The only for sale magazine I read wrt games is Game Developer Magazine. Most of the other magazines bore me as they tend to have old news and clueless writers. Besides almost all of them have audio shows / podcasts anyways so I can just listen to them. Generally the inaccuracies in them are enough to quench my interest in picking them up in paper form.
Eg one of the shows (I think it was Hot Spot, produced by GameSpot / EGM IIRC.) didn't know what languages most games are coded in (C/C++). IMHO that's a bit like a sports commentator not knowing on what kind of surface hockey is played on.
Anyways, GDM has clue-ful people making interesting comments. They tend to have a couple of articles which focus on deconstructing game design (eg the "Post mortems", these are sometimes linked from Slashdot on the GDM sister-site Gamasutra) and a few on the state of game production. They also have reoccuring articles on the details of game making, such as the column on audio production and in depth algorithms.
Basically, GDM is the only game oriented magazine which I can put down feeling I have actually learned something. The other magazines I mostly feel like I've lost knowledge (or been filled with disinformation).
The only other game mag I read is the Scandinavian GameReactor. It's a free magazine and it has slightly less ads than most other magazines. I wouldn't trust the reviews blindly, but they seem to be pretty on the money compared to stuff I read online. And the price is right.
Casual gaming typically refer to the type of games people play. And hard-core gamers are a subset of casual gamers. Bejewelled, Minesweeper and those types of games are casual. Typically it's games that are easy and quick to understand and which have short "turns" (the interval until you press "New game".) I'd say most of the old games (Pac-man, Frogger etc) were in most aspects casual.
I think you completely miss the point wrt to your argument about how hard-core gamers also like those (or similar) games. That's the entire point! Not only does casual games attract the people that usually don't play, but it also attracts the hard-core audience.
Combine that with simpler games (faster and cheaper to make) and you have a winning concept.
Casual games is typically used for games like Bejewelled, Solitare, Hearts and similar games. If you have a top of the line computer it doesn't seem likely that you'd fall into that catergory. Though you may of course play those games as well. In some ways hard-core gamers is more of a sub-set of casual gamers and a complete different set.
However, the main difference is that I was talking about DRM from the producers pow and you are talking about it from the consumers point of view. Naturally shoplifting is independant of copyright. It has to do with material goods, copyright OTOH conserns itself with immaterial rights.
Personally I'd argue that without copyright (and the copyright/intellectual property thinking that goes with it) we wouldn't have DRM. The would be no point. You could also argue that DRM is not so much a technical implementation of copyright (only some or parts of DRM systems specifically try to limit copying of a work) but that it aimed to extend the limitations imposed by copyright.
Personally I wouldn't say that Sony et al are using DRM wrt releasing games on consoles. All that is mainly about them wanting money from developers for making games for their platforms. They are using systems similar to DRM (encryption, signing) but so are programs like PGP/GPG and I wouldn't call them DRM.
You are absolutely right when you write that DRM is a tool used to control distribution though. I just don't agree with how you tie it into game development.
And for the record, I work with DRM. Hence my "producers view" of things. (Hopefully noone reads this thread anymore, otherwise I'll get a lot of Foes.;-)
If the adventure is going to make a comeback it is going to be in the form of the old adventure. Just the adventure and nothing but the adventure. If you look at the small successes that is exactly what happened.
Well, personally I think that adventure games have a great chance at a comeback now.
Everyone talks about how the new thing is all of the "non-gamer" gamers. The people that play Bejewelled and such. It seems to me that those people could be perfect for playing adventure games. And particularly adventure games like the old LucasArts games.
For me the most important part of those games where always that you could never get truly stuck (get in an impossible to solve situation), you could never die and it was funny. That ment you had a lot of freedom with exloring the humour in the game.
However I think that adventure games "died" when they did mostly because many moved on to new and shinier things. And not only gamers but mostly publishers and game studios.
It would seem to me like many adventure games could be great for online episodic play as well as on handheld systems. And with humour and puzzles I think you'll have an easier time to attract audiences which don't consider themselves to be gamers (yet).
But, isn't "internet cafes" or "game cafes" what has taken the place of arcade halls? I know that in my city (Malmö, Sweden) there are a handful of places that have arcade games. (Most of them 10+ years old and no-one plays them.) But there are dozens of game cafes where you rent a computer for an hour or two and play online.
They typically cost less than $10 an hour too, and you don't have to quite just 'cause you got shot. Seems like if arcade halls want to compete that's what they have to aim for.
Also why is it that all new arcade racers look like crap? I mean, I have not seen an arcade racing game which made me go "ohhh" in the last 10 years. It seems like putting a high end PC in a box with a big screen is more value for the money than a normal crappy arcade machine.
Eg, regarding racing games. You could have made a game like Project Gotham Racing 3 for quite a while if you targetted a high end PC. Put that and a stupid big screen in an arcade and I bet you have a winner.
And as another poster said, serve food/snacks and beer as well. Don't only target the 10 year olds, target companies (for off work activities) and bored people in their 20-30'ies.
In conclusion: Arcades are dead because they deserved to die. They haven't innovated in 10 years and today you can play games on your portable console that look as good as what you play in the arcade.
If the "rights" claimed by DRM is correct or not is besides the point. The point of DRM is to give the copyright owner more control than they usually have.
The number of particles in the Universe is estimated at around 10^89 (high estimates). This is about 2^270 (I can't be bothered to calculate the correct number).
That should put 2^128 in perspective when it comes to adressing. Also see the posts about how much energy it would take to store this amount of data.
Really there comes a time when "... enough for anyone" really is enough for anyone. Unless you're building Deep Though or similar computers.
No, that is not DRM. DRM is short for "Digital Rights Management", the "rights" mentioned is "copy right". The point of DRM is to ensure that you can't use material you have bought in ways the copy right owner doesn't want you to.
Now you could extend DRM to mean "run unauthorized programs" but that's not really the norm. That's what "trusted computing" and all that crap is about.
Personally I don't like the "feel your body" type mediation exercises.
Two that work better for me is to either breathe slowly and count down from 100 with each breath. Try to only think of the number you are on, if you get distracted start from 100 again.
The second (and my favourite) is to concentrate on your breathing. Try to breath in - hold your breath - and breath out, while doing this try to meke each of the three steps take the same amount of time. (So count in your head.) This really helps me focus on not thinking about anything else and can work great for calming down.
I typically use that (or similar breath in - breath out) exercises if I get annoyed by something stupid in every day life. Such as getting stuck in the slowest queue at the supermarket.
Do you know of any way of putting traces from a debugger back into the source browser?
For me the holy grail would be to have a system similar to Doxygen which would allow me to "load" a trace from a debug session and use that to step around in the code.
Probably the most important "feature" you get with a (D)SLR is changeable lenses.
The reason being that the different lenses will give you a lot more power to alter the results than any other settings on your camera. (Eg get an extremely wide angle lens, or a super tele, or a prime with extreme low light capability.)
I'm sure your camera is good though, high end P&S cameras typically are good enough for most people.
Of course, the police in Sweden have been caught lying and faking evidence before, such as when covering their backs after shooting someone (who was unarmed) in Gothernburg during a demonstration there a few years back.
The only person I know that was shot during those demonstrations survived. (But that's really a reply to the other replies here.)
The guy shot was throwing cobble stones at the police. (Though he wasn't even close of hitting them.) Not that this justifies the shooting or the forgery of evidence.
It was brought up on quite a lot of news during the time though. I'm not sure what happened with the officer but I wouldn't be surprised if he was "let go".
In my experience (I've dabbled with both GP-GPU and custom FPGA chips) FPGAs don't always come out on top. There certainly are things for which FPGAs are better, but there are also things for which GPUs are better.
If for no other reason than that you can get a working GP-GPU program running in a day or two. Designing hardware (even on FPGA) typically takes months.
I believe the cost of the console in Eu is going to be a lot higher than $600. In UK it's supposed to be $800+ as Sweden tend to follow UK prices quite well. (Or be slightly higher still.)
Re:Pasting for the PS3 because it invents not copi
on
How the PS3 Hit $600
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· Score: 3, Informative
3) HD-DVD doesn't have region coding
They do now.http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060526- 6927.html
I remember that there was quite a lot of talk about the paper back then (I was studying in Lund at the time). But personally I never managed to get hold of it at the time. If you know how to get it (the link is only to the abstract and basic info as far as I can tell) please let me (us) know.
Basically he went from describing "component based design" (some spinnoff of object oriented) and then went into how this could be used to create more realistic virtual worlds. He then continued into the virtual world and started asking if we would want something like that and what is computing really about.
Basically he went so off topic he couldn't even see the topic from the end. Be he gets a big bonus for the title "Shadows of Cavernous Shades: Charting the Chiaroscuro of Realistic Computing". It's quite a little poem.
The DRM scheme in OMA DRM1.0 is pretty basic. Basically it would mean that this patent holder has put a patent on the process of "encrypting content and then giving away the key". I'd say that's pretty damned bogus.
I haven't heard anything else about this patent dispute (and it's over a year old) so I don't know what happened with it. (And I work in the business, fortunately not with the legal parts though.) To me it just seems like the standard "Ha ha, now you have to pay us." crap that pantent lawyers call "All in a days work".
I can say that I sometimes feel dirty for working with DRM. But I comfort myself with the knowledge that at least I'm not a litigious patent lawyer.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course the PSP has that feature too. Although you have to give the power button a quick flick in that case instead.
It's very practical though.
Not quite all. Eg Handelsbanken uses certificates instead and is thus safe from MITM attacks.
The only for sale magazine I read wrt games is Game Developer Magazine. Most of the other magazines bore me as they tend to have old news and clueless writers. Besides almost all of them have audio shows / podcasts anyways so I can just listen to them. Generally the inaccuracies in them are enough to quench my interest in picking them up in paper form.
Eg one of the shows (I think it was Hot Spot, produced by GameSpot / EGM IIRC.) didn't know what languages most games are coded in (C/C++). IMHO that's a bit like a sports commentator not knowing on what kind of surface hockey is played on.
Anyways, GDM has clue-ful people making interesting comments. They tend to have a couple of articles which focus on deconstructing game design (eg the "Post mortems", these are sometimes linked from Slashdot on the GDM sister-site Gamasutra) and a few on the state of game production. They also have reoccuring articles on the details of game making, such as the column on audio production and in depth algorithms.
Basically, GDM is the only game oriented magazine which I can put down feeling I have actually learned something. The other magazines I mostly feel like I've lost knowledge (or been filled with disinformation).
The only other game mag I read is the Scandinavian GameReactor. It's a free magazine and it has slightly less ads than most other magazines. I wouldn't trust the reviews blindly, but they seem to be pretty on the money compared to stuff I read online. And the price is right.
Casual gaming typically refer to the type of games people play. And hard-core gamers are a subset of casual gamers. Bejewelled, Minesweeper and those types of games are casual. Typically it's games that are easy and quick to understand and which have short "turns" (the interval until you press "New game".) I'd say most of the old games (Pac-man, Frogger etc) were in most aspects casual.
I think you completely miss the point wrt to your argument about how hard-core gamers also like those (or similar) games. That's the entire point! Not only does casual games attract the people that usually don't play, but it also attracts the hard-core audience.
Combine that with simpler games (faster and cheaper to make) and you have a winning concept.
Casual games is typically used for games like Bejewelled, Solitare, Hearts and similar games. If you have a top of the line computer it doesn't seem likely that you'd fall into that catergory. Though you may of course play those games as well. In some ways hard-core gamers is more of a sub-set of casual gamers and a complete different set.
World of Warcraft is not a casual game.
But other than that I agree that there are more casual gamers than hard-core gamers.
Ok I see what you're saying now.
;-)
However, the main difference is that I was talking about DRM from the producers pow and you are talking about it from the consumers point of view. Naturally shoplifting is independant of copyright. It has to do with material goods, copyright OTOH conserns itself with immaterial rights.
Personally I'd argue that without copyright (and the copyright/intellectual property thinking that goes with it) we wouldn't have DRM. The would be no point. You could also argue that DRM is not so much a technical implementation of copyright (only some or parts of DRM systems specifically try to limit copying of a work) but that it aimed to extend the limitations imposed by copyright.
Personally I wouldn't say that Sony et al are using DRM wrt releasing games on consoles. All that is mainly about them wanting money from developers for making games for their platforms. They are using systems similar to DRM (encryption, signing) but so are programs like PGP/GPG and I wouldn't call them DRM.
You are absolutely right when you write that DRM is a tool used to control distribution though. I just don't agree with how you tie it into game development.
And for the record, I work with DRM. Hence my "producers view" of things. (Hopefully noone reads this thread anymore, otherwise I'll get a lot of Foes.
Well, personally I think that adventure games have a great chance at a comeback now.
Everyone talks about how the new thing is all of the "non-gamer" gamers. The people that play Bejewelled and such. It seems to me that those people could be perfect for playing adventure games. And particularly adventure games like the old LucasArts games.
For me the most important part of those games where always that you could never get truly stuck (get in an impossible to solve situation), you could never die and it was funny. That ment you had a lot of freedom with exloring the humour in the game.
However I think that adventure games "died" when they did mostly because many moved on to new and shinier things. And not only gamers but mostly publishers and game studios.
It would seem to me like many adventure games could be great for online episodic play as well as on handheld systems. And with humour and puzzles I think you'll have an easier time to attract audiences which don't consider themselves to be gamers (yet).
But, isn't "internet cafes" or "game cafes" what has taken the place of arcade halls? I know that in my city (Malmö, Sweden) there are a handful of places that have arcade games. (Most of them 10+ years old and no-one plays them.) But there are dozens of game cafes where you rent a computer for an hour or two and play online.
They typically cost less than $10 an hour too, and you don't have to quite just 'cause you got shot. Seems like if arcade halls want to compete that's what they have to aim for.
Also why is it that all new arcade racers look like crap? I mean, I have not seen an arcade racing game which made me go "ohhh" in the last 10 years. It seems like putting a high end PC in a box with a big screen is more value for the money than a normal crappy arcade machine.
Eg, regarding racing games. You could have made a game like Project Gotham Racing 3 for quite a while if you targetted a high end PC. Put that and a stupid big screen in an arcade and I bet you have a winner.
And as another poster said, serve food/snacks and beer as well. Don't only target the 10 year olds, target companies (for off work activities) and bored people in their 20-30'ies.
In conclusion: Arcades are dead because they deserved to die. They haven't innovated in 10 years and today you can play games on your portable console that look as good as what you play in the arcade.
If the "rights" claimed by DRM is correct or not is besides the point. The point of DRM is to give the copyright owner more control than they usually have.
No.
Some (Stallman) call it "Restriction Management" but those people are the minority.
The number of particles in the Universe is estimated at around 10^89 (high estimates). This is about 2^270 (I can't be bothered to calculate the correct number).
That should put 2^128 in perspective when it comes to adressing. Also see the posts about how much energy it would take to store this amount of data.
Really there comes a time when "... enough for anyone" really is enough for anyone. Unless you're building Deep Though or similar computers.
No, that is not DRM. DRM is short for "Digital Rights Management", the "rights" mentioned is "copy right". The point of DRM is to ensure that you can't use material you have bought in ways the copy right owner doesn't want you to.
Now you could extend DRM to mean "run unauthorized programs" but that's not really the norm. That's what "trusted computing" and all that crap is about.
Battlestar Galactica did that as well. (Or more accurately, the director did.)
But I never heard of the Scrubs commentaries before, thanks for the link!
Personally I don't like the "feel your body" type mediation exercises.
Two that work better for me is to either breathe slowly and count down from 100 with each breath. Try to only think of the number you are on, if you get distracted start from 100 again.
The second (and my favourite) is to concentrate on your breathing. Try to breath in - hold your breath - and breath out, while doing this try to meke each of the three steps take the same amount of time. (So count in your head.) This really helps me focus on not thinking about anything else and can work great for calming down.
I typically use that (or similar breath in - breath out) exercises if I get annoyed by something stupid in every day life. Such as getting stuck in the slowest queue at the supermarket.
Do you know of any way of putting traces from a debugger back into the source browser?
For me the holy grail would be to have a system similar to Doxygen which would allow me to "load" a trace from a debug session and use that to step around in the code.
The RebelXT is a good entry level dSLR but it's not in the same class as the EOS-5.
Probably the best match would be a Canon 5D, but even a 20/30D would make a good alternative. In any case those are not all that cheap.
Probably the most important "feature" you get with a (D)SLR is changeable lenses.
The reason being that the different lenses will give you a lot more power to alter the results than any other settings on your camera. (Eg get an extremely wide angle lens, or a super tele, or a prime with extreme low light capability.)
I'm sure your camera is good though, high end P&S cameras typically are good enough for most people.
The only person I know that was shot during those demonstrations survived. (But that's really a reply to the other replies here.)
The guy shot was throwing cobble stones at the police. (Though he wasn't even close of hitting them.) Not that this justifies the shooting or the forgery of evidence.
It was brought up on quite a lot of news during the time though. I'm not sure what happened with the officer but I wouldn't be surprised if he was "let go".
In my experience (I've dabbled with both GP-GPU and custom FPGA chips) FPGAs don't always come out on top. There certainly are things for which FPGAs are better, but there are also things for which GPUs are better.
If for no other reason than that you can get a working GP-GPU program running in a day or two. Designing hardware (even on FPGA) typically takes months.
I believe the cost of the console in Eu is going to be a lot higher than $600. In UK it's supposed to be $800+ as Sweden tend to follow UK prices quite well. (Or be slightly higher still.)
They do now.http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060526
I remember that there was quite a lot of talk about the paper back then (I was studying in Lund at the time). But personally I never managed to get hold of it at the time. If you know how to get it (the link is only to the abstract and basic info as far as I can tell) please let me (us) know.
Basically he went from describing "component based design" (some spinnoff of object oriented) and then went into how this could be used to create more realistic virtual worlds. He then continued into the virtual world and started asking if we would want something like that and what is computing really about.
Basically he went so off topic he couldn't even see the topic from the end. Be he gets a big bonus for the title "Shadows of Cavernous Shades: Charting the Chiaroscuro of Realistic Computing". It's quite a little poem.
According to Amazon.co.uk a X360 (non-core) costs £279.99, which is about $525 (it's probably a bit less though).
Naturally nothing has been officially said about the price on the Wii yet.
The DRM scheme in OMA DRM1.0 is pretty basic. Basically it would mean that this patent holder has put a patent on the process of "encrypting content and then giving away the key". I'd say that's pretty damned bogus.
I haven't heard anything else about this patent dispute (and it's over a year old) so I don't know what happened with it. (And I work in the business, fortunately not with the legal parts though.) To me it just seems like the standard "Ha ha, now you have to pay us." crap that pantent lawyers call "All in a days work".
I can say that I sometimes feel dirty for working with DRM. But I comfort myself with the knowledge that at least I'm not a litigious patent lawyer.