Looking Glass, makers of the original Thief games, has generally been considered a victim of piracy. Their games were very well regarded but didn't sell well enough to sustain the studio. It's said that the sales were borderline, so if some of those who pirated the games would have bought them, the studio would have been able to continue.
Completely agree. Starting developers go to where they can make a difference. It's hard to make a big different on Windows, but on new platforms there's space for an individual to make his mark without spending years of development.
Several things: - Having $2K is one thing, spending it on MSDN is a whole different thing, and basically a stupid thing to do. Say you scrapped a $20K budget (quite a bit for a startup before an investment, sometimes that's even what the first angel investor will give), that's 10% of your budget for a development environment that's licensed to a single person. - MSDN Enterprise has been dead for years. A top end subscription will now cost you over $10,000. Granted you don't need to go for that.
But, on the other hand, there's no particular need to pay anything for development tools, since Visual Studio Express is free and the MSDN library is, too. All you need to develop on Windows is a Windows license.
I think it's a reasonable modern day equivalent, though not a perfect match. It covers a lot more in what it teaches, because there's a lot more to cover, but it does provide a good introduction to a lot of stuff in computing. Haven't read it for a couple of years, though (since they stopped shipping single issues; international subscriptions to it are extremely costly).
Although the study is an interesting one, I dislike calling what people are presented with "scientific data". What people see are scientific theories. The most data they typically get is statistics, which are a minor subset of the data that's chosen to support the theory. Much of scientific research is flawed, as is often seen when research contradicts other research. It's incomplete becuase it's indeed very complicated, and must use approximations and models. That's not to say science is impotent, because these tools have self controls (which are sometimes even used), and science can use predictions to test theories. Still, people must make the distinction between data and theory, and realise that theory can be flawed.
You're not following the argument because you're thinking about patents and not copyright.
You must ask how sustainable is a software industry where anyone can get any product for free. What's the incentive of any company to create a competing product to a product which earns very little? And why would a company create a product when a bigger company can sell it as its own and take all the support money (which is where many free products can get money)?
You end up with an "open source" style world of mediocre software and no incentive to invest the huge amounts of money required to create quality products.
A story which doesn't inform people doesn't work well even if it's well placed. Sure, if I'm looking for a particular piece of news I might hit the best placed news item first, but normally I read sites that have good news, and only rarely supplement it with a search. I do this when the news item doesn't have enough information. So the thing is, if you have a very informative news site, I will follow it. If you have a news site that's not very informative I might still get to it through google, but will dismiss it.
It's a good question whether it's more beneficial to have tons of occasional hits rather than a good following.
But anti-Apple people also ignore all the good things about Apple products.
Apple makes good hardware. People who like Windows buy Macs and run Windows on it because they like the design (Apple haters usually complain about Mac prices, not their design). Apple broke new ground with touch on the iPhone and still has the best touch hardware. It created an interface for the iPhone that everyone then tried to immitate -- and not just because it sells, but because it's a really convenient interface to use.
People buy Apple products because they're good products. They're sometimes inferior in some aspects. They're usually more expensive than a non-Apple product with similar specs would cost. But on the whole, yes, Apple does make "the best whatever in the world" at the time of release. The iPad is the best tablet currently available, for most people. It's only inferior to unreleased or imagined products.
Disclaimer: I never bought an Apple product, though I've seen an iPad and found it much more impressive than I thought I would. I'm unlikely to buy one, though. I'm not dead set against Apple products, but my geek tendencies do tell me to try other options first.
"To increase the pressure on Google, the telecoms groups are interested in finding common cause with content owners such as media companies, which get little or no money from the technology company when it aggregates their content on Google News."
If the telecoms say that media companies are right in asking for money for access to their content, then the telecoms should pay the media companies, since they aggregate their content, giving the user one data pipe to access the entire internet. Basically (by this argument) the telecoms should pay Google, which in turn should pay the media companies.
Speaking of blind people and movies, does anyone know of DVD's (or Blu-rays) for movies other than Moulin Rouge which specifically cater to the blind? For those not familiar with it, the Moulin Rouge DVD has a soundtrack for the blind, where a narrator describes what's happening in the movie.
Kills me how what looks like a nice Dutch success is translated into stupid conclusions. Dutch succeeded by changing lane widths and planting trees. Americans now change this to nearby cars and buildings, so when a car does have an accident, it will also hurt nearby property. The nearby houses will also suffer from the traffic. Huh?
I'd bet that the majority of CEO's know that most software is released with bugs (the others are not in the software business:). Any product manager worth his salt will be able to manage priorities correctly. So the entire argument is built on false assumptions. Sure, there are bad managers who will get priorities horribly wrong, but even they probably know that not all bugs can be squashed. To present this as if it's something new and revolutionary is silly.
IMO games were largely held back by the majority of gamers being on XP, which is limited to DX9. Once enough users move to a more up to date Windows OS, there will be more incentive to move to a newer API. There no other reason not to use DX11. Console programming is not similar to DX9 programming, so using DX11 instead of DX9 is fine. In terms of hardware, the consoles do provide more than a standard DX9 experience. The 360 has a tesselator (though simpler than DX11's one) and the PS3 has the Cell, which can be used for advanced effects. Sure, you have to write separate code for them all, but you have to do this anyway if you want to take advantage of the hardware.
Many developers do like the advanced hardware and would like to use it (and do), so I don't think things will turn really badly for the PC unless there's a serious decline in PC sales.
Agreed. I don't think it's a scam. It's just a way to give a little extra to the experience. It's like saying that the iPhone is a scam because it costs more than a basic phone and doesn't have full multitasking. Or whatever other silly statement of this type. Not everything fits everyone, but I'm sure a lot of people do enjoy the experience.
More companies do choose freedom, by staying away from the GPL, which is one of the more limiting licenses around. GPL is kind of like the paparazzi following you around saying "you're free to do anything you want, just as long as you don't mind that I share it with everybody". Hmmm, actually it's like if the paparazzi would force you to take your own pictures and publish them. Anyway, that's not the kind of freedom most people want.
That's how a developer would look at it. From a user's POV, "free as in speech" is meaningless. Free like beer is something users love, but many would prefer stealing a well programmed commercial program than getting one that's already free. I'm not a big Microsoft fan (though I use Windows and develop on it), and tended to stay away from its office suite for my personal needs, but whenever I needed to do something complex at work, Microsoft Office always worked a lot more smoothly than Open Office or alternatives (which I do always try). So I don't know what you're talking about with "their software disrespects you as a user and keeps pushing the limits in dividing and taking power away from their user base". From my experience if you're looking to be productive, a well established commercial product is a good way to go, if you can afford it (or don't mind getting it illegally).
Quite the opposite, D&D is the source of a an incredible amount of derivative fantasy. It's what made everyone "know" what an elf or dwarf looks and acts like. It gave us pictures and stats and backgrounds. If as a DM I dared put in a goblin that wasn't evil and accompanied the party, everyone was certain that at any moment it will steal, kill, etc. I can think of cases when I deviated from the D&D depictions of creatures, even outside the direct context of D&D, and got "corrections" from D&D players.
I'm not saying that there aren't imaginative D&D games, but I'd imagine that there are probably more derivative ones than original ones, or the market for expansions and adventures wouldn't have been as big. To this day you can see fiction magazine submission guidelines asking not to submit things that resemble D&D adventures.
It's not the hype. It's just that the discriminating buyers are the minority. Most people want crap, or what "elitists" think is crap. Kind of like soap operas, which many people consider junk, yet are extremely popular. Or reality shows. Or big budget effect movies. Companies just do what most people are okay with. A minority of people want dedicated servers, so there's no big need to implement them. Having a patch a few days late doesn't matter to most, either, I'd bet. Most people are willing to live with minor setbacks.
It's more than this. The article is a serious bit of FUD. OpenGL lagged behind in implementing DX10 features, such as geometry shaders, and the people who were disappointed with OpenGL 3 and decided to try DX10 weren't Microsoft lackeys. The article links to a 3-4 year old NVIDIA article mentioning that Direct3D call overhead is higher than OpenGL's, and that's true for DX9. A large part of the work on DX10 was to remove overheads. The tesselation available in OpenGL is ATI's previous simpler installation, which was also available for Direct3D (as a proprietary extension from ATI), and my guess is that the latest tesselation hardware isn't yet available in OpenGL (correct me if I'm wrong). Catalyst 9.12 added support for GL_ARB_geometry_shader4 and cube map arrays (see the release notes), features available in Direct3D for quite a while.
I agree that OpenGL is the best for cross platform, the rest of the article is IMO bad advice for developers who want to develop cutting edge games. It's not terrible advice, and it actually makes some sense for indies, but still... I do want to see Microsoft continue to dominate for the simple fact that it's the only one actively trying to advance the hardware and keep both major players supplying the same features. OpenGL is neat in providing a way to add unique features, but these are developer hell. Using different extensions on different hardware makes things a lot harder, and it takes quite a bit of time for the ARB to standardise on an extension.
Regarding WebGL, I think it's the future for indies, the only important thing I see missing there is a way to protect your code. That could be a real issue. My prediction for the future is that the PC as we know if will decline, as the web browser will become an application platform that's decoupled from the OS. OpenGL (ES) has an important place as the backbone of the OS, but I don't know how much it will be used directly. So I do think that OpenGL will win in the long run (unless microsoft decouples Direct3D from Windows).
It was the death of Commodore that killed the Amiga. That happened in '94. The Amiga was declining before that, ever since the PC hardware started surpassing it.
Windows 95 did have an effect on alternative OS's, since it was good enough for everyday use. It might not have been perfect, but it nailed most of the important points (long filenames, preemptive multitasking).
A lot of Amiga users moved to OS/2. I don't know if any moved to Linux. I don't remember Linux as being a real alternative at the time. Maybe for users who hang on a few more years, but they're probably the minority.
I agree with the notion that we should lessen our effect on the environment, however, I feel that global warming is distracting us from other problems. Everything is focused on CO2, just one of the ways we affect the environment. People do care about other stuff, which is why you see more biodegradable plastics, for example, but you don't have a policy on them, even though plastic wastes are a serious problem.
I read both media and user reviews, though mainly for games I'm thinking of buying because they're on sale on Steam or the like. If the reviews aren't good, I'm less likely to buy the game. The other way though, review causing me to buy a game, is less likely, simply because I don't tend to read reviews if I don't yet have an interest in the game.
I was surprised that advertising visuals are the next most important factor after genre, playing a previous version and price.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't notice this post. I just posted the same.
Looking Glass, makers of the original Thief games, has generally been considered a victim of piracy. Their games were very well regarded but didn't sell well enough to sustain the studio. It's said that the sales were borderline, so if some of those who pirated the games would have bought them, the studio would have been able to continue.
Completely agree. Starting developers go to where they can make a difference. It's hard to make a big different on Windows, but on new platforms there's space for an individual to make his mark without spending years of development.
Several things:
- Having $2K is one thing, spending it on MSDN is a whole different thing, and basically a stupid thing to do. Say you scrapped a $20K budget (quite a bit for a startup before an investment, sometimes that's even what the first angel investor will give), that's 10% of your budget for a development environment that's licensed to a single person.
- MSDN Enterprise has been dead for years. A top end subscription will now cost you over $10,000. Granted you don't need to go for that.
But, on the other hand, there's no particular need to pay anything for development tools, since Visual Studio Express is free and the MSDN library is, too. All you need to develop on Windows is a Windows license.
I think it's a reasonable modern day equivalent, though not a perfect match. It covers a lot more in what it teaches, because there's a lot more to cover, but it does provide a good introduction to a lot of stuff in computing. Haven't read it for a couple of years, though (since they stopped shipping single issues; international subscriptions to it are extremely costly).
Although the study is an interesting one, I dislike calling what people are presented with "scientific data". What people see are scientific theories. The most data they typically get is statistics, which are a minor subset of the data that's chosen to support the theory. Much of scientific research is flawed, as is often seen when research contradicts other research. It's incomplete becuase it's indeed very complicated, and must use approximations and models. That's not to say science is impotent, because these tools have self controls (which are sometimes even used), and science can use predictions to test theories. Still, people must make the distinction between data and theory, and realise that theory can be flawed.
You're not following the argument because you're thinking about patents and not copyright.
You must ask how sustainable is a software industry where anyone can get any product for free. What's the incentive of any company to create a competing product to a product which earns very little? And why would a company create a product when a bigger company can sell it as its own and take all the support money (which is where many free products can get money)?
You end up with an "open source" style world of mediocre software and no incentive to invest the huge amounts of money required to create quality products.
A story which doesn't inform people doesn't work well even if it's well placed. Sure, if I'm looking for a particular piece of news I might hit the best placed news item first, but normally I read sites that have good news, and only rarely supplement it with a search. I do this when the news item doesn't have enough information. So the thing is, if you have a very informative news site, I will follow it. If you have a news site that's not very informative I might still get to it through google, but will dismiss it.
It's a good question whether it's more beneficial to have tons of occasional hits rather than a good following.
But anti-Apple people also ignore all the good things about Apple products.
Apple makes good hardware. People who like Windows buy Macs and run Windows on it because they like the design (Apple haters usually complain about Mac prices, not their design). Apple broke new ground with touch on the iPhone and still has the best touch hardware. It created an interface for the iPhone that everyone then tried to immitate -- and not just because it sells, but because it's a really convenient interface to use.
People buy Apple products because they're good products. They're sometimes inferior in some aspects. They're usually more expensive than a non-Apple product with similar specs would cost. But on the whole, yes, Apple does make "the best whatever in the world" at the time of release. The iPad is the best tablet currently available, for most people. It's only inferior to unreleased or imagined products.
Disclaimer: I never bought an Apple product, though I've seen an iPad and found it much more impressive than I thought I would. I'm unlikely to buy one, though. I'm not dead set against Apple products, but my geek tendencies do tell me to try other options first.
They should just google "ET's place". It's that simple.
"To increase the pressure on Google, the telecoms groups are interested in finding common cause with content owners such as media companies, which get little or no money from the technology company when it aggregates their content on Google News."
If the telecoms say that media companies are right in asking for money for access to their content, then the telecoms should pay the media companies, since they aggregate their content, giving the user one data pipe to access the entire internet. Basically (by this argument) the telecoms should pay Google, which in turn should pay the media companies.
Speaking of blind people and movies, does anyone know of DVD's (or Blu-rays) for movies other than Moulin Rouge which specifically cater to the blind? For those not familiar with it, the Moulin Rouge DVD has a soundtrack for the blind, where a narrator describes what's happening in the movie.
Kills me how what looks like a nice Dutch success is translated into stupid conclusions. Dutch succeeded by changing lane widths and planting trees. Americans now change this to nearby cars and buildings, so when a car does have an accident, it will also hurt nearby property. The nearby houses will also suffer from the traffic. Huh?
I'd bet that the majority of CEO's know that most software is released with bugs (the others are not in the software business :). Any product manager worth his salt will be able to manage priorities correctly. So the entire argument is built on false assumptions. Sure, there are bad managers who will get priorities horribly wrong, but even they probably know that not all bugs can be squashed. To present this as if it's something new and revolutionary is silly.
IMO games were largely held back by the majority of gamers being on XP, which is limited to DX9. Once enough users move to a more up to date Windows OS, there will be more incentive to move to a newer API. There no other reason not to use DX11. Console programming is not similar to DX9 programming, so using DX11 instead of DX9 is fine. In terms of hardware, the consoles do provide more than a standard DX9 experience. The 360 has a tesselator (though simpler than DX11's one) and the PS3 has the Cell, which can be used for advanced effects. Sure, you have to write separate code for them all, but you have to do this anyway if you want to take advantage of the hardware.
Many developers do like the advanced hardware and would like to use it (and do), so I don't think things will turn really badly for the PC unless there's a serious decline in PC sales.
Agreed. I don't think it's a scam. It's just a way to give a little extra to the experience. It's like saying that the iPhone is a scam because it costs more than a basic phone and doesn't have full multitasking. Or whatever other silly statement of this type. Not everything fits everyone, but I'm sure a lot of people do enjoy the experience.
More companies do choose freedom, by staying away from the GPL, which is one of the more limiting licenses around. GPL is kind of like the paparazzi following you around saying "you're free to do anything you want, just as long as you don't mind that I share it with everybody". Hmmm, actually it's like if the paparazzi would force you to take your own pictures and publish them. Anyway, that's not the kind of freedom most people want.
That's how a developer would look at it. From a user's POV, "free as in speech" is meaningless. Free like beer is something users love, but many would prefer stealing a well programmed commercial program than getting one that's already free. I'm not a big Microsoft fan (though I use Windows and develop on it), and tended to stay away from its office suite for my personal needs, but whenever I needed to do something complex at work, Microsoft Office always worked a lot more smoothly than Open Office or alternatives (which I do always try). So I don't know what you're talking about with "their software disrespects you as a user and keeps pushing the limits in dividing and taking power away from their user base". From my experience if you're looking to be productive, a well established commercial product is a good way to go, if you can afford it (or don't mind getting it illegally).
Spent all his money on DLC, and now he's trying to get some back.
Before that he lost money in a casion, and wanted to get it back.
As for Google, I don't know how much money it's possible to lose on ads, but I'd love to find out.
Quite the opposite, D&D is the source of a an incredible amount of derivative fantasy. It's what made everyone "know" what an elf or dwarf looks and acts like. It gave us pictures and stats and backgrounds. If as a DM I dared put in a goblin that wasn't evil and accompanied the party, everyone was certain that at any moment it will steal, kill, etc. I can think of cases when I deviated from the D&D depictions of creatures, even outside the direct context of D&D, and got "corrections" from D&D players.
I'm not saying that there aren't imaginative D&D games, but I'd imagine that there are probably more derivative ones than original ones, or the market for expansions and adventures wouldn't have been as big. To this day you can see fiction magazine submission guidelines asking not to submit things that resemble D&D adventures.
It's not the hype. It's just that the discriminating buyers are the minority. Most people want crap, or what "elitists" think is crap. Kind of like soap operas, which many people consider junk, yet are extremely popular. Or reality shows. Or big budget effect movies. Companies just do what most people are okay with. A minority of people want dedicated servers, so there's no big need to implement them. Having a patch a few days late doesn't matter to most, either, I'd bet. Most people are willing to live with minor setbacks.
[Slashdot ate my post, so I'll try again.]
It's more than this. The article is a serious bit of FUD. OpenGL lagged behind in implementing DX10 features, such as geometry shaders, and the people who were disappointed with OpenGL 3 and decided to try DX10 weren't Microsoft lackeys. The article links to a 3-4 year old NVIDIA article mentioning that Direct3D call overhead is higher than OpenGL's, and that's true for DX9. A large part of the work on DX10 was to remove overheads. The tesselation available in OpenGL is ATI's previous simpler installation, which was also available for Direct3D (as a proprietary extension from ATI), and my guess is that the latest tesselation hardware isn't yet available in OpenGL (correct me if I'm wrong). Catalyst 9.12 added support for GL_ARB_geometry_shader4 and cube map arrays (see the release notes), features available in Direct3D for quite a while.
I agree that OpenGL is the best for cross platform, the rest of the article is IMO bad advice for developers who want to develop cutting edge games. It's not terrible advice, and it actually makes some sense for indies, but still... I do want to see Microsoft continue to dominate for the simple fact that it's the only one actively trying to advance the hardware and keep both major players supplying the same features. OpenGL is neat in providing a way to add unique features, but these are developer hell. Using different extensions on different hardware makes things a lot harder, and it takes quite a bit of time for the ARB to standardise on an extension.
Regarding WebGL, I think it's the future for indies, the only important thing I see missing there is a way to protect your code. That could be a real issue. My prediction for the future is that the PC as we know if will decline, as the web browser will become an application platform that's decoupled from the OS. OpenGL (ES) has an important place as the backbone of the OS, but I don't know how much it will be used directly. So I do think that OpenGL will win in the long run (unless microsoft decouples Direct3D from Windows).
It was the death of Commodore that killed the Amiga. That happened in '94. The Amiga was declining before that, ever since the PC hardware started surpassing it.
Windows 95 did have an effect on alternative OS's, since it was good enough for everyday use. It might not have been perfect, but it nailed most of the important points (long filenames, preemptive multitasking).
A lot of Amiga users moved to OS/2. I don't know if any moved to Linux. I don't remember Linux as being a real alternative at the time. Maybe for users who hang on a few more years, but they're probably the minority.
I agree with the notion that we should lessen our effect on the environment, however, I feel that global warming is distracting us from other problems. Everything is focused on CO2, just one of the ways we affect the environment. People do care about other stuff, which is why you see more biodegradable plastics, for example, but you don't have a policy on them, even though plastic wastes are a serious problem.
I read both media and user reviews, though mainly for games I'm thinking of buying because they're on sale on Steam or the like. If the reviews aren't good, I'm less likely to buy the game. The other way though, review causing me to buy a game, is less likely, simply because I don't tend to read reviews if I don't yet have an interest in the game.
I was surprised that advertising visuals are the next most important factor after genre, playing a previous version and price.