Day 45 - Beta Test Results
16 07 2008If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
It’s been a few days since I posted and I’ve got a fair bit to catch up on, but I won’t be able to cover everything in this post tonight.
Results for RC1 have been largely very good, the only show stopper coming in was from a tester with multiple sound cards. This is tricky to say the least, but I’m incredibly grateful to Mike Wilson for finding the issue and reporting it. Most of my customers for this version of MixAction are unlikely to have more than one soundcard, but a bug is a bug and this one looks very ugly when it occurs.
While all of my machines have multiple soundcard’s I can only test on a couple of them. Most of that testing is in virtual machines and they do not play well with most pro-Audio cards, especially when you have around four.
So tomorrow guess what I’ll be recoding. 
I had a demo of ByteShield on Monday. I was so impressed I’ve agreed to sign up with them. This is a very impressive system, check it out if you have not already done so. In a nutshell you upload the unprotected exe of your application to their servers to do their magic (automated). Parts of the exe are removed and patched with, AFAICT, null data and some nice routines (sufficient to cause a Jolly Roger to suffer either a mental breakdown or a case of incredible boredom - with any luck significant doses of each). The resulting exe is then distributed (options for trials, renting etc making this rather flexible) by you and when customer installs the exe is validated against the server, patched appropriately (but differently each time with a large quantity of jumps to keep Olly debugger enthusiasts busy until the next decade), not forgetting of course the standard debugger protections to keep out the totally lame and clueless newbs in their quest for “scene glory”.
As I said, that’s in a nutshell. It’s far more powerful than that, amazingly so and I’m extremely enthusiastic about it. Plus - their service and support so far has been personal, frank and enthusiastic. Their CEO Jan Samzelius was even prepared to work with me with my DownUnder time zone in order to show me the product. What more could an ISV ask for?
In conclusion I’m also going to reveal the Audio engine that powers MixAction as some folks have asked me about that back in June.
Originally I coded my own DirectX routines and a bunch of other stuff that worked, but wasn’t anywhere near as robust or expansive as I wished for. This left me with a choice. Do everything incrementally the hard way, reinvent the wheel and spend more time hacking API’s than actually working on product.
Or - license a solid piece of technology, cannibalize stuff from my own code where necessary to support that - and of course eat into my own rather limited budget further.
I chose this latter course. There are a number of great libraries available that wrap DirectX and other technologies. While I consider some better than others I found most wanted to restrict the price for which one could sell a product for. The licenses I could afford would not lend me the pricing structure I needed if I was stay in license (essential).
Except for the library from one vendor who has generous licensing options, offers fantastic support, is really approachable and who responds within hours to the few questions I’ve asked. Brilliant stuff. MultMediaSoft’s products are a delight to use. I was honestly blown away (and am still being delighted as they are deep products full of wonderful treats to discover) and would rate it as the best development library I’ve ever purchased a license to.
Severino from MultMediaSoft has put together some really impressive stuff here and I recommend them without hesitation.
While for specialized Audio domain knowledge is certainly still essential I’d have to say I would not be at RC1 (and getting RC2 together) now without MultMediaSoft!
Updates on development of MixAction in the next post…
Scott Kane
Quote of the day:
The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. - Mark Twain
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
With ByteShield, what happens when the user goes offline?
Hi Sohail,
That’s an excellent question and one that would affect me if it was a problem as my users will certainly be “offline” while using the product quite frequently (at venues where net access is totally unlikely). How ByteShield workd is it allows you to set parameters for how the program checks, including frequency. So as long as the customer checks in during the required period there is no problem. As the dev can set this to a value that suits their purposes this should prove to be more than adequate. For example, one could set 20 executions without needed to checkin. How one does it would depend on the type of application.
Glad to be of service!
MixAction is looking like it will have the potential to be absolutely superb for live events. I’m looking forward to the next release.
What is ByteShield’s pricing structure? I looked at their website and cannot figure out how much it costs. I will contact them soon, but just wondering if there will be “sticker shock”….
thanks
Hi Robert,
As ByteShield are not publishing this on their website it’d be poor form for me to do so on my blog. However… Contact them. Tell them you read about them here. I guarantee you will be 100% satisfied with the price - it’s not at all painful. They are not pushy sales people. They will give you a web demonstration, at least they did me, and the decision to use them will be your own.