ALL of the games for the aforementioned console systems do it with packages, do they not? I don't follow them very well. Suffice it to say that you're coming in equal with everyone else.
As for The Sims and Starcraft, it's unarguable that they sold on their own merit, but these are from publishers who have previous best selling games. It's hardly possible to discern the size of the box selling these games with so many other variables.
There is a limited shelf space. Shelf space in brick and mortar stores costs quite a significant amount of money. I'm hoping a game designer will reply to this thread and say just how much money it really costs to get shelf space. Games that don't pay for shelf space get bargain bin space, instead. This seriously compromises your ability to sell your title at a decent price. Microsoft is effectively pushing smaller boxes off the end of the shelf. It's things like this that force you to have a publisher if you are to sell your software in a brick and mortar store. (Of course, that's where microsoft steps in and buys Bungie's developer's souls...)
Let's say that one domain, or even three or fifty controlled all of the advertising on the Internet due to patents. While junkbuster is a godsend, no third party software is going to stand up to the simplicity of simply firewalling these offending domains.
Internet advertising relies on the same things as distributing DeCSS: A massive distribution of the ad content so that it becomes hard to block it.
Already, I've been bitching at the sysadmin at work to firewall incoming traffic from doubleclick.net; these guys have got a ton of traffic coming from that one domain, and none of it is useful to us. Furthermore, I know a lot of sysadmins who ALREADY block doubleclick.
Re:Mozilla... Mozirra... proper pronunciation?
on
Mozilla M16 Released
·
· Score: 2
I think the correct spelling of the pronounciation is 'Cochira'. Try poking your head out of a blanket and saying it with rasp in your voice, you'll notice I'm right.
For around a year now, I've wondered if there's any advantage to mimicking the visual cortex in networking. To me, it seems like the bandwidth would be immense. However, the range is significantly short with this sort of connection.
Sci-Fi always contained stories of people with cybernetic parts fused to them. How about the other way around? It would seem we're a more efficient computer than the turing model.
... if I had continued work on my code until it was completed. As it is, it's only pre alpha.
I'm talking about the midi to guitar tab software I was writing around six months ago. You plug a midi in, and it outputs the guitar tab for any given midi track. Even drum.:)
It's command line GPL'd software, written in C, compiles with GCC. Just like it should be. This is the first time I've released this piece of software, so have at it, my friends.
Last year, some friends and myself got together to perform Super Mario Brothers songs for the school talent show. We dressed up as the characters and did a medley, which included Hammer Brothers, Underground, The Castle Song From Mario 1, the water tune from smb3 and a few others. It was pretty obvious that a program like the one I've written would have been a great help.:)
One of the most misused definitions when speaking about GUIs is 'easy to use'. There are two separate directions for a good, heathly UI to go in: Either it can be easy to learn, which usually incorporates large images on icons, lots of help files, massive amounts of mouse usage and a stripping of most functionality, or you can have TRUE easy to use, which assumes only that the user is willing to memorize many commands, is lightweight on screen real estate when it comes to help, and just basically has a lot more features. Case in point: Emacs. Certainly harder to use than Wordpad, Word, or Notepad. Is it more efficient? (Minus formatting.) Hell, yes. Once you've put the time in to learn something like emacs, you can very simply open another window, display two buffers on the new window, open a file on the second one and switch to it: cx-5-2, cx-2, cx-o, cx-bn.
I, personally think it's a shame that EVERYONE is aiming for easy to learn. Once you've learned a program, you're stuck with the interface you learned it on. Why not become familiar with something efficient?
SDL, Simple Direct Media Layer, by Sam Lantinga (not Lokigames, but he his their head programmer) is supported in news groups and mailing lists, and is a very well documented API that is already in many shipping products from Loki games.
I cannot remember all of the operating systems and platforms it compiles and runs under, but let's just say that it allows you to interface with TWO renderers under both Windows AND Linux, plus OpenGL and OpenAL support. Also, it is endian-portable, as it works on the Mac as well.
It also supports all of the other major facets of DirectX: DirectInput, DirectSound, oh wait, that's about all the other major facets.:)
About the only benefit that I can see from this new API is a unified driver programming interface. Right now, SDL interfaces with renderers elsewhere. This means many different types of drivers must be programmed in order to have your hardware work cross platform a'la SDL.
No offense, but everyone knows who Sid Meier is because he puts his name on all of his games. The names of most of his games are not as famous as he is; a sure sign of the propaganda working.
nevertheless, he DID do some interesting work with civilisation. I loved that game, as I'm sure many did.
My method of producing music with my computer is rather unconventional; it consists of a tracker (modplug), a program that allows me to throw multiple.wav's on top of each other and record in synch (cooledit pro), full duplex, and a nice high quality sound recorder (soundforge will do nicely).
My setup sounds far nicer than MIDI at the very bottom of the musician-hardware pile. It is a travesty that this setup is not covered in pedantic magazines more often, as it's the setup of a lot of 'underground' trackers. I've had a chance to talk to profesional digital musicians and they state that they didn't do it my way, because they didn't need as much hardware.
I have a full duplex soundblaster, some Windows software and a few nice guitars. Guess which piece of that lineup I'd like to eliminate from the equation?:)
This has the potential to succeed where Napster has failed. Napster works with only MP3s, which means Napster's designers have applied content discrimination. The law decrees, and IANAL, that as soon as you discriminate against content posted, that you are responsible for all content posted. If this program is much more general-purpose, it shouldn't be dogged by the same laws that Napster was dogged by.
Thus Spoke Zarathrustra is the name of the orchestrated piece in 2001: A Space Oddysey that plays a couple of times, whenever mankind evolves further. The first time it plays is when man figures out how to use weapons, in a scene with an ape smashing a ribcage with a hammer-like bone. The music rises to a pinnacle.
Although the original author never requested this, I feel I should speak up on one of my projects: A midi to guitar tab converter that works, but I haven't released yet. Also, the midi reading part is pretty general-purpose, so I'd probably do pretty good to release it as a separate lib.
Nintendo makes it's licensees sign a contract that makes any game developed for their system, be for their system exclusively. I am idly wondering of the implications of software portability if they get released with some sort of certification for this system.
Yes, you WILL be argued with. Backing up a statement such as 'Without marketing, Linux is nothing', by informing readers of your accomplishments and respect-status is NOT the same as providing examples and reasons.
By the way, the very beginning of Linux was not two years ago. My own personal first encounter with Linux was five years ago, and from what I can rememeber, it was fairly fleshed out then.
Whether or not PCs die out, in the past year or so, and increasingly so in the future, video games have required specialized gaming hardware. It used to be that I could go over to a friend's house where their parents had bought a computer for word processing and install eight or nine games, and they would actually become interested in computers.
These days, games cannot be an afterthought when buying a computer, sadly. It was Tim Sweeney who commented that engines are going to have to become even more scalable, because the 'home user PC' and the video gamer PC are really starting to get a vast difference between them.
I think this could be a major curbing point for PC game evolution, if engines do not become VERY scalable.
Scalability isn't the be-all end-all solution, either. While you support features that can be turned off, they can't really be directly related to gameplay. For example, in Quake 2, the OpenGL renderer on my 3DFx ran in 16bpp, but the textures were all 8bpp. (The extra bittage was used for coloured lighting.) The 8bpp software renderer held the high colour renderer back.
On win32, there are two OpenGL dlls, as any Windows OpenGL programmer knows. One is made by SGI, and the other by Microsoft. The SGI one is vastly superior in speed for software rendering, because of the dynamic code generation optimisations, I'd assert.
However, after browsing through the source tree for a while, I've found that the version released for Linux does not have these optimisations.
Before I give my speculations, I'd like to point out that I'm pretty new to the OpenGL programming scene, and I'm not completely aware of SGI's motives and resulting tactics in the past.
Here are the reasons I can speculate for this:
1) This is an example OpenGL implementation in order to assist developers in getting the implementation correct, the algorithms are not the focus of this release.
2) SGI has their own motives for not letting others know the dynamic code generation secrets due to political reasons, though I cannot fathom what they'd be.
3) Their original intention for the release of this source tree was to assist Mesa3D, and Mesa3D is a portable implementation of OpenGL, and an x86 code generator would defeat that.
All in all, I cannot settle on a single reason as to why SGI would benefit to not release the highest possible quality OpenGL code.
This may be the stores policies, but I believe it's also law. The stores are not really getting raped- it's the record companies (and game companies in some cases).
At the beginning of 1999, Corel said they'd have a Linux Corel Draw port 'by the end of the year'.
It was on my list of promised things by the end of the year, that didn't come out then. In fact, one of the only ones that did, was the Opera Browser Beta.
Sure, I can get Red Hat free myself, but the box and manual is an addition that may have changed my school's opinion on the matter around.
My highschool, of which I dropped out in my senior year from, was part of a school district that refused to run anything but Windows NT and 95, due to the fact that they "have seen Linux take down an NT server when plugged into the network."
This anti-alternative OS situation became a problem when a friend and I created an alternative network for the school. We had everything up and running under Slackware 3.6 with redundant servers, NIS and workstation apps such as The GIMP. (Which was cool since the school only had six photoshop licenses for fourty computers).
When we presented our network to the school's administration, they refused to hook us up to the school's network because Linux was a "Shareware operating system with source code, so any 'hacker' could put a back door in it."
Redhat on a CD with a box from a company would be the first step in opening these sorts of people's minds. I applaud Redhat.
It's not the students who need to learn, it's the administration.
I have heard some inside information from a person who has worked with the sourcecode as to why Valve has not ported the client: The code is too messy.
Look at it this way: Zoid did the server port to Linux. Zoid has been known to port software to obscure ( in the context of games ) for the price of giving him the hardware to do it on.
Halflife's code must have all sorts of MFC lying around in the main functions. Yes, I know it's the Quake engine, but it's highly modified. Hell, that's the Quake ONE engine Valve bought, and those are coloured lights, added by Valve.
Slashdot Mirror
ALL of the games for the aforementioned console systems do it with packages, do they not? I don't follow them very well. Suffice it to say that you're coming in equal with everyone else.
As for The Sims and Starcraft, it's unarguable that they sold on their own merit, but these are from publishers who have previous best selling games. It's hardly possible to discern the size of the box selling these games with so many other variables.
There is a limited shelf space. Shelf space in brick and mortar stores costs quite a significant amount of money. I'm hoping a game designer will reply to this thread and say just how much money it really costs to get shelf space. Games that don't pay for shelf space get bargain bin space, instead. This seriously compromises your ability to sell your title at a decent price. Microsoft is effectively pushing smaller boxes off the end of the shelf. It's things like this that force you to have a publisher if you are to sell your software in a brick and mortar store. (Of course, that's where microsoft steps in and buys Bungie's developer's souls...)
Let's say that one domain, or even three or fifty controlled all of the advertising on the Internet due to patents. While junkbuster is a godsend, no third party software is going to stand up to the simplicity of simply firewalling these offending domains.
Internet advertising relies on the same things as distributing DeCSS: A massive distribution of the ad content so that it becomes hard to block it.
Already, I've been bitching at the sysadmin at work to firewall incoming traffic from doubleclick.net; these guys have got a ton of traffic coming from that one domain, and none of it is useful to us. Furthermore, I know a lot of sysadmins who ALREADY block doubleclick.
I think the correct spelling of the pronounciation is 'Cochira'. Try poking your head out of a blanket and saying it with rasp in your voice, you'll notice I'm right.
For around a year now, I've wondered if there's any advantage to mimicking the visual cortex in networking. To me, it seems like the bandwidth would be immense. However, the range is significantly short with this sort of connection.
Sci-Fi always contained stories of people with cybernetic parts fused to them. How about the other way around? It would seem we're a more efficient computer than the turing model.
Your best bet is a Virtual Private Network.
You forgot Adrian Carmack, the guy who did all the textures for every game since, I think, Wolf3D. No relation to John.
... if I had continued work on my code until it was completed. As it is, it's only pre alpha.
:)
:)
I'm talking about the midi to guitar tab software I was writing around six months ago. You plug a midi in, and it outputs the guitar tab for any given midi track. Even drum.
It's command line GPL'd software, written in C, compiles with GCC. Just like it should be. This is the first time I've released this piece of software, so have at it, my friends.
Be sure to e-mail me any changes.
Midi To Tab converter
Last year, some friends and myself got together to perform Super Mario Brothers songs for the school talent show. We dressed up as the characters and did a medley, which included Hammer Brothers, Underground, The Castle Song From Mario 1, the water tune from smb3 and a few others. It was pretty obvious that a program like the one I've written would have been a great help.
Play your ass off.
One of the most misused definitions when speaking about GUIs is 'easy to use'. There are two separate directions for a good, heathly UI to go in: Either it can be easy to learn, which usually incorporates large images on icons, lots of help files, massive amounts of mouse usage and a stripping of most functionality, or you can have TRUE easy to use, which assumes only that the user is willing to memorize many commands, is lightweight on screen real estate when it comes to help, and just basically has a lot more features. .
Case in point: Emacs. Certainly harder to use than Wordpad, Word, or Notepad. Is it more efficient? (Minus formatting.) Hell, yes. Once you've put the time in to learn something like emacs, you can very simply open another window, display two buffers on the new window, open a file on the second one and switch to it: cx-5-2, cx-2, cx-o, cx-bn
I, personally think it's a shame that EVERYONE is aiming for easy to learn. Once you've learned a program, you're stuck with the interface you learned it on. Why not become familiar with something efficient?
SDL, Simple Direct Media Layer, by Sam Lantinga (not Lokigames, but he his their head programmer) is supported in news groups and mailing lists, and is a very well documented API that is already in many shipping products from Loki games.
:)
I cannot remember all of the operating systems and platforms it compiles and runs under, but let's just say that it allows you to interface with TWO renderers under both Windows AND Linux, plus OpenGL and OpenAL support. Also, it is endian-portable, as it works on the Mac as well.
It also supports all of the other major facets of DirectX: DirectInput, DirectSound, oh wait, that's about all the other major facets.
About the only benefit that I can see from this new API is a unified driver programming interface. Right now, SDL interfaces with renderers elsewhere. This means many different types of drivers must be programmed in order to have your hardware work cross platform a'la SDL.
PS. SDL is lgpl'd.
No offense, but everyone knows who Sid Meier is because he puts his name on all of his games. The names of most of his games are not as famous as he is; a sure sign of the propaganda working.
nevertheless, he DID do some interesting work with civilisation. I loved that game, as I'm sure many did.
My method of producing music with my computer is rather unconventional; it consists of a tracker (modplug), a program that allows me to throw multiple .wav's on top of each other and record in synch (cooledit pro), full duplex, and a nice high quality sound recorder (soundforge will do nicely).
:)
My setup sounds far nicer than MIDI at the very bottom of the musician-hardware pile. It is a travesty that this setup is not covered in pedantic magazines more often, as it's the setup of a lot of 'underground' trackers. I've had a chance to talk to profesional digital musicians and they state that they didn't do it my way, because they didn't need as much hardware.
I have a full duplex soundblaster, some Windows software and a few nice guitars. Guess which piece of that lineup I'd like to eliminate from the equation?
This has the potential to succeed where Napster has failed. Napster works with only MP3s, which means Napster's designers have applied content discrimination. The law decrees, and IANAL, that as soon as you discriminate against content posted, that you are responsible for all content posted. If this program is much more general-purpose, it shouldn't be dogged by the same laws that Napster was dogged by.
Thus Spoke Zarathrustra is the name of the orchestrated piece in 2001: A Space Oddysey that plays a couple of times, whenever mankind evolves further. The first time it plays is when man figures out how to use weapons, in a scene with an ape smashing a ribcage with a hammer-like bone.
The music rises to a pinnacle.
Although the original author never requested this, I feel I should speak up on one of my projects: A midi to guitar tab converter that works, but I haven't released yet. Also, the midi reading part is pretty general-purpose, so I'd probably do pretty good to release it as a separate lib.
All (L)GPL'd, of course.
Nintendo makes it's licensees sign a contract that makes any game developed for their system, be for their system exclusively. I am idly wondering of the implications of software portability if they get released with some sort of certification for this system.
Deeply evil?
TLDs are quite expensive to enact. I'm not sure who pays, or how much (maybe someone could reply to this), but I don't think it's too easy.
As for the unsung heros, you're dreaming. No one minority group is louder on the Internet than OSS programmers.
> Any takers?
'Any givers', you mean?
Yes, you WILL be argued with. Backing up a statement such as 'Without marketing, Linux is nothing', by informing readers of your accomplishments and respect-status is NOT the same as providing examples and reasons.
By the way, the very beginning of Linux was not two years ago. My own personal first encounter with Linux was five years ago, and from what I can rememeber, it was fairly fleshed out then.
Linux existed before it was for sale.
Whether or not PCs die out, in the past year or so, and increasingly so in the future, video games have required specialized gaming hardware. It used to be that I could go over to a friend's house where their parents had bought a computer for word processing and install eight or nine games, and they would actually become interested in computers.
These days, games cannot be an afterthought when buying a computer, sadly. It was Tim Sweeney who commented that engines are going to have to become even more scalable, because the 'home user PC' and the video gamer PC are really starting to get a vast difference between them.
I think this could be a major curbing point for PC game evolution, if engines do not become VERY scalable.
Scalability isn't the be-all end-all solution, either. While you support features that can be turned off, they can't really be directly related to gameplay. For example, in Quake 2, the OpenGL renderer on my 3DFx ran in 16bpp, but the textures were all 8bpp. (The extra bittage was used for coloured lighting.) The 8bpp software renderer held the high colour renderer back.
Such is the price of scalability.
On win32, there are two OpenGL dlls, as any Windows OpenGL programmer knows. One is made by SGI, and the other by Microsoft. The SGI one is vastly superior in speed for software rendering, because of the dynamic code generation optimisations, I'd assert.
However, after browsing through the source tree for a while, I've found that the version released for Linux does not have these optimisations.
Before I give my speculations, I'd like to point out that I'm pretty new to the OpenGL programming scene, and I'm not completely aware of SGI's motives and resulting tactics in the past.
Here are the reasons I can speculate for this:
1) This is an example OpenGL implementation in order to assist developers in getting the implementation correct, the algorithms are not the focus of this release.
2) SGI has their own motives for not letting others know the dynamic code generation secrets due to political reasons, though I cannot fathom what they'd be.
3) Their original intention for the release of this source tree was to assist Mesa3D, and Mesa3D is a portable implementation of OpenGL, and an x86 code generator would defeat that.
All in all, I cannot settle on a single reason as to why SGI would benefit to not release the highest possible quality OpenGL code.
Any ideas?
This may be the stores policies, but I believe it's also law. The stores are not really getting raped- it's the record companies (and game companies in some cases).
At the beginning of 1999, Corel said they'd have a Linux Corel Draw port 'by the end of the year'.
It was on my list of promised things by the end of the year, that didn't come out then. In fact, one of the only ones that did, was the Opera Browser Beta.
Sure, I can get Red Hat free myself, but the box and manual is an addition that may have changed my school's opinion on the matter around.
My highschool, of which I dropped out in my senior year from, was part of a school district that refused to run anything but Windows NT and 95, due to the fact that they "have seen Linux take down an NT server when plugged into the network."
This anti-alternative OS situation became a problem when a friend and I created an alternative network for the school. We had everything up and running under Slackware 3.6 with redundant servers, NIS and workstation apps such as The GIMP. (Which was cool since the school only had six photoshop licenses for fourty computers).
When we presented our network to the school's administration, they refused to hook us up to the school's network because Linux was a "Shareware operating system with source code, so any 'hacker' could put a back door in it."
Redhat on a CD with a box from a company would be the first step in opening these sorts of people's minds. I applaud Redhat.
It's not the students who need to learn, it's the administration.
I have heard some inside information from a person who has worked with the sourcecode as to why Valve has not ported the client: The code is too messy.
Look at it this way: Zoid did the server port to Linux. Zoid has been known to port software to obscure ( in the context of games ) for the price of giving him the hardware to do it on.
Halflife's code must have all sorts of MFC lying around in the main functions. Yes, I know it's the Quake engine, but it's highly modified. Hell, that's the Quake ONE engine Valve bought, and those are coloured lights, added by Valve.
When I choose games to buy/play for the PC, usually I choose them based on how they play, not based on the Operating System they run under.
That being said, Linux has a ways to go until games can be chosen before the platform becomes an issue.
Every little bit helps. Between JAL2 and Loki's latest additions, I could game my ass off all year if I purchased all those titles.