That's odd, I've played dozens of non-FPS games. Arkham Asylum. Mass Effect. Portal. Dragon Age. Final Fantasy. Assassin's Creed. Sure, the FPS is popular, but no more so than the platformer was in the early 90s.
Further, more and more games are blurring genres. Mass Effect is combining the RPG and the third-person shooter, Borderlands is almost a dungeon-crawler at times, and pretty much every game has some sort of RPG mechanic. People are making hybrids of genres normally left alone - platformer-shooters, puzzle-RPGs, MMO-Sports.
And even within "pure" shooters, you've got an incredible variety of gameplay. You've got your ultra-realistic shooters (STALKER), your action-movie shooters (Battlefield, Call of Duty, Crysis, Halo), your old-school arcadey shooters (Serious Sam, Bulletstorm), your team-based online shooters (Brink, TF2), and a bunch more I can't neatly categorize (FEAR, Left 4 Dead, Rage (soon)). It's a lot more diverse a genre than it was two decades ago, back when we were still calling them "Doom clones", when everything looked and felt the same.
The shooters haven't killed off the other genres. They've just blended everything together so much that you can no longer say "that game is a shooter" without needing to qualify that by adding "with some light RPG elements", or "with a number of vehicle-racing segments", or "with heavy strategy elements".
How about this. We make a national standards body, drawn from all the existing ones (or just promote ANSI or something). Make it partially government - it gets some funding, but doesn't answer to the executives or legislators. And, most important, give it the ability to "purchase" patents necessary for the standards. Classify it as eminent domain, so you don't even have the issue of companies demanding billions for their patents - they just get a flat rate in the range of $10,000 per patent.
Bam. Problem solved. It even encourages companies to make and publish standards (in hopes that they're adopted as national-level standards), as it makes them immune to patent trolls.
Sounds to me that what's needed is to make the "cyber-warfare" division more like the special operations groups. From what I've heard, the SpecOps soldiers are basically given a check to buy their own equipment, since they need something better than the off-the-shelf M4. Same for the rest of their gear. Sure, that means they're costing many times more than the average grunt, but it also means that they're putting cutting-edge top-of-the-line gear into the hands of those best able to utilize it.
We could just do the same for "CybOps" or whatever fancy name you want to call it. You need a server? Here's $10,000, go buy a commercial server, paint it camo, and slap a fake model number on it. There'll be a need for more budget auditing and performance reviews, obviously, to make sure it's not being spent on WoW subscriptions and porn, but honestly, sometimes you need to just let the skilled people do their job, and worry about the budget later.
Besides, it's not like the military would've spent the money on something useful. I'd rather them waste $2B on developing a brand-new military-grade OS than have them buy yet another B2 bomber.
You seem to have misunderstood. What he was saying was that for desktops, the difference in speed between different SSDs is negligible, not that the difference in speed between an SSD and a HDD is negligible.
1. Better yet, remove the "speed limit" laws entirely. They're pure profit-making laws - if it was anyone other than the government, it would be called rent-seeking. You can already cover the thing you're supposedly preventing via reckless driving charges. This could arguably make things even safer - most traffic [i]already[/i] does 5-15 mph over the speed limit, such that driving "legally" is actually more dangerous than keeping up with traffic. Maybe enforce limits in special areas - school zones, high-pedestrian areas - but we don't need a sign on every road.
2. Fully agreed. Now [i]that[/i] would be transparency and accountability in government.
Actually, let's expand that to include legislators. It would definitely cut down on the bribery we facetiously call "lobbying", for one.
3. I wouldn't make it [i]every[/i] case - after all, undercover cops need to be able to lie sometimes - but I would say that any time it's actual intimidation, especially to conceal a police action of any sort, definitely. But giving such a broad license to sue police would be a knee-jerk overreaction to our problems.
I came across this rumor on another forum, and I'm disappointed that I'm going to have to disprove it here as well.
I did some quick, back-of-the-napkin estimates of what you'd need to play a full-power 360 game on a PC:
First, let's assume the GPU is not the bottleneck. It rarely is, in emulators. So we're left with the CPU.
The Wii uses a processor similar in architecture to the 360, but running at ~1/4 the clock, and having only a single-core, not three SMT-enabled cores (that would be "triple-core with Hyper-Threading", or about the performance of a quad-core). So a 360 emulator would run ~1/16 to 1/20 the speed of a Wii emulator.
An i7 860 (only reliable numbers I could find) can run Mario Kart Wii at ~200FPS. That game doesn't exactly stress even the Wii - I'll assume for the worst-case that it only uses ~50% the Wii's power.
So, worst-case, an i7 860 would run a high-end 360 game at... 5 FPS.
Ouch.
Best-case, it could run ~12 FPS. Still not nearly playable.
And the 860's not a bad processor, either - a top-of-the-line i7 990X or i5 2500K is only 2-3x the power. So, using the best possible commercially-available processor, you could expect to get, perhaps, 30FPS.
So, the question is, "would Microsoft spend a huge amount of effort making a 360 emulator, when only the highest-end PCs can only barely run it playably?". Especially when you remember their audience - the average XBox gamer doesn't understand that not all PCs are created equal, would be mystified as to why Halo won't run on their Pentium IV and 8400GS.
Sure, years down the line, perhaps, when the average computer could run it. But by that logic, they would be releasing Windows with compatibility for the original XBox about now, and I see no sign, no indication, not even a half-assed sensationalist rumor of that.
All parties are guilty of this to some extent. The Democrats are pretty bad about it, as are the Republicans, as are the Greens, but the Tea Party takes it to the level of actively hating reason and logic.
Re:In My Opinion, More So a Lack of Understanding
on
Technology and Moral Panic
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I think simply informing people alleviates this.
The problem is that, for some people, "information" is seen as the enemy. You see this mainly in fundamentalist countries (eg. Iran) and dictatorships or generally repressive regimes (eg. North Korea), but it also shows up in many reactionary political groups. They actively reject "data" and "logic", and take pride in that. For a particularly tragic example, look at the American Tea Party - when presented with evidence that contradicts their views, they don't claim the evidence is wrong, but that evidence, logic and science are wrong.
That's why American politics will ultimately be the death of America. Modern American politics is based on taking an issue and making it an emotional rallying point. When an issue is purely a technical or logical one, it gets solved rapidly (by government standards) and easily (by government standards). But once an issue has been made into a political one, all hope of it being actually resolved is lost. Look at, for instance, abortion. Simple logical issue - do we consider a fetus a full human, or merely an extension of the mother's body? You can argue both sides, more so than you can in most issues, but with educated and rational people, you could reach some common consensus. But now that it's a political point, logic and rationale are thrown out the window - you get people vaguely gesturing at religious texts (but unable to actually point to somewhere where it specifically says anything relevant), you get people highlighting extreme cases, and ultimately something that should be a minor issue is one of the big points on every cadnidate's platform. It's gotten so bad that the laws are actually contradictory - for purposes of medical procedures, it goes one way, but for purposes of homicide it goes another. it's gotten so bad that we have people bombing each other over, essentially, a philosophical debate. All because American politicians need some banner to wave if they want to get elected.
Honestly, in the current environment here, you can't engage the public in a logical manner, can't rely on informing the public of the facts and letting them decide. If you want to get anything done, you have to proactively and preemptively make it a political emotional point. Which, ultimately, only continues the problem, but hopefully within a few generations all the emotional die-hards will have died (hard, if necessary), and things will get back to normal.
That doesn't compute. The amounts just don't make sense - if 5 square miles could provide enough for a year's use, then we'd have to be dumping several billion tons of rare-earth metals every year. Since we only dump less than 100 million tons annually, and most of that (by mass) is plastics or common metals, there's no way we can be causing this. Contributing, perhaps, but not causing.
From what I can tell (I'm nowhere near an expert, could be completely wrong here), rare-earth elements seem most common in newer mountain ranges. So they're probably being slowly eroded over time, eventually pooling in the oceans. Since the Pacific is a very tectonically active ocean, it's also possible that it's being pushed up from lower in the Earth's crust. That's what I would guess, but I could be wrong.
Claiming your engine is original when it is not is not only unethical, but also a violation of the license. Even the BSD license forbids such things - you'll notice, somewhere buried deep inside, OS X will admit to using parts of FreeBSD.
We haven't gotten fusion to be a net energy gain here on Earth yet (outside tritium-boosted or thermonuclear atomic bombs). While I'm sure it will eventually happen, what makes it so that it's easier to make fusion work in space, compared to Earth?
I could read it, but I had to keep flipping open a Latin/English dictionary for words I hadn't learned. Doesn't help that the book isn't really that interesting.
I'd say no child porn (those exist), nothing that's blatant and inexcusable copyright infringement (an obviously-cracked version of someone else's game), and nothing that would be "hate speech" - so no "KKK presents: N****r Killing: The Game". The games that would be illegal not because of some game-specific law, but because of something that applies to everything. The kind of law where possession itself is deemed criminal.
Hmmm. FFIV. Been a while, a long while, since I played that one. Edge was the ninja, right? Never really used him, almost never used Throw - I just kept Cecil, Kain, Rydia and Rosa for as much of the game as possible. Porom and Palom when necessary for plot reasons. I seem to recall the ninja stars were the only decent throwing weapons. I'm going to go with that. Then I'm going to go dig up my SNES emulator and check.
Most dangerous job... hmmm.... my first guess would be some sort of infantry role, but that seems too easy. Americans had bombing duty during the day, so it's probably something related to that. I'm going to go with the belly gun on a B-17. Final answer.
Here's the thing - pure open-source games will never work. Not just "will never" - can never.
The bazaar works well for programming. It works well for logical, scientific stuff - you can have an open-source telescope design, or an open-source car, or an open-source operating system. But it works less well for art stuff - I have yet to see an open-source novel, or open-source sculpture, or open-source opera. I've sort-of seen an open-source character, but that's about it.
Games are a weird thing. They're art - not just legally, but philosophically. Designing the gameplay itself is an art, just as writing a poem or painting a portrait is an art. It's something that needs a real artist in charge. The bazaar model doesn't allow that, especially when almost everybody thinks they know how to do it, but almost nobody actually knows how to do it. It's really one of the areas where the cathedral model works better.
Here's how it should be - a hybrid of the two. The engine is open-source, community-developed. Put it up on Sourceforge, let the bazaar do its thing. Make it read gameplay data from something modular (this is a good idea anyways, but extra-important here). Store levels as XML. Write the game-specific code (how weapons work, how movement works, etc.) in Python or Perl or Lua. Store the art assets in PNGs and.Blend files or something. Take all those, the stuff that turns the engine into a game, and wrap it inside a compressed archive. Wrap some light DRM around it if commercial - nothing much, just enough to make piracy more difficult than getting the game. The game data becomes the game - that's the part that gets sold, gets copyright protection. The good games will use the cathedral model for this - dozens of skilled, dedicated people, with minimal outside control, led by some visionary. Or just one focused guy in his basement. There will probably be a bunch of bad, or at most decent, games made using the bazaar model as well. They'll be decent, maybe even some good free fun, but they won't be the Good Games. Maybe they'll serve as tech demos of the engine - showing how well it works and so on.
That's how I'd like to do it. That's how I think it will work best.
PS: I'm not worried about software patents. The issue with my game is that I'm parodying/satirizing/whatever a bunch of major companies, and using a lot of product names and such. Trademarks, really, are more my problem than copyright or patents. I'll probably submit a story on the game when I make a proper website for it and all, hence why I'm being vague about it.
Actually, the coding hasn't gotten too much more complicated. You can pull off a decent-looking game with 3 programmers (and a licensed engine) - 1 for "real" programming, 1 for shaders and other visual stuff, and 1 more for AI and gameplay stuff. Even the big-shot engines support Linux - Unreal Engine does, as does Unity. Source (the engine) is partway there - it has OS X support, which means an OpenGL renderer, but no Linux. Idtech is "ported but not supported" - it compiles, and it sometimes even works, but there's no guarantees. And there's plenty of free ones - the previous idtech engines (Quake III engine) are GPL, there's Sauerbraten, and many more.
The problem with modern games is the art. Doom, for instance, had one programmer, one artist and two level designers. Nowadays, you need dozens of artists, because instead of a handful of sprites or a solid-color mesh of 100 polygons, you're dealing with a 100k-poly model with about a dozen different 1024x1024 textures layered on it.
I did a brief, unscientific glance at things (because I'm too lazy to do a full count). Looked at the last 10 developers on Valve's staff roster. Two programmers, a writer, a translator, a game designer, and five artists (2 3d artists, an interface designer, an animator and a mixed level designer/3d artist/animator). That seems about in line with what I've seen of things - over twice as many artists as programmers.
Not a concern for my project - it's free, open-source. I'm not even asking for donations. Mainly because I'm worried that if I start profiting from it, I'll get sued into oblivion - the list of copyrights being fairly used at the end of the readme is longer than some of the code files, and some of those have a history of not giving two craps about fair use. As far as I'm concerned, the game is just my resume - when a game dev I'm trying to get hired by says "so what can you do?", I can point to it and say "This."
But, from what I read, the console will be app-store only - no SD card slot, no streaming. Just copy the data into the 2GB (base model - there'll probably be more expensive options with more space) internal flash. The terms of the app store are already set - 90% of the gross goes to the developer. Which seems rather reasonable. No word on what apps will be approved, or if approval will even be needed, but it's open-source, so I think the restrictions will be "no blatant warez, no illegal games, and no malware".
Here's the thing - SDL is easy. It's easy to pick up, easy to use, and easy to debug. And, surprisingly, most indie games don't stress the hardware to anything resembling a limit. Even the 3D ones - my two-year old laptop can max out Magicka. So optimization isn't usually a problem.
Sure, if you find that it is too slow, using something more optimal, or even rolling your own, might make sense. But what was it someone once said? Is not premature optimization the root of all evil?
I've been working on a game for a while. It's had a Linux port since version 0.0.4. Sure, right now it's all command-line (not even ncurses), but I'm planning to add graphics in the release after the next one. It shouldn't be too hard to design the UI to work at 320x240, although I'll probably have to make it a different design than the PC one - 320x240 is a far cry from the 960x540 I'm currently designing for (960x540 will pixel-double to 1080p, the most common PC resolution, and will generally scale well to other resolutions).
My own distinction between the two is that geeks know lots about something useless, while nerds know lots about something useful. Thus someone with encyclopediac knowledge of sports, AD&D rules, or Pokemon is a geek, while someone with similar knowledge of automotive engines, Linux or firearms is a nerd.
I tend to focus on WWI and later, but I'm still more interested and educated on the subject than most people (what I would consider part of the definition of a geek). And I did at least try to read De Bello Gallico in the original Latin...
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If only the games industry made non-FPS games
That's odd, I've played dozens of non-FPS games. Arkham Asylum. Mass Effect. Portal. Dragon Age. Final Fantasy. Assassin's Creed. Sure, the FPS is popular, but no more so than the platformer was in the early 90s.
Further, more and more games are blurring genres. Mass Effect is combining the RPG and the third-person shooter, Borderlands is almost a dungeon-crawler at times, and pretty much every game has some sort of RPG mechanic. People are making hybrids of genres normally left alone - platformer-shooters, puzzle-RPGs, MMO-Sports.
And even within "pure" shooters, you've got an incredible variety of gameplay. You've got your ultra-realistic shooters (STALKER), your action-movie shooters (Battlefield, Call of Duty, Crysis, Halo), your old-school arcadey shooters (Serious Sam, Bulletstorm), your team-based online shooters (Brink, TF2), and a bunch more I can't neatly categorize (FEAR, Left 4 Dead, Rage (soon)). It's a lot more diverse a genre than it was two decades ago, back when we were still calling them "Doom clones", when everything looked and felt the same.
The shooters haven't killed off the other genres. They've just blended everything together so much that you can no longer say "that game is a shooter" without needing to qualify that by adding "with some light RPG elements", or "with a number of vehicle-racing segments", or "with heavy strategy elements".
How about this. We make a national standards body, drawn from all the existing ones (or just promote ANSI or something). Make it partially government - it gets some funding, but doesn't answer to the executives or legislators. And, most important, give it the ability to "purchase" patents necessary for the standards. Classify it as eminent domain, so you don't even have the issue of companies demanding billions for their patents - they just get a flat rate in the range of $10,000 per patent.
Bam. Problem solved. It even encourages companies to make and publish standards (in hopes that they're adopted as national-level standards), as it makes them immune to patent trolls.
Sounds to me that what's needed is to make the "cyber-warfare" division more like the special operations groups. From what I've heard, the SpecOps soldiers are basically given a check to buy their own equipment, since they need something better than the off-the-shelf M4. Same for the rest of their gear. Sure, that means they're costing many times more than the average grunt, but it also means that they're putting cutting-edge top-of-the-line gear into the hands of those best able to utilize it.
We could just do the same for "CybOps" or whatever fancy name you want to call it. You need a server? Here's $10,000, go buy a commercial server, paint it camo, and slap a fake model number on it. There'll be a need for more budget auditing and performance reviews, obviously, to make sure it's not being spent on WoW subscriptions and porn, but honestly, sometimes you need to just let the skilled people do their job, and worry about the budget later.
Besides, it's not like the military would've spent the money on something useful. I'd rather them waste $2B on developing a brand-new military-grade OS than have them buy yet another B2 bomber.
Other than a few minor mistypings (SDD instead of SSD, pci-e instead of PCIe), I see nothing wrong.
You seem to have misunderstood. What he was saying was that for desktops, the difference in speed between different SSDs is negligible, not that the difference in speed between an SSD and a HDD is negligible.
1. Better yet, remove the "speed limit" laws entirely. They're pure profit-making laws - if it was anyone other than the government, it would be called rent-seeking. You can already cover the thing you're supposedly preventing via reckless driving charges. This could arguably make things even safer - most traffic [i]already[/i] does 5-15 mph over the speed limit, such that driving "legally" is actually more dangerous than keeping up with traffic. Maybe enforce limits in special areas - school zones, high-pedestrian areas - but we don't need a sign on every road.
2. Fully agreed. Now [i]that[/i] would be transparency and accountability in government.
Actually, let's expand that to include legislators. It would definitely cut down on the bribery we facetiously call "lobbying", for one.
3. I wouldn't make it [i]every[/i] case - after all, undercover cops need to be able to lie sometimes - but I would say that any time it's actual intimidation, especially to conceal a police action of any sort, definitely. But giving such a broad license to sue police would be a knee-jerk overreaction to our problems.
I came across this rumor on another forum, and I'm disappointed that I'm going to have to disprove it here as well.
I did some quick, back-of-the-napkin estimates of what you'd need to play a full-power 360 game on a PC:
First, let's assume the GPU is not the bottleneck. It rarely is, in emulators. So we're left with the CPU.
The Wii uses a processor similar in architecture to the 360, but running at ~1/4 the clock, and having only a single-core, not three SMT-enabled cores (that would be "triple-core with Hyper-Threading", or about the performance of a quad-core). So a 360 emulator would run ~1/16 to 1/20 the speed of a Wii emulator.
An i7 860 (only reliable numbers I could find) can run Mario Kart Wii at ~200FPS. That game doesn't exactly stress even the Wii - I'll assume for the worst-case that it only uses ~50% the Wii's power.
So, worst-case, an i7 860 would run a high-end 360 game at... 5 FPS.
Ouch.
Best-case, it could run ~12 FPS. Still not nearly playable.
And the 860's not a bad processor, either - a top-of-the-line i7 990X or i5 2500K is only 2-3x the power. So, using the best possible commercially-available processor, you could expect to get, perhaps, 30FPS.
So, the question is, "would Microsoft spend a huge amount of effort making a 360 emulator, when only the highest-end PCs can only barely run it playably?". Especially when you remember their audience - the average XBox gamer doesn't understand that not all PCs are created equal, would be mystified as to why Halo won't run on their Pentium IV and 8400GS.
Sure, years down the line, perhaps, when the average computer could run it. But by that logic, they would be releasing Windows with compatibility for the original XBox about now, and I see no sign, no indication, not even a half-assed sensationalist rumor of that.
Do we have to bring them back down afterwards?
All parties are guilty of this to some extent. The Democrats are pretty bad about it, as are the Republicans, as are the Greens, but the Tea Party takes it to the level of actively hating reason and logic.
I think simply informing people alleviates this.
The problem is that, for some people, "information" is seen as the enemy. You see this mainly in fundamentalist countries (eg. Iran) and dictatorships or generally repressive regimes (eg. North Korea), but it also shows up in many reactionary political groups. They actively reject "data" and "logic", and take pride in that. For a particularly tragic example, look at the American Tea Party - when presented with evidence that contradicts their views, they don't claim the evidence is wrong, but that evidence, logic and science are wrong.
That's why American politics will ultimately be the death of America. Modern American politics is based on taking an issue and making it an emotional rallying point. When an issue is purely a technical or logical one, it gets solved rapidly (by government standards) and easily (by government standards). But once an issue has been made into a political one, all hope of it being actually resolved is lost. Look at, for instance, abortion. Simple logical issue - do we consider a fetus a full human, or merely an extension of the mother's body? You can argue both sides, more so than you can in most issues, but with educated and rational people, you could reach some common consensus. But now that it's a political point, logic and rationale are thrown out the window - you get people vaguely gesturing at religious texts (but unable to actually point to somewhere where it specifically says anything relevant), you get people highlighting extreme cases, and ultimately something that should be a minor issue is one of the big points on every cadnidate's platform. It's gotten so bad that the laws are actually contradictory - for purposes of medical procedures, it goes one way, but for purposes of homicide it goes another. it's gotten so bad that we have people bombing each other over, essentially, a philosophical debate. All because American politicians need some banner to wave if they want to get elected.
Honestly, in the current environment here, you can't engage the public in a logical manner, can't rely on informing the public of the facts and letting them decide. If you want to get anything done, you have to proactively and preemptively make it a political emotional point. Which, ultimately, only continues the problem, but hopefully within a few generations all the emotional die-hards will have died (hard, if necessary), and things will get back to normal.
That doesn't compute. The amounts just don't make sense - if 5 square miles could provide enough for a year's use, then we'd have to be dumping several billion tons of rare-earth metals every year. Since we only dump less than 100 million tons annually, and most of that (by mass) is plastics or common metals, there's no way we can be causing this. Contributing, perhaps, but not causing.
From what I can tell (I'm nowhere near an expert, could be completely wrong here), rare-earth elements seem most common in newer mountain ranges. So they're probably being slowly eroded over time, eventually pooling in the oceans. Since the Pacific is a very tectonically active ocean, it's also possible that it's being pushed up from lower in the Earth's crust. That's what I would guess, but I could be wrong.
There's a big difference between "not advertising it" and "blatantly lying about it".
Claiming your engine is original when it is not is not only unethical, but also a violation of the license. Even the BSD license forbids such things - you'll notice, somewhere buried deep inside, OS X will admit to using parts of FreeBSD.
We haven't gotten fusion to be a net energy gain here on Earth yet (outside tritium-boosted or thermonuclear atomic bombs). While I'm sure it will eventually happen, what makes it so that it's easier to make fusion work in space, compared to Earth?
I could read it, but I had to keep flipping open a Latin/English dictionary for words I hadn't learned. Doesn't help that the book isn't really that interesting.
1) Make a good editor.
2) Have it save as XML
3) ???
4) Profit
I'd say no child porn (those exist), nothing that's blatant and inexcusable copyright infringement (an obviously-cracked version of someone else's game), and nothing that would be "hate speech" - so no "KKK presents: N****r Killing: The Game". The games that would be illegal not because of some game-specific law, but because of something that applies to everything. The kind of law where possession itself is deemed criminal.
OK, nerd's honor not to use google or anything.
Hmmm. FFIV. Been a while, a long while, since I played that one. Edge was the ninja, right? Never really used him, almost never used Throw - I just kept Cecil, Kain, Rydia and Rosa for as much of the game as possible. Porom and Palom when necessary for plot reasons. I seem to recall the ninja stars were the only decent throwing weapons. I'm going to go with that. Then I'm going to go dig up my SNES emulator and check.
Most dangerous job... hmmm.... my first guess would be some sort of infantry role, but that seems too easy. Americans had bombing duty during the day, so it's probably something related to that. I'm going to go with the belly gun on a B-17. Final answer.
Here's the thing - pure open-source games will never work. Not just "will never" - can never.
The bazaar works well for programming. It works well for logical, scientific stuff - you can have an open-source telescope design, or an open-source car, or an open-source operating system. But it works less well for art stuff - I have yet to see an open-source novel, or open-source sculpture, or open-source opera. I've sort-of seen an open-source character, but that's about it.
Games are a weird thing. They're art - not just legally, but philosophically. Designing the gameplay itself is an art, just as writing a poem or painting a portrait is an art. It's something that needs a real artist in charge. The bazaar model doesn't allow that, especially when almost everybody thinks they know how to do it, but almost nobody actually knows how to do it. It's really one of the areas where the cathedral model works better.
Here's how it should be - a hybrid of the two. The engine is open-source, community-developed. Put it up on Sourceforge, let the bazaar do its thing. Make it read gameplay data from something modular (this is a good idea anyways, but extra-important here). Store levels as XML. Write the game-specific code (how weapons work, how movement works, etc.) in Python or Perl or Lua. Store the art assets in PNGs and .Blend files or something. Take all those, the stuff that turns the engine into a game, and wrap it inside a compressed archive. Wrap some light DRM around it if commercial - nothing much, just enough to make piracy more difficult than getting the game. The game data becomes the game - that's the part that gets sold, gets copyright protection. The good games will use the cathedral model for this - dozens of skilled, dedicated people, with minimal outside control, led by some visionary. Or just one focused guy in his basement. There will probably be a bunch of bad, or at most decent, games made using the bazaar model as well. They'll be decent, maybe even some good free fun, but they won't be the Good Games. Maybe they'll serve as tech demos of the engine - showing how well it works and so on.
That's how I'd like to do it. That's how I think it will work best.
PS: I'm not worried about software patents. The issue with my game is that I'm parodying/satirizing/whatever a bunch of major companies, and using a lot of product names and such. Trademarks, really, are more my problem than copyright or patents. I'll probably submit a story on the game when I make a proper website for it and all, hence why I'm being vague about it.
Actually, the coding hasn't gotten too much more complicated. You can pull off a decent-looking game with 3 programmers (and a licensed engine) - 1 for "real" programming, 1 for shaders and other visual stuff, and 1 more for AI and gameplay stuff. Even the big-shot engines support Linux - Unreal Engine does, as does Unity. Source (the engine) is partway there - it has OS X support, which means an OpenGL renderer, but no Linux. Idtech is "ported but not supported" - it compiles, and it sometimes even works, but there's no guarantees. And there's plenty of free ones - the previous idtech engines (Quake III engine) are GPL, there's Sauerbraten, and many more.
The problem with modern games is the art. Doom, for instance, had one programmer, one artist and two level designers. Nowadays, you need dozens of artists, because instead of a handful of sprites or a solid-color mesh of 100 polygons, you're dealing with a 100k-poly model with about a dozen different 1024x1024 textures layered on it.
I did a brief, unscientific glance at things (because I'm too lazy to do a full count). Looked at the last 10 developers on Valve's staff roster. Two programmers, a writer, a translator, a game designer, and five artists (2 3d artists, an interface designer, an animator and a mixed level designer/3d artist/animator). That seems about in line with what I've seen of things - over twice as many artists as programmers.
Not a concern for my project - it's free, open-source. I'm not even asking for donations. Mainly because I'm worried that if I start profiting from it, I'll get sued into oblivion - the list of copyrights being fairly used at the end of the readme is longer than some of the code files, and some of those have a history of not giving two craps about fair use. As far as I'm concerned, the game is just my resume - when a game dev I'm trying to get hired by says "so what can you do?", I can point to it and say "This."
But, from what I read, the console will be app-store only - no SD card slot, no streaming. Just copy the data into the 2GB (base model - there'll probably be more expensive options with more space) internal flash. The terms of the app store are already set - 90% of the gross goes to the developer. Which seems rather reasonable. No word on what apps will be approved, or if approval will even be needed, but it's open-source, so I think the restrictions will be "no blatant warez, no illegal games, and no malware".
Here's the thing - SDL is easy. It's easy to pick up, easy to use, and easy to debug. And, surprisingly, most indie games don't stress the hardware to anything resembling a limit. Even the 3D ones - my two-year old laptop can max out Magicka. So optimization isn't usually a problem.
Sure, if you find that it is too slow, using something more optimal, or even rolling your own, might make sense. But what was it someone once said? Is not premature optimization the root of all evil?
I've been working on a game for a while. It's had a Linux port since version 0.0.4. Sure, right now it's all command-line (not even ncurses), but I'm planning to add graphics in the release after the next one. It shouldn't be too hard to design the UI to work at 320x240, although I'll probably have to make it a different design than the PC one - 320x240 is a far cry from the 960x540 I'm currently designing for (960x540 will pixel-double to 1080p, the most common PC resolution, and will generally scale well to other resolutions).
My own distinction between the two is that geeks know lots about something useless, while nerds know lots about something useful. Thus someone with encyclopediac knowledge of sports, AD&D rules, or Pokemon is a geek, while someone with similar knowledge of automotive engines, Linux or firearms is a nerd.
I tend to focus on WWI and later, but I'm still more interested and educated on the subject than most people (what I would consider part of the definition of a geek). And I did at least try to read De Bello Gallico in the original Latin...