It’s been a (long) while, but I’m finally back to continue my discussion of Dan Teasdale’s Design Lessons Learned From Rock Band. Dan brings up issues of design, re-design, software development cycles, management, communities and dealing with the unexpected that are much more universal than just game design. I discussed the One Question Principle in the previous post, and in this one, I’ll consider the second principle he discusses – the Perceptual Control Theory (PCT). The What What What? If
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By Ran Arad | September 23rd, 2009 | Filed under Development, SDKs
Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror wrote some months back on the fake user interface, and its ability to trick innocent users into running malicious software. It was on my to-do list for a while, but now I noticed a link to another post from three years ago, discussing the “dancing bunnies” problem (aka the “dancing pigs” problem), as formulated by Larry Osterman: It’s a description of what happens when a user receives an email message that says “click here to
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By Ran Arad | November 12th, 2008 | Filed under Development
Is developing protocol stacks and communication software any different from developing any other software? I have to develop API’s for my protocol stacks a challenge in itself and related more to user psychology than to programming. I have to check control flows all the way down to the network and back to the application. I also need to process large amounts of data and develop many platforms. I hope these tools will be as useful to you as they are
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By Ran Arad | June 9th, 2008 | Filed under Development
There is a huge difference between compiled languages and scripting languages: the former are first entirely compiled and then executed, the latter are interpreted as they progress. I will use this terminology to discuss two types of protocols: the more common is made up of readymade messages or methods; each message type indicates a predetermined course of action. The less common type, and one I think deserves more attention, sends messages made up of many simple commands that do very
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By Ran Arad | May 27th, 2008 | Filed under Standardization
At times, I like to keep scores between Development and Customer Support (CS). If a problem is on the customer’s side, a point is awarded to development and if the problem is with our code, a point is awarded to customer support. Then there are the many special cases, for example problems with documentation (points for CS), problems with API design (more points for CS), problems fixed for another customer already (points for Development) problems which are already fixed in
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By Ran Arad | April 14th, 2008 | Filed under SDKs
