It is called Digipen Institute, and it has campuses in Redmond and Vancouver. I have never been there, but when I worked at [MEDIUM SIZED GAME DEV HOUSE], I interviewed a ton of graduates, and they had better skills, more diverse skills, and better communications skills (big thing, yeah) then a lot of the industry people I was talking too. They had to build working games, from the ground up, in teams, from their freshmen years, and they used all the top APIs and tools, stuff as good as we had. [MEDIUM SIZED GAME DEV HOUSE] used to be the "college" of the computer game industry, especially outside of CA, but Digipen may have that beat.
Digipen is pretty expensive, (300/hr), but the classes seemed to be pretty hard, and the graduates knew their stuff! If I was a rich kid who wanted to do games, I could think of worse ways (like being a playtester!) to enter the industry.
First, this IS a great story. Companies, looking out for their own best interest (educated workers = better workers) are doing things much more effeciantly and postively than the government every could. The best part of the deal, (Which Katz did not mention) is that Ford is NOT giving them away for free, but is holding each employee acountable for how they use that PC, and expect the level of computer use at work to grow in size and sophistication. Anyway, obvious fallacies in Katz's anti-corporate rant: 1. Bill Gates and giving. Bill is giving BILLIONS of dollar to help people. Not to give them computers, but to SAVE THEIR LIVES. I would rather see him wipe out malaria and aids than give people computers that not be replaced when they are obsolete. 2. Corporatations not spending money on anything but stockholder. BS. Any corporation that does not reinvest their profits into their own infrastructure (capital and labor) are asking for death. This is still a free market, and only those that are looking ahead will survive. Hell, the internet companies, that is what they are doing with ALL of their revenue. 3. Ability of Ford Employees to buy computers. I thought Ford was a union shop? If so, then the workers sure as hell can afford computers. They are choosing to NOT buy them, and if they are, they are not using them in ways that will benifit Ford. Ford is not giving computers to poor welfare people, but unionized middle Americans. God bless America. God bless Adam Smith.
2 comments on the price: 1. $350 is the launch price. What was the launch price for the N64? What was the price that most people payed? What price is it now? Early adopters (like us) will pay more, but the majority of purchases will be after the first year, at a much lower price point. Besides, Sony might "dump" it below cost anyway. 2. Word on the street is that Sony is going to make PSX2 an open hardware platform, and liscense it to other companies. Sony is making a "game" version, but Panasonic might be making a "DVD Home Theater + Game" version. If more people make a hardware, the hardware will be cheaper.
We here in the game development community are live in awe/fear of the PSX2. It is an extremely capable device, beyond it's gaming characteristics. It has FireWire. It has DVD. It has PC Card. It cost $200. It will be in every living room, bought as a game device.
But, with the right marketing and accessories, it could do everything that 80% of home computer users need in a computer. It will surf the web, do email, and play games. For way less than a PC, and no hassles with compatibility, no installation nightmares, no DirectX downloads, no problems at all.
I predict this device will sneak into America's homes and become the home computer that everyone envisioned in Sci-Fi books 20 years ago.
We here on/. sometimes forget how little of the market we represent. We are elite. Most people don't even know what we are talking about. While we argue about the suspensions in our sports cars, most of the world drives their Hondas, oblivious to our passions.
By the way, everyone thought the IBM PC sucked when it first came out. Remember?
I don't know if y'all are aware of this, but there is a HUGE money crunch in the Computer Games industry right now. Look at the cancled products, the destroyed brand names (Microprose?), the laid off workers. We are entering into a new era where your games have to proven to be SUPER PROFITABLE before you can get the funds to even start development. The big publishers have no desire to make small money on Linux version of their games.
And profit ratios are not enough, you need to be profitable in both magitude and ratio! My last job, we were making 8-to-1 profit on 300K sellers, and they cancled our whole product line, because we were not making SimCity, Sports, or (god forbid) Ultima Online revenues. The oppurtunity costs of our little enterprise was too high to the management and the stockholders.
Linux ports of games will happen for only 2 reasons: PR or love. There is a great little PR "bump" now for Linux Support, and it is great to get free press from it. Or, you will see a port of a game by a person who is doing it as a labor of love, probably in addition to their normal job
This is harsh, but true. The people who run the gaming business or either money-grubbing assholes, or ex-money-grubbing assholes who are so rich now they don't have to worry about it anymore. Or they are John Carmack.
I recently left a shop (in disgust) that had been taken over by people espousing "Software Engineering" and McConnell. I had been through many crunch projects, and was tired of it, and was willing to give anything a try to be able to go home once in a while.
So, I bought a copy of "Software Project Survival Guide", read it, learned it, loved it. I was willing to start to implement the good ideas, and ignore the ones that did not apply to our warez, and make a go of it. We still had to make software, but there might be a better way.
Well, it turned out the the push behind our embracing of "Software Engineering" was not a way to get schedules and process under control, it was a new, novel way for executives (who were lawyers and accountants!) to micromanage the architecture and coding of our systems! We would generate all of the "Upstream" documents, and they would be picked apart by people who couldn't tell the difference between C and ASM. So, we went back, and regenerated (meetings, meetings, months). The other problem was that during the time we were generating the "Upstream" documents, we were not actually coding. That in itself was not bad, but to people above us, it appeared that the only output of my group was the paperwork. Since no real implementation work could be done, then it was SIMPLE for the execs to drastically change the nature of the product we were working on. After all, we hadn't DONE anything, right?
After months of this, and 3 complete sets of docs, I left. I went to a small software house, and hacked for a good 3 months to get back into the groove. At the new place, we use some of the ideas in the "Big Orange Book", but we are thankfully able to concentrate on the real job: Making software.
Bottom line: Software engineering is a means to and end. Beware the motives of those who would make you concentrate more on that process, and less on the actual output. Make sure that the people managing the process are actual engineers. Customers could care less about how you made the software, they just care about the end product.
Re:I did prepare...for stupidity
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
Horde it for the time when the gov't tries to take my guns away, of course. But, since I live in Texas, it will be a while. In California, it happened on Saturday.
I did prepare...for stupidity
on
Apocalypse Not
·
· Score: 1
Not because I was worried that computers would crash, but because I was worried that the hype itself would cause panic among uninformed people. A person is smart, people are stupid.
If something small was to go wrong (ie. power outage), I was afraid that the people around me would assume that the end was nigh.
I am sure glad they did not. Now I have a nice supply of water and ammo, a shortwave radio, and a bunch of really good flashlights, things I should have around anyway. -Donut
Slashdot Mirror
It is called Digipen Institute, and it has campuses in Redmond and Vancouver. I have never been there, but when I worked at [MEDIUM SIZED GAME DEV HOUSE], I interviewed a ton of graduates, and they had better skills, more diverse skills, and better communications skills (big thing, yeah) then a lot of the industry people I was talking too. They had to build working games, from the ground up, in teams, from their freshmen years, and they used all the top APIs and tools, stuff as good as we had. [MEDIUM SIZED GAME DEV HOUSE] used to be the "college" of the computer game industry, especially outside of CA, but Digipen may have that beat.
Digipen is pretty expensive, (300/hr), but the classes seemed to be pretty hard, and the graduates knew their stuff! If I was a rich kid who wanted to do games, I could think of worse ways (like being a playtester!) to enter the industry.
The URL is HERE
Donut, mere lead programmer
2 reasons for crypto on a save game:
1. Storing your Pr0n, warez, and MP3 site passwords.
2. Making it more difficult (not impossible, of course) for 3rd party hardware hacks for the save games, such as GameShark.
First, this IS a great story. Companies, looking out for their own best interest (educated workers = better workers) are doing things much more effeciantly and postively than the government every could. The best part of the deal, (Which Katz did not mention) is that Ford is NOT giving them away for free, but is holding each employee acountable for how they use that PC, and expect the level of computer use at work to grow in size and sophistication. Anyway, obvious fallacies in Katz's anti-corporate rant: 1. Bill Gates and giving. Bill is giving BILLIONS of dollar to help people. Not to give them computers, but to SAVE THEIR LIVES. I would rather see him wipe out malaria and aids than give people computers that not be replaced when they are obsolete. 2. Corporatations not spending money on anything but stockholder. BS. Any corporation that does not reinvest their profits into their own infrastructure (capital and labor) are asking for death. This is still a free market, and only those that are looking ahead will survive. Hell, the internet companies, that is what they are doing with ALL of their revenue. 3. Ability of Ford Employees to buy computers. I thought Ford was a union shop? If so, then the workers sure as hell can afford computers. They are choosing to NOT buy them, and if they are, they are not using them in ways that will benifit Ford. Ford is not giving computers to poor welfare people, but unionized middle Americans. God bless America. God bless Adam Smith.
2 comments on the price: 1. $350 is the launch price. What was the launch price for the N64? What was the price that most people payed? What price is it now? Early adopters (like us) will pay more, but the majority of purchases will be after the first year, at a much lower price point. Besides, Sony might "dump" it below cost anyway. 2. Word on the street is that Sony is going to make PSX2 an open hardware platform, and liscense it to other companies. Sony is making a "game" version, but Panasonic might be making a "DVD Home Theater + Game" version. If more people make a hardware, the hardware will be cheaper.
We here in the game development community are live in awe/fear of the PSX2. It is an extremely capable device, beyond it's gaming characteristics. It has FireWire. It has DVD. It has PC Card. It cost $200. It will be in every living room, bought as a game device.
/. sometimes forget how little of the market we represent. We are elite. Most people don't even know what we are talking about. While we argue about the suspensions in our sports cars, most of the world drives their Hondas, oblivious to our passions.
But, with the right marketing and accessories, it could do everything that 80% of home computer users need in a computer. It will surf the web, do email, and play games. For way less than a PC, and no hassles with compatibility, no installation nightmares, no DirectX downloads, no problems at all.
I predict this device will sneak into America's homes and become the home computer that everyone envisioned in Sci-Fi books 20 years ago.
We here on
By the way, everyone thought the IBM PC sucked when it first came out. Remember?
I don't know if y'all are aware of this, but there is a HUGE money crunch in the Computer Games industry right now. Look at the cancled products, the destroyed brand names (Microprose?), the laid off workers. We are entering into a new era where your games have to proven to be SUPER PROFITABLE before you can get the funds to even start development. The big publishers have no desire to make small money on Linux version of their games.
And profit ratios are not enough, you need to be profitable in both magitude and ratio! My last job, we were making 8-to-1 profit on 300K sellers, and they cancled our whole product line, because we were not making SimCity, Sports, or (god forbid) Ultima Online revenues. The oppurtunity costs of our little enterprise was too high to the management and the stockholders.
Linux ports of games will happen for only 2 reasons: PR or love. There is a great little PR "bump" now for Linux Support, and it is great to get free press from it. Or, you will see a port of a game by a person who is doing it as a labor of love, probably in addition to their normal job
This is harsh, but true. The people who run the gaming business or either money-grubbing assholes, or ex-money-grubbing assholes who are so rich now they don't have to worry about it anymore.
Or they are John Carmack.
-Donut, 9 year game industry vet
I recently left a shop (in disgust) that had been taken over by people espousing "Software Engineering" and McConnell. I had been through many crunch projects, and was tired of it, and was willing to give anything a try to be able to go home once in a while.
So, I bought a copy of "Software Project Survival Guide", read it, learned it, loved it. I was willing to start to implement the good ideas, and ignore the ones that did not apply to our warez, and make a go of it. We still had to make software, but there might be a better way.
Well, it turned out the the push behind our embracing of "Software Engineering" was not a way to get schedules and process under control, it was a new, novel way for executives (who were lawyers and accountants!) to micromanage the architecture and coding of our systems! We would generate all of the "Upstream" documents, and they would be picked apart by people who couldn't tell the difference between C and ASM. So, we went back, and regenerated (meetings, meetings, months).
The other problem was that during the time we were generating the "Upstream" documents, we were not actually coding. That in itself was not bad, but to people above us, it appeared that the only output of my group was the paperwork. Since no real implementation work could be done, then it was SIMPLE for the execs to drastically change the nature of the product we were working on. After all, we hadn't DONE anything, right?
After months of this, and 3 complete sets of docs, I left. I went to a small software house, and hacked for a good 3 months to get back into the groove. At the new place, we use some of the ideas in the "Big Orange Book", but we are thankfully able to concentrate on the real job: Making software.
Bottom line: Software engineering is a means to and end. Beware the motives of those who would make you concentrate more on that process, and less on the actual output. Make sure that the people managing the process are actual engineers.
Customers could care less about how you made the software, they just care about the end product.
Horde it for the time when the gov't tries to take my guns away, of course.
But, since I live in Texas, it will be a while. In California, it happened on Saturday.
Not because I was worried that computers would crash, but because I was worried that the hype itself would cause panic among uninformed people. A person is smart, people are stupid.
If something small was to go wrong (ie. power outage), I was afraid that the people around me would assume that the end was nigh.
I am sure glad they did not. Now I have a nice supply of water and ammo, a shortwave radio, and a bunch of really good flashlights, things I should have around anyway. -Donut