Any idiot can have a pile of ideas. The implementation is what matters.
Too bad the idea pays 95%, the implementation 5%
I run into "Ideas Men" in the indie game dev scene all the time... Most never make a game unless they learn actual coding, art, music -- Some actual skill other than thinking up WiBCIs ("wouldn't it be cool if ___"s). In my experience, it's the implementation that pays, ideas are worth less than a dime a dozen.
In addition to this parental and, yes, proper advice: Go read some books in stead of throwing toys.
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
Thing is; there is no way of telling just yet. It is just a way of predicting the future, and there is no such business.
There is this thing called Science, and it has a Method. There is a way to test the hypothesis: "Warming trends in climate change are mad made". You simply apply the scientific method. We change what we're doing, and try to reduce our impact as much as possible. Then we observe what happens. Considering we only have one Planet to use, I think it would be irrational NOT to do the experiment.
Life has changed the climate of this planet before -- It's why you can breathe oxygen, so there is precedent for thinking life forms can cause massive planet-scale changes. Additionally: Climate change caused Mammoths and a lot of other species to die out. Rapid Climate change killed the Dinosaurs and much of the life on the planet as well.
No one can know 100% for sure EITHER WAY (man made warming or otherwise). What we can say is that there is a Chance that we're going to burn ourselves out of a place to live.
TL;DR: Stop whining you selfish fool, the CHANCE that it could be us causing rapid climate chance means we need to take action. You just don't want to make any sacrifice at all even if it could save us all from extinction.
I guess the point is, we're not all bad. And the stupid high school kid in Bumblefuck, MO isn't representative of the entire brand.
You've just proven otherwise... Your ignorance is astounding.
One example of your ignorance is your use of the term "Bumfuck". It's a term which disparages not only folks of small (farming) towns, but also potentially Gays.
I was born in a small town of Missouri (population 200), now I live in Houston (4th largest city in the USA), and I've lived in other small towns and big cities over the years. As an Elementary school kid in "Bumfuck, MO", I built my own electronics -- I made an LED game of Tetris with only transistors, no ICs. When personal computers came around, I was the first in town to assemble my own. I now know almost everything about computing hardware. I write system level software, build my own compilers for languages I invent myself -- I Debug Machine Level Op Code when I make the Debuggers. I know how to build a hub from scratch -- I can "type" by making and breaking circuits with bare wires on the serial port. I certainly know far more about technology than you even care to -- My eight year old self would probably have bested you in any test of intellect. You're clearly a chauvinist. The environment does not make you stupid, only your ignorance does.
Furthermore, your big box electronic stores DO NOT EXIST in the places one would consider "Bumfuck"... further proving your ignorance.
Both large and small towns have pros and cons. In a small town you typically find individuals who necessarily wield a broad spectrum of knowledge within their field of expertise. In larger cities it's been my experience that there are far more specialists with deep but narrowly focused skill sets.
For instance, I repaired a computer for a friend in Pittsburgh, PA, who had returned from the Geek Squad -- The machine would turn itself on for no reason, but only when connected to her broadband modem. From this description I immediately knew where to look, but the GS was mystified -- As you no doubt are as well. It's an incorrect implementation of the Wake On LAN protocol in the motherboard's integrated NIC. A simple BIOS setting disabled WOL and solved the issue.
When I lived in a small community on Mars, I found the local computer Gal was on par with my level of experience. We talked computers and geeked out over electronics together -- I helped her fixed a bluray player (GS: "Buy a new one"), and she even repaired my classic Galaga arcade cabinet, FOR FUN. That's service you can't get at any big box electronics store -- Least of all Best Buy's Geek Squad.
In conclusion, think on this: You'll naturally find far more butt-fucking high school aged individuals in a larger population density.
I've always considered Best Buy a terrific example to illustrate the quote "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
If publishers are insisting that people throw away the value left in the good that they would normally resell, then the prices better come down to reflect that loss of value in the product.
I agree. The other thing is -- When you build a car, you do work, and the worker gets paid for that work once. Publishers do not need to exist. The game makers that work at the studios get paid once for the work they do, just like any other worker. Once their work is done the configuration of bits is literally in near infinite supply thanks to how little it costs to replicate digital information. Basic economics 101: Price tends to Zero as Supply approaches infinity, regardless of Demand or Cost to create.
Imagine a world without Publishers, where the folks working at the studio still get paid for the work they do -- Like a Homebuilder gets a contract to build a house. The builder doesn't get money each time someone moves into the house, she's done her work, she's got other houses to build. So, the game developer gets his paycheck and contracts to make more games. The current publisher model relies on enforcing artificial scarcity because the publisher needs to add cost to distribution to support their very existence, but they don't actually need to exist!
All Software, Art, Games, etc. can be given away for next to nothing after they are created if we pay the creators enough to create them (we'd have already paid for them to do the work). I find it odd when people spread FUD about systems like Kickstarter -- These systems are merely allowing the game creators and artists to get paid up front for their work, a sane business model not based on artificial scarcity -- What's scarce is the ability to configure the bits, not the bits. There will necessarily be a transitionary period while we bootstrap ourselves into the new publishing model. However, right now some developers and artists are actually able to stop emulating Publishers. They can stop extorting their customers via artificial scarcity, by asking for enough money up front to cover the cost their development costs (accounting for profit -- like the way a mechanic factors profit into her prices).
Essentially, my point is that the current game economy is RIDICULOUS. Paying trumped up fees for 1's and 0's in order for publishers to get paid multiple times for doing little or nothing isn't economically tenable, it doesn't make any sense. The price of games CAN be reduced to what it costs to make them simply by circumventing the extortionist & middlemen: Publishers.
The difference between Sci Fi and Wi Fi is that they're both poor designations for differing reasons. Oft, the former contains more events based on actual facts and mathematics than your average (Auto)Biography... If you're talking the station itself, it comes in over wireless signal (WiFi? no Microwave -- Like the oven? No. The radar? Yeah, something like that) and has been dumbed down and renamed to Sy Fy (with plans to complete the naming conversion to Syphie -- slang for one having syphilis). The latter stands for Wireless Fidelity which should be the name of a unit of measure -- a signal to noise ratio -- not the actual technology. That would be like calling your TV a Microwave!
This is getting ridiculous... people will start believing this crap if they keep writing stories about it.
The rumor of the stock market's imminent crash greatly contributed to the crash. Belief is a powerful tool -- In this case, it's not being used for evil, so I'm cool with that.
The real story is what I've been saying for years: Screw the Platforms they're just APIs from a dev's point of view, its the applications that matter most -- I don't care if my users want to use a proprietary or FLOSS OS. Cross platform deployment is the future (it's here now) because we all want choice in OS unhindered by what programs we want to run, and vice versa. When developers start with a cross platform tool chain they don't have to needlessly ignore any market segment (read: money). It's not any more expensive to click [Build.EXE] than to click [Build.RPM] or [Build.DEB] or [Build.APP] or [Build.APK], etc... Porting costs disappear and are replaced with more moolah. Software houses with tons of legacy code (and no foresight) have a hard time bringing games to other platforms, but that doesn't have to be the case, or even the norm.
I'm not talking Java or other VMs here either. My "build all" command builds native binaries for Linux / Windows in x86 and x64, signed.APKs for Android, etc. The price of bringing games to Linux and Mac is now next to nill, so here they come.
Cookie cutter just because it's made with Unity? That's like saying Unreal engine games are cookie cutter. Or any game made with any full featured third party engine is cookie cutter.
I remember an age just before hardware accelerated graphics -- Those game devs who wrote their own (3D) engine had games that looked very different than the others who licensed the Wolf3D, Doom or Quake engine. After hardware accelerated graphics everything sort of looked the same for a while until GPUs had more features to select from -- The fixed function pipeline "look" is easily recognisable. Vertex & pixel shaders have given us back almost all of the flexibility and diversity that software rasterizers have, enabling Homogeneous computing could get us the rest of the way...
Unfortunately, the diversity gained in modern GPUs has been diminished a great deal by the prolific use of just a few 3D engines. Even when the game tries to be visually different I can usually tell at a glance what engine the game's using: It's a running joke among my friends & colleagues, we show a vid and guess the engine. Most games are all too easy. Very few have us scratching our heads, and of those even fewer used a dominant engine like Unity, Unreal, etc. Eg: I can look at a game like Borderlands and say, Ah yep, it's the same engine as Gears. The slow texture streaming on level load is a dead give-away, but there are many other similarities too... It's sameness that otherwise wouldn't exist if not for the re-use of an engine.
Prolific use of only a few physics engines, like Havok, also reduce variety in gameplay a great deal.
I'm not saying reusing software is bad, writing engines is hard work, but it's really not THAT hard (far easier than writing software rasterizers)... I think we need A LOT more engines out there to stave off the sameness we currently have.
I know this is Slashdot, but one thing I've learned is to have an open mind and consider the other side of an argument: Why does someone feel this way? Is there merit to their point of view? Argument is worth less than discussion, IMO.
You've taken the GP's comment to an extreme -- Every game that uses the same engine is not cookie-cutter just because they use the same engines, but the complaint is valid. There is a certain samey look to the Unity, IDTech, Unreal engine, etc. engines, and it takes a fair amount of effort to actually make a game look different while using these engines -- Many gamedevs don't make the effort.
Publishers don't want to hear, "We're making our own engine" -- That's risky, they'd rather you license a popular engine -- Until the indie game resurgence it was very difficult to get into the game industry if you wrote your own engine -- This is why there is so much graphics sameness among AAA titles, IMO. Differentiation comes at a price, and publishers don't want to take the risk.
There would be much more diversity if we used a more diverse selection of game engines. This is why I support the idea of writing a new engine. Even if you don't personally recognize the similarities, can you not believe that some do? I put it to you that more engine diversity naturally begets more diverse games.
One can learn a great deal about Statistics by having multiple Statisticians perform multiple predictions based on a series of datasets with reduced sample sizes, all the way down to one sample.
(un)Surprisingly, the prediction accuracy is only very weakly related to the dataset accuracy, and varies wildly between predictioneers. One can thus conclude that Statistics are Statistically worthless.
I will by your tetrahedron loaves, and they wouldn't be that hard or different to make. I would then expose the loaves to different strains of moulds and play a dangerous game of IRL Minecraft...... Then get sued by Mojang?
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin.
are growing exponentially faster than
you keep using that expression... it does not mean what you think it does
Introducing: FRACTIONAL EXPONENTS! Try our patented Zero over ONE!!!1!!
Also try our small line of negative exponents.
So you don't use the FROM clause?
No, he LIKEs using *.
Any idiot can have a pile of ideas. The implementation is what matters.
Too bad the idea pays 95%, the implementation 5%
I run into "Ideas Men" in the indie game dev scene all the time... Most never make a game unless they learn actual coding, art, music -- Some actual skill other than thinking up WiBCIs ("wouldn't it be cool if ___"s). In my experience, it's the implementation that pays, ideas are worth less than a dime a dozen.
Or when some metal thieves can't find enough scrap metal above ground.
Hippies love color changing things w/ LEDs -- There's certainly a market for Fiber thieves.
So, when will Yahoo team up with Oracle and make an underwhelming Phone OS: yPhone powered by Oracle's Java!
Note: Prefixing "Java" with "Oracle's" will be made mandatory, on penalty of TOS violation.
That's why I never took Klout.com seriously.
Bitcoin.
The 32 in Win32 doesn't mean 32 bits. It only means NOT 16 BIT. You use Win32 on 64 bit systems.
In addition to this parental and, yes, proper advice: Go read some books in stead of throwing toys. There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW. Thing is; there is no way of telling just yet. It is just a way of predicting the future, and there is no such business.
There is this thing called Science, and it has a Method. There is a way to test the hypothesis: "Warming trends in climate change are mad made". You simply apply the scientific method. We change what we're doing, and try to reduce our impact as much as possible. Then we observe what happens. Considering we only have one Planet to use, I think it would be irrational NOT to do the experiment.
Life has changed the climate of this planet before -- It's why you can breathe oxygen, so there is precedent for thinking life forms can cause massive planet-scale changes. Additionally: Climate change caused Mammoths and a lot of other species to die out. Rapid Climate change killed the Dinosaurs and much of the life on the planet as well.
No one can know 100% for sure EITHER WAY (man made warming or otherwise). What we can say is that there is a Chance that we're going to burn ourselves out of a place to live.
TL;DR: Stop whining you selfish fool, the CHANCE that it could be us causing rapid climate chance means we need to take action. You just don't want to make any sacrifice at all even if it could save us all from extinction.
I guess the point is, we're not all bad. And the stupid high school kid in Bumblefuck, MO isn't representative of the entire brand.
You've just proven otherwise... Your ignorance is astounding.
One example of your ignorance is your use of the term "Bumfuck". It's a term which disparages not only folks of small (farming) towns, but also potentially Gays.
I was born in a small town of Missouri (population 200), now I live in Houston (4th largest city in the USA), and I've lived in other small towns and big cities over the years. As an Elementary school kid in "Bumfuck, MO", I built my own electronics -- I made an LED game of Tetris with only transistors, no ICs. When personal computers came around, I was the first in town to assemble my own. I now know almost everything about computing hardware. I write system level software, build my own compilers for languages I invent myself -- I Debug Machine Level Op Code when I make the Debuggers. I know how to build a hub from scratch -- I can "type" by making and breaking circuits with bare wires on the serial port. I certainly know far more about technology than you even care to -- My eight year old self would probably have bested you in any test of intellect. You're clearly a chauvinist. The environment does not make you stupid, only your ignorance does.
Furthermore, your big box electronic stores DO NOT EXIST in the places one would consider "Bumfuck"... further proving your ignorance.
Both large and small towns have pros and cons. In a small town you typically find individuals who necessarily wield a broad spectrum of knowledge within their field of expertise. In larger cities it's been my experience that there are far more specialists with deep but narrowly focused skill sets.
For instance, I repaired a computer for a friend in Pittsburgh, PA, who had returned from the Geek Squad -- The machine would turn itself on for no reason, but only when connected to her broadband modem. From this description I immediately knew where to look, but the GS was mystified -- As you no doubt are as well. It's an incorrect implementation of the Wake On LAN protocol in the motherboard's integrated NIC. A simple BIOS setting disabled WOL and solved the issue.
When I lived in a small community on Mars, I found the local computer Gal was on par with my level of experience. We talked computers and geeked out over electronics together -- I helped her fixed a bluray player (GS: "Buy a new one"), and she even repaired my classic Galaga arcade cabinet, FOR FUN. That's service you can't get at any big box electronics store -- Least of all Best Buy's Geek Squad.
In conclusion, think on this: You'll naturally find far more butt-fucking high school aged individuals in a larger population density.
I've always considered Best Buy a terrific example to illustrate the quote "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public."
Wrong: Circuit City went Bankrupt.
Protip: Blanket statements are always wrong. Stop repeating them.
I was somewhat amazed the whole landing worked, so many complex parts that had to work together...
You have clearly never ejaculated in a female before.
Females? The wired link has a few iffy folks in it, but they could just be sexy men...
Why do I have to decrypt the summary?
You don't. That compulsion can be completely ignored. For proof, see: Nearly all the other comments.
Got nothing more to do with a time machine than your average lump of matter...
... bears really do shite in the woods.
...and Publishers actually shit where they eat.
If publishers are insisting that people throw away the value left in the good that they would normally resell, then the prices better come down to reflect that loss of value in the product.
I agree. The other thing is -- When you build a car, you do work, and the worker gets paid for that work once. Publishers do not need to exist. The game makers that work at the studios get paid once for the work they do, just like any other worker. Once their work is done the configuration of bits is literally in near infinite supply thanks to how little it costs to replicate digital information. Basic economics 101: Price tends to Zero as Supply approaches infinity, regardless of Demand or Cost to create.
Imagine a world without Publishers, where the folks working at the studio still get paid for the work they do -- Like a Homebuilder gets a contract to build a house. The builder doesn't get money each time someone moves into the house, she's done her work, she's got other houses to build. So, the game developer gets his paycheck and contracts to make more games. The current publisher model relies on enforcing artificial scarcity because the publisher needs to add cost to distribution to support their very existence, but they don't actually need to exist!
All Software, Art, Games, etc. can be given away for next to nothing after they are created if we pay the creators enough to create them (we'd have already paid for them to do the work). I find it odd when people spread FUD about systems like Kickstarter -- These systems are merely allowing the game creators and artists to get paid up front for their work, a sane business model not based on artificial scarcity -- What's scarce is the ability to configure the bits, not the bits. There will necessarily be a transitionary period while we bootstrap ourselves into the new publishing model. However, right now some developers and artists are actually able to stop emulating Publishers. They can stop extorting their customers via artificial scarcity, by asking for enough money up front to cover the cost their development costs (accounting for profit -- like the way a mechanic factors profit into her prices).
Essentially, my point is that the current game economy is RIDICULOUS. Paying trumped up fees for 1's and 0's in order for publishers to get paid multiple times for doing little or nothing isn't economically tenable, it doesn't make any sense. The price of games CAN be reduced to what it costs to make them simply by circumventing the extortionist & middlemen: Publishers.
"Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
Wherever the hell I am.
The difference between Sci Fi and Wi Fi is that they're both poor designations for differing reasons. Oft, the former contains more events based on actual facts and mathematics than your average (Auto)Biography... If you're talking the station itself, it comes in over wireless signal (WiFi? no Microwave -- Like the oven? No. The radar? Yeah, something like that) and has been dumbed down and renamed to Sy Fy (with plans to complete the naming conversion to Syphie -- slang for one having syphilis). The latter stands for Wireless Fidelity which should be the name of a unit of measure -- a signal to noise ratio -- not the actual technology. That would be like calling your TV a Microwave!
This is getting ridiculous... people will start believing this crap if they keep writing stories about it.
The rumor of the stock market's imminent crash greatly contributed to the crash. Belief is a powerful tool -- In this case, it's not being used for evil, so I'm cool with that.
The real story is what I've been saying for years: Screw the Platforms they're just APIs from a dev's point of view, its the applications that matter most -- I don't care if my users want to use a proprietary or FLOSS OS. Cross platform deployment is the future (it's here now) because we all want choice in OS unhindered by what programs we want to run, and vice versa. When developers start with a cross platform tool chain they don't have to needlessly ignore any market segment (read: money). It's not any more expensive to click [Build .EXE] than to click [Build .RPM] or [Build .DEB] or [Build .APP] or [Build .APK], etc... Porting costs disappear and are replaced with more moolah. Software houses with tons of legacy code (and no foresight) have a hard time bringing games to other platforms, but that doesn't have to be the case, or even the norm.
I'm not talking Java or other VMs here either. My "build all" command builds native binaries for Linux / Windows in x86 and x64, signed .APKs for Android, etc. The price of bringing games to Linux and Mac is now next to nill, so here they come.
Cookie cutter just because it's made with Unity? That's like saying Unreal engine games are cookie cutter. Or any game made with any full featured third party engine is cookie cutter.
I remember an age just before hardware accelerated graphics -- Those game devs who wrote their own (3D) engine had games that looked very different than the others who licensed the Wolf3D, Doom or Quake engine. After hardware accelerated graphics everything sort of looked the same for a while until GPUs had more features to select from -- The fixed function pipeline "look" is easily recognisable. Vertex & pixel shaders have given us back almost all of the flexibility and diversity that software rasterizers have, enabling Homogeneous computing could get us the rest of the way...
Unfortunately, the diversity gained in modern GPUs has been diminished a great deal by the prolific use of just a few 3D engines. Even when the game tries to be visually different I can usually tell at a glance what engine the game's using: It's a running joke among my friends & colleagues, we show a vid and guess the engine. Most games are all too easy. Very few have us scratching our heads, and of those even fewer used a dominant engine like Unity, Unreal, etc. Eg: I can look at a game like Borderlands and say, Ah yep, it's the same engine as Gears. The slow texture streaming on level load is a dead give-away, but there are many other similarities too... It's sameness that otherwise wouldn't exist if not for the re-use of an engine.
Prolific use of only a few physics engines, like Havok, also reduce variety in gameplay a great deal.
I'm not saying reusing software is bad, writing engines is hard work, but it's really not THAT hard (far easier than writing software rasterizers)... I think we need A LOT more engines out there to stave off the sameness we currently have.
I know this is Slashdot, but one thing I've learned is to have an open mind and consider the other side of an argument: Why does someone feel this way? Is there merit to their point of view? Argument is worth less than discussion, IMO.
You've taken the GP's comment to an extreme -- Every game that uses the same engine is not cookie-cutter just because they use the same engines, but the complaint is valid. There is a certain samey look to the Unity, IDTech, Unreal engine, etc. engines, and it takes a fair amount of effort to actually make a game look different while using these engines -- Many gamedevs don't make the effort.
Publishers don't want to hear, "We're making our own engine" -- That's risky, they'd rather you license a popular engine -- Until the indie game resurgence it was very difficult to get into the game industry if you wrote your own engine -- This is why there is so much graphics sameness among AAA titles, IMO. Differentiation comes at a price, and publishers don't want to take the risk.
There would be much more diversity if we used a more diverse selection of game engines. This is why I support the idea of writing a new engine. Even if you don't personally recognize the similarities, can you not believe that some do? I put it to you that more engine diversity naturally begets more diverse games.
What you call a drooling vegetable, I call a self lubricating sex toy.
One can learn a great deal about Statistics by having multiple Statisticians perform multiple predictions based on a series of datasets with reduced sample sizes, all the way down to one sample.
(un)Surprisingly, the prediction accuracy is only very weakly related to the dataset accuracy, and varies wildly between predictioneers. One can thus conclude that Statistics are Statistically worthless.
I will by your tetrahedron loaves, and they wouldn't be that hard or different to make. I would then expose the loaves to different strains of moulds and play a dangerous game of IRL Minecraft...... Then get sued by Mojang?