Hell, forget Samsung's stalls, the first thing that popped into my head was that it looked like every other mobile phone outlet in the UK. The O2 store, Vodaphone, Virgin Mobile, Phones4U, Carphone Warehouse, Orange.
Here's a handy checklist of wrong reasons to make a video game:
- Are you making the same game two or more years in a row? (Bonus points for adding the Year onto the end of the name)
- Is your game an clone of another, more successful game, adding no new features and having near identical art assets?
- Do your long-term goals revolve around a microtransaction model that requires people to pay money not to be Kerb-stomped?
Each boil down to "I'm making this game to make some quick cash" whether it be by taking an initially inovative and fun game and reskinning it every year, wholesale lifting of game mechanics from another game you *dont* own the rights to and reskinning it, or creating a potentially fun game, but requiring people to constantly fork out cash just to have fun (I'm mostly looking at World of Tanks in this case, as well as alot of Mobile games).
Games made for those reasons are rarely remembered - they might make a shittone of cash, and that's why they keep getting made - but in the same way that 9 out of 10 Rom Coms won't be remembered in 2 years time, these games will fall by the wayside, meanwhile games that have some love put into them a decade ago are still selling today.
Like one of the GPPs said, people are still playing Freelancer. There's still a community for a bunch of old X games too. The Modding scene for Oblivion has seen it still being bought today, even after Skyrim - which also has a decent modding community now - was released.
Companies like Valve and Acti-Blizzard have seen the way forwards for modding, the Steam Workshop and SC2's map/mod store thing (I don't know what it's called I don't play SC2) allow people to look for mods and maps in-game, download them through a common interface and play them right away.
When it comes to Valve, look at the PeTI for Portal 2 or the community submissions workshop for TF2 (which actually shares revenue with creators who've had their stuff put in-game) - They became the giant they are today because of the loyalty of their fans, which for the most part came from how moddable their games are.
They seem to be mistaken on the basic principles of education. Education doesn't teach the truth. It teaches only what we know. It should be teaching kids that what they learn now isn't set in stone. It's not 100% proven, and is subject to change through discovery and hard work. The don't have to believe in a thing to learn about a thing, but if they believe strong enough in the contrary then rather than just have kids dismiss it out of hand, schools should be teaching them to question, probe and investigate.
The only reason these people are SHOCKED that evolution is in the curriculum is because they believe everything taught in schools should be 100% true, always and forever, and actually believe such an idea exists.
This is why we write our own Abstraction layer and make sure none of our site code directly references any of the API calls directly. We just roll our own functions for whatever we need to do and while yes, if we need to switch cloud service it relies on, then we deal with when and if we come to it.
If you write for both services - or use an abstraction that covers both - *now*, yet only use one of them, then you're giving yourself redundancy that may or may not still be compatible 1, 5, 10 years down the line when it comes to move. If you move to the other (or, indeed, if you choose a third option) then the time wasted on maintaining both, or switching your abstraction layer to one that supports all the new things, will probably take about as much time as if you'd just programmed it against the Native API, and created it to be replaceable in the first place.
Hell even just drawing various types of chart requires maths knowledge. Not much mind, but it does. I work on alot of accounting software, so a knowledge of statistics is also useful (just a pity I don't have any:P)
Maths came in useful for one piece of learning software that had the crazy requirement of scoring people based on the standard deviation of their answers. (ie, sort a list in order of importance, if the resultant list isn't exact, but good enough - the standard deviation beneath a threshold - mark it right)
For anything from drawing tools to 3D worlds, I've had to use parametric equations in order to do various types of LERPing (ie xd = t(x2-x1)+x1) for camera tweens, fade effects etc. For various sketching apps I've had to employ line simplification on the input using catmull-rom splines.
Then ofcourse there's physics, which obviously comes into play when you're making some kind of dynamic world, like a game or a simulation. Luckilly most things have a built in physics engine and all you have to worry about is feeding in the right values. Ofcourse, it helps if you can work out on paper the numbers beforehand.
I could rant all day about how terrible phone-based chat is - having worked on a tech support line - and how often people assume that just because you're on the phone to them you can magically see what's on their screen. How reading from a list of required questions (ie, to figure out what system they're running) exasperates people who expect you to already know this because they've been on your site/using your application and they MUST have entered their own phone number for a reason, if it's not to identify who you are when you phone for help then what's it for?
I certainly wouldn't submit it as a/. article though.
Let the artist design the layout in a WYSIWYG editor, Let the programmer design the delivery system in whatever IDE they want.
WYSIWYG editors are useless for coding, likewise development IDEs are useless for design.
A good design will let a programmer deliver their content in they way the designer wants. A good system will let the artist have reign over content placement.
Your Art should be code agnostic. Your code should be design agnostic.
This is why there are two professions. Web Designers and Web Developers. When I was working on my own, designing *and* developing sites, I used dreamweaver. Now I work in a team, with a designer, and I've barely touched Dreamweaver in years. It's not the 'novice' factor, it's because I no longer need to design a website. I develop. If the designer finds using Dreamweaver helps him develop faster, good for him. The great thing about HTML is that it can be passed from programme to programme and retain all its structure.
No WYSIWYG editor, or programming IDE, can replace actually communicating with your team.
The Article poster also mentions his son uses Google Dev Tools. Now, I'm assuming this is the Firebug-like console that lets you twiddle with the html tags and CSS values. Well, what's that if not a WYSIWYG tool?
Things like the Flu, and even the common cold, rarely kill directly. It normally exaccerbates existing conditions by weakening the body and allowing said existing conditions to worsen.
My uncle died of liver failure, but he contracted MRSA while in hospital, and while it was the liver that gave in, the MRSA caused him to deteriorate rapidly.
Flu (be it seasonal or one of these 'super flus'), MRSA and colds rarely kill on their own.
If all you have is Hep C, yeah, you're in trouble.
Bastion exists. How can anyone say Fiction in video games is in decline when we have gems like fucking Bastion. Indie games are where we find proper stories nowadays. Braid and Limbo spring to mind too.
Not to say that in the past 5 years there's not been any good AAA stories. For all it's problems GTA IV had a decent storyline, and it's expansions are supposed to be so much better (I've got them on the Steam Sale, but I've not started them yet) The new Batman games had a good deal of story to them, even beyond the main plot thread. The Telltale Point & Clicks: Sam & Max, Walking Dead, hell, even the Back to the Future games. (okay, not AAA, and practically Indie, but I enjoyed them) Deus Ex: Human Revolution's story stands up to the originals story.
Any increase in performance without reducing size is a step forwards. If speed increases, for example, we'd go from 4GHz to 120GHz, which is at the low end of the scale mentioned in the summary (ie, it goes up to a few Terahertz in theory) So we'd be at the start of a whole new clock speed race.
I was about to say the same thing. BT Openzone's been running for yonks, and now Sky are getting in on the act (although I don't believe they're using phoneboxes, I think they're just using base stations in the cabinets)
And it's not like it's just in London. It's all over. We have them in Glasgow, and I've seen them as far north as Inverness. While it's not *completely* city wide, there are gaps in the net, even in the center (the wifi can only broadcast so far, and it's not like they're cell masts or anything), but it's there, and it works for surfing atleast.
The hunger mechanic is kinda a chore to handle, and finding food requires too much work at times. The NPCs are a bit stupid and just wander around aimlessly all day before going indoors and doing sod-all at night. The free roaming's quite good, and you can go from built up areas to forests or deserts. Only problem is you can't build where you want, kill what you want or even wield a sword without getting into trouble...
and CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray. Corrective eye surgery, along with many other types of keyhole surgery. Laser Welding LIDAR Laser Printers Laser cutting and engraving and, ofcourse, the Laser Harp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_harp
Slashdot Mirror
You do know you can choose not to give *any* money to the developers and make it all go to the charities if you desire?
also, Lol @ "wouldn't sell anyway" considering Torchlight's one of them.
or where 0 - 1 = 4,294,967,295
hold on, I thought jQuery was run by a not-for-profit foundation, not Google?
and I'm a fat bastard, so my trouser pockets are oversized anyway. I can fit my phone *and* a chocolate bar in my trouser pocket.
well, except Silicon Glen has kinda collapsed in on itself.
Also this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_with_'Silicon'_names
No, they'll just come after us and steal all the women
Hell, forget Samsung's stalls, the first thing that popped into my head was that it looked like every other mobile phone outlet in the UK. The O2 store, Vodaphone, Virgin Mobile, Phones4U, Carphone Warehouse, Orange.
They've been doing that design for ages.
Here's a handy checklist of wrong reasons to make a video game:
- Are you making the same game two or more years in a row? (Bonus points for adding the Year onto the end of the name)
- Is your game an clone of another, more successful game, adding no new features and having near identical art assets?
- Do your long-term goals revolve around a microtransaction model that requires people to pay money not to be Kerb-stomped?
Each boil down to "I'm making this game to make some quick cash" whether it be by taking an initially inovative and fun game and reskinning it every year, wholesale lifting of game mechanics from another game you *dont* own the rights to and reskinning it, or creating a potentially fun game, but requiring people to constantly fork out cash just to have fun (I'm mostly looking at World of Tanks in this case, as well as alot of Mobile games).
Games made for those reasons are rarely remembered - they might make a shittone of cash, and that's why they keep getting made - but in the same way that 9 out of 10 Rom Coms won't be remembered in 2 years time, these games will fall by the wayside, meanwhile games that have some love put into them a decade ago are still selling today.
Like one of the GPPs said, people are still playing Freelancer. There's still a community for a bunch of old X games too. The Modding scene for Oblivion has seen it still being bought today, even after Skyrim - which also has a decent modding community now - was released.
Companies like Valve and Acti-Blizzard have seen the way forwards for modding, the Steam Workshop and SC2's map/mod store thing (I don't know what it's called I don't play SC2) allow people to look for mods and maps in-game, download them through a common interface and play them right away.
When it comes to Valve, look at the PeTI for Portal 2 or the community submissions workshop for TF2 (which actually shares revenue with creators who've had their stuff put in-game) - They became the giant they are today because of the loyalty of their fans, which for the most part came from how moddable their games are.
They seem to be mistaken on the basic principles of education.
Education doesn't teach the truth. It teaches only what we know. It should be teaching kids that what they learn now isn't set in stone. It's not 100% proven, and is subject to change through discovery and hard work.
The don't have to believe in a thing to learn about a thing, but if they believe strong enough in the contrary then rather than just have kids dismiss it out of hand, schools should be teaching them to question, probe and investigate.
The only reason these people are SHOCKED that evolution is in the curriculum is because they believe everything taught in schools should be 100% true, always and forever, and actually believe such an idea exists.
This is why we write our own Abstraction layer and make sure none of our site code directly references any of the API calls directly.
We just roll our own functions for whatever we need to do and while yes, if we need to switch cloud service it relies on, then we deal with when and if we come to it.
If you write for both services - or use an abstraction that covers both - *now*, yet only use one of them, then you're giving yourself redundancy that may or may not still be compatible 1, 5, 10 years down the line when it comes to move. If you move to the other (or, indeed, if you choose a third option) then the time wasted on maintaining both, or switching your abstraction layer to one that supports all the new things, will probably take about as much time as if you'd just programmed it against the Native API, and created it to be replaceable in the first place.
I got an email saying they'd pay me a million dollars if I helped some arab guy transfer his money.
Sultan of Swing or something.
Hell even just drawing various types of chart requires maths knowledge. Not much mind, but it does. I work on alot of accounting software, so a knowledge of statistics is also useful (just a pity I don't have any :P)
Maths came in useful for one piece of learning software that had the crazy requirement of scoring people based on the standard deviation of their answers. (ie, sort a list in order of importance, if the resultant list isn't exact, but good enough - the standard deviation beneath a threshold - mark it right)
For anything from drawing tools to 3D worlds, I've had to use parametric equations in order to do various types of LERPing (ie xd = t(x2-x1)+x1) for camera tweens, fade effects etc.
For various sketching apps I've had to employ line simplification on the input using catmull-rom splines.
Then ofcourse there's physics, which obviously comes into play when you're making some kind of dynamic world, like a game or a simulation. Luckilly most things have a built in physics engine and all you have to worry about is feeding in the right values. Ofcourse, it helps if you can work out on paper the numbers beforehand.
I could rant all day about how terrible phone-based chat is - having worked on a tech support line - and how often people assume that just because you're on the phone to them you can magically see what's on their screen. How reading from a list of required questions (ie, to figure out what system they're running) exasperates people who expect you to already know this because they've been on your site/using your application and they MUST have entered their own phone number for a reason, if it's not to identify who you are when you phone for help then what's it for?
I certainly wouldn't submit it as a /. article though.
I'd probably leave it as a comment.
It gets even worse if you install the handyman mod and wield a wooden spoon in the same manner you would a 1 handed sword
Let the artist design the layout in a WYSIWYG editor,
Let the programmer design the delivery system in whatever IDE they want.
WYSIWYG editors are useless for coding, likewise development IDEs are useless for design.
A good design will let a programmer deliver their content in they way the designer wants.
A good system will let the artist have reign over content placement.
Your Art should be code agnostic. Your code should be design agnostic.
This is why there are two professions. Web Designers and Web Developers. When I was working on my own, designing *and* developing sites, I used dreamweaver. Now I work in a team, with a designer, and I've barely touched Dreamweaver in years. It's not the 'novice' factor, it's because I no longer need to design a website. I develop.
If the designer finds using Dreamweaver helps him develop faster, good for him. The great thing about HTML is that it can be passed from programme to programme and retain all its structure.
No WYSIWYG editor, or programming IDE, can replace actually communicating with your team.
The Article poster also mentions his son uses Google Dev Tools. Now, I'm assuming this is the Firebug-like console that lets you twiddle with the html tags and CSS values. Well, what's that if not a WYSIWYG tool?
Things like the Flu, and even the common cold, rarely kill directly. It normally exaccerbates existing conditions by weakening the body and allowing said existing conditions to worsen.
My uncle died of liver failure, but he contracted MRSA while in hospital, and while it was the liver that gave in, the MRSA caused him to deteriorate rapidly.
Flu (be it seasonal or one of these 'super flus'), MRSA and colds rarely kill on their own.
If all you have is Hep C, yeah, you're in trouble.
It still had a *story*
Sure, it wasn't told through cutscenes, it was told through the game. But a story's a story.
Bastion exists.
How can anyone say Fiction in video games is in decline when we have gems like fucking Bastion.
Indie games are where we find proper stories nowadays.
Braid and Limbo spring to mind too.
Not to say that in the past 5 years there's not been any good AAA stories.
For all it's problems GTA IV had a decent storyline, and it's expansions are supposed to be so much better (I've got them on the Steam Sale, but I've not started them yet)
The new Batman games had a good deal of story to them, even beyond the main plot thread.
The Telltale Point & Clicks: Sam & Max, Walking Dead, hell, even the Back to the Future games. (okay, not AAA, and practically Indie, but I enjoyed them)
Deus Ex: Human Revolution's story stands up to the originals story.
Any increase in performance without reducing size is a step forwards.
If speed increases, for example, we'd go from 4GHz to 120GHz, which is at the low end of the scale mentioned in the summary (ie, it goes up to a few Terahertz in theory)
So we'd be at the start of a whole new clock speed race.
My Mega Drive couldn't even reach the pedals
I was about to say the same thing.
BT Openzone's been running for yonks, and now Sky are getting in on the act (although I don't believe they're using phoneboxes, I think they're just using base stations in the cabinets)
And it's not like it's just in London. It's all over. We have them in Glasgow, and I've seen them as far north as Inverness.
While it's not *completely* city wide, there are gaps in the net, even in the center (the wifi can only broadcast so far, and it's not like they're cell masts or anything), but it's there, and it works for surfing atleast.
But it's not.
The Education system says it's alright to be average, not excellent, which is what Sasuke celebrates.
The hunger mechanic is kinda a chore to handle, and finding food requires too much work at times.
The NPCs are a bit stupid and just wander around aimlessly all day before going indoors and doing sod-all at night.
The free roaming's quite good, and you can go from built up areas to forests or deserts.
Only problem is you can't build where you want, kill what you want or even wield a sword without getting into trouble...
Minecraft's so much better than RL.
The Olsen Twins have a *dad*
I always thought they were some kind of fungus.
and CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray.
Corrective eye surgery, along with many other types of keyhole surgery.
Laser Welding
LIDAR
Laser Printers
Laser cutting and engraving
and, ofcourse, the Laser Harp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_harp