You probably don't know this. Epic have had more than just one hit game.
First released game appeared in 1992 as Epic (and one before that in 1991 with another company name) I really dare you to put out a full blown release of a game software product running on just one platform, even with today's free tools and git-ware. It takes a lot more time than you can imagine.
In Those 30 years, the tiny company Epic managed to outsmart Id, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Valve, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Crytek, Take2, Vivendi, Infinity Ward, Bioware, Capcom, TT, SquareEnix Sierra, Dynamics, Microprose, ActiBliz, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, Mojang, Dice, Treyarch, Bethesda and many more. That's a hell of lot of industry competition to handle. They did not simply manage, they were setting the rules at every step of the way.
Actually this kind of 'disaster' cancelling occurs quite often in other companies as well. Typically it goes something like:
The company reaches a point like: "We made a few games, we know our trade, we have the cash, now let's do something interesting." Then they throw all their best ideas onto a huge pile, and the game-design sanctioned people try to make sense out of it. At this point, a lot of creativity is already out of the door, since of course, the huge undertaking has to play safe ball to ensure success, and who knows better than anyone else how huge games work except game designers, right? In parallel, work starts on pre-production, concept art, prototyping, level design, game play mechanics, effects, you name it. After a while, it turn out that the really fun bits are not fun at all, no matter how much you tweak them, and everything starts to look like a tech-demo, because everyone is focusing on just a small fraction, and there's no coherence whatsoever. How could there be. Of course by then we're 2 year after the project starts, and canning it is starting to sound expensive. In the end, it comes down to a financial gamble: releasing crap can mean the end of the company (ahum: Destiny). You can sell crap once with success and maybe break even or profit, but you shit most of your loyal fans in the face, and usually they tend to not take that lightly. Or you can cancel, and swallow the loss and work on something that holds the promise to bring more grit (of which, of course, there is no proof yet).
If there's one team that has the money and the minds to work on very ambitious projects, it's Blizzard. And apparently the teams values their future productions and fan-base as more important than selling Titan. That said, Titan did look impressive from the setup, so I hope the tech and team survives.
I fully agree with the argument that professional development applications such as 3DMax still have not cut it into the UX realm, except from the usual suspects like Gimp and Renderman. Developing games for other platforms could easily be supported on Linux - ps development - if only the tools were up to par. Meaning: saving time rather than costing it.
That sort of givens automatically drive your decision making process as to what platform you'll be using when developing games. There are alternatives. Like there are alternatives in choosing your workforce, or spending lots of training to convert to Maya or Houdini, but that is not the cheaper solution, and it kind of voids the whole argument.
That said, I really think most of the arguments are really quite minor, except for maybe 1: a regression suite that can detect hardware incompatibility problems.
Another one that would be easy to come up with is a test-suite that streamlines the development of application configuration through both command-line and GUI. Helpful, but not crucial.
Reading the other items, I had an idea: What if distro's refer to a sort of xml configuration file with a shared / common format that specifies how exactly each distro has to set up it's files and dependencies, such that such configuration grief and the fact that 'each distro organises things differently' could be overcome in true linux style: maintaining uniqueness of the software (kernel) AND being flexible about the details (data).
In Belgium, rental stories for movies are allowed to rent out (old) games until the end of this year (2009). After that, no (second hand) games may be SOLD NOR RENTED any longer, since, apparently, only in Belgium, do they hurt regular sales.
Thanks for this to IFPI, aka the European version of RIAA and MPAA.
Not shocking at all, really. You have to consider the goals of a system such as this... It obviously is tailored to contain any person who might become influential in changing the social or political order of things. As such, it's a natural extension of that to want to collect the data as early on in the life of these people as possible. The goal isn't to use the data to catch criminals, to monitor all the actions of everyone, or other nonsense; the goal is obviously to identify those that would change the social or political order so that those people can be politically assassinated (have all of their political or social influence negated) _before_ they actually change things.
It's still big brother, no matter how you turn it. The fact that the scope of the act is limited to only a certain demographic is stigmatizing and insulting and opens up the path for abuse and mistakes, and makes it deviate even harder from traditional law-driven state adagios like: guilty until proven guilty. By what right can governments collect personal data on someone that MAY one day become a true criminal? What happened to the good old "benefit of the doubt"?
I'm surprised to see US and UK people make fun comments about the French over this. US and UK governments aren't exactly known for managing their own records on their citizens with much care either.
The UK has lost, what, 400.000 personal records on it's citizens?
The US has had terrorist lists made, leaked to the press, remade, leaked again..
It's not like France is in this trade alone. Privacy is at stake in every country, including your own. Or what else do you think the War on Terror realy is, other than building databases. The only new thing here, which is truely shocking, is that the system is about minors, who have practically no means to exercise pressure on a governmental system.
The Romans managed to preserve their language and culture for 2000 years completely by accident. Do you really think all the stuff we're doing today will vanish in the same time span.
In far less than 100 years the whole of today's Internet will fit on a single USB stick - smaller than a single shard of Roman pottery.
You probably mean on a CSSB stick. You know, using a Chingaia Super Serial Bus. Chingaia? The time when chinese culture swamped all other culture because of higher efficiency?
..I used to listen to tape-cassettes that came with Kellog's cornflakes on the adventures of Skeletor and He-man. That and even much more at that: the Lego-space set, these were the most SF related things that kind of shaped my childhood. Been going downhill ever since;)
Nowadays I can tell you all about how Starwars is just a Dune rip-off, my all time favourite, next to Snowcrash, Akira and GITS of course.
Great list, you should try Dune, too because if you like SnowCrash you'll certainly like Dune!
As for the parent's original question concerning reading material for pre-teens, I think Pratchett's discworld series can be appropriate, though somewhat thick. The same yields for the HitchHiker's I guess.
Like many here say, dune is indeed non film-able, but not because of the risks to success. The world may have been ready for the fairytale land of LOTR with it's elves and knights and walking trees, but will it be ready for
- the difficult to grasp twisted minded political evils and schemes.. - the glorification of persona worshiping and subsequently the mockery of it.. - the various "abominations", the "accepted" nature of being married and love someone else in power circles, even discussions on sex between siblings.. I can imagine that budget-wise, these topics will be avoided as much as possible. - the intriguing but purposely never clarified deep analogies, metaphors and symbolism.. Hollywood is mostly a question/answer game, a mold that this book definitely does not fit into. - an untold (but avidly quoted) history of events that are so subtle yet so important to get the whole universe in a dynamic living breathing state. - many "discussions" on balance versus risk, courage versus fear
There are, of course, some easy grabs to get it going: - the many races and characters, houses, plots,.. - the many sets (planets, underground, wide open,..) - dramatic events (killings, battles, learn/teach,..) - ecological topics (water / spice / drugs / fuel / addictions/.. ) - the superstitious & supernatural (Hello REM)
So while I think I can also make a Dune movie, I don't think I can make one that this world would accept, hence it will not be for me. Nor for any producer that remains faithful to the original book.
My suggestion would be to simply read the book out loud in several movies, and a black screen to go with that.
Lots of capitals, but nevertheless you're right about the mis-bashing.
I think the editors let it post anyway, because of the obvious comments on the bad bashing and then the comments saying "wait a fucking minute, there's a problem with the whole IPv6 idea".
Apart from that I always find it amazing how so many people eagerly "switch" operating systems. I mean, like, I'm doing *everything* to prevent having to switch, after installing all that gear I work with all the time. Some people must like pain much more than I do.
Nice try:) I'm not a pro website developer nor do I run pro sites, or pretend to. I agree that it is a bitch to try and make a site run on all browsers, in fact, it's probably THE most annoying thing. But on the other hand that's why such people are getting payed, too. The thing is, one does not really have a choice but to make things work. Picking the top 2 browsers and testing my private websites against them was enough for me, but if your browser complains, tell me how I can reproduce it by email and maybe, if I'm in the mood, I might try to fix it for you.. Everything runs fine on FF. IE should do fine too, but I don't care too much.
I don't understand why the Creative Commons license is being singled out as vulnerable to this sort of problem. Anyone, anywhere, could buy content from one entity who claims to have a copyright on it, then get hit with a lawsuit by another entity who disputes the copyright. Creative Commons is no more and no less subject to the problem.
Exactly my thoughts. Except that I have a good reason: singling out the CC is a way to make sure lawyers earn more bucks, since the creative herd will be more confused about the interpretation of the licenses of their output, hence will have to turn to more traditional legal protection systems.
Code is organic by nature, because humans tend to evolve things in an organic way. As such, keeping code in good health requires a lot of attention, which costs money. Automatic refactoring tools may be evil for VCSes, but they are the most valuable tools we have to keep code in shape.
Code is also (usually) a collaborative exercise, bringing lots of different ideas and principles to the table. That is why software "Patterns" are so valuable, so that people can communicate about code in a structured and compatible way.
Code is something that no one has time for. Visual programming 4th generation languages and Functional Programming are ways to get the job done faster, easier and with less of a hassle, and more docs to read. Both are still way off the target goal, but in the last few years some nice tools have developed.
Code is bound to run on something, and that "something" is changing all the time. You can't check in and label your machine in your VCS, which means you have to try to make it run as good as one can within certain constraints. This is where the virtual machine has helped make a lot of progress.
Code will always be needed, though the format and logic behind it will keep changing and morphing. The battles between speed and memory, cost and ownership, data or function, abstraction or generalization, top-down or bottom-up, these battles will always exist. In the end, writing an executable program that does the job is just a very sophisticated search in a search-space that we still need to define better.
That said, check out Variform by kewlers for no apparent good reason, other than to look at code as an artform. Ps. There's tons more where that came from.
Seriously. What's wrong with more articles? Why would wikipedia ever reject a voluntary contribution?
Extra articles don't clutter up wikipedia. They simply don't get looked at. So what? Who cares? Let them sit there. If someone wants to improve them, let them. If no one looks at them, then they aren't harming anyone. The elitism that's taken hold in wikipedia is an antithetical to the very principles on which it was founded.
You can put your extra articles on your own website if you like, that's why we have the web, after all. WikiPedia is not here to give everyone the room to just publish anything they well damn please. If you need a bundled search, try Google.
More FUD between the good stuff means intrinsic delay to find the good stuff, which brings down the value and purpose of WikiPedia.
If comics are important to describe historical facts, I'm quite sure that admins will keep the relevant information intact. The rest of it simply does not serve, no matter how good it is.
I bet that ALive is a nice example of what can happen if the rules of Go are a little bit broadened. Solving ALive is whatone whould possibly call "game theory", so it would be interesting if both approaches would converge.
Just thinking..
Does any real-world problem translate into go?
on
Cracking Go
·
· Score: 1
Just a question. I'd consider it somewhat wasteful to let a computational sucker like described in the article play "Go", but I can imagine that 1) the methodologies of attacking problems is valid so it can be applied to other problem domains, but 2) I can also imagine that strategic and planning problems could be formalized as "Go" problem fragments, or even "Chess" problems. Has anyone done any work on that?
Slashdot Mirror
You probably don't know this. Epic have had more than just one hit game.
First released game appeared in 1992 as Epic (and one before that in 1991 with another company name) I really dare you to put out a full blown release of a game software product running on just one platform, even with today's free tools and git-ware. It takes a lot more time than you can imagine.
In Those 30 years, the tiny company Epic managed to outsmart Id, Sony, Nintendo, Electronic Arts, Valve, Microsoft, Ubisoft, Crytek, Take2, Vivendi, Infinity Ward, Bioware, Capcom, TT, SquareEnix Sierra, Dynamics, Microprose, ActiBliz, Rockstar, Naughty Dog, Mojang, Dice, Treyarch, Bethesda and many more. That's a hell of lot of industry competition to handle. They did not simply manage, they were setting the rules at every step of the way.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Actually this kind of 'disaster' cancelling occurs quite often in other companies as well. Typically it goes something like:
The company reaches a point like: "We made a few games, we know our trade, we have the cash, now let's do something interesting." Then they throw all their best ideas onto a huge pile, and the game-design sanctioned people try to make sense out of it. At this point, a lot of creativity is already out of the door, since of course, the huge undertaking has to play safe ball to ensure success, and who knows better than anyone else how huge games work except game designers, right? In parallel, work starts on pre-production, concept art, prototyping, level design, game play mechanics, effects, you name it. After a while, it turn out that the really fun bits are not fun at all, no matter how much you tweak them, and everything starts to look like a tech-demo, because everyone is focusing on just a small fraction, and there's no coherence whatsoever. How could there be. Of course by then we're 2 year after the project starts, and canning it is starting to sound expensive. In the end, it comes down to a financial gamble: releasing crap can mean the end of the company (ahum: Destiny). You can sell crap once with success and maybe break even or profit, but you shit most of your loyal fans in the face, and usually they tend to not take that lightly. Or you can cancel, and swallow the loss and work on something that holds the promise to bring more grit (of which, of course, there is no proof yet).
If there's one team that has the money and the minds to work on very ambitious projects, it's Blizzard. And apparently the teams values their future productions and fan-base as more important than selling Titan. That said, Titan did look impressive from the setup, so I hope the tech and team survives.
Not wanting to start a war on anything:
I fully agree with the argument that professional development applications such as 3DMax still have not cut it into the UX realm, except from the usual suspects like Gimp and Renderman. Developing games for other platforms could easily be supported on Linux - ps development - if only the tools were up to par. Meaning: saving time rather than costing it.
That sort of givens automatically drive your decision making process as to what platform you'll be using when developing games. There are alternatives. Like there are alternatives in choosing your workforce, or spending lots of training to convert to Maya or Houdini, but that is not the cheaper solution, and it kind of voids the whole argument.
That said, I really think most of the arguments are really quite minor, except for maybe 1: a regression suite that can detect hardware incompatibility problems.
Another one that would be easy to come up with is a test-suite that streamlines the development of application configuration through both command-line and GUI. Helpful, but not crucial.
Reading the other items, I had an idea: What if distro's refer to a sort of xml configuration file with a shared / common format that specifies how exactly each distro has to set up it's files and dependencies, such that such configuration grief and the fact that 'each distro organises things differently' could be overcome in true linux style: maintaining uniqueness of the software (kernel) AND being flexible about the details (data).
All yours for the bashing..
In Belgium, rental stories for movies are allowed to rent out (old) games until the end of this year (2009). After that, no (second hand) games may be SOLD NOR RENTED any longer, since, apparently, only in Belgium, do they hurt regular sales.
Thanks for this to IFPI, aka the European version of RIAA and MPAA.
Not shocking at all, really. You have to consider the goals of a system such as this... It obviously is tailored to contain any person who might become influential in changing the social or political order of things. As such, it's a natural extension of that to want to collect the data as early on in the life of these people as possible. The goal isn't to use the data to catch criminals, to monitor all the actions of everyone, or other nonsense; the goal is obviously to identify those that would change the social or political order so that those people can be politically assassinated (have all of their political or social influence negated) _before_ they actually change things.
It's still big brother, no matter how you turn it. The fact that the scope of the act is limited to only a certain demographic is stigmatizing and insulting and opens up the path for abuse and mistakes, and makes it deviate even harder from traditional law-driven state adagios like: guilty until proven guilty. By what right can governments collect personal data on someone that MAY one day become a true criminal? What happened to the good old "benefit of the doubt"?
I'm surprised to see US and UK people make fun comments about the French over this. US and UK governments aren't exactly known for managing their own records on their citizens with much care either.
The UK has lost, what, 400.000 personal records on it's citizens?
The US has had terrorist lists made, leaked to the press, remade, leaked again..
It's not like France is in this trade alone. Privacy is at stake in every country, including your own. Or what else do you think the War on Terror realy is, other than building databases. The only new thing here, which is truely shocking, is that the system is about minors, who have practically no means to exercise pressure on a governmental system.
The Romans managed to preserve their language and culture for 2000 years completely by accident. Do you really think all the stuff we're doing today will vanish in the same time span.
In far less than 100 years the whole of today's Internet will fit on a single USB stick - smaller than a single shard of Roman pottery.
You probably mean on a CSSB stick. You know, using a Chingaia Super Serial Bus. Chingaia? The time when chinese culture swamped all other culture because of higher efficiency?
I am rubber, you are glue.
You mean goo..
Nowadays I can tell you all about how Starwars is just a Dune rip-off, my all time favourite, next to Snowcrash, Akira and GITS of course.
Great list, you should try Dune, too because if you like SnowCrash you'll certainly like Dune!
As for the parent's original question concerning reading material for pre-teens, I think Pratchett's discworld series can be appropriate, though somewhat thick. The same yields for the HitchHiker's I guess.
Like many here say, dune is indeed non film-able, but not because of the risks to success. The world may have been ready for the fairytale land of LOTR with it's elves and knights and walking trees, but will it be ready for
- the difficult to grasp twisted minded political evils and schemes..
- the glorification of persona worshiping and subsequently the mockery of it..
- the various "abominations", the "accepted" nature of being married and love someone else in power circles, even discussions on sex between siblings.. I can imagine that budget-wise, these topics will be avoided as much as possible.
- the intriguing but purposely never clarified deep analogies, metaphors and symbolism.. Hollywood is mostly a question/answer game, a mold that this book definitely does not fit into.
- an untold (but avidly quoted) history of events that are so subtle yet so important to get the whole universe in a dynamic living breathing state.
- many "discussions" on balance versus risk, courage versus fear
There are, of course, some easy grabs to get it going:
- the many races and characters, houses, plots,..
- the many sets (planets, underground, wide open,..)
- dramatic events (killings, battles, learn/teach,..)
- ecological topics (water / spice / drugs / fuel / addictions
- the superstitious & supernatural (Hello REM)
So while I think I can also make a Dune movie, I don't think I can make one that this world would accept, hence it will not be for me. Nor for any producer that remains faithful to the original book.
My suggestion would be to simply read the book out loud in several movies, and a black screen to go with that.
And eh, who the fuck is Peter Berg, at that.
Lots of capitals, but nevertheless you're right about the mis-bashing.
I think the editors let it post anyway, because of the obvious comments on the bad bashing and then the comments saying "wait a fucking minute, there's a problem with the whole IPv6 idea".
Apart from that I always find it amazing how so many people eagerly "switch" operating systems. I mean, like, I'm doing *everything* to prevent having to switch, after installing all that gear I work with all the time. Some people must like pain much more than I do.
Nice try :) I'm not a pro website developer nor do I run pro sites, or pretend to. I agree that it is a bitch to try and make a site run on all browsers, in fact, it's probably THE most annoying thing. But on the other hand that's why such people are getting payed, too. The thing is, one does not really have a choice but to make things work. Picking the top 2 browsers and testing my private websites against them was enough for me, but if your browser complains, tell me how I can reproduce it by email and maybe, if I'm in the mood, I might try to fix it for you.. Everything runs fine on FF. IE should do fine too, but I don't care too much.
So, it isn't DOCTYPE switch that failed, but it was Microsoft that failed to implement the standards
Boy would I hate to be the one to break that awfully shocking news to them. Don't suppose they will survive that one, you think?
Anyway. Get over it. Detect your browser version and render your custom CSS. Play like everyone else plays.
Last year I put together a clone of Pacman (windows DX9), just to prove to myself that my self-developed libraries hold together.
You can find everything at http://www.binarycolonies.com/
Have fun!
I don't understand why the Creative Commons license is being singled out as vulnerable to this sort of problem. Anyone, anywhere, could buy content from one entity who claims to have a copyright on it, then get hit with a lawsuit by another entity who disputes the copyright. Creative Commons is no more and no less subject to the problem.
Exactly my thoughts. Except that I have a good reason: singling out the CC is a way to make sure lawyers earn more bucks, since the creative herd will be more confused about the interpretation of the licenses of their output, hence will have to turn to more traditional legal protection systems.
Code is organic by nature, because humans tend to evolve things in an organic way. As such, keeping code in good health requires a lot of attention, which costs money. Automatic refactoring tools may be evil for VCSes, but they are the most valuable tools we have to keep code in shape.
Code is also (usually) a collaborative exercise, bringing lots of different ideas and principles to the table. That is why software "Patterns" are so valuable, so that people can communicate about code in a structured and compatible way.
Code is something that no one has time for. Visual programming 4th generation languages and Functional Programming are ways to get the job done faster, easier and with less of a hassle, and more docs to read. Both are still way off the target goal, but in the last few years some nice tools have developed.
Code is bound to run on something, and that "something" is changing all the time. You can't check in and label your machine in your VCS, which means you have to try to make it run as good as one can within certain constraints. This is where the virtual machine has helped make a lot of progress.
Code will always be needed, though the format and logic behind it will keep changing and morphing. The battles between speed and memory, cost and ownership, data or function, abstraction or generalization, top-down or bottom-up, these battles will always exist. In the end, writing an executable program that does the job is just a very sophisticated search in a search-space that we still need to define better.
That said, check out Variform by kewlers for no apparent good reason, other than to look at code as an artform. Ps. There's tons more where that came from.
Cheers!
The big reason why games are "designed" as co-op is because it cuts tweaking time in half.
1/r^2 is invented as per intelligent design. Otherwise, playing soccer in the heavens is a dread burden, fetching that ball back every time and again.
Seriously. What's wrong with more articles? Why would wikipedia ever reject a voluntary contribution?
Extra articles don't clutter up wikipedia. They simply don't get looked at. So what? Who cares? Let them sit there. If someone wants to improve them, let them. If no one looks at them, then they aren't harming anyone. The elitism that's taken hold in wikipedia is an antithetical to the very principles on which it was founded.
You can put your extra articles on your own website if you like, that's why we have the web, after all. WikiPedia is not here to give everyone the room to just publish anything they well damn please. If you need a bundled search, try Google.
More FUD between the good stuff means intrinsic delay to find the good stuff, which brings down the value and purpose of WikiPedia.
If comics are important to describe historical facts, I'm quite sure that admins will keep the relevant information intact. The rest of it simply does not serve, no matter how good it is.
What's with those odd numbers attached to the boxes anyway..
I bet that ALive is a nice example of what can happen if the rules of Go are a little bit broadened. Solving ALive is whatone whould possibly call "game theory", so it would be interesting if both approaches would converge.
Just thinking..
Just a question. I'd consider it somewhat wasteful to let a computational sucker like described in the article play "Go", but I can imagine that 1) the methodologies of attacking problems is valid so it can be applied to other problem domains, but 2) I can also imagine that strategic and planning problems could be formalized as "Go" problem fragments, or even "Chess" problems. Has anyone done any work on that?
See, this is EXACTLY is why you eventually skipped grades.
God heavens no! Just suppose Laura runs for the presidency later on!