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http://www.pandemicstudios.com/jobs_la.php

No guarantees, but sending in a resume can't hurt. Prepare for a tough interview.

(Not speaking for the company, opinions are my own, yadda yadda...)

Interestingly, Pandemic Studios has just added a "Communities" link to their homepage. I wonder if we will see a BioWare-type community environment in the months following the developers' merger.

Interestingly, Pandemic Studios has just added a "Communities" link to their homepage. I wonder if we will see a BioWare-type community environment in the months following the developers' merger.

You are right about one thing - we are trying to generate interest in a very non-standard career not many people are thinking about.

BioWare is one of Canda's Top 100 employers for the 3rd straight year now, and no - we're definitely not desperate. The problem is that it is quite challenging to find writers that are capable of writing for a computer game. It's not as easy as taking a good novel writer and telling him to write a good game now. We have writers with very good backgrounds and a lot of experience on books fail miserably when confronted with the limits of game writing.

BioWare is one of a handful of companies in the gaming industry that employs dedicated writers for their games. Most companies have a single programmer, designer or producer create the stories for their games - Our projects are story driven games that require between 3+ full time writers [b]per game[/b].

BioWare has been steadily growing in the last 10 years and we are now running several projects simultaneously at any given time, and with that growth opportunities for new writers are obviously created as well. Since there is a limited number of professional game writers in the industry and it takes a lot of time to find other, suitable candidates from outside the industry through traditional methods, why not try to find potential new writers (that maybe have never even thought about this career path) in a place that likely has a few of them - the fan community.

We had a lot of success with hiring people from our game community for other positions in programming, art and design in the past couple of years (I think around 8 to 10). Since the community was such a great source for skilled programmers, designers or artists, why not see if some of the hobby writers out there meet our requirements? The contest is a great way of getting people that would never have thought of submitting an actual job application to find out if they have the talent to write for games and get an idea if that might be a career they would want to pursue.

Of course we can't give a guarantee for employment to the contest winner, after all it takes a bit more than just being great in your field to get a job in any company, from immigration issues to fitting into corporate culture.

Anway, there is always the traditional way of applying if you feel uncomfortable about the contest.

http://jobs.bioware.com./
http://bioware.pandemicstudios.com/jobs.html

I guess they are... --> http://bioware.pandemicstudios.com/jobs.html

http://bioware.pandemicstudios.com/

http://bioware.pandemicstudios.com/ Oooooh.
I just hope they're hirin'.
--
"Immature Artists borrow. Mature Artists steal."
Wes Borg

Since when is Mercenaries a sequel? The article calls it Pandemic Studios' follow up to "its innovative strategy game Full Spectrum Warrior." Since when is a "follow-up" game a sequel? And what makes this a "follow-up", other than being developed by the same studio? Is Full Spectrum Warrior a follow-up to Pandemic's earlier games like Clone Wars or Triple Play Does that mean Full Spectrum Warrior is a sequel to a baseball title? By that rationale, id's Doom 3 is a sequel to their previous title Quake 3 Arena. Does this seem silly to anybody else?

Name games you can't wait to play on the PS2, here's my list for XBox: Fable Doom 3 Halo 2 Republic Commando Full Spectrum Warrior

There was a sequel to Battlezone a few years back: Battlezone 2. Improved graphics, slightly different gameplay, fun to play. Unfortunately, it didn't sell. Just like the first part. A real pity :( Cinemaware re-released a fews classics (Defender of the Crown, Wings, The Three Stooges). DotC was stunning back in the old days, mostly due to the graphics. But today...

Personally I nonetheless think that brushed up classics could sell. It just has to be done right, not 'simply' transferring the game to current hardware.

It's OK, all that'll happen is that 20 years later, Emporer Bush III will invade the Jovian moons, claiming the Jovian WMD program presents a clear and present danger to the United States of Earth. "We know where they are. They are in the area around Ganymede and Callisto," states Rumsfeld Jr(1), sweeping aside accusations that the nucular(2) materials were originally dumped there by the government itself, and countering with an attack on the "Old Europans". Immediately, hardware manufacturers across the planet rename IO ports "Freedom Ports" in a gesture of patriotism and support for "our boys in Jove". Noam Chomsky, in a statement smuggled out of Guantanamo Bay by underground "extremists", points out "our boys and girls are actually sitting at home in Wisconsin, playing Full Spectrum Warrior on the Playstation 5 with the signals relayed via ssh tunnel across the InterPlaNet to our new 'Xenophobe'-class attack drones" and is summarily executed for recklessly endangering the high scores of troops in a time of war. Damn terrorist.

(1) successor to his father's role as Defense Secretary
(2) the official spelling as laid out in the 2008 Project for the New American Dictionary

Only user inputs are sent around in BZ2, and used by every machine in the game to compute a new gamestate; if a client disagrees with the server, we can either shove a correct gamestate do that client, or kick them out. While traditional lockstep methods do have smoothness problems due to unpredictable transmission delays over the internet, on BZ2, we developed an interesting solution which we call 'Multiworld' -- sorry I can't say much more than that.

Even with synchronization, there still are client-side hacks that can be used-- people changing texture maps to show enemies more clearly, perfect radar hacks, and more. Even if everything's checksummed up the wazoo and that "works" (hah), a hacked driver can do fun stuff with texturemaps, or more.

This all points to one fundamental problem in computer security: on a system, there is at least one user (and/or process) that can read another processes's memory. Just that abiity is enough to develop cheats. [See: perfect radar above.] Unix's root account can do that, so it's really no better in terms of trust than Win95/98.

Fully stopping cheating is a problem not in computer science. It's a problem in humanity-- we're buggy to the core.

Nathan Mates
BZ2 Network Programmer
http://www.visi.com/~nathan/