Slashdot Mirror

For more "funny" comments from industry experts, pick up the latest issue of "Game Developer" magazine which happens to have a great article on the issues of programming touch-screen devices. ( http://gdmag.com/ ) A few concrete examples are given regarding the iPhone.

Everyone interested in indie games should sign up to computer graphics world and Game Developer mag. They give away subscriptions if you're a developer. You know, basically anyone who fills out their form. Their online articles are decent too.

One of the best features of Game Developer is the postmortem, the what went right, what went wrong. Fascinating stuff about the industry for an indie publisher or an outsider to read.

The Indie Games show off some of the best out there.

While there are some very good indie works out there it is like the movies. You can tell the difference between a hollywood movie and a indie film, just like a AAA game title and an indie title. Although there are enough gems in both indie movements to make it interesting.

You bring up some excellent history and titles.

For some further support of #1 I'd suggest looking at the Indie games conferences. Small group, Indie games may be the future of 'real games'. Game Developer Magazine just had an article about the potential demise of 'real gaming'. Compared to the financial success to non-games like Audition live, Habbo hotel, second life it may be hard to keep plopping down 20 million to create a triple A game if you could get a larger audience base doing something far less 'traditional'.

As an aside, one of the more fun 'what can one guy accomplish alone' would be Minions of Mirth. A complete MMORPG - albiet older style gameplay and graphics it's actually impressive.

Gamastura is the web front of the CMP Game Group, which is in turn part of CMP Media at large. Amongst other things, this company organizes major industry events (such GDC), and publishes Game Developer Magazine. Gamasutra is mainly a web clearinghouse (and advertisement) for Game Developer Magazine content. Thusly, there are folks with editorial control over the content published on Gamasutra; this is not a blog, where a writer says whatever they want with nobody to edit their content for public consumption.

Ian Bogost is much more than a "blogger". Judging by the derisive fashion with which you wield the term, I'm guessing you take that to mean "person who writes about stuff because they are too untalented/lazy to actually be involved with any of the stuff they write about". No offense; that is the same way I bandy the word about. Check out his website, and take a look around. Yes, it links to a lot of articles he has written, and mentions in the mass media (including an appearance on The Colbert Report), but if you take a look at these, you'll find that in addition to doing real business with corporate advertisers hawking products, he is actually in involved in trying use games for conveying something beyond a fun experience or a product placement.

No, I don't work for him, and I'm not his #1 fanboy. I simply knew that the "publisher" and the author of the content you called a "blog" were so much more than that.

Back in the 80s and 90s I read and cherished every new issue of a certain home computing magazine (for a while I was getting two). But after the internet exploded, it seems quite pointless. There was a while there where I'd consider buying Dr.Dobbs, but then they became... boring (not to mention silly expensive in this part of the world).

I'm currently paying for GDM but delivered online. Not very convinient to read (in fact it's almost painful, with the whole issue being multiple layers of images (for "protection" purposes) all wrapped up in javascript), but a year /w all back-issues was very cheap.

The only for sale magazine I read wrt games is Game Developer Magazine. Most of the other magazines bore me as they tend to have old news and clueless writers. Besides almost all of them have audio shows / podcasts anyways so I can just listen to them. Generally the inaccuracies in them are enough to quench my interest in picking them up in paper form.

Eg one of the shows (I think it was Hot Spot, produced by GameSpot / EGM IIRC.) didn't know what languages most games are coded in (C/C++). IMHO that's a bit like a sports commentator not knowing on what kind of surface hockey is played on.

Anyways, GDM has clue-ful people making interesting comments. They tend to have a couple of articles which focus on deconstructing game design (eg the "Post mortems", these are sometimes linked from Slashdot on the GDM sister-site Gamasutra) and a few on the state of game production. They also have reoccuring articles on the details of game making, such as the column on audio production and in depth algorithms.

Basically, GDM is the only game oriented magazine which I can put down feeling I have actually learned something. The other magazines I mostly feel like I've lost knowledge (or been filled with disinformation).

The only other game mag I read is the Scandinavian GameReactor. It's a free magazine and it has slightly less ads than most other magazines. I wouldn't trust the reviews blindly, but they seem to be pretty on the money compared to stuff I read online. And the price is right.

Sorry, but I agree with what you say about everyone you mention except the programmers. As a programmer (retired) myself, my experience with respect to the programmer's role has been the opposite of yours.

Certainly, the marketing and design people and all that have their job. No disagreement there; they're supposed to be the experts. And lots of coders are no good at public interactions or at least need to have their interactions with customers managed ... that's one of the things managers are supposed to do.

But building great stuff in general is more than just being a code bureaucrat in a cubicle following instructions in the Plan ... no matter how good the Plan may be. Some people work best that way, and there's plenty of need for that sort of person, but for those who go beyond that function, the ability of people in all project specialties to communicate with other people in the other specialties ... when needed, and using appropriate mechanisms ... to be extremely important. Read the aricle on "Scaling the Cabal" in November '05 issue of Game Developer. Going one step further, into customer fora would seem to be the natural step!

Naturally people who run off at the mouth need to be managed, and also naturally, a hierarchy of decision may have to be enforced ... but again, that's what management is supposed to do, and blinding the programmers to the customers is necessary only when management can't do their job. If a programmer is just not interested in the customers, well fine, then what you've got is a programmer working for just for the dough, which is different motivator than that for those others do better work when they can reach out & touch the customer base.

I had nothing to do with WoW's development, so I can't answer your questions about it. But in about 20 years of developing software, the most frequently common element in the disasters was the excessive playing of the "telephone game".

Of any non-academic magazines, Game Developer Magazine is by the far the hardest of the hardcore when it comes to programming and computer science. Plus its fun stuff (but not easy!). Its tough to get a sub if you aren't in the games industry, but if you manage to get one, you won't be disappointed.

Indeed, I was using Emule/ed2k network to download long before the Bittorrent / The Piratebay et. al. anwhere available, Personally I find more things on the Ed2k networks...
As an example, there is NO WAY you can find a movie called "Rojo Amanecer" (mexican movie abou the October 2nd massacre in Tlatelolco) on any torrent, but it is available on Emule.

I also used sometime Winmx, that was when I was looking for the digital version of back iusses of the GAme developers Magazine which I could not find on emule (less on bittorrent of course) and I think some japanesse or chinesse had it on WinMX because it was there. These days, I could find only the CD 2 of those archives.

Indeed, I was using Emule/ed2k network to download long before the Bittorrent / The Piratebay et. al. anwhere available, Personally I find more things on the Ed2k networks...
As an example, there is NO WAY you can find a movie called "Rojo Amanecer" (mexican movie abou the October 2nd massacre in Tlatelolco) on any torrent, but it is available on Emule.

I also used sometime Winmx, that was when I was looking for the digital version of back iusses of the GAme developers Magazine which I could not find on emule (less on bittorrent of course) and I think some japanesse or chinesse had it on WinMX because it was there. These days, I could find only the CD 2 of those archives.

I read both Sky & Telescope and Game Developer regularly cover-to-cover and occasionally 2600 (when I am somewheres that sells it). All three are informative and interesting. As for accurate, the first two seem to be pretty good - although I am reading them to learn the stuff so I wouldn't necessarily know if they were incorrect but I hope they aren't, and I haven't read a 2600 in a while so I can't remember.

There was, and is, a lot of crossover between the internet and published magazines. Famitsu the magazine has Famitsu online. Die Hard Game Fan had Die Hard Online. IGN's Snowball owned several magazines. Gamespot is owned by Cnet, who owns everyone else. Plus, there actually were several rather famous cases of video game magazines pulling FAQs directly off of the web, adding photographs, and publishing them as if they were their own.

I wish I had more recent examples, but I've abandoned all of the published videogame magazines except for Game Developer Monthly, a cute little mag that reprints from Gamasutra. Or is it vice versa?

(From this month's Game Developer Magazine), by sean wagstaff

"If you work in 3D, navigation in space probably occupies far more of your day than you realize. But just as a painter doesn't give much thought to how he positions his brush on the canvas, experienced 3D artists don't really think about moving around in three-dimensional space. Unless you're using an unfamiliar application, say, switching from Maya to 3DS Max, navigation is simply an integral part of what you do and there's not much room for improvement. Or is there?

The $599 Space Traveler, which looks like a volume control knowb (complete with a purple LED accent on the buttons around it's rim) is designed to make 3D operations faster and more intuitive.

Using the Space Traveler is almost immediately familiiar. You plug it into your USB port and install the driver software (plug-ins are provided for Maya and Max, and built into MotionBuilder, Cinema 4D, and BodyPaint 3D, but the controller doesn't work with every 3D tool). To use it, you simply push, pull, tilt, and tist the single contol knob. Your finger movements translate directly into 3D space- x,y, and z rotation and translation, often referred to as six degrees of freedom - in your application. Lift th knob and you move up in y, push it forward and you move forward in z. Twist the knob and you'll rotate in y; tilt it, and you'll pitch forward or back, left or right. The tricky part is learning not to traslate on z when you pitch on x, and not to translate on y when you actually mean to roll on z (a temporary filter can be turned on that blocks non-dominant movements). But with a few minutes worth of practice to get a feel for it, the Space Traveler becomes very natural to use, although it is quite sensitive to even fine movement. However, you'll soon find yourself tumbling a scene around as easily as you would with your standard keyboard and moust combinations, and rotating a camera is certainly more intuitive than, say SHFT-CTRL-ALT-middle-mouse dragging.

Which brings us to the most obvious question about this device: who needs it? If you're already comfortable working in a 3d application, and navigation with the standard key commands and mouse actions has become second nature, why bother with yet another input device? In my experience, many 3D operations, such as architectural modeling, dynamics, and texture manipulations, simply require too much keyboard input to benefit from the Space Traveler at all. I need my hands on the keyboard, and mouse, and instant access to pop-ups and marking menus provided by my right hand mouse button, which just doesn't leave enough hands for a third input device.

On the other hand (literally) when it comes to operations that require one-handed navigation, the SpaceTraveler is a terrific idea. For example, when sculpting an organic model or painting textures on surfaces with a Wacom tablet, you can rotate and tumble the model with one hand, while painting with the other. While doing character animation, the SpaceTraveler can be used as a low-speed motion capture input device that lets you use gestures, rather than explicit rotations, to move a joint, although you'll have to set up your characters to work with this input. The device's eight buttons can be mapped to common keyboard shortcuts, and the defaults for Maya activate the Hot Box, translate, rotate, and scale commands. However, the buttons are too small with terrible ergonomics, and I still need to use the keyboard for other commands, such as the marking menus.

The SpaceTraveler, as the name implies, is small and portable. Although on-the-road walkthroughs of real-time-3D scenes seem unlikely, I found the SpaceTraveler useful as an accessory to a high-end 3D laptop for bringing work home. My Compaq runs all my 3D applications, but the built-in trackpad is all but useless for 3D navigation, and the keyboard is cramped, with a non-standard layout, which also makes navigation clumsy. The SpaceTraveler really i

Game Developer magazine has a series of articles that are trying to determine the 400 rules of game design. Things are usually in the format of "Game logic should be internally consistent, except when it shouldn't." I know that sounds a little pathetic, but it's really quite interesting and far more comprehensive than I am willing to attempt to communicate right now.

Here is a little bit of info on the project, but I can't quickly locate any meaty content online....

"The 400 Project is an ambitious attempt to collect "The 400 Rules of Game Design." These rules are being published in the column "Better by Design" in Game Developer magazine. This web site is the first place they have been collected and will serve as their long-term home."

You can always apply for a free subscription at http://www.gdmag.com/2rev3/ if you live in the US or Canada.

Crud! Why couldn't this book have come out 5 years ago when I was actually doing game development? Oh well, at least Chris Hecker's physics articles in Game Developer came at the right time.

BTW, if anyone happens to see a Simpsons Bowling arcade machine in the Chicago area, let me know where. I'd love to see if my physics model made it into the final production.

Zelda isn't the only upcoming game which uses a cartoon shader. Cel Damage for the xbox uses one too and I think it looks better than the Zelda shader. Source code for such a cartoon shader can be found at Game Developer Magazine (source code of the march 2001 edition).

Unfortunally it appears that all the books in this collection suck. The Game Developer Magazine has a review on Beginning Direct3D Game Programming and they give it a 1/5 score

Go to a news and magazines store, pick up a copy of Game Developer magazine, and look at the classifieds.