault e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6223 Account Representative, Target Pavilion, Education, & Recruitment part of the stolen source) declined to take more than they were already will- Aaron Murawski e: [email protected] t: 415.947.6227 offer me any official comments on the ing to give. ADVERTISING PRODUCTION situation beyond Valve managing direc- Welcome, Steve. Finally, and not on an Advertising Production Coordinator Kevin Chanel tor Gabe Newell’s posts to the entirely unrelated note, this month I am Reprints Terry Wilmot t: 516.562.7081 www.HalfLife2.net forums, where he excited to introduce our new Artist’s GAMA NETWORK MARKETING Senior MarCom Manager Jennifer McLean first confirmed the hack. Havok remains View columnist, Steve Theodore, whose Marketing Coordinator Scott Lyon in wait-and-see mode. career includes many years at Valve, CIRCULATION Developers may grudgingly accept where he worked on Half-Life, Team Fortress Classic Counter-Strike Circulation Director Kevin Regan that cracked or leaked betas will appear , , Circulation Manager Peter Birmingham online while they are still fixing bugs and Team Fortress 2. I have had the Asst. Circulation Manager Lisa Oddo Game Developer Circulation Coordinator Jessica Ward and tuning gameplay, but when news of pleasure of knowing Steve for several is BPA approved the Half-Life 2 source heist broke, it years now, and you may have seen his SUBSCRIPTION SERVICES was hard not to feel the collective shud- name before in Game Developer next to For information, order questions, and address changes t: 800.250.2429 or 847.647.5928 f: 847.647.5972 der wriggle up the spines of game devel- various product reviews and last year’s e: [email protected] opers the world over. feature on animation blending, or per- INTERNATIONAL LICENSING INFORMATION Of course no professional would lift haps you’ve seen him speak at GDC on Mario Salinas e: [email protected] t: 650.513.4234 f: 650.513.4482 chunks of Valve’s code wholesale for use one of his many areas of expertise. EDITORIAL FEEDBACK in a commercial product, but is there As game art is becoming increasingly [email protected] harm in just looking, poring over five specialized, Steve’s as close to a jack-of- CMP MEDIA MANAGEMENT years’ worth of innovations and opti- all-trades that could be expected of a President & CEO Gary Marshall Executive Vice President & CFO John Day mizations by some of the best in the single human these days, and it’s a privi- Executive Vice President & COO Steve Weitzner business? Well, if you find a wallet on lege to have him batting for our team. Executive Vice President, Corporate Sales & Marketing Jeff Patterson Chief Information Officer Mike Mikos the street with $5,000 in it and no ID, That his fluency in Latin and Greek is President, Technology Solutions Robert Faletra do you say, “Hmmm, act of God!” and almost on par with mine is just so much President, Healthcare Media Vicki Masseria go buy a mammoth new plasma HDTV satin piping on the jersey. Steve takes on Senior Vice President, Operations Bill Amstutz Senior Vice President, Human Resources Leah Landro while blessing your good fortune, or do procedural textures starting on page 22. Vice President & General Counsel Sandra Grayson you turn it into the police with the con- I hope you enjoy getting to know him Vice President, Group Publisher Applied Technologies Philip Chapnick Vice President, InformationWeek Media Network Michael Friedenberg tents intact? Most of us like to think of over the next few months; he’s got a lot Vice President, Group Publisher Electronics Paul Miller ourselves as the kind of honest person in store for you. Vice President, Group Publisher Software Development Peter Westerm Corporate Director, Audience Development Shannon Aronson who would turn in the money. Corporate Director, Audience Development Michael Zane But what if you somehow knew that Corporate Director, Publishing Services Marie Myers the wallet had been stolen ten minutes before it had been lost, and that the thief would claim it before the rightful owner? Is it still wrong to keep the Jennifer Olsen money if you know the rightful owner Editor-In-Chief 4 WWW.GAMANETWORK.COM SAYS YOU A FORUM FOR YOUR POINT OF VIEW. GIVE US YOUR FEEDBACK...C Diagnosing Addiction A Distcc Second n reference to the parents whose 22- am writing regarding Justin Lloyd’s I year-old son seems addicted to Ever- I review of Incredibuild (March 2003). I quest (“Says You,” October 2003), agree with everything he said about the their son is not responding to the world product. However, Justin writes that in a normal fashion. There are a number Incredibuild is only available for VC++ of things that can cause addictive behav- 6.0 and .NET, thus leaving out platforms ior, but an all too common one is a such as Gamecube and Playstation 2, and mental disease known as “affective dis- more generally any project that does not order” to clinicians, or “clinical depres- (or cannot) make use of VC++. sion” to the layperson. I must point out the existence of If this is his problem, then the issue is distcc, a free GPL tool that works over not with the game, it’s an organic imbal- gcc to allow for distributed builds. It ance in brain chemistry. If it weren’t this functions similarly to Incredibuild in game it might be booze, drugs, sex, or that it does not require distributed anything else that would provide a makefiles or any complex additions to respite from his inner turmoil. This is a the build process. You run a daemon on potentially fatal disease as one of its every machine that is to participate in documented symptoms is suicide. builds and call distcc in place of gcc. By coincidence, I myself was diag- believe negative numbers would be Your machine will preprocess source nosed with this disease at age 22 and, problematic with the current solution. files and send them out to individual with the help of a few pills each night, I Would it be a better idea to offset my hosts, specified in a local configuration have since gone on to graduate from data to be all positive and take that into file, for compilation. college and have a highly successful 15 account by the unpacking caller? Or Alban Wood years in the technology industry as a should I simply encode the sign bit as via e-mail prominent, respected, and professionally another bit and decode it on unpack CORRECTIONS published software engineer. automatically? Or is this technique only Since these parents are concerned applicable in the specialized situation In the October 2003 feature “Struc- about their son’s future, I would implore you described in your article? turing Creativity,” co-author Wolfgang them to stop looking for outside things Brett Bibby Hamann’s bio was incomplete. He also to blame and get him to a good psychia- GameBrains (via e-mail) worked on The Hulk, Simpsons Road trist who can diagnose or rule out inter- Rage, and most recently, Simpsons Hit nal problems. If he is a depressive, then Jonathan Blow replies: Actually, I don’t cover and Run. He was previously a record we aren’t just talking about his future, the negative number thing in any of the producer and personal manager in the but potentially his very life.