I agree with the email problems. As I am the sysadm of the box that runs our email, i doubt that'd happen... and as for the cmp people (who run igf) I really did expect that they'd have better check on their systems.
Anyway, thanks for the support. I'll see about putting up screenshots and possibly a downloadable version soon.
We've sent several emails to CMP, from different domains, and none have been replied to. The most recent one was sent about this issue a week ago. Have you actually checked your servers and connection? www.mozilla.se and a few other sites run off that very same box - if it'd been down i'd have known.
Still, very interesting that someone actually reacted somehow at all, that's the first time. If something blocks our communication (and since the IGF forums are broken, that's the only channel for communication), that really needs to be fixed.
Of course the world is full of crap competitions and the like, but the IGF is run by the CMP Game Group (producer of Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra.com, and the Game Developers Conference), so I'd held it to higher standards. Yes, screenshots and more info is starting to seem like a good idea. They didn't at the time that page was written though - mainly because it looked like crap at the time:)
Of course we always welcome mirrors, but that's offtopicness delux. Talk to someone in #modarchive on espernet (irc) if you feel like it. My new nick there's limestar.
The pages you get access to via the links on the IGF site are made by the teams themselves. We've opted to not offer any public downloads of Velox ATM. If we'd won, that'd possibly have been reconsidered.
The judges had a lot of additional information, as well as a separate link to actually download the game, of course.
That's actually the site for the previous beta mentioned on this page. It's old and obsolete, and as you might have noticed, the links are all dead.
For our own sake, I don't find this a big deal. We've never stopped working on the game, and have no intention of doing so. However, for the sake of the IGF, and defenitely for the Student Showcase part of it, isn't it a bit troubling for the reputation of it that they don't even look at all the games entered? I'd think so.
That's not the download link. The download link was given to them in the entry submission, and was a separate page that noone except the IGF knew about. There were no hits to that page.
And they had our number. No missed calls, no emails, nothing.
OpenBSD also caused a lot of grief on the IPv6 front. The OpenBSD guys intentionally broke their IPv6 stack to not allow IPv4 connections to and from IPv6 sockets using the IPv4 mapped addresses that the IPv6 standard defines for thus purpose. I find this behaviour of pissing on internet standards despicable and unworthy of free operating systems.
Ok, so the only "content" worth serving on the ever-evolving net is text/pictures? I'll agree to that you need alot of hits to approach the limit with those, but with anything larger, you'll be there fast. Also, if your application/content relies heavily on dynamic things, you could quickly bog down servers with that.
The problem with the net is that popularity limits itself. Once your site gets too popular, you'll hit limits and need to start paying alot more. Naturally, you (providing free content) don't want to pay for it, so you try to charge your viewers/readers/visitors/users for it, and as a response, they go somewhere else. Your site is now roughly as popular as before, but with a bad reputation. Similar reactions occur to advertising and even requests for donations / selling t-shirts / all other failed schemes people have tried.
Maybe I'm biased since I've spent alot of time dealing with these issues when hosting huge amounts of audio files for "free", but that's my point of view anyway... to maintain an impression of "freeness", the only way is to find someone else to pay.
Analog publishing generates per-unit costs -- each book or magazine requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per post or per reader.
Sure. I'll be contacting him shortly about hosting some sites... since he's figured out how to do it for free, regardless of the bandwidth usage. In the end, someone pays. You may or may not do it directly, which/. is a good example of, but you do pay.
I think that DirectX 9.0 does the same thing, but I would love for someone to correct me on this.
Okay, so here's for you, not a correction but more like a clarification: DirectX has had this functionallity since at least DirectX 8. For game developers, these things aren't "new and exciting" anymore, they're things you need to make a new game. So - this issue of not having a standard interface to programmable shaders in opengl has been a big factors in making people move to DirectX for a while now, so this is really a welcome update.
However, what most of the other games have in common is a well-designed Web site. Here, I can see about two thirds of the main frame, and there's no scroll bars for me to see the rest. If the development team is unable to do such a simple task as designing a user-friendly Web site, I'm a little sceptical about the quality of their game.
Yes, because we all know that the quality of a book can be seen from its cover, don't we?
(And if you didn't catch the sarcasm there, don't bother with a reply.)
They'd like you to think so, yes. Except, it was more of a "Let's call ourself neutral in order to not get our ass kicked" kind of situation, which progressed into a "sure, your nazi soliders can take the train straight across our country but call us neutral" kind of situation.
Alot of people here in Sweden are starting to call for dropping the neutrality clause since it was never actually followed anyway.
And as far as police states are concerned, we've had our touch of recording of "dangerous" people (like communists) by police.
It all depends on what platform you program on and so on. Newer x86 processors do their floating point in an 80-bit format and only truncate when copying back to your original 32 or 64 bit floats. That saves you some precision but not that much. As others have said, there are probably situations where almost all of the material in those articles is valid.
Basically, turn it in to an actual *programming* competition rather than a design and programming competition.
Unless, of course, they'd rather have it be the latter, but then they can't call it a pure programming competition.:)
Who said it was a "pure programming competition"? It was a game creation competition (Game Awards, as opposed to Game Programming Awards). And what's the point in having a simple programming challenge in game development? That's like having a "tape-the-wall" movie competition. Game development is about so much more than just mere programming.
As a game developer, I'd like to mention that I prefer Direct3D before the mess that is OpenGL in some ways. Yes, the interface is awful, and yes, OpenGL has a nice interface - but only until you start making state-of-the-art game graphics, when you're forced to use 20 different extensions on different hardware to accomplish the same thing on OpenGL, while DirectX just works. Even something as simple as multi-texturing requires you to juggle around function pointers which may not exist etc. OpenGL 2 would seem to somewhat fix the situation but they never seem to actually release it so it's no good for me.
Also, the DirectX interface is well documented - you don't need the implementation to port it, only the interface, so feel free to go ahead. AFAIK several game companies have done their own wrappers for DirectX in order to port games (mainly to Mac). While I agree that MS is probably not going out of their way to help platform-independence, I doubt they're actively trying to hinder it either. Last I heard was that there was a project to implement D3D on X11, so you might look at that.
No, see a previous thread on the same subject. And yes, MS was a sponsor, which really made no difference since they weren't judging the entries. Note the team making a game for the Gameboy Advance, for instance.
The competition was not only for Windows games. Our game (Velox) runs on Windows, Solaris and Linux, for instance. The competition page states a deadline for handin of a "PC or UNIX executable", and you might also note that one team has made a game for the Gameboy Advance.
Nothing prevents anyone from writing another editing application (Adobe Acrobat is one already, but it's not free). The format is quite straightforward, but for some reason it's been seen as a companion to postscript and confined to the printing system. However, just because that's the way it has been, that's not the way it has to be.
Prepare files in which the file content conforms to the Portable Document
Format.
Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable
Document Format.
Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format
and displays the results, prints the results, or otherwise interprets a file
represented in the Portable Document Format.
Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of operators and data structures, as well as the
PDF sample code and PostScript language Function definitions in the written
specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for
the above purposes.
It locks the text down to one paper layout format, destroying all of the advantages computers can bring to perusing text. Microsoft Word(tm) you can at least repaginate.
Portable Document Format. As in documents you can edit. You don't happen to have missed the fact that you can actually load and edit PDF files just like DOC files if you have an application which can handle it?
On my linux box, DOCs are just as limited for me as PDFs are for you.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyway, thanks for the support. I'll see about putting up screenshots and possibly a downloadable version soon.
Still, very interesting that someone actually reacted somehow at all, that's the first time. If something blocks our communication (and since the IGF forums are broken, that's the only channel for communication), that really needs to be fixed.
Of course we always welcome mirrors, but that's offtopicness delux. Talk to someone in #modarchive on espernet (irc) if you feel like it. My new nick there's limestar.
The judges had a lot of additional information, as well as a separate link to actually download the game, of course.
It's a student showcase entry. No entry fee for those.
For our own sake, I don't find this a big deal. We've never stopped working on the game, and have no intention of doing so. However, for the sake of the IGF, and defenitely for the Student Showcase part of it, isn't it a bit troubling for the reputation of it that they don't even look at all the games entered? I'd think so.
And they had our number. No missed calls, no emails, nothing.
And yeah, the game is not publicly released.
OpenBSD also caused a lot of grief on the IPv6 front. The OpenBSD guys intentionally broke their IPv6 stack to not allow IPv4 connections to and from IPv6 sockets using the IPv4 mapped addresses that the IPv6 standard defines for thus purpose. I find this behaviour of pissing on internet standards despicable and unworthy of free operating systems.
Ok, so the only "content" worth serving on the ever-evolving net is text/pictures? I'll agree to that you need alot of hits to approach the limit with those, but with anything larger, you'll be there fast. Also, if your application/content relies heavily on dynamic things, you could quickly bog down servers with that.
The problem with the net is that popularity limits itself. Once your site gets too popular, you'll hit limits and need to start paying alot more. Naturally, you (providing free content) don't want to pay for it, so you try to charge your viewers/readers/visitors/users for it, and as a response, they go somewhere else. Your site is now roughly as popular as before, but with a bad reputation. Similar reactions occur to advertising and even requests for donations / selling t-shirts / all other failed schemes people have tried.
Maybe I'm biased since I've spent alot of time dealing with these issues when hosting huge amounts of audio files for "free", but that's my point of view anyway... to maintain an impression of "freeness", the only way is to find someone else to pay.
No. 1000 micropayments would be... 1 millipayment?
Sure. I'll be contacting him shortly about hosting some sites... since he's figured out how to do it for free, regardless of the bandwidth usage. In the end, someone pays. You may or may not do it directly, which /. is a good example of, but you do pay.
Okay, so here's for you, not a correction but more like a clarification: DirectX has had this functionallity since at least DirectX 8. For game developers, these things aren't "new and exciting" anymore, they're things you need to make a new game. So - this issue of not having a standard interface to programmable shaders in opengl has been a big factors in making people move to DirectX for a while now, so this is really a welcome update.
Please stop spreading that. Racer is NOT Open Source.
This is the last source version I will release for Racer (but the executables will still be free as normal
On the download page is this notice:
WARNING
There have been misunderstandings about the source code in the past time. This project is NOT OpenSource.
So, I'll take this news on a *finished* game anytime before that one.
Yes, because we all know that the quality of a book can be seen from its cover, don't we?
(And if you didn't catch the sarcasm there, don't bother with a reply.)
They'd like you to think so, yes. Except, it was more of a "Let's call ourself neutral in order to not get our ass kicked" kind of situation, which progressed into a "sure, your nazi soliders can take the train straight across our country but call us neutral" kind of situation.
Alot of people here in Sweden are starting to call for dropping the neutrality clause since it was never actually followed anyway.
And as far as police states are concerned, we've had our touch of recording of "dangerous" people (like communists) by police.
It all depends on what platform you program on and so on. Newer x86 processors do their floating point in an 80-bit format and only truncate when copying back to your original 32 or 64 bit floats. That saves you some precision but not that much. As others have said, there are probably situations where almost all of the material in those articles is valid.
Unless, of course, they'd rather have it be the latter, but then they can't call it a pure programming competition. :)
Who said it was a "pure programming competition"? It was a game creation competition (Game Awards, as opposed to Game Programming Awards). And what's the point in having a simple programming challenge in game development? That's like having a "tape-the-wall" movie competition. Game development is about so much more than just mere programming.
Also, the DirectX interface is well documented - you don't need the implementation to port it, only the interface, so feel free to go ahead. AFAIK several game companies have done their own wrappers for DirectX in order to port games (mainly to Mac). While I agree that MS is probably not going out of their way to help platform-independence, I doubt they're actively trying to hinder it either. Last I heard was that there was a project to implement D3D on X11, so you might look at that.
No, see a previous thread on the same subject. And yes, MS was a sponsor, which really made no difference since they weren't judging the entries. Note the team making a game for the Gameboy Advance, for instance.
The competition was not only for Windows games. Our game (Velox) runs on Windows, Solaris and Linux, for instance. The competition page states a deadline for handin of a "PC or UNIX executable", and you might also note that one team has made a game for the Gameboy Advance.
Yes of course. And while the farmers are busy growing food and surviving, the rest of the human race will just willingly lay down and die, right?
Nothing prevents anyone from writing another editing application (Adobe Acrobat is one already, but it's not free). The format is quite straightforward, but for some reason it's been seen as a companion to postscript and confined to the printing system. However, just because that's the way it has been, that's not the way it has to be.
Yes. From the PDF specification:
Adobe gives permission to anyone to:
Portable Document Format. As in documents you can edit. You don't happen to have missed the fact that you can actually load and edit PDF files just like DOC files if you have an application which can handle it?
On my linux box, DOCs are just as limited for me as PDFs are for you.