Personally, I hate Digital Rights Management (DRM). Hate it with a vengeance. In music, in games, it doesn't matter. Contrary to what the execs in their ivory towers believe, DRM serves one purpose and one purpose only: to piss off and prevent legitimate customers from playing and using their purchased goods.

Case in point: Crysis Warhead. I was actually extremely surprised, in a pleasant way, when EA (yes, EA!) released Crysis Warhead (and the original Crysis) on Steam for purchase. More impressively, they decided not to charge the Rest Of The World (ie. not the USA) far extra for exactly the same thing), otherwise known as price gouging. It costs, very reasonably, US$30. (Unfortunately, they are still gouging us for Crysis 1. US$40 if you download from the USA, US$60 if you download from Australia. What a crock.)

Obviously, releasing Crysis & Crysis Warhead on Steam is a toe-in-the-water test by EA to see the response from consumers. Certainly, Crytek, the developers of Crysis have been whinging like stuck pigs about the rampant pirating of Crysis. Of course, the extreme levels of piracy have nothing to do with the fact that Crysis runs like crap on the computers that your customers spent a lot of money upgrading to play your game, unless you're willing to crank down the graphics (which defeats the purpose of upgrading). It's alright, just blame your customers because they're obviously not smart enough to see a brilliant product when they see it. Oops, I've started foaming at the mouth... anyway, back to Crysis Warhead on Steam.

I'm always harping on about how, if games companies were to offer a decent product I want, not price-gouge me because I live in the Rest Of The World, not load it with crippling DRM, and optionally, offer the game as a download through Steam, I would be more than happy to throw my money at them like there was no tomorrow. So I decided now, with EA (yes, EA!!) putting Crysis Warhead on Steam as a test, was the time to put my money where my mouth is.

So I purchased Crysis Warhead.

That was a mistake, of sorts.

Don't get me wrong. The game is great. I like the game. I enjoyed Crysis, once I got past the terrible graphics performance and the crippling kick in the 'nads that I received upon realising those hundreds of dollars spent upgrading my PC were worthless since it still played like crap. Crysis Warhead is more of that (including the kick to the 'nads, but also the great gameplay). The problem is the DRM it comes infected with.

Stupid me. Thinking that some god somewhere had finally showed his hand and guided EA back to the path of righteousness (or some shit). I expected, having being released on Steam, EA would be utilizing Steam's DRM mechanism to protect their game. I was so wrong.

Steam's DRM is the only DRM that I have ever used that doesn't kick the purchaser in a very painful place. It never gets in the way. It has never, ever, prevented me from playing a game I own. I can play my games on whatever damn PC I want. I can redownload my games for free if I lose them in a hard-drive failure or something. I never get told that I can't play my game because I have some advanced computer-user tool installed. These days, it doesn't collapse in a smoking heap on launch day, preventing customers from playing the game. The only thing it asks is that I log in to Steam, which I don't mind. Why don't I mind? Because lots of games use Steam. If every different game used a different "log in please" program, I'd get annoyed. But with Steam, I can log in and get all my games, because it has them all (unless you live in The Rest Of The World, in which case it doesn't. I feel more mouth-foam on the way... must stay focused!).

Turns out, Crysis Warhead comes with the same DRM malware that has pissed off so many people who tried to own Spore: SecuROM. Incidentally, SecuROM is made by Sony, a company I loathe because of the contempt it holds for its customers. Crysis Warhead also came loaded with a load of bloatware as well.

When I started the game, Steam oddly requested admin rights (through UAC), which it never does. I granted it, and it began installing stuff, except it didn't have a UI, programs just popped up wanting to install. I was slightly suspicious, so I opened Process Explorer so I could see what the hell was going on. Steam was running some install script for Crysis Warhead, which was spawning off installers for various programs including Punkbuster. I let them through, but when it tried to foist off GameSpy Comrade on me by just throwing the installer in my face, I said stuff this and cancelled the GameSpy installer.

I ran the game again and was presented with... "A required security module cannot be activated. This program cannot be executed (5024)." I pressed OK, and was returned to Steam sans Crysis Warhead. Shit, I thought, maybe cancelling that GameSpy Comrade cancer stuffed up some DRM-installing process, because it's damn obvious now that this isn't using Steam's DRM.

So after around 15-20 minutes of poking around on the Steam forums, I discovered why I was not allowed to play the game I legally purchased with my hard-earned money: I was running Process Explorer. For those who haven't heard of Process Explorer, its basically a fancy Task Manager that provides me with more information about what my computer's doing. It is not a cracking tool. It does not reverse engineer programs. It's even made by Microsoft, not some dodgy back-room company. But apparently, the joint Sony and EA gods of contempt decree that I'm not allowed to use it.

So in summary: I paid money for a game and was unable to play it after purchase. I then had to decode a uselessly obscure error message to work around the DRM before I could play. On the other side of the fence, I could have done the wrong thing and asked my friend Mr B Torrent to get me Crysis Warhead and I would have been playing immediately, since the Sony DRM would have been cracked out for me. Do tell me, which process do you think actually allows the player to actually play the game? Really, has the Sony DRM prevented the Mr B Torrent edition as is its purpose? No. The only, the only, thing it has done is to waste the time of legitimately paying customers like myself. Correct me if I'm wrong, but since I'm paying for the game, I ought to be getting a better, not worse, experience than those who steal it.

Daniel James, CEO of the games company Three Rings, in his post on Penny Arcade laid the smackdown on DRM and said it exactly as I feel about it:

DRM takes a big poo on your best customers -- the ones who've given you money -- whilst doing nothing practical to prevent others from 'stealing' your precious content juices. Worse, it makes these renegades feel nice and righteous about sticking it to 'the man'. Stop trying to persuade people to love you more by hitting them a rusty pipe. Put down the pipe, and give up on DRM.

He also says this, in reference also to the music industry (emphasis mine):

'Not fair', the vendor of music or packaged software cries. Well, tough shit. Nobody added your business to the list of protected species, despite what your lobbyists and lawyers say. Find a business model that's actually appropriate to the 21st century, and perhaps scale back your expectations of vast profits accordingly (oh, and fire some lawyers and lobbyists, too, please). For example, as some musicians have done by returning to live performance as their main source of revenue.

I yelled in joy when I read that. Finally, someone who gets it. In terms of the movie and music industries, trying to force your customers to use your far outdated business model by corrupting politicians and bashing people with the "law" (and it's not the law: they are just forcing you to do what they want because you can't afford a lawyer to defend yourself) is absolutely and undeniably despicable. And they wonder why people now take pleasure in stealing music etc.

And don't tell me that "oh the retail game industry can't make money if we make these changes you want, waah!". That is crap. Look at Valve. They make games that are quality and people want them. They sell them at a reasonable price that is the same no matter where you live in the world. Their DRM is Steam's DRM, so it's not obnoxious. People can purchase their games online and download them directly to their PCs. They can play the games on whatever PC they like, whenever they like. Their games play on the majority of PCs out there (Valve uses Steam to do hardware surveys to discover what level of computer they should target their games at. That data is available to all game developers for free). And because of all this, they make tonnes of money.

So don't tell me its not possible to make money without DRM. The writing is on the wall. DRM doesn't work. It never will. Treat your customers with respect and you'll receive the same back.

Please note that I do not condone piracy as a solution to the problem. Developers deserve your money, but they have to earn it. If you don't think a game is worth your money, don't pay for it and don't play it. Pay for and play games that are brilliant and don't treat you like a criminal. Speak with your wallet; money is the language that corporations talk in. Piracy only proves to them that you would take their product if there was no piracy (hence DRM). Show them that you wouldn't take their crappy product at all. They'll learn very quickly when they don't have piracy figures to fall back on as an excuse as to why people aren't buying their games.

This is the final blog I am doing for my Software Development Practices subject. It is on a game, so you probably will find it less dry than the previous four blogs.

Cellfactor Revolution is a computer game that, in my opinion, has some serious interaction design flaws. For those that don’t know, Cellfactor is a free first person shooter game released by Ageia as a marketing tool to attract people to buy their hardware physics processors. Cellfactor is a heavily physics-based game, which means that you use physics (aka being able to move objects realistically in game) to kill other players. For example, you might use your psychic powers and push a stack of boxes onto another player to kill them. You might fire a dart into an enemy player which causes all objects that are not tied down to be drawn to that player, crushing him. It is intensely physics based and needs an Ageia PhysX card to be played properly, hence why it has been released free to attract people into buying Ageia’s hardware.

From an interaction perspective, Cellfactor uses the standard first person shooter (FPS) controls: WASD for movement and the mouse to look around and fire weapons. But Cellfactor introduces new the new physics abilities that confuse the standard key-bindings that a seasoned FPS player would use. Obviously, in an attempt to make it easier to play, the developers set the default key bindings for the physics push and pull abilities to Ctrl and spacebar. This is where the problems start.

As any regular FPS player probably knows, Ctrl and spacebar are normally bound to crouch and jump. So by changing the default controls, Cellfactor’s developers have either forced you to relearn controls (a difficult and frustrating process: an exaggeration would be to imagine trying to relearn how to type on a Dvorak keyboard), or forced you to change them manually to something else. That doesn’t sound too bad until you figure out that there aren’t another good two keys you can bind physics push and pull to. See, in Cellfactor, you don’t just push and pull. You combine those abilities with other key-presses like Alt and right-click to perform special physics abilities like physics shockwaves. I tried to bind push and pull to mouse 4 (the thumb button on the mouse) and the F key and found it a real hand-bender to try and press mouse 4 + right-click + alt during an in-game fire-fight. Note that if you are able to change yourself to use Ctrl and spacebar as push and pull then you don’t get these finger contortions, which is probably why they are set to be the defaults.

In Cellfactor, you can play as different classes of player: a psychic, a soldier, and a mechanised robot. This introduces another problem: each class has different key bindings. For example, using default controls, pressing F will cause you to hyperjump if you are the robot, but pressing F when you are the soldier causes you to throw a proximity mine. Trying to remember what key does what when you are using a certain class at the same time as trying to bend your fingers unnaturally to press mouse 4 + right-click + F at the same time as using WASD is as difficult as trying to parse and read this sentence.

The solution requires a rethink as to how the player should interact with the physics abilities. What I would do is to bind the separate physics abilities such as push, pull and each of the special physics abilities to a number key. The player could then press the number key of the ability he wants, for example key 3 for physics push, and then use the standard FPS left and right-click to prepare and “fire” it. It is standard behaviour in FPS games to change binding of the number keys to different weapons or abilities in different classes, which reduces the player class / key-binding issue since people are used to it already.

I’m surprised that these problems weren’t encountered during play-testing. Either the developers didn’t do enough testing (a possibility because of the restricted budget this free game probably had), or they decided that relearning the controls was an acceptable thing they were willing to force players to do. It is possible they tried my idea that I discussed above and found that it prevented the player from using the physics abilities as quickly as the currently implemented design (after learning it).

In the end, the interaction design problem behind Cellfactor only affects those too stubborn or those that find it too hard to relearn their controls. It would also affect those who switch between games, since having to mentally switch between Cellfactor controls and Counter-Strike controls all the time would be annoying and frustrating.

Bah, I seem to be attracting hardware failures of late. The new stick of RAM I bought for my laptop in June decided to up and die, corrupting my Windows installation along with it. Luckily it has lifetime warranty, so I didn't lose anything, except my patience with the sluggish remaining 512MB of "not enough" RAM and having to reinstall everything which sucks when you're a developer (it takes ages).

But let's move onto the more interesting things. What I've begun doing is having a folder in my bookmarks in Opera, and when I get a particularly interesting article I stick it in there to write about later. This should mean I will blog more frequently*.
* Terms and Conditions Apply. :)

So. The first item: Windows PowerShell has gone 1.0! As we all know, the standard command prompt and scripting offered in Windows blows when compared to Bash in Linux. PowerShell is here to rectify that. However, don't go jumping into it thinking that you can just run all of Windows from the shell. Windows is still a strongly GUI-centred operating system and you can't just run the OS from the command-line like you can in Linux. Certainly it has been touted to make Windows Server administrators' lives easier, but unlike Linux, most apps for Windows aren't written with command-line functionality or COM interfaces.

The PowerShell syntax is a weird amalgam of C# syntax with a little Bash and some weirdness thrown in there for good measure. I almost wish it was more C#ish; just some things like the equality operator being -eq, as opposed to the more C-style ==, seem strange when you are doing C# style foreach loops.

Where Bash is often centered around plain text hacking, PowerShell does it differently. When you "pipe" things around you are piping objects. Yes, PowerShell is weirdly object oriented. Kind of. PowerShell is built on top of the .NET Framework, and it shows through. Passing objects around instead of plain strings is better since different cmdlets (pronounced "command-lets", these are the commands in PowerShell) can act on the objects differently without the need of string hacking ala Bash. For example, instead of (in Bash) getting a list of files, using awk to rip out the filenames then throwing them into file, PowerShell does it by getting objects that represent the files and passing those objects to some other command which will extract the filename object property and write them to a file. Its a crappy example, I know, but I haven't spent a lot of time in PowerShell yet. :)

If you're interested, you can download PowerShell here, and read a rather good starter tutorial here. In my summer holidays I'm looking forward to fiddling around more in PowerShell.

The next item on today's agenda: threading in the Source Engine! If you don't know what the Source Engine is you either live under the "I don't play computer games" rock or you play way too much Starcraft. For you people, the Source Engine is the game engine that powers the bestselling Half-Life 2 game and has been licenced for other good games like Dark Messiah - Might and Magic, and Sin Episodes.

Most game engines these days don't properly take use of dual/quad core CPUs because they are not "multithreaded". A program that is multithreaded has multiple lines of execution all running concurrently. This means, on a multi-core computer, more than one thing is happening at once. If your game isn't threaded it pretty much means a whole half (or three-quarters or whatever) of your CPU is going to waste. So its an important thing for games to become multithreaded.

Valve (the makers of the Source Engine, oh uneducated ones :P) have started work on making the Source Engine multithreaded. This is difficult since threading can be a real pain in the butt and will require a large amount of the engine to be rewritten. There are three main ways that multithreading can be done in a game engine: in a coarse fashion, in a fine fashion, and in a hybrid fashion that uses elements from both coarse and fine.

The coarse fashion is where different game subsystems are put on different threads. Valve found this to be ineffective in utilising the entire CPU fulltime. The fine fashion is where low level tasks are split across cores. This method was also unsatisfactory since not all tasks are well suited to being split in this fashion. Valve settled on the hybrid method which pretty much means it uses the coarse fashion where it suits the problem and the fine fashion where it suits the problem. This way is the most complex but it scales well and maxes out the CPU.

What Valve has done is to create N-1 threads (for N cores on the CPU) with the other thread being the master controller thread. Valve uses lock-free algorithms to help remove the problem of threads sitting around blocking (doing nothing) while they wait for access to data (two threads cannot write to the same piece of data at the same time, that would be bad).

Multithreading in Source can only bring benefits to Source-based games. I know that currently half of my CPU (1 core of 2) sits around doing nothing when I play games, and last time I checked I didn't fork out good cash for it to be slacking! There is a full on article about multithreaded Source which goes into more detail and has a good focus on the technical side of the threading, which a lot of the other articles about this didn't.

A nice thing to hear is that Valve uses iterative development on the Source Engine (building and improving it piece by piece over time, rather than writing it and then rewriting it from scratch for upgrades) because my course at University likes to rave about iterative development. Wonder whether they do unit tests :).

And finally on today's show is a little something to back up my rant on Apple a few blogs ago. I will now degrade into IM-speak: LOFL, ROFLMAO, LOL.

Ouch. Sony is in big trouble with this one. As you probably know, Sony and some other companies decided it was a good idea to make an entirely new CPU called Cell. Cell is supposed to the powerhouse core that empowers the PS3 enough so that it can kick the crap out of Microsoft's Xbox 360.

Well that seems to be a bit, well, wrong. Instead of creating an awesome processor, Sony has managed (at this point in time) to create a dud that gets severely trounced by the 360. Cell's write speed from local memory is at a paltry 4GB/s and its write speed is at an absolutely rock bottom 16MB/s. Yes that's megabytes per second. What the hell. My iPod writes to its hard drive almost as fast at that. Good work Sony.

So not only is the PS3 ridiculously late, but at this point in time it barely works. I feel sorry for the developers having to work on games for that platform. They've been told to use main memory instead of local memory to avoid this local memory problem. It was said in such a way that indicated that this problem is not going to be fixed any time soon. Surely not?

So not only is the PS3 already difficult to program for (compared to the Xbox 360 which apparently has quite good tools) its going to get even harder with crippled local memory that will put this console in a firm second place behind the 360. And that's OK with me. I'm a Microsoft fan and anything that rubs Sony's face in the dirt makes me happy. I've never really forgiven them after that rootkitting scandal they were involved in.

In my opinion, Sony betted too much on their ability to create a new CPU. Its not an easy thing to do, as evidenced by the fact that only two main companies actually make CPUs AMD and Intel. VIA is an example of a company that will always be behind the 8 ball. Its like in Formula 1 racing: Williams used to be a good team up there at the top, then at some point they stuffed up and now they are constantly behind Ferrari, because Ferrari is always one step ahead. Its too hard to overtake them. Sony's bet on Cell doesn't seem to be paying off.

I got some disappointing feedback about my last blog, so I'll point out the nuances for people who missed it. Yes, I was deliberately being a hypocrite with my whinging and constant "shut up"s. I had hoped that more people would get the irony in my blog, that I, the hater of whinging useless blogs, now am writing one myself. Oh well, obviously it was lost in text, like sarcasm in an instant message.