This most likely happens for a couple of reasons. The first being that joining a project instead of starting your own usually requires a strong purpose. Imagine a world of projects where an entire game idea was set in stone, and three artists and a sound guy collaborated and created everything for a game but the code.
So you have masses of incomplete game projects out there in this scenario (much like real life). It's one thing to come up with an idea to scratch an itch. It's another to join a project when your authority status is 'do what other people say' and work your ass off. Remember, this is a game project and a lot of the creativity is already thought out and completed before you come on board.
The second reason is that Free software doesn't tend to reach an operating system for artists. Get those games ported, and make it super easy to share resources with the developer, and see them in the game. I'm more than fairly convinced artists are out there -- we have four non programmers working at Threewave including one guy who pumps out images all day long. Has any Free software game/multimedia tool team campaigned for artists? As in, really made an effort?
Re:Does it have to be C++?
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 2
an extremely fast Pascal compiler that compiles thousand-line apps in literally seconds
I'm sorry, but is that supposed to be fast? Compilation is mostly about header files unless you are using pch.
Re:wxWindows (slightly OT)
on
GTK-- vs. QT
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· Score: 5, Informative
I second this, and find it not offtopic at all. wxWindows doesn't get anywhere near as much press as the other toolkits, but it's got fully fleshed out documentation available in a number of formats, active developers, four mailing lists of which I can attest the developer one getting 15-20 messages a day and ships with tons of code samples.
The license it's under is acceptable (to me), and there are working large apps such as Audacity out there.
When I discovered all of this, I decided to look into the technology side of things. To throw more goodness at you, let me say reiterate that the toolkit looks native to your environment which is a big win. On top of that, it lets you do things which aren't lowest common denominator and exist in only one or more environments, such as toolbar icons in Windows.
I also like the class hierarchy. I had never done GUI programming before but everything came across rather clearly when I started reading the documentation.
Additional to all the "low level" GUI junk, it also contains some routines for networks and a portable wxString class which is a lot like stl::string with more methods added. I found myself using this almost immediately and I haven't looked back.
It's worth learning this stuff just to get away from MFC without taking the speed hit of learning Java/Swing and having to learn a whole new language and culture. There is even some boasting about how 'the Java honeymoon is over' on the page, stating that wxWindows is actually a more portable toolkit.:) ymmv.
There are both Python and Perl bindings for it. I haven't looked into either really, but at least the Python ones seem to be of high quality as a number of people on the mailing list are Python programmers.
Check it out before coming to a conclusion of what toolkit to use. It's worked for me.
Well, I got the game yesterday, and played it until 5 am. I then woke up and played it until around now. I'm on mission five, the snowy terrain map. (Note: I go through games very slowly and never miss a nook or cranny. I annoy myself, but I cannot help it.)
Things that are good:
Anywhere where there is fire, the game is damned beautiful.
The ghouls and ghosts part of the game is tastefully done, and well integrated so far. I was disappointed when I read that they were going to put this in, but it's been the most intense part of the game yet.
The stealth mission was a lot of fun. I enjoy killing things before they're aware of my existance. I am personally guessing that there is a routine in the player code that gives them more health when they spot you. The game seems to really encourage killing things while they're still unaware of your existance.
It uses the Quake 3 engine which means it's familiar, works well and is portable.
Lots of good textures. A lot of games ship with only decent textures. This game comes close to the texture art in Q3 at points, which is the best out there, in my opinion.
I think those are authentic Nazi propaganda posters on the walls, that have been scanned and put into the game. Right on!
The artificial intelligence is really quite good. You can still break it down into different methods in your head, and learn how to react to each mode of attack/defense the AI takes on, but it still manages to deservingly sap your health.
Bad Stuff:
The developers seem indifferent to putting corridors with lots of doors and gray walls in their game. This makes the first couple of missions VERY stock FPS. In fact, I was downright bored playing at first. It picked up later, but has started to waver again.
The Nazis speak english, and only english. I want German with subtitles. Talk about an atmosphere reduction.
You can't kill civilians. To me, this is annoying because of the principal at play here: The game has probably been toned down in an attempt to obtain a softer rating.
Same principal as above, I have yet to encounter any dogs!
Enemies don't twitch when they're shot with a machine gun. You'd be surprised at how much satisfaction this takes away when blowing up round after round of bad guys.
Now, for the comparison: Halflife versus Return To Castle Wolfenstein. What if RTCW came out the same day as Half-Life? I would be VERY impressed with the image quality in RTCW over Half Life and the high res textures would be amazing. However, I would still choose Half Life as a better single player game, because the variety of monsters is what made that game so amazing. RTCW seems to have some surprises in store for me, but nothing too exciting yet.
As of the first four missions (each containing four levels) of the game, I would rate this game 7/10. It's a good FPS, but it borrows more ideas from the genre than it gives back to it.
I also have the strange habit of constantly selecting and deselecting paragraphs as I browse, so usually an entire paragraph of random text gets pasted as a url.
I have the same ugly habit. It pisses my girlfriend off to no end.
Ah, this is great news! I often hit the middle mouse button by accident on the page when I have crap in my buffer, and I used to get wierd errors about pages not being found. I never put 11 and 11 (binary) together.
I'm going to miss these days. My favourite browser gets massive improvements every couple of months.
Idea wishlist:
Ability to bring up my $EDITOR when typing in a textarea
Plugin missing popup isn't so annoying (I refuse to install flash)
A clean looking theme that isn't netscape 4-ish
More usability based around the tab feature. That thing is wonderful!
A way to delete the contents of the URL bar without destroying the contents of my clipboard. Right now, I copy a URL from somewhere else, then click in the URL bar and hit delete, just to have the contents of the URL bar copied to my clipboard.
I'm a very busy person who does some good for the community already in his free time, so don't ask me to implement these features. I just don't have the time.
Perhaps this would be a good time to ask... does anyone know of a proxy that allows you to rewrite packets on the fly? I think the web's got to the point where I want to start overriding some HTML arbitrarily. I know regular expressions, so some sort of regex interpreter would be quite handy.
Telex4, maybe you can tell me the answer to this: Does the Windows registry allow fine grained access priveledges? It seems to me that you have either allow every user full write access(unacceptable) or no access at all(unacceptable).
Fortunately for game publishers, the average gamer doesn't seem to be able to separate motif from gameplay, which makes it a lot easier to sell rehashed game styles with new designs. Take the FPS released last year, Alice, for instance. Completely linear, borrows heavily from other FPSes. However, it's style of execution was excellent. The word on the street was that gamers were snapping it up.
The bottom line is that Nintendo themselves has always been able to dish out at least one or two EXCELLENT games which are CLASSICS with each system. This can be directly attributed to the gameplay. Ignore the 'bloopy shit'. It doesn't matter. It's better than playing with a bunch of bounding boxes.:)
I heard you were fairly choked when you heard Duke Nukem 3D ripped off some of your lines. Now, those lines weren't written by you presumably, but by a third party. How tied do actors feel to their lines? You seemed to take personal offense to this.
Well, when I installed slackware 8, I pulled a few tricks out of my hat to use ReiserFS. So far, it's been flawless for my rather normal needs. The few times I've gone down, I came back up with no problems.
It would seem to me anyone willing to undertake this entire project from scratch would be more than a small weight in the amount of contribution they could lend to the wxWindows effort.
Perhaps an interesting project would be a wxWindows target for an MFC reimplementation.
Making a bunch of troops that sap your enemies resources indirectly through killing their troops can only go so far and for me, only be so fun. A lot of responses to this story are going to refer to larger online games, perhaps with an interesting motif such as World War 2.
I don't really care about presentations when coming up with gameplay ideas. The theme can come later. Too many people in the game industry think they're in the movie industry as it is.:)
That said, I think an interesting strategy game would be one where you build a fortress in a 3D world out of blocks much like lego in a round turn much like the classic game of Rampart. Once the turn is up, each side is presented with a number of units (which grows every turn) to infiltrate and attempt to demolish the newly created base.
The game ends when all of the resource generating 'units' have been destroyed. The number of resource generating units depends entirely on the level chosen for play.
What is cool about this game:
The harvesting of resources is automatically done until you fuck up. This is the opposite of a lot of RTS games, and removes an initial learning curve.
The game varies wildly with each opponent that you play, as their architecture, traps and strategies therein allow for a far larger variant than a normal FPS 'tank rush' game.
The gameplay allows you to set up "fun moments". This is a key aspect to multiplayer gaming these days. With games like CaptureStrike,
the style of game allows you to set up conditions.
For example, the basic premise of CaptureStrike is that one CTF team is entirely on offense and one is entirely defense. Both teams are loaded up with all their weapons and told to attack. Now you are a) Attacking with full health and armour and b) With teammates assistance. This gives the player an opportunity to do something incredibly worthwhile for his team, and keeps him riveted to the game. And, it's guaranteed to happen approx. once a minute. (CaptureStrike is really fun, by the way. You can grab the ThreeWave Q3CTF mod at this URL if you're interested in trying it out.)
Bad things about this game style:
Infiltrating the enemy's base would probably be best done in an FPS style manner, but that only allows you to control one person at a time by conventional logic. If there are many people on a team, who is going to build the architecture?
It would be possible, but tough to prevent architectural traps which lead to impossibilities.
For example, you could make your base have a drop down ledge which you cannot get back up. When leaving your base to attack the enemy, you leap down, but cannot get back up. Now your fortress is impenetrable, but you cannot go home. Solutions to this are some algorithm intensive work, or perhaps a game style much like Capture The Flag, where you HAVE to go back to your base.
It's about time a new multiplayer gameplay strategy game style came to be. And these days, a game where you only need two players to be fun can be considered low risk- A lot of games aren't popular because they aren't popular. You need a bare minimum of four players to make a team game fun.
I am rapidly becoming a wxWindows fan. I've spent the last week or so learning this toolkit and implementing something like Gamespy or The All Seeing Eye.
I admit this is the first GUI toolkit that I've used (for the desktop), but it seems to be very clear to use. I've got most of the standard functionality down now - events, windows/frames, window sizing, encapsulated string handling, etc, and I've only had to consult the mailing list for a single issue.
I'm using it with C++, but there are some rather popular bindings for Python called wxPython, as well as Perl and an assortment of other languages.
And the thing that gives me wood is that it looks native in each environment. GTK+ with themes under Linux, and Win32 GUI widgets under windows. And yes, it manages to do this without taking the lowest common denominator route: Sometime features like traybar iconifing under Win32 get plainly ignored under other OSes.
Learned a new API this year? (If you are a coder...) If you have not, you're due.
Re:These guys have got the right idea.
on
Tiny Apps
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· Score: 2
Am I missing something, or does the Rox Filer actually not identify most of the files by their extension, and properly assign icons to them?
Re:Here's a concept: mod the ads
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 2
This might not be perfect for slashdot, but could make a nice other slashsite. The advantage here would of course be readership. It would be very strange if there were another slash site as popular as slashdot...THAT is a test of the company writing OpenSource model.
I'm not sure that this strays too far from what slashdot has become. Obviously it has no place in the "neat toys" stories that Cmdrtaco posts, but slashdot's ink is quite frequently used up describing legal conundrums. Large amounts of space are given to uncertain frustrations from the readers.
To me, it seems like an obvious feature suggestion. Even the slightest amount of legal information is modded up to +5 in a short amount of time.
Re:Here's a concept: mod the ads
on
Slashdot Updates
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I think this is a smart idea. In the more corporate world, when I sign up for things, they give me the option to "value-add" my name to mailing lists, and to receieve "product notifications".
In this pessimistic anti-marketing community, perhaps it could be done well to reverse this, and instead of saying what you like, say what you hate. Mod DOWN the bad stories.
As an aside, I would pay for Slashdot if they hired a lawyer to give legal commentary on relevant stories. I'm not pretending to have a business model where this would work. However, it would be far more educational and enlightening if a comment about SomeBadCompany's lawyers taking candy from a baby could have a few quotes from relevant law.
And no, I'm not even American. But, I still think it would be interesting.
Alright, the first emacs 21 question
on
GNU Emacs 21
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· Score: 2
How do we get rid of that cursor blinking? It's driving me up a wall.
I agree with your comments on lisp being a good parser. For those who prefer perl, I say stick with Perl for non-interactive scripts.
Emacs makes for a great interface for one-off LISP scripts that need interaction.
I have found a niche for both.
Slashdot Mirror
Right. Uh, try this url
Words ending with "us"
So you have masses of incomplete game projects out there in this scenario (much like real life). It's one thing to come up with an idea to scratch an itch. It's another to join a project when your authority status is 'do what other people say' and work your ass off. Remember, this is a game project and a lot of the creativity is already thought out and completed before you come on board.
The second reason is that Free software doesn't tend to reach an operating system for artists. Get those games ported, and make it super easy to share resources with the developer, and see them in the game. I'm more than fairly convinced artists are out there -- we have four non programmers working at Threewave including one guy who pumps out images all day long. Has any Free software game/multimedia tool team campaigned for artists? As in, really made an effort?
I'm sorry, but is that supposed to be fast? Compilation is mostly about header files unless you are using pch.
The license it's under is acceptable (to me), and there are working large apps such as Audacity out there.
When I discovered all of this, I decided to look into the technology side of things. To throw more goodness at you, let me say reiterate that the toolkit looks native to your environment which is a big win. On top of that, it lets you do things which aren't lowest common denominator and exist in only one or more environments, such as toolbar icons in Windows.
I also like the class hierarchy. I had never done GUI programming before but everything came across rather clearly when I started reading the documentation.
Additional to all the "low level" GUI junk, it also contains some routines for networks and a portable wxString class which is a lot like stl::string with more methods added. I found myself using this almost immediately and I haven't looked back.
It's worth learning this stuff just to get away from MFC without taking the speed hit of learning Java/Swing and having to learn a whole new language and culture. There is even some boasting about how 'the Java honeymoon is over' on the page, stating that wxWindows is actually a more portable toolkit. :) ymmv.
There are both Python and Perl bindings for it. I haven't looked into either really, but at least the Python ones seem to be of high quality as a number of people on the mailing list are Python programmers.
Check it out before coming to a conclusion of what toolkit to use. It's worked for me.
It was taken out in one of the Quake tests, but put back in due to popular demand. This makes it a bug turned feature.
Things that are good:
Bad Stuff:
Now, for the comparison: Halflife versus Return To Castle Wolfenstein. What if RTCW came out the same day as Half-Life? I would be VERY impressed with the image quality in RTCW over Half Life and the high res textures would be amazing. However, I would still choose Half Life as a better single player game, because the variety of monsters is what made that game so amazing. RTCW seems to have some surprises in store for me, but nothing too exciting yet.
As of the first four missions (each containing four levels) of the game, I would rate this game 7/10. It's a good FPS, but it borrows more ideas from the genre than it gives back to it.
I have the same ugly habit. It pisses my girlfriend off to no end.
Ah, this is great news! I often hit the middle mouse button by accident on the page when I have crap in my buffer, and I used to get wierd errors about pages not being found. I never put 11 and 11 (binary) together.
Idea wishlist:
I'm a very busy person who does some good for the community already in his free time, so don't ask me to implement these features. I just don't have the time.
Perhaps this would be a good time to ask... does anyone know of a proxy that allows you to rewrite packets on the fly? I think the web's got to the point where I want to start overriding some HTML arbitrarily. I know regular expressions, so some sort of regex interpreter would be quite handy.
Perfectly clear skies up here in Vancouver, BC, Canada.
Telex4, maybe you can tell me the answer to this: Does the Windows registry allow fine grained access priveledges? It seems to me that you have either allow every user full write access(unacceptable) or no access at all(unacceptable).
The bottom line is that Nintendo themselves has always been able to dish out at least one or two EXCELLENT games which are CLASSICS with each system. This can be directly attributed to the gameplay. Ignore the 'bloopy shit'. It doesn't matter. It's better than playing with a bunch of bounding boxes. :)
I heard you were fairly choked when you heard Duke Nukem 3D ripped off some of your lines. Now, those lines weren't written by you presumably, but by a third party. How tied do actors feel to their lines? You seemed to take personal offense to this.
So, mark one vote of confidence for reiser.
A triangle can be 3D. They are the most complicated object that can't be concave, which makes them efficient for line of sight algorithms.
Perhaps an interesting project would be a wxWindows target for an MFC reimplementation.
Making a bunch of troops that sap your enemies resources indirectly through killing their troops can only go so far and for me, only be so fun. A lot of responses to this story are going to refer to larger online games, perhaps with an interesting motif such as World War 2.
I don't really care about presentations when coming up with gameplay ideas. The theme can come later. Too many people in the game industry think they're in the movie industry as it is. :)
That said, I think an interesting strategy game would be one where you build a fortress in a 3D world out of blocks much like lego in a round turn much like the classic game of Rampart. Once the turn is up, each side is presented with a number of units (which grows every turn) to infiltrate and attempt to demolish the newly created base.
The game ends when all of the resource generating 'units' have been destroyed. The number of resource generating units depends entirely on the level chosen for play.
What is cool about this game:
For example, the basic premise of CaptureStrike is that one CTF team is entirely on offense and one is entirely defense. Both teams are loaded up with all their weapons and told to attack. Now you are a) Attacking with full health and armour and b) With teammates assistance. This gives the player an opportunity to do something incredibly worthwhile for his team, and keeps him riveted to the game. And, it's guaranteed to happen approx. once a minute. (CaptureStrike is really fun, by the way. You can grab the ThreeWave Q3CTF mod at this URL if you're interested in trying it out.)
Bad things about this game style:
It's about time a new multiplayer gameplay strategy game style came to be. And these days, a game where you only need two players to be fun can be considered low risk- A lot of games aren't popular because they aren't popular. You need a bare minimum of four players to make a team game fun.
I am rapidly becoming a wxWindows fan. I've spent the last week or so learning this toolkit and implementing something like Gamespy or The All Seeing Eye.
I admit this is the first GUI toolkit that I've used (for the desktop), but it seems to be very clear to use. I've got most of the standard functionality down now - events, windows/frames, window sizing, encapsulated string handling, etc, and I've only had to consult the mailing list for a single issue.
I'm using it with C++, but there are some rather popular bindings for Python called wxPython, as well as Perl and an assortment of other languages.
And the thing that gives me wood is that it looks native in each environment. GTK+ with themes under Linux, and Win32 GUI widgets under windows. And yes, it manages to do this without taking the lowest common denominator route: Sometime features like traybar iconifing under Win32 get plainly ignored under other OSes.
Learned a new API this year? (If you are a coder...) If you have not, you're due.
Am I missing something, or does the Rox Filer actually not identify most of the files by their extension, and properly assign icons to them?
I'm not sure that this strays too far from what slashdot has become. Obviously it has no place in the "neat toys" stories that Cmdrtaco posts, but slashdot's ink is quite frequently used up describing legal conundrums. Large amounts of space are given to uncertain frustrations from the readers.
To me, it seems like an obvious feature suggestion. Even the slightest amount of legal information is modded up to +5 in a short amount of time.
I think this is a smart idea. In the more corporate world, when I sign up for things, they give me the option to "value-add" my name to mailing lists, and to receieve "product notifications".
In this pessimistic anti-marketing community, perhaps it could be done well to reverse this, and instead of saying what you like, say what you hate. Mod DOWN the bad stories.
As an aside, I would pay for Slashdot if they hired a lawyer to give legal commentary on relevant stories. I'm not pretending to have a business model where this would work. However, it would be far more educational and enlightening if a comment about SomeBadCompany's lawyers taking candy from a baby could have a few quotes from relevant law.
And no, I'm not even American. But, I still think it would be interesting.
How do we get rid of that cursor blinking? It's driving me up a wall.
I agree with your comments on lisp being a good parser. For those who prefer perl, I say stick with Perl for non-interactive scripts. Emacs makes for a great interface for one-off LISP scripts that need interaction. I have found a niche for both.
With a sub-$100 webcam watching you, look at the point of the screen where you would click, and blink.
Are there lots of problems to doing this? Yes. Should that stop me from throwing out the idea? No.