Imagine that you have to turn off your phone in order to change games.
I do, I have an N-Gage.
You're all missing the point. The problem isn't that you have to turn off the phone to switch cards, it's that you have to switch cards. If I want to play a commerical game from an MMC ROM card I have to take out my 128MB MMC RAM card with all my apps installed on it.
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer was one of the best reasons to own an N64. The second and third Lord of the Rings games for the GBA are probably the best games I've played on that platform. Neither of these stuck tightly to the story of the movie. They picked out key elements and used them to flavour a game that would have been popular even without the francise. That's how you make a movie license game.
Imagine that to change the video cassete you had to first remove the power suppy from your vcr. Imagine that to change channels on your tv you first had to unplug it. Imagine that to install a piece of software you had to reboot.
Imagine that you had to turn off your games console before you changed the cartridge. Wait...
I've done some non-work stuff from a hammock outdoors using an ultralight PC with a WiFi card. Fairly pleasant but a little uncomfortable. However, given that I have three screens wrapped 'round me at work and I'd have more if I could justify the cost I think that going entirely portable for work would be counterproductive. Also, it's just started winter here;-p
I can't imagine any seller that would do this. Also, I don't see how this system is geared towards sellers.
The solution was posted way back at the beginning. Extend the deadline whenever a bid is made in the last few minutes. That would have solved my problem -- and actualy made it more like a real auction.
Who compares themselves to 3DO on purpose? The 3DO idea fell apart specifically because you can't dodge the redundancy cycle. Every X years you have to push out a whole new version. If you don't, you get left behind. The 3DO "we design it, you build it" idea added way to many delays into the process. And if you try incremental upgrades, you piss-off customers and developers. Are they going to make voluntary comparisons to the 32X next?
Who cares? Most of the truly innovative games were written by people and teams that made their own development system. Heck, SimCity was a development environment -- it started life as the in-house level editor for Raid on Bungling Bay.
If I'd set my maximum higher on all the items and won them all I wouldn't have been able to afford them all. What I'm willing to pay for an individual item and what I've entered into the eBay system while I'm bidding on multiple items are different things. The fact that eBay couldn't see the difference is the reason that I cancelled my account. (Actually, I cancelled my account because the many security issues that surround eBay mean that an inactive account is a risk. If it wasn't for that risk, I would have just walked away for a while.)
I don't know about grid computing, but the little Dell PCs we have in our computer labs will start coming out of lease in a couple of year's time. I know they're "identical" because I manage them with Ghost. I'm seriously tempted to get 10 or so then and try to build my own cluster. They even have Gigabit ethernet built-in. Some cat 6 cable, a 12-port switch, a few powerboards, one master with a screen... I just need something worth doing with them.
I'm not saying there aren't problems inside games design houses that are leading to really crap games. I'm saying that this divide between "artists" and "programmers" is crap. It's not wider or otherwise than any other given communications and culture problem in any given industry.
Was the "creatively sapping environment" at Game Systems Robots caused by the coders refusing to program anything new, or the management refusing to bankroll anything that wasn't a sequel?
US$13 for 8.5Gig. CD-r discs are around US$0.50 each depending on quantity. Given that my Plexwriter Premium can almost fit 1Gig on a CD-r, DVD-DLs are roughly 3x the price per MB. Much as I enjoy being an early adopter (*cough*), I think I'll wait until the price per MB comes down to around US$1.
there are plenty of un-creative, overly technically obsessed, keeping-up-with-the-chipset-joneses-driven game 'designers' out there as well, pumping out boring dreck with their warezed 3DSMax installs, re-used Half Life engines, and 'games == war' mindset.
Do you really think they'd be doing this if it wasn't want the company wanted? Are you saying that games design houses are filled top to bottom with programmers like this? Managers, directors, producers and plenty of other non-technical people obviously agree that this is the way to go -- or worse, they encourage/enforce it. No doubt that listed in the credits of every cookie-cutter game there are programmers and engineers that would have liked to be more creative and more experimental and not just in a bleeding-edge hardware way.
No one group of people can be blamed for this. It wouldn't hurt to have a little more culture through the business world, full stop.
Sniping would not have helped me stick to my budget. Fark had a funny example of how wrong that can get some months back where a stick of RAM went for over US$4,000. Sniping only disadvantages people on a budget bidding on multiple things -- that's specifically who it disadvantages, that's the only time it has any real effect. If I'm only bidding on one thing, I put in my maximum then forget about it until I get an email with the result.
Fortunately I don't need eBay for anything. Maybe I'd sign up for a sniping service if I was buying chips for NASA or something.
Many popular early games were basically tech demos in as much as they were often gameplay wrapped around a particularly impressive bit of coding. I recall the story of a starfield effect on the Atari 2600 that was done by accident, stored away until the current project was finished, then massaged into a game afterwards. I think that game was released as Cosmic Ark, but I'm not sure.
Fine, I'll bite. What an utter wank. There are plenty of people out there designing and writing games who are both creative artists and decent engineers and programmers.
On the flip-side, in a large team there needs to be people who specialise so that the hard tasks can be done.
Communication is an issue in any large team and it's not due to some abitrary divide. In any industry, not just the games industry, anyone who isn't interested in learning a little bit about everything that goes on in their company will always be a problem, from the IT officer that never learns how the marketing deparment works, to the engineer that doesn't know how to budget, to the project manager that doesn't understand how hard it is to workout how long it will take to do something that's never been done before.
The most telling part of the article is below:
For example, some years ago at an annual conference that I host on interactive storytelling, one session was scheduled for a discussion of the Two Cultures problem. As soon as the discussion began, the traditional game design people walked out of the session and went off to discuss technical matters. What a graphic demonstration of the magnitude of the problem!
What a graphic demonstration of how wrong the author is.
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You're all missing the point. The problem isn't that you have to turn off the phone to switch cards, it's that you have to switch cards . If I want to play a commerical game from an MMC ROM card I have to take out my 128MB MMC RAM card with all my apps installed on it.
Star Wars Episode 1 Racer was one of the best reasons to own an N64. The second and third Lord of the Rings games for the GBA are probably the best games I've played on that platform. Neither of these stuck tightly to the story of the movie. They picked out key elements and used them to flavour a game that would have been popular even without the francise. That's how you make a movie license game.
It's pronounced arsehole. The t, z, e and r are silent. It's like Hen3ry.
Not that he couldn't, he didn't. Nothing asked him to.
I've done some non-work stuff from a hammock outdoors using an ultralight PC with a WiFi card. Fairly pleasant but a little uncomfortable. However, given that I have three screens wrapped 'round me at work and I'd have more if I could justify the cost I think that going entirely portable for work would be counterproductive. Also, it's just started winter here ;-p
The solution was posted way back at the beginning. Extend the deadline whenever a bid is made in the last few minutes. That would have solved my problem -- and actualy made it more like a real auction.
Who compares themselves to 3DO on purpose? The 3DO idea fell apart specifically because you can't dodge the redundancy cycle. Every X years you have to push out a whole new version. If you don't, you get left behind. The 3DO "we design it, you build it" idea added way to many delays into the process. And if you try incremental upgrades, you piss-off customers and developers. Are they going to make voluntary comparisons to the 32X next?
Who cares? Most of the truly innovative games were written by people and teams that made their own development system. Heck, SimCity was a development environment -- it started life as the in-house level editor for Raid on Bungling Bay.
Uh, huh. So the 500+MB Outlook.pst files I find at work are an illusion? Or maybe it's all those FMV appointments.
Invite me in and my friends and I will ruin that percentage.
I've been here so long my ID is binary.
If I'd set my maximum higher on all the items and won them all I wouldn't have been able to afford them all. What I'm willing to pay for an individual item and what I've entered into the eBay system while I'm bidding on multiple items are different things. The fact that eBay couldn't see the difference is the reason that I cancelled my account. (Actually, I cancelled my account because the many security issues that surround eBay mean that an inactive account is a risk. If it wasn't for that risk, I would have just walked away for a while.)
I don't suppose any of this will get rid of ACs here on /.?
They weren't the same thing and some were quite rare, a couple were even unique. Someone was liquidating a collection to pay off some related debts.
Nope, someone else got some items for less than I was willing to pay, because sniping turned multiple auctions into a single one.
I don't know about grid computing, but the little Dell PCs we have in our computer labs will start coming out of lease in a couple of year's time. I know they're "identical" because I manage them with Ghost. I'm seriously tempted to get 10 or so then and try to build my own cluster. They even have Gigabit ethernet built-in. Some cat 6 cable, a 12-port switch, a few powerboards, one master with a screen... I just need something worth doing with them.
Yeah, yeah, per GB.
Was the "creatively sapping environment" at Game Systems Robots caused by the coders refusing to program anything new, or the management refusing to bankroll anything that wasn't a sequel?
US$13 for 8.5Gig. CD-r discs are around US$0.50 each depending on quantity. Given that my Plexwriter Premium can almost fit 1Gig on a CD-r, DVD-DLs are roughly 3x the price per MB. Much as I enjoy being an early adopter (*cough*), I think I'll wait until the price per MB comes down to around US$1.
No one group of people can be blamed for this. It wouldn't hurt to have a little more culture through the business world, full stop.
Fortunately I don't need eBay for anything. Maybe I'd sign up for a sniping service if I was buying chips for NASA or something.
Many popular early games were basically tech demos in as much as they were often gameplay wrapped around a particularly impressive bit of coding. I recall the story of a starfield effect on the Atari 2600 that was done by accident, stored away until the current project was finished, then massaged into a game afterwards. I think that game was released as Cosmic Ark, but I'm not sure.
On the flip-side, in a large team there needs to be people who specialise so that the hard tasks can be done.
Communication is an issue in any large team and it's not due to some abitrary divide. In any industry, not just the games industry, anyone who isn't interested in learning a little bit about everything that goes on in their company will always be a problem, from the IT officer that never learns how the marketing deparment works, to the engineer that doesn't know how to budget, to the project manager that doesn't understand how hard it is to workout how long it will take to do something that's never been done before.
The most telling part of the article is below:
What a graphic demonstration of how wrong the author is.