No digitizer? Hm - the entire tablet allows you to draw on it, as long as the application allows it. As for copy and paste - works great between applications that suport copy and paste. IE - it's not the tablet that's the issue, and it still works well for your scenario *IF* app developers would get offa' their butts and support a few more things in their apps. (However, I can't think of a single productivity app on my iPad that I can't cut and paste between apps, and I've got more than one app that allows me to scetch out something, save it, and paste it into another app.) And if you REALLY have to have it, you can pick up a cheap stylus for it. And you can always shoot pics of the chalkboard from the iPad and save it, too.
iBooks with the ability to add annotations both textual and arbitrary hand drawn graphics would be a bit help.
Not gonna say it's perfect solution - then again, carrying my old Toshiba Libretto wasn't exactly a perfect solution either:-)
I'm one of the folks who's probably going to buy it sight unseen. I could care less about if someone else things I'm affluent because I have an iPhone 5, or if I'm "trendy" because of it, or anything else. And just because it's got an Apple logo in the middle of the back doesn't mean it's worth it's weight in gold either.
I'm still using a 3GS, and after two years it's starting to get a little beaten up - the screen isn't cracked or deeply scratched, but it's got a few pits here and there, etc. I was going to upgrade to a 4, but I decided to skip a generation since we're so close to the release of the 5. And, since once of the reasons I wanted the 4 was a improvement in the camera over the 3GS (which I use a lot), I figure the 5's camera will more likely than not be slightly better.
Which brings me to the question: how may of of the 35% mentioned are people who decided to skip a generation because there wasn't a compelling reason to upgrade to a 4, but about the time the 5 rolls around their 3G or 3GS is due for a replacement?
You might be thinking too 'inside the box' - for instance, PhoneGap handles pretty much every smartphone OS out there, plus Mac and PC. SO HTML 5 + CSS + JavaScript + (insert JS datahandling concept of choice) has become a VERY viable way of handling a write once then compile for platfom(s) of choice. It's not a solution for every problem, of course - I somehow doubt writing RageHD in HTML 5 is going to be a choice anytime soon. But for 75% of apps out there, it's a good, solid solution. And PhoneGap is by no means the only one out there providing such a solution.
I'll agree with you - most of my development these days is web development and iPhone / iPad development, but I still dabble back into industrial automation from time to time. I like my Mac Mini, for instance - it's solid, it's managed to survive three major OS upgrades since 2006, and it's still solid after four years of constant use. I like the "it just works" philosophy - I can focus on software development, not hardware troubleshooting. Apple isn't perfect, but the OS and Hardware combination is pretty damned good. (I will say, though, that after four years I'm finally going to upgrade the little box. This one will sit on the shelf and be a media box.)
The 'cool factor' is problematic - you're dead on right about that. But I've not been one to care too much about what everyone else thinks is cool anway;-)
Conceptually, cracking this game is trivial. If it's using a DNS lookup to find the server, edit hosts. so it just loops back to the local machine (127.0.0.1). Then, write app that simulates the DRM server to save games, etc. are handled locally. Of course, I say it's conceptually trivial - depending on some specifics, it could get a little more difficult, but definitely doable. Same goes for the idea of streaming textures, etc. that someone else suggested - it's all crackable, just like nearly every scheme. Heck, even having the game live online only can be overcome with the help of some really determined people - if you can set up a WoW server at home, then even streaming game content isn't viable as a copyprotection mechanism.
I agree with ya' completely - and I've done that very thing once already. I've also done that once with a book that was new, but there was no ebook version of it. I feel bit silly about buying a used copy and pirating an ebook - the only reason for doing it was the "tagable" copy on my shelf. The new one I bought, though, was to help support the author and the company that published the book.
One of my solutions to the problem is a good set of vitamins. I tend to shy away from stuff like Centrum, and use multi-vitamin packs with a little more "kick" to them (and are a heck of a lot more soluable in the digestive system), and B12 sublingual drops.
If I have to ask myself the question "how long was it since I took my vitamins?" then the answer is probably about three days - that's how long it take for them to wear off on me.
As with a lot of processes in our bodies, good nutritian helps the brain considerably. Eat right, exersize, and take a good multi vitamin, and you'll probably see a lot of the memory issues go away. It works for me anyway - as with any random commenter on/., YMMV:-)
I remember being excited as hell to see the original - got the tickets, and played Tron (the arcade game, which was released a month or so before the movie was) until it was time to watch the movie.
I was completely blown away. CGI is taken for granted these days (and often villified if it's anything but perfect), but Tron was the first of it's kind. The story is... ok (though it doesn't really stand up over time). But the visuals were amazing, and some of the music was great at adding even more punch to the unique environment created (heck, my iPhone's alarm clock plays the "Tron Scherzo" track to wake me up in the morning. Yeah, ok, maybe a little too geeky:-)
The Tron 2.0 game didn't really "do much" for me, and I'm not someone who get's all hyped up over a bad quality cell phone (or god knows what) recording of a teaser - if it ain't HD, I woudn't normally bother watching it. I mainly wanted to see it to scoff at it and make fun of it (my haven't I gotten to be an ass as I've gotten older;-)
After seeing that... wow. It just looked right. Hopefully, someone isn't about to piss on what was a cool movie concept back then. But, even that low quality crappy version just looks too damned cool! Some one has got to go beat a high quality copy outta someone and post it online soon!
Time to load up MAME and play a little Disks of Tron and throw the DVD in the player:-)
My off hand guess, Bittorrents. I've noticed with the WRT54G that I had for a while would have problems if you're running multiple torrents, and don't have any cap on how many inbound and outbound connections there can be (IE, overnight runs where you don't need to use any of your bandwidth:-) A reboot always fixed the problem - I assume it's either running out of memory, or running out of ports to work with (since each connection has a timeout of an hour, IIRC)
Actually, I think they would allow it. Since it's a virtualized set of hardware MAME is running, the apps are just data files at that point. The ability to move data files off and on the iPhone is going to be an important point for backups, etc. anyway. (Heck, part of that happens anyways. Even though there's no ties between ToDo lists and OS X apps, iPhone Notes are still backed up with the rest of the phone information like SMS messages, etc.) However, I doubt you'll see any ties between the App Store and downloading roms:-)
One has to wonder -most things that they've done for the iPhone (Multitouch, etc.) have been showing up back on the Mac OS platform. How long until there's a version of the App Store native to OS X? (As a developer, I wouldn't mind - 70% revenue, they handle bandwidth, alerting users for updates, etc.? Not too bad - just as long as it doesn't involve OS X apps being only obtained exclusively through the App Store;-)
They didn't brick XBox 360's that were modded, but, they did ban 'em from XBox Live. While not the same as bricking it, it definitely rendered it less valuable to people who were playing online games or enjoyed downloading games, videos, etc. from XBox Live.
I was expecting to get some over-defensive crap, maybe some Internet Tough Guy talking about how he could kick my ass, but that was actually pretty interesting.
Hey, let's not get carried away - this is still/., and I can still kick your ass!:-)
I wish I did know those sorta things - I can only speak for the people I know unluckly:-/ At one time I used to own a LAN gaming center, and the crowd was pretty diverse in the evenings (daytime and early evening was kids and teens almost exclusively, who did fit the obsessive-geeky stereotypes to a T) You had a few obsessives, but more of the people were just folks who liked games and wanted some place to hang out with like minded people. Even some folks I wouldn't normally expected to see hanging out in the same location (a great example of that was a hispanic group and a group o' rednecks that I thought for a while I'd have problems with, instead eventually they ended up playing a lot of Halo and Half-Life 2 DM against each other.)
But that's still far from a good sample of people - with WoW, how many people fit that obsessive-geeky profile that set at home and wouldn't go to a social gaming setup like that? Phht - no clue.
I think it's more that the average old lady could kick the ass of the average WoW addict.
While it makes for a good joke, I'm pretty surprised how much the WoW players I've been exposed to DON'T match that steriotype. Quick rundown of the people I know who play WoW. Brandon is 6' 5", and works out a lot (huge arms), owns his own plumbing company, and isn't generally a gamer. My ex-wife (and litterally all of her family) was anything but geeky - she was introduced to WoW by her step father, and got me into the game (I am a gamer though). I own three businesses, generally in ok shape (working my way to 'good' shape now;-). Meredith is a 6' 2" good looking blonde, and her husband isn't someone you'd like to pick a fight with - he's built pretty well. All of the people I mentioned are also above 30 years old.
Most of the people (not all) that I know who play WoW are surprisingly normal people who have interests outside of the game, and it's another fun diversion to play. Very few of them are the obsessive geeky gamers you normally associate with video games.
Of course, this could be saying a lot more about the people I associate with - but based on the spread of people I saw standing in line for the release of Burning Crusade, the 'common gamer' image doesn't seem to match up with reality nearly as much when you start talking about WoW.
I use http://www.bloglines.com/, and have been for a while now. I pull in stuff from all sorts of differnt sources, into one page. Yep, same thing that you can do with Firefox.
But - I can access Bloglines anywhere, on any machine, and I have access to my already customized list of news feeds and the stuff that I've marked for further reading later, etc. For some reason I keep finding myself needing the ability to access my stuff from multiple machines, so it works great for me. Especially nice since my Mac isn't very portable at the moment, and when my co-host and I set down at the local coffee shop (WiFi access and long island iced teas:-) and start going through news to see what's going to be on the show this week, we can both pull up our list of stuff that we've marked in Bloglines, and discuss it. Very nice.
How many people actually need that sort of functionality? Eh. Not very many, really, since most people only have one machine to deal with (not talking about the/. crowd, people in general:-) where they would read thier RSS feeds anyway. So you're partially right - it's a bit of a business fad. It's got it's uses, but as a couple of sites that do it get popular, there's gonna end up being a whole bunch of sites, then the nitch market gets crowded, and 2/3rds of them just die. The rest will continue to exist for people like me who find a good use for it:-)
(And, yeah, there's a bunch of other ways I could do it, including setting up setup for pulling all the RSS feeds down on my own server, and reading that. I might do that some day, when I have enough spare time. Bleh - got a lack of that.)
Oh heck, and since I'm here and mentioned the show, here's a link - http://www.worldofgamerzone.com/. Only the first three episodes are up at the moment, which puts me 5 episodes behind the broadcasts. Need to find more hours in the day...:-)
Now, how can it be used in "NON-FREE COMPUTER GAMES" if its under the terms of the GPL? Doesn't the GPL force any derived work to be freed whether it wants to be or not?
You missunderstand the GPL. I can, with no problems, create a game that utilizes a GPL based engine, but copyright the content that makes up the game. Sure, the engine can be reused at will, and I do have abide by the terms of the GPL (making all of my programming changes available to PURCHASERS. Note that word - purchasers can redistribute it to non-purchasers, but I can choose to only make the source available to anyone who I provide a binart yo.) But the content? That CAN (your option) be strictly copyrighted material. Check the GNU site for more information on the subject.
I didn't have the Big Trak, but I had the Corvette. Somewhere, in my pile of toys from childhood it still resides (stuff I couldn't part with - the Corvette, a Donkey Kong portable game that looks like a mini-Donkey Kong cabinet, cool stuff like that) My problem with it was that I had always wished it was more programable - I managed to hit it's limits for programmability pretty quick. Now, if it had had more sensors, a programming port (upload a new program from, say, the C64) I wouldn't have gotten bored with it. But, it was cool enough that it's still in the pile of cool toys:-)
One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?
Of course - this sort of venture always comes with risk, and one of 'em is pushing your timetable up because the other guy looks like he's about to win. Given what happens when you screw up with space flight, I'd expect to see a fatality or two occur in the next couple o' years.
And one should keep in mind: It's all fun and games until someone gets killed. Then it's a SPORT!:-)
I own a Toshiba Libretto C110. I still use the heck outta it - I never bothered with buying a PDA, I use my Libretto instead. It's small enough to drop into the pocket of my trench coat when I head out on a startup, or go to gaming on the weekends.
PDA's have a very confining feature set - very little storage, low processing power, etc. For instance, I hate carrying my books to gaming - so, I have scanned versions of my books (and some that I bought from TSR in.pdf format) When I need to look up something, just pull up the document, hit find, and I've found what I need - more convenient than a dead trees version (for searching - there's still something I prefer about dead trees for normal reading). Plus, it beats the heck outta carrying 5 books. Sure, I could convert to plain text for a PDA, but then I loose most of the table formatting. Plus I also keep my characters on there in Excel (I'd run OpenOffice, but, the Libretto is too underpowered for OO - it works fine with the fairly old version of Office that was included.)
It's also great on a startup for similar reasons - just throw all my manuals on it, and when I need to look up something, pull that sucker out. Also great for times when I need to upload a program to a PanelView, connect to a PLC, etc. It's small, and I can hold it in one hand while connecting to the PLC - no need to have to set up a table or rest it on a rack.
For any serious long term use, it requires an external keyboard and monitor hooked up - I've used it that way a few times, but more often than not I just suffer through 15 minutes of typing on the itty-bitty keyboard it has.
This thing sounds like a perfect successor to my Libretto. The Libretto has 32Mb RAM, 166MHz processor (I overclocked mine to 233Mhz - there's some nice sites out there about hackin' the Libretto), and a 6Gb HD in it at the moment. 1 Ghz, 256MB, 30GB HD, and 802.11g? Sounds like a great upgrade to me:-)
Now if I could only get: Same thing with a G4 in it (what ever happened to the idea that Transmeta was going to be able to emulate any processor?!) running MacOS X, a touch screen that can be rotated around like some of the (way too large!) TabletPC's, and a decent 3D card in it (for when I'm bored at the airport, car trips, meetings:-) I'd REALLY happy:-) (And my wife would too - while I don't have a PDA, she does. She also has a Mac, and if she had her choice everything would run OS X / work like a Mac:-)
If the law says "thou shalt not make a product that can copy money", then Adobe would be exhibiting gross negligence (at the very least) if their product was in fact able to produce lifelike copies of money.
The law says you can't kill people. But we still have guns. Obviously gun makrs are exhibiting gross negligence by making such deadly products. And knife makers. And spoon makers. And car makers. And everything else.
But that's not what he said (and I can't believe someone modded it up without reading what the previous poster said, even though it was quoted right there.)
I'll state it differently, just in case you missunderstood what the previous poster said: If the law says you can't make a product that can copy money, that's the law. If the law says you can't kill, then nothing prevents you from making a product that can kill. You miss the difference - one covers the product directly (can't make something that copies money), the other covers potential uses (can't kill). VERY different situations.
Read. Think. Post. While it's not always the way people do it, it helps a lot;-)
Yep, those stereotypes exist. Sucks too:-) But, it's up to the developer / self publisher to change those impressions. That's a part of marketing ANY product - trying to overcome any negative impressions that exist about your product.
Can it be done? Heck yeah! Some indies have very ugly websites - well, that's not helping sales any (I've been guilty of this one.) If the webpage & sales pages don't look all nice and polished, why would I think the game it's self is all nice and polished?
Market your strengths - unique gameplay (if your game is unique;-), incredible online community, whatever it is that makes your game stand out. If it doesn't stand out (IE, you just released your third version of the old standard Arcade Lines clone), you don't stand a chance.
Find out what people's impressions of your game are, both before they have played it and after. Yes, it's quite possible to do, just takes a lot of footwork:-) Then, strategize how to overcome the negative perceptions that people have - and market either directly against that perception, or find ways to actually capitolize on that (For instance - some people think indie games are too short, so, market it as a short game with lots of replay value!)
It's all in how you invest your time and energy when it comes to marketing.
When I spoke at IGC '03, one of my comments was "Publishers are tools.", and went on to explain that I included online publishers with that too. By that, I mean they are just another way to build up your business. Use them as you see fit, but, don't try and run your business using just one tool. While Dan mentioned that it's a $57 Million dollar business (download games), that's NOT that big of a pool to play in when you are up against some much larger opponents. Make use of existing channels - get your name out there some. But your core business should be building YOUR channel. Dan presented some excellent strategies for this sort of thing - some of which I'll be making use of since I've got some games going into retail space here in the next month or so. Use retail space and other online sales channels as a bit of a trojan horse for marketing your own channels.
Quick note side note / nearly off topic note about the GarageGames group, since Dan mentions them being great guys in his article - they invited Shockwave and some of the other publishers to talk at Indie Games Con '03, and they themselves are online publishers. Before getting up and insulting my hosts, I pulled Jay Moore of GarageGames aside, and told him what I was planning on saying. This would seem to be a setup for conflict - telling people not to make long-term use of publishers while talking at a publisher sponsored event. Not only did Jay say no problem, the really DO want Indies to build up thier own channels, and Jay encouraged me to say what I planned on saying. To me, they are guys who "Get it" when it comes to dealing with Indies. Shockwave, etc... well, they just want to be yet another retailer, selling online space instead of shelf space. They "Don't Get It" when it comes to dealing with Indies, and I'm waiting to hear the horror stories about Indies who depended solely on channels like them to start showing up in about a year or so. IMHO, these guys are just as likely as big publishers to start bending development teams over the table.
(And in the interest of full disclosure - I talk to Dan McDonnald on a semi-regular basis. But then again... that's pretty typical for Indie game developers these days to chat, talk shop, and strategize with other indies:-)
I'll start off by saying that I typically don't recommend overly expensive (because I'm a tightwad), but in this case I'll make an exception.
Allen Bradley uses Elo Touch products for thier industrial control touch screen PC's. These things are wonderful IMHO - I didn't want to see the ones I had leave when the project was done, and they had to go be installed on site - I love mine as a nice 21" desktop montitor and touchscreen combo:-) These critters are a bit hefty price wise, but I haven't seen one fail yet in the field (and these are industrial areas - either gritty dirt or greasy type stuff). They are pretty nice displays, but a little more faded color wise than I'd like to normally use for a desktop application like Photoshop. Incredibly durable, lots of different styles, and they have excellent accuracy. I recommended 'em.
What I DON'T recommend is going with the lowest priced one you find. It will fail. Seriously. Don't be afraid to take your time, and find out what has the longest time between failures -vs- ruggedness (they don't always go together) -vs- the features you need. Anything less than what you need for the application is going to REALLY hurt you later.
As for programming for one - if it's on Windows, no problem. It's just a one-button mouse. They also have Linux, Mac, etc. drivers - it's just sending ya' mouse coordinates and a mouse click. For most applications, it's ready to roll before you even see the touch screen, it's that simple.
Aaarrgg!!! (Plug for Trajectory Zone)
on
SCOrched Earth
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Must... resist... urge....
Damnit, I knew I couldn't resist! Keep your eye on a game called Trajectory Zone. Beta 3 (it's a closed beta, sorry - but you can contact the author for beta signup information) The screenshots only show some of the environments, but you can also see some of the cool random level generation toys and the toys for modders (Trajectory Zone has an IDE in it. Not exactly normal for a game...:-) Or you can take a look here at another couple o' screenshots, including how particle based nuclear explosions look in the game.
However, this isn't just Scorched Earth in 3D. It's got the classic turn based play if you want, or a new simultaneous fire resolution mode (everyone locks in a shot, and they all fire at once), or you can get nasty with it and play the realtime versions of the game. There's just.... LOTS of cool stuff in there. And of course, it's going to be available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
Sorry - couldn't help but plug the game. I'm the owner of Midnight Ryder Technologies (the company doing Trajectory Zone), and plugging the game is just one of those things that's almost reflex these days:-)
Hm - you've missed how things have evolved recently:
1. BUYING a modern working 3D engine SDK costs between 300K to around a million, depending on engine. Wrapping it costs a few developer years.
Torque. Crystal Space 3D. There's more of 'em to. Personally, I licensed Torque. It cost me a whopping $100 for the license and souce code. If (and only if) the game starts to hit big (in excess of $500k in business for the company, or the publisher I deal with) then I have to move to the 'commercial' license - which is $10k. still pretty good. Of course, some people will say that CS3D is crap (gee, it managed to power an on the shelf retail game that's still on the shelves now - can't be that bad!), or that Torque is too dated (got look at the site, or check out screenshots of Trajectory Zone (still not a lot of content there, but, some pretty nice in game shots of the levels. The engine isn't very dated any more:-)
So, the myth of the quarter-million dollar engine is dead. There's plenty of options to choose from. And since Torque went to $100 to license it, a couple of other engines have done the same (but, truthfully, none of the others have impressed me yet. That could change in the future.)
Plus, using an existing engine cuts WAY down on the QA costs - you already know the engine runs on a diverse set of hardware, since everyone else who's licensed it makes it work (and in the case of CrystalSpace or Torque, everyone is highly likely to share information on quirks, enhancements, etc.) So now what you have to spend time testing is content and game specific stuff.
The game concepts are there - I can already tell ya they are. I was at Indie Games Con '03 (disclosure: I was a speaker there this year and last year. This year's topic: "Surviving Indie Game Development":-) and talked with a lot of people about what they were working on, etc. There's both brand new concepts, and rethinking of old concepts. Not a single game there didn't have a unique selling point of some sort - something that makes 'em really stand out. (Well, that's not COMPLETELY true. There were a couple o' knockoffs there. But they weren't the promonent games.) Close enough to mainstream to get gamers attention, but different enough to make thier own nitch (GravRally comes to mind.)
It's far from gloom and doom for indies like myself - if you are smart, it's a good time to be an Indie. If you want to make Doom III - well, good luck on getting your day job back:-)
Oh, forgot to cover this: Art. Trajectory Zone was done by a team of 9 people grand total (I'm the owner of Midnight Ryder Technologies, the developer behind Trajectory Zone) So what DO you do to fill up a game like this? Well, in my case Eric Forhan (art director) found people who were willing to work for a percent of profits after it's published. That defrayed the up front costs, and a lot of guys get to see thier name on a box when it comes out:-) But for some of our other titles in the pipeline, we're doing things like licensing content from various places (Gee, I could hire an art guy to model a table, chairs, couch, and stuff for this room. Or, I could buy it all for $40, and reskin the couch to match the room.) which also (if done smart) reduce the overhead for the art budget considerably. Next time, we don't need a team of 9 people - two will suffice, plus our licensed content.
And here's what's cool... the Indie situation continues to improve. Suddenly, someone figured out there's a whole new market segment to sell to. So now there are products and services showing up that are less expensive, and aimed directly at Indie budgets. Heck, if I need to construct and entire city, I can buy all the parts for building, roads, street lights, etc. all in one package for $20! Indies are likely to save time, and reuse the content rather than build new - which means
Ya know - I forgot about that:-) Originally, there were only 5 games in there. Fuzzee Teevee and BridgeIt weren't in there (which proves a write-in candidate can win sometimes;-)
Slashdot Mirror
No digitizer? Hm - the entire tablet allows you to draw on it, as long as the application allows it. As for copy and paste - works great between applications that suport copy and paste. IE - it's not the tablet that's the issue, and it still works well for your scenario *IF* app developers would get offa' their butts and support a few more things in their apps. (However, I can't think of a single productivity app on my iPad that I can't cut and paste between apps, and I've got more than one app that allows me to scetch out something, save it, and paste it into another app.) And if you REALLY have to have it, you can pick up a cheap stylus for it. And you can always shoot pics of the chalkboard from the iPad and save it, too.
iBooks with the ability to add annotations both textual and arbitrary hand drawn graphics would be a bit help.
Not gonna say it's perfect solution - then again, carrying my old Toshiba Libretto wasn't exactly a perfect solution either :-)
I'm one of the folks who's probably going to buy it sight unseen. I could care less about if someone else things I'm affluent because I have an iPhone 5, or if I'm "trendy" because of it, or anything else. And just because it's got an Apple logo in the middle of the back doesn't mean it's worth it's weight in gold either.
I'm still using a 3GS, and after two years it's starting to get a little beaten up - the screen isn't cracked or deeply scratched, but it's got a few pits here and there, etc. I was going to upgrade to a 4, but I decided to skip a generation since we're so close to the release of the 5. And, since once of the reasons I wanted the 4 was a improvement in the camera over the 3GS (which I use a lot), I figure the 5's camera will more likely than not be slightly better.
Which brings me to the question: how may of of the 35% mentioned are people who decided to skip a generation because there wasn't a compelling reason to upgrade to a 4, but about the time the 5 rolls around their 3G or 3GS is due for a replacement?
You might be thinking too 'inside the box' - for instance, PhoneGap handles pretty much every smartphone OS out there, plus Mac and PC. SO HTML 5 + CSS + JavaScript + (insert JS datahandling concept of choice) has become a VERY viable way of handling a write once then compile for platfom(s) of choice. It's not a solution for every problem, of course - I somehow doubt writing RageHD in HTML 5 is going to be a choice anytime soon. But for 75% of apps out there, it's a good, solid solution. And PhoneGap is by no means the only one out there providing such a solution.
I'll agree with you - most of my development these days is web development and iPhone / iPad development, but I still dabble back into industrial automation from time to time. I like my Mac Mini, for instance - it's solid, it's managed to survive three major OS upgrades since 2006, and it's still solid after four years of constant use. I like the "it just works" philosophy - I can focus on software development, not hardware troubleshooting. Apple isn't perfect, but the OS and Hardware combination is pretty damned good. (I will say, though, that after four years I'm finally going to upgrade the little box. This one will sit on the shelf and be a media box.)
The 'cool factor' is problematic - you're dead on right about that. But I've not been one to care too much about what everyone else thinks is cool anway ;-)
Conceptually, cracking this game is trivial. If it's using a DNS lookup to find the server, edit hosts. so it just loops back to the local machine (127.0.0.1). Then, write app that simulates the DRM server to save games, etc. are handled locally. Of course, I say it's conceptually trivial - depending on some specifics, it could get a little more difficult, but definitely doable. Same goes for the idea of streaming textures, etc. that someone else suggested - it's all crackable, just like nearly every scheme. Heck, even having the game live online only can be overcome with the help of some really determined people - if you can set up a WoW server at home, then even streaming game content isn't viable as a copyprotection mechanism.
I agree with ya' completely - and I've done that very thing once already. I've also done that once with a book that was new, but there was no ebook version of it. I feel bit silly about buying a used copy and pirating an ebook - the only reason for doing it was the "tagable" copy on my shelf. The new one I bought, though, was to help support the author and the company that published the book.
One of my solutions to the problem is a good set of vitamins. I tend to shy away from stuff like Centrum, and use multi-vitamin packs with a little more "kick" to them (and are a heck of a lot more soluable in the digestive system), and B12 sublingual drops.
If I have to ask myself the question "how long was it since I took my vitamins?" then the answer is probably about three days - that's how long it take for them to wear off on me.
As with a lot of processes in our bodies, good nutritian helps the brain considerably. Eat right, exersize, and take a good multi vitamin, and you'll probably see a lot of the memory issues go away. It works for me anyway - as with any random commenter on /., YMMV :-)
I remember being excited as hell to see the original - got the tickets, and played Tron (the arcade game, which was released a month or so before the movie was) until it was time to watch the movie.
I was completely blown away. CGI is taken for granted these days (and often villified if it's anything but perfect), but Tron was the first of it's kind. The story is... ok (though it doesn't really stand up over time). But the visuals were amazing, and some of the music was great at adding even more punch to the unique environment created (heck, my iPhone's alarm clock plays the "Tron Scherzo" track to wake me up in the morning. Yeah, ok, maybe a little too geeky :-)
The Tron 2.0 game didn't really "do much" for me, and I'm not someone who get's all hyped up over a bad quality cell phone (or god knows what) recording of a teaser - if it ain't HD, I woudn't normally bother watching it. I mainly wanted to see it to scoff at it and make fun of it (my haven't I gotten to be an ass as I've gotten older ;-)
After seeing that... wow. It just looked right. Hopefully, someone isn't about to piss on what was a cool movie concept back then. But, even that low quality crappy version just looks too damned cool! Some one has got to go beat a high quality copy outta someone and post it online soon!
Time to load up MAME and play a little Disks of Tron and throw the DVD in the player :-)
My off hand guess, Bittorrents. I've noticed with the WRT54G that I had for a while would have problems if you're running multiple torrents, and don't have any cap on how many inbound and outbound connections there can be (IE, overnight runs where you don't need to use any of your bandwidth :-) A reboot always fixed the problem - I assume it's either running out of memory, or running out of ports to work with (since each connection has a timeout of an hour, IIRC)
Actually, I think they would allow it. Since it's a virtualized set of hardware MAME is running, the apps are just data files at that point. The ability to move data files off and on the iPhone is going to be an important point for backups, etc. anyway. (Heck, part of that happens anyways. Even though there's no ties between ToDo lists and OS X apps, iPhone Notes are still backed up with the rest of the phone information like SMS messages, etc.) However, I doubt you'll see any ties between the App Store and downloading roms :-)
One has to wonder -most things that they've done for the iPhone (Multitouch, etc.) have been showing up back on the Mac OS platform. How long until there's a version of the App Store native to OS X? (As a developer, I wouldn't mind - 70% revenue, they handle bandwidth, alerting users for updates, etc.? Not too bad - just as long as it doesn't involve OS X apps being only obtained exclusively through the App Store ;-)
Davis Sickmon,
Gameripeda - For gamers, duh.
They didn't brick XBox 360's that were modded, but, they did ban 'em from XBox Live. While not the same as bricking it, it definitely rendered it less valuable to people who were playing online games or enjoyed downloading games, videos, etc. from XBox Live.
I was expecting to get some over-defensive crap, maybe some Internet Tough Guy talking about how he could kick my ass, but that was actually pretty interesting.
/., and I can still kick your ass! :-)
:-/ At one time I used to own a LAN gaming center, and the crowd was pretty diverse in the evenings (daytime and early evening was kids and teens almost exclusively, who did fit the obsessive-geeky stereotypes to a T) You had a few obsessives, but more of the people were just folks who liked games and wanted some place to hang out with like minded people. Even some folks I wouldn't normally expected to see hanging out in the same location (a great example of that was a hispanic group and a group o' rednecks that I thought for a while I'd have problems with, instead eventually they ended up playing a lot of Halo and Half-Life 2 DM against each other.)
Hey, let's not get carried away - this is still
I wish I did know those sorta things - I can only speak for the people I know unluckly
But that's still far from a good sample of people - with WoW, how many people fit that obsessive-geeky profile that set at home and wouldn't go to a social gaming setup like that? Phht - no clue.
I think it's more that the average old lady could kick the ass of the average WoW addict. ;-). Meredith is a 6' 2" good looking blonde, and her husband isn't someone you'd like to pick a fight with - he's built pretty well. All of the people I mentioned are also above 30 years old.
While it makes for a good joke, I'm pretty surprised how much the WoW players I've been exposed to DON'T match that steriotype. Quick rundown of the people I know who play WoW. Brandon is 6' 5", and works out a lot (huge arms), owns his own plumbing company, and isn't generally a gamer. My ex-wife (and litterally all of her family) was anything but geeky - she was introduced to WoW by her step father, and got me into the game (I am a gamer though). I own three businesses, generally in ok shape (working my way to 'good' shape now
Most of the people (not all) that I know who play WoW are surprisingly normal people who have interests outside of the game, and it's another fun diversion to play. Very few of them are the obsessive geeky gamers you normally associate with video games.
Of course, this could be saying a lot more about the people I associate with - but based on the spread of people I saw standing in line for the release of Burning Crusade, the 'common gamer' image doesn't seem to match up with reality nearly as much when you start talking about WoW.
I use http://www.bloglines.com/, and have been for a while now. I pull in stuff from all sorts of differnt sources, into one page. Yep, same thing that you can do with Firefox.
But - I can access Bloglines anywhere, on any machine, and I have access to my already customized list of news feeds and the stuff that I've marked for further reading later, etc. For some reason I keep finding myself needing the ability to access my stuff from multiple machines, so it works great for me. Especially nice since my Mac isn't very portable at the moment, and when my co-host and I set down at the local coffee shop (WiFi access and long island iced teas :-) and start going through news to see what's going to be on the show this week, we can both pull up our list of stuff that we've marked in Bloglines, and discuss it. Very nice.
How many people actually need that sort of functionality? Eh. Not very many, really, since most people only have one machine to deal with (not talking about the /. crowd, people in general :-) where they would read thier RSS feeds anyway. So you're partially right - it's a bit of a business fad. It's got it's uses, but as a couple of sites that do it get popular, there's gonna end up being a whole bunch of sites, then the nitch market gets crowded, and 2/3rds of them just die. The rest will continue to exist for people like me who find a good use for it :-)
(And, yeah, there's a bunch of other ways I could do it, including setting up setup for pulling all the RSS feeds down on my own server, and reading that. I might do that some day, when I have enough spare time. Bleh - got a lack of that.)
Oh heck, and since I'm here and mentioned the show, here's a link - http://www.worldofgamerzone.com/. Only the first three episodes are up at the moment, which puts me 5 episodes behind the broadcasts. Need to find more hours in the day... :-)
Now, how can it be used in "NON-FREE COMPUTER GAMES" if its under the terms of the GPL? Doesn't the GPL force any derived work to be freed whether it wants to be or not?
You missunderstand the GPL. I can, with no problems, create a game that utilizes a GPL based engine, but copyright the content that makes up the game. Sure, the engine can be reused at will, and I do have abide by the terms of the GPL (making all of my programming changes available to PURCHASERS. Note that word - purchasers can redistribute it to non-purchasers, but I can choose to only make the source available to anyone who I provide a binart yo.) But the content? That CAN (your option) be strictly copyrighted material. Check the GNU site for more information on the subject.
I didn't have the Big Trak, but I had the Corvette. Somewhere, in my pile of toys from childhood it still resides (stuff I couldn't part with - the Corvette, a Donkey Kong portable game that looks like a mini-Donkey Kong cabinet, cool stuff like that) My problem with it was that I had always wished it was more programable - I managed to hit it's limits for programmability pretty quick. Now, if it had had more sensors, a programming port (upload a new program from, say, the C64) I wouldn't have gotten bored with it. But, it was cool enough that it's still in the pile of cool toys :-)
One has to wonder, with launch dates being set, will some projects step up and attempt a flight without being fully ready for it?
Of course - this sort of venture always comes with risk, and one of 'em is pushing your timetable up because the other guy looks like he's about to win. Given what happens when you screw up with space flight, I'd expect to see a fatality or two occur in the next couple o' years.
And one should keep in mind: It's all fun and games until someone gets killed. Then it's a SPORT! :-)
I own a Toshiba Libretto C110. I still use the heck outta it - I never bothered with buying a PDA, I use my Libretto instead. It's small enough to drop into the pocket of my trench coat when I head out on a startup, or go to gaming on the weekends.
PDA's have a very confining feature set - very little storage, low processing power, etc. For instance, I hate carrying my books to gaming - so, I have scanned versions of my books (and some that I bought from TSR in .pdf format) When I need to look up something, just pull up the document, hit find, and I've found what I need - more convenient than a dead trees version (for searching - there's still something I prefer about dead trees for normal reading). Plus, it beats the heck outta carrying 5 books. Sure, I could convert to plain text for a PDA, but then I loose most of the table formatting. Plus I also keep my characters on there in Excel (I'd run OpenOffice, but, the Libretto is too underpowered for OO - it works fine with the fairly old version of Office that was included.)
It's also great on a startup for similar reasons - just throw all my manuals on it, and when I need to look up something, pull that sucker out. Also great for times when I need to upload a program to a PanelView, connect to a PLC, etc. It's small, and I can hold it in one hand while connecting to the PLC - no need to have to set up a table or rest it on a rack.
For any serious long term use, it requires an external keyboard and monitor hooked up - I've used it that way a few times, but more often than not I just suffer through 15 minutes of typing on the itty-bitty keyboard it has.
This thing sounds like a perfect successor to my Libretto. The Libretto has 32Mb RAM, 166MHz processor (I overclocked mine to 233Mhz - there's some nice sites out there about hackin' the Libretto), and a 6Gb HD in it at the moment. 1 Ghz, 256MB, 30GB HD, and 802.11g? Sounds like a great upgrade to me :-)
Now if I could only get: Same thing with a G4 in it (what ever happened to the idea that Transmeta was going to be able to emulate any processor?!) running MacOS X, a touch screen that can be rotated around like some of the (way too large!) TabletPC's, and a decent 3D card in it (for when I'm bored at the airport, car trips, meetings :-) I'd REALLY happy :-) (And my wife would too - while I don't have a PDA, she does. She also has a Mac, and if she had her choice everything would run OS X / work like a Mac :-)
If the law says "thou shalt not make a product that can copy money", then Adobe would be exhibiting gross negligence (at the very least) if their product was in fact able to produce lifelike copies of money.
The law says you can't kill people. But we still have guns. Obviously gun makrs are exhibiting gross negligence by making such deadly products. And knife makers. And spoon makers. And car makers. And everything else.
But that's not what he said (and I can't believe someone modded it up without reading what the previous poster said, even though it was quoted right there.)
I'll state it differently, just in case you missunderstood what the previous poster said: If the law says you can't make a product that can copy money, that's the law. If the law says you can't kill, then nothing prevents you from making a product that can kill. You miss the difference - one covers the product directly (can't make something that copies money), the other covers potential uses (can't kill). VERY different situations.
Read. Think. Post. While it's not always the way people do it, it helps a lot ;-)
Yep, those stereotypes exist. Sucks too :-) But, it's up to the developer / self publisher to change those impressions. That's a part of marketing ANY product - trying to overcome any negative impressions that exist about your product.
Can it be done? Heck yeah! Some indies have very ugly websites - well, that's not helping sales any (I've been guilty of this one.) If the webpage & sales pages don't look all nice and polished, why would I think the game it's self is all nice and polished?
Market your strengths - unique gameplay (if your game is unique ;-), incredible online community, whatever it is that makes your game stand out. If it doesn't stand out (IE, you just released your third version of the old standard Arcade Lines clone), you don't stand a chance.
Find out what people's impressions of your game are, both before they have played it and after. Yes, it's quite possible to do, just takes a lot of footwork :-) Then, strategize how to overcome the negative perceptions that people have - and market either directly against that perception, or find ways to actually capitolize on that (For instance - some people think indie games are too short, so, market it as a short game with lots of replay value!)
It's all in how you invest your time and energy when it comes to marketing.
When I spoke at IGC '03, one of my comments was "Publishers are tools.", and went on to explain that I included online publishers with that too. By that, I mean they are just another way to build up your business. Use them as you see fit, but, don't try and run your business using just one tool. While Dan mentioned that it's a $57 Million dollar business (download games), that's NOT that big of a pool to play in when you are up against some much larger opponents. Make use of existing channels - get your name out there some. But your core business should be building YOUR channel. Dan presented some excellent strategies for this sort of thing - some of which I'll be making use of since I've got some games going into retail space here in the next month or so. Use retail space and other online sales channels as a bit of a trojan horse for marketing your own channels.
Quick note side note / nearly off topic note about the GarageGames group, since Dan mentions them being great guys in his article - they invited Shockwave and some of the other publishers to talk at Indie Games Con '03, and they themselves are online publishers. Before getting up and insulting my hosts, I pulled Jay Moore of GarageGames aside, and told him what I was planning on saying. This would seem to be a setup for conflict - telling people not to make long-term use of publishers while talking at a publisher sponsored event. Not only did Jay say no problem, the really DO want Indies to build up thier own channels, and Jay encouraged me to say what I planned on saying. To me, they are guys who "Get it" when it comes to dealing with Indies. Shockwave, etc... well, they just want to be yet another retailer, selling online space instead of shelf space. They "Don't Get It" when it comes to dealing with Indies, and I'm waiting to hear the horror stories about Indies who depended solely on channels like them to start showing up in about a year or so. IMHO, these guys are just as likely as big publishers to start bending development teams over the table.
(And in the interest of full disclosure - I talk to Dan McDonnald on a semi-regular basis. But then again... that's pretty typical for Indie game developers these days to chat, talk shop, and strategize with other indies :-)
I'll start off by saying that I typically don't recommend overly expensive (because I'm a tightwad), but in this case I'll make an exception.
Allen Bradley uses Elo Touch products for thier industrial control touch screen PC's. These things are wonderful IMHO - I didn't want to see the ones I had leave when the project was done, and they had to go be installed on site - I love mine as a nice 21" desktop montitor and touchscreen combo :-) These critters are a bit hefty price wise, but I haven't seen one fail yet in the field (and these are industrial areas - either gritty dirt or greasy type stuff). They are pretty nice displays, but a little more faded color wise than I'd like to normally use for a desktop application like Photoshop. Incredibly durable, lots of different styles, and they have excellent accuracy. I recommended 'em.
What I DON'T recommend is going with the lowest priced one you find. It will fail. Seriously. Don't be afraid to take your time, and find out what has the longest time between failures -vs- ruggedness (they don't always go together) -vs- the features you need. Anything less than what you need for the application is going to REALLY hurt you later.
As for programming for one - if it's on Windows, no problem. It's just a one-button mouse. They also have Linux, Mac, etc. drivers - it's just sending ya' mouse coordinates and a mouse click. For most applications, it's ready to roll before you even see the touch screen, it's that simple.
Must... resist... urge....
Damnit, I knew I couldn't resist! Keep your eye on a game called Trajectory Zone. Beta 3 (it's a closed beta, sorry - but you can contact the author for beta signup information) The screenshots only show some of the environments, but you can also see some of the cool random level generation toys and the toys for modders (Trajectory Zone has an IDE in it. Not exactly normal for a game... :-) Or you can take a look here at another couple o' screenshots, including how particle based nuclear explosions look in the game.
However, this isn't just Scorched Earth in 3D. It's got the classic turn based play if you want, or a new simultaneous fire resolution mode (everyone locks in a shot, and they all fire at once), or you can get nasty with it and play the realtime versions of the game. There's just.... LOTS of cool stuff in there. And of course, it's going to be available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.
Sorry - couldn't help but plug the game. I'm the owner of Midnight Ryder Technologies (the company doing Trajectory Zone), and plugging the game is just one of those things that's almost reflex these days :-)
Hm - you've missed how things have evolved recently:
1. BUYING a modern working 3D engine SDK costs between 300K to around a million, depending on engine. Wrapping it costs a few developer years.
Torque. Crystal Space 3D. There's more of 'em to. Personally, I licensed Torque. It cost me a whopping $100 for the license and souce code. If (and only if) the game starts to hit big (in excess of $500k in business for the company, or the publisher I deal with) then I have to move to the 'commercial' license - which is $10k. still pretty good. Of course, some people will say that CS3D is crap (gee, it managed to power an on the shelf retail game that's still on the shelves now - can't be that bad!), or that Torque is too dated (got look at the site, or check out screenshots of Trajectory Zone (still not a lot of content there, but, some pretty nice in game shots of the levels. The engine isn't very dated any more :-)
So, the myth of the quarter-million dollar engine is dead. There's plenty of options to choose from. And since Torque went to $100 to license it, a couple of other engines have done the same (but, truthfully, none of the others have impressed me yet. That could change in the future.)
Plus, using an existing engine cuts WAY down on the QA costs - you already know the engine runs on a diverse set of hardware, since everyone else who's licensed it makes it work (and in the case of CrystalSpace or Torque, everyone is highly likely to share information on quirks, enhancements, etc.) So now what you have to spend time testing is content and game specific stuff.
The game concepts are there - I can already tell ya they are. I was at Indie Games Con '03 (disclosure: I was a speaker there this year and last year. This year's topic: "Surviving Indie Game Development" :-) and talked with a lot of people about what they were working on, etc. There's both brand new concepts, and rethinking of old concepts. Not a single game there didn't have a unique selling point of some sort - something that makes 'em really stand out. (Well, that's not COMPLETELY true. There were a couple o' knockoffs there. But they weren't the promonent games.) Close enough to mainstream to get gamers attention, but different enough to make thier own nitch (GravRally comes to mind.)
It's far from gloom and doom for indies like myself - if you are smart, it's a good time to be an Indie. If you want to make Doom III - well, good luck on getting your day job back :-)
Oh, forgot to cover this: Art. Trajectory Zone was done by a team of 9 people grand total (I'm the owner of Midnight Ryder Technologies, the developer behind Trajectory Zone) So what DO you do to fill up a game like this? Well, in my case Eric Forhan (art director) found people who were willing to work for a percent of profits after it's published. That defrayed the up front costs, and a lot of guys get to see thier name on a box when it comes out :-) But for some of our other titles in the pipeline, we're doing things like licensing content from various places (Gee, I could hire an art guy to model a table, chairs, couch, and stuff for this room. Or, I could buy it all for $40, and reskin the couch to match the room.) which also (if done smart) reduce the overhead for the art budget considerably. Next time, we don't need a team of 9 people - two will suffice, plus our licensed content.
And here's what's cool... the Indie situation continues to improve. Suddenly, someone figured out there's a whole new market segment to sell to. So now there are products and services showing up that are less expensive, and aimed directly at Indie budgets. Heck, if I need to construct and entire city, I can buy all the parts for building, roads, street lights, etc. all in one package for $20! Indies are likely to save time, and reuse the content rather than build new - which means
Ya know - I forgot about that :-) Originally, there were only 5 games in there. Fuzzee Teevee and BridgeIt weren't in there (which proves a write-in candidate can win sometimes ;-)