Haha, of course! Troubleshooting network issues is so much simpler when you're using twice the bandwidth as you were before just so that you can send yourself a copy of everything being sent.
Everyone!? Hahahahahahahahahahaha. You are hilarious. Why would they do that? Then everyone could watch videos and that'd cut into their bandwidth. They'll upgrade themselves. Everyone else is screwed and they'll be too busy watching YouTube videos to care.
Lot's of corporations still have IE 6 as their "corporate IT approved" browser.
This. This. This. Our web apps are written exclusively for big companies and we're still stuck supporting IE6 because our customers absolutely require it. It's painful. *sigh* What I wouldn't do to go Office Space on something that represents IE6.
I'd prefer not to get screwed like I did with Left 4 Dead. That game is insanely fun but every time I tried to play my fun was ruined by a horrible matchmaking system and gobs of bugs. Lame. I'd have rather waited a year and gotten a game that was playable.:(
Yeah, but how much does that really matter? Honestly, how many things do you still do that you did as a 10 year old? In other news, all people of the future are predicted to spend half the day watching cartoons and eating cocoa puffs.
I hate wireless. Wireless needs to die a horrible death. For a mouse / keyboard it's just silly to have a wireless one unless you're planning on spending most of your time on the couch or giving presentations. Speaking of being on the couch - Bring back wired game controllers too please. I spend a ridiculous amount of money on batteries for rockband / various other wireless console controllers. It seems like I have terrible luck finding rechargeables that are any good and charging cables are always just a little bit too short. (Don't even get me started on how awful the wireless is for rockband on the Wii. When I play at my friend's house we spend the first 20 minutes of every rockband session figuring out why the wireless isn't working.)
PS - I have long wished that the number pad was on the left hand side of the keyboard. It makes much more sense for gaming as well as desktop applications.
I think the necessity of graphics depends a great deal on the style of game you're playing. In an FPS graphics can make a huge difference in gameplay. Your ability (or inability) to distinguish friend from foe at a great distance is crucial. You've also got to be able to distinguish your enemy from its surrounding environment. When you're aiming at a target that's only a few pixels across crisp graphics are going to make a big difference. I really do feel that improved graphics engines have made FPSs easier to play.
RTSs are another story though. I actually believe we've gone backwards a bit in that arena. In the quest to bring better and better graphics we keep reducing the amount of the screen you can see at a time. I used to play C&C at 800x600 and I could see nearly all of a very large base. Now, even at 1600x1200, you can barely see anything on RA3 - and it sucks. They've sacrificed gameplay for graphics and it's a terrible trade off. Keep me zoomed out farther, make it a little less pretty and let me actually manage an entire war rather than just one tiny battle. (bookmarks and other crap are no substitute for seeing more all at once)
So, regarding the original question: You've got to determine whether graphics are, in and of themselves, an essential part of gameplay for the genre you're working with. If they are, be sure to focus on them just as much as you would AI, game balance, story, etc. If they aren't, you can push them lower down the list of priorities. Plants vs Zombies is tons of fun but no one would say that it's mind-blowingly realistic. Graphics are just there to help a user play the game, the style of gameplay is what determines how important they are in the development process.
Look away where? Off the screen? elsewhere on the screen? What happens when you're reading reference docs and typing code at the same time? It's a neat idea but there are some edge cases that will be really frustrating if you don't handle them properly. I'm frequently looking at other things on my screen and I only rarely want them to have focus.
It's all about the quality of the monitor. Cheap LCDs are lousy just like cheap CRTs were lousy - they just fail in different ways. Shop around and you can find a flat panel with a good viewing angle as well as decent color reproduction.
Meh. It sounds like people complaining about AWPs in CS or demo spam in TF2. If you can't figure out how to deal with it then you need to learn how to play the game better. With the exception of a few games with glaring design flaws, things like that are perfectly legitimate tactics and there are easy ways to defeat them. You can cry all you want that someone isn't following your unspoken rules but the fact is you can either learn to beat them despite their choice of tactics, play on a modified server or quit.
The huge headache everyone wants to avoid is content providers having to code around, and store duplicate copies of video, to cater to all the browsers.
My point exactly.
Besides, WTF is the point of a standard if the people making the standard are just following whatever the browsers are already doing? Why even bother pretending like we've got a standard that everyone follows?
90% of users aren't going to know the difference between a browser problem and a site problem. They'll just assume your site looks like crap. Devs have no choice but to program around these problems - Just like we do with Javascript and CSS issues and everything else. It turns into a huge waste of time, energy and storage space. Video will only make it worse.
It's 2009 and we still have to program around browser differences and quirks. Doesn't that seem a bit ridiculous? If everything is going to be web based for the next 20 or 30 or however many years don't you think we should fix that?
Because you end up with the craptastic situation like IE6 where they sort of support PNG but not really because they don't support transparency. If there isn't universal browser support for a format it might as well not even exist / be an option because you can't use it. If you have to code for IE6 you can't use transparent PNGs can you? So what difference does it make that you can "use any format?"
If we go this route with video what options are left? Stick with flash? Encode everything in two different codecs and *hope* that the browsers all support one of the two? I don't know about you but I think those options suck.
By your logic this entire story is a waste of time. Whatever Mozilla, Apple and everyone else is doing is irrelevant - Microsoft has the market share. Let's just do what they're doing.
This would be nice but 85% of what people? The same scummy types of people that squat also run botnets. Botnet + any sort of voting system = botnet wins. The closest thing I've seen to a decent solution is the increasing price model that someone mentioned above; although I could see squatters getting around that by using fake names and such to just keep on registering 1 domain.
Slashdot Mirror
Palm: You contain within you the seeds of your own destruction!
Haha, of course! Troubleshooting network issues is so much simpler when you're using twice the bandwidth as you were before just so that you can send yourself a copy of everything being sent.
Ahhh luxury. I remember privacy once... It's been over eight years now but I'm pretty sure I'd like to have some of that again...
What? How are you going populate Mars when the Decepticons are already there? Haven't you seen Transformers!?
Everyone!? Hahahahahahahahahahaha. You are hilarious. Why would they do that? Then everyone could watch videos and that'd cut into their bandwidth. They'll upgrade themselves. Everyone else is screwed and they'll be too busy watching YouTube videos to care.
Lot's of corporations still have IE 6 as their "corporate IT approved" browser.
This. This. This. Our web apps are written exclusively for big companies and we're still stuck supporting IE6 because our customers absolutely require it. It's painful. *sigh* What I wouldn't do to go Office Space on something that represents IE6.
I'd prefer not to get screwed like I did with Left 4 Dead. That game is insanely fun but every time I tried to play my fun was ruined by a horrible matchmaking system and gobs of bugs. Lame. I'd have rather waited a year and gotten a game that was playable. :(
Yeah, but how much does that really matter? Honestly, how many things do you still do that you did as a 10 year old? In other news, all people of the future are predicted to spend half the day watching cartoons and eating cocoa puffs.
Yeah, thank God for that accidental damage protection. Those keyboard spills are ruinous!
Oh yes! I love a good UID fight. Sadly, being content to lurk as an AC for years has relegated me to the sidelines of such battles.
Well of course - for a while most KVMs wouldn't even do anything over 1280x1024. They'll catch up, it'll just take a while and they'll be expensive :-/
I hate wireless. Wireless needs to die a horrible death. For a mouse / keyboard it's just silly to have a wireless one unless you're planning on spending most of your time on the couch or giving presentations. Speaking of being on the couch - Bring back wired game controllers too please. I spend a ridiculous amount of money on batteries for rockband / various other wireless console controllers. It seems like I have terrible luck finding rechargeables that are any good and charging cables are always just a little bit too short. (Don't even get me started on how awful the wireless is for rockband on the Wii. When I play at my friend's house we spend the first 20 minutes of every rockband session figuring out why the wireless isn't working.)
PS - I have long wished that the number pad was on the left hand side of the keyboard. It makes much more sense for gaming as well as desktop applications.
I think the necessity of graphics depends a great deal on the style of game you're playing. In an FPS graphics can make a huge difference in gameplay. Your ability (or inability) to distinguish friend from foe at a great distance is crucial. You've also got to be able to distinguish your enemy from its surrounding environment. When you're aiming at a target that's only a few pixels across crisp graphics are going to make a big difference. I really do feel that improved graphics engines have made FPSs easier to play.
RTSs are another story though. I actually believe we've gone backwards a bit in that arena. In the quest to bring better and better graphics we keep reducing the amount of the screen you can see at a time. I used to play C&C at 800x600 and I could see nearly all of a very large base. Now, even at 1600x1200, you can barely see anything on RA3 - and it sucks. They've sacrificed gameplay for graphics and it's a terrible trade off. Keep me zoomed out farther, make it a little less pretty and let me actually manage an entire war rather than just one tiny battle. (bookmarks and other crap are no substitute for seeing more all at once)
So, regarding the original question: You've got to determine whether graphics are, in and of themselves, an essential part of gameplay for the genre you're working with. If they are, be sure to focus on them just as much as you would AI, game balance, story, etc. If they aren't, you can push them lower down the list of priorities. Plants vs Zombies is tons of fun but no one would say that it's mind-blowingly realistic. Graphics are just there to help a user play the game, the style of gameplay is what determines how important they are in the development process.
Look away where? Off the screen? elsewhere on the screen? What happens when you're reading reference docs and typing code at the same time? It's a neat idea but there are some edge cases that will be really frustrating if you don't handle them properly. I'm frequently looking at other things on my screen and I only rarely want them to have focus.
It's all about the quality of the monitor. Cheap LCDs are lousy just like cheap CRTs were lousy - they just fail in different ways. Shop around and you can find a flat panel with a good viewing angle as well as decent color reproduction.
What rights? You are the property of the government. Be glad we haven't drafted you yet and are content milking you for money. ~
Meh. It sounds like people complaining about AWPs in CS or demo spam in TF2. If you can't figure out how to deal with it then you need to learn how to play the game better. With the exception of a few games with glaring design flaws, things like that are perfectly legitimate tactics and there are easy ways to defeat them. You can cry all you want that someone isn't following your unspoken rules but the fact is you can either learn to beat them despite their choice of tactics, play on a modified server or quit.
The huge headache everyone wants to avoid is content providers having to code around, and store duplicate copies of video, to cater to all the browsers.
My point exactly.
Besides, WTF is the point of a standard if the people making the standard are just following whatever the browsers are already doing? Why even bother pretending like we've got a standard that everyone follows?
90% of users aren't going to know the difference between a browser problem and a site problem. They'll just assume your site looks like crap. Devs have no choice but to program around these problems - Just like we do with Javascript and CSS issues and everything else. It turns into a huge waste of time, energy and storage space. Video will only make it worse.
It's 2009 and we still have to program around browser differences and quirks. Doesn't that seem a bit ridiculous? If everything is going to be web based for the next 20 or 30 or however many years don't you think we should fix that?
Because you end up with the craptastic situation like IE6 where they sort of support PNG but not really because they don't support transparency. If there isn't universal browser support for a format it might as well not even exist / be an option because you can't use it. If you have to code for IE6 you can't use transparent PNGs can you? So what difference does it make that you can "use any format?"
If we go this route with video what options are left? Stick with flash? Encode everything in two different codecs and *hope* that the browsers all support one of the two? I don't know about you but I think those options suck.
Yeah, a wiimote hitting your TV is nothing in comparison to a bullet.
Sandwich!? I want a Spicy SuperTuna Roll.
By your logic this entire story is a waste of time. Whatever Mozilla, Apple and everyone else is doing is irrelevant - Microsoft has the market share. Let's just do what they're doing.
Terrorists around the world would like to thank the US government for making this valuable information freely available! ~
This would be nice but 85% of what people? The same scummy types of people that squat also run botnets. Botnet + any sort of voting system = botnet wins. The closest thing I've seen to a decent solution is the increasing price model that someone mentioned above; although I could see squatters getting around that by using fake names and such to just keep on registering 1 domain.