Today I had my first lick of the Steam Pipe today.

I managed to convert Garry’s Mod Beta over to the new Steampipe format. It was pretty straight forward. And now with the run of a .bat file I can send an update to Steam and have it live around the world within a couple of minutes!

You can make branches too. This means I can make a special development branch and potentially integrate with our build servers so that the Steampipe version is always using the latest version. This will allow people asking for bug fixes to receive them within 10 minutes of reporting, being able to test and verify the fix – and then have the fix pushed out whenever we think the world is ready.

So if you were lucky enough to have access to the Garry’s Mod Beta back in the day it might be a good idea to reinstall it and check it out

We got our devkit on Thursday.. and spent a lot of Friday in the office finding fun things to do with it.

We found that the reactions are best from people who don’t really play video games, or use computers. The best reaction was from our friend Simon. We decided to play a joke on him. Everyone left the office, and I showed him the mask, and got him to wear it. Then while he had it on everyone came in and stood around him, so that when he took it off he’d be all suprised.

This didn’t really work because he’s kind of slow and hardly realised that 6 people had appeared out of nowhere. And he wasn’t that impressed with the rift because one of the lenses wasn’t in (something he failed to realise/mention).

But then we got him on the rollercoaster demo. And he went insane. Short hard breaths. Repeatedly squatting. Hands shaking uncontrollably. It was both hilarious and scary. Even afterwards, an hour later, he was still shaking.

This probably less of an indication of how real the Rift feels, and more an indication of how badly wired Simon’s brain is.

My personal experience is sickness. I tried it for about 20 minutes and felt very very sick. I think there’s two things that make me feel sick. Firstly and most obviously is movement. If I’m standing still and looking around I’m fine, but any movement is awful for me. Another related thing is how it doesn’t move when you move your head. For example, when moving your head closer to an object. This is probably expected – but it must confuse my brain and make me sick.

The sickness is that bad that even the thought of putting the mask on makes me feel sick. My brain has learned to avoid it. I’ve been told to ease myself in slowly.. but I don’t really know how to do that.

Beyond that I’ve got nothing else to say that hasn’t already been said. The resolution is an issue – but it’s something you can overlook (especially considering it’s a devkit). It gives a spectacular sense of scale. In Half-Life 2 when an NPC looks at me – I feel something deep in my chest that I feel in real life when strangers look at me – that I’ve never felt in a video game before. Like a prompt to react, to smile back or say hello.

This is the future of gaming. And I wouldn’t be surprised to see movies that we can look around in too in the near future.

You know how I’ve been going on for months about switching Garry’s Mod over to the Steam Pipe. Well, that is about to become a reality. This week I merged with Valve’s latest code. There’s still a few issues to overcome – but I’m hoping that we’ll make the switch in the next couple of weeks.

This is going to present some issues for dedicated server hosting. It’s my understanding that it uses a completely different system to download and install the dedicated server. This is something that you might want to look at now if you run a server, but we’ll try to get an in depth guide on the wiki before release.

GMod Linux is kind of working. I have been told by people that they have got it working with a bit of fudging around. One of the few things I like about the Linux community is that they will go ahead and figure out stuff like this for themselves (the downside being that a lot of the time you’re kind of expected to). I’m not going to release a version before the Steam Pipe update – because that will fix a lot of Linux issues. Plus I’ll be able to iterate more quickly when we’re on the pipe.

We haven’t really decided what we’re going to use the downstairs of the office for. But we know we want to use it for something. Whether that’s throwing desks down here. Or dividing it into offices. Or just leaving the pool table here for people to shoot the shit around.

We decided we didn’t want to go crazy with it. So didn’t have the walls plastered, or have fancy new radiators. But we built big green columns to hide the wires and pipes. Just to tidy it up.

Old and newz:

I made my first wordpress plugin today. It makes it so you can upload unity3d files to wordpress and and embed them in your posts!

It solves a lot of problems that seem to exist in current plugins. One of the issues was that they all kind of wanted you to upload your unity3d files via ftp to get them to work. That is terrible. So I made it so you can upload them via the media player, and insert them via the media player.. and it just works.

They play together nice too. So when you play one, it stops the others. I’ll probably make that optional though.. cuz there’s nothing stopping multiple unity players playing at the same time.

Another thing is a lot of web servers can’t serve unity3d files.. because they don’t have the mime type and permissions set. So when you upload a unity3d file it just adds .zip to the end. The unity player can still play it – and you don’t have to mess with your config. All good!

I’m gonna play around with it and clean it up then I’ll see about getting it in the searchable wordpress plugin install thing.

So I’ve been working on getting Linux Garry’s Mod working this week. And it’s gone well.

I’ve got it all compiling nicely, all packaged. But I haven’t been able to test it.

We built a Linux testing PC but it doesn’t want to cooperate. When I start Team Fortress up it just shows a black window. I’ve messed with the drivers – changing them popups up an OpenGL error about a lack of scissorgl or something. The PC is running Ubuntu (the latest one – 13?) and has a Geforce GTX 240 (I think).

So that’s what I’ll be doing next week. Trying different graphics cards. Trying to build a computer on which TF2 for Linux actually works. Then I’ll be able to test whether Garry’s Mod actually works.

For now, if you want to have a fiddle you can download the latest SVN from here.

We went to the beach on Monday. It was a bank holiday. It was sunny too. I’m sure a lot of you American guys are surprised to hear that we have beaches in the UK. And even more surprised to find out that it’s sometimes sunny.

The beach we went to was in Wales, in a little place called Rhyl. So it was a long drive for us. 100 miles, about 2 hours. It looks something like this.

But the beach was cool. And the sun was out. And I of course got sunburnt because I’m a huge nerd.

The sea was miles out. Like, scary miles out. We built a dam and redirected a stream that was going out to sea. It got pretty awesome.

Further out, some of the sand was more mud than sand. There’s probably a good explanation for that.

We had a week of sun last week. And now all the trees have booted up! The first image here is a week ago. The second is 10 seconds ago.

So yeah. Just to confirm. The sun and rain makes trees grow their leaves and stuff.

Open Broadcaster Software is an open source live streaming/recording program. This is going to sound like an advert – but it isn’t. I just really really like it and want it to succeed.

If anyone has tried streaming their desktop they probably know about xsplit. It’s about as good as it gets. It works, you can do stuff. But it’s far, far, far, far, far from perfect. It’s pretty slow. And as far as I know it doesn’t have any plugin support.

OBS is like black magic. It records and you don’t even notice. Maybe it is magic, or maybe it’s just coded really really well, or maybe it’s taking advantage of some Windows 8 desktop recording thing I’ve been hearing about.

But check this video out. This is me, recording 3 huge monitors (all 2560×1440) and 3 HD webcams, downscaling them to 720p and saving them to a mp4. This is all done on the fly. It isn’t saving to some huge format and then processing it afterwards. BLACK MAGIC.

The best thing is it’s open source. So you can go in there and see what’s making it work. Or mod it. One of the things I wanted in XSplit was to have it follow my cursor around. No plugins meant that wasn’t gonna happen unless the guy who makes it decided to add it. With this I don’t have to wait – I can just make it happen. Or maybe if it’s done right (to work with the licensing) I could add lagless twitch streaming/mp4 recording right in GMod using it.

Even though it is awesome it is still in early beta. Version 0.51 right now. So it has some way to come. But it’s a horse you should back.

We started a thing in the office. Everyone has to come up with a game idea every week. It has to fit on a single sheet of A4 paper.

As you would expect a lot of the best ideas don’t actually come from people that know much about game development. They come from people that are thinking without limitations. When I think of a game I’m breaking it down and walling it in, my brain is designing on a grid, with existing technology.

But Craig is on another level. Craig is the office manager. His day job involves things like accounting and payroll. He doesn’t know how to program. So his ideas were the most crazy.

The last one, Quick Draw, the drawing made me laugh that much in the meeting that I turned it into an actual game. There’s a 10-20 second delay, a bell rings, then the crosshair will appear and you have to shoot your opponent before they shoot you. Check it out (needs unity player).