I don't see anything like that listed at the BBC open source website, so maybe they decided to contribute to an existing project instead
http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/
Do you really have your heart set on keeping the same container format, or would you be satisfied with an editing process that imports the audio and video without an extra re-encoding step (to preserve data quality)?
I ask because AVCHD is *not* an extra codec, but merely a different container for H.264 video and ac3 (or rarely, uncompressed pcm) audio. You would be able to import and edit it in free video editors such as OpenShot, since ffmpeg can demux AVCHD files. After editing you'd need to export to some other format since ffmpeg doesn't create AVCHD files, but then again exporting videos to a format that more things than camcorders and expensive proprietary editors can play seems like a good idea in general;)
of all the extended goal possibilities in the poll, which do you seriously believe would go toward bringing in new backers? More missions than before? More NPCs? I suspect that the lion's share of backers who would be swayed by those (and the "improved FPS mode"...) have already pledged.
That's me! I'm only going to pledge if there are at least 20 more NPCs! I don't know how many there are now, but there must be more!!!
J/K. In this household we're holding out for Linux support, and strongly hope for Mac for the sake of a couple other friends. The windows gamers in our group are also not likely to pledge without platform support, because they are busy engineers who nowadays mostly just play online games with our group.
A sensible policy! Supposing your non-Windows OS is either Linux or Mac OS, are you interested in increasing the number of titles available by having another big game engine support it? Or is CryENGINE just not your style (it is rather different than DF after all).
Those are all legitimate opinions. It looked like you might be arguing with the original post, but I guess you're not. Regardless of whether Star Citizen is an awesome game like original Wing Commander (as some of us hope), the side-effect of having a sweet game engine be ported to non-windows desktops could be enough for some Linux/Mac gamers to pledge some money to the project (those who don't dual-boot and who are fortunate to have some discretionary money to throw around).
"could turn out to be the high-profile game that brings a AAA game engine to the growing Mac and Linux gaming communities"
Is he trying to make out CryEngine 3 will be the first AAA game engine on Mac and Linux? I guess the Quake, ID Tech, Unreal and Source (been on Mac for a while, Linux is in Beta now) engines done count?
No, the point is that this game could bring *another* AAA game engine to Mac and Linux, namely CryENGINE. There was no mention of the word "first", but some of us are still excited at the prospect of another former Windows** gaming stronghold going cross-platform. It is not a frequent event that this happens, but your examples are all good ones as well!
** yes I know CryENGINE runs on consoles and android too, I'm discussing PC platforms here
I don't think there was - he chose an engne to work on the platform everyone makes games for - Windows. then he adds the poll option "d'ya want it on Linux?" and 21% of responders have said "yes".
That does mean 79% think other factors are more important.
From the Star Citizen FAQ on kickstarter:
Star Citizen is a PC game through and through and could never be played on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 or WiiU. We currently plan to support Windows and are examining our options regarding possible Linux and Macintosh releases. The Cloud Imperium team includes many Linux and Macintosh fans!
Even with some core team members who are Linux and Mac fans, they picked the engine they thought would make the game most outstanding on Windows, since that's their only mandatory platform to be successful on a large scale. However, if there proves to be enough interest in the game on other PC platforms, then they have good business reasons to invest some of the additional money to extend their market to these new groups, and boost team morale as a bonus. How many Windows gamers are going to say "well this would have been an *excellent* game worthy of purchase if only there were a few more ship classes but with merely 5... forget it (no way am I going to wait for an expansion)"? Whereas it appears that they will add a significant amount of presales by helping sponsor full OpenGL support for CryENGINE -- the Linux category alone is bouncing between 21% and 23% of votes, and the Mac category is probably not entirely overlapping. The main question now is how much Crytek would charge for the porting effort; ideally they will not be too unreasonable, since adding more platforms should make their engine even more competitive.
Being on slashdot frontpage is a decent first step to letting Linux gamers know about the existence and possible relevance of Star Citizen; my guess is a lot of us read slashdot (I have for many years, though only recently converted from anonymous coward)
Stepping aside from whether there is significant reason to be skeptical about the success Star Citizen itself... the OP claim was that the *game engine* is AAA class. Are you going to dispute that CryENGINE 3 is not being used for AAA titles? How about the first two Crysis games which have each sold in the millions? I suspect some of the other stuff currently in development will also qualify as AAA titles.
I learned Linux during grad school, with a little help from lab-mates but mostly by reading online stuff and trying things out. It is incredibly more fun to fix and explore Linux systems than it is to write conference papers or a thesis! I also got nominated as sys admin for the lab after the previous guy quit school to join a dot com, and learned a great lesson on security: script kiddies break into computers that have no valuable information on them (Why would anybody bother breaking into this computer? Oh, it's been subverted into a tool for sniffing passwords to accounts that might actually be interesting... password sniffing on uni networks preceded the current age of bot nets where zombie computers became a business commodity in themselves for DDoS and such)
While in grad school I helped start a LUG, which has been a great source of contacts for my eventual career as Linux consultant. Both key colleagues and clients have been met through the LUG. Most of the contracts my company has now are directly or indirectly (as in initial person was met due to LUG, then introduced us to future clients) related to the LUG. One contract opportunity initially came via a recommendation by my dad who was working at the company as a programmer, but even then being an officer in a LUG lent more credibility to claims that I was a Linux expert.
Note that although the LUG has been great for my career, that's certainly not the reason I participate. I picked both the career and the LUG because I love Linux, and it sounds like you've got that enthusiasm to help out as well.
Read it over 20 years ago in a sci-fi anthology, no idea who the author was or the overall title of the short story collection.
It began with an agent being sent out to deal with a new street drug that turned people permanently catatonic as its withdrawal symptom. Of course the agent ended up being drugged with a dose of this stuff by the bad guys. At first he thought he'd survived it... until at the end of his life, he woke up from the hallucination. And lived a whole other life. And then woke up... and lived another... and woke up....
So by the time the drug really wore off, he'd lived so many different lives in his head, he was in a mode where he didn't believe anything anymore and was totally non-responsive and catatonic like all the other victims.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't see anything like that listed at the BBC open source website, so maybe they decided to contribute to an existing project instead
http://www.bbc.co.uk/opensource/
Do you really have your heart set on keeping the same container format, or would you be satisfied with an editing process that imports the audio and video without an extra re-encoding step (to preserve data quality)? I ask because AVCHD is *not* an extra codec, but merely a different container for H.264 video and ac3 (or rarely, uncompressed pcm) audio. You would be able to import and edit it in free video editors such as OpenShot, since ffmpeg can demux AVCHD files. After editing you'd need to export to some other format since ffmpeg doesn't create AVCHD files, but then again exporting videos to a format that more things than camcorders and expensive proprietary editors can play seems like a good idea in general ;)
of all the extended goal possibilities in the poll, which do you seriously believe would go toward bringing in new backers? More missions than before? More NPCs? I suspect that the lion's share of backers who would be swayed by those (and the "improved FPS mode"...) have already pledged.
That's me! I'm only going to pledge if there are at least 20 more NPCs! I don't know how many there are now, but there must be more!!!
J/K. In this household we're holding out for Linux support, and strongly hope for Mac for the sake of a couple other friends. The windows gamers in our group are also not likely to pledge without platform support, because they are busy engineers who nowadays mostly just play online games with our group.
A sensible policy! Supposing your non-Windows OS is either Linux or Mac OS, are you interested in increasing the number of titles available by having another big game engine support it? Or is CryENGINE just not your style (it is rather different than DF after all).
Those are all legitimate opinions. It looked like you might be arguing with the original post, but I guess you're not. Regardless of whether Star Citizen is an awesome game like original Wing Commander (as some of us hope), the side-effect of having a sweet game engine be ported to non-windows desktops could be enough for some Linux/Mac gamers to pledge some money to the project (those who don't dual-boot and who are fortunate to have some discretionary money to throw around).
"could turn out to be the high-profile game that brings a AAA game engine to the growing Mac and Linux gaming communities" Is he trying to make out CryEngine 3 will be the first AAA game engine on Mac and Linux? I guess the Quake, ID Tech, Unreal and Source (been on Mac for a while, Linux is in Beta now) engines done count?
No, the point is that this game could bring *another* AAA game engine to Mac and Linux, namely CryENGINE. There was no mention of the word "first", but some of us are still excited at the prospect of another former Windows** gaming stronghold going cross-platform. It is not a frequent event that this happens, but your examples are all good ones as well!
** yes I know CryENGINE runs on consoles and android too, I'm discussing PC platforms here
I don't think there was - he chose an engne to work on the platform everyone makes games for - Windows. then he adds the poll option "d'ya want it on Linux?" and 21% of responders have said "yes".
That does mean 79% think other factors are more important.
From the Star Citizen FAQ on kickstarter:
Star Citizen is a PC game through and through and could never be played on the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 or WiiU. We currently plan to support Windows and are examining our options regarding possible Linux and Macintosh releases. The Cloud Imperium team includes many Linux and Macintosh fans!
Even with some core team members who are Linux and Mac fans, they picked the engine they thought would make the game most outstanding on Windows, since that's their only mandatory platform to be successful on a large scale. However, if there proves to be enough interest in the game on other PC platforms, then they have good business reasons to invest some of the additional money to extend their market to these new groups, and boost team morale as a bonus. How many Windows gamers are going to say "well this would have been an *excellent* game worthy of purchase if only there were a few more ship classes but with merely 5... forget it (no way am I going to wait for an expansion)"? Whereas it appears that they will add a significant amount of presales by helping sponsor full OpenGL support for CryENGINE -- the Linux category alone is bouncing between 21% and 23% of votes, and the Mac category is probably not entirely overlapping. The main question now is how much Crytek would charge for the porting effort; ideally they will not be too unreasonable, since adding more platforms should make their engine even more competitive.
Being on slashdot frontpage is a decent first step to letting Linux gamers know about the existence and possible relevance of Star Citizen; my guess is a lot of us read slashdot (I have for many years, though only recently converted from anonymous coward)
Stepping aside from whether there is significant reason to be skeptical about the success Star Citizen itself... the OP claim was that the *game engine* is AAA class. Are you going to dispute that CryENGINE 3 is not being used for AAA titles? How about the first two Crysis games which have each sold in the millions? I suspect some of the other stuff currently in development will also qualify as AAA titles.
I learned Linux during grad school, with a little help from lab-mates but mostly by reading online stuff and trying things out. It is incredibly more fun to fix and explore Linux systems than it is to write conference papers or a thesis! I also got nominated as sys admin for the lab after the previous guy quit school to join a dot com, and learned a great lesson on security: script kiddies break into computers that have no valuable information on them (Why would anybody bother breaking into this computer? Oh, it's been subverted into a tool for sniffing passwords to accounts that might actually be interesting... password sniffing on uni networks preceded the current age of bot nets where zombie computers became a business commodity in themselves for DDoS and such)
While in grad school I helped start a LUG, which has been a great source of contacts for my eventual career as Linux consultant. Both key colleagues and clients have been met through the LUG. Most of the contracts my company has now are directly or indirectly (as in initial person was met due to LUG, then introduced us to future clients) related to the LUG. One contract opportunity initially came via a recommendation by my dad who was working at the company as a programmer, but even then being an officer in a LUG lent more credibility to claims that I was a Linux expert.
Note that although the LUG has been great for my career, that's certainly not the reason I participate. I picked both the career and the LUG because I love Linux, and it sounds like you've got that enthusiasm to help out as well.
Read it over 20 years ago in a sci-fi anthology, no idea who the author was or the overall title of the short story collection.
It began with an agent being sent out to deal with a new street drug that turned people permanently catatonic as its withdrawal symptom. Of course the agent ended up being drugged with a dose of this stuff by the bad guys. At first he thought he'd survived it... until at the end of his life, he woke up from the hallucination. And lived a whole other life. And then woke up... and lived another... and woke up....
So by the time the drug really wore off, he'd lived so many different lives in his head, he was in a mode where he didn't believe anything anymore and was totally non-responsive and catatonic like all the other victims.