Novadex, by Aegia, is, imho, much more interesting and easier to use than Havok. It's free too, which is a big plus over having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a middle-ware package.
I'll point out here that Novodex is free for non-commercial use only. Anyone wanting to use their physics engine for a commercial project needs to contact them for licensing details. I imagine there's a charge and/or royalties involved there, but I'll bet my lunch it's not as expensive as Havok.
Yep, I'll agree with you there. There's a lot of FUD around regarding H1 workers replacing local workers because allegedly the H1 workers are prepared to work for buttons. In reality, the cost to the employer, when you take into account legal fees, government fees, relocation costs and so on, will be not much cheaper - if at all - than a local worker. That's assuming if they do take the route of paying exactly the minimum they can get away with.
Having an employee locked into their job is another issue. While it sucks from the H1's point of view, the company knows that that employee is less likely to disappear to a competitor after an expensive 6-12 months investment in their training, before seeing a return on that investment. That's the big pull, in my opinion, rather than the cheap labor aspect.
Yeah- but the H-1b is a new graduate when the US techie has 10 years of experience
Not quite sure I follow this... do you mean they're hiring new graduates and paying them less than someone with 10 years experience? Or do you mean they're somehow falsifying documentation to show the H1b guy with 10 years experience is a new graduate, and so they can pay him at entry level?
As an H1b worker myself, I've seen the amount of educational background checks required for the petition, and it would be difficult to forge these.
I don't see how they're toying with other people's computers. Valve would be simply closing accounts on the Steam service - the download isn't frying hard drives or anything. Or have I missed something?
Multimap.com has aerial photographs for the UK that can be viewed with maps overlayed. I found it useful on several occasions, to help find directions to places by identifying surrounding landmarks or seeing how a particular motorway intersection looks in real life, before you're hitting the thing at 70mph. Cool stuff. I miss it, here in the US, but not enough to pay for it - which is probably where the whole thing falls flat.
First, maybe I am just not superhuman enough to work in the game industry, but I find that if I work insane hours for more than a couple of days, the quality of my work suffers dramatically. I have noticed it isn't just me either. I've code reviewed programs that were written under extreme schedule pressure, and most of the time, the code was terrible.
I wonder if the 80+ hour week mentality is self-propogating in the sense that long hours leads to more bugs, which leads to more long hours to fix them, etc.
Games programmers don't have superhuman qualities when it comes to working long hours, even if they think they might - and yes, the quality of work suffers as a result.
I remember one game I worked on, we needed a demo producing for an internal review. Just something for a suit to look at. It was required for the Monday lunchtime, and needless to say, the team was in all weekend. When midnight passed and we were into the early hours of Monday morning, I told the project manager I was going home to sleep. He begged me to stay a few more hours, but I told him I'd just spent the last two hours unsuccessfully trying to fix a bug because my brain was fried. I left, got some sleep and returned at 9am.
When I got back into my office, I found my co-worker still there attempting to work after 24 straight hours. He was tripping after consuming an unknown quantity of caffiene pills, and was sent home. It took me about 45 mins to clear the rest of my bug list with a relatively clear mind, and spent the rest of the morning fixing the bugs my co-worker had introduced through the night.
Sustained long hours are a false economy. Fatigue will slow you down and introduce errors, and you will end up taking 12 hours to accomplish what you could do in 8 if you weren't so damned tired.
While a lot of the problems can be pinned down to poor planning, design and management, there are still those developers in the industry who let their ego get in the way. One guy I was unfortunate enough to work with was assigned a lead programmer role. He took an unusual approach - he attempted to write the whole game himself, and when he got bored or stuck on a particular section, he'd hand that section off to one of the other programmers on the team.
While the work he churned out early in the project made him look like a hero, it came back later to bite him on the ass. He'd made himself the critical team member for every part of the project. He was having to fix problems in his code throughout the entire game, working silly hours trying to keep on top of it all. Eventually he cracked, left the office in the early hours one morning, and disappeared for several weeks. He returned for a while doing light tasks, then quit. You can imagine the mess this left the project in.
I downloaded HL2 via Steam at the weekend. It took about 15-20 mins of unlocking/decoding last night (7pm CST), while I made a nice cup of tea and reflected on how easy it all was compared to driving down to a store.
Worked fine for me... I like the Steam approach and dream of the day all games can be bought and installed this way.
Do you have Adblock installed? I've seen the same thing and assumed it was a side effect of Adblock stripping out vertical ads on the right hand side of the screen.
The main problem with comedy in games is that it often doesn't travel well across borders. Word play, such as a level name "Tulips from Hamster Jam" (instead of Tulips from Amsterdam), will, I imagine, be completely lost when translated from English to Spanish.
Other jokes may rely heavily on local knowledge. You could add gameplay around touching Terry Wogan's knee, but it'd be more of a "huh?" than a "ha!" unless you're a familiar with 1980's UK talk show hosts. A good example of this is in the film Shrek 2, where Donkey (I think) suggests giving the cat the Bob Barker treatment. Without knowing who Bob Barker is, and what he recommends people do to their pets, the joke falls flat. I also believe that this scene was rescripted for some locations for this very reason.
For large, successful, high-budget titles, you'll be looking to sell internationally in multiple languages. You need to make sure the humor works universally, or go to the extra expense of producing different versions, rescripted each target location. Very few developers could afford to do the latter, hence it's very rare to find a game these days that relies on humor as it's primary selling point.
I've still got the Division algorithm I found somewhere on paper, just in case I ever have a need for it (yes, I know...)
I went for a job interview last week, which included a written test. Curiously, one of the questions was for a C implementation of an integer long division routine. I'd keep a hold of that piece of paper, if I were you!
I'd agree with this, but what do I know, I'm a bloke.
The papers pick up on how women are more drawn to games requiring more social aspects, eg. MMOGs or The Sims, or pick-up-and-play games like Bejewelled that don't require investing hours and hours of your time.
The second paper refers to the IGDA Quality of Life white paper, which addresses the subject of excessive working hours, which has historically plagued the industry. This is an important point. These long hours do nothing for your social life, so if it's something that's important to you, the horror stories of frequent 70+ hour weeks are going to make you think twice.
Thankfully, things are starting to improve. Most successful companies are investing more time and effort in the design and planning stages of a project, refining the schedule and limiting the amount of slippage and crunch time. But, there is still a long way to go. I had the displeasure of working for an inept senior manager who basically told us all to suck it up and that "overtime was what you signed up for". More people working more hours was the solution to everything, with little apparent concern as to why the project was late and how to fix the problems next time around. I believe his latest venture has run into legal difficulties, so I guess that's karma for you.
Anyway, I digress. When the industry sorts out these issues, a career in games development will be more appealing all round - not just to women, but anyone with family, friends or interests outside of their day job.
This is a serious problem... I get emails from Bank of America, telling me how cool it is to pay my bills through their online service, and provides links to the site. The link isn't simply to http://www.bankofamerica.com/, it's http://links.bankofamerica1.com:8082/Click?q=eXXXX , which redirects to the former. Is it really Bank of America, or is it a phisher who's registered the domain name with a '1' on the end? I'm fairly sure it's ok, but I'm sure they don't expect all customers to run whois enquiries on link addresses.
The thing that scares me is that it could so easily be a more subtle phishing email. It doesn't follow the more obvious method of asking for people to login to verify their details. If it was a scam, this could easily fool even those of us who should know better - those of us who have just crawled out of bed and remembered the phone bill still needs paying. Clicking the link and logging in is so easy, and exactly what a phisher is waiting for.
Agreed... I have a 256MB key, cheap as chips and hard as nails.
It went missing about a month ago. I found it in the bottom of the washing machine. Still worked fine after several wash cycles, although it didn't get the bugs out of my code.
I seem to recall a spoof Google-looking site that claimed that Google had acquired a large archive of old icq/msn chat logs and had made them searchable. This was not too long after they acquired the usenet archives from Dejanews, so it wasn't too big a stretch of the imagination. There were shouts of privacy concerns from the unwary, before folks realised it was picking from a few sections of fabricated conversations. Or something like that.
I can't find it now; I believe Google may have persuaded them to take the site down. Either that or they don't index it, as I can't find it on Google...!
Source code wise for PS2, the vector unit asm files are probably only a small proportion of your codebase, but the tiny workspace, mad dual pipelining and arithmetic result delays demand a larger than expected amount of effort and time on behalf of the developer, especially if they are trying to squeeze every last cycle. Of course, it depends on how far you're pushing the console - it's possible to make an ok game without dipping too far - or at all - into asm.
I downloaded a movie, too, but it was a proper, full length, made-for-cinema film.
I'll admit it. I've done it.
It's not being released in the cinema in the US, so I can't go to see it. I could import the DVD, but the region code prevents me from watching it.
So what am I to do? The only thing I can do is not watch it. So, seeing as I can't watch it anyway, the copyright holders are losing nothing if I do watch it. And this twisted little piece of logic helps me feel a little bit less guilty while watching.
If they do release it here, I'll go see it on the big screen, or buy the dvd. It's got to be better than the mid-res mpeg files I have at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
Clearly, while still sufficiently nerdy, those with a 1xxxxx userid are also fashionably late.
Novadex, by Aegia, is, imho, much more interesting and easier to use than Havok. It's free too, which is a big plus over having to spend tens of thousands of dollars on a middle-ware package.
I'll point out here that Novodex is free for non-commercial use only. Anyone wanting to use their physics engine for a commercial project needs to contact them for licensing details. I imagine there's a charge and/or royalties involved there, but I'll bet my lunch it's not as expensive as Havok.
Yep, I'll agree with you there. There's a lot of FUD around regarding H1 workers replacing local workers because allegedly the H1 workers are prepared to work for buttons. In reality, the cost to the employer, when you take into account legal fees, government fees, relocation costs and so on, will be not much cheaper - if at all - than a local worker. That's assuming if they do take the route of paying exactly the minimum they can get away with.
Having an employee locked into their job is another issue. While it sucks from the H1's point of view, the company knows that that employee is less likely to disappear to a competitor after an expensive 6-12 months investment in their training, before seeing a return on that investment. That's the big pull, in my opinion, rather than the cheap labor aspect.
Sooooo... why not just employ a new US graduate if they're intent on replacing a 10yr veteran with a new grad on an entry level salary?
Yeah- but the H-1b is a new graduate when the US techie has 10 years of experience
Not quite sure I follow this... do you mean they're hiring new graduates and paying them less than someone with 10 years experience? Or do you mean they're somehow falsifying documentation to show the H1b guy with 10 years experience is a new graduate, and so they can pay him at entry level?
As an H1b worker myself, I've seen the amount of educational background checks required for the petition, and it would be difficult to forge these.
I don't see how they're toying with other people's computers. Valve would be simply closing accounts on the Steam service - the download isn't frying hard drives or anything. Or have I missed something?
Multimap.com has aerial photographs for the UK that can be viewed with maps overlayed. I found it useful on several occasions, to help find directions to places by identifying surrounding landmarks or seeing how a particular motorway intersection looks in real life, before you're hitting the thing at 70mph. Cool stuff. I miss it, here in the US, but not enough to pay for it - which is probably where the whole thing falls flat.
First, maybe I am just not superhuman enough to work in the game industry, but I find that if I work insane hours for more than a couple of days, the quality of my work suffers dramatically. I have noticed it isn't just me either. I've code reviewed programs that were written under extreme schedule pressure, and most of the time, the code was terrible.
I wonder if the 80+ hour week mentality is self-propogating in the sense that long hours leads to more bugs, which leads to more long hours to fix them, etc.
Games programmers don't have superhuman qualities when it comes to working long hours, even if they think they might - and yes, the quality of work suffers as a result.
I remember one game I worked on, we needed a demo producing for an internal review. Just something for a suit to look at. It was required for the Monday lunchtime, and needless to say, the team was in all weekend. When midnight passed and we were into the early hours of Monday morning, I told the project manager I was going home to sleep. He begged me to stay a few more hours, but I told him I'd just spent the last two hours unsuccessfully trying to fix a bug because my brain was fried. I left, got some sleep and returned at 9am.
When I got back into my office, I found my co-worker still there attempting to work after 24 straight hours. He was tripping after consuming an unknown quantity of caffiene pills, and was sent home. It took me about 45 mins to clear the rest of my bug list with a relatively clear mind, and spent the rest of the morning fixing the bugs my co-worker had introduced through the night.
Sustained long hours are a false economy. Fatigue will slow you down and introduce errors, and you will end up taking 12 hours to accomplish what you could do in 8 if you weren't so damned tired.
While a lot of the problems can be pinned down to poor planning, design and management, there are still those developers in the industry who let their ego get in the way. One guy I was unfortunate enough to work with was assigned a lead programmer role. He took an unusual approach - he attempted to write the whole game himself, and when he got bored or stuck on a particular section, he'd hand that section off to one of the other programmers on the team.
While the work he churned out early in the project made him look like a hero, it came back later to bite him on the ass. He'd made himself the critical team member for every part of the project. He was having to fix problems in his code throughout the entire game, working silly hours trying to keep on top of it all. Eventually he cracked, left the office in the early hours one morning, and disappeared for several weeks. He returned for a while doing light tasks, then quit. You can imagine the mess this left the project in.
If you can reverse the process, you'd have an awesome compression tool. There's $$$ in there somewhere.
I downloaded HL2 via Steam at the weekend. It took about 15-20 mins of unlocking/decoding last night (7pm CST), while I made a nice cup of tea and reflected on how easy it all was compared to driving down to a store.
Worked fine for me... I like the Steam approach and dream of the day all games can be bought and installed this way.
[flame-proof pants on]
Sheep may seem quite docile and stupid, but it's all an act. See here.
In fact, I'm wondering how long it'll take the crafty buggers to reprogram the electric sheep to do their own bidding.
Lego is wasted on the kids. This year, my wife bought me a Lego advent calendar. I love her!
Do you have Adblock installed? I've seen the same thing and assumed it was a side effect of Adblock stripping out vertical ads on the right hand side of the screen.
I think you're on the right lines...
The main problem with comedy in games is that it often doesn't travel well across borders. Word play, such as a level name "Tulips from Hamster Jam" (instead of Tulips from Amsterdam), will, I imagine, be completely lost when translated from English to Spanish.
Other jokes may rely heavily on local knowledge. You could add gameplay around touching Terry Wogan's knee, but it'd be more of a "huh?" than a "ha!" unless you're a familiar with 1980's UK talk show hosts. A good example of this is in the film Shrek 2, where Donkey (I think) suggests giving the cat the Bob Barker treatment. Without knowing who Bob Barker is, and what he recommends people do to their pets, the joke falls flat. I also believe that this scene was rescripted for some locations for this very reason.
For large, successful, high-budget titles, you'll be looking to sell internationally in multiple languages. You need to make sure the humor works universally, or go to the extra expense of producing different versions, rescripted each target location. Very few developers could afford to do the latter, hence it's very rare to find a game these days that relies on humor as it's primary selling point.
Yeah, I moved abroad. Got fed up with smarmy Blair, Prescott, Blunkett & Co sending the country down the pan with no credible opposition.
I also found the weather's nicer in Texas.
I've still got the Division algorithm I found somewhere on paper, just in case I ever have a need for it (yes, I know...)
I went for a job interview last week, which included a written test. Curiously, one of the questions was for a C implementation of an integer long division routine. I'd keep a hold of that piece of paper, if I were you!
I'd agree with this, but what do I know, I'm a bloke.
The papers pick up on how women are more drawn to games requiring more social aspects, eg. MMOGs or The Sims, or pick-up-and-play games like Bejewelled that don't require investing hours and hours of your time.
The second paper refers to the IGDA Quality of Life white paper, which addresses the subject of excessive working hours, which has historically plagued the industry. This is an important point. These long hours do nothing for your social life, so if it's something that's important to you, the horror stories of frequent 70+ hour weeks are going to make you think twice.
Thankfully, things are starting to improve. Most successful companies are investing more time and effort in the design and planning stages of a project, refining the schedule and limiting the amount of slippage and crunch time. But, there is still a long way to go. I had the displeasure of working for an inept senior manager who basically told us all to suck it up and that "overtime was what you signed up for". More people working more hours was the solution to everything, with little apparent concern as to why the project was late and how to fix the problems next time around. I believe his latest venture has run into legal difficulties, so I guess that's karma for you.
Anyway, I digress. When the industry sorts out these issues, a career in games development will be more appealing all round - not just to women, but anyone with family, friends or interests outside of their day job.
This is a serious problem... I get emails from Bank of America, telling me how cool it is to pay my bills through their online service, and provides links to the site. The link isn't simply to http://www.bankofamerica.com/, it's http://links.bankofamerica1.com:8082/Click?q=eXXXX , which redirects to the former. Is it really Bank of America, or is it a phisher who's registered the domain name with a '1' on the end? I'm fairly sure it's ok, but I'm sure they don't expect all customers to run whois enquiries on link addresses.
The thing that scares me is that it could so easily be a more subtle phishing email. It doesn't follow the more obvious method of asking for people to login to verify their details. If it was a scam, this could easily fool even those of us who should know better - those of us who have just crawled out of bed and remembered the phone bill still needs paying. Clicking the link and logging in is so easy, and exactly what a phisher is waiting for.
You've got to warn everyone and tell them! Women is made of people! You've got to tell them! Women is people!
Ask Charlton Heston.
Agreed... I have a 256MB key, cheap as chips and hard as nails.
It went missing about a month ago. I found it in the bottom of the washing machine. Still worked fine after several wash cycles, although it didn't get the bugs out of my code.
I seem to recall a spoof Google-looking site that claimed that Google had acquired a large archive of old icq/msn chat logs and had made them searchable. This was not too long after they acquired the usenet archives from Dejanews, so it wasn't too big a stretch of the imagination. There were shouts of privacy concerns from the unwary, before folks realised it was picking from a few sections of fabricated conversations. Or something like that.
I can't find it now; I believe Google may have persuaded them to take the site down. Either that or they don't index it, as I can't find it on Google...!
So I guess this is actually from the debug-twice-distribute-once-post-thrice dept?
Source code wise for PS2, the vector unit asm files are probably only a small proportion of your codebase, but the tiny workspace, mad dual pipelining and arithmetic result delays demand a larger than expected amount of effort and time on behalf of the developer, especially if they are trying to squeeze every last cycle. Of course, it depends on how far you're pushing the console - it's possible to make an ok game without dipping too far - or at all - into asm.
I downloaded a movie, too, but it was a proper, full length, made-for-cinema film.
I'll admit it. I've done it.
It's not being released in the cinema in the US, so I can't go to see it. I could import the DVD, but the region code prevents me from watching it.
So what am I to do? The only thing I can do is not watch it. So, seeing as I can't watch it anyway, the copyright holders are losing nothing if I do watch it. And this twisted little piece of logic helps me feel a little bit less guilty while watching.
If they do release it here, I'll go see it on the big screen, or buy the dvd. It's got to be better than the mid-res mpeg files I have at the moment.
Reminds me of the hours I wasted playing GB Ltd, although this dealt with running the country after the election.
I always seemed to end up with riots across the country, somehow.