A useful "don't cut humans" test would be something that distinguishes a human from, say, the side of pork I WANT my robot to cut up.
I would imagine that the collision sensors would detect unanticipated collisions. If it's just got the knife out of the drawer and it's making its way to the chopping board, then it probably wants to stop instantly if the knife touches something. If it's chopping meat, the meat will probably be cold so a thermal sensor could trigger a "not meat! hand! stop!" response if someone WAS stupid enough to stick their hand on the chopping board. If they deliberately chilled their hand in cold water, say, then put it on the chopping board with the meat while the robot was chopping, then I'd say that signifies intent and chopping their hand off would only be following orders.
Couldnt they leave the courses/areas open but make the acievements require high levels of skill in them all (e.g. collect all the gold stars that are in really high up spots).
Actually, this is a gripe that I have with pretty much all modern games, compared with 'classic' games. Back in my day, when it snowed uphill both ways and kids kept off my lawn, the only thing stopping you from getting somewhere in a game was whether or not you could actually GET there, within the game mechanics. Back then I imagine that if you'd gotten to the extra life on Sonic stage 1, and been told "I'm sorry, you don't have enough Chaos Points to collect that extra life, you need 9200 or more!" then you'd have said "What the FUCK is this SHIT?" and thrown the cartridge in the bin.
Now you're expected to accept it when the game says "No, you can't race on track 3 until you've come #1 on track 1 fifteen times while whistling the national anthem backwards and masturbating a skunk." Apparently those fifteen laps of skunk masturbation comprise half of the "90 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY!!!!!!!!" that are advertised.
Competitive was only mentioned in the context of FPS games. Then again, I must stand corrected - Donkey Kong was released in 1980 (shortly before I was born!) whereas Tetris was first adapted from Polyominoes in 1984. Regardless, you only prove my point - competitive FPS and other such 'e-sport' games do have a lot of staying power (witness CounterStrike or StarCraft) but puzzle games can still endure if the game mechanic is good enough.
Actually, that's a good point - how is using such a low-power infrastructure (even as a starting point) any easier than starting from scratch? Are they just re-purposing the pipes and sheaths from the old landlines?
For starters, they already have the land reserved. I'd imagine the paperwork required to requisition a half-square-meter of public land on a roadside in the center of a city would be overwhelming, and that's not to mention the added drama of laying new cable routes.
Five bucks says we start seeing this code in copy-paste applications soon because people too lazy to write and understand the code they're producing are also to lazy to look where the code came from...
Yeah, that sounded pretty annoying to me, although I never played. Yes, we get it, you kill a dragon to get a sword to kill a bigger dragon to get a better sword to kill a BIGGER dragon to... anyway. The point is the same dragon you just killed shouldn't magically repop a second later and a level higher, or the entire game could just be replaced with some target dummies that give XP. Not that it couldn't anyway, but I digress.
If I had mod points I'd give you a +insightful, but I don't, so I'll give you a post instead. I think you make a good point - games are often marketed on their genre and their technical feature set, but there's not much press attention given to "is this game an RPG with a focus on puzzles" vs "focus on action / grinding / leveling / item collection". You don't see "Best sandbox game of its generation - but if you like story then ignore it". Maybe in the depths of a review, but the company's own marketing department should be trying harder to let their audience know exactly what kind of game to expect.
Maybe it's something to do with the fact that even in the games industry, marketing people are often fairly generic (like 'managers' are) and tend to have little domain knowledge compared to their general 'marketing' knowledge.
Getting good, marketable ideas, that are developable into a commercial success is enormously difficult.
You're correct if we're talking about small scale PopCap-style games. If you're considering bigger, AAA-scale blockbusters, though, the development costs far more than the basic game design. Creating a new Tetris requires a work of genius, yes, but creating a new WoW requires impossible levels of funding.
In fact, looking through the list of Cataclysm changes, a lot of them are things I begged them to do way back in vanilla WoW. Fixing game mechanic scaling (I still think spellpower should scale with spirit not int, but whatever), providing multiple equal progression paths for raiders and non-raiders (hello badges and heroics), if I could explain in detail what seemed obvious to me back then when it's just my hobby, and they then come around to my viewpoint four years later, it can't be that hard.
Actually, the story that came to my mind was more along the lines of this one.
Given the choice of paying $400 for a Wii plus the Wii Fit game, or paying $18k for a medical grade device that does pretty much exactly the same job, I'd think the government would prefer the former.
Yes exactly. Some film schools really needs to watch this too. I hear they're developing a pornography filming program - it's only a minor, though. No majors.
Good analogy. (Heh heh... analogy has the word 'anal' in it.)
In fact, shooting porn is probably a more pragmatic career path.
Unfortunately, as a Mason student, I can tell you that they won't be taking C++ unless they voluntarily opt to take higher-level CS classes. Our introductory language here is Python, which while not necessarily an easy course, it's still not as challenging as C.
Why does it matter how "challenging" a language is? Surely the important features of a language are execution speed, development speed, flexibility, expressiveness, and readability? Deliberately choosing a language because it's challenging is fine if you're doing it as an intellectual exercise, but is a terrible way to start a commercial development project.
I do think there are underlying problems with this degree, though. Being the game designer is 'the fun bit' of game development. You wave your hand and the entire game world changes. You say 'it shall be so' and teams of peons toil to make it so. However, only a small percentage of game developers get to be designers - in the company I worked in, we had one lead designer and two or three assistant designers working on smaller details, out of a total staff of around 100. I'm sure students would flock to a course in professional surfing, too, if it were offered - and there are probably as many paid positions for surfers as there are for video game designers.
In that case you simply take it up the food chain. Transparency is your best friend. Your boss is demanding a password that your standard operating procedure says you're not allowed to give him? Ask for a meeting between you, your boss, and his boss. Explain the situation and ask for authorisation. Keep going up the hierarchy until you're talking to someone who has the authority to override the rule which is preventing you from giving out the password. Then, if they say to do it, they take responsibility. If they say *not* to do it, they STILL take responsibility.
'Supervisor' may mean your direct superior in your company's chain of command. In that case, he should already have access. If he doesn't, then hand it over.
''Supervisor' may mean a liason officer between your company and a client. In that case, hell no - but it's up to your boss (or his boss, etc) to make that call.
If someone higher up on the chain of command than your boss asks you to break a rule you might ask them to ask you formally (via your boss) but then you still do it. If your boss tells you to break a rule that he set, and security is compromised, you wouldn't be liable (as long as your have the request is documented).
This is excellent advice. As long as it's clear that you're acting under orders at all times, and what you're doing is legal, you take no personal liability. You can do it under protest if you think it's stupid or destructive, but if your boss says "switch that power supply from 240v mode to 110v mode" then in the end, he takes responsibility for the resulting loud bang.
Of course, you still have to obey the law. You can't steal a car or kneecap someone and then get off with "da boss says do it, so I do it". More relevantly, you can't withhold data or property from the police if they have the proper warrant. If I had sole access to vital infrastructure, and a government official or law enforcement agent wanted me to give them access, I'd take the issue to my boss and let them duke it out. If I *was* that boss, then I would take the issue to a lawyer to see whether I could legally withhold the information. That's what the chain of command (and ultimately, legal consultation) is for - to make, and take responsibility for, high level policy decisions.
The point (on here) is that Steve was really proud / pretentious / narcissistic that they do exactly that. He takes a swipe at others for being lowbrow.
Mr. Jobs has made an entire career on pretension. There's a reason that Apple evokes so much rabid zealotry from the otherwise computer-agnostic arty types. Just look at the way he boldly announces products' limitations and disabilities as strokes of design genius (and then later, even more astoundingly, announces re-enabling basic functionality as 'groundbreaking new features' - witness the iPhone's recent addition of multi-tasking, and the "you can't fit a netbook in your pocket" campaign with the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch, then the backflip to "bigger is better" with the release of the iPad). In the art world, you can go an awfully long way on "you're just not insightful enough to understand the vision", and these schmucks don't realise that it doesn't carry over into technical areas.
And they don't have an "18+: There Might Be a Nipple Somewhere in This App" rating? What makes this sort of adult material different from other sorts of adult material, aside from the developer agreement?
Puritanical moral hang-ups more suited to a Sharia state than a capitalist democracy?
I dare you to go to any foreign country and walk around without your passport.
Try Europe. After a rather gruelling entrance exam at Heathrow Airport (I'd just spent a month and a half in Thailand, I looked like a hippie, I was possibly still drunk from the free booze on the plane flight, and I couldn't remember the address I was staying at) I then proceeded to travel overland all the way to Amsterdam via Paris and virtually every city in southern Germany. I had to use my passport exactly once and that was while bluffing my way into a World Cup match. I actually spent ten minutes wandering around the train station in Paris after getting off the chunnel train, trying to find someone to show my passport so I could get it stamped, before being told not to bother.
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It takes a hell of a lot longer and costs a lot more to replace half your hand.
A useful "don't cut humans" test would be something that distinguishes a human from, say, the side of pork I WANT my robot to cut up.
I would imagine that the collision sensors would detect unanticipated collisions. If it's just got the knife out of the drawer and it's making its way to the chopping board, then it probably wants to stop instantly if the knife touches something. If it's chopping meat, the meat will probably be cold so a thermal sensor could trigger a "not meat! hand! stop!" response if someone WAS stupid enough to stick their hand on the chopping board. If they deliberately chilled their hand in cold water, say, then put it on the chopping board with the meat while the robot was chopping, then I'd say that signifies intent and chopping their hand off would only be following orders.
Couldnt they leave the courses/areas open but make the acievements require high levels of skill in them all (e.g. collect all the gold stars that are in really high up spots).
Actually, this is a gripe that I have with pretty much all modern games, compared with 'classic' games. Back in my day, when it snowed uphill both ways and kids kept off my lawn, the only thing stopping you from getting somewhere in a game was whether or not you could actually GET there, within the game mechanics. Back then I imagine that if you'd gotten to the extra life on Sonic stage 1, and been told "I'm sorry, you don't have enough Chaos Points to collect that extra life, you need 9200 or more!" then you'd have said "What the FUCK is this SHIT?" and thrown the cartridge in the bin.
Now you're expected to accept it when the game says "No, you can't race on track 3 until you've come #1 on track 1 fifteen times while whistling the national anthem backwards and masturbating a skunk." Apparently those fifteen laps of skunk masturbation comprise half of the "90 HOURS OF GAMEPLAY!!!!!!!!" that are advertised.
Competitive was only mentioned in the context of FPS games. Then again, I must stand corrected - Donkey Kong was released in 1980 (shortly before I was born!) whereas Tetris was first adapted from Polyominoes in 1984. Regardless, you only prove my point - competitive FPS and other such 'e-sport' games do have a lot of staying power (witness CounterStrike or StarCraft) but puzzle games can still endure if the game mechanic is good enough.
That might be why competitive FPS games tend to have more staying power; they're more of a sport than some sort of clever puzzle/timing game.
Tetris.
Actually, that's a good point - how is using such a low-power infrastructure (even as a starting point) any easier than starting from scratch? Are they just re-purposing the pipes and sheaths from the old landlines?
For starters, they already have the land reserved. I'd imagine the paperwork required to requisition a half-square-meter of public land on a roadside in the center of a city would be overwhelming, and that's not to mention the added drama of laying new cable routes.
NI!
Five bucks says we start seeing this code in copy-paste applications soon because people too lazy to write and understand the code they're producing are also to lazy to look where the code came from...
I hate you for how plausible that sounds.
Yeah, that sounded pretty annoying to me, although I never played. Yes, we get it, you kill a dragon to get a sword to kill a bigger dragon to get a better sword to kill a BIGGER dragon to... anyway. The point is the same dragon you just killed shouldn't magically repop a second later and a level higher, or the entire game could just be replaced with some target dummies that give XP. Not that it couldn't anyway, but I digress.
A "tossed together" D&D game can easily run a year.
Maybe not everyone wants to spend a year playing a 'tossed together' game?
If I had mod points I'd give you a +insightful, but I don't, so I'll give you a post instead. I think you make a good point - games are often marketed on their genre and their technical feature set, but there's not much press attention given to "is this game an RPG with a focus on puzzles" vs "focus on action / grinding / leveling / item collection". You don't see "Best sandbox game of its generation - but if you like story then ignore it". Maybe in the depths of a review, but the company's own marketing department should be trying harder to let their audience know exactly what kind of game to expect.
Maybe it's something to do with the fact that even in the games industry, marketing people are often fairly generic (like 'managers' are) and tend to have little domain knowledge compared to their general 'marketing' knowledge.
Getting good, marketable ideas, that are developable into a commercial success is enormously difficult.
You're correct if we're talking about small scale PopCap-style games. If you're considering bigger, AAA-scale blockbusters, though, the development costs far more than the basic game design. Creating a new Tetris requires a work of genius, yes, but creating a new WoW requires impossible levels of funding.
In fact, looking through the list of Cataclysm changes, a lot of them are things I begged them to do way back in vanilla WoW. Fixing game mechanic scaling (I still think spellpower should scale with spirit not int, but whatever), providing multiple equal progression paths for raiders and non-raiders (hello badges and heroics), if I could explain in detail what seemed obvious to me back then when it's just my hobby, and they then come around to my viewpoint four years later, it can't be that hard.
Actually, the story that came to my mind was more along the lines of this one.
Given the choice of paying $400 for a Wii plus the Wii Fit game, or paying $18k for a medical grade device that does pretty much exactly the same job, I'd think the government would prefer the former.
Wow, I've been doing it all along and I thought I was just being lazy. Now I can tell people, "Shush, I'm Zen."
Is there a better commentary on the west's general inability to grok zen than our endless bastardization of the word, zen?
That's so ironic. *ducks*
Yes exactly. Some film schools really needs to watch this too. I hear they're developing a pornography filming program - it's only a minor, though. No majors.
Good analogy. (Heh heh... analogy has the word 'anal' in it.)
In fact, shooting porn is probably a more pragmatic career path.
Unfortunately, as a Mason student, I can tell you that they won't be taking C++ unless they voluntarily opt to take higher-level CS classes. Our introductory language here is Python, which while not necessarily an easy course, it's still not as challenging as C.
Why does it matter how "challenging" a language is? Surely the important features of a language are execution speed, development speed, flexibility, expressiveness, and readability? Deliberately choosing a language because it's challenging is fine if you're doing it as an intellectual exercise, but is a terrible way to start a commercial development project.
I do think there are underlying problems with this degree, though. Being the game designer is 'the fun bit' of game development. You wave your hand and the entire game world changes. You say 'it shall be so' and teams of peons toil to make it so. However, only a small percentage of game developers get to be designers - in the company I worked in, we had one lead designer and two or three assistant designers working on smaller details, out of a total staff of around 100. I'm sure students would flock to a course in professional surfing, too, if it were offered - and there are probably as many paid positions for surfers as there are for video game designers.
In that case you simply take it up the food chain. Transparency is your best friend. Your boss is demanding a password that your standard operating procedure says you're not allowed to give him? Ask for a meeting between you, your boss, and his boss. Explain the situation and ask for authorisation. Keep going up the hierarchy until you're talking to someone who has the authority to override the rule which is preventing you from giving out the password. Then, if they say to do it, they take responsibility. If they say *not* to do it, they STILL take responsibility.
It depends on what supervisor means.
'Supervisor' may mean your direct superior in your company's chain of command. In that case, he should already have access. If he doesn't, then hand it over.
''Supervisor' may mean a liason officer between your company and a client. In that case, hell no - but it's up to your boss (or his boss, etc) to make that call.
If someone higher up on the chain of command than your boss asks you to break a rule you might ask them to ask you formally (via your boss) but then you still do it. If your boss tells you to break a rule that he set, and security is compromised, you wouldn't be liable (as long as your have the request is documented).
This is excellent advice. As long as it's clear that you're acting under orders at all times, and what you're doing is legal, you take no personal liability. You can do it under protest if you think it's stupid or destructive, but if your boss says "switch that power supply from 240v mode to 110v mode" then in the end, he takes responsibility for the resulting loud bang.
Of course, you still have to obey the law. You can't steal a car or kneecap someone and then get off with "da boss says do it, so I do it". More relevantly, you can't withhold data or property from the police if they have the proper warrant. If I had sole access to vital infrastructure, and a government official or law enforcement agent wanted me to give them access, I'd take the issue to my boss and let them duke it out. If I *was* that boss, then I would take the issue to a lawyer to see whether I could legally withhold the information. That's what the chain of command (and ultimately, legal consultation) is for - to make, and take responsibility for, high level policy decisions.
He doesn't work there.
I prefer to call it intellectual honesty but you're free to form your own viewpoint.
The point (on here) is that Steve was really proud / pretentious / narcissistic that they do exactly that. He takes a swipe at others for being lowbrow.
Mr. Jobs has made an entire career on pretension. There's a reason that Apple evokes so much rabid zealotry from the otherwise computer-agnostic arty types. Just look at the way he boldly announces products' limitations and disabilities as strokes of design genius (and then later, even more astoundingly, announces re-enabling basic functionality as 'groundbreaking new features' - witness the iPhone's recent addition of multi-tasking, and the "you can't fit a netbook in your pocket" campaign with the release of the iPhone and iPod Touch, then the backflip to "bigger is better" with the release of the iPad). In the art world, you can go an awfully long way on "you're just not insightful enough to understand the vision", and these schmucks don't realise that it doesn't carry over into technical areas.
And they don't have an "18+: There Might Be a Nipple Somewhere in This App" rating? What makes this sort of adult material different from other sorts of adult material, aside from the developer agreement?
Puritanical moral hang-ups more suited to a Sharia state than a capitalist democracy?
I dare you to go to any foreign country and walk around without your passport.
Try Europe. After a rather gruelling entrance exam at Heathrow Airport (I'd just spent a month and a half in Thailand, I looked like a hippie, I was possibly still drunk from the free booze on the plane flight, and I couldn't remember the address I was staying at) I then proceeded to travel overland all the way to Amsterdam via Paris and virtually every city in southern Germany. I had to use my passport exactly once and that was while bluffing my way into a World Cup match. I actually spent ten minutes wandering around the train station in Paris after getting off the chunnel train, trying to find someone to show my passport so I could get it stamped, before being told not to bother.