Indeed. Quantity isn't the issue, especially when data available shows that the US school kids has up to, or more than, twice the number of hours spent in school. I know my kids in third grade here have longer days than I did in Sweden in the third grade by a rather significant margin. What is also rather apparent is that US school kids tend to spend less weeks in school, but with longer days. It's pretty obvious for anyone that works that mornings usually are more productive, by far, than evenings. The same is true for schooling. Adding a few hours to the day will result in even less efficient learning and bad bang for the buck. Add days but lower the number of hours per day, and quality will go up even if the hours spent at work goes down.
Heck, it's not uncommon in the nordic countries at least go have 7x5 work weeks (yes 35 hours) and as a result gain overall productivity and quality of work performed. More doesn't even equal better. In fact, most of the time it equals worse.
And apples taste like oranges, am I right? No, addons can't steal passwords. Back in the day it was possible, through somewhat hacky methods, to "skin" the login page. There was a little "addon" that remembered the login credentials for you (or at least the login name, don't recall now). Once Blizzard found out they fixed that hole pretty quickly since it could and would have been used for malicious purposes.
So before you try to come with "insightful" comments, make sure your facts are straight. An addon is not a keylogger and a keylogger is not an addon. Some people try to spread keyloggers using fake or others addons, but that's unrelated to the addons themselves.
I was just thinking how ads for present day products would rock in Auto Assault. Not only does it go with the post-apocalyptic theme - if you don't LIKE the ad you can just blow it to pieces. Sure it will respawn but then you can blow it up again.
I wouldn't be bothered at all if I they used advertising on old billboards in that game (which by the way is a rather fun MMORPG).
Although it's nice to have a lot of resolution I'd much rather play in 480p than 1080i. Getting rid of interlacing really is the major benefit you'd get. It isn't very noticeable on TV compared to gaming due to naturally occuring anti-aliasing.
However going from 480i to 480p is an incredible improvement for games. Of course 720p would be even better and if you can handle 1080p (my TV does not) that would kick ass if the performance was good.
As for it being needed, I don't think it's a determing factor for this console generation. Also although I have a HDTV capable TV, I have never actually used it. If I were to get HDTV from Comcast, I couldn't use my TIVO. If there was an affordable HD-DVD system with sufficient content (may the best format win) I would definitely use that though.
I think that's all I need to say. Next time read the TOS, or specifically naming rules, before making a character.
As for changing it later on - they have millions of characters (I have, for example, 5 that are more than just bank / AH alts). They can't effectively monitor all characters and thus rely on:
1) User reporting names. 2) You reporting an issue and them noticing that your name violates the policy (this is fairly common).
If you see users named 'Mrleetdoodz', report them.
I for one am glad they changed CmdrTaco as it in no way fits in the WoW universe. I didn't name any of my characters neotron (the ALT/unix login name I've had for the last 15+ yrs) because frankly it doesn't fit. If I had, I wouldn't have been surprised to see it changed though.
P.S.It's not a reference to The Matrix - it's much older and the original train of thought was "New Tron". Yes, I was thinking about Tron when I came up with it.
Actually I think that Sid Meier's remake of Pirates! both makas a good game and brings back the old vibes and good fun of the original version.It also improves on some of the worst aspects of the original game such as land combat.
As I pointed out in my previous post, he stood to gain zero dollars before the repricing, and zero dollars after since the share priced had dropped below the lowered price by that time. It doesn't even compare to your situation - you actually started with a great value which you lost.
Although this wasn't a good scenario (layoffs), you lost nothing from this. Why? Vested options expire after three months. Your old options was worth nothing, but neither were the new ones should you have received then.
Basically you're upset because you lost options worth exactly $0? I think it's rather you being upset about being laid off. One would have figured you'd been over it by now (stuff happens). Spreading ill words just as "payback" seems highly uncalled for. Bad timing? sure. Did it hurt you more than if you had received those options? No, not at all.
So Loki had more people there - well, they also worked on more titles at the same time. I'd say, not having worked there as jvalenzu, the typical game had between 1 and 3 ppl actively working on it (not counting minor contributions etc).
Although endian issues are great when doing ports from x86 to ppc, those aren't specifically "bugs" in the x86 version of the code. If anything, lack of planning / forsight. Rather the bugs you DO find when porting to Linux from Win32 are cases of sloppy memory management which win32 simply ignore. It's not at all uncommon to see code, which in essence looks like this:
Class *c = new Class(); delete c; if(c->something) { }
Naturally, it's never as easy as above but accessing deleted/freed memory on Win32 works just fine and dandy, generally. However these are also bugs that potentially affects certain flavors of Windows (NT, 2k,...) which has more strict memory management.
This is a MAJOR reason why code ported to Linux is more robust - you can't get away with sloppy coding such as this. There are of course many other reasons as well.
The Win32 API code was written before there was an SDL port and I believe before Brian knew of SDL. Writing a native interface IS so much harder. Think about all the things SDL gives you:
- Fullscreen support (not a huge deal but still much more complex than the simple one line command in SDL). - Abstracted audio support for OSS, Alsa, ESD, Arts (shall I go on?). - Rendering support using X11, dga2, svgalib. fbdev (and so on).
To sum it up, SDL gives you support for MULTIPLE platforms. Implementing ONE backend using X11 and OSS isn't that had. Implementing X11, SVGALib, fbdev, ggi, dga2 and OSS, Alsa and the various sound daemons. That is a massive waste of time.
Also remember that, as I said, SDL is also used on MacOS (always been the case) and MacOS X (rather recent change). Also BeOS and other platforms SDL runs on naturally.
Basically what SDL gives you is MUCH less source to maintain and update. Sure, Pyrogon used native Win32 interfaces, but it doesn't use native MacOS, MacOS X, Linux, [... insert other platform here...] ones. There's a huge gain from that and a relatively low cost (in many cases I'm sure less experienced developers benefit in performance from using SDL too). Not simply "just extra baggage".
As for use of SDL in Windows games natively - surely you understand why? Developers use what they know and more importantly know _OF_. As a parallell, I can mention that OpenAL, another cross-platform library for 3D audio, IS being used for commercial games in Win32. For example Tribes 2 and Unreal Tournament 2003.
SDL has caused a significant increase in available smaller games (and possibility to write games using Perl, Python, Pike etc). It saves A LOT of boring implementation of low-level graphical stuff that you really don't want to deal with. Also it does of course also gives you cross platform support out-of-the-box.
Of course, you're welcome to spend your time on writing platform specific, low-level code - that's fine by me. I, however, prefer to concentrating on the more interesting parts.
Re:candy cruncher file sizes...
on
Brian Hook Interview
·
· Score: 3, Informative
As already mentioned. the Linux version is bigger primarily because it contains two binaries - one dynamically linked (to comply with LGPL) and one msotly statically linked (i.e no dependencies on LGPL or a specific libstdc++ for example). I should also add that the LGP retail release includes binaries for Sparc Linux and PPC Linux as well.
Also for your information Ryan "icculus" Gordon did the initial SDL porting and I am the current maintainer of the SDL as well as Qtopia ports.
Who says it's Linux only? As a matter of fact, the press release, which you must not have taken the time to read (just as the editor who posted the story), specifically touches this issue:
"The game must run on the Linux platform, but this does NOT exclude other platforms. The development team is strongly advised to consider cross-platform development, as each platform increases revenue. This is purely at the decision of the development team. LGP will market the game wherever we can for any platform it runs on."
I.e it is STRONGLY ADVISED to develop the game with cross-platform issues in mind. This means that you'd likely see Windows, MacOS(X) and possibly other versions also available.
Of course, the Linux version would be released in advance of other platforms.
Think about this small fact: People already DO spend this kind of time working on voluntary projects, even without any plans on making money. I'm not talking about your average open source project, but rather talking about game mods. I know it's not a complete game, but remember - no one says that this project can't use an already existing engine or other technologies.
That said, I think that it's a very viable project overall but I don't think it'll be easy (or easy money).
I don't understand why this post has is insightful. Rather it is, as pointed out by prevoous posters, entirely based onto invalid statements.
SDL exists and works great (and are also used increasingly by Windows developers in favor of DirectX). There are other API's as well - for audio we have SDL / SDL_mixer, mikmod and OpenAL (to mention a few select ones).
Besides, in this case it we're not even talking about "Open Source / Free games" but rather a commercial product which INITIALLY would be Linux only. It would of course most likely be ported to other platforms - since SDL, OpenGL and such API's would be used, porting would be a snap (it wouldn't surprise me if initial development was done on multiple architectures in the very least).
Right, because if you want your game published, you usually get to keep 100% of the profits. Of course, as you know, you don't get to keep 100%. If you do online publishing (the various places with downloadable games), you usually get 30-50%. Do "offline" publising and you get perhaps 5-20%.
Getting 70% for a game which is published, and more importantly, marketed, is a great deal.
So please go climb into your own hole - there's obviously a lot of space in there.
"(http://www.opie.info) will be ported, allowing to
put the root filesystem on a SD card thus keeping
the while 64M of memory for the system."
Well, actually, no. First of all _OPIE_ has nothing to do with that (the project formerly known as OpenZaurus, now OpenEmbedded does). However the C700, B500 and upcoming US version of the B500 (5600) already uses (internal) flash for storage. There is no "memory" being used for this - i.e these PDA's have 32 MB of memory and the only way to get more is to use a swap file (or I suppose perform hardware hacks, adding more memory).
As a perspective on size without actually measurement, I can tell you that this device is smaller than my Handspring Edge. Not by a whole lot, but still. The A300 is quite a bit more powerful than the Handspring (like 16 bit color, 16 bit audio with integrated speaker (yay), much more memory and the CPU etc).
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed. Quantity isn't the issue, especially when data available shows that the US school kids has up to, or more than, twice the number of hours spent in school. I know my kids in third grade here have longer days than I did in Sweden in the third grade by a rather significant margin. What is also rather apparent is that US school kids tend to spend less weeks in school, but with longer days. It's pretty obvious for anyone that works that mornings usually are more productive, by far, than evenings. The same is true for schooling. Adding a few hours to the day will result in even less efficient learning and bad bang for the buck. Add days but lower the number of hours per day, and quality will go up even if the hours spent at work goes down.
Heck, it's not uncommon in the nordic countries at least go have 7x5 work weeks (yes 35 hours) and as a result gain overall productivity and quality of work performed. More doesn't even equal better. In fact, most of the time it equals worse.
And apples taste like oranges, am I right? No, addons can't steal passwords. Back in the day it was possible, through somewhat hacky methods, to "skin" the login page. There was a little "addon" that remembered the login credentials for you (or at least the login name, don't recall now). Once Blizzard found out they fixed that hole pretty quickly since it could and would have been used for malicious purposes.
So before you try to come with "insightful" comments, make sure your facts are straight. An addon is not a keylogger and a keylogger is not an addon. Some people try to spread keyloggers using fake or others addons, but that's unrelated to the addons themselves.
-50 DKP? You fail too! It's "50 DKP minus"... :-)
This is not always true.
Actually, isn't Nintendo the only current console maker that actually does make money on their consoles right from the start?
I was just thinking how ads for present day products would rock in Auto Assault. Not only does it go with the post-apocalyptic theme - if you don't LIKE the ad you can just blow it to pieces. Sure it will respawn but then you can blow it up again.
I wouldn't be bothered at all if I they used advertising on old billboards in that game (which by the way is a rather fun MMORPG).
Although it's nice to have a lot of resolution I'd much rather play in 480p than 1080i. Getting rid of interlacing really is the major benefit you'd get. It isn't very noticeable on TV compared to gaming due to naturally occuring anti-aliasing.
However going from 480i to 480p is an incredible improvement for games. Of course 720p would be even better and if you can handle 1080p (my TV does not) that would kick ass if the performance was good.
As for it being needed, I don't think it's a determing factor for this console generation. Also although I have a HDTV capable TV, I have never actually used it. If I were to get HDTV from Comcast, I couldn't use my TIVO. If there was an affordable HD-DVD system with sufficient content (may the best format win) I would definitely use that though.
I think that's all I need to say. Next time read the TOS, or specifically naming rules, before making a character.
As for changing it later on - they have millions of characters (I have, for example, 5 that are more than just bank / AH alts). They can't effectively monitor all characters and thus rely on:
1) User reporting names.
2) You reporting an issue and them noticing that your name violates the policy (this is fairly common).
If you see users named 'Mrleetdoodz', report them.
I for one am glad they changed CmdrTaco as it in no way fits in the WoW universe. I didn't name any of my characters neotron (the ALT/unix login name I've had for the last 15+ yrs) because frankly it doesn't fit. If I had, I wouldn't have been surprised to see it changed though.
P.S.It's not a reference to The Matrix - it's much older and the original train of thought was "New Tron". Yes, I was thinking about Tron when I came up with it.
Actually I think that Sid Meier's remake of Pirates! both makas a good game and brings back the old vibes and good fun of the original version.It also improves on some of the worst aspects of the original game such as land combat.
The repricing of the stocks didn't affect pay. You could have opted for less options, higher pay at the time you were hired though.
As I pointed out in my previous post, he stood to gain zero dollars before the repricing, and zero dollars after since the share priced had dropped below the lowered price by that time. It doesn't even compare to your situation - you actually started with a great value which you lost.
Although this wasn't a good scenario (layoffs), you lost nothing from this. Why? Vested options expire after three months. Your old options was worth nothing, but neither were the new ones should you have received then.
Basically you're upset because you lost options worth exactly $0? I think it's rather you being upset about being laid off. One would have figured you'd been over it by now (stuff happens). Spreading ill words just as "payback" seems highly uncalled for. Bad timing? sure. Did it hurt you more than if you had received those options? No, not at all.
Well, did you check the second link to my mirror? It should not be struggling...
So Loki had more people there - well, they also worked on more titles at the same time. I'd say, not having worked there as jvalenzu, the typical game had between 1 and 3 ppl actively working on it (not counting minor contributions etc).
Although endian issues are great when doing ports from x86 to ppc, those aren't specifically "bugs" in the x86 version of the code. If anything, lack of planning / forsight. Rather the bugs you DO find when porting to Linux from Win32 are cases of sloppy memory management which win32 simply ignore. It's not at all uncommon to see code, which in essence looks like this:
Class *c = new Class();
delete c;
if(c->something) {
}
Naturally, it's never as easy as above but accessing deleted/freed memory on Win32 works just fine and dandy, generally. However these are also bugs that potentially affects certain flavors of Windows (NT, 2k,...) which has more strict memory management.
This is a MAJOR reason why code ported to Linux is more robust - you can't get away with sloppy coding such as this. There are of course many other reasons as well.
The Win32 API code was written before there was an SDL port and I believe before Brian knew of SDL. Writing a native interface IS so much harder. Think about all the things SDL gives you:
... insert other platform here ...] ones. There's a huge gain from that and a relatively low cost (in many cases I'm sure less experienced developers benefit in performance from using SDL too). Not simply "just extra baggage".
- Fullscreen support (not a huge deal but still much more complex than the simple one line command in SDL).
- Abstracted audio support for OSS, Alsa, ESD, Arts (shall I go on?).
- Rendering support using X11, dga2, svgalib. fbdev (and so on).
To sum it up, SDL gives you support for MULTIPLE platforms. Implementing ONE backend using X11 and OSS isn't that had. Implementing X11, SVGALib, fbdev, ggi, dga2 and OSS, Alsa and the various sound daemons. That is a massive waste of time.
Also remember that, as I said, SDL is also used on MacOS (always been the case) and MacOS X (rather recent change). Also BeOS and other platforms SDL runs on naturally.
Basically what SDL gives you is MUCH less source to maintain and update. Sure, Pyrogon used native Win32 interfaces, but it doesn't use native MacOS, MacOS X, Linux, [
As for use of SDL in Windows games natively - surely you understand why? Developers use what they know and more importantly know _OF_. As a parallell, I can mention that OpenAL, another cross-platform library for 3D audio, IS being used for commercial games in Win32. For example Tribes 2 and Unreal Tournament 2003.
Oh, by the way, the MacOS 9 and MacOS X versions (now) use SDL as well, which saves time since there's now one less backend to support / develop.
SDL has caused a significant increase in available smaller games (and possibility to write games using Perl, Python, Pike etc). It saves A LOT of boring implementation of low-level graphical stuff that you really don't want to deal with. Also it does of course also gives you cross platform support out-of-the-box.
Of course, you're welcome to spend your time on writing platform specific, low-level code - that's fine by me. I, however, prefer to concentrating on the more interesting parts.
Also for your information Ryan "icculus" Gordon did the initial SDL porting and I am the current maintainer of the SDL as well as Qtopia ports.
Think about this small fact: People already DO spend this kind of time working on voluntary projects, even without any plans on making money. I'm not talking about your average open source project, but rather talking about game mods. I know it's not a complete game, but remember - no one says that this project can't use an already existing engine or other technologies.
That said, I think that it's a very viable project overall but I don't think it'll be easy (or easy money).
I don't understand why this post has is insightful. Rather it is, as pointed out by prevoous posters, entirely based onto invalid statements.
SDL exists and works great (and are also used increasingly by Windows developers in favor of DirectX). There are other API's as well - for audio we have SDL / SDL_mixer, mikmod and OpenAL (to mention a few select ones).
Besides, in this case it we're not even talking about "Open Source / Free games" but rather a commercial product which INITIALLY would be Linux only. It would of course most likely be ported to other platforms - since SDL, OpenGL and such API's would be used, porting would be a snap (it wouldn't surprise me if initial development was done on multiple architectures in the very least).
Right, because if you want your game published, you usually get to keep 100% of the profits. Of course, as you know, you don't get to keep 100%. If you do online publishing (the various places with downloadable games), you usually get 30-50%. Do "offline" publising and you get perhaps 5-20%.
Getting 70% for a game which is published, and more importantly, marketed, is a great deal.
So please go climb into your own hole - there's obviously a lot of space in there.
Well, actually, no. First of all _OPIE_ has nothing to do with that (the project formerly known as OpenZaurus, now OpenEmbedded does). However the C700, B500 and upcoming US version of the B500 (5600) already uses (internal) flash for storage. There is no "memory" being used for this - i.e these PDA's have 32 MB of memory and the only way to get more is to use a swap file (or I suppose perform hardware hacks, adding more memory).
As a perspective on size without actually measurement, I can tell you that this device is smaller than my Handspring Edge. Not by a whole lot, but still. The A300 is quite a bit more powerful than the Handspring (like 16 bit color, 16 bit audio with integrated speaker (yay), much more memory and the CPU etc).