Don't Understand?
on
Steal This Film
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
'old media' crews who don't understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods
Sounds to me like they understand the net perfectly, because P2P networks as they're currently used *are* a threat to their livelihoods. Note that this isn't the fault of the technology, but the people using it. And the threat isn't all that big or serious, but it is there.
And while I respect the fact that they're releasing their film in this manner, I wish they'd respect the rights of the people making the content they facilitate the downloading of. But hey, that's just my opinion...:)
But the reasons why other people don't use it might highlight shortcomings that the people who *do* use it could fix to make it better. Don't have a closed mind to suggestions!
Disclaimer - I work for Sony as a games programmer.
But I haven't always worked there. I've worked on PS2, Xbox, Gamcube, PSP and PS3 games. Every single platform I've worked on has pushed the capacities of the media we've had to work with for various reasons. Take audio for example. A game with a lot of speech needs a lot of audio, at least until we can get synthesized voices sounding good. Not so bad if you only need to support one language, but us European devs tend to ship games that can support at least three or four languages, sometimes more. So triple or quadruple the amount of audio data you need to store right off the bat. Graphics are the really obvious space eater, though. Higher poly counts, higher resolution textures, shaders requiring multiple textures for multiple passes. More levels, more characters, more sounds, more content. More more more! Yeah, more isn't always better, but all else being equal as a developer I'd rather have loads of space and not need it, than need it and not have it.
That would be the PS1, and soon enough the PS2 I suspect. Unless developers suddenly ignore the huge number of people who own them, of course, which one would hope won't happen overnight!
Saying they're working on all platforms *is* a sign that they're concentrating on the fans. It increases development costs substantially, but means that whatever platform the fans go for they'll have games to play on it.
...although the license doesn't allow developing a non-MS platform using the emulator, or porting the emulator to a non-MS platform. So all you Linuxy types are shit out of luck!;)
Still nice to see things become a little more open, I suppose.
Yeah, because the first thing you'll think when you make a game that sells loads is "Ahh, now I've done that I never need to do it again and make even more money with a product people obviously want!"
What people should really be objecting to is crappy sequels, not sequels themselves. Whether EA's sequels are always crappy is very much a matter of opinion, I quite like some of them. And enough people buy them to keep those sequels at the top of the retail charts for a long, long time.
FF7 didn't revolutionize the industry. It's arguable whether it should have - I'm not a fan, and am glad other RPGs have mostly stayed away from it's style and gameplay mechanics. It did do the PlayStation a world of good though, that's true!
...is probably laughing at this right now, wherever he is in the afterlife! The RIAA have turned into Wonko the Sane. I hope they're happy outside the asylum!
Not really. From Lik-Sang you can get a pretty solid metal dance pad for under $150. Maybe not "better than arcade quality", but then I'd question whether the project listed is better either. Without trying it, you can't tell, but hey. Fair play to the guys for doing it though, it's a nice project anyway!:)
I've been looking for something like this for a while now. I was contemplating one of those pre-built consumer level NAS (like the Terastation), but a nice tailored setup like this could tempt me to build my own. I need storage space for samples, I make lots of music with them:)
The guy says nothing about open source, he talks about relying on community support or going with commercial support. What's the point of posting this article other than a million angry responses from people who just read the title?
...like Pokemon? A fairly blatant kid-targetted merchandising campaign spread over several media, as far as I could see. Gotta catch 'em all;)
Not that I'm saying the game wasn't good, you understand, just that maybe advertising isn't as clear cut as the gap between shows. Just look at MS and Viva Pinata for a more recent attempt at the same thing.
Thought I'd chime in here as well - the people who are getting the most fun out of this game around our office are musicians. Mostly guitarists, I personally play bass and a little guitar. We all love it. It's just a fun game really, it gets the feel of guitar just right and uses the feel to give you points. Try it, you might like it!
Of course, it's not an FPS. "Third Person Shooter" kind of gives that away...;)
It actually looks fairly reminiscent of Killswitch, which I never picked up for PS2 but apparently it was ok. This looks a bit more polished though, so if I do get a 360 I'll probably give it a go. My PC will never be able to handle it...:(
See, my first thought on reading the article was that it was set in the pre-Awakening era of the Shadowrun setting. Magic is around (esp. shamanic) but fairly rare, and everything else fits: there's plenty of worldwide excitement to deal with, corporations have been granted nation status, etc. Most of the big things from the Shadowrun universe are just starting, and that seems like a decent place for a game to begin, at least to me. And yeah, I'm a Shadowrun fan too from back in 2nd edition.
They're not throwing it away, at least not completely. They're taking it a piece at a time. The pertinent quote:
"We decided to restart the Shadowrun timeline and grow the fiction over a series of games, allowing the world we loved to unfold over time."
So to start with they're doing magic, cybertech and weapons. Kind of like Deus Ex, I suspect, which many people will be familiar enough with to (hopefully) draw them into the world, then move through it introducing the rest of the stuff later - metahumans, Matrix/Astral stuff, hopefully Rigging (guess what kind of character I used to play...
By restricting the scope of the task, they have more likelihood of getting it right.
...and disclaimer, work for Sony, am the devil incarnate etc.
From the sections of the thing that I saw (Zelda, and Red Thingy the FPS) it looks like the Weemote works fairly well. One of the big worries I had, that it wasn't gonna be precise enough for decent lightgun-style control, wasn't an issue. Some of the gesture-based stuff also looked cool, like Link's shield-block in the Zelda fight.
One of the things I thought might be a problem did crop up in Red Thingy - using the "mouse-look" style of aiming to also rotate the viewpoint. It seemed like the character was fairly slow to turn around, throughout the demo it was all fairly gently turns rather than how I know I play fps games (twitching round corners like a caffeine bomb just went off).
I think a great deal of the success of the new control-style will be how well it maps onto what gamers expect it to do. We've had pads and sticks for a long time, and we've mostly grown accustomed to the quirks of how we map them to solutions - when these fail, like FPS y-axis inversion and left-right camera rotation in 3rd person games (my own personal bugbear), it really kills the enjoyment of the game for some players. If the blend of interaction is right, these things will fly off the shelves.
"It seems to me that "DirectX 10 hardware" may finally be approaching a phase-3 machine."
No, at least from a coding point of view it passed that around the time of maybe DX5 to DX7. Back then it was a real chore to write stuff for, documentation wasn't entirely great and textbooks got all confused and out of date really really quickly. Round about DX8 it really started to be OK though, and that's about when I did a bit of Xbox dev work. Since then, I've been on PS2 duties so have fallen out of touch.
The thing is, DX isn't the same as OpenGL. It's pretty much a full game middleware platform, only for Windows and Xbox instead of being really multiplatform. Open Source stuff can approximate the feature set if you combine things (OpenGL + SDL + various things for audio, networking, etc.) but they're all done by different people, with different coding styles and different levels of goodness. DirectX's strength is its coherence, and the big install base of Windows users.
DX10 is throwing away a big pile of audience, I'm not sure that's a good idea...
...software generally shouldn't be any more complex than it needs to be. This is where many applications either get confused or fall over completely: they could make things easier with no loss of flexibility, but don't. Poor documentation, poor interfaces (or badly-named or hidden or arcane parameters for command line tools), the list goes on and on. Things which could be fixed, but aren't.
Some software needs to be complicated, but no software should ever be *too* complicated for the required purpose or intended users.
As a games programmer and non-US gamer, I've never heard of this XFire lot until now. A quick look at their website doesn't give me a real idea of what it is that they do, anyone fancy illuminating me as to why someone would buy this company?:)
...a TV is useless if nobody broadcasts anything. A DVD player or VCR is useless if there's nothing to play or record with it. And anyone with a computer can already play computer games.
Sounds like Intel has put the cart quite a long way before the horse, and has released a platform with no worthwhile content. We'll see if the platform survives long enough to get any worthwhile content now, but I'm not hugely optimistic. Time will tell, I suppose!
Slashdot Mirror
'old media' crews who don't understand the net and see peer-to-peer organisation as a threat to their livelihoods
:)
Sounds to me like they understand the net perfectly, because P2P networks as they're currently used *are* a threat to their livelihoods. Note that this isn't the fault of the technology, but the people using it. And the threat isn't all that big or serious, but it is there.
And while I respect the fact that they're releasing their film in this manner, I wish they'd respect the rights of the people making the content they facilitate the downloading of. But hey, that's just my opinion...
...between that and the current Windows Media Player being unable to play DVDs. Doesn't stop people watching them, does it?
It doesn't.
But the reasons why other people don't use it might highlight shortcomings that the people who *do* use it could fix to make it better. Don't have a closed mind to suggestions!
Disclaimer - I work for Sony as a games programmer.
But I haven't always worked there. I've worked on PS2, Xbox, Gamcube, PSP and PS3 games. Every single platform I've worked on has pushed the capacities of the media we've had to work with for various reasons. Take audio for example. A game with a lot of speech needs a lot of audio, at least until we can get synthesized voices sounding good. Not so bad if you only need to support one language, but us European devs tend to ship games that can support at least three or four languages, sometimes more. So triple or quadruple the amount of audio data you need to store right off the bat. Graphics are the really obvious space eater, though. Higher poly counts, higher resolution textures, shaders requiring multiple textures for multiple passes. More levels, more characters, more sounds, more content. More more more! Yeah, more isn't always better, but all else being equal as a developer I'd rather have loads of space and not need it, than need it and not have it.
That would be the PS1, and soon enough the PS2 I suspect. Unless developers suddenly ignore the huge number of people who own them, of course, which one would hope won't happen overnight!
Saying they're working on all platforms *is* a sign that they're concentrating on the fans. It increases development costs substantially, but means that whatever platform the fans go for they'll have games to play on it.
...although the license doesn't allow developing a non-MS platform using the emulator, or porting the emulator to a non-MS platform. So all you Linuxy types are shit out of luck! ;)
Still nice to see things become a little more open, I suppose.
Yeah, because the first thing you'll think when you make a game that sells loads is "Ahh, now I've done that I never need to do it again and make even more money with a product people obviously want!"
What people should really be objecting to is crappy sequels, not sequels themselves. Whether EA's sequels are always crappy is very much a matter of opinion, I quite like some of them. And enough people buy them to keep those sequels at the top of the retail charts for a long, long time.
FF7 didn't revolutionize the industry. It's arguable whether it should have - I'm not a fan, and am glad other RPGs have mostly stayed away from it's style and gameplay mechanics. It did do the PlayStation a world of good though, that's true!
...is probably laughing at this right now, wherever he is in the afterlife! The RIAA have turned into Wonko the Sane. I hope they're happy outside the asylum!
Not really. From Lik-Sang you can get a pretty solid metal dance pad for under $150. Maybe not "better than arcade quality", but then I'd question whether the project listed is better either. Without trying it, you can't tell, but hey. Fair play to the guys for doing it though, it's a nice project anyway! :)
I've been looking for something like this for a while now. I was contemplating one of those pre-built consumer level NAS (like the Terastation), but a nice tailored setup like this could tempt me to build my own. I need storage space for samples, I make lots of music with them :)
Depends - that description could apply equally to Deus Ex, and it was fantastic.
The guy says nothing about open source, he talks about relying on community support or going with commercial support. What's the point of posting this article other than a million angry responses from people who just read the title?
...like Pokemon? A fairly blatant kid-targetted merchandising campaign spread over several media, as far as I could see. Gotta catch 'em all ;)
Not that I'm saying the game wasn't good, you understand, just that maybe advertising isn't as clear cut as the gap between shows. Just look at MS and Viva Pinata for a more recent attempt at the same thing.
Thought I'd chime in here as well - the people who are getting the most fun out of this game around our office are musicians. Mostly guitarists, I personally play bass and a little guitar. We all love it. It's just a fun game really, it gets the feel of guitar just right and uses the feel to give you points. Try it, you might like it!
Of course, it's not an FPS. "Third Person Shooter" kind of gives that away... ;)
:(
It actually looks fairly reminiscent of Killswitch, which I never picked up for PS2 but apparently it was ok. This looks a bit more polished though, so if I do get a 360 I'll probably give it a go. My PC will never be able to handle it...
See, my first thought on reading the article was that it was set in the pre-Awakening era of the Shadowrun setting. Magic is around (esp. shamanic) but fairly rare, and everything else fits: there's plenty of worldwide excitement to deal with, corporations have been granted nation status, etc. Most of the big things from the Shadowrun universe are just starting, and that seems like a decent place for a game to begin, at least to me. And yeah, I'm a Shadowrun fan too from back in 2nd edition.
...none of you actually read the f'n article.
They're not throwing it away, at least not completely. They're taking it a piece at a time. The pertinent quote:
"We decided to restart the Shadowrun timeline and grow the fiction over a series of games, allowing the world we loved to unfold over time."
So to start with they're doing magic, cybertech and weapons. Kind of like Deus Ex, I suspect, which many people will be familiar enough with to (hopefully) draw them into the world, then move through it introducing the rest of the stuff later - metahumans, Matrix/Astral stuff, hopefully Rigging (guess what kind of character I used to play...
By restricting the scope of the task, they have more likelihood of getting it right.
You can do the hand-thing already with EyeToy Groove, a few of my gamer friends love it. I, alas, am not coordinated enough to play it ;)
...and disclaimer, work for Sony, am the devil incarnate etc.
From the sections of the thing that I saw (Zelda, and Red Thingy the FPS) it looks like the Weemote works fairly well. One of the big worries I had, that it wasn't gonna be precise enough for decent lightgun-style control, wasn't an issue. Some of the gesture-based stuff also looked cool, like Link's shield-block in the Zelda fight.
One of the things I thought might be a problem did crop up in Red Thingy - using the "mouse-look" style of aiming to also rotate the viewpoint. It seemed like the character was fairly slow to turn around, throughout the demo it was all fairly gently turns rather than how I know I play fps games (twitching round corners like a caffeine bomb just went off).
I think a great deal of the success of the new control-style will be how well it maps onto what gamers expect it to do. We've had pads and sticks for a long time, and we've mostly grown accustomed to the quirks of how we map them to solutions - when these fail, like FPS y-axis inversion and left-right camera rotation in 3rd person games (my own personal bugbear), it really kills the enjoyment of the game for some players. If the blend of interaction is right, these things will fly off the shelves.
"It seems to me that "DirectX 10 hardware" may finally be approaching a phase-3 machine."
No, at least from a coding point of view it passed that around the time of maybe DX5 to DX7. Back then it was a real chore to write stuff for, documentation wasn't entirely great and textbooks got all confused and out of date really really quickly. Round about DX8 it really started to be OK though, and that's about when I did a bit of Xbox dev work. Since then, I've been on PS2 duties so have fallen out of touch.
The thing is, DX isn't the same as OpenGL. It's pretty much a full game middleware platform, only for Windows and Xbox instead of being really multiplatform. Open Source stuff can approximate the feature set if you combine things (OpenGL + SDL + various things for audio, networking, etc.) but they're all done by different people, with different coding styles and different levels of goodness. DirectX's strength is its coherence, and the big install base of Windows users.
DX10 is throwing away a big pile of audience, I'm not sure that's a good idea...
...software generally shouldn't be any more complex than it needs to be. This is where many applications either get confused or fall over completely: they could make things easier with no loss of flexibility, but don't. Poor documentation, poor interfaces (or badly-named or hidden or arcane parameters for command line tools), the list goes on and on. Things which could be fixed, but aren't.
Some software needs to be complicated, but no software should ever be *too* complicated for the required purpose or intended users.
As a games programmer and non-US gamer, I've never heard of this XFire lot until now. A quick look at their website doesn't give me a real idea of what it is that they do, anyone fancy illuminating me as to why someone would buy this company? :)
...a TV is useless if nobody broadcasts anything. A DVD player or VCR is useless if there's nothing to play or record with it. And anyone with a computer can already play computer games.
Sounds like Intel has put the cart quite a long way before the horse, and has released a platform with no worthwhile content. We'll see if the platform survives long enough to get any worthwhile content now, but I'm not hugely optimistic. Time will tell, I suppose!