Unfortunately, with the *quality* of code being separate from how it looks, a lot of time is often spent polishing in the wrong places.
Many times, this results in bad code crystallized into finely polished and chromed pieces of garbage. Which, incidentally, makes it also more difficult for others to change or refactor it, lest they make it "less pretty".
I believe it's better for the quality to show the code, in general, but how about trying to formalize code review and other better-coding-through-groups practices with sites like SourceForge?
After taking the time to read some of the links of the post, it seems my comments were in line with others who waited for this one. Mod parent down as redundant if necessary.:-)
To stay somewhat on topic, Japan declared a law back in the day to stop Dragon Quest games from being released on any other day than a Sunday or a holiday.
While the Tomb Raider phenomenon is huge, I can't see many skipping work to spend the afternoon with Lara instead this summer.
Wonder what happens when Half-Life 2 comes out, though? Or EverQuest 2?
Now, if the game was any good they would have a better chance of making this work. Unfortunately, Angel of Darkness has been murdered in the first reviews.
It's not true that we'd get less sunlight here in Finland; our sunlight is simply unevenly distributed. Our winter nights are long and dark, our summer nights short and sweet. Up North, we get the midnight sun and literally no nights for months on end.
However, our population is sparse and I believe distance plays heavily into this pattern. Finland has roughly equivalent land mass compared to England, and carries only a tenth of the population. That's a lot of forest.
In a high-tech country, separated far from your friends, using a computer for company and communication becomes a lot more attractive. We are to blame for IRC, Linux and Nokia, how's that for a pattern?
Combine this with Kojima-san's upcoming curiosity Boktai, a vampire hunting game that requires sunlight to power up weapons, and you've got your kids sorted.:-)
If they keep this up, in a few years time games could well have even overweight couch potatoes running for their lives.:-)
Most desktop architectures have gone all the way to push wide bands of parallel processed float and double calculations through the pipes, but the mobile world is a whole different story.
PDA level mobile FPUs are very rare indeed. In practice, devices using the ARM family processors have no hardware float support. It's thus very important for developers to understand floating point intimately, so that they won't be left at the mercy of awful compiler-emulated floating point code. Of course, in those cases most code tends to orient itself for fixed point arithmetic. Fixed point calculations are much better suited for the integer crunching power of, say, the Intel XScale.
There are also good tradeoffs developers can make between floats and fixed point, for example by using block floating point (BFP) formats, where a whole block of values shares the same common exponent.
Now that 3D is really coming to mobile devices, plenty of people will get first-hand experience of emulating floating point for the first time since the 80's.:-)
The original posting is a bit misleading, the tax is only on "sales of digital goods and other electronic transactions", as stated by the article (which nobody reads:)).
To verify this, quoted from Europemedia: "From the first of next month, a new EU directive will be enacted, forcing all internet companies to impose VAT (value-added tax) on all digital sales. This amounts to a tariff of between 15 and 25 per cent on items such as software or music downloads, any transactions as part of online auctions and subscriptions to internet service providers, sold over the internet anywhere within the European Union."
In other words, the tax is on services and digital products sold to EU citizens on the Internet. It's still annoying (and hellish for small shareware shops to deal with!) but at least it doesn't affect the cost of physical goods... yet.
And in the case of online auctions, this means that the EU will tax the service eBay provides, not the actual product supplied from seller to buyer.
Somewhat related; while space flight simulation seems to be quite covered by the free software, plenty of folks might find the Space Station Simulator by Mistaril pretty compelling. It's not open source, but at $19.95, it's a steal.
Just start doing it by yourself. Games companies tend to (wisely) hire only game programmers for game programming jobs; as a rule you need to demonstrate both passion and ability before you are considered a serious applicant.
Ability is best demonstrated with a showcase of a playable game or at least a prototype that shows you "get it". If you specifically aim for the consoles, then Game Boy Advance is a good place to start as it has a healthy and active indie/hobbyist developer community.
Game companies often find interns who have no skills to be a mere distraction, they rarely train people to become games programmers although I've seen this happen too! Not many remain with that company today.
As for Japanese, the skill is handy in the first months of development on new platforms when technical documentation is scarce and most of it in the original Japanese form. While this would make platforms like PlayStation 3 theoretically applicable, you'd also have to have serious PlayStation 2 experience to be useful in such teams.
You can program any of the current generation consoles without knowing a word of Japanese. Also for most games localization into other languages is generally done with language experts and little to no specific programming is involved in making each of the language versions.
Perhaps there are opportunities to look into for translating existing Japanese games to the American market. As the popularity of the manga culture seems to be on a constant rise, it's very likely that we will see more of the older Japanese games which were originally never planned to be localized. The code and comments for these are likely to be Japanese, or Engrish at best.
The one advantage you have from your lingual ability is that you can play rare Japanese games and thus expand your knowledge and understanding of the art. Play those games, and make sure you mention it on your resume!
I should have read the last few sentences of the article before typing up the response. Apologies for the duplicate information, hope the links make up for it.:-)
For what it's worth, there are some real standards being worked on for mobile 3D graphics. Even HI Corp who the article mentions are contributing, but everyone is welcome to participate in community review.
The two main standards currently under development are OpenGL ES by the Khronos group and the JSR-184 headed by Nokia. If you read through the list of participating companies, you'll notice a good bit of overlap; we can expect the two APIs to play quite nicely together.
While all mobile devices will have to make their own compromises on functionality, battery life, weight and cost, almost all of them are capable of running 3D graphics when the software is carefully constructed. Many modern software rendering techniques are based on dynamically generated/compiled code, and the processes are very similar to what happens inside 3D hardware. As these libraries will also be fairly small, they will not add cost or weight to the devices themselves. 3D chips will be reserved to those more keen on playing games on the road.
The technology is definitely coming, now all we need to do is invent the killer application. Ideas anyone?
Someone should set up a page for this kind of stuff, except it's no longer funny when you think about 419-spammers laughing all the way to the bank...
One of those keen 419-folk promised to fax me some financial documents today; I helpfully provided them with the fax number to the local police branch for international business. I told them to put them to the attention of "Rahanpesu", that's money launder in Finnish.:-)
For burning your money, KLF still stands out as the uncontested classic with the one million UK pounds.
Jouni
Swarm Intelligence: The book
on
Swarm Intelligence
·
· Score: 5, Informative
There's a book on Amazon by the same name (not the one mentioned earlier in this thread). It's a very good overview of artificial social intelligence models, very profound in places. Incidentally, Amazon offers it at a discount when bought together with Bonabeau's book of the same title.
People interested in intelligence and life as an emergent and evolving quality would probably also enjoy "Creation: Life and how to make it", "The Tipping Point", and "Figment of Reality". They should all be reasonably easy to find.
I think there is plenty of room for new inventions from those who understand both software technology and the emergence of intelligence from social models.
In this day of constant deadlines and lighting-fast Internet, few people stop to seriously study what they are doing. You have stopped, at least for long enough to ask about this on SlashDot.
There are plenty of good books on software project management out there, from Peopleware to Extreme Programming eXplained and from The Psychology of Computer Programming to The Mythical Man Month.
I use a simple rule of thumb for every book I read; if the ~12 hours spent on the book is not going to pay itself back in time savings in the next 12 months of my life, it's not worth reading. However, I can safely say that any one of these books should have enough to save you at least one working day in your year.
The worst excuse for not reading is that you don't have time. All of us have equal amount of time allocated, it's up to you to choose how you spend it.
Wanting to learn software project management is a good start, now hit the books, then apply your learning to real life. Ideas can be summarized in books and Internet posts, experience you have to get for yourself.
I don't drive or shoot firearms, but after excessive hours of GTA I now feel the impulse to grab the door handles on passing police cars. The image of the policeman briefly dragging with the car door struggling to keep up still cracks me up.
So far, I've avoided the temptation. People just wonder why I'm grinning like a lunatic.
When throwing these numbers around, do you ever see mentions of network response times? Sure, the bandwidth is a big number but how much difference does it make in practice?
Quake and other forms of twitch gaming do not care that much about the bandwidth. The current cellular phone networks have more than enough bandwidth to handle multiplayer FPS games.
However, what they don't have is the latency to drive games that require sub-second reactions. I have seen no indication from anyone that this would yet happen even with the next generation of cell phones. Even the latest networks employ packet systems that might take anywhere up to several seconds to respond to your query.
Until we actually get some decent ping times on the network, game design has to be centered around other ideas. Like this one about persistent 24/7 galactic exploration & conquest in the style of Master of Orion...
That, and wireless hotspots. Bring on BlueTooth Quake!
Just a bit of trivia; the Pike language is based on LPC which was the language designed to drive LP-MUDs, after its creator Lars Pensjö. The language is easy to pick up and robust - I like to think of it like object oriented C with better string handling.
The MUD systems built with the language are very interesting as well; they generally have a central "game driver" object that handles the game objects and their heart beats with an internal call queue approach. This was guaranteed to keep the world and objects "live" at all time even if some of them failed. It was very common to have new areas being built on MUDs while the game was running, new objects being coded and recompiled on the fly.
Most of the MMORPG games built today have nowhere near this level of sophistication that MUDs reached back in the 80's. Maybe some of them would do well to look at Pike.:-)
I think the original news post should be modded down as flamebait for the XP reference. It's quite unnecessary. It would have been a better post if there was an *actual* stated need for such a software instead of speculating about cheating on security/authentity callbacks.
Just packet filtering won't trivially allow you to fake conversations between client software and servers anyway; it's very likely that the application wants to do much more than 'ping' the server so each solution would have to be custom made. Filtering is easy, talking back is hard.
Most of these custom solutions would probably involve stuff like hacking EverQuest, running your own unofficial Blizzard game servers, blocking Carnivore and stopping Bill from snooping around on your hard drive.
Now here's a controversial solution - if you are concerned about callback features, why not stick with open source software and operating systems in the first place?:-) I don't mean formatting your hard drive, as your packet filtering doesn't have to happen on the host machine. Wouldn't most people run this kind of software on the router, anyway?
That's what people hacking EverQuest usually do, anyway.:-)
Back in the day, Accolade was working on StarCon; the latest title in the Star Control continuum. We were working with those guys on the 3D graphics technology front - they were making it a space shooter and our technology that was also used by Warthog in Starlancer was well suited for the project.
Unfortunately, the project was put on ice and never completed; the Accolade development studio was acquired by Infogrames and it gradually shut down over the following few years.
The project itself was quite ambitious and well received by many of the early previews. It was not being developed as a strategy game, though, so it could have sat oddly with some of the old fans. I think the game had a lot going for it, considering it was done by the same company and the designers of previous Star Control games.
In the end it became just another fatality of the games industry battleground.
Still, it's nice to see that the legacy of the series lives on. Long live Star Control!
Regardless of what legistlation is passed in the US, all other countries in the world have to deal with the same issues. Some of them will follow an example set by the US, some will follow the rules of the marketplace, but there will be countries where consumer's options will be severely limited.
This kind of copy-protection schemes are starting to emerge in Europe as well; just yesterday I saw a CD by Ian Van Dahl clearly marked as non-playable on PCs and Macs. I didn't buy the particular CD to test the validity of these claims, but that's down to personal choice rather than a market trend. I do not know whether the sales of the record have been impaired in any way.
Funny, though; the fact that it's unplayable in PCs and Macs is not explained in any way. It is left almost as an anomaly with the CD, with no symbol of value that would express increased protection, value or proof of originality. All it has is a little black box stating the obvious problem.
I imagine something like a "original audio recording - for stereo equipment only" holographic label or something a bit more upbeat could have given a better message to the consumers. On the other hand maybe we should be glad they didn't think of this?
It's unfortunate that the unofficial Game Boy Advance tools are no longer sold through them either. There is a big community of budding game developers out there, but with the prices Nintendo asks for the official development kits, the unofficial tools are their only way of getting started.
Of course, tools like that will always find their way. Unfortunately also the site of the company that makes them is either hacked or taken down. Anyone know which?
I'm probably not the only one to be amused by this: "Moderation Totals: Redundant=2, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Underrated=1, Total=5"
I believe the appropriate karma to follow should be tagged "Funny".:-) Community moderation at work!
And now, to make my post important enough for it to avoid the dreaded zero...
Regarding life anywhere; Steve Grand makes a very interesting point about life in his book "Creation"; it's not tied to the matter that makes life up but rather the patterns in how things connect. The analogy he drew was how clouds are not static bodies of steam but rather areas inside which the water carried by air becomes visible. Like ripples in the water, we only borrow the atoms in our own bodies for a while, binding them to the patterns of interaction that make us unquestionably alive.
While it's far fetched to imagine even bugs on Venusian surface, it is not impossible to envision bacteria evolving from the complex interactions of heat and gases in the atmosphere. All evolution needs to kick off is a fertile playground, a pattern that can replicate itself with a degree of variation, and a lucky roll of dice.
If there indeed *is* bacteria discovered on Venus it would suggest the dice of the universe are heavily loaded with a bias towards generating life. It's that bias which would determine not just whether we are alone but just how crowded it can this universe get after a while. On the other hand, the Venusians have quite a few hundred million years to catch up with their Terran cousins.
Although, with the moderation above points, one has to wonder.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Many times, this results in bad code crystallized into finely polished and chromed pieces of garbage. Which, incidentally, makes it also more difficult for others to change or refactor it, lest they make it "less pretty".
I believe it's better for the quality to show the code, in general, but how about trying to formalize code review and other better-coding-through-groups practices with sites like SourceForge?
Jouni
To stay somewhat on topic, Japan declared a law back in the day to stop Dragon Quest games from being released on any other day than a Sunday or a holiday.
While the Tomb Raider phenomenon is huge, I can't see many skipping work to spend the afternoon with Lara instead this summer.
Wonder what happens when Half-Life 2 comes out, though? Or EverQuest 2?
Jouni
And I really, really wanted to like this one.
Jouni
However, our population is sparse and I believe distance plays heavily into this pattern. Finland has roughly equivalent land mass compared to England, and carries only a tenth of the population. That's a lot of forest.
In a high-tech country, separated far from your friends, using a computer for company and communication becomes a lot more attractive. We are to blame for IRC, Linux and Nokia, how's that for a pattern?
The links are all appropriately chat-related...
Jouni
If they keep this up, in a few years time games could well have even overweight couch potatoes running for their lives. :-)
Jouni
PDA level mobile FPUs are very rare indeed. In practice, devices using the ARM family processors have no hardware float support. It's thus very important for developers to understand floating point intimately, so that they won't be left at the mercy of awful compiler-emulated floating point code. Of course, in those cases most code tends to orient itself for fixed point arithmetic. Fixed point calculations are much better suited for the integer crunching power of, say, the Intel XScale.
There are also good tradeoffs developers can make between floats and fixed point, for example by using block floating point (BFP) formats, where a whole block of values shares the same common exponent.
Now that 3D is really coming to mobile devices, plenty of people will get first-hand experience of emulating floating point for the first time since the 80's. :-)
Jouni
To verify this, quoted from Europemedia: "From the first of next month, a new EU directive will be enacted, forcing all internet companies to impose VAT (value-added tax) on all digital sales. This amounts to a tariff of between 15 and 25 per cent on items such as software or music downloads, any transactions as part of online auctions and subscriptions to internet service providers, sold over the internet anywhere within the European Union."
In other words, the tax is on services and digital products sold to EU citizens on the Internet. It's still annoying (and hellish for small shareware shops to deal with!) but at least it doesn't affect the cost of physical goods... yet.
And in the case of online auctions, this means that the EU will tax the service eBay provides, not the actual product supplied from seller to buyer.
Jouni
Support the shareware game development. :-)
Cheers,
Jouni
Ability is best demonstrated with a showcase of a playable game or at least a prototype that shows you "get it". If you specifically aim for the consoles, then Game Boy Advance is a good place to start as it has a healthy and active indie/hobbyist developer community.
Game companies often find interns who have no skills to be a mere distraction, they rarely train people to become games programmers although I've seen this happen too! Not many remain with that company today.
As for Japanese, the skill is handy in the first months of development on new platforms when technical documentation is scarce and most of it in the original Japanese form. While this would make platforms like PlayStation 3 theoretically applicable, you'd also have to have serious PlayStation 2 experience to be useful in such teams.
You can program any of the current generation consoles without knowing a word of Japanese. Also for most games localization into other languages is generally done with language experts and little to no specific programming is involved in making each of the language versions.
Perhaps there are opportunities to look into for translating existing Japanese games to the American market. As the popularity of the manga culture seems to be on a constant rise, it's very likely that we will see more of the older Japanese games which were originally never planned to be localized. The code and comments for these are likely to be Japanese, or Engrish at best.
The one advantage you have from your lingual ability is that you can play rare Japanese games and thus expand your knowledge and understanding of the art. Play those games, and make sure you mention it on your resume!
Jouni
Jouni
The two main standards currently under development are OpenGL ES by the Khronos group and the JSR-184 headed by Nokia. If you read through the list of participating companies, you'll notice a good bit of overlap; we can expect the two APIs to play quite nicely together.
Mobile 3D hardware will also be coming probably sooner than what most people think. Some Ericsson researchers will be giving a SIGGRAPH talk on the subject ("Graphics for the Masses: A Hardware Rasterization Architecture for Mobile Phones") even if nothing more than the title is known at this time.
While all mobile devices will have to make their own compromises on functionality, battery life, weight and cost, almost all of them are capable of running 3D graphics when the software is carefully constructed. Many modern software rendering techniques are based on dynamically generated/compiled code, and the processes are very similar to what happens inside 3D hardware. As these libraries will also be fairly small, they will not add cost or weight to the devices themselves. 3D chips will be reserved to those more keen on playing games on the road.
The technology is definitely coming, now all we need to do is invent the killer application. Ideas anyone?
Jouni
One of those keen 419-folk promised to fax me some financial documents today; I helpfully provided them with the fax number to the local police branch for international business. I told them to put them to the attention of "Rahanpesu", that's money launder in Finnish. :-)
For burning your money, KLF still stands out as the uncontested classic with the one million UK pounds.
Jouni
People interested in intelligence and life as an emergent and evolving quality would probably also enjoy "Creation: Life and how to make it", "The Tipping Point", and "Figment of Reality". They should all be reasonably easy to find.
I think there is plenty of room for new inventions from those who understand both software technology and the emergence of intelligence from social models.
Read up! Enjoy!
Cheers, Jouni
Glutton for punishment, eh? Do not underestimate the power of Slash-DoS!
;-)
Hit the links harder, boys!
Jouni
In this day of constant deadlines and lighting-fast Internet, few people stop to seriously study what they are doing. You have stopped, at least for long enough to ask about this on SlashDot.
There are plenty of good books on software project management out there, from Peopleware to Extreme Programming eXplained and from The Psychology of Computer Programming to The Mythical Man Month.
I use a simple rule of thumb for every book I read; if the ~12 hours spent on the book is not going to pay itself back in time savings in the next 12 months of my life, it's not worth reading. However, I can safely say that any one of these books should have enough to save you at least one working day in your year.
The worst excuse for not reading is that you don't have time. All of us have equal amount of time allocated, it's up to you to choose how you spend it.
Wanting to learn software project management is a good start, now hit the books, then apply your learning to real life. Ideas can be summarized in books and Internet posts, experience you have to get for yourself.
Jouni
So far, I've avoided the temptation. People just wonder why I'm grinning like a lunatic.
Jouni
Quake and other forms of twitch gaming do not care that much about the bandwidth. The current cellular phone networks have more than enough bandwidth to handle multiplayer FPS games.
However, what they don't have is the latency to drive games that require sub-second reactions. I have seen no indication from anyone that this would yet happen even with the next generation of cell phones. Even the latest networks employ packet systems that might take anywhere up to several seconds to respond to your query.
Until we actually get some decent ping times on the network, game design has to be centered around other ideas. Like this one about persistent 24/7 galactic exploration & conquest in the style of Master of Orion...
That, and wireless hotspots. Bring on BlueTooth Quake!
Jouni
The MUD systems built with the language are very interesting as well; they generally have a central "game driver" object that handles the game objects and their heart beats with an internal call queue approach. This was guaranteed to keep the world and objects "live" at all time even if some of them failed. It was very common to have new areas being built on MUDs while the game was running, new objects being coded and recompiled on the fly.
Most of the MMORPG games built today have nowhere near this level of sophistication that MUDs reached back in the 80's. Maybe some of them would do well to look at Pike. :-)
Welcome back, LPC! We missed you!
Jouni
Oh MAN, it will take us HOURS to slashdot these servers down! We should get paid for this stuff.
Jouni
Just packet filtering won't trivially allow you to fake conversations between client software and servers anyway; it's very likely that the application wants to do much more than 'ping' the server so each solution would have to be custom made. Filtering is easy, talking back is hard.
Most of these custom solutions would probably involve stuff like hacking EverQuest, running your own unofficial Blizzard game servers, blocking Carnivore and stopping Bill from snooping around on your hard drive.
Now here's a controversial solution - if you are concerned about callback features, why not stick with open source software and operating systems in the first place? :-) I don't mean formatting your hard drive, as your packet filtering doesn't have to happen on the host machine. Wouldn't most people run this kind of software on the router, anyway?
That's what people hacking EverQuest usually do, anyway. :-)
Jouni
Unfortunately, the project was put on ice and never completed; the Accolade development studio was acquired by Infogrames and it gradually shut down over the following few years.
The project itself was quite ambitious and well received by many of the early previews. It was not being developed as a strategy game, though, so it could have sat oddly with some of the old fans. I think the game had a lot going for it, considering it was done by the same company and the designers of previous Star Control games.
In the end it became just another fatality of the games industry battleground.
Still, it's nice to see that the legacy of the series lives on. Long live Star Control!
This is linked to right from their main news page, too. Introduction indeed.
Don't you feel safer when you know that your Internet standards are in good hands?
Jouni
Regardless of what legistlation is passed in the US, all other countries in the world have to deal with the same issues. Some of them will follow an example set by the US, some will follow the rules of the marketplace, but there will be countries where consumer's options will be severely limited.
This kind of copy-protection schemes are starting to emerge in Europe as well; just yesterday I saw a CD by Ian Van Dahl clearly marked as non-playable on PCs and Macs. I didn't buy the particular CD to test the validity of these claims, but that's down to personal choice rather than a market trend. I do not know whether the sales of the record have been impaired in any way.
Funny, though; the fact that it's unplayable in PCs and Macs is not explained in any way. It is left almost as an anomaly with the CD, with no symbol of value that would express increased protection, value or proof of originality. All it has is a little black box stating the obvious problem.
I imagine something like a "original audio recording - for stereo equipment only" holographic label or something a bit more upbeat could have given a better message to the consumers. On the other hand maybe we should be glad they didn't think of this?
Jouni
It's unfortunate that the unofficial Game Boy Advance tools are no longer sold through them either. There is a big community of budding game developers out there, but with the prices Nintendo asks for the official development kits, the unofficial tools are their only way of getting started.
Of course, tools like that will always find their way. Unfortunately also the site of the company that makes them is either hacked or taken down. Anyone know which?
Jouni
I believe the appropriate karma to follow should be tagged "Funny". :-) Community moderation at work!
And now, to make my post important enough for it to avoid the dreaded zero...
Regarding life anywhere; Steve Grand makes a very interesting point about life in his book "Creation"; it's not tied to the matter that makes life up but rather the patterns in how things connect. The analogy he drew was how clouds are not static bodies of steam but rather areas inside which the water carried by air becomes visible. Like ripples in the water, we only borrow the atoms in our own bodies for a while, binding them to the patterns of interaction that make us unquestionably alive.
While it's far fetched to imagine even bugs on Venusian surface, it is not impossible to envision bacteria evolving from the complex interactions of heat and gases in the atmosphere. All evolution needs to kick off is a fertile playground, a pattern that can replicate itself with a degree of variation, and a lucky roll of dice.
If there indeed *is* bacteria discovered on Venus it would suggest the dice of the universe are heavily loaded with a bias towards generating life. It's that bias which would determine not just whether we are alone but just how crowded it can this universe get after a while. On the other hand, the Venusians have quite a few hundred million years to catch up with their Terran cousins.
Although, with the moderation above points, one has to wonder. :-)
Jouni