The term you're looking for is Sturgeon's Law. "90% of Science Fiction... of everything, really... is crap".
The problem is that Sturgeon's Law only defines how much is crap, not how good the remaining 10% is. The problem with movies is that the remaining 10% has become "watchable" instead of "spectacular". I blame bigger budgets - these mega-budget movies constrain geniuses. The geniuses can't break out in an increasingly expensive and ignored indie market, and even if they do, they remain constrained by the managers watching the money. Only the old geniuses (like Tim Burton) get to play with ideas and create things that are truly cool.
I'm curious about this too. I've been seeing the "triple A" buzzword come around recently, and it scares me. I assume it refers to the budget and hype level of a title. This means that the industry has totally given up on considering games based on their quality, just on the amount of labour poured into the game and it's promotion.
My opinion on the solution - start cutting costs, hire independants, and cut the ticket prices in half. Yes, it flies in the face of the "bigger is better" mentality in Hollywood, but so many industries are hitting hard times from making projects bigger than they can support, thinking that bigger budgets create bigger successes. The truth is that having a huge field of innovations allows the sucesses to bubble to the top.
Alternately, find a way to make a 200-player game of Super-Smash Brothers and give every person in the theatre a gamepad. I'd pay to play that (or any other shared-screen multiplayer game on a full theatre).
Yep. If the movies were DVD quality and the PSP had some RCA jacks so I could plug it into my TV, I'd be there. But they're not, it doesn't, so it's stupid.
Well, for disc-delivered content, I can see his objection - why waste image quality? However, for downloaded content, I want the textures crammed in as small space as possible. I'm sick of connecting to UT2k4 maps and having to wait through the first 2 points of a 5 point CTF game because the mapper decided that the base textures just weren't good enough and loaded in a bunch've new texture data that takes a dog's age to download.
Player-editable content needs to be small for others to use it. Mods need to be small so they can be fetched on the fly. 4 megs for each texture is unacceptable under those circumstances. Use super-lossy jpeg, procedural textures, SVGs involving the existing texture-base for stuff within the SVG - whatever. But no more bloat of the media files, plz.
As a Notes user who didn't touch full Outlook until recently (before then I was a Thunderbird/custom-web-calendar user, and an OE user before that) I have to say that Notes isn't annoying because it's "not outlook" - it's annoying because it is just ugly, clumsy, and bizarre. It manages to ignore every single UI convention on every issue.
Have you looked at the posts? Everyone just says "email, a really, really good calendar, and a bunch of acronyms that I wont care to explain".
You did even less. Wikipedia does less. It sounds like Active Directory is good for providing a company phonebook, but that doesn't sound like that big a deal.
So can someone actually explain - besides calendar, address book, and email - what does it do? Yes, I realise that it allows some nice conflict-resolution and organisation on those fronts, but still... what the hell are these other "features" that people ambiguously describe with buzzwords and acronyms - don't say "collaboration", "groupware", or "XPQF" or "messaging". What do you _use_ it for?
Yes, but such extra, random footage often ends up on the "Special Features" section of the DVD. I'm not saying that such extra crap should be in the game, proper - but an "extended features" section that requires a little digging to access would be nice.
Yes, I know it's not polished - like the "Special Features" sections, the "director commentary", etc., you don't watch it until you've seen the movie enough times that you're really interested in all the details. But leave it accessible for those of us who don't want to buy this game-genie-like device.
Given that "standard" mods have been available for Quake (OpenQuartz) and Doom (FreeDoom) and I don't know that those are in Yum yet either, I doubt it.
WoW is generally agreed to be the best thing since sliced bread... but the harshest critic any artist is always the little voice in your own head.
Are there any game-design decisions you made in WoW that you regret? I don't mean minor tweaks that you patch, but major, basic gameplay concepts that might've seemed fine early-on (or even in beta) but didn't pan out. Any things that you'd wished you'd done differently?
1: superlong page, I highlight some text, accidentally scroll down to bottom of page. System slows to a crawl while it highlights all that.
2: sometimes, inexplicably, highlighted text doesn't unhighlight. It just gets suck that way. If I highlight it again, then part of the stuck highlighting goes away.
Well, remember that UE3's innovation is far more than just the graphics. For example, consider Kismet, the graphical programming language to replace UScript. For those who've used them, it's supposedly similar to VirTools or G (the langauge in LabView).
Yes, I've been running into stability issues myself as I get more used to it. Under win32, highlighting text is outright dangerous, acrobat files are still risky, and occaisionally it seems to page itself out of existence - that is, I switch to another program, then go back to firefox, and wait several minutes before I see a page again... I think it doesn't handle having too many tabs well.
Let's repeal the stupid laws to force most parents to be more responsible. Those children harmed by poor parenting will probably be less than those children harmed by poor laws.
You're overly optimistic in the competence of the average parent.
Because with Q3 being free-as-in-freedom, your derived games will be actually opensource, instead of simply free-as-in-beer. If I have to explain the importance of this distinction, then you're on the wrong website.
Well, apples to oranges. While Q3 is opened, the content remains closed. Star Control II had all it's content freed - everything but the name of the game is open for the UQM team to use. Similarly, crack dot com's Abuse (awesome platformer) is open, including all content but sound. Opening the source is extremely awesome, but isn't comparable to those who throw the entire game - content and all - into the public domain.
Kudos to Id for doing it tho - probably the best opened engine yet, and the amount of free content available for Quake 3 - plus the DM gameplay means not needing monsters - means that cobbling together a FreeQ3 pack similar to OpenQuartz and FreeDoom should be an order of magnitude easier.
Fsck that. Tenebrae is a friggin' techdemo. I want to see something actually useful... like all the huge Quake3 TCs released as standalone opensource games and bundled with Linux distros.
For shit's sake, Quake 3 was the first Id game to actually support mods as first-class citizens with their own keybinding menus and stuff. The Q3 TCs are an order of magnitude more complete than the Q2 ones because of it (Action Q2 is nice, but having to use the console for everything is inexcusable in a modern game).
Plus, Q3 allowed for replacement of all major media in game, without even modding. This means that there are already numerous replacement collections of player models and weapon models available on Polycount (not having monster models makes it easier) and maps on various mapping sites. As a result, all you'd have to replace to make a FreeQ3 TC would be the textures and sounds - everything else has been done already (whereas Q1 didn't have prevalent player-model and weapon-model replacements at the time of opensourcing).
This is by far some of the best news the opensource gaming world has ever seen. I can't wait to see this capitalised on.
That's a very good idea. Since something like Hot Coffee or other games with sex scenes (which aren't necessarily pornographic) are classified as AO, then the ESRB really does need a second rating for pr0n. By classifying legitimite games as porno, they marginalize edgy titles.
Hmmph. I've seen worse. I've seen the store owner stop the kid, talk to his mom, explain to his mom how the game includes picking up prostitutes and shooting cops and is really aimed at college students.... and she still bought it for him.
I still thing that the rating system needs to be re-evaluated. First of all, they need a distinction between violence and illegal activity. Fighting to defend the Earth is different from murdering innocent bystanders. There are some games that are designed specifically for a perverse pleasure in being a monstrous villain. In AvsP, it's one thing to kill the marines who are shooting at you, it's another thing to kill the scientists who're begging for mercy - but to the ESRB it's the same.
Secondly, they need to distingish game content from game data. There are various good technical reasons to include clandestine data within a game, such as for regionalization, physical needs (cloth modelling could one day have nude models under clothes), or laziness (Chex Quest was a kid's game based on the Doom engine that still had all the nasty doom graphics in unused parts of the Wad file). This needs to be clearly outlined, and possibly marked on the box, same as if a game can have adult content when played online as opposed to at home.
Yes, it is cynical. I never said it wasn't. The GPL is a good compromise between pure-free BSD and commercial freeware. It is a pragmatic viewpoint that allows for free use and resale of software, but requires that you obey the Golden Rule.
I don't believe the OSS community would have gotten half as far without the GPL. People are selfish - that's how the economy works. GPL means that free-software is compatible with the selfishness of the human race. Anything else is idealism.
It depends what you want to happen with your product.
If your tool is complete and you don't want any help with it, and people should use it freely, use the BSD license.
If you want to see it improved and become something greater than one man's labour, use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements.
By using the GPL, it says "look, I put some effort in here - you can use it for free, but all I expect is that if you do something cool with it, you do the same thing I did". This seems perfectly reasonable, and seems like a way to ensure the long-term success of a product.
Free from sense? To use the BSD license is to devalue the time you spent on the code. A BSD-licensed project is shouting into vacuum - nobody but other altruists will ever publish improvements. GPL means that others who use the code are required to be as generous as you were. If they don't give back to you, at least they'll give back to others.
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The term you're looking for is Sturgeon's Law. "90% of Science Fiction... of everything, really... is crap".
The problem is that Sturgeon's Law only defines how much is crap, not how good the remaining 10% is. The problem with movies is that the remaining 10% has become "watchable" instead of "spectacular". I blame bigger budgets - these mega-budget movies constrain geniuses. The geniuses can't break out in an increasingly expensive and ignored indie market, and even if they do, they remain constrained by the managers watching the money. Only the old geniuses (like Tim Burton) get to play with ideas and create things that are truly cool.
I'm curious about this too. I've been seeing the "triple A" buzzword come around recently, and it scares me. I assume it refers to the budget and hype level of a title. This means that the industry has totally given up on considering games based on their quality, just on the amount of labour poured into the game and it's promotion.
My opinion on the solution - start cutting costs, hire independants, and cut the ticket prices in half. Yes, it flies in the face of the "bigger is better" mentality in Hollywood, but so many industries are hitting hard times from making projects bigger than they can support, thinking that bigger budgets create bigger successes. The truth is that having a huge field of innovations allows the sucesses to bubble to the top.
Alternately, find a way to make a 200-player game of Super-Smash Brothers and give every person in the theatre a gamepad. I'd pay to play that (or any other shared-screen multiplayer game on a full theatre).
Yep. If the movies were DVD quality and the PSP had some RCA jacks so I could plug it into my TV, I'd be there. But they're not, it doesn't, so it's stupid.
Well, for disc-delivered content, I can see his objection - why waste image quality? However, for downloaded content, I want the textures crammed in as small space as possible. I'm sick of connecting to UT2k4 maps and having to wait through the first 2 points of a 5 point CTF game because the mapper decided that the base textures just weren't good enough and loaded in a bunch've new texture data that takes a dog's age to download.
Player-editable content needs to be small for others to use it. Mods need to be small so they can be fetched on the fly. 4 megs for each texture is unacceptable under those circumstances. Use super-lossy jpeg, procedural textures, SVGs involving the existing texture-base for stuff within the SVG - whatever. But no more bloat of the media files, plz.
Bone grows YOU!
As a Notes user who didn't touch full Outlook until recently (before then I was a Thunderbird/custom-web-calendar user, and an OE user before that) I have to say that Notes isn't annoying because it's "not outlook" - it's annoying because it is just ugly, clumsy, and bizarre. It manages to ignore every single UI convention on every issue.
Have you looked at the posts? Everyone just says "email, a really, really good calendar, and a bunch of acronyms that I wont care to explain".
You did even less. Wikipedia does less. It sounds like Active Directory is good for providing a company phonebook, but that doesn't sound like that big a deal.
So can someone actually explain - besides calendar, address book, and email - what does it do? Yes, I realise that it allows some nice conflict-resolution and organisation on those fronts, but still... what the hell are these other "features" that people ambiguously describe with buzzwords and acronyms - don't say "collaboration", "groupware", or "XPQF" or "messaging". What do you _use_ it for?
Yes, but such extra, random footage often ends up on the "Special Features" section of the DVD. I'm not saying that such extra crap should be in the game, proper - but an "extended features" section that requires a little digging to access would be nice.
Yes, I know it's not polished - like the "Special Features" sections, the "director commentary", etc., you don't watch it until you've seen the movie enough times that you're really interested in all the details. But leave it accessible for those of us who don't want to buy this game-genie-like device.
Given that "standard" mods have been available for Quake (OpenQuartz) and Doom (FreeDoom) and I don't know that those are in Yum yet either, I doubt it.
WoW is generally agreed to be the best thing since sliced bread... but the harshest critic any artist is always the little voice in your own head.
Are there any game-design decisions you made in WoW that you regret? I don't mean minor tweaks that you patch, but major, basic gameplay concepts that might've seemed fine early-on (or even in beta) but didn't pan out. Any things that you'd wished you'd done differently?
Of course, what I always wonder is - why hide them? Oh are you afraid your players might, y'know, have fun playing with the game?
PC titles often come with a full devkit. Console titles? If you're lucky, you can pick your character. Yay customisation.
Please go see a psychologist. I think you need your dosage changed.
2 problems.
1: superlong page, I highlight some text, accidentally scroll down to bottom of page. System slows to a crawl while it highlights all that.
2: sometimes, inexplicably, highlighted text doesn't unhighlight. It just gets suck that way. If I highlight it again, then part of the stuck highlighting goes away.
Well, remember that UE3's innovation is far more than just the graphics. For example, consider Kismet, the graphical programming language to replace UScript. For those who've used them, it's supposedly similar to VirTools or G (the langauge in LabView).
Yes, I've been running into stability issues myself as I get more used to it. Under win32, highlighting text is outright dangerous, acrobat files are still risky, and occaisionally it seems to page itself out of existence - that is, I switch to another program, then go back to firefox, and wait several minutes before I see a page again... I think it doesn't handle having too many tabs well.
Let's repeal the stupid laws to force most parents to be more responsible. Those children harmed by poor parenting will probably be less than those children harmed by poor laws.
You're overly optimistic in the competence of the average parent.
Because with Q3 being free-as-in-freedom, your derived games will be actually opensource, instead of simply free-as-in-beer. If I have to explain the importance of this distinction, then you're on the wrong website.
Well, apples to oranges. While Q3 is opened, the content remains closed. Star Control II had all it's content freed - everything but the name of the game is open for the UQM team to use. Similarly, crack dot com's Abuse (awesome platformer) is open, including all content but sound. Opening the source is extremely awesome, but isn't comparable to those who throw the entire game - content and all - into the public domain.
Kudos to Id for doing it tho - probably the best opened engine yet, and the amount of free content available for Quake 3 - plus the DM gameplay means not needing monsters - means that cobbling together a FreeQ3 pack similar to OpenQuartz and FreeDoom should be an order of magnitude easier.
Fsck that. Tenebrae is a friggin' techdemo. I want to see something actually useful... like all the huge Quake3 TCs released as standalone opensource games and bundled with Linux distros.
For shit's sake, Quake 3 was the first Id game to actually support mods as first-class citizens with their own keybinding menus and stuff. The Q3 TCs are an order of magnitude more complete than the Q2 ones because of it (Action Q2 is nice, but having to use the console for everything is inexcusable in a modern game).
Plus, Q3 allowed for replacement of all major media in game, without even modding. This means that there are already numerous replacement collections of player models and weapon models available on Polycount (not having monster models makes it easier) and maps on various mapping sites. As a result, all you'd have to replace to make a FreeQ3 TC would be the textures and sounds - everything else has been done already (whereas Q1 didn't have prevalent player-model and weapon-model replacements at the time of opensourcing).
This is by far some of the best news the opensource gaming world has ever seen. I can't wait to see this capitalised on.
That's a very good idea. Since something like Hot Coffee or other games with sex scenes (which aren't necessarily pornographic) are classified as AO, then the ESRB really does need a second rating for pr0n. By classifying legitimite games as porno, they marginalize edgy titles.
Hmmph. I've seen worse. I've seen the store owner stop the kid, talk to his mom, explain to his mom how the game includes picking up prostitutes and shooting cops and is really aimed at college students.... and she still bought it for him.
I still thing that the rating system needs to be re-evaluated. First of all, they need a distinction between violence and illegal activity. Fighting to defend the Earth is different from murdering innocent bystanders. There are some games that are designed specifically for a perverse pleasure in being a monstrous villain. In AvsP, it's one thing to kill the marines who are shooting at you, it's another thing to kill the scientists who're begging for mercy - but to the ESRB it's the same.
Secondly, they need to distingish game content from game data. There are various good technical reasons to include clandestine data within a game, such as for regionalization, physical needs (cloth modelling could one day have nude models under clothes), or laziness (Chex Quest was a kid's game based on the Doom engine that still had all the nasty doom graphics in unused parts of the Wad file). This needs to be clearly outlined, and possibly marked on the box, same as if a game can have adult content when played online as opposed to at home.
Yes, it is cynical. I never said it wasn't. The GPL is a good compromise between pure-free BSD and commercial freeware. It is a pragmatic viewpoint that allows for free use and resale of software, but requires that you obey the Golden Rule.
I don't believe the OSS community would have gotten half as far without the GPL. People are selfish - that's how the economy works. GPL means that free-software is compatible with the selfishness of the human race. Anything else is idealism.
It depends what you want to happen with your product.
If your tool is complete and you don't want any help with it, and people should use it freely, use the BSD license.
If you want to see it improved and become something greater than one man's labour, use the GPL, because that's the only way you'll ever see the improvements.
By using the GPL, it says "look, I put some effort in here - you can use it for free, but all I expect is that if you do something cool with it, you do the same thing I did". This seems perfectly reasonable, and seems like a way to ensure the long-term success of a product.
Free from sense? To use the BSD license is to devalue the time you spent on the code. A BSD-licensed project is shouting into vacuum - nobody but other altruists will ever publish improvements. GPL means that others who use the code are required to be as generous as you were. If they don't give back to you, at least they'll give back to others.