Not that Jackson didn't do his best to portray him as being in his 20's during the LOTR movies...One of many deviations from the book that made me grind my teeth. There's a scene in the extended edition of Two Towers that explains Aragorn's age and heritage, and why he looks to be maybe 30 when he's actually somewhere in his 80's.
Kandinsky actually wasn't crazy, but had synesthesia. Once I found that out, I started understanding his work a lot more. It might be more correct to say that you don't understand art, rather than it's all crap. Of course, it's perfectly fine for it to just not be your particular cup of tea.
The villest thing the Night Elves did was to go around in a killing spree against Furbolgs, thinking all of them were corrupted and thus killing the minority that wasn't. They also built a new giant tree when their gods told them "no" (the shock! the horror!).
Weren't they also addicted to magic? And didn't they almost, you know, destroy the entire world once?
And the Humans, ah, the Humans! The most horrendous thing they did was not to pay the masons that rebuilt their capital, these masons now being pretty revolted with the nobles...
They also enslaved an entire race (orcs), and gave birth to the scourge due to their own corruptability.
FWIW, the Narbacular Drop team didn't come out of a "program games quickly" school, they studied for four years and earned their BS's. Not saying that's what you meant, but those two phrases so close together makes it sound like they were just tooling around with this game idea and got lucky.
Also, not to be a wiseass, but how do skydivers get out of a plane?
Those planes have sliding doors instead of ones that open inward.
They don't all have sliding doors, although many do. PAC 750's do, as do Twin Otters, Caravans, and Porters. Some planes (Cessna 172, 182, 206) can have outwardly opening doors. Some are rear-loading aircraft without any real "doors" to speak of. There is one actual jet aircraft that has been approved for skydiving, although I don't know the specifics of how they plan to jump it. My (completely uninformed) guess is that they'll fly it unpressurized.
On the other hand, flying unpressurized means a lot of the time you can just fly without a door on at all. Even in bigger planes with sliding doors, we usually open the door after takeoff on hot days just to cool off a bit on the ride up.
In all honesty, how do people have time to play MMO games and do anything fulfilling with their lives?...I maintain an Everquest subscription for old time's sake, and... I'm lucky if I log on two hours per week.
Sounds like an answer to your question from where I'm sitting.
I started playing WoW this week. I play for an hour or two at night after I get home from work, eat, and do homework for an hour or two. People can play MMO's and do "fulfilling" things the same way anybody can do anything and still have time for something else: by not doing any one thing to excess such that it pushes out anything else.
Thanks for the advice, but most people I've talked to think it's great; they're often surprised that such programs exist, and they're happy with the kinds of things I'm learning. I'm not sure what you consider a 'strong game dev' house to be, but those that I've talked to are very interested in the program and where it's going.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'real' Master's, either, but my degree is going to be in Computer Science, if that's what you mean.
I do agree that the program isn't everything, but that's true for any degree. By the time I graduate, I'll have made two games as student projects, written a thesis, and worked on one published portable title (my current summer internship). Between that and previous work experience, I think I've got a pretty good shot - fingers crossed and all that.
But isn't going to school and not having a job _more_ expensive than just quitting your job and coding up some games on your own? (Assuming no scholarship, obviously).
It's all in how you add up the cost, and what the opportunity is worth to you. The answer might be different for whoever you ask, but I decided that going back to school was worth the money spent, the money cost (in interest for loans, moving, living, and money I wasn't earning at a job), and much more than that. I don't have any scholarships in my case, but I thought it was worth it anyway. It's like anything you buy, really: is what you get worth more to you than this money?
In my case, I figured that in addition to a Master's degree (an obvious plus), I also got actual teachers, a more rigid structure (important for me; having something due in two weeks is a great motivator to get work done), and the opportunity to be surrounded by like-minded students working towards the same goals. I can tell you that I'm learning a lot more being in school and working with friends than I would on my own, and based on that I think my chances of getting a job in the industry are much, much higher than if I had quit my job and just stayed home working on my own.
On the other hand, I did pick a school based on relative name recognition/repuation and a cost analysis...I had the opportunity to go to a much more prestigous school (with a relatively new and unknown program), but picked the one that had more name recognition in the industry and about half the cost.
4. You can use graduate school as a pivot to change your career.
That was my #1 reason. I wasn't really happy doing general business consulting after my undergrad, so I quit to get a Master's degree and get myself into the entertainment industry. I moved myself across the U.S. to do so, and I've got to say I haven't regretted doing so.
I have a year left in my program, but I'm confident that I'm going to get a job where I want. Programming video games is a little more specific than other industry changes, perhaps, but at least in this case I know that I'm getting some skills and practical experience doing things I haven't ever done before. A lot of people said to me, "Don't go back to school, just program some games yourself!" That's hard to do when you've got a full-time job and a commute, so I decided going back to school was the best thing to do in my case.
School is expensive, but having a job that you love doing is worth any amount of money.
Anyways, I think it's the parents' responsibility to figure out that there's a rating system; the ESRB's job is not to find every single parent and explain.
It isn't, in that it's not in their job description, but it might as well be. The ESRB might have the best ratings system in the world, be the envy of all other ratings & classifications organizations, and perform their job flawlessly and efficiently, but if people (i.e., parents, i.e. consumers with money) don't know about it, ESRB is basically worthless.
For all of the people arguing that parents should be in charge of what their kids see and what they don't (and I'm with you on that), parents need to be better aware of the ratings system in place, including its symbols and what ratings mean. The ESRB knows this, and it's why they're participating in wider marketing campaigns right now. It's why they tried to start out using the MPAA classification symbols (G, PG, PG-13, etc.) instead of making their own. Half of their job now is making people aware of the ratings and how they can be used.
That's certainly true, but for the time being, these guys have a point. Getting through security more quickly without ID isn't an isolated incident, either. I was flying with a few coworkers out of Atlanta last year, and one of my buddies had left his wallet at home accidentally. He went through whatever special process for not having ID while I went through the regular line...where I was stopped and had to submit to a bag check. The item of mine security was suspicious of was my sport skydiving rig, which while unusual, isn't illegal to carry on commercial airlines, and when security was through checking me out, my ID-less buddy was finished and waiting for me.
I also made a cross-country move recently, and I found a company called upack (upack.com) that rents space in large, commercial trailers. For about the price as renting a uhaul would have cost me, I got to pack up my stuff in a trailer and have someone else drive it for me. The savings in gas and motels (not to mention not having to drive cross country myself) made it more than worth it. Their service was friendly, and you can get door-to-door delivery as well. I would recommend them.
Towards that end, I want the Congress to play Ico and Rez, and then come back and tell us with straight faces that "games" aren't "art."
You know, if they weren't so overbearing with their stereotyping, they might actually have some semblance of a point. There are games that are simulation! There are games that are glorified board games, too. Calling a genre of works any one thing is gloriously short-sighted.
You know that there's a permanent front-page link to PA in the form of the Funnies slashbox, right?
PA can handle it. They get an absurd amount of traffic. Besides, as other people have mentioned, traffic has its uses in the form of ad revenue/unique IP statistics.
Oh goodness, yes. The Secretary of Transportation was by far the worst commencement speaker I saw. I graduated in '02, and we had Dennis Tito speak. He was the first civilian space tourist, and alum '64...kinda. He'd gotten his Masters from RPI@Hartford, and we got the impression that he hadn't ever been to campus before our graduation.
Sorry you had trouble getting out of the garage on 2000, but at least your planned outdoor graduation wasn't almost snowed out as mine was. That was an absolute fiasco. (Three inches in May!);)
Not only that, but he insisted on standing up and shaking every single graduate's hand as they received their diploma. The head of the board said it was the only time a guest speaker/honorary doctor had done this in his many years of presiding over commencements. I thought that said a lot about him. Also, he was really cool about signing autographs backstage. I got his on a copy of the graduation program.
I was there, too, but I didn't graduate that year (1999). Although it's arguable if he was the best speaker in the four years of commencement ceremonies I saw ('99-'02, Bill Cosby spoke in '01), he was by far the most down-to-earth and approachable. And he actually tried to reason through his advice, rather than just spouting about all the cool things he'd done or pretending to know better than anyone; he seriously complimented the graduates on what they'd accomplished and gave his advice based on the reasoning that if anybody could actually see these things through, it would be those of us about to go out into the world to design and build.
3. [begin rant] Does it bother anyone else that federal officers will attempt to pass a law just because they "feel" they have the power, and "feel" something is needed? If there must be standards, why not let the bloody states set them and stop trying to distend the limits of federal authority beyond all recognizable bounds? [end rant]
I dunno, how should federal officials attempt to pass laws? For that matter, if they let the "bloody states" set standards, when should state officials attempt to pass laws?
Let's be honest with ourselves here: most of our laws today come from lawmakers feeling that "there oughta be a law" or something similar. Unless you've got proof otherwise, I honestly don't think that very many laws (if any at all) come from constituents' suggestions. The outrage being thrown at this particular issue really only serves to back up this point of view.
To be fair, I'm glad that most laws come from lawmakers; that's their job, and I don't want to have to worry about changing the tax code after I get home from work. But sometimes they come up with stupid ideas, and I don't mind telling them so, since they're also paid to listen to people like you and me about what we think are good ideas or not. And if they don't, we have the power to tell them to get a different job.
So to answer your question, no, it doesn't bother me that lawmakers come up with ideas for laws. It might bother me if they didn't listen to citizens about what should and shouldn't be law.
Yeah, I think that would be okay. You'd have to balance the game's rewards (credits won) to account for the fact that you now have repair in addition to maintenance, but I think that could be done without too much difficulty. Otherwise, I'm fine with the car looking banged-up after I smash it into guard rails and whatnot. I might still disagree with stopping the race for a head-on into the wall of a tunnel, but at this point we understand each other.
Did you get to play Burnout 3 on X-Box? Not at all like GT(x), but a really fun game. In one of the modes, called Road Rage, you have to cause your opponents to crash without crashing yourself. You're only allowed a certain number of crashes before the game ends, and they represent each one by showing more and more damage to your car. By the end of the mode, the tail end of your car is missing, the doors are falling off, sparks are flying, etc. The car still drives as well as it ever does (as far as I can tell), so it's just the visuals that change. I'd be fine with that sort of implementation in GT3/4/5/whatever, but if I were on the team, I wouldn't want to make the decision to implement damage without modeling it in the simulation.
But yeah, I can see it going either way. Good idea.
For me, I could never get around the indestructible cars. It spoils the game, IMO.
Really? I always though that the game was better for not modeling damage. It's a driving simulation that lets you focus on the driving itself, rather than the repercusions of failure if you take a turn too fast.
For the purposes of the game, compare slaming to a full stop and having to regain 12 seconds to an automatic disqualification; the first is still a penalty for my mistake, but I can learn from it and immediately get back to the game. Stopping the race to tell me that I just totaled my car and I have to start over would get annoying very quickly. From a game design perspective, I think it's better to keep the player playing, and to treat the simulation as a simulation - it's not the real thing, but you can learn a lot from it if you want to.
I find it disturbing that they consider 45 fps to be "unacceptable." I know we can see the difference between 30 fps and 45, but come on; 30 fps is still playable.
Slashdot Mirror
Kandinsky actually wasn't crazy, but had synesthesia. Once I found that out, I started understanding his work a lot more. It might be more correct to say that you don't understand art, rather than it's all crap. Of course, it's perfectly fine for it to just not be your particular cup of tea.
Weren't they also addicted to magic? And didn't they almost, you know, destroy the entire world once?
They also enslaved an entire race (orcs), and gave birth to the scourge due to their own corruptability.
FWIW, the Narbacular Drop team didn't come out of a "program games quickly" school, they studied for four years and earned their BS's. Not saying that's what you meant, but those two phrases so close together makes it sound like they were just tooling around with this game idea and got lucky.
They don't all have sliding doors, although many do. PAC 750's do, as do Twin Otters, Caravans, and Porters. Some planes (Cessna 172, 182, 206) can have outwardly opening doors. Some are rear-loading aircraft without any real "doors" to speak of. There is one actual jet aircraft that has been approved for skydiving, although I don't know the specifics of how they plan to jump it. My (completely uninformed) guess is that they'll fly it unpressurized.
On the other hand, flying unpressurized means a lot of the time you can just fly without a door on at all. Even in bigger planes with sliding doors, we usually open the door after takeoff on hot days just to cool off a bit on the ride up.
Radioactive scorpions?
It's been done.
Sounds like an answer to your question from where I'm sitting.
I started playing WoW this week. I play for an hour or two at night after I get home from work, eat, and do homework for an hour or two. People can play MMO's and do "fulfilling" things the same way anybody can do anything and still have time for something else: by not doing any one thing to excess such that it pushes out anything else.
Thanks for the advice, but most people I've talked to think it's great; they're often surprised that such programs exist, and they're happy with the kinds of things I'm learning. I'm not sure what you consider a 'strong game dev' house to be, but those that I've talked to are very interested in the program and where it's going.
I'm not sure what you mean by 'real' Master's, either, but my degree is going to be in Computer Science, if that's what you mean.
I do agree that the program isn't everything, but that's true for any degree. By the time I graduate, I'll have made two games as student projects, written a thesis, and worked on one published portable title (my current summer internship). Between that and previous work experience, I think I've got a pretty good shot - fingers crossed and all that.
It's all in how you add up the cost, and what the opportunity is worth to you. The answer might be different for whoever you ask, but I decided that going back to school was worth the money spent, the money cost (in interest for loans, moving, living, and money I wasn't earning at a job), and much more than that. I don't have any scholarships in my case, but I thought it was worth it anyway. It's like anything you buy, really: is what you get worth more to you than this money?
In my case, I figured that in addition to a Master's degree (an obvious plus), I also got actual teachers, a more rigid structure (important for me; having something due in two weeks is a great motivator to get work done), and the opportunity to be surrounded by like-minded students working towards the same goals. I can tell you that I'm learning a lot more being in school and working with friends than I would on my own, and based on that I think my chances of getting a job in the industry are much, much higher than if I had quit my job and just stayed home working on my own.
On the other hand, I did pick a school based on relative name recognition/repuation and a cost analysis...I had the opportunity to go to a much more prestigous school (with a relatively new and unknown program), but picked the one that had more name recognition in the industry and about half the cost.
That was my #1 reason. I wasn't really happy doing general business consulting after my undergrad, so I quit to get a Master's degree and get myself into the entertainment industry. I moved myself across the U.S. to do so, and I've got to say I haven't regretted doing so.
I have a year left in my program, but I'm confident that I'm going to get a job where I want. Programming video games is a little more specific than other industry changes, perhaps, but at least in this case I know that I'm getting some skills and practical experience doing things I haven't ever done before. A lot of people said to me, "Don't go back to school, just program some games yourself!" That's hard to do when you've got a full-time job and a commute, so I decided going back to school was the best thing to do in my case.
School is expensive, but having a job that you love doing is worth any amount of money.
As usual, Penny Arcade covered this pretty well.
Anyways, I think it's the parents' responsibility to figure out that there's a rating system; the ESRB's job is not to find every single parent and explain.
It isn't, in that it's not in their job description, but it might as well be. The ESRB might have the best ratings system in the world, be the envy of all other ratings & classifications organizations, and perform their job flawlessly and efficiently, but if people (i.e., parents, i.e. consumers with money) don't know about it, ESRB is basically worthless.
For all of the people arguing that parents should be in charge of what their kids see and what they don't (and I'm with you on that), parents need to be better aware of the ratings system in place, including its symbols and what ratings mean. The ESRB knows this, and it's why they're participating in wider marketing campaigns right now. It's why they tried to start out using the MPAA classification symbols (G, PG, PG-13, etc.) instead of making their own. Half of their job now is making people aware of the ratings and how they can be used.
That's certainly true, but for the time being, these guys have a point. Getting through security more quickly without ID isn't an isolated incident, either. I was flying with a few coworkers out of Atlanta last year, and one of my buddies had left his wallet at home accidentally. He went through whatever special process for not having ID while I went through the regular line...where I was stopped and had to submit to a bag check. The item of mine security was suspicious of was my sport skydiving rig, which while unusual, isn't illegal to carry on commercial airlines, and when security was through checking me out, my ID-less buddy was finished and waiting for me.
I also made a cross-country move recently, and I found a company called upack (upack.com) that rents space in large, commercial trailers. For about the price as renting a uhaul would have cost me, I got to pack up my stuff in a trailer and have someone else drive it for me. The savings in gas and motels (not to mention not having to drive cross country myself) made it more than worth it. Their service was friendly, and you can get door-to-door delivery as well. I would recommend them.
Towards that end, I want the Congress to play Ico and Rez, and then come back and tell us with straight faces that "games" aren't "art."
You know, if they weren't so overbearing with their stereotyping, they might actually have some semblance of a point. There are games that are simulation! There are games that are glorified board games, too. Calling a genre of works any one thing is gloriously short-sighted.
Pretty good, but Gabe does it better.
You know that there's a permanent front-page link to PA in the form of the Funnies slashbox, right?
PA can handle it. They get an absurd amount of traffic. Besides, as other people have mentioned, traffic has its uses in the form of ad revenue/unique IP statistics.
It seems to me that Apple are doing versioning right.
I don't know about this whole point release thing. I mean, personally, I want my operating system to go to eleven. OSX doesn't go to eleven!
Oh goodness, yes. The Secretary of Transportation was by far the worst commencement speaker I saw. I graduated in '02, and we had Dennis Tito speak. He was the first civilian space tourist, and alum '64...kinda. He'd gotten his Masters from RPI@Hartford, and we got the impression that he hadn't ever been to campus before our graduation.
;)
Sorry you had trouble getting out of the garage on 2000, but at least your planned outdoor graduation wasn't almost snowed out as mine was. That was an absolute fiasco. (Three inches in May!)
Not only that, but he insisted on standing up and shaking every single graduate's hand as they received their diploma. The head of the board said it was the only time a guest speaker/honorary doctor had done this in his many years of presiding over commencements. I thought that said a lot about him. Also, he was really cool about signing autographs backstage. I got his on a copy of the graduation program.
I was there, too, but I didn't graduate that year (1999). Although it's arguable if he was the best speaker in the four years of commencement ceremonies I saw ('99-'02, Bill Cosby spoke in '01), he was by far the most down-to-earth and approachable. And he actually tried to reason through his advice, rather than just spouting about all the cool things he'd done or pretending to know better than anyone; he seriously complimented the graduates on what they'd accomplished and gave his advice based on the reasoning that if anybody could actually see these things through, it would be those of us about to go out into the world to design and build.
3. [begin rant] Does it bother anyone else that federal officers will attempt to pass a law just because they "feel" they have the power, and "feel" something is needed? If there must be standards, why not let the bloody states set them and stop trying to distend the limits of federal authority beyond all recognizable bounds? [end rant]
I dunno, how should federal officials attempt to pass laws? For that matter, if they let the "bloody states" set standards, when should state officials attempt to pass laws?
Let's be honest with ourselves here: most of our laws today come from lawmakers feeling that "there oughta be a law" or something similar. Unless you've got proof otherwise, I honestly don't think that very many laws (if any at all) come from constituents' suggestions. The outrage being thrown at this particular issue really only serves to back up this point of view.
To be fair, I'm glad that most laws come from lawmakers; that's their job, and I don't want to have to worry about changing the tax code after I get home from work. But sometimes they come up with stupid ideas, and I don't mind telling them so, since they're also paid to listen to people like you and me about what we think are good ideas or not. And if they don't, we have the power to tell them to get a different job.
So to answer your question, no, it doesn't bother me that lawmakers come up with ideas for laws. It might bother me if they didn't listen to citizens about what should and shouldn't be law.
Yeah, I think that would be okay. You'd have to balance the game's rewards (credits won) to account for the fact that you now have repair in addition to maintenance, but I think that could be done without too much difficulty. Otherwise, I'm fine with the car looking banged-up after I smash it into guard rails and whatnot. I might still disagree with stopping the race for a head-on into the wall of a tunnel, but at this point we understand each other.
Did you get to play Burnout 3 on X-Box? Not at all like GT(x), but a really fun game. In one of the modes, called Road Rage, you have to cause your opponents to crash without crashing yourself. You're only allowed a certain number of crashes before the game ends, and they represent each one by showing more and more damage to your car. By the end of the mode, the tail end of your car is missing, the doors are falling off, sparks are flying, etc. The car still drives as well as it ever does (as far as I can tell), so it's just the visuals that change. I'd be fine with that sort of implementation in GT3/4/5/whatever, but if I were on the team, I wouldn't want to make the decision to implement damage without modeling it in the simulation.
But yeah, I can see it going either way. Good idea.
For me, I could never get around the indestructible cars. It spoils the game, IMO.
Really? I always though that the game was better for not modeling damage. It's a driving simulation that lets you focus on the driving itself, rather than the repercusions of failure if you take a turn too fast.
For the purposes of the game, compare slaming to a full stop and having to regain 12 seconds to an automatic disqualification; the first is still a penalty for my mistake, but I can learn from it and immediately get back to the game. Stopping the race to tell me that I just totaled my car and I have to start over would get annoying very quickly. From a game design perspective, I think it's better to keep the player playing, and to treat the simulation as a simulation - it's not the real thing, but you can learn a lot from it if you want to.
I find it disturbing that they consider 45 fps to be "unacceptable." I know we can see the difference between 30 fps and 45, but come on; 30 fps is still playable.
In iTunes, select "Enable FireWire disk use." under iPod Preferences.
Open terminal.Note: this might not be exactly right, as I'm not sitting right in front of Terminal right now. But come on, this isn't exactly rocket science.