B. Mann Consulting

Warning: Some spoilers.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy - awesome, even better, and truly epic and spectacular. I saw all three movies up on the big screen one last time yesterday, an event that started at 9:30 AM and went until 1:18 AM the next day. There is nothing available for one's home that can match a theatre in terms of quality of screen size, though Sound can be matched to the thundering, seat-vibrating bass pumped out by some of these movies.

This three movie showing used the extended footage editions of Fellowship and Two Towers, I have the FOTR extended version on DVD, but the TTT extended scenes I'd only read about. Both movies were wondrous on the big screen again, every time I watch them I sense increasingly more subtleties in the sound and scenes, and still wonder where I was when some of those scenes flashed by me. Paying adult price to see them both again was well worth it, for the TTT extended footage, and seeing both in a theatre in what might be the last time ever.

Then came Return of the King, and all of a sudden Peter Jackson revealed an entirely different nuance to his movies - a slightly depraved side of life in Middle Earth. We see the story of Deagol and Smeagol when Deagol finds the ring, and it drives Smeagol to strangle him. Fortunately, Andy Serkis played Smeagol and finally gets his face on screen, but a short while later I realized - Smeagol's face is modeled after Serkis' own, only the eyes and perhaps the upper skull don't precisely match. A nice but disturbing piece, it looked horribly out of place and was perhaps over-done in terms of the introductory scene set decor. But Serkis had to be put on screen, his contribution and committment to the role of Gollum was extreme, and the drain of having to do "the voice" to thousands of different reporters and PR shows can drive an actor to fear about getting future roles in anything other than that typecast.

Bob Cringely updates his site with more colours and a bigger, more personal picture.

Boris updates his own website, adding more colours and a picture that doesn't include industry figureheads beside it, although it does look a lot like something Tom Cruise might look like.

Is there a connection? Is Boris turning into a mad prophet of the web?

Speaking of mad prophets of information mediums, I came across the movie Network recently, and absolutely loved it. It's a 10 out of 10 for renting, absolutely hilarious and scathing criticism of news media back in the 70s, and things have only gotten worse in the news media since.

Being serious about this idea, I've gone and contacted my guys at EA. It turns out one is now at Microsoft and the other is doing his MBA.

The two pointed out the obvious difficulty in starting an MMORPG from scratch.

That brought up the obvious - why not start a Mud, and grow it into an MMORPG over time?

We get the software infrastructure up and running as a Mud, and gradually roll out the features and innovations that depart from a Mud and turn into a real MMORPG game engine (not graphics engine). It could even depart from a Telnet interface, and replaced with something akin to a really Spartan 2D interface, something sufficient to make it an MMORPG and demonstrate it to potential investors.

At that point we begin the fundraising drive, incorporate, print stock on toilet paper leafs and pay people in shares. ;)

Thoughts? Sorry for using so much blog space Boris. Is this OK?

How does a gaming company start?

A friend of mine was talking today about his desire to start a company, and we got onto the topic of starting a gaming company. What I didn't tell him at the time is that this idea resurfaced recently in my mind as well.

But I have no idea how a game company starts. Where does the money come from? How do you get the talented staff to join?

The game ideas are pretty much contained in the Scaleable MMORPG article, and I've got two game producer contacts at Electronic Arts right here in BC, plus plenty of programmer friends known to me and my friends.

Your thoughts on how to start a gaming company?

An MMORPG with a scaleable graphical interface that can be run on multiple classes of computer, from an old 486 running Win 3.1 to a high end machine with the Radeon 9800 XT and an Athlon 64 processor, maybe even a text interface like a Mud as well.

This is an idea for the client-side interface to an MMORPG I've had for quite some time, and have probably brought it up before.

I do not have current statistics, but believe that there are enough people still running MacOS (not OSX), Windows 3.1, 95, and 98, or using old hardware to create a viable sub-set of the market. There are countless people I encounter with computers that can't handle the latest graphics engines, but can handle older engines like the original Doom interface, telnet, and other light interfaces.

An MMORPG could be made available on the client side through any of those interfaces, from telnet a-la MUDs, to Doom/Ultima Online class, to Everquest, Asheron's Call, and the state-of-the-art.

So why not develop a graphics interface that, throughout the development process, produces milestones that are complete interfaces of increasing complexity and system requirements, and evolve perpetually?

I didn't know there were precisely 9 browsers available for the Mac, but I did know there were probably 7 or more. Ars Technica does a 9 Mac Browser Shootout comparing all nine in speed, rendering quality, features, and how well they fit as Mac browsers, or horrible indy ports (like Mozilla, Firebird ;). Naturally, Safari ranks high, but there is still plenty of room between version 1.0 and 2.0, with speed tweaks, revised features, increasing standards compliance, and the opening up of its WebCore code to the FSF-compliant APSL 2.0 license.

On the topic of FSF-compliant but not GPL-compliance, the FSF has given Apple the FSF seal of approval, but still insists that APSL 2.0 is not GPL compatible, and insists a company should not be judged by part of its software portfolio, but all. Do you agree? Disagee? Why?

I wonder if Apple is actually moving to full GPL certification, and will open up OSX.

Ok, I still don't understand why few console vendors have never put a VGA connector onto their console, particularly Microsoft.

It makes so much sense - there is huge crossover between Console and PC, that plenty of console owners could hook one up to a high-res computer monitor and get better quality than on TV. Then, with a KVM switch, they could use the KVM box to tie in the keyboard, mouse, gamepad and monitor between the two devices.

It's bad enough that I once worked at Enterprise Rent-A-Car and got to see the horrors of owning Chevy products, or all domestic cars for that matter. Now I see that same company putting out ads with a bunch of "life's morals" if nothing else. But intersperssed with those life's morals are, not only a bunch of Chevy products, new and old, but several morals I find rather... well... pathetically in their interest:

I just realized something - the recent article on Weta Digital's upgrades for ROTK and the discussion about how the GPU and CPU might flip relationships are parallel: Weta Digital is adding 27 Terabytes of memory for all the data in ROTK, and while I was searching for data on the IBM Power 5 I noticed that the IBM supercomputer Asci Purple, which will use Power5 processors, will also have 50 TB of storage. It will also have something like 116,000 processors.

Ahh, it's a beautiful day. Apple introduced new PowerMac systems based on the IBM PowerPC 970 chip. And a few other surprises.