digitalbreed

Many people are posting interesting queries for Google code search. Here’s another one which might make Java engineers shake their heads.

Tonight, I added the batch processing. On the left image, you can see a set of six input images on the left, and three output images on the right (all images at 50% zoom, another feature I added).

The packing is not optimal in a mathematical sense, but it’s effective anyway, as the shot on the right shows. These (100% zoom) images were randomly picked from a set of output images which were created when I reorganized all of the plants we have in DVW to test my tool.

Tonight, I enhanced the tool (codenamed TexTorture, hehe) with a little rectangle packing algorithm. Taking an unsorted list of sprites (i.e. rectangles), the outcome is already quite lovely. Next, I will try how presorting of the rectangles by width, heigth or area will affect the result. Finally, I want to be able to merge n input textures into m output textures, where m<<n, hopefully.

I just wrote a quick and dirty Java/Swing tool. It loads and autodetects DVW sprites from a texture file and allows to reorganize them. This is useful for stupid programmers like me who don’t want to mess around with mspaint.exe or The GIMP but feel the urge to move sprites around for whatever reason. I am planning some improvements like a textual export of the rectangle coordinates and a cool algorithm to align the sprites automatically including batch processing, but for now, manual moving of the sprites is exactly what I wanted.
The autodetection is done using a simple floodfill approach which proved to be sufficient for my test texture. I might find other textures where this approach isn’t enough, therefore I will provide means to apply a dilatation operation on an image and to merge detected rectangles.

While I wrote this tool, I recognized a little problem in the AWT drag and drop framework, java.awt.dnd.DropTargetListener in particular. I used DropTargetListener#dragOver(DropTargetDragEvent) to listen for dragging but found that there was no (direct) way to find out which object was actually dragged (those objects implement java.awt.datatransfer.Transferable).
I was not the first one who stumbled over this, like the entries in Suns bug database showed, and fortunately one suggestion from this page worked for me:

DropTargetDropEvent tempDTDropEvent = new DropTargetDropEvent( dtde.getDropTargetContext(), dtde.getLocation(), 0, 0 );
Transferable dragData = tempDTDropEvent.getTransferable();
MyTransferable trans = (MyTransferable) dragData.getTransferData( MyTransferable.DATA_FLAVOR );

This issue was fixed in Tiger where an appropriate getter for Transferable was added.

Many of us are enthusiastic about getting into the game industry. And the more enthusiastic we are, the more we might wonder why people are happy to leave the business again. At the end of 2004, a blog entry widely known by the authors nickname, ea-spouse, rocked the boat. I remember that many professionals joined in complaining about the working conditions. Recently, I read two similar articles again: Jurie Horneman of ex Rockstar Vienna wrote that he was glad when the studio was shut down. He refered to another article entitled The joyful life of a lapsed game developer whose author was glad to have left the industry for good.
How can it be that so many want to get in, and at least some are happy to get out again?
Let’s face it. The trouble is that the game industry still is an industry. Like in every other business, be it software or whatever, there are customers, deadlines, and consequently there are crunch times. And I’d expect my employees to commit themselves to the project to some level. This does not mean that overtime should be the custom, nor this means that a company has a right to exploit its employees. But for me, the willingness to do extra hours was part of my employment contract. On Sundays or holidays, if required. Also, I had to agree to relocate to another site of my company if necessary (which could be Cologne<->Calgary in my company, for example). Working in a fast moving industry requires some flexibility.
The second thing is how people got laid off recently at Rockstar. Apart from the many creative and technologically skilled people and those people who feel that making games is their profession, there are business people who don’t care about your great story, your cutting edge technology, whatever. Those people just see these little numbers at the end of the fiscal year. Those people might make mistakes just like we (the creative idealists on the other side of the table) might do, but in the end they’re just doing their job. I believe – well, I hope, at least – that they had a good reason for their decision, and I’m confident that those who are skilled and flexible enough will find a new job soon – be it game development or not, there are a lot of related fields. If not… Darwins natural selection comes into mind.
While this is my very rational point of view, the emotional one is that I feel deepest sympathy for those who got laid off in such a bad manner. And I never want this happen to me. But it will, and I will have to face it, too, I guess. My employer handed out a little book called “30 minutes for sovereign dealing with changes” to all employees several months ago. The actual intention is still unknown to me, but you might guess what many of us feared…