There are two things that this news causes me to think about. The division of the single player and multiplayer components of a game currently offered up as a single product. And the entrance of the free-to-play (or pay as it were) gaming model into the top tier of video games.

Fun fact #1: The last three games I purchased were: Modern Warfare 3, Battlefield 3 and Skyrim (all for the Xbox 360 but that’s immaterial in this case). I even picked up the Hardened Edition of MW3, for a crisp benjamin, so that I could have access to the first year worth of multiplayer downloadable content and Call of Duty Elite for what I decided was a pretty good price.

Now Skyrim, being a single player only game, really doesn’t factor into this discussion much though it is tangentially relevant (3 prissy points for tangentially) as I’ll point out later.

Fun fact #2: Of the roughly way-too-much-damned-time I’ve played of these three games I’ve dedicated exactly diddly-squat to the single player campaigns of MW3 and BF3, perhaps 2 hours combined. But I paid full price for the pleasure of basically playing half of what’s on offer. Hell in the case of MW3 I paid 1.5 times full price (sadly the game is absolute garbage and I regret every last cent, but that’s for another day). I would have been completely happy with only buying the multiplayer components of both of those games. I have no intention of every completing the campaigns. In fact the only reason I’ve bothered starting them at all is because I feel some sort of obligation to because I paid for the whole game. It feels a lot like paying for two coach seats on the plane and using the second seat as a place to put my free peanuts, which I didn’t even want in the first place but I said sure because, you know, free.

With Skyrim I paid for a full single player game and that’s what I got. Simple.

In recent review of a game that I care nothing about Michael Barnes over at nohighscores.com talked briefly about the bifurcated design mentality that is bleeding into what seems like every recent high profile release. People like me who play only multiplayer and others who are really only interested in the single player are all being sold the same $60 game. Does this make any sense any more?

There seems to be a few ways that development companies could address the issue. One way is what Barnes implies when he talks about incredible single player experiences like Bioshock or Dead Space. Just cut the multiplayer out. It was an afterthought to begin with; something tacked on to fill out the market pitch bullet list. Even if the effort to create the multiplayer portion of the game was relatively small, it would have been better directed at making the finished single player game that much better.

On the other hand you have the direction Killzone is going with their next installment. Separate the products. Give people who just want the multiplayer a different product all together. We pay for what we want and leave the rest. Oh wouldn’t it be great to live in that wonderful fantasy land.

Which brings us to the second aspect of this discussion, the free-to-play model. You see because as nice as it might sound it most certainly is a fantasy land if we think that this will all stop with a entry level multiplayer product and relatively low cost upgrade to the full experience. Publishers may start out with a model like Killzone is using and offer up the multiplayer as stand-alone product for less, and still including it in the full game purchase. But what we’ll end up with is likely the complete separation of the multiplayer component; consumers paying their $60 for the single player and then shelling out another $60 for the multiplayer. Or perhaps it’s $30 for the multiplayer and we’ll get micro-transactioned into oblivion for additional content. So instead of feeling like we’re finally only having to pay for what we actually want to play we’ll be feeling like we’re getting nickel and dimed into the poor house. The Zynga-fication of the video game ecosystem is almost an inevitability at this point (Zynga is creator of the soul sucking Farmville and all of its children).

Even this initial foray by Killzone smacks of this. You get hooked for free but to be competitive at all you’ll have to shell out a little extra cash. Now, whether micro-payments will factor into the equation for that particular title has yet to be seen, but I can certainly foresee a time when we need to provide a credit card just to boot up the game and each reload of your Taco Bell branded M4 will cost you 99 cents.

It’s an amazing platform.

Backers are not “investors.” The developers keep 100% ownership of their creation. Backers are often enticed with rewards for various levels of backing. Depending on the project it could be a copy of the product itself or some unique experience related to it that provides something to backer for their donation.

The Double Fine Adventure is the first time, at least that I’m aware of, that an already well established company has come to gather funding for a what amounts to a side project. And it’s been amazingly successful. They reached their goal in record time, reached $1 million in record time and are the first project to reach $2 million, and as of this writing they still have over 13 days remaining of their original 30 day goal.

The reason this particular project is exciting, at least to me, is that it represents what could be a fundamental change in how games get made. Minecraft gave this type of funding it’s first taste of fame. By putting out a very early version of the game and asking people to basically pay early for the finished product Markus Persson (@notch) has been able to not only fund his brain child in perpetuity but he’s now developing all sorts of other games and projects. He’s not beholden to publisher whims. He has the freedom to create without needing to justify his decisions to a board or shareholders or some mindless marketing drone. The only thing stopping him from doing whatever the hell he damn well pleases is the support of the people who play his games. If he puts out crap, no one will buy it and he’ll fade into obscurity.

That’s the sort of relationship that I would love to have with creators. In this instance I’m talking rather specifically about the game development world but I could certainly apply the same desire to any creator.

Back to Double Fine and Tim Schafer and the Double Fine Adventure and why I think it’s potentially more significant than the success of Minecraft. The first important distinction is the chain of events. By using Kickstarter Double Fine is asking for funding up front, before development has started. With Minecraft Persson had a working game that he put out there in demo form and then asked for money to continue development. Buy getting funding up front people developers with great ideas who may not have the time or finances to get started can try to come up with a pitch that will get them the funding that they need to get started. Obviously Double Fine is a special case here, Schafer has a cult-like status in the gaming world so just putting his name on a project guarantees a certain level of support from his fan base. But the success of the Double Fine Adventure brings me to my second point.

Visibility.

The success has brought attention to Kickstarter as a platform for game funding that wasn’t there before. Take a look at Code Hero which blew up in the last few days of funding after Double Fine announced their project. Here’s a game with a fantastic, fresh concept that would never get the backing of a big name publisher. They may have hit their funding goal without the added attention but because of it they hit almost 200% of their goal giving them that much more backing to make the game better.

As awesome as all of this is it isn’t going to change the fundamental nature of the game development world. Triple A games are going to stay on their breakneck annual release schedule and they are going to continue to rake in hojillions of dollars on the backs of overworked developers and under funded QA departments.

What I hope does happen though, is that the success of Minecraft and the Double Fine Adventure opens up new lines of direct communication and support between creators and their fans. If a new breed of games can gather funding directly from the pockets of the people who want to play them without marketers, publishers, and god knows who else taking their cut, developers can get the freedom to do what they truly want to do. Sure, some will fail and for every Psychonauts that may be born from this process we’ll probably see just as many Shaq Fu’s but that’s the price you pay.

Enter: VisualTotals() (msdn function reference)

The VisualTotals() function dynamically totals child members in a set. By adding the “All” member for whatever hierarchy you’re building your set from and wrapping the whole set in the VisualTotals() function you can get Excel to treat the named set just like any other group/hierarchy when it comes to sub-totals.

Typically if you created a set like this one (all examples from Adventure Works):

WITH SET [Amasia] AS
{
	[Geography].[Country].&[United States]
	,[Geography].[Country].&[Canada]
	,[Geography].[Country].&[Australia]
}

You’d see something like this:

no sub-totals

If instead you create your set like so:

WITH SET [Amasia] AS
VisualTotals(
	{
		[Geography].[Country].[All Geographies]
		,[Geography].[Country].&[United States]
		,[Geography].[Country].&[Canada]
		,[Geography].[Country].&[Australia]
	}
)

You’ll get a nice little sub-total at the bottom.

Yey! sub-totals

One thing to note is that you need to put the “All” member at the beginning of your VisualTotals set. Otherwise it won’t be correctly filtered by the children that follow and you’ll end up with a sub-total that is actually the full, unfiltered total of the “All” member.

That being said, I want a Mirrorless Interchangable Lens Camera (Mirrorless ILC or MILC) right now.

Trey Ratcliff (G+, twitter) over at www.stuckincustoms.com made a post recently about the coming demise of the DSLR. It got me interested in the technology and after looking at some of the new cameras that are coming out, I can’t wait to upgrade.

This one in particular caught my eye. It’s the Olympus OM-D E-M5. Stupid naming conventions aside, it looks sweet. The silver body model, with it’s throwback design is especially appealing. I reminds me of the my old film camera from high school. And although I have no particular love of my high school days I did love taking pictures and working in the dark room for hours on end.

Olympus OM-D E-M5

Unfortunately an upgrade is a long way off. These new-fangled toys don’t come cheap and all my existing DSLR lenses don’t do me a lick of good. Yep, gotta buy new stuff there too.

On the upside by the time I can afford to upgrade I believe the vast majority of the “issues” people have with the new technology will be worked out. Sensors will be bigger, the electronic viewfinder will have improved in speed and performance, and most importantly, the prices will start to come down.

In the mean time I’ll just lust after all the pretty hardware from afar.

Thankfully that’s not the case. There isn’t a convenient number format screen for the map legend but it is possible to do all of the fancy formatting you want; it just may not be apparent at first glance.

The first thing that might throw you is that formatting for the various values that you want in the legend is not done in the properties of the legend itself. Legends in SSRS maps are just containers. You can display the values for multiple pieces of data in a single legend, like showing both the color and the size of a bubble. This means that the number format for a particular data set is done on whichever layer contains that piece of data.

In the list of map layers click on the little down arrow to the right of the layer that contains the legend data you want to modify and then select either the color or the size rule that you want to display. In this example I’m changing the color rules for a point layer, but you’ll find the same options the center point of a polygon layer as well.

Once in the properties dialog select the legend tab.

Here you can select which legend container you want this legend to appear in and you can set the format in the “Legend text:” box.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the format string you see in that box:

#FROMVALUE{N0} - #TOVALUE{N0}

• #FROMVALUE (and #TOVALUE) – pretty self explanatory these are indicators for the values on either side of each range in your legend.
• {N0} – This is the format of the value on either side of range.
• If you’re so inclined you can even change the center ‘-’ to some other character(s) to change how the range values are separated.

On to the formatting itself. “N0″ is the same formatting string you see elsewhere in your SSRS reports, meaning a number with 0 decimals. So by using rather typical Excel style formatting strings you can make the values in your legend look however you like. So

Showing 2 decimals

#FROMVALUE{N2} - #TOVALUE{N2}

Percent with a single decimal

#FROMVALUE{P1} - #TOVALUE{P1}

Or this way if you prefer

#FROMVALUE{#.0%} - #TOVALUE{#.0%}

Which means that if you want to get fancy and do something like, say, change negatives to use parentheses instead of a dash you can use a semicolon to delineate how a number looks when it’s positive or when it’s negative, like so: (I changed the separator to a || just for fun)

#FROMVALUE{#.0%;(#.0%)} || #TOVALUE{#.0%;(#.0%)}

I’ve been spending  a bit of time with map reports lately so I’ll some more mapping related stuff to post in the near future.

SCOPE({MeasureGroupMeasures("Internet Sales"), MeasureGroupMeasures("Reseller Sales")});

I forgot the {} the first time around and was super confused by an error message when I attempted to deploy the MDX calculation to the cube that said that said “The END SCOPE statement does not match the opening SCOPE statement.” Because my SCOPE and END SCOPE statements looked just fine to me.

It’s ludicrous (or is it Ludacris, I get them mixed up).

And yet, I think I could conservatively estimate that about 98% of all the articles the show up on Tech Crunch and other tech blogs make some mention of some new funding round that Social-McGamify (totally trademarking that) has just managed to secure.

But when a startup announces that they’re going to focus on generating revenue instead of digging a hole of debt they get a polite golf-clap and whispers ripple through the audience of people trying to figure out what they could be thinking; “You’re never going to make it the front page of Techmeme with a viable business model, you fool.”

What they’re thinking is that wrapping your mouth around the VC funding exhaust pipe (or other metaphoric pipe-shaped thing) is, for lack of better phrase, retarded. Not only are you reinforcing the fact that you can’t make money, you’re spending your time whoring yourself to VCs rather than working on your business/product/service. Take that time and energy and put it toward making something that people will actually pay you for.

Listen, if your strategy is hovering anywhere near the “get a bunch of users and then monetize them with ads” model I’m going to clue you in on something:

No one wants your shit.

Users want more ads like they want to get shot in the face with Nerf darts dipped in feces. If you can’t come up with a product or service that people will give you actual money for, just stop. Stop what you’re doing and go beg for your job back stacking widgets at the widget factory. Besides people with good ideas need widgets and those widgets aren’t going to make themselves.

That a company with Microsoft’s history and with the negative perception that hangs over just about everything the company has done since their inception to fling the doors open on the entire design and development process for their flagship product borders on the insane.

But I love it.

Despite  its size and technical detail (or maybe “because of”, I can’t decide) the post below was one of the most interesting things I’ve read in months. I mean, holy shit, there’s a goddamned comparison heat map of mouse travel time for a user to get to their favorite applications between Windows 7 and Windows 8. Who exposes that level of detailed research to their users (at times overtly hostile users at that)? There’s even a mathematical formula for Fitts’ Law (which I had never heard of) that I can’t imagine anyone cares about, but still it’s there and it made perfect sense to me to include it in the post.

Now granted, I work for a Microsoft Partner, and Microsoft technology has put food on the table and a roof over my family’s head for basically my entire working career, but in all that time I still often felt like I was working for the “bad guy.” Microsoft the unstoppable devil of the tech world that’s going to eat up all the little guys and squelch any and all innovation it can get its grubby mitts on.

But in the last two or three years, with a real ramp-up around the release of Windows Phone 7, my feelings have changed dramatically. Now I feel that Microsoft is doing more interesting and innovative work than the vast majority of the cookie-cutter startups in Silicon Value that Robert Scoble likes to blather on about. I’m pretty sure I’m going to puke the next time I see “breaking” news about the latest location-based, app-discovery, picture-sharing, social-network, wunderkind that’s managed to convince a gaggle of jack-ass VCs (who all just happened to have started the last, now defunct, version of the very same thing) to give them a few million dollars.

Give me a company that’s making fundamental changes to the most widely used operating system on the planet and doing it completely out in the open. That’s who I want to work with.

I’d be curious to hear your suggestions for the list.

News:

• Zite (excellent presentation and very configurable)
• Flipboard (also good for social networks and whatnot. I like Zite better for straight news)
• Huffington Post
• NPR for iPad

Games: (Side note: I like iPad board games, so this list is a little heavy with that type of game)

• Smallworld (fantastic boardgame by Days of Wonder – my favorite game company.)
• Ticket to Ride (again by Days of Wonder – their most popular game)
• Conquist (this game is beautiful. There is a sequel that I haven’t played but it looks to be even better than the first.)
• Scrabble (great iphone integration. Of course you have to like scrabble)
• Cut the Rope HD
• Steambirds (there’s a free flash version on the web you can try out to see if you like it)
• Crimson: Steam Pirates (a rip off of Steambirds with higher production values, still good)
• Puzzle Agent 1 and 2 (I liked 2 better but both are great)
• Plants vs. Zombies

Kids: (I have a 3 year old girl, just for context on these picks)

• Parachute Panic HD (fun game in its own right, but my little girl loves it)
• Doodle Find
• Little Things (fun “find the item game.” Artistically quite nice.)
• Rapunzel – Tangled (animated story book. my daughter’s favorite)
• PBS Kids (can be hit or miss, but I have found some good stuff for the kids)

Productivity/Tools:

• Springpad (a great web service for saving notes and all sorts of other stuff)
• AppShopper (great for finding new and onsale stuff. I got just about every EA game over a few months for $0.99 because of this)
• Bing for iPad (surprisingly awesome)
• Quickoffice Pro HD (spendy, but great if you want to use your iPad for work related stuff)
• Penultimate (best handwriting app by far)
• Nightstand Central (I use this for my alarm clock. Tons of options.)
• Wundermap (my favorite weather app)

Other Stuff:

• NFL ’11 for iPad (very well done if you’re a football fan. Must have.)

These are the decisions that baffle me. Android tablets like the Xoom that come in a at the same price as the iPad. Price drops that are essentially meaningless because you’re still more expensive than your competitor and that’s all that people care about. You could have dropped it to $200 even and still would have been idiotic because even $1 more than the Fire is way to much.

Now if they had done something interesting like say, dropped the price to $180 so they were closer to the price of the new B&W Kindle Touch, that might make a difference to consumers. As it stands, unless they plan another significant price drop to coincide with the actual release of the Fire on Nov.15, B&N is in for a world of hurt.