It’s been a while since I reported that Gravitas was in final play testing. To be honest the process didn’t actually take that long, I just became busy in the meantime. But I have now finally submitted Gravitas for peer review and it’s currently marked as “60% complete”. Based on what I’ve seen of other games as a reviewer that means it should be a few days before it’s eligible for release.

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been some work not related to the release. Firstly, the game now runs successfully on a Mac thanks to MonoGame which I hope will lead to a Mac App Store release. Secondly, I’ve been cleaning up the code (mainly separating out anything that isn’t Gravitas specific in preparation for beginning my second game, which for the moment I’m going to keep quite about.

To keep up to date on that and any other Gravitas news, visit Gravitas on Google+.

I’ve submitted Gravitas for what will hopefully be a final playtest.

Here are some screenshots: https://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf

CCP have just announced DUST514 will be exclusive to the Playstation 3. Which is a shame (check out the EVE Online forums for some stronger opinions). Unfortunately it makes sense for a few reasons (well making it exclusive to one console makes sense - whether the 360 or the PS3 was the better choice is more debatable).

Developing for a single console is quicker and easier - especially important for a game that will probably have more updates than the average game.

There are suggestions that one or both of Sony and Microsoft aren’t happy about cross-platform multiplayer games.

Since the idea of the game (a console FPS interacting with a PC MMO) is quite revolutionary they could get a lot of support (both financially and in terms of marketing and other benefits) from the console manufacturer, but only if it’s exclusive.

That being said, it may not be the end for the Xbox 360 and DUST.  Sony have suffered recently and definitely have lower consumer confidence (will players have to give Sony any personal information to play DUST?) and this decision will have been made long before Sony’s hacking problems. If sales are lower than CCP hope they may rethink the plan. And remember, “exclusive” in the games industry can be a vague and rarely lasts for ever.

The game is scheduled for a Spring release so at least 360-only owners have a while to decided if they want to get a PS3 just for this game…

CCP recently announced that their long awaited “walking-in-stations” feature will now include an item store selling character customization options exclusively for real money (actually for Aurum another in game currency only available for real money).

Some people have lamented the idea of EVE finally entering this area and selling items for real money. After all today you can buy a monocle, tomorrow a ship. This is a slippery slope that will lead to death of EVE Online as we know it. Except, of course, it won’t. Since PLEXs were introduced anything in game has essentially been purchasable for real money. Take the price in ISK, devide that by approximately 350 million and multiply by half the price of a 60 day gamecard. These items are slightly different since they aren’t available in game without using real money at some point (but it is possible to trade them between players so you don’t personally have to spend real money).

One final note: the same customization opens are likely to be available to DUST 514 players once it’s released.

One of my most read (and most commented on) posts was the one claiming “ASP.NET sucks”, which only goes to show being a little offensive goes disappointingly far on the internet. Since it has now been five years since I posted that, I thought a quick follow-up was in order.

I stand by most of what I said my initial post, but with a little specificity. It’s not ASP.net that’s the problem but Webforms. Unfortunately at the time Webforms was all you ever saw. There are alternatives around today (and may have been back then but none were especially high profile and none were by Microsoft). These days of course Webforms are very much out of fashion. Following on from the success of Rails Microsoft realised that Webforms weren’t an idea that could keep up with modern web development. A quick glance at the ASP.net home page today shows four out of five articles talking solely about ASP.net MVC and one article talking about both MVC and Webforms (of course that will vary by day I but I doubt the result will be very different).

So taking into account a minor title change (ASP.net Webforms suck!) I’d say my original point stands.

Google continue to improve upon Google Docs today with the release of Google Docs motion which will “introduce a new way to collaborate - using your body”. Anything else I saw will be underwhelming compared to the article form Google, especially some of the pictures of some of the more advanced gestures it supports.

I figured any effort to get back to regular posting would only be helped by starting on today of all days… XBMC have announced a new partnership with Sony.

It will include the assimilation of the XBMC team into Sony’s Home Theatre and Console division and the closing of the XBMC source. Presumably a PS3 port will be forthcoming.

Since the switch to Amazon EC2 I cancelled hosting with my previous provider Site5. Now due to unfortunate timing I cancelled a day after being invoiced for (and paying) a months hosting. But in an unexpected move, in the email confirming my cancellation I also got a full refund for my last payment.

So if anyone needs web hosting, consider Site5.

I’ve just moved the blog over to Amazon EC2 and so far everything seems to be going well. I’d been considering the move for a while and a new feature (well I’m not sure how new it is but I only just noticed it) is a new smaller instance type.

The virtual servers Amazon offer used to come in three sizes, small medium and large starting at $0.10*. Pretty quickly they added some bigger sizes (going all the way up to $2.00 per hour for quadruple extra large) as well as some more specialized types like GPU clusters. But it still meant the minimum price per month for a server always on was about $74/month which is expensive for simple web hosting. Now however, their new micro instances are available at a pretty cool $0.02/hour (about $15 a month). For the performance you’re likely to get it’s still probably not the most cost effective solution for plain web hosting, but for having complete access to a server with high availability (and the extra features hosting on Amazon’s infrastructure provides like being able to clone a whole server with one click) it’s pretty good. One final note is to remember that these numbers are not the final costs you’ll have to pay. You still pay for storage and data transfer which in my case look like they’ll be about an extra 10% extra.

Since then the price of the small instance has come down to $0.085/hour or about $63/month.

A version of Gravitas available to play right in your browser using Silverlight is now available.

http://picasaweb.google.com/s/c/bin/slideshow.swf