I'm sure the OP would qualify his distain for CS grads to be "CS degree and no other interest in programming".
It's all about balances... a good games programmer needs to have an enthusiasm for programming outside of their CS (or any computer related) degree. At the same time, a CS degree will open your eyes to a whole range of concepts that you may never have otherwise experienced, yet will help you greatly when deciding how to tackle new problems. Also, a CS degree generally contains a lot of individual research, which is a key part of games programming. This is why I'm sometimes leery of applicants with plenty of back-bedroom hacking experience, but no CS degree.
People with a few programming courses under their belt, and thinking they'll try games programming because playing games all day is fun - turn around now and look for something else. But if you've got the enthusiasm and tinker around with games programming in your spare time, then completing your CS degree to compliment this is absolutely the right track.
Slashdot reported there were sales figures of 1.7 million units through retail, back in January. Can't find any mention of sales since then, or how many copies were sold through Steam, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were in the region of 3+ million in total. Not too shabby, particularly for a PC game.
I'd be particularly interested in the Steam sales figures, as I'd imagine there'd be a much larger profit on each of those units compared to box sales.
Boring? Probably wasn't your sort of game. It certainly held my attention, which is rare these days.
I finished reading Neuromancer just a couple of weeks ago. I knew William Gibson was famous for coining the term "cyberspace" as well as a lot of the concepts behind The Matrix. So, when I saw the book in my local library, I decided to take it - it seemed like one of those books I should have read by now.
Now, maybe it was because I was reading the book mostly when I was tired, but I had immense difficulty in following the story. It was often confusing about where the characters were, why they'd gone there and what exactly it was that they hoped to achieve there. I hoped that by the time I got to the end of the story, all the pieces would fall into place and it'd all make sense. Unfortunately, I was left unsure as to exactly what they'd done and even less clear on why they'd decided it needed doing in the first place.
I think I must have missed something critical... fallen asleep and accidently flipped a chapter, maybe. Did anyone else find this book to be hard work, or should I hand in my geek pass on my way out the door?
My thoughts exactly: this isn't unexplored territory. While I personally keep AI at arms length, a good friend of mine specializes in the subject. He was working on the AI for the cpu-controlled drivers in a racing game a couple of years ago and implemented some kind of neural net based learning system. He would switch it into learning mode and drive around the tracks himself while the AI monitored the control inputs and learned how to handle the simulation of the car. I'm not sure that it continues learning in the released version, but it certainly isn't a script-based or the old car-on-rails system.
Reminds me of playing Speedball on my friend's Amiga. A slew of these button hammering games had taken their toll on the joysticks, leaving broken microswitches under the fire buttons. I ended up wrapping my thumb and forefinger in kitchen foil, and connected the wires from the broken fire button switch to the foil with sticky tape. Tap thumb and forefinger together to fire...
It worked. Sort of. There wasn't a whole lot of wire to pull outside of the joystick, so it was very easy to pull one away from the foil. Nothing more frustrating than suddenly being unable to hit that fire button seconds from scoring a point.
I wonder if this'll mean more or less spam for me.
Look, I was using the nickname "Scorchio" before them. It came from The Fast Show, and I thought it was an apt name to describe the burnt up heap of bones I regularly became when getting pwned at Quake.
I don't play neopets, I never have, and I have no intention of starting, despite the regular invites I kept receiving until I blocked neopets.com.
Why don't you make some of your projects available for review on your website? I'm talking about the source code, not executables, so it doesn't matter if they're complete or fully working or not. While reviewing resumes for game development positions, one thing I always love to see from someone new to the industry is some example work.
Also, you'll be surprised (I know I was) at the number of recruiters and company HR folk who may find you through your website. I've had several cold calls/emails from people who found or were referred to my website, on which I had a couple of games for download with full source.
It'll offer proof that you have the talent that employers are looking for, rather than them having to potentially waste time and money on what could be a load of hot air.
Or even pop the audio book CD out of your car CD player and continue playing it on your home audio system. The CD would need a writable area to record the last play position.
Bruce Willis and a rag-tag team of one-armed, lesbian basket weavers bravely try to save the world when a covert government agency accidently sends thirty copies of the same huge postscript document to a printer, which for unknown reasons decides to parse the entire lot as plain text.
A rate which is possible if all your data is batched together into one sequential block. I've seen this technique of creating data snapshots for common stages of the game, like the beginning of the first level, and it does dramatically improve load times.
Most of the time, however, you're going to be loading unpredictable data sets - you're in this part of the game carrying this set of items, this set of weapons, each of which with their own related effects, or a hundred other possible variations. In this situation, even a well planned resource management system is going to require multiple seeks/loads. Seek time is the killer here, not raw throughput from the drive, and it cannot be discounted as easily as you do.
Now that was a great game... I never did complete it, but I loved the exploration aspect. The first link on the Google search you posted includes a link to this site, where it looks like there's a homebrew remake underway. I hope they manage to complete it, although the page doesn't seem to have been updated since last year...
I particularly liked the ability to download and copy programs from robot to robot, solving puzzles with combinations of a utility provided by a specific program with the abilities of the type of robot carrying it. Nice mechanism - cool stuff.
I've been trying to figure this one out... the article describes it in a way that leads you to believe it's a process that only the Xenon can do, and will do it for free. It's a common technique used in many games. It doesn't mention anything about the Xenon that would significantly improve the process - I'll bet my lunch it doesn't have a BLOW_IN_WIND operator in the silicon. Unless I'm very much mistaken, the whole process will still need to be programmed much the same as it is on other machines.
Reminds me of some of the fluff that came out about the Emotion Engine in the run up to the PS2 release.
I still have my Psion Series 5... it's a nice little machine, but my biggest gripe is that it doesn't (or didn't) include any flash based storage as standard. It continually draws power to preserve it's RAM based file system, even when turned off. If you forget to put in fresh batteries and leave it for a few days, you can find the batteries dead, the small pricey backup cell drained, and all your files and non-default applications gone.
On the plus side, the software is pretty good, the screen is large, and the keyboard is the best I've used at that size.
Just remember to get a flash drive at the same time!
Well, the letters have been flaking off my Acer laptop keyboard for a few months now. If you can wait till Christmas, I should be able to report back how typing on a blank keyboard goes. It might save you the cost of the paint!
It's true that most phishing attempts appear obvious to the not-so-untrained eye, following the familiar pattern of "There's a problem with your account; please log in here to verify your details".
However, I receive the occasional promotional email from my bank, and have previously used the links provided to log in, purely because getting the email reminded me about a bill I need to pay, or that I need to check if a payment has been received or something. It was only afterwards I realised what I'd done, and then made damned sure the email and links I'd used were genuine. They were, but it could so easily have not been.
My point is that not all phishing emails will come from "chase_bank_182736abc@hotmail.com" and specifically ask you to log in to verify details. Just because you can spot an obvious attempt doesn't mean you'll notice a well disguised one. The safest approach is to never use any links provided in emails, no matter how convenient they are. With that in mind, I'm surprised banks still send out genuine emails containing log-in links.
All very well and good, but the Germans produced this synthetic fuel from coal, so this is hardly getting away from fossil reserves.
Bio-diesel - fuel from vegetable oil - is more promising, but is there enough arable land to produce anywhere near the amount required to replace fossil fuels?
I've been through exactly the same thing. It seems that a driver's licence is already an official-but-don't-tell-them-in-case-they-panic ID card, rather than proof of ability to drive a car.
The worst example I've seen is when Honda Finance refused a loan for a car because I didn't have a US licence at the time. I was the source of income, but my wife was the one with the US licence. USAA got our business that day.
I know that there is very little evidence of adult rated games being harmful to children - it's just common sense reinforced by plenty of studies.
What I was saying, is that if it is illegal for a minor to buy x, then surely it should also be illegal for an adult to buy x for the minor. We see plenty of news stories where a particular game is being blamed for the actions of a child rather than the buck stopping at the people responsible for his or her upbringing - the parents or guardians. The law would enable the blame to be pinned back on the parenting of the child rather than the games developer. Don't get me wrong - I'd much prefer that common sense be used in these cases rather than have to enforce a new law, but we all know common sense is rarely seen when the lawsuits start flying.
While there are alternative theories to evolution as to the origins of life, they are not scientifically viable theories, and as such, they should not be taught within a science lesson.
I've no objection to ID and creationism being taught in schools, but they should be taught in religious education classes, along with similar concepts from non-Christian religions and cultures for completeness.
If a scientifically sound alternative theory is proposed, then by all means include it in the science lessons.
Would this not be like buying alcohol for a minor? If the law stretches to prosecuting adults who are found to have bought M-rated games for under-age kids, it might just spur them on to start reading the labels and being a little more responsible.
Draconian? Yes. But while we live in a society where games developers are regularly blamed/sued/lynched because some poorly parented kid committed a crime, we need something to help point the finger of guilt back to where it belongs.
Ford Prefect was ok, but having watched the BBC TV series more times than I care to remember, I was always going to have problems seeing someone new in the role.
In a perfect world, I'd like to have seen the "beware of the leopard" joke survive, and "last orders" being called in the pub. I preferred the old booming, awe-inspiring voice of Deep Thought rather than the film's version, but I did like having the massive crowd there reacting to the answer.
It was good to see the sperm whale joke, but I was even more pleased to see the bowl of petunias! I thought that as a particularly bizarre element, it might have been removed or replaced with something less taxing for those who aren't familiar with the story.
Overall, I really enjoyed the film, and I'd be over the moon if they made the sequels.
Either that, or the entire series comprises of the same episode week after week, with random bits of editing and new CG bolted on each time. The challenge is that the final episode should tell an entirely different story to the first.
I'm not sure how things were in your household, but I don't know any parents who keep their porno library on display next to the tv for anyone to pick up and play. These parents you speak of - in which reality have they been waiting for the DVD technology to refuse to play the films to the wrong person, instead of just storing the questionable disks on a high shelf in the back of a locked closet in their own room?
...until you run into all these people who insist on MS Word format documents.
I ran into this problem last year when sending out copies of my resume. It was all nicely formatted in OO.o, and it exported perfectly to PDF. "Great!", I think, and start submitting it to various companies and web sites. It was then I discovered that many places won't accept anything that's not a Word document, so I was forced to re-export the OO.o doc in Word format. I then checked the output in Word to check everything was OK. What a complete mess! It was mostly readable, but it didn't exactly give the first impression I was hoping for. I think I tried fixing up the output in MS Word, as well as a few PDF->Word convertors, but I think the best results were when I took the plain text from OO.o and reformatted it by hand in Word. Groovy.
The problem's not really with OO.o, of course, it's the monkeys running the HR depts and recruitment sites (*cough*monster*cough*) who insist on having Word docs. I tried reasoning with a few that PDF wasn't a bad alternative, although mostly this was met with the email equivalent of blank stares and "Yeah, we need MS Word format".
While this situation persists it would be nice if the MS Word format was opened to allow OO.o to export reliably. Which would then prolong the insistance on using Word format documents in the first place, which is probably bad... oh god, it's depressing...
Besides, I thought that most word processors this side of the 1980's were supposed to be WYSIWYG, OO.o and MS Word included? Not "What You See Is Something Almost, But Not Entirely, Unlike The Thing You're Going To Export" - WYSISABNEUTTYGTE??
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure the OP would qualify his distain for CS grads to be "CS degree and no other interest in programming".
It's all about balances... a good games programmer needs to have an enthusiasm for programming outside of their CS (or any computer related) degree. At the same time, a CS degree will open your eyes to a whole range of concepts that you may never have otherwise experienced, yet will help you greatly when deciding how to tackle new problems. Also, a CS degree generally contains a lot of individual research, which is a key part of games programming. This is why I'm sometimes leery of applicants with plenty of back-bedroom hacking experience, but no CS degree.
People with a few programming courses under their belt, and thinking they'll try games programming because playing games all day is fun - turn around now and look for something else. But if you've got the enthusiasm and tinker around with games programming in your spare time, then completing your CS degree to compliment this is absolutely the right track.
Slashdot reported there were sales figures of 1.7 million units through retail, back in January. Can't find any mention of sales since then, or how many copies were sold through Steam, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were in the region of 3+ million in total. Not too shabby, particularly for a PC game.
I'd be particularly interested in the Steam sales figures, as I'd imagine there'd be a much larger profit on each of those units compared to box sales.
Boring? Probably wasn't your sort of game. It certainly held my attention, which is rare these days.
I finished reading Neuromancer just a couple of weeks ago. I knew William Gibson was famous for coining the term "cyberspace" as well as a lot of the concepts behind The Matrix. So, when I saw the book in my local library, I decided to take it - it seemed like one of those books I should have read by now.
Now, maybe it was because I was reading the book mostly when I was tired, but I had immense difficulty in following the story. It was often confusing about where the characters were, why they'd gone there and what exactly it was that they hoped to achieve there. I hoped that by the time I got to the end of the story, all the pieces would fall into place and it'd all make sense. Unfortunately, I was left unsure as to exactly what they'd done and even less clear on why they'd decided it needed doing in the first place.
I think I must have missed something critical... fallen asleep and accidently flipped a chapter, maybe. Did anyone else find this book to be hard work, or should I hand in my geek pass on my way out the door?
My thoughts exactly: this isn't unexplored territory. While I personally keep AI at arms length, a good friend of mine specializes in the subject. He was working on the AI for the cpu-controlled drivers in a racing game a couple of years ago and implemented some kind of neural net based learning system. He would switch it into learning mode and drive around the tracks himself while the AI monitored the control inputs and learned how to handle the simulation of the car. I'm not sure that it continues learning in the released version, but it certainly isn't a script-based or the old car-on-rails system.
Reminds me of playing Speedball on my friend's Amiga. A slew of these button hammering games had taken their toll on the joysticks, leaving broken microswitches under the fire buttons. I ended up wrapping my thumb and forefinger in kitchen foil, and connected the wires from the broken fire button switch to the foil with sticky tape. Tap thumb and forefinger together to fire...
It worked. Sort of. There wasn't a whole lot of wire to pull outside of the joystick, so it was very easy to pull one away from the foil. Nothing more frustrating than suddenly being unable to hit that fire button seconds from scoring a point.
I wonder if this'll mean more or less spam for me.
Look, I was using the nickname "Scorchio" before them. It came from The Fast Show, and I thought it was an apt name to describe the burnt up heap of bones I regularly became when getting pwned at Quake.
I don't play neopets, I never have, and I have no intention of starting, despite the regular invites I kept receiving until I blocked neopets.com.
Grumble, whine, etc.
Why don't you make some of your projects available for review on your website? I'm talking about the source code, not executables, so it doesn't matter if they're complete or fully working or not. While reviewing resumes for game development positions, one thing I always love to see from someone new to the industry is some example work.
Also, you'll be surprised (I know I was) at the number of recruiters and company HR folk who may find you through your website. I've had several cold calls/emails from people who found or were referred to my website, on which I had a couple of games for download with full source.
It'll offer proof that you have the talent that employers are looking for, rather than them having to potentially waste time and money on what could be a load of hot air.
Or even pop the audio book CD out of your car CD player and continue playing it on your home audio system. The CD would need a writable area to record the last play position.
Coming to a cinema near you this summer...
Bruce Willis and a rag-tag team of one-armed, lesbian basket weavers bravely try to save the world when a covert government agency accidently sends thirty copies of the same huge postscript document to a printer, which for unknown reasons decides to parse the entire lot as plain text.
A rate which is possible if all your data is batched together into one sequential block. I've seen this technique of creating data snapshots for common stages of the game, like the beginning of the first level, and it does dramatically improve load times.
Most of the time, however, you're going to be loading unpredictable data sets - you're in this part of the game carrying this set of items, this set of weapons, each of which with their own related effects, or a hundred other possible variations. In this situation, even a well planned resource management system is going to require multiple seeks/loads. Seek time is the killer here, not raw throughput from the drive, and it cannot be discounted as easily as you do.
I thought he lived in a luxurious mansion, bedecked with all kinds of tech stuff? Not exactly roughing it, by any standards...
Now that was a great game... I never did complete it, but I loved the exploration aspect. The first link on the Google search you posted includes a link to this site, where it looks like there's a homebrew remake underway. I hope they manage to complete it, although the page doesn't seem to have been updated since last year...
I particularly liked the ability to download and copy programs from robot to robot, solving puzzles with combinations of a utility provided by a specific program with the abilities of the type of robot carrying it. Nice mechanism - cool stuff.
I've been trying to figure this one out... the article describes it in a way that leads you to believe it's a process that only the Xenon can do, and will do it for free. It's a common technique used in many games. It doesn't mention anything about the Xenon that would significantly improve the process - I'll bet my lunch it doesn't have a BLOW_IN_WIND operator in the silicon. Unless I'm very much mistaken, the whole process will still need to be programmed much the same as it is on other machines.
Reminds me of some of the fluff that came out about the Emotion Engine in the run up to the PS2 release.
I still have my Psion Series 5... it's a nice little machine, but my biggest gripe is that it doesn't (or didn't) include any flash based storage as standard. It continually draws power to preserve it's RAM based file system, even when turned off. If you forget to put in fresh batteries and leave it for a few days, you can find the batteries dead, the small pricey backup cell drained, and all your files and non-default applications gone.
On the plus side, the software is pretty good, the screen is large, and the keyboard is the best I've used at that size.
Just remember to get a flash drive at the same time!
Well, the letters have been flaking off my Acer laptop keyboard for a few months now. If you can wait till Christmas, I should be able to report back how typing on a blank keyboard goes. It might save you the cost of the paint!
It's true that most phishing attempts appear obvious to the not-so-untrained eye, following the familiar pattern of "There's a problem with your account; please log in here to verify your details".
However, I receive the occasional promotional email from my bank, and have previously used the links provided to log in, purely because getting the email reminded me about a bill I need to pay, or that I need to check if a payment has been received or something. It was only afterwards I realised what I'd done, and then made damned sure the email and links I'd used were genuine. They were, but it could so easily have not been.
My point is that not all phishing emails will come from "chase_bank_182736abc@hotmail.com" and specifically ask you to log in to verify details. Just because you can spot an obvious attempt doesn't mean you'll notice a well disguised one. The safest approach is to never use any links provided in emails, no matter how convenient they are. With that in mind, I'm surprised banks still send out genuine emails containing log-in links.
All very well and good, but the Germans produced this synthetic fuel from coal, so this is hardly getting away from fossil reserves.
Bio-diesel - fuel from vegetable oil - is more promising, but is there enough arable land to produce anywhere near the amount required to replace fossil fuels?
I've been through exactly the same thing. It seems that a driver's licence is already an official-but-don't-tell-them-in-case-they-panic ID card, rather than proof of ability to drive a car.
The worst example I've seen is when Honda Finance refused a loan for a car because I didn't have a US licence at the time. I was the source of income, but my wife was the one with the US licence. USAA got our business that day.
You've entirely missed the point of my post.
I know that there is very little evidence of adult rated games being harmful to children - it's just common sense reinforced by plenty of studies.
What I was saying, is that if it is illegal for a minor to buy x, then surely it should also be illegal for an adult to buy x for the minor. We see plenty of news stories where a particular game is being blamed for the actions of a child rather than the buck stopping at the people responsible for his or her upbringing - the parents or guardians. The law would enable the blame to be pinned back on the parenting of the child rather than the games developer. Don't get me wrong - I'd much prefer that common sense be used in these cases rather than have to enforce a new law, but we all know common sense is rarely seen when the lawsuits start flying.
While there are alternative theories to evolution as to the origins of life, they are not scientifically viable theories, and as such, they should not be taught within a science lesson.
I've no objection to ID and creationism being taught in schools, but they should be taught in religious education classes, along with similar concepts from non-Christian religions and cultures for completeness.
If a scientifically sound alternative theory is proposed, then by all means include it in the science lessons.
Would this not be like buying alcohol for a minor? If the law stretches to prosecuting adults who are found to have bought M-rated games for under-age kids, it might just spur them on to start reading the labels and being a little more responsible.
Draconian? Yes. But while we live in a society where games developers are regularly blamed/sued/lynched because some poorly parented kid committed a crime, we need something to help point the finger of guilt back to where it belongs.
Ford Prefect was ok, but having watched the BBC TV series more times than I care to remember, I was always going to have problems seeing someone new in the role.
In a perfect world, I'd like to have seen the "beware of the leopard" joke survive, and "last orders" being called in the pub. I preferred the old booming, awe-inspiring voice of Deep Thought rather than the film's version, but I did like having the massive crowd there reacting to the answer.
It was good to see the sperm whale joke, but I was even more pleased to see the bowl of petunias! I thought that as a particularly bizarre element, it might have been removed or replaced with something less taxing for those who aren't familiar with the story.
Overall, I really enjoyed the film, and I'd be over the moon if they made the sequels.
Either that, or the entire series comprises of the same episode week after week, with random bits of editing and new CG bolted on each time. The challenge is that the final episode should tell an entirely different story to the first.
I'm not sure how things were in your household, but I don't know any parents who keep their porno library on display next to the tv for anyone to pick up and play. These parents you speak of - in which reality have they been waiting for the DVD technology to refuse to play the films to the wrong person, instead of just storing the questionable disks on a high shelf in the back of a locked closet in their own room?
...until you run into all these people who insist on MS Word format documents.
I ran into this problem last year when sending out copies of my resume. It was all nicely formatted in OO.o, and it exported perfectly to PDF. "Great!", I think, and start submitting it to various companies and web sites. It was then I discovered that many places won't accept anything that's not a Word document, so I was forced to re-export the OO.o doc in Word format. I then checked the output in Word to check everything was OK. What a complete mess! It was mostly readable, but it didn't exactly give the first impression I was hoping for. I think I tried fixing up the output in MS Word, as well as a few PDF->Word convertors, but I think the best results were when I took the plain text from OO.o and reformatted it by hand in Word. Groovy.
The problem's not really with OO.o, of course, it's the monkeys running the HR depts and recruitment sites (*cough*monster*cough*) who insist on having Word docs. I tried reasoning with a few that PDF wasn't a bad alternative, although mostly this was met with the email equivalent of blank stares and "Yeah, we need MS Word format".
While this situation persists it would be nice if the MS Word format was opened to allow OO.o to export reliably. Which would then prolong the insistance on using Word format documents in the first place, which is probably bad... oh god, it's depressing...
Besides, I thought that most word processors this side of the 1980's were supposed to be WYSIWYG, OO.o and MS Word included? Not "What You See Is Something Almost, But Not Entirely, Unlike The Thing You're Going To Export" - WYSISABNEUTTYGTE??