While I agree with you that it's a bit cheeky for countries that didn't contribute to the development of the internet to insist on their say etc. I would like to point out that the main conflict of interests is between the US and Europe. Europe had a role of similar magnitude to that of the US in the early development of the internet. Although TCP and IP were developed in the US, http and HTML were originally developed at CERN (in Europe). Also much of the original European Internet infrastructure predates the use of IP networks and DNS in Europe.
Given that http was developed by an organization funded mostly by European taxes, and that Europe's adoption of IP (over protocols like X.25) was pivotal in the worldwide adoption of IP I don't really see that the US has 'EARNED THE RIGHT' anymore than the European nations. Your argument works very well for 3rd world countries, but that's not really what the article is about.
Unlike the games themselves (which make plenty of money and don't really need to be saved) the media surrounding the video game industry could really do with some saving. Mainly because it's full of crap like this article.
(in keeping with the style of the article, I am going to make as many unfounded generalizations as possible)
Fire the author of this particular piece of 'journalism'.
Stop whining about successful games. The consumers obviously like them.
Stop trying to save the industry with 'journalism'. Only hard work and intelligence will get the industry out of any problems that it might have, neither of these are things that journalists are particularly good at so leave it to the people that have made the industry the success that it is today.
Leave your attitude at home when you go to 'work'. Those who can make good games do, those who can't often end up as game journalists. If you don't like it, go make a better game.
Visual Assist will (amongst other things) refomat all your code into the "correct" tab/space arrangement. Just select the text (or Ctrl-A for the whole file) and then (Alt-F8). Done. It'll do all your intenting for if's, loops etc. and make sure that everything is tabbed (instead of spaced).
Of course, you have to be using Visual Studio and writing C++ (or maybe C#, basically anything with {'s should work).
Where was this 18 months ago?
on
J2ME Polish 1.0
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· Score: 1
I had to write a whole bunch of hacked tools to do this sort of thing when I was working on J2ME. I'm glad that someone has created a real solution, getting all this stuff to work on a deadline was a real pain.
... and homeworld 2 (and the expansion packs etc) are all great 3D Rts games. They're set in space so you can conquer the galaxy, and there's alot of options for low level troop (well, ship) management. You can set formations, aggressivness and all sorts of things. It's also a really nice game.
Whilst I agree that there are alot of bad game design and desingers out there. I don't think that it's because designers are too technical. If anything my experience is that they are neither technical nor artistic enough. Generally the people who end up being designers are people that entered the industry from the bottom rung: testing.
Lots of the designers that I've worked with over the years are people who are in the games industry because they want to be (nothing wrong with that) and have no skills that are of obvious practical use to the industry (i.e. they can't draw, they can't code, and they can't project manage). So, we make them testers, and then when they've been there long enough to deserve a decent salary we make them into designers.
There's no qualifications that you need to be a designer, people just get into it and they're either good or bad at the job. This is unlike both code and art, most studios don't employ coders or artists without qualifications (unless they take them on as co-ops or something).
Maybe all these game design courses that universities are starting up will help, but in the end I think that this is just the nature of the beast.....
The fact of the matter is that women gamers are a very small minority when considered in terms of sales (of the games mentioned in the article). The fact that these games have portrayed women in this way is a simple matter of economy. It leads to higher sales because it appeals to the majority of the audience (the x million men that bought the games).
The opinion of the few women that already paid for the game before they decided that they didn't like it, really doesn't matter. They don't represent a significant piece of revenue for those games, why should the makers care?
Men don't go around saying "I'm really offended by the way that male character in that Jackie Collins novel was portrayed because he was too sensitive and gentle and didn't kick the crap out of the guy that screwed his wife", do they? That's because they don't buy them. If you don't like the way that a game portrays women, then don't buy it.
When 2 million or so women are prepared to go to EB and spend $50 on a game (or whatever) the industry will start to cater to them. Until then, unless you can think of a way to make this happen (presumably through a game or marketing concept) shut up and start buying things that you like!
This is certainly the case in terms of technology. Many engines are implemented this way, most of them make all games network games even if only 1 person is playing (i.e. Quake 3).
If a game is made to be multiplayer from the start, then the extra programming work to add things like coop etc. is normally minimal. If there's a single player version of the game and you want to add coop, then you're normally looking at alot of work.
However, technology is only half the battle, there's also the issues of level design, game flow and balance.
Whichever way you look at it, co-op is a significant amount of work. Unless a development team think that putting co-op in is going to shift more units, then they generally won't bother.
Normally, co-op will be used by more people on consoles (esp. if there it's 2 players on 1 machine) than on PC's, so it does kind of make more sense. To put it in only on a console version of a game.
Assuming that what you mean by "the potential size of the instruction set" is the number of opcodes (i.e. ADD, MUL etc. think 'function') that are available in the instruction set. I think that you might have misunderstood what a 64-bit processor is.
The 'bitness' of a processor has NO relationship to the number of opcodes. A 64-bit chip will not have 2^64 opcodes (or even the possibility of such a thing).
The 'instruction-size' of a given architecture may be a constant size (i.e. 32-bit) however, this refers to the size of a complete instruction. That is the encoded opcode and the operands (i.e. register0, #0x01 etc. think 'parameter'). Some architectures (such as ARM) have a constant instruction-size (all ARM instructions are 32-bit). Others, such as x86 have a variable instruction-size (x86 instructions can vary from 4 to around 11 bytes).
Current CPU design methods call for a reduced number of opcodes. This is because the number of opcodes is limited by the fact that each opcode requires an actual physical piece of silicon to execute it. So more opcodes = more silicon and more silicon = hotter (which can mean slower) and more expensive chips.
x86 has alot of opcodes, however, these are not 'real'. The x86 architecture is a 'micro-architecture' which means that each instruction is actually decoded into a number of smaller operations (called micro-ops). In the case of micro architectures, there is a smaller piece of silicon to decode the opcode into micro-ops, and then several other pieces of silicon to execute the resulting micro-ops, however, these are shared between many opcodes. This allows x86 to have a large number of opcodes for backwards compatability, without a crippling chip size. The extra silicon needed for each opcode is relativly small but the whole set of opcodes can be implemented by a much smaller number of micro-ops.
The downside to this is that a number of the opcodes are very slow, as they decode to alot of micro-ops. These opcodes are not really used by modern compilers/programmers because they can normally be replaced by a sequence of several other instructions that are faster (as they decode to less micro-ops or 1 micro-op in some cases).
What a "64-bit processor", normally means is that the GPRs in the processor are 64-bit. The main advantage of this is that larger integers can be represented by the GPRs which also means that 'larger' pointers can be held in them. Hence a larger memory space can be directly addressed by the machine (i.e. the machine can have more RAM).
64-bit processors also normally come with 64-bit architectures so the memory bus etc. is wider.
There's really no way that a "higher-level" language could be implemented effectivly in hardware. It doesn't make any sense. C++, C and Java are all compiled anyway, and the python interpreter is way to complex to put into hardware. There is a chip that executues the Java byte-code instruction set in hardware. But that's the closest that you're going to get, and really, coding in Java byte-code is both painful and pointless.
Anyway, to say something slightly on topic. I have found that going back and learning alot of asm has definatly made me better at my job. I haven't read the book, but I believe that it's a sound approach if you want to work in a field where performance really matters (like games) to look at asm first. However, if you're going to be a database programmer or make business tools or somthing, you can probably find better things todo with your time.
Well, I am a game developer, and I have to say that I disagree entirely.
The dramatic rise in the number of small studios going bust (mostly in the UK AFAIK) is nothing todo with technology or QA or Art or any other kind of production problem. Remember that the whole development cycle is a drop in the ocean in terms of total development costs. Most of the cash goes on marketing and manufactuing. The root of the matter is the failing relationship between small studios and their publishers.
There are really 2 reasons for this kind of failure.
The first is having a publisher that's just trying to get something for nothing (or as close to it as possible). Generally, these publishers are in fanancial hot water themselves, and would rather not pay for milestones and shipped products if they can avoid it. Small studios normally can't sue publishers when this happens, so they fold instead. Publishers as dishonest as Bam!, for example, probably account for a fair number of bust studios in the UK.
The second is having a project that's too clogged up by the details of the publisher/studio business relationship to allow development to continue in a cost-effective manner. I have read in several places that the average time taken to sign a game in the UK is now 7 months. Small studios don't have the resources for this kind of wait, and generally don't have the manpower to perform all of the contract negotiation etc. that you have to do before anyone even writes any code. Even the most "honest" publishers are now very distrustful of studios because there are so many ways that a studio can screw up a project and cost the publisher lots of money (normally much more than the studio would ever see even if the project was totally sucessful). Many studios have stung publishers for loads of money, whether through incompetance, deception (stealing resources from one OK project to help out a another failing one), or just by putting all of the publishers cash up their noses and then turning out a crap game (i.e. Dikatana).
The real problem here is that publishers are trying to protect themselves with standard business approaches (mainly lawyers and accountants). This is only partly effective as it only really gives the publishers more control of the situation, but normally leaves the studio unable to actually ship a game, or forces them to ship a crap game. This is of course bad for the publishers in the long run. What these publishers tend to fail todo is protect themselves by monitoring how studios actually produce games. The studios that are still around are around because the people that deal with their publishers are good at their jobs, not because those studios make better or worse games than the other studios that have gone bust. IMHO publishers should stop putting studios through the mill with royalty and IP negotiation, and start inspecting their internal processes. I've only ever encountered 1 publisher that sent a programmer along with their producer to evaluate the studios' technical expertise, and that was Micro$oft. They also sent an artists to evaluate our art team, and a designer to evaluate our design team. Well done Micro$oft!
It's not a lie to say that a 120GB drive is a 120GB even if it's only 115GB when it's formatted. Unless you say that it's 120GB when formatted, then giving the unformatted size is, in fact correct, as the manufacturer doesn't know what FS you will choose to format it with. In fact, maybe you'll never format it and just leave it in the box, in which case it's still 120GB and there is no other number for you to attribute to it:)
With regard to this stupid lawsuit. I think that we should sue all these idiots trying to make a quick buck (SCO, the retard woman who fried her kid and blamed Everquest and these idiots - oh and the "GTA made me do it" whiners) for claiming to be human on their packaging, but in fact being vegetables. Better yet, let's just lock them up, they're obviously insane.
"Plead guilty and say you played computer games. That will shift most of the blame."
And now we get down to what's really going on:)
On a more serious note everything that you say about C&C in germany sounds pretty harsh. Still I don't see how it will stop kids getting the games via piracy (as you mention) and via their older brothers/sisters/friends/relatives just going into shops and purchasing it for them.
With regard to sales, if kids in Germany are anything like kids in the UK then having the 'banned' version of C&C will give them somthing to tell their friends, so I think that it might increase sales, but either way I think we can agree that it's not going to hurt sales too much.
OK yeah. That *is* a bad thing then, espically if u live in Germany. But that's not really what most of the hubbub is about, is it? I also wonder how much effect this actually has on sales. I mean, does that mean that there are lots kids in Germany that are under 18 and want a copy of C&C and have to go without. Or is this the kind of law that is easily circumvented (like the legal drinking age in the UK, for example). If it is then it's possible that this kind of restriction causes a rise in sales (although I've never been to Germany, so maybe I'm totally wrong about this).
And, of course, guns kill people, not games.
Surely (in these cases) people kill people? No gun was involved in the girl-trapped-in-car death, and blaming the gun for people's actions is not really any better than blaming the game that they were playing earlier in the day. How's about we blame their jackets?
Although I totally disagree with the "Doom made me do it" argument that these *criminals* continually spout off, and I am always sad to hear about these kinds of incidents, I don't think that this kind of coverage is a bad thing at all. It creates a whole bunch of free media coverage for games, and it makes them "cool" and "bad" for kids. It's also good for jounalists because they get more headlines. What is the problem? We (game players) all know this is crazy, so why do we care that the media brings a whole bunch of (negative) attention to games? There is no such thing as bad publicity, and I'm sure than incidents like this actually increase sales of the games in question. So why are we complaining?
Seems like my 68K skills are not quite redundant yet. When Palm went ARM I figured that was the end of it, but now 68K is back in the garage so to speak. It's a good thing really, I wish that it had been around a year or so before I started trying to get into the games industry, I think that it would have made things alot easier. Putting a nice demo together would have made interviews go alot better.
I wonder if they'll release a "non-SDK" version, with a nice case etc. then you might actually be able to sell games for it.... then again...
Analog controller, integrated triggers and a full complement of action buttons
This is what makes it better for gaming that the current range of PDA's. Having an Analog controller is a good thing IMHO it's what's missing from every handheld gaming device that I've encountered. The only reservation that I have is the construction quality. If you can snap the stick off, or even if it only feels like you can then it will be totally pointless. Otherwise, I think that the device has a really good chance. Certainly looks more promising than the N-Gage...
Now that all of the obvious reasons for the N-Gage to fail have been covered in great depth (price, crap games, crap screen, poor phone talking design, crap media, need to take out the battery to change game etc.). I'd like to add another, slightly less obvious one, that I think might be far harder to fix when (if) Nokia ever get their act together: Nokia treat developers badly.
The N-Gage, as a games programming platform is a nightmare when compared to almost every similar platform. The operating system (Symbian 6.1) has all of the (over-)protective security features that you would find in a 'fully-blown' operating system (memory protection, HAL etc.) but none of the API's that are normally found in such environments to allow low-level access to the hardware that games need (such as DirectX).
While there are lots of work-arounds and blatant hacks for doing all these kinds of things, most of the API's involved are poorly documented (if they are documented at all) and coders spend alot of their time trying to fool the OS, when they should be making games. In addition to this Symbian is an OS with a fairly ridgid coding style and alot of it's own unique methodologies and conventions. These are often incompatible with existing codebases (in a standard Symbian application, which is in effect a dll, you cannot create global variables!) and developers existing work practices.
When compared to PalmOS, WindowsCE and the GBA the 'learning curve' that's required to put a game out on the N-Gage is pretty steep. Although it may be more geared towards gaming than any existing Palm or CE device, remember that the helix is on it's way (eventually) and there is already a large homebrew game development community associated with the PalmOS platform.
In addition to this Nokia provide no real technical support on any of these issues, there are no example workarounds or anything. And the existing homebrew Symbian developers are unfriendly, insular and unhelpful when compared to their PalmOS or GBA counterparts. The symbian documentation itself doesn't cover anything that is N-Gage specific. In fact, the first on-device debugger for the platform was only released recently, and by metrowerks. The SDK's available from Nokia have no on-platform debugger.
In short, even if the N-Gage was a really well put together platform, which people really wanted to buy and then pay more money for games on it, I still think that it would be a long time before a decent set of quality titles made an appearance.
Nokia can keep getting publishers to port existing titles to the platform (and I'd like to know exactly which way the money changes hands on a deal like that), but they'll never get any decent original IP on the platform until they start treating developers better. Of course, none of it really matters, as it's not going to sell, but when the N-Gage 2 or 3 or 9909 or whatever get's it right, then I'm sure that this will become an issue.
Oh man. Have you ever tried to program one of these things? I can tell you, it ain't pretty. Give me a GBA and one of those flash carts any day.
Although, I think that Nintendo are sueing the makers of flash carts, so maybe that won't be an option soon:(
Also, it's still worth spending time on the asm for the N-Gage even though it's got a much faster chip than the GBA, as you've got to do all your blitting etc. yourself (the Symbian API's for such things are slloooww). If you want to start now, pick yourself up a 7650, which is binary compatible and has most of the features of the N-Gage (and a camera - woo!)
A ex-colleague of mine (now a PS/2 programmer) mentioned that he expected Sony to release an emulator for Vector Unit code, to allow standard debuggers to be used on VU code. Apparently there is no debuging capability in the VU architecture.
Could be way out on this, he wasn't completely sober at the time.....
I don't think that there's a "type" of game that appeals to women more or less than others. Different women like different games, but what makes women different to men is that men (or a large part of the male market) are prepared to invest a fair amount of time on "learning" a game before they expect to have fun. Women are not.
My girlfriend and I played though the co-op half-life addon (Decay) on the PS/2, and we both enjoyed it alot. We got to the end of Decay so I bought an XBox and slapped in Halo. We started it up in co-op but, she went into the kitchen to call her friends after 5 minutes. I've tried many other co-op games, all with the same result. But she sometimes turns on Half-life *by herself*.
What makes Half-life different is that she has seen me playing Half-life (and all the addons) on the PC for several years. She's even had a half-hearted go herself every once or twice. By osmoses she had done all the learning before we even bought a PS/2. When we finally sat down to play together, she already knew what to shoot at and which guns were good etc. so she was spared the chore of figuring it out.
Women (in the general case) seem to like games that require no learning at all. In fact, any kind of preparation seems to be a big no-no. Free web games, solitaire etc. are easy to get to and quick to learn (often the rules are learnt from a real-world version of the game). Installing, configuring etc. are all big turn off's for women, as well as purchasing a specific piece of hardware (e.g. consoles), for women I think that convenience is king.
I think that the place that they can really add something is in the controller department. If GBA's had even 1 analogue stick it would add alot I think. Also, a rumble pack would be nice (but the battery will probably be a real problem there).
It's all very well saying that a game needs 6 months of polish. In my experience almost any game will benefit from that much polish. But how do u convince your publisher (or producer if it's an internal project) of that? How do you convince them that spending an extra £700,000 (just a guess) on the time between alpha and gm is worthwhile? It would be great if someone were able to compile a set of statistics regarding the relationship(s) between polish time and game profit. Anyone?
Slashdot Mirror
While I agree with you that it's a bit cheeky for countries that didn't contribute to the development of the internet to insist on their say etc. I would like to point out that the main conflict of interests is between the US and Europe. Europe had a role of similar magnitude to that of the US in the early development of the internet. Although TCP and IP were developed in the US, http and HTML were originally developed at CERN (in Europe). Also much of the original European Internet infrastructure predates the use of IP networks and DNS in Europe.
Given that http was developed by an organization funded mostly by European taxes, and that Europe's adoption of IP (over protocols like X.25) was pivotal in the worldwide adoption of IP I don't really see that the US has 'EARNED THE RIGHT' anymore than the European nations. Your argument works very well for 3rd world countries, but that's not really what the article is about.
(in keeping with the style of the article, I am going to make as many unfounded generalizations as possible)
There are plenty of diff programs that can 'ignore white space'. IIRC even the default Source Safe diff program can do this!
Visual Assist will (amongst other things) refomat all your code into the "correct" tab/space arrangement. Just select the text (or Ctrl-A for the whole file) and then (Alt-F8). Done. It'll do all your intenting for if's, loops etc. and make sure that everything is tabbed (instead of spaced).
Of course, you have to be using Visual Studio and writing C++ (or maybe C#, basically anything with {'s should work).
I had to write a whole bunch of hacked tools to do this sort of thing when I was working on J2ME. I'm glad that someone has created a real solution, getting all this stuff to work on a deadline was a real pain.
Well done.
... and homeworld 2 (and the expansion packs etc) are all great 3D Rts games. They're set in space so you can conquer the galaxy, and there's alot of options for low level troop (well, ship) management. You can set formations, aggressivness and all sorts of things. It's also a really nice game.
Whilst I agree that there are alot of bad game design and desingers out there. I don't think that it's because designers are too technical. If anything my experience is that they are neither technical nor artistic enough. Generally the people who end up being designers are people that entered the industry from the bottom rung: testing.
Lots of the designers that I've worked with over the years are people who are in the games industry because they want to be (nothing wrong with that) and have no skills that are of obvious practical use to the industry (i.e. they can't draw, they can't code, and they can't project manage). So, we make them testers, and then when they've been there long enough to deserve a decent salary we make them into designers.
There's no qualifications that you need to be a designer, people just get into it and they're either good or bad at the job. This is unlike both code and art, most studios don't employ coders or artists without qualifications (unless they take them on as co-ops or something).
Maybe all these game design courses that universities are starting up will help, but in the end I think that this is just the nature of the beast.....
What exactly is the problem here?
The fact of the matter is that women gamers are a very small minority when considered in terms of sales (of the games mentioned in the article). The fact that these games have portrayed women in this way is a simple matter of economy. It leads to higher sales because it appeals to the majority of the audience (the x million men that bought the games).
The opinion of the few women that already paid for the game before they decided that they didn't like it, really doesn't matter. They don't represent a significant piece of revenue for those games, why should the makers care?
Men don't go around saying "I'm really offended by the way that male character in that Jackie Collins novel was portrayed because he was too sensitive and gentle and didn't kick the crap out of the guy that screwed his wife", do they? That's because they don't buy them. If you don't like the way that a game portrays women, then don't buy it.
When 2 million or so women are prepared to go to EB and spend $50 on a game (or whatever) the industry will start to cater to them. Until then, unless you can think of a way to make this happen (presumably through a game or marketing concept) shut up and start buying things that you like!
This is certainly the case in terms of technology. Many engines are implemented this way, most of them make all games network games even if only 1 person is playing (i.e. Quake 3).
If a game is made to be multiplayer from the start, then the extra programming work to add things like coop etc. is normally minimal. If there's a single player version of the game and you want to add coop, then you're normally looking at alot of work.
However, technology is only half the battle, there's also the issues of level design, game flow and balance.
Whichever way you look at it, co-op is a significant amount of work. Unless a development team think that putting co-op in is going to shift more units, then they generally won't bother.
Normally, co-op will be used by more people on consoles (esp. if there it's 2 players on 1 machine) than on PC's, so it does kind of make more sense. To put it in only on a console version of a game.
Assuming that what you mean by "the potential size of the instruction set" is the number of opcodes (i.e. ADD, MUL etc. think 'function') that are available in the instruction set. I think that you might have misunderstood what a 64-bit processor is.
The 'bitness' of a processor has NO relationship to the number of opcodes. A 64-bit chip will not have 2^64 opcodes (or even the possibility of such a thing).
The 'instruction-size' of a given architecture may be a constant size (i.e. 32-bit) however, this refers to the size of a complete instruction. That is the encoded opcode and the operands (i.e. register0, #0x01 etc. think 'parameter'). Some architectures (such as ARM) have a constant instruction-size (all ARM instructions are 32-bit). Others, such as x86 have a variable instruction-size (x86 instructions can vary from 4 to around 11 bytes).
Current CPU design methods call for a reduced number of opcodes. This is because the number of opcodes is limited by the fact that each opcode requires an actual physical piece of silicon to execute it. So more opcodes = more silicon and more silicon = hotter (which can mean slower) and more expensive chips.
x86 has alot of opcodes, however, these are not 'real'. The x86 architecture is a 'micro-architecture' which means that each instruction is actually decoded into a number of smaller operations (called micro-ops). In the case of micro architectures, there is a smaller piece of silicon to decode the opcode into micro-ops, and then several other pieces of silicon to execute the resulting micro-ops, however, these are shared between many opcodes. This allows x86 to have a large number of opcodes for backwards compatability, without a crippling chip size. The extra silicon needed for each opcode is relativly small but the whole set of opcodes can be implemented by a much smaller number of micro-ops.
The downside to this is that a number of the opcodes are very slow, as they decode to alot of micro-ops. These opcodes are not really used by modern compilers/programmers because they can normally be replaced by a sequence of several other instructions that are faster (as they decode to less micro-ops or 1 micro-op in some cases).
What a "64-bit processor", normally means is that the GPRs in the processor are 64-bit. The main advantage of this is that larger integers can be represented by the GPRs which also means that 'larger' pointers can be held in them. Hence a larger memory space can be directly addressed by the machine (i.e. the machine can have more RAM).
64-bit processors also normally come with 64-bit architectures so the memory bus etc. is wider.
There's really no way that a "higher-level" language could be implemented effectivly in hardware. It doesn't make any sense. C++, C and Java are all compiled anyway, and the python interpreter is way to complex to put into hardware. There is a chip that executues the Java byte-code instruction set in hardware. But that's the closest that you're going to get, and really, coding in Java byte-code is both painful and pointless.
Anyway, to say something slightly on topic. I have found that going back and learning alot of asm has definatly made me better at my job. I haven't read the book, but I believe that it's a sound approach if you want to work in a field where performance really matters (like games) to look at asm first. However, if you're going to be a database programmer or make business tools or somthing, you can probably find better things todo with your time.
The dramatic rise in the number of small studios going bust (mostly in the UK AFAIK) is nothing todo with technology or QA or Art or any other kind of production problem. Remember that the whole development cycle is a drop in the ocean in terms of total development costs. Most of the cash goes on marketing and manufactuing. The root of the matter is the failing relationship between small studios and their publishers.
There are really 2 reasons for this kind of failure.
The real problem here is that publishers are trying to protect themselves with standard business approaches (mainly lawyers and accountants). This is only partly effective as it only really gives the publishers more control of the situation, but normally leaves the studio unable to actually ship a game, or forces them to ship a crap game. This is of course bad for the publishers in the long run. What these publishers tend to fail todo is protect themselves by monitoring how studios actually produce games. The studios that are still around are around because the people that deal with their publishers are good at their jobs, not because those studios make better or worse games than the other studios that have gone bust. IMHO publishers should stop putting studios through the mill with royalty and IP negotiation, and start inspecting their internal processes. I've only ever encountered 1 publisher that sent a programmer along with their producer to evaluate the studios' technical expertise, and that was Micro$oft. They also sent an artists to evaluate our art team, and a designer to evaluate our design team. Well done Micro$oft!
Anyway, that's my 2p.
It's not a lie to say that a 120GB drive is a 120GB even if it's only 115GB when it's formatted. Unless you say that it's 120GB when formatted, then giving the unformatted size is, in fact correct, as the manufacturer doesn't know what FS you will choose to format it with. In fact, maybe you'll never format it and just leave it in the box, in which case it's still 120GB and there is no other number for you to attribute to it :)
With regard to this stupid lawsuit. I think that we should sue all these idiots trying to make a quick buck (SCO, the retard woman who fried her kid and blamed Everquest and these idiots - oh and the "GTA made me do it" whiners) for claiming to be human on their packaging, but in fact being vegetables. Better yet, let's just lock them up, they're obviously insane.
"Plead guilty and say you played computer games. That will shift most of the blame."
:)
And now we get down to what's really going on
On a more serious note everything that you say about C&C in germany sounds pretty harsh. Still I don't see how it will stop kids getting the games via piracy (as you mention) and via their older brothers/sisters/friends/relatives just going into shops and purchasing it for them.
With regard to sales, if kids in Germany are anything like kids in the UK then having the 'banned' version of C&C will give them somthing to tell their friends, so I think that it might increase sales, but either way I think we can agree that it's not going to hurt sales too much.
OK yeah. That *is* a bad thing then, espically if u live in Germany. But that's not really what most of the hubbub is about, is it? I also wonder how much effect this actually has on sales. I mean, does that mean that there are lots kids in Germany that are under 18 and want a copy of C&C and have to go without. Or is this the kind of law that is easily circumvented (like the legal drinking age in the UK, for example). If it is then it's possible that this kind of restriction causes a rise in sales (although I've never been to Germany, so maybe I'm totally wrong about this).
And, of course, guns kill people, not games.
Surely (in these cases) people kill people? No gun was involved in the girl-trapped-in-car death, and blaming the gun for people's actions is not really any better than blaming the game that they were playing earlier in the day. How's about we blame their jackets?
Although I totally disagree with the "Doom made me do it" argument that these *criminals* continually spout off, and I am always sad to hear about these kinds of incidents, I don't think that this kind of coverage is a bad thing at all. It creates a whole bunch of free media coverage for games, and it makes them "cool" and "bad" for kids. It's also good for jounalists because they get more headlines. What is the problem? We (game players) all know this is crazy, so why do we care that the media brings a whole bunch of (negative) attention to games? There is no such thing as bad publicity, and I'm sure than incidents like this actually increase sales of the games in question. So why are we complaining?
Seems like my 68K skills are not quite redundant yet. When Palm went ARM I figured that was the end of it, but now 68K is back in the garage so to speak. It's a good thing really, I wish that it had been around a year or so before I started trying to get into the games industry, I think that it would have made things alot easier. Putting a nice demo together would have made interviews go alot better.
I wonder if they'll release a "non-SDK" version, with a nice case etc. then you might actually be able to sell games for it.... then again...
Analog controller, integrated triggers and a full complement of action buttons
This is what makes it better for gaming that the current range of PDA's. Having an Analog controller is a good thing IMHO it's what's missing from every handheld gaming device that I've encountered. The only reservation that I have is the construction quality. If you can snap the stick off, or even if it only feels like you can then it will be totally pointless. Otherwise, I think that the device has a really good chance. Certainly looks more promising than the N-Gage...
... is by transgaming:
http://www.transgaming.com/
Now that all of the obvious reasons for the N-Gage to fail have been covered in great depth (price, crap games, crap screen, poor phone talking design, crap media, need to take out the battery to change game etc.). I'd like to add another, slightly less obvious one, that I think might be far harder to fix when (if) Nokia ever get their act together: Nokia treat developers badly.
The N-Gage, as a games programming platform is a nightmare when compared to almost every similar platform. The operating system (Symbian 6.1) has all of the (over-)protective security features that you would find in a 'fully-blown' operating system (memory protection, HAL etc.) but none of the API's that are normally found in such environments to allow low-level access to the hardware that games need (such as DirectX).
While there are lots of work-arounds and blatant hacks for doing all these kinds of things, most of the API's involved are poorly documented (if they are documented at all) and coders spend alot of their time trying to fool the OS, when they should be making games. In addition to this Symbian is an OS with a fairly ridgid coding style and alot of it's own unique methodologies and conventions. These are often incompatible with existing codebases (in a standard Symbian application, which is in effect a dll, you cannot create global variables!) and developers existing work practices.
When compared to PalmOS, WindowsCE and the GBA the 'learning curve' that's required to put a game out on the N-Gage is pretty steep. Although it may be more geared towards gaming than any existing Palm or CE device, remember that the helix is on it's way (eventually) and there is already a large homebrew game development community associated with the PalmOS platform.
In addition to this Nokia provide no real technical support on any of these issues, there are no example workarounds or anything. And the existing homebrew Symbian developers are unfriendly, insular and unhelpful when compared to their PalmOS or GBA counterparts. The symbian documentation itself doesn't cover anything that is N-Gage specific. In fact, the first on-device debugger for the platform was only released recently, and by metrowerks. The SDK's available from Nokia have no on-platform debugger.
In short, even if the N-Gage was a really well put together platform, which people really wanted to buy and then pay more money for games on it, I still think that it would be a long time before a decent set of quality titles made an appearance.
Nokia can keep getting publishers to port existing titles to the platform (and I'd like to know exactly which way the money changes hands on a deal like that), but they'll never get any decent original IP on the platform until they start treating developers better. Of course, none of it really matters, as it's not going to sell, but when the N-Gage 2 or 3 or 9909 or whatever get's it right, then I'm sure that this will become an issue.
Oh man. Have you ever tried to program one of these things? I can tell you, it ain't pretty. Give me a GBA and one of those flash carts any day.
:(
Although, I think that Nintendo are sueing the makers of flash carts, so maybe that won't be an option soon
Also, it's still worth spending time on the asm for the N-Gage even though it's got a much faster chip than the GBA, as you've got to do all your blitting etc. yourself (the Symbian API's for such things are slloooww). If you want to start now, pick yourself up a 7650, which is binary compatible and has most of the features of the N-Gage (and a camera - woo!)
... if slightly less exciting.
A ex-colleague of mine (now a PS/2 programmer) mentioned that he expected Sony to release an emulator for Vector Unit code, to allow standard debuggers to be used on VU code. Apparently there is no debuging capability in the VU architecture.
Could be way out on this, he wasn't completely sober at the time.....
I don't think that there's a "type" of game that appeals to women more or less than others. Different women like different games, but what makes women different to men is that men (or a large part of the male market) are prepared to invest a fair amount of time on "learning" a game before they expect to have fun. Women are not.
My girlfriend and I played though the co-op half-life addon (Decay) on the PS/2, and we both enjoyed it alot. We got to the end of Decay so I bought an XBox and slapped in Halo. We started it up in co-op but, she went into the kitchen to call her friends after 5 minutes. I've tried many other co-op games, all with the same result. But she sometimes turns on Half-life *by herself*.
What makes Half-life different is that she has seen me playing Half-life (and all the addons) on the PC for several years. She's even had a half-hearted go herself every once or twice. By osmoses she had done all the learning before we even bought a PS/2. When we finally sat down to play together, she already knew what to shoot at and which guns were good etc. so she was spared the chore of figuring it out.
Women (in the general case) seem to like games that require no learning at all. In fact, any kind of preparation seems to be a big no-no. Free web games, solitaire etc. are easy to get to and quick to learn (often the rules are learnt from a real-world version of the game). Installing, configuring etc. are all big turn off's for women, as well as purchasing a specific piece of hardware (e.g. consoles), for women I think that convenience is king.
We could ban toddlers in supermarkets tho....
I think that the place that they can really add something is in the controller department. If GBA's had even 1 analogue stick it would add alot I think. Also, a rumble pack would be nice (but the battery will probably be a real problem there).
It's all very well saying that a game needs 6 months of polish. In my experience almost any game will benefit from that much polish. But how do u convince your publisher (or producer if it's an internal project) of that? How do you convince them that spending an extra £700,000 (just a guess) on the time between alpha and gm is worthwhile? It would be great if someone were able to compile a set of statistics regarding the relationship(s) between polish time and game profit. Anyone?