So a few weeks back the RazerBlade 14" laptop was announced and frankly this is exactly the kind of machine I have been looking for for a very long time.  I am exclusively a laptop user, but also a gamer and obviously as a game creator, I put a certain additional demand on my machines.

Right now, I am working primarily with a pair of machines.  The first is a Asus RoG G53SX.  Its coming up on two years old now, but it has a i7 with 16GB of RAM as well as an OK nVidia 560M video card.  So far as laptops went a year and a half back, this was about as good as you could get for a game playing system.  There is really only one problem:

It's a monster.  Endor has small moons that weigh less, then you can take into account another couple pounds for the equally monstrous power supply.  Plus the fans literally burn my legs if I game with it actually on my lap!

Still, it serves it's purpose well.  When I am home at my desk, this is my primary machine, but it's portable enough that I can move between rooms or take it with me if I need a full power machine.  I will say though, lugging this thing around isn't pleasant… good exercise, but not good fun.

Earlier this year when my ultra portable died I ended up replacing it with a MacBook Air.  This wasn't my intention, I actually already have an iMac that I can port/test for iOS on, so I actually purchased this laptop with the intention of running only Windows on it ( in the end, I dual booted ).  When shopping I found that portable laptops where either cheap and awful, or expensive and awful!  At it's price level the MBA was actually the best constructed while still being ultra portable.  It's been a good machine and I can't complain.  The performance is OK, but if this was my only machine I certainly wouldn't be doing any gaming!  The HD4000 just isn't up to the task, and frankly, the battery isn't either.

On a typical day, I spend about 4 hours out and about using my MacBook, then another 4-6 working or playing on the Asus at home.  Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could just have one machine?  One that had the portability of my MacBook Air, but the power of my "desktop replacement"?

Enter the Razer Blade!  In case you haven't heard of it, Razer announced a 14 inch laptop, packing a 675M GPU and the newest Haswell Intel CPU.  Most impressively, they did it in a .66inch heigh form factor!

For me, and my circumstances, its a match made in heaven!  The only thing I wasn't too keen on was the price, but at the end of the day if you want good + small + fast, you are going to have to pay for it.  It's still cheaper than a MacBook Pro and seemingly of comparable build quality.

Anyways, this is exactly the type of laptop I have been looking to buy for the last decade, and that has never existed.  After a couple days humming and hawing, I pre-ordered one.

Then E3 came and they announced "they were rewarding their loyal pre-order customers" and shipping early.  This was yesterday, so my laptop was being shipped to me about 2 weeks earlier than I expected.  WOOT!

Then today I get a notice that my shipment was back-ordered and it would be at least a 2 - 4 week wait.

So I basically went from patiently waiting for the ship date to arrive, to exuberant that it was going to be here in a day or two, to outright frustrated and waiting at least as long, perhaps twice as long as I originally expected, all in the span of 2 days.

This was really really really bad PR Razer!  The whole idea of back-ordering a pre-order is already quite irritating.  I mean, if you are going to not be able to ship on your ship date… why the hell are you taking pre-orders?  Why in my right mind would I pre-order something from you if it doesn't help me in the slightest. More so, you really blew it on the PR front.  The communication has been awful.  Frankly if it wasn't such a unique product, my order would have been cancelled already.  It's not really a matter that a manufacturing delay occurred, that happens, it sucks, but it happens.  

Where you blew it was managing expectations.  I was ok with my initial release date, thats the entire concept behind pre-order in the first place, so when that date arrives, you are sure you will get one.  Then you got my hopes up and my anticipation going by announcing at E3 that you shipped.  Not only aim I not receiving now… I am not even getting it on my original ship date… hell, being back ordered, who knows when I will get it making me question why the hell I pre-ordered in the first place.  Oh and on top, the notice of back order was a system generated message with not a lick of explanation why.

This is my first transaction with Razer and I am certainly not impressed.

Sorry, end of rant.  In the grand scheme of things it's very minor… I have to wait longer for a laptop I don't specifically need ( if my laptop was broken, that would be a much different story! ).  If they hadn't announced it was shipping yesterday, or it was explained why it was backordered it would have simply irritated, not aggravated me.  It's the combination of aspects that got me steamed… and incredibly disappointed in Razer.

Totally Off Topic Rant

You are going to hear nothing but the sound of crickets on GameFromScratch tomorrow.  April 1st is the one day of the year I turn off the internet. Each year, April fools jokes get worse and worse and worse.  People have said that sarcasm is the lowest form of wit… no doubt, those people were born before Aprils fools day.  Actually, in the pre-internet days, I actually found April’s Fools day rather amusing, I love a good prank.  But once the internet got involved,it just became painfully stupid.

Already the first of the bad Aprils Foolsday jokes have infected reddit. 

If you haven’t detected yet…

See y’all on April 2nd!  The best day of the year, as it’s 364 days away from the next April’s Fools day…

I seriously will be completely offline browsing wise tomorrow, it’s become an annual tradition for me.  I will of course still be available by email should anything not April 1 related come up!

Totally Off Topic Rant

I don’t throw around words like ‘Nanny State’ often or lightly, but when it comes to epically stupid “think of the children” laws effecting video games I take notice.  This one is a whopper though.  When I think Nanny State… there are a few countries and companies I think of, Germany and Nintendo nearly topping both of those lists ( well.. and Australia…  they’ve mastered the art of stupid law making in the name of protecting children ).  When Germany and Nintendo combine, the results are some epic stupidity.

As of right now you can’t buy games online in Europe that have a PEGI 18 rating, unless it’s after 11PM and before 3AM.  So, if you want to buy Assassin's Creed or ZombieU online and aren’t a night owl, you can’t.

Here is a quote from Nintendo in response to Eurogamer:

“At Nintendo we always aim to provide a safe gaming experience for fans of all ages and ensure that we comply with applicable legal age restriction requirements across Europe,” a Nintendo spokesperson told Eurogamer.

“Legal age restriction requirements vary across a number of European countries. Since Nintendo of Europe is based in Germany, Nintendo eShop is complying with German youth protection regulation which therefore applies to all our European markets. Under German law, content rated 18+ must be made available only at night.

“Therefore the accessibility of 18+ content in Nintendo eShop is limited to [USK: 22:00 UTC until 4:00 UTC] [PEGI: 23:00 UTC until 3:00 UTC].”

So, Germany has a downright stupid child protection law on the books, and Nintendo Europe’s offices are based out of Germany, so they are applying the law TO ALL OF EUROPE.

So, Germany get’s the stupid prize for enacting a law that makes not a lick of sense.  It’s modeled in the mode of television restrictions where adult content can’t be played until a certain time window, which itself is completely ignorant of 10 years of progress in digital distribution rendering the entire concept archaic and mostly pointless.  Not to mention the fact… what are the demographic that are up between 11 and 3?  Outside the university crowd…  that’s basically insomniacs, people working nights and….  well, students under the age of 18!  Buying *ANY* content on the app store already requires users submit their age, making the entire scheme redundant anyways.  All you are doing is annoying your users.

Nintendo obviously takes their share of the blame here.  They have a history of stupidity when it comes to online, "protecting” users behind those god awful friend codes being the most glaring example.  This just seems to be another example of them being pretty out of touch with online reality.  Now it may be a legal requirement due to their office location, but this doesn’t absolve them of responsibility.  First off, basing your European operations out of the most legally anti-video game country in Europe is a downright stupid decision to start with.  The fact they can’t seem to work their way around a problem that EVERY other online retailer solved years ago… well, that’s 100% on Nintendo.  It would take their lawyers about 20 minutes to spin the eStore European division off as a subsidiary and open an unmanned office in a more legally friendly country.  Instead they took the lazy and downright stupid approach of applying this bad restriction to all of their customers.

I imagine in time common sense will prevail… at least, I certainly hope it does.

This post isn’t as off topic as it might seem.  These kind of legal hassles, especially as it applies to digital distribution, should be of concern to all indie game developers.  When or if you register your company, you should be exceptionally mindful of your host countries laws and how they can impact your legal rights and liabilities.

Totally Off Topic, News Rant, News

In recent years I have gotten used to having increasingly larger hard drives, so I never really paid attention to how large Windows 7 had gotten.  Until I recently installed Win 7 on a 60GB SSD partition…

and nearly half of if was consumed by the OS!

This is simply put, insane.

The first obvious use of space is the PageFile ( 4GB, or 1 to 1 with actual RAM ), but for now I am leaving that one be.  So I wondered how much low hanging fruit I could get, and the answer is, surprisingly a lot.

First to go, System Restore.  I never use this feature anyways.  I backup remotely, so If my OS corrupts, I reinstall.  I never trust the state of a machine that requires a System Restore anyways.  Net savings, 1.5GB.

Next up, and this one kinda sucks to remove, but Hibernate.  Removing Hibernate ( powercfg –hibernate off ).  Net savings, 4GB.

Then I went in to Windows Features and removed the bits I didn’t use ( Games, DVD Maker, a few others ) for a grand total savings of a few hundred MB.  Meh.

At this point I started to think I was out of options, then I looked at WinSxS in the Windows folder… holy crap.

10GB, and a fresh install!  What the hell is going on here!

So looking in to it a little deeper, apparently Windows 7 makes a backup copy of pretty much every file it ever patches, so after a service pack there is a gigantic amount of bloat, so you can uninstall the Service Pack.  This one falls under the same category as System Restore… I will not undo a Service Pack install… I will reinstall completely.  Problem is, I couldn’t figure out a way to remove bits from WinSxS safely, until I found this.

Basically you run ( as Admin )

dism /online /cleanup-image /spsuperseded

and:

And after it finished:

A net savings of nearly 4GB. 

So, grand total I managed to shrink the install size down by damn near 50%, with almost no downsides.  So, if you are running on a solid state drive and need more space free, consider the steps above.  Just a warning, if something goes wrong ( a bad driver install, a corrupted program install, etc… ) you will probably be doing a reinstall.

Totally Off Topic Rant, Tips

Have I ever mentioned how much I hate

a) developing for Android

b) using Eclipse

c) developing for Android using Eclipse?

Well, I do.  So often you spend more time fighting the tools than you do fighting with code, and today was yet another example.

I have some Moai code that worked perfectly well, both in the Windows host and on my device.  I made some alterations to the Lua code testing it to work on iOS ( by the way, the process of getting Moai running on iOS is 10000000x times easier than getting it running on Android! ), so other than some scripting changes, I haven't changed a thing.

I load up Eclipse click Run and…

[2012-09-03 14:54:20 - DeviceMonitor] Failed to start monitoring 84ef7369

[2012-09-03 14:54:20 - DeviceMonitor] Failed to start monitoring 84ef7369

[2012-09-03 14:54:20 - DeviceMonitor] Failed to start monitoring 84ef7369

[2012-09-03 14:54:20 - DeviceMonitor] Failed to start monitoring 84ef7369

[2012-09-03 14:54:20 - DeviceMonitor] Failed to start monitoring 84ef7369

[2012-09-03 14:54:20 - DeviceMonitor] Failed to start monitoring 84ef7369

[2012-09-03 14:54:20 - DeviceMonitor] Failed to start monitoring 84ef7369

WTF?

So I kill off adb ( adb kill-server ) and restart it ( adb start-server ).  Still no luck.

I exit and restart Eclipse.  No luck

I reboot my computer and phone.  No luck

I switch devices and try a different Android device.  No luck

Want to know what it is?  USB3.

Seriously, ADB doesn’t play well with USB3, or at least Eclipse+ADB don’t play well with USB3.

I plug into a different port and everything is just fine.  Well, except a few more gray hairs that is.

Totally Off Topic Rant, Android