That's part of the point of Rails, though. It usually is cheaper to buy more hardware than to optimize, Ruby just forces you to face that up front.
I haven't actually used RoR, but you have to admit that this sounds like you're taking "ruby is really slow" and trying to spin it into an advantage.
"Most people end up having to optimize eventually. But that's hard. Ruby on Rails can't be optimized! You just have to buy more hardware! Isn't it great!"
I mostly mean "anyone who makes a UI for the iPhone or similar platform has to deal with the new UI properly."
I mean, the only ones you could claim haven't "adjusted" are those who still say things like "hold the mouse pointer over a UI element" when obviously that is not possible. I don't think anyone's terrible enough to do that.
As an example, I'm working on a game right now for the iPhone. I'm using an existing PC game I wrote just to make the infrastructure work. My PC game has "move the mouse over things in order to see their description" functionality, which obviously does not work on the iPhone. If I were to actually port the game, rather than just the engine, I'd have to change that.
That's what I mean by "adjust". You adjust to fit the platform. It's not a complicated thing.
It's not like this is a problem that is specific to Flash. It's the same problem that all UIs have. Flash UIs will adjust accordingly, just like other UIs have.
You're seriously claiming that "run a simple process over a relatively small datastream", "render some buttons", and "display video on the user's screen" uses six times as much CPU as decoding the highly-compressed video datastream does in the first place?
Your speed benchmark is absolutely meaningless - running that code will take literal nanoseconds, virtually your entire execution time is taken up with program setup, program shutdown, console output, and benchmarking overhead.
Joysticks have major precision problems. With a steering wheel I can control it to a precision of less than five degrees, with a total range of well over a thousand degrees. With a joystick . . .
. . . well, old PC joysticks had 8-bit input, and you were lucky if you could hold it steady within a value of ten.
There's a reason why people buy steering wheels for racing games.
As a side effect of the same process that lets our legal system grant you copyright over your work. Namely, it's our legal system, in our country, and we can do what we like with it.
If China wanted to remove all copyright from anyone who isn't a Chinese citizen, they would be legally allowed to do so, largely by virtue of the fact that they are beholden to no-one. Legally speaking, this is the same situation.
(You can make a moral argument about it, of course. That's different entirely.)
You seem to have missed the point where I mentioned "semi trucks and airplanes". The point I'm making is that everything fails when you're trying to cut corners everywhere. Electronics built to be reliable tend - surprisingly - to be reliable.
I'm guessing Lucas and Dodge both decided that reliability was too expensive.
Or alternatively, it could be because a user-replacable battery takes up extra space and extra weight, and they decided it wasn't worth bulking the device up.
Of course, you can say the same thing about electronic interconnects, considering that they seem to work just peachy fine on semi trucks and airplanes.
Well, for a while it was just a novel and expensive toy. Later it ended up being more efficient. It was certainly never, at any point, introduced as a solution to the horse manure issue.
Except that the automobile wasn't built as a response to the horse manure problem, it was built as a response to the people-want-to-travel-faster-and-more-cheaply problem. We didn't do anything proactive to solve the problem. We did something to make a lot of money by solving a totally different problem, and it just coincidentally happened to solve this one as well.
That's sort of the point, though. In a lot of games, who cares if there's 10,000 lines of monolithic unreadable crap? If it gets the job done, then it works. Hell, in many cases you can't patch the game post-release anyway - you release the game, it's done, you move on.
This is extremely true. I admit that I have never come up with a good plan on how to do it, even if I started from the assumption that I had been elected President.
That still doesn't explain the $320,000 difference:)
Anyway, I can tell you why he considers his time free. It's because he'd be doing it whether he got paid or not. Being able to make money is just a nice bonus.
I agree with everything you're saying here, honestly.
I think what we have here is, while not ideal, still not a terrible layout, though. There are a lot of communities built around good work conditions for game employees at this point, and, as mentioned, it's surprisingly easy to go out in the indie world and Do It Yourself. Good developers are in high demand in the game industry as long as you don't demand high salaries, and let's be honest, if you're either masochistic enough or dumb enough to work in the game industry you're not expecting a high salary anyway.
(I say this as someone who's planning to spend his life in games, note;) )
There are certainly exploitative companies. The nice thing about them is that they tend to burn themselves out - as an artistic medium, games suffer ridiculously if people aren't well-rested. It's sort of a cute self-balancing feature, with, admittedly, the unfortunate side effect of burning out otherwise-skilled people.
I think any sort of an industry-wide union would be great for a bit. I'm uncertain on whether it would be a disaster long-term or not, but I'm satisfied enough with the current situation, and worried enough of what that force could do to the industry, that I'd rather not see it happen.
My mom taught for years, and left, largely because of the teacher's union. The union, you see, has no interest in providing good education. It's a seniority system, and solely a seniority system. If a school has to fire someone, they have one choice and one choice only: the person who's been there the shortest period of time.
In return for this "job security", my mom was forced to pay a significant chunk of her already-meager paycheck.
The teacher's union is heavily involved in banning homeschooling. The teacher's union is heavily involved in requiring "teaching degrees" for all teachers, and don't be fooled by the name - a "teaching degree" has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the rote busywork of making generic uninspired lesson plans.
I've got a friend who's a teacher, and her school is currently fighting with the public schools in the area. Why? Because her school takes crummy students and actually educates them. They refuse to graduate kids if the kid doesn't deserve an A - no grade at all - and the majority of their one-on-one tutored children end up earning that A when no other school could make them learn.
They're fighting with the public schools because the public schools think they're doing too good of a job. That is literally the problem.
You're right. I don't like unions. I don't like unions because I saw what my mom went through to be involved in one.
Unions are a monopoly. Like any monopoly, they can be good or bad. But power corrupts, and they tend to move towards "bad" - some worse than others.
All the art was done custom on our own, and the engine was developed in-house (for a previous title, admittedly.)
I'm really curious where you're getting a budget of $500,000, considering that Jonathan Blow has been quoted as saying it cost $180,000.
And, yes, you're right. A little indie studio can't hope to compete with the AAA studios. Neither can small independent film studios. On the other hand, that's why you don't try to - many indie game studios are making some great stuff right now and are easily paying their employee's (frequently singular) paychecks.
Base level of competence? Like the Teacher's Union shows?:P
That said, game development is far away from electrical work. Electrical work has a set of best practices and a code to adhere to. Game programming is more of an art. You slap the thing together and pray it keeps working, because it's not like it's going to burn anyone's house down, and you do whatever it takes to release a good game, which has little to do with good code or good art.
If I'm hiring a game programmer I don't really care if he knows design patterns. I care if he can take a game engine and turn it inside-out in a week because we had a neat new idea that the current engine can't support.
There's a reason that technical competence certificates are crucial in the electrical industry, and largely irrelevant in the programming and artistic fields.
Yes, of course there's a lot of bad managers out there (see Sturgeon's Law) but there are also very good ones. The same is, naturally, true of unions, except that unions are far harder to remove if they turn bad than managers are.
Assuming the top leadership of the company is sane, of course, and if it isn't, you have bigger problems on your hands anyway.
Braid had one artist. AI War had no artists. World of Goo had one artist. I don't know how many artists Osmos had, but I'm guessing it's one or fewer. Machinarium claims to be six, but most of them are under "Additional", and I suspect the bulk was done by two people.
I worked on a full commercial PS2 game, Everquest: Champions of Norrath. We had seven artists and five coders.
No, we weren't going to be able to make something like God of War 3 or World of Warcraft, but don't underestimate the strength of small teams. If you spend a tenth as much on development, you only need to sell a tenth as many copies to break even.
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I haven't actually used RoR, but you have to admit that this sounds like you're taking "ruby is really slow" and trying to spin it into an advantage.
"Most people end up having to optimize eventually. But that's hard. Ruby on Rails can't be optimized! You just have to buy more hardware! Isn't it great!"
Yup :)
I mostly mean "anyone who makes a UI for the iPhone or similar platform has to deal with the new UI properly."
I mean, the only ones you could claim haven't "adjusted" are those who still say things like "hold the mouse pointer over a UI element" when obviously that is not possible. I don't think anyone's terrible enough to do that.
As an example, I'm working on a game right now for the iPhone. I'm using an existing PC game I wrote just to make the infrastructure work. My PC game has "move the mouse over things in order to see their description" functionality, which obviously does not work on the iPhone. If I were to actually port the game, rather than just the engine, I'd have to change that.
That's what I mean by "adjust". You adjust to fit the platform. It's not a complicated thing.
It's not like this is a problem that is specific to Flash. It's the same problem that all UIs have. Flash UIs will adjust accordingly, just like other UIs have.
You're seriously claiming that "run a simple process over a relatively small datastream", "render some buttons", and "display video on the user's screen" uses six times as much CPU as decoding the highly-compressed video datastream does in the first place?
Bullshit.
Faith is unChristian.
Wait, something about that sounds wrong
Your speed benchmark is absolutely meaningless - running that code will take literal nanoseconds, virtually your entire execution time is taken up with program setup, program shutdown, console output, and benchmarking overhead.
Joysticks have major precision problems. With a steering wheel I can control it to a precision of less than five degrees, with a total range of well over a thousand degrees. With a joystick . . .
. . . well, old PC joysticks had 8-bit input, and you were lucky if you could hold it steady within a value of ten.
There's a reason why people buy steering wheels for racing games.
There are many known cases of a mechanical throttle getting stuck internally on something. It's not always as simple as "the cord breaks".
(I think one of the parent posts lists a bunch of 'em)
As a side effect of the same process that lets our legal system grant you copyright over your work. Namely, it's our legal system, in our country, and we can do what we like with it.
If China wanted to remove all copyright from anyone who isn't a Chinese citizen, they would be legally allowed to do so, largely by virtue of the fact that they are beholden to no-one. Legally speaking, this is the same situation.
(You can make a moral argument about it, of course. That's different entirely.)
You seem to have missed the point where I mentioned "semi trucks and airplanes". The point I'm making is that everything fails when you're trying to cut corners everywhere. Electronics built to be reliable tend - surprisingly - to be reliable.
I'm guessing Lucas and Dodge both decided that reliability was too expensive.
Or alternatively, it could be because a user-replacable battery takes up extra space and extra weight, and they decided it wasn't worth bulking the device up.
Of course, you can say the same thing about electronic interconnects, considering that they seem to work just peachy fine on semi trucks and airplanes.
Well, for a while it was just a novel and expensive toy. Later it ended up being more efficient. It was certainly never, at any point, introduced as a solution to the horse manure issue.
Except that the automobile wasn't built as a response to the horse manure problem, it was built as a response to the people-want-to-travel-faster-and-more-cheaply problem. We didn't do anything proactive to solve the problem. We did something to make a lot of money by solving a totally different problem, and it just coincidentally happened to solve this one as well.
That's sort of the point, though. In a lot of games, who cares if there's 10,000 lines of monolithic unreadable crap? If it gets the job done, then it works. Hell, in many cases you can't patch the game post-release anyway - you release the game, it's done, you move on.
This is extremely true. I admit that I have never come up with a good plan on how to do it, even if I started from the assumption that I had been elected President.
It's a tough situation.
That still doesn't explain the $320,000 difference :)
Anyway, I can tell you why he considers his time free. It's because he'd be doing it whether he got paid or not. Being able to make money is just a nice bonus.
I think it's funny that I got both a Flamebait and a +5, Insightful in the same discussion, making the exact same point. Such is life. :)
I agree with everything you're saying here, honestly.
I think what we have here is, while not ideal, still not a terrible layout, though. There are a lot of communities built around good work conditions for game employees at this point, and, as mentioned, it's surprisingly easy to go out in the indie world and Do It Yourself. Good developers are in high demand in the game industry as long as you don't demand high salaries, and let's be honest, if you're either masochistic enough or dumb enough to work in the game industry you're not expecting a high salary anyway.
(I say this as someone who's planning to spend his life in games, note ;) )
There are certainly exploitative companies. The nice thing about them is that they tend to burn themselves out - as an artistic medium, games suffer ridiculously if people aren't well-rested. It's sort of a cute self-balancing feature, with, admittedly, the unfortunate side effect of burning out otherwise-skilled people.
I think any sort of an industry-wide union would be great for a bit. I'm uncertain on whether it would be a disaster long-term or not, but I'm satisfied enough with the current situation, and worried enough of what that force could do to the industry, that I'd rather not see it happen.
Good question.
My mom taught for years, and left, largely because of the teacher's union. The union, you see, has no interest in providing good education. It's a seniority system, and solely a seniority system. If a school has to fire someone, they have one choice and one choice only: the person who's been there the shortest period of time.
In return for this "job security", my mom was forced to pay a significant chunk of her already-meager paycheck.
The teacher's union is heavily involved in banning homeschooling. The teacher's union is heavily involved in requiring "teaching degrees" for all teachers, and don't be fooled by the name - a "teaching degree" has nothing to do with actual education and everything to do with the rote busywork of making generic uninspired lesson plans.
I've got a friend who's a teacher, and her school is currently fighting with the public schools in the area. Why? Because her school takes crummy students and actually educates them. They refuse to graduate kids if the kid doesn't deserve an A - no grade at all - and the majority of their one-on-one tutored children end up earning that A when no other school could make them learn.
They're fighting with the public schools because the public schools think they're doing too good of a job. That is literally the problem.
You're right. I don't like unions. I don't like unions because I saw what my mom went through to be involved in one.
Unions are a monopoly. Like any monopoly, they can be good or bad. But power corrupts, and they tend to move towards "bad" - some worse than others.
All the art was done custom on our own, and the engine was developed in-house (for a previous title, admittedly.)
I'm really curious where you're getting a budget of $500,000, considering that Jonathan Blow has been quoted as saying it cost $180,000.
And, yes, you're right. A little indie studio can't hope to compete with the AAA studios. Neither can small independent film studios. On the other hand, that's why you don't try to - many indie game studios are making some great stuff right now and are easily paying their employee's (frequently singular) paychecks.
Base level of competence? Like the Teacher's Union shows? :P
That said, game development is far away from electrical work. Electrical work has a set of best practices and a code to adhere to. Game programming is more of an art. You slap the thing together and pray it keeps working, because it's not like it's going to burn anyone's house down, and you do whatever it takes to release a good game, which has little to do with good code or good art.
If I'm hiring a game programmer I don't really care if he knows design patterns. I care if he can take a game engine and turn it inside-out in a week because we had a neat new idea that the current engine can't support.
There's a reason that technical competence certificates are crucial in the electrical industry, and largely irrelevant in the programming and artistic fields.
Yes, of course there's a lot of bad managers out there (see Sturgeon's Law) but there are also very good ones. The same is, naturally, true of unions, except that unions are far harder to remove if they turn bad than managers are.
Assuming the top leadership of the company is sane, of course, and if it isn't, you have bigger problems on your hands anyway.
Braid had one artist. AI War had no artists. World of Goo had one artist. I don't know how many artists Osmos had, but I'm guessing it's one or fewer. Machinarium claims to be six, but most of them are under "Additional", and I suspect the bulk was done by two people.
I worked on a full commercial PS2 game, Everquest: Champions of Norrath. We had seven artists and five coders.
No, we weren't going to be able to make something like God of War 3 or World of Warcraft, but don't underestimate the strength of small teams. If you spend a tenth as much on development, you only need to sell a tenth as many copies to break even.