So, Roger Ebert finally accepts that he “…was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place.”  But, he isn’t convenced that some game, somewhere might be art, just leaves that it is possible, maybe.

Here’s a game that I have no doubt is art:  Every Day The Same Dream

I am funding a movie!

I knew when Amazon.com bought Reflexive that my game shoppee’s days where numbered. It is a big reason why I left Vermont and found a “real” job.  Today, my instincts where proven correct, by this email:

Dear Valued Affiliate,

I wanted to write to you today to thank you for your participation in the Game Center Solution Affiliate Program and to inform you that as of June 30, 2010, Reflexive Entertainment, Inc. will be terminating the Game Center Solution Affiliate program to focus entirely on game development.

Between now and June 30, 2010, the Game Center Solution Affiliate Program will continue its business as usual. We will continue to provide web service and support and pay referral fees on every qualified sale through June 30, 2010. We will stop processing sales after that date and our agreement with you governing the Game Center Solution Affiliate Program will terminate on June 30, 2010.

You will continue to have access to the Control Center until July 31, 2010 at which time we will distribute your final royalty report to the email address we have on file and our agreement with you governing the Game Center Solution Affiliate Program will terminate. Please be sure your contact information is current in our system.

We wish you all the best and hope that we will have more opportunities to work together in the future.

If you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact us at xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxx.xxxx.

Sincerely,

Lars Brubaker
CEO – Reflexive Entertainment, Inc.

Moral of the story: Don’t build a business based on something someone else can pull the plug on.

Imagine, there is a treasure worth $10 million buried at the bottom of a 150 foot hole.  It was put there by someone who does not want anyone else to have it.  There are lots of tricks, traps and other things that make getting to money next to impossible.  Let’s say you have already spend $9.5 million to get 130 ft.  It is the final push, the last 20 feet, but there is a problem.  The final obstacle is going to cost you $700k.  Do you keep going?

In business and economics, the concept of sunk costs is taught.  It should be taught in all disciplines, because, no matter what endeavor you undertake, the dilemma of sunk costs will be encountered.  So, what are sunk costs?  Sunk costs are time, energy and money you have already spent.  It’s the resources you can’t get back no matter what.  The permanence of this unrecoverabilty is very important in understanding the true dilemma of sunk costs.

So, back to the Money Pit.  Do you keep going?  A lot of people would answer, “Yes! Absolutely!  You’ve spent $9 million dollars, how could you stop!”  This is faulty thinking.  Those $9 million dollars are gone, spent, fineto!  There is no getting them back.  The question isn’t what you’ve already put into the project.  The question is, what is the cost of moving forward?  Is it worth investing?  This is the phenomena of sunk costs.  Sunk costs is the investment we’ve already made.  Pyscologically, this past exerition of effort and use of resources increases our committment to the project.  This committment clouds our judgement and often leads us down the path of wasted time, and money.  Instead of giving up while we are ahead, those sunk costs push us further down the path, and we waste more time, energy and money.

Now, that we are aware of sunk costs what is the true decision on the treasure we are facing?  Is $700k worth more or less than the treasure at the bottom of the pit?  Clearly the answer is yes and we should move forward.  If on the other hand we weren’t sure and there was risk involved it might not be the clear answer.  If there was a good chance that no money was at the bottom of the pit, and only small chance of $10 million, you probably should just walk away.

So, next time you are facing a decision, remember.  You’ve got to let the past go.  You can’t get it back and if you let it cloud your judgement then you are going to find yourself pouring more and more money, time, blood, sweat, and tears into a losing proposition.  Don’t believe me?  Read the sad tale of 3D Realms, Duke Nukem Forever, 12 years and countless millions spent with nothing to show for it.

PS.  If you are interested, the Money Pit is a real thing, check it out.

One of the gotchas I pointed out earlier was that Validation and Intellisense doesn’t work right for XAML files. A related trap that took me quite a while to figure out is the WPF Designer in Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t understand SilverLight XML! I had to right click my XAML file and tell it to open with the XML Editor in order to make all the errors go away. Even then it still complains about the “x:name” attribute. This is what I think they meant. All quirks, I hope, God willing, will go away with Visual Studio 2008, Glory be to Digital Lord Gates.

An interesting question is how pop-up blockers and such interact with SilverLight. I personally had troubles with AVG freaking out when I was installing the SilverLight SDK. I finally got it to install correctly after I disable the “Resident shield.” I then promptly turned it back on only to have it mess up the creation of a SilverLight project. So at this point AVG gets turned off any time I’m dealing with SilverLight.

For now protection software makers’ are playing catching up and are slowly becoming aware of SilverLight. I’d wager that pop-ups will be a problem for about a year, so plan accordingly.

When Pete Brown was building the Carbon Calculator pop-up blockers where a big concern. His solution was to use a page redirect and query strings. The crux of the problem is if a blocker comes up, then the user has to enable pop-ups, which causes the page to refreshed, thereby zapping all the data!

Here are several gotchas I learned about at SilverLight DevCamp DC. You might not even understand what some of these are talking about, but hopefully by the end of this series you will.

• Keyboard input doesn’t work right for fullscreen mode
• Blend’s Media encoding fails sometimes
• You need to deploy debug (.pdb) files in order for Firefox to work
• You need to save the root element passed during the onload event so you can do a find controls with it later
• Validation and intellisense don’t work right in xaml files
• Attached properties don’t show-up in intellisense
• Do not start animations in the constructor
• No design time support for UserControls in Blend

This is an amazing video of a sun flare. The TRACE satellite caught this flare which is what they call an X-Class flare, one of the largest and the kind responsible for blackouts and communication disruption. These loops are generating massive radiation and are estimated to be hotter than ten million degrees!

This weekend I hauled myself down to DC to attend the SilverLight DevCamp DC.  I learned quite a few things so I’ve decided, instead of one really long post about it all I’d do a series of quick posts about the things I learned.

I’d like to send a big THANK YOU to Frank La Vigne for organizing this event and recognize all the speakers because they did this as volenteers:

• Dr Z
• Vishwas Lele
• Rob Zelt
• Andrew Duthie
• Pete Brown
• Kevin Jones
• Dani Diaz

Apparently I came the furthest for the event and so was given a free copy of the just released SilverLight 1.0 Unleashed.  I was quite happy because it was a book I was thinking about getting.  If that wasn’t surprise enough the book is filled with bright colors!

SilverLight DevCamp DC Nuggest #1

The first nugget I’ll share is that a Windows Mobile version of SilverLight is in the works.  Apparently there was a working demo at MIX07 and I found a video of the presentation by MLB.com, the mobile part is right at the end.

Even though I’m not done I’ve decided to post my research so far onSilverLight. I’ve tried to find working examples for everything and cross-reference everything as much as I can. I apologize for the link happy post, but I want you to be able to get the info from the horse’s mouth and judge for yourself. First I’ll give you the executive summary. If you want more details follow the related link below.

Executive Summary

SilverLight allows you to deploy vector graphics and media rich applications through the browser unto Windows and Mac. Essentially it is a stripped down (currently 1 meg download for 1.0, 4 megs for 1.1) version of the .Net framework that runs in a browser (IE, Firefox, Safari and more planned.) It will allow games to switch to fullscreen mode, collect keyboard and mouse input, play videos and music seamlessly and save to a special sandbox area of the client.

The graphics are described in a new html like language called XAML which has a complex event system that allows the graphics to respond to changes in the game data. Think of a GUI layer that is responsible for itself, making changes to the way it looks based on user input and changes inside the game world.

One important thing to note is that search engines will be able to see the XAML. SilverLight should be viewed as a new API for the web. It isn’t just a way to embed games and videos on an html page. It will become a complete replacement for ASP.NET and HTML. Entire website will be made with XAML and run by SilverLight.

Is SilverLight a new gaming platform? Yes

User Experience

Blue Rose Games‘ Dr. Popper – Seemless Fullscreen Mode, look for button with arrow in the top right of the game frame

Terralever’s Zero Gravity

• Load bar while the game sets itself up
• Video transition to game canvas
• Seamless music , you can’t tell when the loop repeats and the sound FX are on queue
• Website navigation – imagine gamers easily looking at online manual, jumping to order game, and popping into the community forums effortlessly.

Netika’s GOA WinForms – Incredible clone of the Windows/Office look and controls. You just have to go see them to believe.

Infragistics‘ has a tech demo – rich user controls stepping beyond the current windows forms look

Technical

Tim Sneath’s post Introducing Microsoft Silverlight – “The first release that we’re shipping later this summer is about a megabyte in size, then we’re going to ship the next release, we’re calling it 1.1, is going to be about 3 to 4 megabytes in size.”

Scot Hanselman’s post Putting Mix, Silverlight, the CoreCLR and the DLR into context – “The Mac version of Silverlight is a Universal Binary and runs the same code and renders the XAML exactly the same on the Mac as it does on Windows.”

Steve C. Orr’s Introduction to SilverLight – “Silverlight’s team has a long term secret goal of keeping the download size under 5MB. Shhhh! Don’t tell anybody!”

Rafe Needleman ‘s What is Silverlight, really? - “search engines, like Google, can scan XAML”

Danny Thorpe , MIX07: Extending the Browser Programming Model with Silverlight - “Silverlight running in different browsers on the same machine will use the same isostorage area on the machine.”

The .NET Show: Silverlight (Transcript)

Misc

The Tater Salad Blog has the best firsthand account of using SilverLight to make games I’ve come across so far: Silverlight Game Development Post Mortem

Joel on Software recently wrote a post titled Strategy Letter VI although he doesn’t mention SilverLight and might not even be thinking about it I definitely think SilverLight could be the “second coming of Microsoft Windows.”

Microsoft is providing free streaming with up to 4 GB for SilverLight

Resources

How to compile using Visual Studio 2005 instead of Orcas

Silverlight Project Template for Visual Studio 2005

Chris Bowden’s List of SilverLight Games

List of 50 SilverLight Applications

Dave Relyea’s Blog : Silverlight 1.1 Alpha Layout System and Controls Framework