I don't really think he's asking for a silver bullet, just a good engine. As your Fred Books allusion suggests, of course he can't reduce the essential complexity of building a game, but he certainly can reduce the accidental complexity by choosing a good engine. Since this is Slashdot, I must indulge my instincts to extend your analogy of killing the monster "werewolf" that is software complexity:
Choosing a poorly designed engine is like greasing the werewolf, and then trying to wrestle him. Choosing a poorly documented engine is like trying to wrestle a werewolf in the dark.
Basically, I think he wants to hear some experiences with engines so that he can hopefully: 1) avoid having to try every engine he comes across, and 2) reduce his accidental complexity. "Science stuff" most likely alludes to wanting to do some physics simulations, which are quite handy for all games. And I highly doubt it's an advertisement for Torque since he is forthrightly asking for a replacement for it.
They're may not be a silver bullet, but being well informed is helpful for any software project.
Actually, I remember running original Marathon in Windows XP with no problems. You can even download all of the Marathon content for free; just have a look here and here. It is not a very difficult process, just takes a little bit of reading and moving things around.
I never actually finished the first game. The story seemed to be primarily dolled out through text communications between the various characters, and you could quite easily ignore it and just shoot things. If you've played Halo first like I have, everything will be eerily familiar, and some things are just plain cool. Dual wielded shotguns anyone?
I think everybody would look at this a bit different if they actually did hijack the guy's page, but you're absolutely wrong. The only thing he got was the URL myspace.com/barackobama to point to the page managed by him and his staff. That is all. Go on, go look at Barack's page; he only has 35k friends right now, and a sign up date of 4/25/07. In fact, why don't you also check out the fan's page that was supposedly hijacked?
Every story reported about this MySpace/Obama case has stated this clearly, and there's evidence to back it up. What you stated is absolutely, 100% wrong.
Personally, I think Obama did the right thing. Imagine if he had continued to negotiate and brought it down to a more reasonable price; how many people would be running to social networking sites, making a page related to Obama, and then trying to enter negotiations?
I think somebody in his campaign probably realized what a wildfire this could turn into, and then they went to MySpace. As for how old the registration is, that makes no difference; it wasn't his to begin with, and MySpace has a long standing precedent of doing this for other celebrities.
It makes me a bit suspect of the guy who was using his name too. If he really was such a supporter of Obama, why didn't he request to meet him in person instead of demanding a high sum? Seems like it would've been the perfect opportunity to me.
Except that if you understand what a creative commons license is, this actually makes a lot of sense. You can call it "name dropping"; I would call it "intelligence".
That, and the fact that it's likely to get big-business and some conservatives in a twist so he can point and say, "See? We just want to let every one have this info, but *they* won't let you." Which is exactly the same thing Steve Jobbs did with the RIAA and DRM. I hope Obama's attempt has a similar result.
perhaps i meant it in the sense that he is to appear to the world like the man running things when he is in fact the figurehead for a well oiled machine. Which makes Obama sound like even more of an ideal candidate; he's charismatic, charming, and people seem to flock to him, primarily on the basis of a single speech. What else would you need for the figurehead/head of PR of this great "well oiled machine" machine we call America? It doesn't seem like his inexperience would discredit him in the slightest, if you truly believe that.
However, I have to take issue with you stating the election of officials as "controlled revolutions" though. In revolutions, real people die for what they believe in. To say that getting a bunch of people to check your name off on a piece of paper equates to giving up your life for your beliefs is demeaning to anyone who has ever been a real revolutionary.
The greatest strength and greatest weakness of democracy is it depends on its citizens to maintain and evolve it. Whether they choose to actively support it or let it crumble into ruin is entirely up to them.
You seem to be the highest modded post advocating the "49K is nothing to Obama's billions" idea, so I suppose this is the best place to reply.
Is $49K less than the millions raised by Obama's campaign? Yes, of course. Was his campaign under any sort of obligation to pay this volunteer? No. Should Obama's campaign have paid this volunteer for his time anyway? Hell no.
Suppose for a moment that they just paid out the $49K the guy quoted, no questions asked. What's to stop the next guy on a so-called "Web 2.0" site from asking the same price? All of a sudden you have profiles related to Obama in Flickr, Youtube, Xanga, Ringo, LiveJournal, Tagged, Blogger, orkut, etc., all of them trying to negotiate a price whilst disseminating who knows what kind of information. It would turn this one volunteer site into a whole plethora of rogue "fan sites", all clamoring for a payout. It's sad for the volunteer since he obviously worked hard, but he was, after all, a volunteer; he shouldn't have been expecting any kind of compensation in the first place.
It's easy to look at the millions in Obama's warchest and think "Why's he being so stingy?", but this really isn't about money, it's about public opinion and votes. Of course, you can say he might have spurned however many votes were on that guy's MySpace friend's page, but probably not; the only reason they became his friend was because they were searching for Obama, not the guy talking about him. He was a volunteer, and he did a good job, but he was just a volunteer. If I was in his place, when they asked for a price, I would've requested to meet Barack Obama. A free plane ride, maybe some meals, and a chance to meet the person I had been supporting all this time. I imagine Obama's campaign will recover with something like this; a singed picture and letter from Obama, or maybe a free flight out to meet him.
I mean, if he really is a supporter of Obama, and did all of this just to support his chosen candidate, what better reward could there possibly be?
he seems awfully underexperienced to be the figurehead of the United States. Actually, an inexperienced candidate would probably make the perfect figurehead, who could easily be controlled by his/her party.
However, I have a feeling you meant something more along the lines of "representative", or perhaps just "president".
I agree with you; there were many things that killed Deus Ex 2, and all of them had nothing to do with the console version. They basically decided to axe everything that made the first one a good game. The GP can try and pin that on the console version, but the blame really lies with the game's designers.
I've seen several good console ports of PC games. Warcraft II and Diablo made an appearance on the PS1 with little ill effect, system wise. Warcraft II had some additional features, such as a build queue; you could set a building to build a set amount of units, or just have it crank a unit out until you ran out of resources. Original Deus Ex went to the PS2 pretty much intact, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 went to XBox with minor changes, although the latter had quite a few more loading screens.
It seems to me that both PCs and consoles are valid video gaming platforms in terms of technical merits; it's the game designers that really screw things up.
I feel your pain. Reinstalling WoW and Guild Wars takes forever... WoW is 4 disks to get me to version 1.7, then patching, then 4 discs to Burning Crusade, then more patching, then installing UI mods...
Even Guild Wars more streamlined patcher takes quite a long time from a fresh install. Since everything is instanced, it seems to patch/decompress areas I visit on the fly, as well as downloading patches in the background while I play.
I never got this either; why doesn't anyone call video games art? Movies and music are both used in video games, and both are considered art forms. What makes video games so special that they are not? Are they not aesthetically pleasing? Are they not capable of evoking emotion?
It seems to me that art is all about providing an experience for the viewer, for evoking emotion from the viewer even if it is just the simple pleasure of viewing something beautiful. Video games possess both an aural or visual component for doing this, but they also have an additional dimension that most art pieces cannot; interaction. The player is directly inovlved in the experience, and can make choices to affect its outcome. It seems to me that uniquely engaging pieces could be created taking advantage of these three areas. I would argue that several already exist.
Perhaps it's the name of the medium? Should we switch to calling it "interactive digital simulation" to make it more appealing?
I do agree that Peter Molyneux is quite the blow hard, but he has made some decent games. Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Populus... Just his recent offerings have been somewhat lackluster; they seem more like tech demos than complete games. Black & White, Fable; all promised more than was ultimately delivered, but they were still enjoyable. Largely shielded from Peter's hype machine, I actually enjoyed Fable quite a bit for the straightforward action RPG it was, instead of staring at the trees for hours and thinking, "Why are they not growing?!?!" He produced a pretty good game, even if it wasn't the revolutionary title he promised.
Mr. Molyneux has good ideas, great ones even, but he doesn't seem to have the ability to really bring them to fruition. He needs a yang to his yin; somebody who can take all his ideas, figure out ones that are actually feasible, distill it to some core set that makes the games fun, and then follow through.
That said, I am cautiously optimistic about Fable 2. I enjoyed the first and The Lost Chapters a fair amount, even though they turned out to be more shallow than they first appeared. I liked that by the end of the game, you essentially were a god-like hero, but you never really got to do anything with it. Most of the time you're fighting almost the same bandits you were at the beginning. They need to offset your powers with some equally powerful villains I think.
As for the dog, I think it's a great idea. I can imagine how many ways it could be useful: using it to sniff out treasure, having it guide you back to areas you've been before, not to mention the emotional attachment it might build up. I suppose we'll see how it actually turns out in 2008...
Sorry to bother you, but it seems like you are knowledgeable about DS homebrew, and I've been dying to ask this question of someone. The question is pretty simple: what card would you recommend for DS homebrew? I want to get started programming some small games and programs for the DS, but I find the sheer number of cards available to be dizzying.
In addition to running homebrew apps, I was hoping to run DS Linux, ScummVM, maybe some emulators, and possibly use it as a media player as well. Again, sorry to bother you, but it seems you might be able to steer me the right way in terms of getting a good, compatible card, and might know of the most affordable one to get too. ^_^
In a no-nonsense presentation... Microsoft's chief executive said the company's partnership with Novell... "demonstrated clearly the value of intellectual property, even in the open-source world." I don't know; it sounds like plenty of nonsense to me.
Animal Crossing may have not had an overt goal, but the structure of the system allowed you to set your own goals to accomplish. You could try and fully upgrade your house, collect all the fossils/fish/bugs/type of furniture, try to make all the townspeople happy, etc.
Second Life has none of these; there's no real strcuture to it. Its only a fancy interface to a chat room.
This reminds me of one of my college professors, who for some reason thought Microsoft could do no wrong. Every day he would come into class and say stuff like, "I was looking at the first public beta of.NET 3.0 that Microsoft recently released, and I've gotta say, it's pretty slick." Funny thing, though, he would never expand on what the "slick" part was...
When pressed, he always answered with something about "metadata improvements" and "XML", as well as stipulating "you could go look up the details for yourself".
I don't know about you, but I'm rather happy I don't get interrogated every time I go to make a purchase. I'm happy the people at Wal-mart don't start assuming the CDRs I buy for data backups are for "teh warez", or the Sharpies I buy to mark them are for "huffing". Honestly, how far does this "reasonability" have to go? The GP post mentioned a person calling a dealership for a "fast car"; wouldn't they just help them out without asking questions? Does the dealer have to immediately assume he's a criminal? And are you going to tell me that if a guy with a bag full of money and a gun (he had to rob the bank with something, right?) climbed in your car and told you to drive, you would tell him no, risking your life for a bag of money that doesn't belong to you and will eventually be recovered anyway? Or that any court in America would say you had a "legal obligation" to tell him no?
I am not sure what the comment about "head shops" has to do with anything. It seems you are advocating shutting down stores whose wares could possibly be used for illegal activity. Why stop at the head shops? Shut down the home supply stores; all that PVC pipe is just waiting to be turned into bongs, all that fertilizer sitting there, waiting to become a bomb. Cars can be weapons, common tools can be used for illegal entry, and nasal decongestants can be turned into methamphetamines; should Bush halt the sale of these too?
In my opinion, this sounds more like paranoia than reasonability.
Sony has never won a format war, haven't they learned their lesson? Just look at Beta and MD. Not really... Both of these formats gained traction in Japan, just not the US/Europe/most of the world. MD players basically trumped regular CD players in Japan since their inception, and only started going away now with the addition of MP3 players and phones that can hold audio. Beta also survived in Japan, and became a standard for video cameras at least.
I have to agree with you. When I saw the headline of the story, I thought, "Oh, why not an FPGA?", but upon opening and seeing the words "high school", the idea quickly evaporated. It's just too complex for not enough pay off; in order for it to be used with any sort of robotics system would require hours and hours of work by the teacher, and it would fly over most of the kids heads anyway. Even though there are available microcontrollers, such as Picoblaze, I've used the Spartan 3 starter kit myself, in college, and it went over the heads of some professors.
Sure, maybe one or two kids in the class would really enjoy it and just go nuts, but for the others, it would probably be the most boring thing they'd ever seen.
Slashdot Mirror
FTL = !FTW
I don't really think he's asking for a silver bullet, just a good engine. As your Fred Books allusion suggests, of course he can't reduce the essential complexity of building a game, but he certainly can reduce the accidental complexity by choosing a good engine. Since this is Slashdot, I must indulge my instincts to extend your analogy of killing the monster "werewolf" that is software complexity:
Choosing a poorly designed engine is like greasing the werewolf, and then trying to wrestle him.
Choosing a poorly documented engine is like trying to wrestle a werewolf in the dark.
Basically, I think he wants to hear some experiences with engines so that he can hopefully: 1) avoid having to try every engine he comes across, and 2) reduce his accidental complexity. "Science stuff" most likely alludes to wanting to do some physics simulations, which are quite handy for all games. And I highly doubt it's an advertisement for Torque since he is forthrightly asking for a replacement for it.
They're may not be a silver bullet, but being well informed is helpful for any software project.
Actually, I remember running original Marathon in Windows XP with no problems. You can even download all of the Marathon content for free; just have a look here and here. It is not a very difficult process, just takes a little bit of reading and moving things around.
I never actually finished the first game. The story seemed to be primarily dolled out through text communications between the various characters, and you could quite easily ignore it and just shoot things. If you've played Halo first like I have, everything will be eerily familiar, and some things are just plain cool. Dual wielded shotguns anyone?
I think everybody would look at this a bit different if they actually did hijack the guy's page, but you're absolutely wrong. The only thing he got was the URL myspace.com/barackobama to point to the page managed by him and his staff. That is all. Go on, go look at Barack's page; he only has 35k friends right now, and a sign up date of 4/25/07. In fact, why don't you also check out the fan's page that was supposedly hijacked?
Every story reported about this MySpace/Obama case has stated this clearly, and there's evidence to back it up. What you stated is absolutely, 100% wrong.
Personally, I think Obama did the right thing. Imagine if he had continued to negotiate and brought it down to a more reasonable price; how many people would be running to social networking sites, making a page related to Obama, and then trying to enter negotiations?
I think somebody in his campaign probably realized what a wildfire this could turn into, and then they went to MySpace. As for how old the registration is, that makes no difference; it wasn't his to begin with, and MySpace has a long standing precedent of doing this for other celebrities.
It makes me a bit suspect of the guy who was using his name too. If he really was such a supporter of Obama, why didn't he request to meet him in person instead of demanding a high sum? Seems like it would've been the perfect opportunity to me.
However, I have to take issue with you stating the election of officials as "controlled revolutions" though. In revolutions, real people die for what they believe in. To say that getting a bunch of people to check your name off on a piece of paper equates to giving up your life for your beliefs is demeaning to anyone who has ever been a real revolutionary.
The greatest strength and greatest weakness of democracy is it depends on its citizens to maintain and evolve it. Whether they choose to actively support it or let it crumble into ruin is entirely up to them.
You seem to be the highest modded post advocating the "49K is nothing to Obama's billions" idea, so I suppose this is the best place to reply.
Is $49K less than the millions raised by Obama's campaign? Yes, of course.
Was his campaign under any sort of obligation to pay this volunteer? No.
Should Obama's campaign have paid this volunteer for his time anyway? Hell no.
Suppose for a moment that they just paid out the $49K the guy quoted, no questions asked. What's to stop the next guy on a so-called "Web 2.0" site from asking the same price? All of a sudden you have profiles related to Obama in Flickr, Youtube, Xanga, Ringo, LiveJournal, Tagged, Blogger, orkut, etc., all of them trying to negotiate a price whilst disseminating who knows what kind of information. It would turn this one volunteer site into a whole plethora of rogue "fan sites", all clamoring for a payout. It's sad for the volunteer since he obviously worked hard, but he was, after all, a volunteer; he shouldn't have been expecting any kind of compensation in the first place.
It's easy to look at the millions in Obama's warchest and think "Why's he being so stingy?", but this really isn't about money, it's about public opinion and votes. Of course, you can say he might have spurned however many votes were on that guy's MySpace friend's page, but probably not; the only reason they became his friend was because they were searching for Obama, not the guy talking about him. He was a volunteer, and he did a good job, but he was just a volunteer. If I was in his place, when they asked for a price, I would've requested to meet Barack Obama. A free plane ride, maybe some meals, and a chance to meet the person I had been supporting all this time. I imagine Obama's campaign will recover with something like this; a singed picture and letter from Obama, or maybe a free flight out to meet him.
I mean, if he really is a supporter of Obama, and did all of this just to support his chosen candidate, what better reward could there possibly be?
However, I have a feeling you meant something more along the lines of "representative", or perhaps just "president".
I agree with you; there were many things that killed Deus Ex 2, and all of them had nothing to do with the console version. They basically decided to axe everything that made the first one a good game. The GP can try and pin that on the console version, but the blame really lies with the game's designers.
I've seen several good console ports of PC games. Warcraft II and Diablo made an appearance on the PS1 with little ill effect, system wise. Warcraft II had some additional features, such as a build queue; you could set a building to build a set amount of units, or just have it crank a unit out until you ran out of resources. Original Deus Ex went to the PS2 pretty much intact, Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 went to XBox with minor changes, although the latter had quite a few more loading screens.
It seems to me that both PCs and consoles are valid video gaming platforms in terms of technical merits; it's the game designers that really screw things up.
I feel your pain. Reinstalling WoW and Guild Wars takes forever... WoW is 4 disks to get me to version 1.7, then patching, then 4 discs to Burning Crusade, then more patching, then installing UI mods...
Even Guild Wars more streamlined patcher takes quite a long time from a fresh install. Since everything is instanced, it seems to patch/decompress areas I visit on the fly, as well as downloading patches in the background while I play.
IRON MAIDEN?!
Excellent idea, old bean!
When the winning console is announced, I recommend unplugging it in preparation for "the quickening".
Oh Saturn and Dreamcast, that was such an unfortuante way to go...
When driving, I rapidly swing the steering wheel left and right.
Especially while drifting; I bring those blue sparks, ladies.
I never got this either; why doesn't anyone call video games art? Movies and music are both used in video games, and both are considered art forms. What makes video games so special that they are not? Are they not aesthetically pleasing? Are they not capable of evoking emotion?
It seems to me that art is all about providing an experience for the viewer, for evoking emotion from the viewer even if it is just the simple pleasure of viewing something beautiful. Video games possess both an aural or visual component for doing this, but they also have an additional dimension that most art pieces cannot; interaction. The player is directly inovlved in the experience, and can make choices to affect its outcome. It seems to me that uniquely engaging pieces could be created taking advantage of these three areas. I would argue that several already exist.
Perhaps it's the name of the medium? Should we switch to calling it "interactive digital simulation" to make it more appealing?
I do agree that Peter Molyneux is quite the blow hard, but he has made some decent games. Dungeon Keeper, Theme Park, Populus... Just his recent offerings have been somewhat lackluster; they seem more like tech demos than complete games. Black & White, Fable; all promised more than was ultimately delivered, but they were still enjoyable. Largely shielded from Peter's hype machine, I actually enjoyed Fable quite a bit for the straightforward action RPG it was, instead of staring at the trees for hours and thinking, "Why are they not growing?!?!" He produced a pretty good game, even if it wasn't the revolutionary title he promised.
Mr. Molyneux has good ideas, great ones even, but he doesn't seem to have the ability to really bring them to fruition. He needs a yang to his yin; somebody who can take all his ideas, figure out ones that are actually feasible, distill it to some core set that makes the games fun, and then follow through.
That said, I am cautiously optimistic about Fable 2. I enjoyed the first and The Lost Chapters a fair amount, even though they turned out to be more shallow than they first appeared. I liked that by the end of the game, you essentially were a god-like hero, but you never really got to do anything with it. Most of the time you're fighting almost the same bandits you were at the beginning. They need to offset your powers with some equally powerful villains I think.
As for the dog, I think it's a great idea. I can imagine how many ways it could be useful: using it to sniff out treasure, having it guide you back to areas you've been before, not to mention the emotional attachment it might build up. I suppose we'll see how it actually turns out in 2008...
Sorry to bother you, but it seems like you are knowledgeable about DS homebrew, and I've been dying to ask this question of someone. The question is pretty simple: what card would you recommend for DS homebrew? I want to get started programming some small games and programs for the DS, but I find the sheer number of cards available to be dizzying.
In addition to running homebrew apps, I was hoping to run DS Linux, ScummVM, maybe some emulators, and possibly use it as a media player as well. Again, sorry to bother you, but it seems you might be able to steer me the right way in terms of getting a good, compatible card, and might know of the most affordable one to get too. ^_^
Terminal services? Remote Desktop? On Windows?
Surely you jest, good sir!
I'd say this one was pretty good; I'm planning on getting a Wii/360 when Tretton sends me a check!
Oh, wait, good for who?
Animal Crossing may have not had an overt goal, but the structure of the system allowed you to set your own goals to accomplish. You could try and fully upgrade your house, collect all the fossils/fish/bugs/type of furniture, try to make all the townspeople happy, etc.
Second Life has none of these; there's no real strcuture to it. Its only a fancy interface to a chat room.
Slight OT tangent.
.NET 3.0 that Microsoft recently released, and I've gotta say, it's pretty slick." Funny thing, though, he would never expand on what the "slick" part was...
This reminds me of one of my college professors, who for some reason thought Microsoft could do no wrong. Every day he would come into class and say stuff like, "I was looking at the first public beta of
When pressed, he always answered with something about "metadata improvements" and "XML", as well as stipulating "you could go look up the details for yourself".
I don't know about you, but I'm rather happy I don't get interrogated every time I go to make a purchase. I'm happy the people at Wal-mart don't start assuming the CDRs I buy for data backups are for "teh warez", or the Sharpies I buy to mark them are for "huffing". Honestly, how far does this "reasonability" have to go? The GP post mentioned a person calling a dealership for a "fast car"; wouldn't they just help them out without asking questions? Does the dealer have to immediately assume he's a criminal? And are you going to tell me that if a guy with a bag full of money and a gun (he had to rob the bank with something, right?) climbed in your car and told you to drive, you would tell him no, risking your life for a bag of money that doesn't belong to you and will eventually be recovered anyway? Or that any court in America would say you had a "legal obligation" to tell him no?
I am not sure what the comment about "head shops" has to do with anything. It seems you are advocating shutting down stores whose wares could possibly be used for illegal activity. Why stop at the head shops? Shut down the home supply stores; all that PVC pipe is just waiting to be turned into bongs, all that fertilizer sitting there, waiting to become a bomb. Cars can be weapons, common tools can be used for illegal entry, and nasal decongestants can be turned into methamphetamines; should Bush halt the sale of these too?
In my opinion, this sounds more like paranoia than reasonability.
I imagine Sony considered these "wins".
I have to agree with you. When I saw the headline of the story, I thought, "Oh, why not an FPGA?", but upon opening and seeing the words "high school", the idea quickly evaporated. It's just too complex for not enough pay off; in order for it to be used with any sort of robotics system would require hours and hours of work by the teacher, and it would fly over most of the kids heads anyway. Even though there are available microcontrollers, such as Picoblaze, I've used the Spartan 3 starter kit myself, in college, and it went over the heads of some professors.
Sure, maybe one or two kids in the class would really enjoy it and just go nuts, but for the others, it would probably be the most boring thing they'd ever seen.