Month: April 2008

Probably the best thing about RentACoder is that you don’t have to pay if the work doesn’t get done. I hired an Indian programmer to fix my TCP based EmailSender class to work with Gmail. I allowed him to use OpenSSL if necessary. Almost two weeks later he tells me OpenSSL can’t send email, and if he can use a 3rd party library to send email. That makes about as much sense as a graphics programmer being asked to fix shader code, and two weeks later asking why C++ doesn’t work in shader code, and if he can use a different graphics engine.

I get this feeling of annoyed despair that I’m wasting time and money, the same feeling I often felt with bad programmers while doing Galactic Melee. I’m really happy that I don’t have to pay if the work isn’t done. This was a major source of lost money on Galactic Melee. Since the project deadline is only 3 days away anyway I’ll just let it elapse and get my money back through arbitration.

My previous experience was good though. I think it’s pretty easy to tell within the first two days if a contract is going to make progress or not. In the future I’ll just go to arbitration right away, rather than giving the contractor the benefit of the doubt and waiting out the whole contract for nothing.

I have a feeling I’m going to end up posting here again how I did the fix myself in a couple of hours.

Over this week I was talking to Linley Henzell about porting Dungeon Crawl to the Wii. It’s one of those 10 year old undiscovered gems like Subspace. Amazing gameplay, great design, actually more fun than some multi-million dollar RPGs to come out recently. It’s undiscovered because the graphics were originally ASCII based, and are now 2D tile based. If you have work to do, don’t download this game, because you won’t do anything else for the next 3 weeks.

However, I was talking to my prospective partner and we agreed it probably wouldn’t sell well as a 2D turn based game. To be appealing on the Wii, it would have to be 3D real-time with a close-up interface like Fate. The problem is that would require a redesign of major parts of the game, so rather than being a 3 month port, it’s now probably a one year project. It’s really too bad too, because I can see the game being insanely addictive and fun.

On the bright side, I came up with an even better idea for a Wii game. From a business perspective it’s great: trivial development costs, wide demographic appeal, holds its value, and it expands upon an already successful genre. I pitched it to my prospective partner tonight, and if he goes for it I think we can do very well in a very short timeframe.

I worked with a guy in the UK on rent-a-coder “fuchsia” who did a really great job on my AutoRPC system. It now supports 32 and 64 bit OSes, and also the Power PC (though untested). He also came up with a way to automatically support pointers. So this call, with a pointer as parameter f, is now valid:

struct ThreeBytes
{
char bytes[3];
};
struct TwentyBytes
{
char bytes[20];
};

void __cdecl cFunc7(char a, short b, int c, long d, unsigned long long e, ThreeBytes* f, TwentyBytes g, AutoRPC* networkCaller)
{
if (networkCaller==0)
autoRpc.Call(“cFunc7”,a,b,c,d,e,f,g);
printf(“cFunc7: %i, %i, %i, %i, %i, %i, %i, sender=%s\n”, a, b, c, d, (unsigned long) e, f->bytes[0], g.bytes[0], networkCaller==0 ? “N/A” : networkCaller->GetLastSenderAddress().ToString());
}