You are partially right..Namco would be 'king' of the arcades, but Sega would be 'queen'... I'd assume, but can't say for sure, that Konami with its recent music-game-hits would even be ahead of Atari who don't have much of a showing these days other than some gun games (Namco's Time Crisis series is much better!!!) and the Rush driving games.
I wouldn't be so quick to call it vaporware. The threat of Sony taking over completely has sent real shockwaves through the console industry. If anyone is likely to start supporting multiple systems with in-house developed software, it's Sega...They already have a history of porting many of their arcade/console titles to the PC, so its not as much of a leap of the imagination as it would be to see Nintendo supporting other platforms. (no, licensing out Mario for edutainment games doesn't count).
I think you have this backwards. Arcades are a dying business. Each year less and less money is brought in and more and more pure arcades go out of business. Why would Nintendo be rushing to get into this market? Console game sales are where the money is.
This is more about Sega's admitting that it is much better at creating gaming software than it is at developing and properly support hardware...
Expect to see more Sega games on future Nintendo systems, and perhaps on X-Box too.
Never say never. Many of the former big names in the console business are (rightly) frightened of the brand, developer support and user base Sony has managed to create with the Playstation and now with the PS2.
All indications of the past few months point to Sega ditching the home hardware market altogether and focusing on software for other people's platforms...Why not Nintendo's?
It depends whether you just ask the audiophile or actually test them.
You see...Any audiophile will tell you that even high-bitrate MP3 is unacceptable for their 'golden ears'. However, in blind tests against CDs and other higher quality sound sources, almost none of them can actually pick which is the MP3 any more than someone choosing at random would.
Read many books that are related to software engineering in general...Books like Code Complete, Design Patterns, Xtreme Programming, etc. Of course, if you don't have a great library available, money becomes a factor, but I suggest reading quite a few of these books and trying out their advice.
Be aware though, a lot of these books contain some amount of bullshit (at least in my experience) that is not applicable to most projects...For example, I'm not really recommending you use Xtreme Programming practices, but in my experience some aspects of it are useful.But you at least get different ideas from reading them and hopefully you can take what works for you and leave the rest behind.
Also, its often good to disect what you think doesn't work, so you can potentially argue against those methologies at future jobs if needed (assuming you are arguing for good reason, not because you are too lazy to adhere to what would be a good process..of course).
Whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of believing in the 'flavor of the month' methodologies! As I mentioned in another post to this thread, I've worked for companies where the higherups cared more about developers strictly following certain processes than they did about getting good, working code. And this company was an Internet startup working on their first real project with fairly inexperienced technology leads. They were not basing their methodology choices on experience, but rather the hyped up snake-oil some of these methodologies offer.
I've had the misfortune of working at a company where they had a big giant wad of 'methodologies' and 'processes' that would make our development 'easier'. It was a total nightmare. Months wasted in design meetings arguing over abstract ideas and stupid dogma (You must use the facade pattern when implementing this!! says one engineer. No, you must use the factory pattern!!! says another, ad infinitium).
In the end we wound up with an extremely well written design document that had no basis in reality. Coding the project was a total failure because, as Mark suggested, the 'design' rarely matches the APIs you depend on when the design is done completely on-paper with no test code written during the design process.
In any case, this is one of the best interview responses I've read on Slashdot (a lot better than the evasive marketing drivel from Indrema, for example), and I'll check NEdit out just because of that.
Deus Ex is based on the same engine as Unreal Tournament, though an earlier version than the current UT codebase.
The Unreal Engine has historically been notoriously crappy on NVidia hardware (well, most anything except 3DFX/Glide, really). Its not so much that its bloatware as it is that some of the 3D subsystems (texture management, especially) are somewhat legacy and were originally written with Glide and software rendering in mind.
This has been fixed quite a bit over the past year...Hopefully some future patch to Deus Ex will roll the improvements into that game.
The N64 was a dismal failure in Japan, and has long been a mixed bag in the US. Nintendo exists today primary due to the Gameboy variations and by extention, Pokemon and all of the merchandising surrounding that.
At any rate, its funny that you ask "why wouldn't I stick to the successful past of PSX and N64"? After slagging Sega (who deserve it, somewhat)... The Genesis was king of the consoles in its time, just proving that a successful past doesn't count for _that_ much in the console world.. It helps get developers pumped (especially when something is as successful as the original PSX), but doesn't guarantee success.
Its also generally agreed that Sony's pretty much botched the roll out of the PS2, which may hurt its long terms sales once all the hardcore gamers buy theirs...
Yes, the Genesis had a similar setup. I forget the exact details, but it was Acclaim who was sued for eventually releasing a non-official game that included Sega's trademarked text (which needed to be in the ROM's header for the Genesis to run the ROM).
Acclaim won the suit, but eventually became a registered Sega developer anyway.
Eh? They aren't talking about games 'like Pong'. The 'Pong' reference is due to the fact that Nolan Bushnell is widely credited as having created Pong (though he had help).
id Software's engine is not Open Source. The game logic source code is available (though it is not released under anything like a true 'Open Source' license) but the engine source is only available commerically. At a cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You could -- if you wrote ALL of the source yourself. The theoretical beauty of open source is that you can make use of lots of other existing, hopefully stable, open source libraries and code to build up your application. Much of this code is currently under the GPL. You clearly can not 'dual license' someone elses code. Thus there is a problem.
Anyone with mod points, mod the parent to this post WAY UP!!!
Please, no more posts about what they might be doing to emulate these systems!!! They are NOT USING EMULATION AT ALL. They aren't even talking about a Java-like VM. Whoever wrote this story made a really bad misinterpretation of what Capcom is doing.
They (Capcom) are just announcing that in the future they will release more games multiplatform (which many companies do now, including Capcom, and it doesn't require emulation technology.) and will allow them to be played online against others on different platforms. This just means the communications protocols will be the same.
There's a far more rational, less hyped up analysis of the same press release at:
QNX has been around far longer than Linux. So perhaps Linus should have not developed the original kernel and should have instead went to work for Quantum (QNX developers)?
In any case, its not completely relevant. QNX isn't 'Free' software in source-code availability terms.
I use emulators as much as the next guy, but all the people on Slashdot (like 20 posts or more on this thread!) that claim the companies should 'release' the games because nobody will buy them anymore need to find a new argument. Sure, nobody is going to buy the Atari 2600 Frogger cartridge (except maybe off EBay, where the original owners get no money from the sale anyway). But that doesn't mean the copyright owners of Frogger can't release the game on a newer system.
This is done quite often, actually! Midway's collection of arcade classics for playstation/dreamcast...Namco's collections of old games, also for psx/dc, etc. Clearly, if people can run these games in MAME on their PC they are less likely to buy these newly released collections.
So, all in all, the blanket idea that the companies should just release rights because they won't lose any money anyway is a pretty flimsy one.
I don't follow your reasoning. By your definition, pretty much every thing every corporation does is consistent with Open Source philosophy.
Observe: Bill Gates had an itch (getting lots and lots of money), scratched it and produced many valuable products (as well as many other pieces of crap products) as a side-effect.
Does the person who originally uploads a file to the network get paid?
No.
Then how do content creators get paid -- what's the incentive for them?
You can earn revenue by publishing through a feature we haven't added yet, which is basically tipping. When you publish you can say, Here's a digital signature on this map: I published this file; this is who to give the tip to.
---
Great! Another system in which the publisher (the people with the money and the big iron and bandwidth to host this stuff) rakes in the profits while content creators have to live on whatever scraps get thrown their way.
Well, I'm about to defend Microsoft (a rare thing for me). I have some karma to spare anyway. Don't try this at home kids.
Eric Trohan said (quoted in this article as saying, anyway):
"Moving Linux forward is important, however. Doing that requires changes that can make it difficult to move applications from newer systems to older ones. This is inevitable, and every platform vendor has this type of problem (applications built for Windows 2000 apps do not work on Windows 98, for example)"
This, actually, is bullshit. Windows 2000 is fully binary compatible with Windows 98 (and Windows 95). I build software on Windows 2000 all the time that runs perfectly fine on the 'lesser' Microsoft OSes. There are some APIs that by default are only shipped with 2000/NT, and there can be API differences (true 32-bit GDI in NT/2000 as opposed to 16-bit thunked), but Trohan is vastly overstating incompatibilities to cover for his company's boneheaded move.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many more responses you can get...Next, I suppose you have to suggest that Atari created the Aibo but sold the rights to Hasbro.
You are partially right..Namco would be 'king' of the arcades, but Sega would be 'queen'... I'd assume, but can't say for sure, that Konami with its recent music-game-hits would even be ahead of Atari who don't have much of a showing these days other than some gun games (Namco's Time Crisis series is much better!!!) and the Rush driving games.
I wouldn't be so quick to call it vaporware. The threat of Sony taking over completely has sent real shockwaves through the console industry. If anyone is likely to start supporting multiple systems with in-house developed software, it's Sega...They already have a history of porting many of their arcade/console titles to the PC, so its not as much of a leap of the imagination as it would be to see Nintendo supporting other platforms. (no, licensing out Mario for edutainment games doesn't count).
This is more about Sega's admitting that it is much better at creating gaming software than it is at developing and properly support hardware... Expect to see more Sega games on future Nintendo systems, and perhaps on X-Box too.
All indications of the past few months point to Sega ditching the home hardware market altogether and focusing on software for other people's platforms...Why not Nintendo's?
You see...Any audiophile will tell you that even high-bitrate MP3 is unacceptable for their 'golden ears'. However, in blind tests against CDs and other higher quality sound sources, almost none of them can actually pick which is the MP3 any more than someone choosing at random would.
The magic is in the version numbers!!
Be aware though, a lot of these books contain some amount of bullshit (at least in my experience) that is not applicable to most projects...For example, I'm not really recommending you use Xtreme Programming practices, but in my experience some aspects of it are useful.But you at least get different ideas from reading them and hopefully you can take what works for you and leave the rest behind.
Also, its often good to disect what you think doesn't work, so you can potentially argue against those methologies at future jobs if needed (assuming you are arguing for good reason, not because you are too lazy to adhere to what would be a good process..of course).
Whatever you do, don't fall into the trap of believing in the 'flavor of the month' methodologies! As I mentioned in another post to this thread, I've worked for companies where the higherups cared more about developers strictly following certain processes than they did about getting good, working code. And this company was an Internet startup working on their first real project with fairly inexperienced technology leads. They were not basing their methodology choices on experience, but rather the hyped up snake-oil some of these methodologies offer.
In the end we wound up with an extremely well written design document that had no basis in reality. Coding the project was a total failure because, as Mark suggested, the 'design' rarely matches the APIs you depend on when the design is done completely on-paper with no test code written during the design process.
In any case, this is one of the best interview responses I've read on Slashdot (a lot better than the evasive marketing drivel from Indrema, for example), and I'll check NEdit out just because of that.
If you an Signal 11 mated, you'd create the uber-karma-whore.
What's your response to this ESR?
The Unreal Engine has historically been notoriously crappy on NVidia hardware (well, most anything except 3DFX/Glide, really). Its not so much that its bloatware as it is that some of the 3D subsystems (texture management, especially) are somewhat legacy and were originally written with Glide and software rendering in mind.
This has been fixed quite a bit over the past year...Hopefully some future patch to Deus Ex will roll the improvements into that game.
At any rate, its funny that you ask "why wouldn't I stick to the successful past of PSX and N64"? After slagging Sega (who deserve it, somewhat)... The Genesis was king of the consoles in its time, just proving that a successful past doesn't count for _that_ much in the console world.. It helps get developers pumped (especially when something is as successful as the original PSX), but doesn't guarantee success.
Its also generally agreed that Sony's pretty much botched the roll out of the PS2, which may hurt its long terms sales once all the hardcore gamers buy theirs...
Acclaim won the suit, but eventually became a registered Sega developer anyway.
Eh? They aren't talking about games 'like Pong'. The 'Pong' reference is due to the fact that Nolan Bushnell is widely credited as having created Pong (though he had help).
id Software's engine is not Open Source. The game logic source code is available (though it is not released under anything like a true 'Open Source' license) but the engine source is only available commerically. At a cost of many hundreds of thousands of dollars.
You could -- if you wrote ALL of the source yourself. The theoretical beauty of open source is that you can make use of lots of other existing, hopefully stable, open source libraries and code to build up your application. Much of this code is currently under the GPL. You clearly can not 'dual license' someone elses code. Thus there is a problem.
Please, no more posts about what they might be doing to emulate these systems!!! They are NOT USING EMULATION AT ALL. They aren't even talking about a Java-like VM. Whoever wrote this story made a really bad misinterpretation of what Capcom is doing.
They (Capcom) are just announcing that in the future they will release more games multiplatform (which many companies do now, including Capcom, and it doesn't require emulation technology.) and will allow them to be played online against others on different platforms. This just means the communications protocols will be the same.
There's a far more rational, less hyped up analysis of the same press release at:
http://dreamcast.ign.com/news/26601.html
In any case, its not completely relevant. QNX isn't 'Free' software in source-code availability terms.
This is done quite often, actually! Midway's collection of arcade classics for playstation/dreamcast...Namco's collections of old games, also for psx/dc, etc. Clearly, if people can run these games in MAME on their PC they are less likely to buy these newly released collections.
So, all in all, the blanket idea that the companies should just release rights because they won't lose any money anyway is a pretty flimsy one.
Also, Bond has sex with several hot chicks a day. I tend to doubt the same applies to Kevin Mitnick.
Observe: Bill Gates had an itch (getting lots and lots of money), scratched it and produced many valuable products (as well as many other pieces of crap products) as a side-effect.
What would a minor be doing working in a mineshaft? Don't they have labor laws against that sort of thing?
Does the person who originally uploads a file to the network get paid?
No.
Then how do content creators get paid -- what's the incentive for them?
You can earn revenue by publishing through a feature we haven't added yet, which is basically tipping. When you publish you can say, Here's a digital signature on this map: I published this file; this is who to give the tip to.
---
Great! Another system in which the publisher (the people with the money and the big iron and bandwidth to host this stuff) rakes in the profits while content creators have to live on whatever scraps get thrown their way.
Eric Trohan said (quoted in this article as saying, anyway):
"Moving Linux forward is important, however. Doing that requires changes that can make it difficult to move applications from newer systems to older ones. This is inevitable, and every platform vendor has this type of problem (applications built for Windows 2000 apps do not work on Windows 98, for example)"
This, actually, is bullshit. Windows 2000 is fully binary compatible with Windows 98 (and Windows 95). I build software on Windows 2000 all the time that runs perfectly fine on the 'lesser' Microsoft OSes. There are some APIs that by default are only shipped with 2000/NT, and there can be API differences (true 32-bit GDI in NT/2000 as opposed to 16-bit thunked), but Trohan is vastly overstating incompatibilities to cover for his company's boneheaded move.