Cal Jacobson’s Blog

UPDATE: If you can stomach my rambling after this post, here’s a new one on the topic from July 2007.

I’d like to preface this post with the following disclaimer, so as to deflect any low-hanging criticism before it appears:

What I’m about to write about is an incredibly minor, gnat-on-an-elephant’s-back annoyance. As far as I know, nobody will be harmed because of this issue. As an Internet freeloader and forum lurker, I’ve invested nothing but a little personal time into the subject at hand. Furthermore, the applicable developers owe me nothing. I do not wish this to be construed as a personal attack against them. I feel compelled to comment since I’ve followed this for a while and it seems so atypical of anything else I’ve seen in terms of software.

We all on the same sheet of music? Fantastic. Let’s have at it.

Several years ago I came across a great graphic engine called Truevision3D (TV3D for short). At the time I was getting hooked on the .NET experience and this engine not only supported the Framework (via COM) but had a nice collection of samples available so that I could quickly get up to speed with things. The community was small but spirited and helpful. Best of all, the engine was cheap: free if you didn’t mind a watermark, up to $500 if you wanted unrestricted rights.

I played with the engine, made some cool orbit simulations, and considered writing a game with TV3D. But on the horizon there awaited even more goodness: the incredible version 6.5. More than just three minor updates from the current v6.2, this new release would be a major rewrite of things and would feature shader support, an overhauled network engine, better terrain and model support and an integrated physics engine. As great as the current engine was, the new version sounded like the Best Thing Since Sliced Bread(TM).

I chose to wait, since I was busy at home and work anyways and had no burning need to crank out a game immediately. I felt that I could take my time, get even more comfortable with 6.2 and then start with 6.5 when it came out rather than try to retrofit older code. My time wasn’t too far away, I figured, since developer darqSHADOW announced in May 2004 that community members were to be slowly added to the beta program and I made it a point to sign up.

Months passed without word from the TV3D team about wider beta involvement. Still, most of the forum discussions focused on 6.2, even though the occasional 6.5 showcase thread would appear to keep us salivating. In December 2004 developer Arli announced that purchasers of 6.2 would automatically get into the beta; because I hadn’t purchased anything I didn’t get in on that action…but that was OK, since this most likely meant that a wider beta — or a full release — was in store for us in 2005.

By April 2005 it seemed like there were more and more questions about 6.5 appearing…the oft-asked “when is 6.5 coming out” forum posts (inevitably asked by new users) were receiving fewer and fewer polite responses by the forum regulars. September came and passed with little more than a new video posted by lead developer Sylvain along with the only “development diary” posted by the dev team for all of 2005. More and more 6.5 examples and sample code were being posted by beta testers; unfortunately this wasn’t as useful to the 6.2 folks.

By this time I wasn’t following TV3D as closely as I had before; whereas previously I visited the user forums on a near-daily basis, now I was coming around perhaps once a week.

Then, perhaps once or twice a month.

I stopped by in Spring 2006 and found that I wasn’t necessarily alone in my lack of optimism about 6.5’s progress. The community wasn’t quite as friendly as it was before: 6.2′ers were getting sick of seeing screenshots, videos and code samples exclusively for 6.5, and the 6.5′ers were sick of listening to the 6.2′ers whining about timelines instead of just ponying up a simple $150 to get in on the beta.

Each side, I think, had legitimate points: the 6.5′ers were mostly veterans of the forums and were sick to death of newbies asking the same questions; the occasional troublemakers and inflated-entitlement leeches didn’t improve the stance of the 6.2′ers either from what I could tell. On the other hand, the 6.5′ers tended to avoid such questions as “how can somebody publish a game using a beta?”

By Summer 2006 things continued their slow but gradual downhill slide. When one forum poster asked “Are they fooling us?” in regards to the ever-closed, never-ending beta, the conversation degenerated into the typical “they owe you nothing” dogfight that I’ve seen on a dozen other discussion boards (usually involving disgrunted game customers versus fanboys), with one developer chiming in and mentioning that the website was a key part of the 3D engine’s release. Then the discussion turned variations on “oh, well I’d rather wait and have something good than have a product that is rushed out” and “you’ll only complain louder if you don’t have proper documentation, which isn’t ready yet!”

It was at this point that I checked back out.

I do agree that in most cases it is better to wait for something great than have something barely adequate immediately. Small development teams may be forgiven for taking a long time to accomplish a task, especially if they are doing so on the side — that is, in their free time. Timelines for software are notoriously difficult. Building a 3D engine that itself is a product must be incredibly challenging and difficult.

But if your product has been in a closed beta for well over two years, you are doing something wrong.

First and foremost, you’ve Balkanized your community: instead of a vast majority that uses one version (with the occasional late-adopter dropping in on occasion), many of your advanced users and evangelists are using the newest toys while everybody else is in the slow lane. The gurus who would normally help the newbies are busy frolicking in greener pastures and are less inclined to “slum it” with the mundane problems of yesteryear.

Secondly, you’ve left some (perhaps many) of your bread-and-butter customers behind. These are people who started on their own projects a year (maybe two) ago and figured that as their own deadlines approached, your component would be ready for use. Maybe they’ve used the old product and their design requires a feature of your new product…or maybe they got in on the new version but can’t release their product because you are holding them up.

I can’t honestly say that watching the Truevision3D beta saga drag on angers me…because I really don’t have a dog in this fight. As I stated earlier, I haven’t invested a dime into this engine. A lot of hope, maybe, but no money. The words confusion and dismay are closer to what I’m feeling, along with disappointment and frustration. I’m having a lot of trouble comprehending how something with so much promise, with so many smart people working on it, can flounder like this.

I’d love to really find out why — but it’s clear that the TV3D forums aren’t the place for this discussion anymore, if it ever was. To have a voice, apparently you need to fork over at least $150…and at that point, you’re no longer interested in the opinion of anybody who hasn’t done the same. And I’d rather not pay somebody that much money for a product that could stay in beta for another two years.

Am I crazy?

This is a trivial thing — especially from my position — but does this situation strike anybody else as being normal or reasonable?

Postscript: the questions about 6.5’s release date continue. Two-and-a-half years later.

Postscript 2 (11 January 2007): TV3D user Zaknafein boldly posted a link to this entry in the Truevision3D forums, which explains my sudden surge of traffic.

Every once in a great while, the adventurous part of my brain pipes up with “hey, wouldn’t it be fun to try a rollercoaster again?”

Then I see something like this, and all I can think about are the minimum-wage guys in charge of maintenance.

I’ll stick with the Merry-Go-Round and bumper cars, thanks. After all, somebody has to hold on to my wife’s purse.

I’m a big fan of the wiki concept.  I have used several different wikis in the past and all, to varying degrees, have helped me keep track of information that I otherwise would have forgotten or lost under a pile of paper.  I recommend their use to any person or organization struggling to organize a mountain of concepts, ideas, how-tos, lessons learned and many other types of information that otherwise wouldn’t properly fit into a database or spreadsheet.

If you haven’t already, go visit Wikipedia; it is the largest and most successful example of a wiki in action.

If you want to set up your own wiki, there are a ton of choices available.  Their features vary, but all should at least permit you to create new pages of information and link them to other pages.   I have two favorites: MediaWiki and ConnectedText.

MediaWiki is the software that powers Wikipedia.  It is free, Open Source, and very robust — Wikipedia has millions of pages of content, thousands of users and billions of hits per day.  Along with full-text search capability, users can upload graphic or audio files and associate them with the appropriate topics.  All changes to pages are tracked, so both vandalism and honest mistakes can be quickly and easily dealt with.  It is, in my opinion, the standard by which all other wikis should be judged.

I’ve written about ConnectedText before.  It differs from MediaWiki in that ConnectedText is a personal wiki — most of the frills of the former but intended for a single, all-powerful user.  Whereas MediaWiki is great for centralizing information for a large number of users (who may or may not contribute further), ConnectedText is ideal for an author or researcher who is unwilling or afraid of making their notes public but enjoys the features of a conventional wiki.  It is a commercial application, however.

ConnectedText’s greatest advantage over MediaWiki is that it can be set up very easily: as a Windows-only application, ConnectedText has a installer that takes care of all the messy details.  Unless you’re comfortable with PHP and MySQL, setting up MediaWiki can be frightening and frustrating experience.

At least, up until now.

About a week ago I stumbled upon this page which takes the user gently through a painless installation process with the end result being a version of MediaWiki that runs on a USB stick with less than 100MB of storage.  The key component here is WOS Portable (Small Edition) by CH Software, which is a self-contained distribution of Apache, PHP, MySQL and a few other useful applications that can run directly from a USB drive without requiring any installation on the hosting system.  In about 15 minutes I had my own version of MediaWiki up and running off of my thumb drive without a hitch.

If you’re joined at the hip to a laptop, this may not be that incredible…but for college students who are dependent upon lab and library computers or anybody who has to shuttle information between their home and work systems, this is hot.  Got USB?  Then you’ve got access to your own data warehouse.  Worried about security?  Install Portable Firefox on your USB drive as well (to ensure local system browsers don’t cache your wiki pages) and use TrueCrypt to lock it all down.  They’re both free, too.

I’ll continue to use ConnectedText — it has quite a few unique features that I like, such as Python and Ruby scripting and the ability to export everything in a self-contained Microsoft Help file.  I’d love for there to be a portable version, but due to prior problems with Chinese hackers stealing his software, Eduardo Mauro (developer of ConnectedText) has had to tie his software to a particular processor ID.  I encourage anybody interested in having a wiki for their personal use to at least give CT a shot if they can afford the $30 (US) fee; Eduardo’s support for his product has been stellar and there are certainly fewer things that can break compared to a MediaWiki + WOS solution.

You may have heard about how the Kim family ordeal ended.

I mention this because for some unknown reason I bothered to read the related thread on Fark.com and was moved by the tremendous amount of stupidity I found…and I don’t just mean the typical trolls that post something insensitive. No, I’m also talking about the emotional hand-wringers who are calling Kim a “hero” for leaving his car and dying alone in the woods.

Mind you, I’m not saying that James Kim deserved to die.…but I can’t help but wonder why the hell they were on that road during the winter in the first damn place.

One Farker posted a picture that allegedly showed one of the warning signs along that road. Call me crazy, but I don’t doubt him one bit; I’ve seen plenty of roads with similar signage in Colorado and Washington state. If the Kim family drove past one of those large, brightly-colored signs and ignored the cautionary text, then they were stupid.

Maybe I’m going to hell for suggesting such a thing. Some of Fark’s more sensitive posters suggested that the sign, which supposedly said “road may be blocked by snowdrifts,” wasn’t a strong enough warning.

Poppycock. That mentality is why we have warning labels on hammers instructing people to wear goggles during use. There is a very good reason why you must pass a couple of tests to earn the privilege of operating a motor vehicle: it’s easy to kill yourself or others with a car if you don’t pay attention to details.

I am very happy to hear that Kim’s wife and two young children survived. I’m sure that James’ decision to leave his car and family to search for help was a difficult one. But doing so does not, as so many Farkers emotionally penned, make Kim a hero. He may have been a victim – of somebody else’s incompetence or his own — but to call his actions heroic merely illustrate how abused and meaningless the word “hero” has become.

The Kim family, once they found themselves stuck, did do some smart things. They stayed in the car, as is suggested by survivalists and law enforcement officials. They ran the engine sparingly — just enough to warm the car — and were able to make the most out of their remaining gas. They set their tires on fire: something that had not occured to me but would have provided additional heat as well as a plume of thick black smoke for rescuers to see. Mrs. Kim and her children were spotted thanks to an umbrella covered with reflective tape, another good idea.

What happened to the Kims is a tragedy. But calling James Kim a hero is nonsense, perpetuated by people who want some sort of happy ending or uplifting note for this story.