No. Wrong wrong wrong. Wrong! Assuming the guy wants to learn about game programming rather than 3D engine programming, that is...;)
See, most people who work in the games industry don't write 3D engines. And the ones that do often don't get to actually work on games, they get shunted off into R&D or game support roles. The rest of us write other systems, like AI or physics or GUI/HUD or cameras, or any number of other things. Or we implement gameplay stuff using all of the above systems (that's what I do, yay me!):D
For some reason though, the graphics programming aspect has glamour. Maybe it's just the easiest one to see a result from, I dunno. But whatever the reason is, you can virtually guarantee that unless you're a really outstanding graphics programmer, you'll be doing something else a most of the time.
And if the op is doing this solely as a hobby project, I'd offer my opinion that working on some of these other areas of a game is more accessible, and more fun, than doing graphics stuff. Just writing graphics code won't really result in a playable game, whereas writing some basic AI gets you into the realm of simple games of many kinds. But at the end of the day, if he or she ss asking for a graphics engine, I guess graphics isn't really what they want to work on:)
There's at least one Garageband specific controller that I know of - it's the M-Audio iControl. And I don't use Apple stuff or follow gear stories particularly closely, so I dunno much about it other than that it exists:)
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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Maybe one of the most pertinent comments so far, well spoken.
I'd argue that writing prose on a sailboat would be a fine way to make a living, as long as people then paid to read it. Books aren't currently under threat in the same way I think recorded music is. Most people still go and buy a physical book, and the author gets a bit of cash. Maybe not much, publishing deals are probably as bad as record deals for new writers. But I digress...
Making recorded music, despite being enjoyable, is actually pretty hard work sometimes. Ignoring the creative process of writing a song, you can spend a very long time (and often money) getting the vision you have for that song into recorded form. I think this is the bit of the process that's most under threat, and any artist who did want to concentrate on that part of the process probably does have to change their approach now. I'm just not sure that's entirely a good thing...
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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We're getting on well, but are still at cross purposes a bit:
I agree that copyright isn't necessary to make money from music. What *is* necessary though is the will of people to pay for recordings of music. That's what I think is slowly disappearing, mostly because of the actions of big labels and the emergence of P2P. And that's why I worry about the future of recorded music. Releasing things with Creative Commons licenses, or just releasing them and letting people do what they like, it's fine. But some means of rewarding the artists would be nice. Not to the tune of millions, a living wage for production of music in the way you describe.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this argument any more, except to try and find out what the future of purely recorded music might be. It sounds like it isn't a rosy one, that's for sure - strictly part time supported by day jobs seems to be the way of it. Ah well.
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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Good post, well reasoned. I agree with most of your points about the record industry too. Aren't we getting along well?:P
But we do seem to be talking at cross purposes - my views have no real relation to copyright, or to the record industry. I'm more concerned with people and P2P, the way that free access to recorded music is increasingly seen as a right. In that context, it seems to me that the prevailing view is that paying for recorded music isn't going to happen anywhere near as much. So artists will be funding works through different means, and in many cases that won't be so bad. Bands can gig and make money, as the other posters have all mentioned. And that's fine. If they can do their music full time and support themselves, that's fantastic.
But having a day job drastically reduces the amount of time one can spend on one's art. I know I'm currently occupied hitting deadlines in work, I have no time to play or write for the next few weeks. If people have to work separately from their art to support themselves, it leaves them less time to produce the art itself. That's why I think there'll be less stuff about. That's not to say anything about the quality of what you'd produce after a day's work, too...
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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I'm talking about me selling my music myself - no labels, no studios, not necessarily even copyright. But it sounds like people object to the act of selling any music, and just want me to support myself with gigs I couldn't play, and wouldn't necessarily want to if I could.
That's the option that commoditised music totally removes from me. I'm left with the status quo, which is to make my music and release it for free. And work a day job which stops me creating as much as I'd like, which means the world has less music than it would otherwise. In my case, yeah, maybe no great loss. But what good stuff that might otherwise have rocked your world won't we get?
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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I don't have many people listening to my music just now, partly because I'm not making much due to work, partly because I'm not promoting it at all. I'm just making it for me, really, and I'm fine with that. My worry is that I can see it getting to the point where only live music is practical to make a living at, and only then if you're willing to perform publically often, and attempt to sell physical objects to people attending performances.
My concern isn't so much for me as it is for music in general - without a way to make money from recorded music, I think the musical spectrum will suffer for it greatly in the long run. As music becomes commoditised in the way it has of late, with many people expecting it to be free and for the artist to make money from other activities like gigging or merchandise, my fear is that it potentially denies the world of things which don't fit into that sort of scheme. Say a lone composer writing for large orchestras, who can't afford to pay musicians to perform his work. Or shy musicians who just don't want to go on stage.
I don't think there's a technical solution to it - as they say, information wants to be free, and there's a large community of people out there who'll free it whether the creators want that or not. I don't know if there's any sort of solution to it, really. I'm just worried we'll lose something special in the rush to get free Metallica MP3s off of our Napster-alike of choice, and we won't even realise it's gone.
Ethics are not always absolute. Whether an action is ethical or not can depend on context, personal beliefs and so on. You can debate ethics as part of a course of education, or as regards a particular area of life.
For instance, you might say it is unethical to hack someone's computer without their knowledge. But if the ethical hacker in question works for a law enforcement agency, and is performing the hack legally with all the relevant oversight in order to gain evidence of or to prevent an illegal act, then you could argue whether it's ethical or not.
You were more correct at the start of your post when you said whether people apply their skills ethically or not is up to them. That's the real issue here - just doing a course in ethical hacking means that the person presumably has knowledge of the ethics issues involved. It doesn't tell you a thing about what they personally believe, or will do with their new-found hacking skill...
Re:Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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I agree, to an extent. I do make music despite the fact that I can't make money from it, because I enjoy the act of creation, and I agree that most musicians probably would continue to do so. I just don't think that a world where the only way to make music for a living is to perform it live will necessarily result in a better world.
Like I said in my original post, I write stuff I couldn't possibly perform. I write things which are possibly physically impossible to play (using samples and sequencers, as well as multitracking real instruments). I write things which outpace my computer's ability to perform it in realtime, and need to carefully assemble mixes from rendered audio, much the same way as recording studios do for albums. As it stands, with the way you and the OP propose music should be financed, I wouldn't be able to make a living doing that. And yeah, I'll still keep doing it, but who knows what great works might be lost - not from me, maybe, but from the next Mozart or whatever - just because the person who might have made them had to go work in a fast food joint to pay the bills.
Why *do* so many people seem to have this base-level objection to paying for recording music? Is it that they think all musicians want to be rapper-rich? I'd be happy earning the same as I do now, but for making music all day, and I don't earn all that much compared to many of you reading this I suspect...:)
Some artists just want to be heard...
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CRIA Falling Apart?
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Because what you said it isn't true, at least not for all musicians. See, you have to separate the love of the art we have from our desirve to live a decent quality of life. Us musicians don't just want to make music for everyone's enjoyment, you see. Some of us want to eat as well!
Many musicians, especially big popular artists of course, want to sell music, and make their living from that. They don't consider their music to be advertising - they may rarely play a gig, they may never want to go on tour, but they may still love making music and want to be able to make a living from it.
Sadly, the people who mask their desire to download music for free from P2P networks claim they're doing it to "fight the man", destroy the evil record labels and so on. That's fine, as far as it goes, but it's an excuse and nothing more. It won't help people like me - I'm a solo musician who plays several instruments, but I'm not in a band. I can record stuff I could never play live. I've enjoyed gigging, but I don't think I'd like to tour really. But why shouldn't I make a living selling music?
If I wanted to sell my music, I'd like people to respect my wishes. If they don't, and I'm relying on making money from my music to live, then I'm fucked and I won't make as much more (if any) because I'll need a job to pay the rent. Which is why I've skipped trying to make a living from music, and instead I'm a games programmer who makes music in his spare time.
I loved the original. Just before HL2 was released, I reinstalled and played through it again to refresh my memory (and truth be told polish my FPS skills, it had been a while). I still liked it just as much - as much as anything else, it has character: the NPCs do things or not for reasons, the game seems to have a logical flow to it which takes you from place to place without seeming hugely contrived (although I didn't like Zen much, or the end boss). And it has that indefinable something that just makes it fun to play, even in the crappier bits, you still keep going to see what happens next.
Fast forward to HL2. I get it on release day and install it, and I've instantly got Steam issues. I won't dwell on them here, but it did leave me in a mood where I was prepared to not enjoy the game which is why I mention it. Anyway, I played through almost to the end over the next day or so, and I did enjoy it. But I was left feeling like the game was a wasted opportunity. For me, it didn't live up to the promise it started with. Most of the game sections seemed to go on for too long, especially the boat and car sections. Many puzzles seemed to be an excuse to show off the physics engine rather than to be there for their own sake (buoyant barrels, seesaws). A lot of it is probably personal taste, I just felt like it wasn't all that good when viewed next to the original. I certainly have no urge to replay it, despite not having reached the end, since I reinstalled it on a new hard disk.
I'd really like to try HL:Source, the original Half-Life in the new engine, but I don't feel like paying for the privilege. I'll keep an eye on the Black Mesa mod which seems to be a more ambitious project anyway...:)
I used to get quite stressed working in Burger King, for example, because we had hard-limited resources (fixed number of staff, fixed number of burgers, fixed rate of production etc) but very variable demand (we were in a place which could be either totally dead quiet, or hyper busy beyond our ability to serve). Now the job itself wasn't what made it stressful, it was dealing directly with customers who got irate because we were in a train station and if we didn't serve them quickly they could miss their train.
Similarly, I often get a bit stressed in my job as a games developer. Not usually because of the work I have to do, but often the circumstances which I need to do it in. But not because I have game-buyers sitting around me telling me the game is gonna suck, either. Things like last-minute new content, demo work for shows like E3 or TGS conflicting with game production work, schedules which bear no relation to reality.
Yeah, my job isn't dangerous like someone on a construction site, except when I plug a 110V American devkit into a 240V UK mains supply without a transformer (oops), but when I get stressed I do feel it just as much as I did in my no-thought-required job.
...despite enjoying the films as standalone lumps of entertainment think that the films jumped the shark first. Dwarf tossing, shield surfing, and various other things that annoy the picky fanboy in me. Don't get me wrong, I love the films, but... dwarf tossing? Seriously, dude!
...must be playing tricks on me. I don't remember Bard's Tale being a massively multiplayer online game. Oh, and I don't remember having to queue for 45 minutes before getting to play it either, even when loading it from tape! Not all of the "improvements" in games have made things any better!:(
...dust off all your jokes about how big the Xbox is!
Seriously though, with Xbox and Xbox Live MS has shown that they are capable of doing interesting, cool things with both consoles and gaming generally. I'll be interested to see what they come up with.
...this time it gets a decent amount of QA before release. Civ IV felt very rushed, and wasn't even playable on my machine until after the first patch. Looking forward to the railroad game though, I always like those:D
That's the software you wan't, I think. Head along to the website and download the free trial, play around with it. It comes with tutorials and a helpful forum. It's like DJing with an infinite number of decks, and the ability to add your own loops, instruments and entire original works of music. It's the best, I totally love it:D
As an aside, I'm surprised so many people on here are referring you to turntables or even Final Scratch. This being a techie site I was sure people would be talking about Ableton and Traktor far more than they have been. Ableton is the app that keeps me on Windows (I know it's out for Mac, but I can't afford to switch just yet...)
...from last time to wait until a combo drive is released which does both. Well, that or wait until one format is a clear winner. My last PC came originally with a DVD+R(W) drive, and at that time nowhere seemed to sell +R disks except online, and they were about twice the price of -R disks even there. So, of course, I kept on using CDR instead until the price fell enough for me to get a +-R drive, and by then the disk price had equalised so it didn't really matter what I bought any more. At least, not to me.
This whole mess will probably sort itself out within a year or two. And since I don't have an HDTV or plan to buy one any time soon, I don't really care just now!:)
...is quiet enough to do music recording in the same room as it. It's fast enough to play most current games at reasonable framerates. It's a four year old Dell with a newer pro-spec soundcard and cheap nvidia fanless graphics card, and is whisper quiet now. When I first got it, it was totally silent except for the DVD drive sometimes whirring a bit. I literally couldn't tell it was turned on. I think the big slow fan is getting old, so it does make some noise now.
Where is everyone else getting their hideously noisy jet-engine PCs from? Or am I just lucky?
Sitting properly!
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I know, sounds daft. But setting up your chair for *real* comfort as opposed to slouching, with a view to helping your wrists stay in the proper position.
Your chair should be high enough so that your feet naturally lay flat on the ground, and your thighs are perpendicular to your shins. If you have one of those annoying spring-backed chairs which let you lean way back, lock it all the way forward for support. Some chairs have adjustable back supports too, move them to the correct place (which I think is supporting the lower back).
At this point, sit up straight and reach your hands out in front of you to a comfortable position. Put the keyboard under them, with the mouse mat next to the keyboard. This should be a decent position for you to work from without straining anything.
A tip I've had from people who get back pains at work is to buy a really big exercise ball, and sit on that instead of a chair. You'll look stupid and people will mock you, but it really helps build up the lower back with all the unconscious movements you use to keep balanced on it. Of course, if your balance sucks you'll fall off and get mocked even more;)
...it starts off talking about the marketing, yeah, but ends up saying the content of the games should be different so they can be marketed better.
It really *is* just that games are often marketed very badly, in particularly tasteless ways. For instance, here in the UK: whoever was responsible for marketing the Burnout franchise pre-EA pulled off some stunts like a "Top Ten Celebrity Car Crashes" featuring Princess Diana and Mark Bolan. Public outcry, free publicity, and a lot of negative coverage in the press. Followed up by an offer to pay all speeding tickets on the day of the game's release, to even more outcry including from the police and government.
I'm not a database-y developer really, so I don't have a grasp of the technical abilities of each database. I just go by how easy it is to get third party stuff to install and run on my webhost, and so far PostgreSQL is pretty crappy on that score, through no real fault of its own.
Pretty much every database-enabled open source CMS or blogging app I've tried to use wants MySQL. I assume from these that it's really difficult to write cross-database-platform code, because hardly any of them will work with PostgreSQL. And some of the ones that claim to, don't (yes I'm looking at you Drupal with your lying version requirements!). Even the plugins for things which do end up working (I'm using Movabletype with its standalone db) depend on MySQL rather than using whatever you've set up with the host application.
If I had more spare time, and the inclination to learn more PHP and web development and database stuff, I'd probably have a look at helping out the projects I've tried and failed to use. But I don't.
...don't think bullying is any worse than carjacking, random street violence, sex with prostitutes, beheading police officers, gang warfare or any of the other stuff that went on in any of the GTA games. That aside, we've had films and comics and tv shows about children inflicting various levels of violence on each other for years - everything from Dennis the Menace, through Lord of the Flies, to Stand By Me. Or take your pick of any film with some jocks-vs-nerds bullying, for that matter.
I got bullied. I don't see how this game has anything to do with that.
...until I see it actually being used in games. Until then, it's a cool idea with absolutely no proof of how well or badly it works, and everything else anyone says is just uninformed speculation (from people who haven't played a game with it) or hype (from people who are developing a game with it).
Slashdot Mirror
No. Wrong wrong wrong. Wrong! Assuming the guy wants to learn about game programming rather than 3D engine programming, that is... ;)
:D
:)
See, most people who work in the games industry don't write 3D engines. And the ones that do often don't get to actually work on games, they get shunted off into R&D or game support roles. The rest of us write other systems, like AI or physics or GUI/HUD or cameras, or any number of other things. Or we implement gameplay stuff using all of the above systems (that's what I do, yay me!)
For some reason though, the graphics programming aspect has glamour. Maybe it's just the easiest one to see a result from, I dunno. But whatever the reason is, you can virtually guarantee that unless you're a really outstanding graphics programmer, you'll be doing something else a most of the time.
And if the op is doing this solely as a hobby project, I'd offer my opinion that working on some of these other areas of a game is more accessible, and more fun, than doing graphics stuff. Just writing graphics code won't really result in a playable game, whereas writing some basic AI gets you into the realm of simple games of many kinds. But at the end of the day, if he or she ss asking for a graphics engine, I guess graphics isn't really what they want to work on
There's at least one Garageband specific controller that I know of - it's the M-Audio iControl. And I don't use Apple stuff or follow gear stories particularly closely, so I dunno much about it other than that it exists :)
Maybe one of the most pertinent comments so far, well spoken.
I'd argue that writing prose on a sailboat would be a fine way to make a living, as long as people then paid to read it. Books aren't currently under threat in the same way I think recorded music is. Most people still go and buy a physical book, and the author gets a bit of cash. Maybe not much, publishing deals are probably as bad as record deals for new writers. But I digress...
Making recorded music, despite being enjoyable, is actually pretty hard work sometimes. Ignoring the creative process of writing a song, you can spend a very long time (and often money) getting the vision you have for that song into recorded form. I think this is the bit of the process that's most under threat, and any artist who did want to concentrate on that part of the process probably does have to change their approach now. I'm just not sure that's entirely a good thing...
We're getting on well, but are still at cross purposes a bit:
I agree that copyright isn't necessary to make money from music. What *is* necessary though is the will of people to pay for recordings of music. That's what I think is slowly disappearing, mostly because of the actions of big labels and the emergence of P2P. And that's why I worry about the future of recorded music. Releasing things with Creative Commons licenses, or just releasing them and letting people do what they like, it's fine. But some means of rewarding the artists would be nice. Not to the tune of millions, a living wage for production of music in the way you describe.
I'm not really sure where I'm going with this argument any more, except to try and find out what the future of purely recorded music might be. It sounds like it isn't a rosy one, that's for sure - strictly part time supported by day jobs seems to be the way of it. Ah well.
Good post, well reasoned. I agree with most of your points about the record industry too. Aren't we getting along well? :P
But we do seem to be talking at cross purposes - my views have no real relation to copyright, or to the record industry. I'm more concerned with people and P2P, the way that free access to recorded music is increasingly seen as a right. In that context, it seems to me that the prevailing view is that paying for recorded music isn't going to happen anywhere near as much. So artists will be funding works through different means, and in many cases that won't be so bad. Bands can gig and make money, as the other posters have all mentioned. And that's fine. If they can do their music full time and support themselves, that's fantastic.
But having a day job drastically reduces the amount of time one can spend on one's art. I know I'm currently occupied hitting deadlines in work, I have no time to play or write for the next few weeks. If people have to work separately from their art to support themselves, it leaves them less time to produce the art itself. That's why I think there'll be less stuff about. That's not to say anything about the quality of what you'd produce after a day's work, too...
I'm talking about me selling my music myself - no labels, no studios, not necessarily even copyright. But it sounds like people object to the act of selling any music, and just want me to support myself with gigs I couldn't play, and wouldn't necessarily want to if I could.
That's the option that commoditised music totally removes from me. I'm left with the status quo, which is to make my music and release it for free. And work a day job which stops me creating as much as I'd like, which means the world has less music than it would otherwise. In my case, yeah, maybe no great loss. But what good stuff that might otherwise have rocked your world won't we get?
I don't have many people listening to my music just now, partly because I'm not making much due to work, partly because I'm not promoting it at all. I'm just making it for me, really, and I'm fine with that. My worry is that I can see it getting to the point where only live music is practical to make a living at, and only then if you're willing to perform publically often, and attempt to sell physical objects to people attending performances.
My concern isn't so much for me as it is for music in general - without a way to make money from recorded music, I think the musical spectrum will suffer for it greatly in the long run. As music becomes commoditised in the way it has of late, with many people expecting it to be free and for the artist to make money from other activities like gigging or merchandise, my fear is that it potentially denies the world of things which don't fit into that sort of scheme. Say a lone composer writing for large orchestras, who can't afford to pay musicians to perform his work. Or shy musicians who just don't want to go on stage.
I don't think there's a technical solution to it - as they say, information wants to be free, and there's a large community of people out there who'll free it whether the creators want that or not. I don't know if there's any sort of solution to it, really. I'm just worried we'll lose something special in the rush to get free Metallica MP3s off of our Napster-alike of choice, and we won't even realise it's gone.
Ethics are not always absolute. Whether an action is ethical or not can depend on context, personal beliefs and so on. You can debate ethics as part of a course of education, or as regards a particular area of life.
For instance, you might say it is unethical to hack someone's computer without their knowledge. But if the ethical hacker in question works for a law enforcement agency, and is performing the hack legally with all the relevant oversight in order to gain evidence of or to prevent an illegal act, then you could argue whether it's ethical or not.
You were more correct at the start of your post when you said whether people apply their skills ethically or not is up to them. That's the real issue here - just doing a course in ethical hacking means that the person presumably has knowledge of the ethics issues involved. It doesn't tell you a thing about what they personally believe, or will do with their new-found hacking skill...
I agree, to an extent. I do make music despite the fact that I can't make money from it, because I enjoy the act of creation, and I agree that most musicians probably would continue to do so. I just don't think that a world where the only way to make music for a living is to perform it live will necessarily result in a better world.
:)
Like I said in my original post, I write stuff I couldn't possibly perform. I write things which are possibly physically impossible to play (using samples and sequencers, as well as multitracking real instruments). I write things which outpace my computer's ability to perform it in realtime, and need to carefully assemble mixes from rendered audio, much the same way as recording studios do for albums. As it stands, with the way you and the OP propose music should be financed, I wouldn't be able to make a living doing that. And yeah, I'll still keep doing it, but who knows what great works might be lost - not from me, maybe, but from the next Mozart or whatever - just because the person who might have made them had to go work in a fast food joint to pay the bills.
Why *do* so many people seem to have this base-level objection to paying for recording music? Is it that they think all musicians want to be rapper-rich? I'd be happy earning the same as I do now, but for making music all day, and I don't earn all that much compared to many of you reading this I suspect...
Because what you said it isn't true, at least not for all musicians. See, you have to separate the love of the art we have from our desirve to live a decent quality of life. Us musicians don't just want to make music for everyone's enjoyment, you see. Some of us want to eat as well!
Many musicians, especially big popular artists of course, want to sell music, and make their living from that. They don't consider their music to be advertising - they may rarely play a gig, they may never want to go on tour, but they may still love making music and want to be able to make a living from it.
Sadly, the people who mask their desire to download music for free from P2P networks claim they're doing it to "fight the man", destroy the evil record labels and so on. That's fine, as far as it goes, but it's an excuse and nothing more. It won't help people like me - I'm a solo musician who plays several instruments, but I'm not in a band. I can record stuff I could never play live. I've enjoyed gigging, but I don't think I'd like to tour really. But why shouldn't I make a living selling music?
If I wanted to sell my music, I'd like people to respect my wishes. If they don't, and I'm relying on making money from my music to live, then I'm fucked and I won't make as much more (if any) because I'll need a job to pay the rent. Which is why I've skipped trying to make a living from music, and instead I'm a games programmer who makes music in his spare time.
I loved the original. Just before HL2 was released, I reinstalled and played through it again to refresh my memory (and truth be told polish my FPS skills, it had been a while). I still liked it just as much - as much as anything else, it has character: the NPCs do things or not for reasons, the game seems to have a logical flow to it which takes you from place to place without seeming hugely contrived (although I didn't like Zen much, or the end boss). And it has that indefinable something that just makes it fun to play, even in the crappier bits, you still keep going to see what happens next.
:)
Fast forward to HL2. I get it on release day and install it, and I've instantly got Steam issues. I won't dwell on them here, but it did leave me in a mood where I was prepared to not enjoy the game which is why I mention it. Anyway, I played through almost to the end over the next day or so, and I did enjoy it. But I was left feeling like the game was a wasted opportunity. For me, it didn't live up to the promise it started with. Most of the game sections seemed to go on for too long, especially the boat and car sections. Many puzzles seemed to be an excuse to show off the physics engine rather than to be there for their own sake (buoyant barrels, seesaws). A lot of it is probably personal taste, I just felt like it wasn't all that good when viewed next to the original. I certainly have no urge to replay it, despite not having reached the end, since I reinstalled it on a new hard disk.
I'd really like to try HL:Source, the original Half-Life in the new engine, but I don't feel like paying for the privilege. I'll keep an eye on the Black Mesa mod which seems to be a more ambitious project anyway...
There are different kinds of stress...
I used to get quite stressed working in Burger King, for example, because we had hard-limited resources (fixed number of staff, fixed number of burgers, fixed rate of production etc) but very variable demand (we were in a place which could be either totally dead quiet, or hyper busy beyond our ability to serve). Now the job itself wasn't what made it stressful, it was dealing directly with customers who got irate because we were in a train station and if we didn't serve them quickly they could miss their train.
Similarly, I often get a bit stressed in my job as a games developer. Not usually because of the work I have to do, but often the circumstances which I need to do it in. But not because I have game-buyers sitting around me telling me the game is gonna suck, either. Things like last-minute new content, demo work for shows like E3 or TGS conflicting with game production work, schedules which bear no relation to reality.
Yeah, my job isn't dangerous like someone on a construction site, except when I plug a 110V American devkit into a 240V UK mains supply without a transformer (oops), but when I get stressed I do feel it just as much as I did in my no-thought-required job.
...despite enjoying the films as standalone lumps of entertainment think that the films jumped the shark first. Dwarf tossing, shield surfing, and various other things that annoy the picky fanboy in me. Don't get me wrong, I love the films, but... dwarf tossing? Seriously, dude!
...must be playing tricks on me. I don't remember Bard's Tale being a massively multiplayer online game. Oh, and I don't remember having to queue for 45 minutes before getting to play it either, even when loading it from tape! Not all of the "improvements" in games have made things any better! :(
...dust off all your jokes about how big the Xbox is!
Seriously though, with Xbox and Xbox Live MS has shown that they are capable of doing interesting, cool things with both consoles and gaming generally. I'll be interested to see what they come up with.
...this time it gets a decent amount of QA before release. Civ IV felt very rushed, and wasn't even playable on my machine until after the first patch. Looking forward to the railroad game though, I always like those :D
That's the software you wan't, I think. Head along to the website and download the free trial, play around with it. It comes with tutorials and a helpful forum. It's like DJing with an infinite number of decks, and the ability to add your own loops, instruments and entire original works of music. It's the best, I totally love it :D
As an aside, I'm surprised so many people on here are referring you to turntables or even Final Scratch. This being a techie site I was sure people would be talking about Ableton and Traktor far more than they have been. Ableton is the app that keeps me on Windows (I know it's out for Mac, but I can't afford to switch just yet...)
...from last time to wait until a combo drive is released which does both. Well, that or wait until one format is a clear winner. My last PC came originally with a DVD+R(W) drive, and at that time nowhere seemed to sell +R disks except online, and they were about twice the price of -R disks even there. So, of course, I kept on using CDR instead until the price fell enough for me to get a +-R drive, and by then the disk price had equalised so it didn't really matter what I bought any more. At least, not to me.
:)
This whole mess will probably sort itself out within a year or two. And since I don't have an HDTV or plan to buy one any time soon, I don't really care just now!
...is quiet enough to do music recording in the same room as it. It's fast enough to play most current games at reasonable framerates. It's a four year old Dell with a newer pro-spec soundcard and cheap nvidia fanless graphics card, and is whisper quiet now. When I first got it, it was totally silent except for the DVD drive sometimes whirring a bit. I literally couldn't tell it was turned on. I think the big slow fan is getting old, so it does make some noise now.
Where is everyone else getting their hideously noisy jet-engine PCs from? Or am I just lucky?
I know, sounds daft. But setting up your chair for *real* comfort as opposed to slouching, with a view to helping your wrists stay in the proper position.
;)
Your chair should be high enough so that your feet naturally lay flat on the ground, and your thighs are perpendicular to your shins. If you have one of those annoying spring-backed chairs which let you lean way back, lock it all the way forward for support. Some chairs have adjustable back supports too, move them to the correct place (which I think is supporting the lower back).
At this point, sit up straight and reach your hands out in front of you to a comfortable position. Put the keyboard under them, with the mouse mat next to the keyboard. This should be a decent position for you to work from without straining anything.
A tip I've had from people who get back pains at work is to buy a really big exercise ball, and sit on that instead of a chair. You'll look stupid and people will mock you, but it really helps build up the lower back with all the unconscious movements you use to keep balanced on it. Of course, if your balance sucks you'll fall off and get mocked even more
...it starts off talking about the marketing, yeah, but ends up saying the content of the games should be different so they can be marketed better.
It really *is* just that games are often marketed very badly, in particularly tasteless ways. For instance, here in the UK: whoever was responsible for marketing the Burnout franchise pre-EA pulled off some stunts like a "Top Ten Celebrity Car Crashes" featuring Princess Diana and Mark Bolan. Public outcry, free publicity, and a lot of negative coverage in the press. Followed up by an offer to pay all speeding tickets on the day of the game's release, to even more outcry including from the police and government.
...for me is MySQL.
I'm not a database-y developer really, so I don't have a grasp of the technical abilities of each database. I just go by how easy it is to get third party stuff to install and run on my webhost, and so far PostgreSQL is pretty crappy on that score, through no real fault of its own.
Pretty much every database-enabled open source CMS or blogging app I've tried to use wants MySQL. I assume from these that it's really difficult to write cross-database-platform code, because hardly any of them will work with PostgreSQL. And some of the ones that claim to, don't (yes I'm looking at you Drupal with your lying version requirements!). Even the plugins for things which do end up working (I'm using Movabletype with its standalone db) depend on MySQL rather than using whatever you've set up with the host application.
If I had more spare time, and the inclination to learn more PHP and web development and database stuff, I'd probably have a look at helping out the projects I've tried and failed to use. But I don't.
...don't think bullying is any worse than carjacking, random street violence, sex with prostitutes, beheading police officers, gang warfare or any of the other stuff that went on in any of the GTA games. That aside, we've had films and comics and tv shows about children inflicting various levels of violence on each other for years - everything from Dennis the Menace, through Lord of the Flies, to Stand By Me. Or take your pick of any film with some jocks-vs-nerds bullying, for that matter.
I got bullied. I don't see how this game has anything to do with that.
...until I see it actually being used in games. Until then, it's a cool idea with absolutely no proof of how well or badly it works, and everything else anyone says is just uninformed speculation (from people who haven't played a game with it) or hype (from people who are developing a game with it).
Ok, you've sold me.
:D
Now, do I put these Xvid files on HDDVD or Bluray disks? Instruct me!