I don't understand what was flamebait about that comment. It's more expensive and less efficient to develop on PS3's mostly linux-based toolchain when we're already running a mostly Microsoft/Visual Studio shop. How is that even opinionated?
After you build an engine, how much work does it take to keep said engine relevant? Specifically, how much work must be done with the underlying graphics API?
It seems to me like it might be a good investment to create a good, solid, cross-platform engine (using OpenGL), and maintain that indefinitely. It may be harder to create initially, but I imagine it would not be significantly harder to maintain in the long run.
My understanding, as a non-coder-
First off, using DirectX on 360 is so crazy convenient... it's a wonderful environment to work with- great documentation, great support, and extremely capable. Porting that to PC using DX is a no brainer- why would you even bother with OpenGL? As far as OpenGL for PS3, etc. goes- it's just cheaper for us to have another studio port it, and handle all the API-level work. They're better off working with PS3's proprietary graphics libraries anyways. It's just not a major issue for us to switch PSGL for DirectX, etc. That's really not the bulk of your problem.
And Wii- well... you don't port 360 games to Wii, in most cases.
The solid class-platform engine is really the right idea and most of our system people would gladly undertake that task. Honestly, that's the ideal, though- often not the reality. Imagine you're developing a new IP on a new engine- suddenly production and design changes EVERYTHING and you have to restructure- new requirements arise, platform changes mid-production!
Now imagine the building is ON FIRE! I mean, figuratively. You have less time every day- thousands of bugs are flowing in from QA and you've got to put in speed hacks, functionality hacks, etc... you no longer can focus on the big picture because there's so many small things to deal with. The only thing you can do is get it shippable before X date set by your publishers. And suddenly most of your engine-level coders are already shifted to a new project across the studio, because their time is NOT cheap.
Why can't you just calmly develop a solid base? Because you're working on putting out as many profitable projects as possible. The best shot you have is if your publisher decides that your studio needs to create *THE* cross platform engine for X number of games across X studios to use. Otherwise, as far as the consumers are concerned, what does it matter if you're releasing a crazily coded mess? With new IP's, how will you know your product will do well enough for that engine to be practical? If you're not selling that engine, it's usually not fiscally viable, espcially since technology needs to be advancing so quickly.
We try, though. If we could afford to, had the time, etc.- I'm sure we would.
In either case, we're looking at using DX (PC, 360..) or PSGL (PS3), why would we ever need to use OpenGL... ? If it's not more capable, easier to use, and we're not targeting Mac, Linux, or Wii- then why bother?
I think Final Fantasy is still very relevant. It's the watermark for which system will be the "J-Rpg System". That's a big deal to a large variety of gamers.
This news, of course, comes as no surprise. Sony doesn't have the financial or install base to finance AAA+ super-titles like Final Fantasy. They're going to want a piece of 360's fat North American/European/Aus market share. Final Fantasy has a massive following in all these regions.
Or- we could optimize our game for the dominant platforms (360, Windows), and then have a smaller, less expensive, less profitable studio under the same publisher handle all the shoulder-work of porting the game to any alternate platforms, such as the less prevalent PS3. We have PS3's but we don't bother with coding them internally.
The ps3's first party toolchain is all linux, or so I hear- although there are third party tools for windows. It's expensive, inefficient, and a major pain compared to 360.
It's better to have an entire linux-based studio handle only ps3 than for us to handle both.
And yes, we're major enough that I don't want to be considered a spokesperson.
The developers decide what goes into DX10 by requesting features and having communication with Microsoft. This is not a dictatorship. The vendors decide by communicating and implementing features. DX presents standards to the industry, in many cases.
By that logic, graphics chips are designed by dictators, as well. It's just the reality of consumer products... these things cost money to develop. How is Microsoft's development of Direct X in any way different than the "community" corporate development of OpenGL? In either case it's communication between hardware producers, game developers, and API developers- in one case it's specialized for Windows gaming- and it's done quite well.
If it were an inferior product, we'd just use OGL.
I work for a major game studio. Direct X games are far easier and cheaper to develop... it's just not a big question for us in the industry. The only benefit to OpenGL at this point for us is for multi-platform graphics. The mac and linux markets for games are... not considerable vs. the ease of development for DX-based games.
It's more capable. That's all there is to it. We wouldn't screw with it if it wasn't.
I'm not a programmer so don't ask me for implementation specifics in this- I am in production.
Vista has a means to use OpenGL- it only usese MSOGL if no alternative driver is presented.
I remember in Computer Science at UIUC, we had a student who had worked as an intern with the Microsoft Kernel team. He always viewed the Linux kernel as sort of a deprecated joke- just barely nipping at the heels of NT and Win95. It was pretty interesting to learn that a lot of the Linux Kernel's new fantastic features are several years behind. I think the weakness of the Linux Kernel is most apparent to people on the Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Wind River, or Green Hills kernel teams. If they read/. I doubt they comment.:p
If anything, video games have made me a better driver. On my way to work, I make sure to do more slide-boosts, more lane changes to avoid bananas, and throw more red shells than ever before. This has given me more time to work and less time to commute (Can anyone say PRODUCTIVITY?). While other drivers are running into explosive snow-men and having their items stolen by ghosts, I'm consistently finding myself at the front of the pack.
Traffic jam? I've found that spiked-blue shells can cut through the thickest traffic in mere seconds.
Some asshole riding my bumper? Let's see how he likes it when he's running into a trail of bananas.
Case and point: Video games have not negatively impacted my driving. Idiot researchers...
Roughly Drafted has had a madman's war with the Zune since its announcement. Look through the archives of this blog, it's like an anti-Microsoft/pro-Apple Mein Kampf. Why do we keep treating this as fact? The Zune is just a (actually fairly-decent) MP3 player... why has it generated such a massive battery of fanatical FUD? The fact that the Zune had so much rambling consumer backlash from Apple-fans will actually help sell them to anti-scenesters.
Here's a viral/word-of-mouth marketing standpoint-
There's been a trend lately with teenage boys, high-schoolers, purchasing Zune's instead of iPod's. Why? Because they're more straight-forward functional and masculine, but have the same Scene-feeling. It doesn't take a marketing rocket scientist to figure out that iPod's are sort of effeminate. What Microsoft has is a solid product that will slowly ride into the mainstream on the shoulders of masculine insecurity. All it takes is a couple generations, focus, and patience. The Zune instantly gobbled up a chunk of the market share on pure 'wtf'- I imagine that as long as the Xbox camp is behind this product, they'll gain market share continuously over the next several years and product revisions.
My standpoint: A couple weeks ago, I rode a train for a few hours, watching episodes of The Office on my Zune- I can even watch anime because the screens so clear I can read subtitles. I carry it with me every day and listen to it quite frequently on long walks and runs. The thought of getting an iPod instead never crosses my mind, especially since I make full use of the Zune Pass for subscription music- I couldn't afford it. I purchase all my music in non-DRM MP3 from Bleep.com and rent music from Zune. So, I guess that would make it a Consumer Product, not a satanic cancer.
I work for a AAA game studio and we hire "vocational" game school students all the time. You have to remember that this industry is portfolio-based- especially for designers. They're looking for computer science students who are focused on gaming, particularly. If they think you're going to bounce off to Google, you won't get in.
Most people here have Liberal Arts degrees. We handle our own recruitment, no thank you, THQ Recruiter Lady.:p
Completely free? You must not be running a massive international bank with a large number of servers and networked systems.
Re:I can't feel any responsiveness improvements.
on
Gnome 2.18 Released
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· Score: 1
This is an open source project. It's absolutely essential to its success that people report any problems they're having. I'm appalled that you would suggest this should be out of the users' hands.
It's important to remember that we work with cross-platform toolkits- the notion of coding a super-optimized solution when porting to a platform with hardly a million units in circulation is a financial impossibility.
Also, it's no fun to stream massive chunks with minimal RAM.
Listen buddy, I have a PS3 dev kit sitting on my desk at work and it is my waking nightmare. Let me put this to you very plainly:
Its cute little SPE's are useless for running Havok physics. Try to imagine porting a major title to the PS3 when you're blowing away all your resources on Havok. It doesn't have the same flexible memory architecture as the 360, no massive on-die DRAM cache on the GPU, and it pushes less poly's to boot!
Now try to imagine you're not a programmer (our system programmers adore this little box for its wackiness) but a producer. You have to meet deadlines- and you've got nothing but poor test kits that are counter-intuitive for QA and horrible technical flaws to deal with.
Is that your idea of fun? Do you have any idea how amazingly progressive and helpful 360 is in terms of consoles? John Carmack didn't say it was easier than PC development because someone slipped him a few bills- he was serious.
Are you trying to convince me or yourself? Why hasn't this big open source explosion happened yet? Let me tell you something about management- they have a keen eye for cost saving. If they don't, another company or individual will take that approach and dominate. If there's a clear better path for software deployment that simply isn't being exploited and is 100% superior, why is it not being used? Why is someone not capitalizing and trumping their competition? Where's the glowing success story?
Is it because Microsoft owns the media? What about Apple/Pixar/Disney/ABC?
Could it possibly be the fact that Microsoft's software is either
A) Superior but more expensive
or
B) Inferior, more expensive, but more profitable?
It's as simple as the 'Communism doesn't work' argument. Why doesn't it work? Because... where's the sickle and hammer? People need results. Where are the results? If Microsoft offered Illinois excellent support porting their system to Microsoft, then they're the victor fair and square- because I assure you this is a level playing field- managers know what linux is.
I'll say it again- Open source enthusiasts- stop being a culture of economic angst and try to be a culture of improvement. You're in the free labor market, stop complaining and get to work.
Computing in the 70's! Problem solved. No closed-source software? That's like the OSS equivalent of being a suicide bomber. Let's just eliminate the jobs "programmer" and "software designer". It'd be better if no one made money doing that. That should be free work.
In fact, let's just make art and writing free too.
Food too.
Yes, everything should be free! All problems solved! No compensation for work, no market, no problems!
What do you mean by the sort of people Microsoft employs? I have many friends at Microsoft, and they're all brilliant computer science students from excellent universities around the world. What's the major problem here?
Is this a sign of a coming linux apocalypse? Interesting question. If linux ever becomes the primary desktop system, we'll see products hitting the market like "Microsoft Office for Linux" or "Visual Studio Linux Edition" or "Linux.NET" or "DirectX for Linux"... I'm pretty sure the future is more gray than people might expect. There's no way in hell there'll be the magical open source free software unicorn land that GNU and FSF might anticipate- but a hybrid market? Quite possible.
I'm not a fan of Linux or its many cacophonous ideas of a desktop system, but I won't care by that point because I'll be driving a flying car.
I say "experiment", but really, some of us know that the results are that in most cases, it works just fine. I used Linux and Open Office in an "all Microsoft" shop for several years and the only noticeable change was that people started coming to me whenever they were having trouble fixing a messed up Word document, a messed up floppy disk (with Word files on it) or needed to burn a CD that was reusable outside the organization (for some reason the standard configured machines could only produce coasters most of the time). My Word documents and Excels files (produced by Open Office) never caused any compatibility problems and I never had to worry about my e-mail archive being corrupted by Outlook bugs. Cost to government (feds) for this "experiment" = $0. Well, really the cost was a negative number, as the Word documents I rescued would have taken many hours to reproduce and the readable CDs I produced saved tons of delay in sending information out to other agencies.
Did your office suffer from some sort of Mummy's Curse?...
Do you have any idea how much it costs to switch an entire infrastructure over to a different platform? If it can't be done overnight, it's EXTREMELY expensive to lose that time and retrain your entire staff that's been using Windows for as long as they've been using computers. Linux has a ways to go before it's "drop everything and change" good. How come every case where Linux is not the solution is somehow flawed? Open source devs/enthusiasts need to stop lamenting and start competing.
'It will initially be staffed by 18 Secret Service agents and will feature classrooms, a forensic laboratory, an evidence vault, and server rooms. No water slide? Those republicans sure know how to "starve the beast"...
I work for a major game development studio... our idea of a "workstation" is pretty excessive compared to most companies. Nonetheless, we're still mostly XP Pro. We need to move over to Vista en masse in the near future to support Games for Windows, though. IT is in a tizzy over it.
I didn't think this was a Vista argument. I'm pretty sure by the time Vista is the only option, the workstations will be well fast enough. I've personally found Vista to run quicker on my machine than Gnome- which seems to just throw away resources without being too pretty. XP screams compared to Gnome 2.16...
Why hasn't anyone hopped into this argument and claimed that Illinois should switch to Mac? It's not an epic Slashdot thread until the Apple fanboy sings.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand what was flamebait about that comment. It's more expensive and less efficient to develop on PS3's mostly linux-based toolchain when we're already running a mostly Microsoft/Visual Studio shop. How is that even opinionated?
It seems to me like it might be a good investment to create a good, solid, cross-platform engine (using OpenGL), and maintain that indefinitely. It may be harder to create initially, but I imagine it would not be significantly harder to maintain in the long run.
My understanding, as a non-coder-
First off, using DirectX on 360 is so crazy convenient... it's a wonderful environment to work with- great documentation, great support, and extremely capable. Porting that to PC using DX is a no brainer- why would you even bother with OpenGL? As far as OpenGL for PS3, etc. goes- it's just cheaper for us to have another studio port it, and handle all the API-level work. They're better off working with PS3's proprietary graphics libraries anyways. It's just not a major issue for us to switch PSGL for DirectX, etc. That's really not the bulk of your problem.
And Wii- well... you don't port 360 games to Wii, in most cases.
The solid class-platform engine is really the right idea and most of our system people would gladly undertake that task. Honestly, that's the ideal, though- often not the reality. Imagine you're developing a new IP on a new engine- suddenly production and design changes EVERYTHING and you have to restructure- new requirements arise, platform changes mid-production!
Now imagine the building is ON FIRE! I mean, figuratively. You have less time every day- thousands of bugs are flowing in from QA and you've got to put in speed hacks, functionality hacks, etc... you no longer can focus on the big picture because there's so many small things to deal with. The only thing you can do is get it shippable before X date set by your publishers. And suddenly most of your engine-level coders are already shifted to a new project across the studio, because their time is NOT cheap.
Why can't you just calmly develop a solid base? Because you're working on putting out as many profitable projects as possible. The best shot you have is if your publisher decides that your studio needs to create *THE* cross platform engine for X number of games across X studios to use. Otherwise, as far as the consumers are concerned, what does it matter if you're releasing a crazily coded mess? With new IP's, how will you know your product will do well enough for that engine to be practical? If you're not selling that engine, it's usually not fiscally viable, espcially since technology needs to be advancing so quickly.
We try, though. If we could afford to, had the time, etc.- I'm sure we would.
In either case, we're looking at using DX (PC, 360..) or PSGL (PS3), why would we ever need to use OpenGL... ? If it's not more capable, easier to use, and we're not targeting Mac, Linux, or Wii- then why bother?
I hope this isn't off-topic- but FFXII was a very redeeming game as far as the series goes, I recommend giving it a shot. :)
I was not too impressed with FFVIII-XI, although I hold FFIX a little dear.
I think Final Fantasy is still very relevant. It's the watermark for which system will be the "J-Rpg System". That's a big deal to a large variety of gamers.
This news, of course, comes as no surprise. Sony doesn't have the financial or install base to finance AAA+ super-titles like Final Fantasy. They're going to want a piece of 360's fat North American/European/Aus market share. Final Fantasy has a massive following in all these regions.
Or- we could optimize our game for the dominant platforms (360, Windows), and then have a smaller, less expensive, less profitable studio under the same publisher handle all the shoulder-work of porting the game to any alternate platforms, such as the less prevalent PS3. We have PS3's but we don't bother with coding them internally.
The ps3's first party toolchain is all linux, or so I hear- although there are third party tools for windows. It's expensive, inefficient, and a major pain compared to 360.
It's better to have an entire linux-based studio handle only ps3 than for us to handle both.
And yes, we're major enough that I don't want to be considered a spokesperson.
The developers decide what goes into DX10 by requesting features and having communication with Microsoft. This is not a dictatorship. The vendors decide by communicating and implementing features. DX presents standards to the industry, in many cases.
By that logic, graphics chips are designed by dictators, as well. It's just the reality of consumer products... these things cost money to develop. How is Microsoft's development of Direct X in any way different than the "community" corporate development of OpenGL? In either case it's communication between hardware producers, game developers, and API developers- in one case it's specialized for Windows gaming- and it's done quite well.
If it were an inferior product, we'd just use OGL.
I work for a major game studio. Direct X games are far easier and cheaper to develop... it's just not a big question for us in the industry. The only benefit to OpenGL at this point for us is for multi-platform graphics. The mac and linux markets for games are... not considerable vs. the ease of development for DX-based games.
It's more capable. That's all there is to it. We wouldn't screw with it if it wasn't.
I'm not a programmer so don't ask me for implementation specifics in this- I am in production.
Vista has a means to use OpenGL- it only usese MSOGL if no alternative driver is presented.
...Yeah, because the Ivory Tower has a lot to teach managers and business leaders about what's profitable and what works. :P
Absolutely-
/. I doubt they comment. :p
I guess that's a common misconception.
I remember in Computer Science at UIUC, we had a student who had worked as an intern with the Microsoft Kernel team. He always viewed the Linux kernel as sort of a deprecated joke- just barely nipping at the heels of NT and Win95. It was pretty interesting to learn that a lot of the Linux Kernel's new fantastic features are several years behind. I think the weakness of the Linux Kernel is most apparent to people on the Microsoft, Apple, Sun, Wind River, or Green Hills kernel teams. If they read
If anything, video games have made me a better driver. On my way to work, I make sure to do more slide-boosts, more lane changes to avoid bananas, and throw more red shells than ever before. This has given me more time to work and less time to commute (Can anyone say PRODUCTIVITY?). While other drivers are running into explosive snow-men and having their items stolen by ghosts, I'm consistently finding myself at the front of the pack.
Traffic jam? I've found that spiked-blue shells can cut through the thickest traffic in mere seconds.
Some asshole riding my bumper? Let's see how he likes it when he's running into a trail of bananas.
Case and point: Video games have not negatively impacted my driving. Idiot researchers...
Roughly Drafted has had a madman's war with the Zune since its announcement. Look through the archives of this blog, it's like an anti-Microsoft/pro-Apple Mein Kampf. Why do we keep treating this as fact? The Zune is just a (actually fairly-decent) MP3 player... why has it generated such a massive battery of fanatical FUD? The fact that the Zune had so much rambling consumer backlash from Apple-fans will actually help sell them to anti-scenesters.
Here's a viral/word-of-mouth marketing standpoint-
There's been a trend lately with teenage boys, high-schoolers, purchasing Zune's instead of iPod's. Why? Because they're more straight-forward functional and masculine, but have the same Scene-feeling. It doesn't take a marketing rocket scientist to figure out that iPod's are sort of effeminate. What Microsoft has is a solid product that will slowly ride into the mainstream on the shoulders of masculine insecurity. All it takes is a couple generations, focus, and patience. The Zune instantly gobbled up a chunk of the market share on pure 'wtf'- I imagine that as long as the Xbox camp is behind this product, they'll gain market share continuously over the next several years and product revisions.
My standpoint:
A couple weeks ago, I rode a train for a few hours, watching episodes of The Office on my Zune- I can even watch anime because the screens so clear I can read subtitles. I carry it with me every day and listen to it quite frequently on long walks and runs. The thought of getting an iPod instead never crosses my mind, especially since I make full use of the Zune Pass for subscription music- I couldn't afford it. I purchase all my music in non-DRM MP3 from Bleep.com and rent music from Zune. So, I guess that would make it a Consumer Product, not a satanic cancer.
I work for a AAA game studio and we hire "vocational" game school students all the time. You have to remember that this industry is portfolio-based- especially for designers. They're looking for computer science students who are focused on gaming, particularly. If they think you're going to bounce off to Google, you won't get in.
:p
Most people here have Liberal Arts degrees. We handle our own recruitment, no thank you, THQ Recruiter Lady.
Completely free? You must not be running a massive international bank with a large number of servers and networked systems.
This is an open source project. It's absolutely essential to its success that people report any problems they're having. I'm appalled that you would suggest this should be out of the users' hands.
:)
Except, of course, if you're joking.
And then Mark Shuttleworth made the Linux community a glass of warm milk and sent them to bed...
You know, XENON is really no joke either.
It's important to remember that we work with cross-platform toolkits- the notion of coding a super-optimized solution when porting to a platform with hardly a million units in circulation is a financial impossibility.
Also, it's no fun to stream massive chunks with minimal RAM.
The question remains- is it better for gaming?
Listen buddy, I have a PS3 dev kit sitting on my desk at work and it is my waking nightmare. Let me put this to you very plainly:
Its cute little SPE's are useless for running Havok physics. Try to imagine porting a major title to the PS3 when you're blowing away all your resources on Havok. It doesn't have the same flexible memory architecture as the 360, no massive on-die DRAM cache on the GPU, and it pushes less poly's to boot!
Now try to imagine you're not a programmer (our system programmers adore this little box for its wackiness) but a producer. You have to meet deadlines- and you've got nothing but poor test kits that are counter-intuitive for QA and horrible technical flaws to deal with.
Is that your idea of fun? Do you have any idea how amazingly progressive and helpful 360 is in terms of consoles? John Carmack didn't say it was easier than PC development because someone slipped him a few bills- he was serious.
Are you trying to convince me or yourself? Why hasn't this big open source explosion happened yet? Let me tell you something about management- they have a keen eye for cost saving. If they don't, another company or individual will take that approach and dominate. If there's a clear better path for software deployment that simply isn't being exploited and is 100% superior, why is it not being used? Why is someone not capitalizing and trumping their competition? Where's the glowing success story?
Is it because Microsoft owns the media? What about Apple/Pixar/Disney/ABC?
Could it possibly be the fact that Microsoft's software is either
A) Superior but more expensive
or
B) Inferior, more expensive, but more profitable?
It's as simple as the 'Communism doesn't work' argument. Why doesn't it work? Because... where's the sickle and hammer? People need results. Where are the results? If Microsoft offered Illinois excellent support porting their system to Microsoft, then they're the victor fair and square- because I assure you this is a level playing field- managers know what linux is.
I'll say it again- Open source enthusiasts- stop being a culture of economic angst and try to be a culture of improvement. You're in the free labor market, stop complaining and get to work.
Ideal solution:
Computing in the 70's! Problem solved. No closed-source software? That's like the OSS equivalent of being a suicide bomber. Let's just eliminate the jobs "programmer" and "software designer". It'd be better if no one made money doing that. That should be free work.
In fact, let's just make art and writing free too.
Food too.
Yes, everything should be free! All problems solved! No compensation for work, no market, no problems!
What do you mean by the sort of people Microsoft employs? I have many friends at Microsoft, and they're all brilliant computer science students from excellent universities around the world. What's the major problem here?
Is this a sign of a coming linux apocalypse? Interesting question. If linux ever becomes the primary desktop system, we'll see products hitting the market like "Microsoft Office for Linux" or "Visual Studio Linux Edition" or "Linux.NET" or "DirectX for Linux"... I'm pretty sure the future is more gray than people might expect. There's no way in hell there'll be the magical open source free software unicorn land that GNU and FSF might anticipate- but a hybrid market? Quite possible.
I'm not a fan of Linux or its many cacophonous ideas of a desktop system, but I won't care by that point because I'll be driving a flying car.
Did your office suffer from some sort of Mummy's Curse?...
Do you have any idea how much it costs to switch an entire infrastructure over to a different platform? If it can't be done overnight, it's EXTREMELY expensive to lose that time and retrain your entire staff that's been using Windows for as long as they've been using computers. Linux has a ways to go before it's "drop everything and change" good. How come every case where Linux is not the solution is somehow flawed? Open source devs/enthusiasts need to stop lamenting and start competing.
Didncha read the Patriot Act? Open Source developers are terrorists.
I work for a major game development studio... our idea of a "workstation" is pretty excessive compared to most companies. Nonetheless, we're still mostly XP Pro. We need to move over to Vista en masse in the near future to support Games for Windows, though. IT is in a tizzy over it.
I didn't think this was a Vista argument. I'm pretty sure by the time Vista is the only option, the workstations will be well fast enough. I've personally found Vista to run quicker on my machine than Gnome- which seems to just throw away resources without being too pretty. XP screams compared to Gnome 2.16...
Why hasn't anyone hopped into this argument and claimed that Illinois should switch to Mac? It's not an epic Slashdot thread until the Apple fanboy sings.