The thing is, I think that game makers can provide free online services independantly of Sony and MS if they so desire - although Xbox Live and the mooted PS3 "Hub" service provide stuff that I don't think the DS does (centralised stats and buddy lists and whatnot), so the requirements in terms of infrastructure are fairly different.
I think there's room for both approaches, for different types of games.
on graduating, most games companies would not take on recent graduates, and required a minimum of 12 months experience and a published title. How to gain 12 months experience and publish a title when nobody will hire you is left as an exercise for the reader.
I eventually landed a job in one of the most expensive parts of the UK to live in (Surrey), earning £20,000 - at the time approximately $30,000 - which I'm told was a decent wage for a graduate programmer at the time. This was less than the average national wage which was £24,000 or thereabouts if I recall correctly. Other graduates from my university class going to work for investment banks or web companies were getting offers of up to £35,000 or thereabouts, and the ones who've become sysadmins rather than programmers all earn more than me even now.
The games industry isn't one where you go for high wages. You do it for the love of games, and then because even if you wanted to change career paths it's tricky when you don't have "serious" coding experience...
...for it to be truly open and future-accessible, it would have to specify everything from the bottom hardware level up - from how bits are encoded on whatever the storage medium is, through to file system layout, and only then starting to talk about the contents of the data itself. From there you then have to decide formats for all types of data (text, formatted text, images, audio, etc.) and specify how they're encoded and what their structure is, and how to interpret their data (e.g. images composed of pixels, which are made up of red green blue and alpha components).
It's really not a trivial thing to do, and simply specifying an Open Document Format is a fairly small part of a bigger situation.
...who are my employer, for what it's worth (but I don't know anything about what the article discusses):
With things like EyeToy and Singstar, and more recently Buzz, Sony has been making more mainstream-style games. I wouldn't be surprised if some research unit somewhere wasn't looking at Revolution-style input. I also wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been looked at before Revolution was announced, but just never made any headway.
I'm still reserving judgement on Rev stuff until I see it running, preferably until I get a chance to try it out. The success or failure of it depends entirely on how good it feels, not on the concept.
I know a lot of people with full romsets for Mame, and many other emulators. Only a handful of them own *any* of the original games or boards, none of them own them all.
Whether this is good or bad I leave to the reader to decide for his or her self, but it's almost certainly the reason that sellers of legit roms are likely to go under. And people wonder why Nintendo do their damndest to squish emulators and rerelase all their old games on new platforms...
The iPod was slightly successful before iTMS. And from what I gather from my non-technical friends, iTunes isn't all that friendly to non-techies. Especially if you try installing it on older PCs.
I'm not entirely sure why the iPod is so successful. I think it was largely a matter of luck to begin with, which has then been capitalised on wisely by Apple. Certainly I can think of many ways I'd prefer an iPod to operate - many of them are taken care of by iRiver, but it's a much geekier and less attractive bit of gear so I can see why it hasn't taken off. iPods look cool - I think that's a big part of it...:)
Firstly, nice to see a Hard Boiled game in the works. I found out about it today, and it sounds pretty cool - a bit like Black, but with John Wooisms!
Secondly, Snow Day sounds pretty cool (tee hee!). Sadly, snow is such a tactile thing that I don't know if it'd work in a game for kids, unless you put them in a fridge too. Also, snow would probably be a difficult thing to simulate well - getting it right enough to make snowballs, snowmen, snow angels and snow forts would probably be a big technical challenge. Of course, it'd be better than more shiny environment-mapped Havok-physics cars...:)
Re:There are a few ways to do something...
on
Source Code & Copyright
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ain't that the truth!
In my Java Data Structures class in University, our first couple of assignments were exactly this sort of thing. I think the first one was a singly linked list, and out of the 100 or so students 60 *identical* solutions were handed in. For the second assignment, a doubly linked list, there was more variation but still 30 or 40 identical solutions. We'd all learned Java in the same classes, we all had the same textbook, it's hardly surprising that there was so much similarity there.
Of course, when in our low-level C programming class that same year ten people handed in identical solutions to an assignment which had no textbook, no enforced coding style, and even the non-code questions were word-for-word the same, it was obvious we had a bit of copying going on...;)
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include --
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
I guess there are probably some judgements which have either increased or decreased the precise scope of it, but like I said in my original post, it isn't clear from *that* whether backups or format shifts would be covered. I could see the RIAA successfully arguing that (2) would give them the right to say you can't do it, and that (3) suggests you can only copy parts of a work rather than the whole thing...
...they could be correct. I don't know the law well enough to say - if memory serves correct, it gives some examples of things which are fair use, none of which include anything like backing up or shifting from one media to another for personal use. So yeah, technically they could be correct.
But I think most people would agree that fairness is also a moral concept, and in that sense it's obvious that it is indeed fair use to copy something you already have to your MP3 player or PC to listen to in a more convenient way.
Here's a hint to the lovely people at the RIAA and similar bodies around the world: if people can't use CDs in this kind of way, they won't buy them.
I love how people with little knowledge of history laud Nintendo as visionaries for things that have been done before...
For instance, Electroplankton was preceded by over 20 years, by things like this, and this, and this, and this - and those are just by one guy, and those are just the ones I know about. Jeff Minter can't have been the only guy making this sort of thing, there's probably been a pile of them in academia too.
As for the virtual pets, ignoring Tamagotchi and whatnot there have been virtual dogs and more imaginative or more prosaic electronic companions for a while too - Little Computer People came out over 20 years ago as well.
Nintendo may popularise many things, but don't make the mistake of thinking they come up with them all...
...of 2D games can be done fairly easily and quickly in Flash. I'm really quite surprised there hasn't been more of an effort made for an Open Source alternative to Flash, maybe the reputation it has for being slow, evil and crap has too much of a foothold, but it's actually quite a nice environment to work in for testing some stuff.
As for this, I suppose it's nice enough. I don't see what it brings to the table that hasn't been done many times before, in many different languages, but making games is fun enough that I do it for a living, so the more people who can have fun doing the same thing the better:)
It's like a bigger fancier version of Jazzmutant's Lemur device, used for controlling virtual synth plugins and the like. It even uses the same OSC protocol, I wonder if they're based on similar multi-touch tech...
The same thing applies - if they could stop the production of drugs, people wouldn't be able to smuggle them in. All it does is drive the problem underground though, so in that respect you're correct. But the big-game-company produced stuff, much like the big drug cartel produced stuff, would be easy to stop if the powers that be chose to do it.
...the only *real* way to stop people obtaining them is to stop them being produced in the first place. Once they exist, trying to stop people obtaining them through any means (legal or illegal) is nigh impossible.
Since almost all of these studies are funded or organised by a party which appears to be inherently for or against one of the things being studied, will it be possible to find anyone willing to compare them impartially? After all, how many people would believe an Open Source company to be any less biased than MS when it comes to comparing their products?
The main problem, I suspect, is that general purpose code just doesn't run very well on it. You really need to optimise for each application, to tune how you handle your data and what algorithms you use in order feed the Cell properly if you want to get the most out of it.
All the gamers I know read books fairly regularly. Of course, they're also all adult and in full time employment or education, and probably are the real target for this book.
So he refuses to endorse Creative Commons, and publically states this, hoping for... what? All of the people whose needs are met by CC licenses to jump over to GPL? I don't get it, really.
As a technical aside, how would the GPL map to creative works in practice anyway? If I use Photoshop to produce an amusing image and release the image under the GPL, would I need to give the PSD file to anyone who asked?
I suspect I'm missing something. But so is Stallman - different people find different levels of "openness" to be acceptable. Welcome to the real world, isn't it fun?:)
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is, I think that game makers can provide free online services independantly of Sony and MS if they so desire - although Xbox Live and the mooted PS3 "Hub" service provide stuff that I don't think the DS does (centralised stats and buddy lists and whatnot), so the requirements in terms of infrastructure are fairly different.
I think there's room for both approaches, for different types of games.
...in the UK:
on graduating, most games companies would not take on recent graduates, and required a minimum of 12 months experience and a published title. How to gain 12 months experience and publish a title when nobody will hire you is left as an exercise for the reader.
I eventually landed a job in one of the most expensive parts of the UK to live in (Surrey), earning £20,000 - at the time approximately $30,000 - which I'm told was a decent wage for a graduate programmer at the time. This was less than the average national wage which was £24,000 or thereabouts if I recall correctly. Other graduates from my university class going to work for investment banks or web companies were getting offers of up to £35,000 or thereabouts, and the ones who've become sysadmins rather than programmers all earn more than me even now.
The games industry isn't one where you go for high wages. You do it for the love of games, and then because even if you wanted to change career paths it's tricky when you don't have "serious" coding experience...
...for it to be truly open and future-accessible, it would have to specify everything from the bottom hardware level up - from how bits are encoded on whatever the storage medium is, through to file system layout, and only then starting to talk about the contents of the data itself. From there you then have to decide formats for all types of data (text, formatted text, images, audio, etc.) and specify how they're encoded and what their structure is, and how to interpret their data (e.g. images composed of pixels, which are made up of red green blue and alpha components).
It's really not a trivial thing to do, and simply specifying an Open Document Format is a fairly small part of a bigger situation.
...who are my employer, for what it's worth (but I don't know anything about what the article discusses):
With things like EyeToy and Singstar, and more recently Buzz, Sony has been making more mainstream-style games. I wouldn't be surprised if some research unit somewhere wasn't looking at Revolution-style input. I also wouldn't be surprised if it hadn't been looked at before Revolution was announced, but just never made any headway.
I'm still reserving judgement on Rev stuff until I see it running, preferably until I get a chance to try it out. The success or failure of it depends entirely on how good it feels, not on the concept.
I know a lot of people with full romsets for Mame, and many other emulators. Only a handful of them own *any* of the original games or boards, none of them own them all.
Whether this is good or bad I leave to the reader to decide for his or her self, but it's almost certainly the reason that sellers of legit roms are likely to go under. And people wonder why Nintendo do their damndest to squish emulators and rerelase all their old games on new platforms...
...that he "found" these memos, does it actually mean that he broke the law to gain access to them in the first place?
The iPod was slightly successful before iTMS. And from what I gather from my non-technical friends, iTunes isn't all that friendly to non-techies. Especially if you try installing it on older PCs.
:)
I'm not entirely sure why the iPod is so successful. I think it was largely a matter of luck to begin with, which has then been capitalised on wisely by Apple. Certainly I can think of many ways I'd prefer an iPod to operate - many of them are taken care of by iRiver, but it's a much geekier and less attractive bit of gear so I can see why it hasn't taken off. iPods look cool - I think that's a big part of it...
...from someone who works in games too!
:)
Firstly, nice to see a Hard Boiled game in the works. I found out about it today, and it sounds pretty cool - a bit like Black, but with John Wooisms!
Secondly, Snow Day sounds pretty cool (tee hee!). Sadly, snow is such a tactile thing that I don't know if it'd work in a game for kids, unless you put them in a fridge too. Also, snow would probably be a difficult thing to simulate well - getting it right enough to make snowballs, snowmen, snow angels and snow forts would probably be a big technical challenge. Of course, it'd be better than more shiny environment-mapped Havok-physics cars...
Ain't that the truth!
;)
In my Java Data Structures class in University, our first couple of assignments were exactly this sort of thing. I think the first one was a singly linked list, and out of the 100 or so students 60 *identical* solutions were handed in. For the second assignment, a doubly linked list, there was more variation but still 30 or 40 identical solutions. We'd all learned Java in the same classes, we all had the same textbook, it's hardly surprising that there was so much similarity there.
Of course, when in our low-level C programming class that same year ten people handed in identical solutions to an assignment which had no textbook, no enforced coding style, and even the non-code questions were word-for-word the same, it was obvious we had a bit of copying going on...
...but hey, at least I don't have Alzheimer's! :)
I'm not talking about their whole license thing, I'm just talking about copyright law. Try to keep up!
I guess there are probably some judgements which have either increased or decreased the precise scope of it, but like I said in my original post, it isn't clear from *that* whether backups or format shifts would be covered. I could see the RIAA successfully arguing that (2) would give them the right to say you can't do it, and that (3) suggests you can only copy parts of a work rather than the whole thing...
...they could be correct. I don't know the law well enough to say - if memory serves correct, it gives some examples of things which are fair use, none of which include anything like backing up or shifting from one media to another for personal use. So yeah, technically they could be correct.
But I think most people would agree that fairness is also a moral concept, and in that sense it's obvious that it is indeed fair use to copy something you already have to your MP3 player or PC to listen to in a more convenient way.
Here's a hint to the lovely people at the RIAA and similar bodies around the world: if people can't use CDs in this kind of way, they won't buy them.
I love how people with little knowledge of history laud Nintendo as visionaries for things that have been done before...
For instance, Electroplankton was preceded by over 20 years, by things like this, and this, and this, and this - and those are just by one guy, and those are just the ones I know about. Jeff Minter can't have been the only guy making this sort of thing, there's probably been a pile of them in academia too.
As for the virtual pets, ignoring Tamagotchi and whatnot there have been virtual dogs and more imaginative or more prosaic electronic companions for a while too - Little Computer People came out over 20 years ago as well.
Nintendo may popularise many things, but don't make the mistake of thinking they come up with them all...
...of 2D games can be done fairly easily and quickly in Flash. I'm really quite surprised there hasn't been more of an effort made for an Open Source alternative to Flash, maybe the reputation it has for being slow, evil and crap has too much of a foothold, but it's actually quite a nice environment to work in for testing some stuff.
:)
As for this, I suppose it's nice enough. I don't see what it brings to the table that hasn't been done many times before, in many different languages, but making games is fun enough that I do it for a living, so the more people who can have fun doing the same thing the better
It's like a bigger fancier version of Jazzmutant's Lemur device, used for controlling virtual synth plugins and the like. It even uses the same OSC protocol, I wonder if they're based on similar multi-touch tech...
...how about "murder simulators"? :P
The same thing applies - if they could stop the production of drugs, people wouldn't be able to smuggle them in. All it does is drive the problem underground though, so in that respect you're correct. But the big-game-company produced stuff, much like the big drug cartel produced stuff, would be easy to stop if the powers that be chose to do it.
...the only *real* way to stop people obtaining them is to stop them being produced in the first place. Once they exist, trying to stop people obtaining them through any means (legal or illegal) is nigh impossible.
Touché :)
Since almost all of these studies are funded or organised by a party which appears to be inherently for or against one of the things being studied, will it be possible to find anyone willing to compare them impartially? After all, how many people would believe an Open Source company to be any less biased than MS when it comes to comparing their products?
The main problem, I suspect, is that general purpose code just doesn't run very well on it. You really need to optimise for each application, to tune how you handle your data and what algorithms you use in order feed the Cell properly if you want to get the most out of it.
...new technology costs more than old? Bigger disks cost less than smaller? What exactly is the news in this news?
All the gamers I know read books fairly regularly. Of course, they're also all adult and in full time employment or education, and probably are the real target for this book.
...but that's his choice.
:)
So he refuses to endorse Creative Commons, and publically states this, hoping for... what? All of the people whose needs are met by CC licenses to jump over to GPL? I don't get it, really.
As a technical aside, how would the GPL map to creative works in practice anyway? If I use Photoshop to produce an amusing image and release the image under the GPL, would I need to give the PSD file to anyone who asked?
I suspect I'm missing something. But so is Stallman - different people find different levels of "openness" to be acceptable. Welcome to the real world, isn't it fun?