The editor/word processor built-in to the Psion s3c and later pdas in the early nineties supported proportional font editing of code with indents preserved by treating tabs not as a series of spaces, but as physical locations like a word processor does.
Most programming language layout patterns only use tabs to indent up to the first character of text.
I use Slickedit with a proportional font and only in the rarest of cases does it cause a problem even without the physical tabbing the Psion had. Using a proportional font makes code so much more compact and easier to read.
Here in Japan, you can get an optical fibre terabit connection for about 50-60 bucks a month.
I've had an 8mbit ADSL for about 5 years now for 25 bucks a month, and if I pay an extra 2-3 bucks I can get 50Mbs or more. For another 10 bucks I can get a 100mb optical fibre connection too.
The consumer base is at the brink of the switch to HDTV and the PS3 has already started tipping people over. Mark my words, within 2 years there will be few modern households without a HDTV capable set.
Blu-ray, HDTV, PS3 all come hand-in-hand ushering the new era in - or at least that's the image Sony is cleverly managing to portray. I know a no. of people who are planning to get full-HD (1080p) TVs now and I want to trade in my 720p HDTV.
The naysayers are simply blinded to the way things are going. DVD is really crap with its letterboxed widescreen format that the dvd players or tvs have to scale up. After watching some blu-ray movies there is no going back.
I was at TGS yesterday, the overal look and feel of the good PS3 titles surpassed the good XBOX360 titles. (there are obviously crap titles on both platforms and they aren't worth comparison) Someone compared Project Gotham 3 with Motor Storm, but Motor Storm's graphics yesterday were far superior and really had a CG movie feel to them.
In theory the XBOX GPU can beat the PS3 GPU for certain things, but people forget that those figures are based on the XBOX360's cpu bandwidth not being used for anything else. (um, like running a game) This is because everything shares the same cache and bus on the XBOX360, even for textures.
The titles shown yesterday showed a lot of potential, but of course in a few months the 2nd generation of xbox 360 titles should start making an appearance, including Halo 3, and if the developers have gotten good at tweaking, the xbox360 should still be able to hold its own. It is going to have to fight a bit though.
1080p 60hz Ridge Raaacer was also very nice and using HDR in a nice subtle fashion (adjusting contrast as you enter and leave tunnels, etc).
> Work is not 'fun', it's not for 'play', it's certainly not a 'life'. It pays the bills, that's what it's for.
Woah, I really feel sorry for you!
Regardless of the hours issue, treating your job as just something that pays the bills is wasting those 40 hours a week and up to 20-30% of your entire life.
Put your heart into your job, make it fun and your quality of life will go up a lot more than simply restricting yourself to an exact 40 hour week and paying your bills with it.
The clearly superior sides change depending on the experience of the player. You just keep learning new tactics.
However, for the very experienced player the Toxin General is the strongest.
We've been playing Zero Hour non-stop every lunchtime at work for over 2 and a half years. That's the longest I've played *any* game daily.
We patched it ourselves to limit each side's money-generators to 10 black markets, 10 drop zones, and 40 hackers... otherwise in 3v3 games, one player can simply concentrating on building a stupendous amount of money generators whilst the others protect him, then he comes out from his den and wipes the entire map clean. (if the game doesn't crash)
Hey, thanks for writing the game that I have spent most time on in the past two years (we still play Zero Hour regularly and it's not looking like it will stop anytime soon - well, until CnC:2 comes out)
It didn't sell well in Japan for some reason (they didn't even produce a translated version of Zero Hour) but I have introduced it to a no. of Japanese people and they have become hooked.
I really don't see any indie games out there right now that are even up to 10% of cnc's overall quality.
yes it is a shame.. I spent a year and a half developing that and because they were dilly-dallying with real 3d roam-anywhere shooting it kind of changed the gameplay and they hadn't quite got 3d-roaming down yet (2 years before Mario 64). However Miyamoto told me recently that a lot of the 3d-roaming techniques we developed for starfox 2 were simply pulled into Mario 64. (in starfox 2 you "roamed" as a robot walker thing and it was primarily a 3d platformer on those levels)
Anyway, we should have simply expanded on the original Starfox theme of flying through set and perfectly crafted stages. Sometimes Nintendo doesn't get it right.. but when it all goes wrong it simply won't release a game. You have to respect that.
I was one of the main programmers on SNES Starfox so I can shed some light here.
There were 5 of us from Argonaut; 2 for the raw 3d FX-chip polygon engine back in England, and 3 for the 3d game engine at Nintendo in Japan.
Everything else was done by Nintendo; game planning, sound&music (which was absolutely brilliant IMHO, shame the guy left Nintendo afterwards), graphics and production.
Apart from (admittedly considerable) input from the 3 of us, the game's direction, design and development was controlled by Nintendo, Miyamoto-san and the rest of the Japanese team and Argonaut had nothing to do with it.
Sometimes it feels like being slartibartfast from HHGTTG and his fjords; I have loving memories of designing certain bosses, enemies or effects, but it was the team as a whole that was very strong and made the game what it was, including Miyamoto who I remember spent a lot of time working with Giles on the ship's controls.
we haven't been playing anything but Command and Conquer Generals for the past 2 or 3 months. And we haven't got the expansion pack yet. Its a hell of a lot of fun with 3-4 people on a LAN. (although the LAN lobby server code must have been written by a blind rabbit with its paws tied behind its back, its so flakey)
And before that it was BF1942, Road2Rome or DesertCombat or Eve of Destruction.
I think you're misjudging how much of a percentage Publishers take.
Development studios are in an *extremely* good contract if they can get 20%, but the average is less than that (actually its 10% for console games!). The publishers get 80% or more because they dish out the development cost upfront.
so 1 million copies at 40 bucks: 10 bucks a copy or more goes to the shop, That leaves 30 million bucks, 25 million of which goes to the publisher and advertising and the remaining 5 million or so will make it to the developer who probably spent 3-4 million (royalty advances), for two years development of the game.
That only leaves 1 or 2 million profit, and of course the development staff are now looking for their nice fat bonusses because they made a MILLION seller! (a big deal in the gaming industry), 20-30 development staff x avg. pre-tax bonus of 20,000 dollars is half a million gone right there.
So you get left with up to a million bucks profit *if* you're lucky, less than one dollar of profit for each game that was sold. Of course, the investors or owners of the company want a slice of that so now its pretty much all gone and your back at the starting block all over again.
Bear in mind, that 1 million copies of a game is a example of a good seller, the *average* sales of any game is more like 100,000. (roughly 300,000 if sold worldwide)
So I suggest either that
1) publishers need to stop taking such ridiculous percentages, or 2) game prices should go up a few dollars with those dollars going directly to the developer.
Err, you're saying very scary things. Think about it:
By your standards I can take out my gun and shoot someone for cutting me off with their car, hey, they took my liberty away.
The girl who felt a hand on her butt on the train, can turn around and blow the guy's head off? It might have been his suitcase simply brushing against her. It *might* have been leading to rape... or can she only use the gun when he's got her underwear off?
Sure, the girl being raped has a very traumatic experience, but she isn't *dead*. Should we just shrug laws and resort to being vigilantes? That would be just like the wild west... ah... I see the root of the problem now...
Q-Games in Kyoto is looking for people
on
Jobs in Japan?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
We're looking for anybody who's good at making games, mainly seriously good animators and programmers right now.
We're based in Kyoto, Japan and are both english and japanese speaking.
yes, the problem with opensource sometimes is that it has the tendency to shoot itself in the foot. As far as I can tell Epson are being fairly honest about the whole thing, but in the meantime the *average* (read "non-slashdot-reader") consumer/user who doesn't give a sh*t about opensource thinks "oh, linux isn't supported very well, think I'll use windows where everything's safe"
Not intended as a flame, although I suppose some extreme advocates might take it that way, just an analysis of the immediate impact of this news.
As a disclaimer, I use lots of open-source products each day and they're great but its all voluntary as should be the choice to reveal source code or not. Some companies with proprietary techniques in some completely irrelevant part of the program who cannot release their source code end up having to re-write all the basic stuff because there was a "touch" of open-source in there. Its a very strange state of affairs, like a hippy camp run by the military.
There's always peercast, its looking really good recently, runs on windows and linux, supports Ogg Vorbis and has a ton of free radio stations out there, growing daily.
check it out, who needs all this paid subscriber rubbish.
Use Cygwin and the inetutils package. It gives you rlogin/ftp/ssh and a bunch of other stuff. You can even download apache for cygwin.
It all works great - and if you remove "Everyone" access from your entire hard disk under win2k (which is a good idea anyway) it even has "fairly" good security.
Regards
justification for region-locking
on
Sony vs Modchips
·
· Score: 1
I hear all these people complaining about a lack of justification for region-locking and the all-powerfulness of large companies such as Sony but they don't seem to realise that the region-locking is there to protect LOCAL companies/distributors, and most of these are small companies that couldn't compete if wholesale importers were able to step up to the plate, which they most definitely would if there was no lock-out!
There are also laws in each country regarding contents and ratings for consumer products - I'm sure people would be complaining the reverse if they'd heard that 100,000 teddy bears from "Gwonga-Longa" were imported *by-passing local laws* and discovered to have metal hooks that poke kids' eyes out.
America is really screwed up if we are to take your comment at face value - ie. You seem to make out that it's almost a matter of fact that someone is going to rampage with a gun.
To quote: "If the facility does NOT have the resources to spend on an armed response team" - the underlying mentality is scary...
Lucas did try and keep C3PO from meeting Obi-Wan as that would screw up C3PO's consistency in the original starwars where he quite plainly doesn't know who Obi-wan is. It was rather painful to watch this contrived avoidance though.
As for R2D2, C3PO does the translation and avoids stuff that seems "ridiculous", so R2D2 probably knows everything - god knows why they don't fix him up with a voice synthesizer.
Slashdot Mirror
The editor/word processor built-in to the Psion s3c and later pdas in the early nineties supported proportional font editing of code with indents preserved by treating tabs not as a series of spaces, but as physical locations like a word processor does.
Most programming language layout patterns only use tabs to indent up to the first character of text.
I use Slickedit with a proportional font and only in the rarest of cases does it cause a problem even without the physical tabbing the Psion had. Using a proportional font makes code so much more compact and easier to read.
Here in Japan, you can get an optical fibre terabit connection for about 50-60 bucks a month.
I've had an 8mbit ADSL for about 5 years now for 25 bucks a month, and if I pay an extra 2-3 bucks I can get 50Mbs or more. For another 10 bucks I can get a 100mb optical fibre connection too.
It's even cheaper in Korea apparently.
I-Tuna is just around the corner..
The consumer base is at the brink of the switch to HDTV and the PS3 has already started tipping people over. Mark my words, within 2 years there will be few modern households without a HDTV capable set.
Blu-ray, HDTV, PS3 all come hand-in-hand ushering the new era in - or at least that's the image Sony is cleverly managing to portray. I know a no. of people who are planning to get full-HD (1080p) TVs now and I want to trade in my 720p HDTV.
The naysayers are simply blinded to the way things are going. DVD is really crap with its letterboxed widescreen format that the dvd players or tvs have to scale up. After watching some blu-ray movies there is no going back.
I was at TGS yesterday, the overal look and feel of the good PS3 titles surpassed the good XBOX360 titles. (there are obviously crap titles on both platforms and they aren't worth comparison)
Someone compared Project Gotham 3 with Motor Storm, but Motor Storm's graphics yesterday were far superior and really had a CG movie feel to them.
In theory the XBOX GPU can beat the PS3 GPU for certain things, but people forget that those figures are based on the XBOX360's cpu bandwidth not being used for anything else. (um, like running a game)
This is because everything shares the same cache and bus on the XBOX360, even for textures.
The titles shown yesterday showed a lot of potential, but of course in a few months the 2nd generation of xbox 360 titles should start making an appearance, including Halo 3, and if the developers have gotten good at tweaking, the xbox360 should still be able to hold its own. It is going to have to fight a bit though.
1080p 60hz Ridge Raaacer was also very nice and using HDR in a nice subtle fashion (adjusting contrast as you enter and leave tunnels, etc).
> Work is not 'fun', it's not for 'play', it's certainly not a 'life'. It pays the bills, that's what it's for.
Woah, I really feel sorry for you!
Regardless of the hours issue, treating your job as just something that pays the bills is wasting those 40 hours a week and up to 20-30% of your entire life.
Put your heart into your job, make it fun and your quality of life will go up a lot more than simply restricting yourself to an exact 40 hour week and paying your bills with it.
You didn't play it for long enough.
The clearly superior sides change depending on the experience of the player. You just keep learning new tactics.
However, for the very experienced player the Toxin General is the strongest.
We've been playing Zero Hour non-stop every lunchtime at work for over 2 and a half years. That's the longest I've played *any* game daily.
We patched it ourselves to limit each side's money-generators to 10 black markets, 10 drop zones, and 40 hackers... otherwise in 3v3 games, one player can simply concentrating on building a stupendous amount of money generators whilst the others protect him, then he comes out from his den and wipes the entire map clean. (if the game doesn't crash)
ogg is much better than mp3, let's keep our chins high, besides, this ogg-supporting player is brilliant:
1 54/code-c/section-electronics/
http://us.yesasia.com/en/PrdDept.aspx/pid-1004060
Hey, thanks for writing the game that I have spent most time on in the past two years (we still play Zero Hour regularly and it's not looking like it will stop anytime soon - well, until CnC:2 comes out)
It didn't sell well in Japan for some reason (they didn't even produce a translated version of Zero Hour) but I have introduced it to a no. of Japanese people and they have become hooked.
I really don't see any indie games out there right now that are even up to 10% of cnc's overall quality.
yes it is a shame.. I spent a year and a half developing that and because they were dilly-dallying with real 3d roam-anywhere shooting it kind of changed the gameplay and they hadn't quite got 3d-roaming down yet (2 years before Mario 64). However Miyamoto told me recently that a lot of the 3d-roaming techniques we developed for starfox 2 were simply pulled into Mario 64. (in starfox 2 you "roamed" as a robot walker thing and it was primarily a 3d platformer on those levels)
Anyway, we should have simply expanded on the original Starfox theme of flying through set and perfectly crafted stages. Sometimes Nintendo doesn't get it right.. but when it all goes wrong it simply won't release a game. You have to respect that.
I was one of the main programmers on SNES Starfox so I can shed some light here.
There were 5 of us from Argonaut; 2 for the raw 3d FX-chip polygon engine back in England, and 3 for the 3d game engine at Nintendo in Japan.
Everything else was done by Nintendo; game planning, sound&music (which was absolutely brilliant IMHO, shame the guy left Nintendo afterwards), graphics and production.
Apart from (admittedly considerable) input from the 3 of us, the game's direction, design and development was controlled by Nintendo, Miyamoto-san and the rest of the Japanese team and Argonaut had nothing to do with it.
Sometimes it feels like being slartibartfast from HHGTTG and his fjords; I have loving memories of designing certain bosses, enemies or effects, but it was the team as a whole that was very strong and made the game what it was, including Miyamoto who I remember spent a lot of time working with Giles on the ship's controls.
I have to disagree,
we haven't been playing anything but Command and Conquer Generals for the past 2 or 3 months. And we haven't got the expansion pack yet. Its a hell of a lot of fun with 3-4 people on a LAN. (although the LAN lobby server code must have been written by a blind rabbit with its paws tied behind its back, its so flakey)
And before that it was BF1942, Road2Rome or DesertCombat or Eve of Destruction.
I think you're misjudging how much of a percentage Publishers take.
Development studios are in an *extremely* good contract if they can get 20%, but the average is less than that (actually its 10% for console games!). The publishers get 80% or more because they dish out the development cost upfront.
so 1 million copies at 40 bucks:
10 bucks a copy or more goes to the shop,
That leaves 30 million bucks, 25 million of which goes to the publisher and advertising and the remaining 5 million or so will make it to the developer who probably spent 3-4 million (royalty advances), for two years development of the game.
That only leaves 1 or 2 million profit, and of course the development staff are now looking for their nice fat bonusses because they made a MILLION seller! (a big deal in the gaming industry), 20-30 development staff x avg. pre-tax bonus of 20,000 dollars is half a million gone right there.
So you get left with up to a million bucks profit *if* you're lucky, less than one dollar of profit for each game that was sold. Of course, the investors or owners of the company want a slice of that so now its pretty much all gone and your back at the starting block all over again.
Bear in mind, that 1 million copies of a game is a example of a good seller, the *average* sales of any game is more like 100,000. (roughly 300,000 if sold worldwide)
So I suggest either that
1) publishers need to stop taking such ridiculous percentages, or
2) game prices should go up a few dollars with those dollars going directly to the developer.
aha.. that's who it was... it was ringing many bells and I was about to go searching through my collection.
It's from the album Supermodified (Amon Tobin) - an absolutely brilliant and a hardly known piece of work.
Err, you're saying very scary things. Think about it:
By your standards I can take out my gun and shoot someone for cutting me off with their car, hey, they took my liberty away.
The girl who felt a hand on her butt on the train, can turn around and blow the guy's head off? It might have been his suitcase simply brushing against her. It *might* have been leading to rape... or can she only use the gun when he's got her underwear off?
Sure, the girl being raped has a very traumatic experience, but she isn't *dead*. Should we just shrug laws and resort to being vigilantes? That would be just like the wild west... ah... I see the root of the problem now...
We're looking for anybody who's good at making games, mainly seriously good animators and programmers right now.
We're based in Kyoto, Japan and are both english and japanese speaking.
You can stream OGG via peercast and either oddcast/winamp or ices2 on linux.
The quality is brilliant, even for a 24kbps ogg stream!
I wonder when the Japanese/asian smileys which are better looking than the standard smiley came about, for those who haven't seen them, here're a few:
^o^ the laughing smiley
-_-; the upset smiley
^L^ the big nosed face smiley
-o- the yawning smiley
^^;;;; the sweating smiley
etc etc
yes, the problem with opensource sometimes is that it has the tendency to shoot itself in the foot. As far as I can tell Epson are being fairly honest about the whole thing, but in the meantime the *average* (read "non-slashdot-reader") consumer/user who doesn't give a sh*t about opensource thinks "oh, linux isn't supported very well, think I'll use windows where everything's safe"
Not intended as a flame, although I suppose some extreme advocates might take it that way, just an analysis of the immediate impact of this news.
As a disclaimer, I use lots of open-source products each day and they're great but its all voluntary as should be the choice to reveal source code or not. Some companies with proprietary techniques in some completely irrelevant part of the program who cannot release their source code end up having to re-write all the basic stuff because there was a "touch" of open-source in there. Its a very strange state of affairs, like a hippy camp run by the military.
There's always peercast, its looking really good recently, runs on windows and linux, supports Ogg Vorbis and has a ton of free radio stations out there, growing daily.
check it out, who needs all this paid subscriber rubbish.
Use Cygwin and the inetutils package. It gives you rlogin/ftp/ssh and a bunch of other stuff. You can even download apache for cygwin.
It all works great - and if you remove "Everyone" access from your entire hard disk under win2k (which is a good idea anyway) it even has "fairly" good security.
Regards
I hear all these people complaining about a lack of justification for region-locking and the all-powerfulness of large companies such as Sony but they don't seem to realise that the region-locking is there to protect LOCAL companies/distributors, and most of these are small companies that couldn't compete if wholesale importers were able to step up to the plate, which they most definitely would if there was no lock-out!
There are also laws in each country regarding contents and ratings for consumer products - I'm sure people would be complaining the reverse if they'd heard that 100,000 teddy bears from "Gwonga-Longa" were imported *by-passing local laws* and discovered to have metal hooks that poke kids' eyes out.
You can't have it both ways I'm afraid.
Wow..
Take a reality check!!
America is really screwed up if we are to take your comment at face value - ie. You seem to make out that it's almost a matter of fact that someone is going to rampage with a gun.
To quote: "If the facility does NOT have the resources to spend on an armed response team" - the underlying mentality is scary...
for that thought invoking last comment...
Lucas did try and keep C3PO from meeting Obi-Wan as that would screw up C3PO's consistency in the original starwars where he quite plainly doesn't know who Obi-wan is. It was rather painful to watch this contrived avoidance though.
As for R2D2, C3PO does the translation and avoids stuff that seems "ridiculous", so R2D2 probably knows everything - god knows why they don't fix him up with a voice synthesizer.
:-)