Yes, spending more time on a game can make it better, but most often it doesn't. One of the biggest parts of game programming is optimizing and unless you design a very scale-able engine, a large amount of the optimizing is based on the hardware that you have to work with now. That means that anything that you wrote more than a year ago needs to be retweeked to run well. The fact of the matter is, It really doesn't look like Daikatana is going to have a new kick-ass engine like unreal was; it's main feature is billed to be the game play, and was going to have a average engine. However this was what was concidered average when they started working on the game and would be considered sucky by today's standard.
What i'm saying is that unless what you are building is an engine, than drawing out the development time will only lead to you having to do more work to keep the game up to speed, and will almost always produce a game with "last year's" technology and it won't hold up against the compitition unless the gameplay is simply amazing.
The best portrayal of a hacker ive ever seen in a movie has got to be r2-d2 in starwars. We didn't know or understand exactly what he was doing and we didn't need to. We just knew that if he didn't get that door open soon they were all going to be banta fodder. Hollywood should learn from this. It is impossible to make a realistic movie about hacking that is interesting to the general public, because the act of hacking isn't interesting to the public in general. Even to hackers watching someone hack is boring, just the readers digest condesed version of how they finaly got things to work is cool.
However, the implications of hacking are of interest to the general public. For this reason I think it would be possible to do a realistic hacking seen with in a movie. The purpose of probably any hacking seen would be to add tension most likely because of the time constraintes required to do the job. To make this effective you need to have a cool atmosphere for the hacker to be working in both the setting and music. He sits down at the console and begins typing. nonhacker friend: what are you doing? h: I'm checking his web scipts for syscalls. nhf: what? h: shut up and let me concentrate. Text flys. Inevitable doom progesses. Hacker curses. nhf: whats wrong? nothing. doom gets closer. snickers text flys. done. just as doom starts to wrapp his grimy fingers around their necks.
Or for those harder, more time consuming hacks show our fearless hacker working all night pouring though volumes of code. Most of the effect will come from her expression and body language. Intense at first. last bit of cold pizza gone. frustration. a glimmer of hope. disapointment. brew another pot. exaustion. still grinds on. clock ticks on. one last idea. then as light peeks though the window, the answer is found, the task is done. An answer that is meaningful to the audiance.
In short the big mistake that hollywood makes in hacker seens is it trys to turn them into something that the public understands, but if that were the the case then everyone could be a hacker. So the act of hacking in the movie comes out as beeing very cheezy and simplistic. But the public does *not* need to understand what the hacker is doing to make the scene effective. And the mystic will add even more to a movie than a gui hack will.
well thats my two bits that know one will ever see because i posted too late.
I started using dvorak a while back and ive been noticing that some of my typing mistakes (like swapping r,c or o,a) have started to show up in my writing, while others, that I had before dvorak have disapeared. The way your brain works sure is strange.
Our civilization has the history of swinging from one extreme to the other. The majority opresses the minority until they have the strengh to rebel and gain power. But then rather than learning from the past the new majority starts persecuting the new minority. This cycle has been going on since the dawn of time and can still be seen in goary detail in yugoslavia.
Our country is an attemt to change that. It is not perfect, but it is not bad. Please don't ruin everything that people have done to improve the balence of power in our country by advocating mindless anarchy.
Instead we should learn from those that have and continue to make a different like the black and woman rights advocists. It is a long hard road to change but it is *real* change. Not a role swap.
If we have the power to make a difference, like you say we do, then we should use it to fix the system not destroy it.
Our civilization has the history of swinging from one extreme to the other. The majority opresses the minority until they have the strengh to rebel and gain power. But then rather than learning from the past the new majority starts persecuting the new minority. This cycle has been going on since the dawn of time and can still be seen in goary detail in yugoslavia.
Our country is an attemt to change that. It is not perfect, but it is not bad. Please don't ruin everything that people have done to improve the balence of power in our country by advocating mindless anarchy.
Instead we should learn from those that have and continue to make a different like the black and woman rights advocists. It is a long hard road to change but it is *real* change. Not a role swap.
If we have the power to make a difference, like you say we do, then we should use it to fix the system not destroy it.
kmactane is right, this is the only thing that will get people to change their minds. Their attention is on us, we make the next move. If we act hostile, they will continue to belive that we are all potential killers. If we slip into the background everyone will forget about the problem and things will continue to be the same. However, if we show them that we are good people and that we are treated unjustly they will listen to us and then we can start to make a change.
I too was in this position in high school and strongly agree that something need to be done to change this. But right now there is a huge barier in the way; People are scared of us. What can we expect, they don't understand us and a member of our group just brutily massecured 13 children.
In order to fix this problem we need to show*them something different. I stress show, not tell. Get together as a group and volenteer to visit elderly, read to chidren, clean up a park, or something less corny that i cant thing of now:) Don't be hostile, acting the same way they do to us will only add to the stereotype they have put on us.
If we force them to look past our appearance they will see that we really are human.
but we are doing it so no-one else will have to again. That is where he completely misses the point. The current system of software development forces us to reinvent the wheel. Work done can only be reused and fixed to the extent that the original author allows. If we were allowed to fix and improve current software then linux would indeed be waste of time. But we can't and in the long run linux and open software will greatly reduce the amount of wasted time and effort that the author is so worried about. Linux is the solution, not the problem!
hi, What type of software was used for these profesional projects? I heard they had renderman running on the freeBSD boxes. What did they use for the modeling? SGI stuff?
Here's my estimate of how many people will ditch work on the 19 to see star wars.
Take the number of screens its going to be showing on during workhours, multiplied times the average number of seats in a theater. Subtract 80% of the number of people that dont have jobs. The rest will be workers, plus some that skipped work hoping that they could get some last minute tickets.
Why would anyone compare the number of people watching star wars with something like the lost world? Even thogth alot of people are going to wait until evening or a couple days after, there will definately be enough fanatics to pack the theaters.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, spending more time on a game can make it better, but most often it doesn't. One of the biggest parts of game programming is optimizing and unless you design a very scale-able engine, a large amount of the optimizing is based on the hardware that you have to work with now. That means that anything that you wrote more than a year ago needs to be retweeked to run well. The fact of the matter is, It really doesn't look like Daikatana is going to have a new kick-ass engine like unreal was; it's main feature is billed to be the game play, and was going to have a average engine. However this was what was concidered average when they started working on the game and would be considered sucky by today's standard.
What i'm saying is that unless what you are building is an engine, than drawing out the development time will only lead to you having to do more work to keep the game up to speed, and will almost always produce a game with "last year's" technology and it won't hold up against the compitition unless the gameplay is simply amazing.
The best portrayal of a hacker ive ever seen in a movie has got to be r2-d2 in starwars. We didn't know or understand exactly what he was doing and we didn't need to. We just knew that if he didn't get that door open soon they were all going to be banta fodder.
Hollywood should learn from this. It is impossible to make a realistic movie about hacking that is interesting to the general public, because the act of hacking isn't interesting to the public in general. Even to hackers watching someone hack is boring, just the readers digest condesed version of how they finaly got things to work is cool.
However, the implications of hacking are of interest to the general public. For this reason I think it would be possible to do a realistic hacking seen with in a movie. The purpose of probably any hacking seen would be to add tension most likely because of the time constraintes required to do the job. To make this effective you need to have a cool atmosphere for the hacker to be working in both the setting and music. He sits down at the console and begins typing. nonhacker friend: what are you doing? h: I'm checking his web scipts for syscalls. nhf: what? h: shut up and let me concentrate. Text flys. Inevitable doom progesses. Hacker curses. nhf: whats wrong? nothing. doom gets closer. snickers text flys. done. just as doom starts to wrapp his grimy fingers around their necks.
Or for those harder, more time consuming hacks show our fearless hacker working all night pouring though volumes of code. Most of the effect will come from her expression and body language. Intense at first. last bit of cold pizza gone. frustration. a glimmer of hope. disapointment. brew another pot. exaustion. still grinds on. clock ticks on. one last idea. then as light peeks though the window, the answer is found, the task is done. An answer that is meaningful to the audiance.
In short the big mistake that hollywood makes in hacker seens is it trys to turn them into something that the public understands, but if that were the the case then everyone could be a hacker. So the act of hacking in the movie comes out as beeing very cheezy and simplistic. But the public does *not* need to understand what the hacker is doing to make the scene effective. And the mystic will add even more to a movie than a gui hack will.
well thats my two bits that know one will ever see because i posted too late.
Hmm,
Everyone at NSA is a nerd.
All nerds read slashdot.
Every reader of slashdot can be a moderator.
:. some of the moderators work at NSA
Think I better read those Anonymous (score:-1) posts:)
I started using dvorak a while back and ive been noticing that some of my typing mistakes (like swapping r,c or o,a) have started to show up in my writing, while others, that I had before dvorak have disapeared. The way your brain works sure is strange.
Our civilization has the history of swinging from one extreme to the other. The majority opresses the minority until they have the strengh to rebel and gain power. But then rather than learning from the past the new majority starts persecuting the new minority. This cycle has been going on since the dawn of time and can still be seen in goary detail in yugoslavia.
Our country is an attemt to change that. It is not perfect, but it is not bad. Please don't ruin everything that people have done to improve the balence of power in our country by advocating mindless anarchy.
Instead we should learn from those that have and continue to make a different like the black and woman rights advocists. It is a long hard road to change but it is *real* change. Not a role swap.
If we have the power to make a difference, like you say we do, then we should use it to fix the system not destroy it.
Our civilization has the history of swinging from one extreme to the other. The majority opresses the minority until they have the strengh to rebel and gain power. But then rather than learning from the past the new majority starts persecuting the new minority. This cycle has been going on since the dawn of time and can still be seen in goary detail in yugoslavia.
Our country is an attemt to change that. It is not perfect, but it is not bad. Please don't ruin everything that people have done to improve the balence of power in our country by advocating mindless anarchy.
Instead we should learn from those that have and continue to make a different like the black and woman rights advocists. It is a long hard road to change but it is *real* change. Not a role swap.
If we have the power to make a difference, like you say we do, then we should use it to fix the system not destroy it.
kmactane is right, this is the only thing that will get people to change their minds. Their attention is on us, we make the next move. If we act hostile, they will continue to belive that we are all potential killers. If we slip into the background everyone will forget about the problem and things will continue to be the same. However, if we show them that we are good people and that we are treated unjustly they will listen to us and then we can start to make a change.
I too was in this position in high school and strongly agree that something need to be done to change this. But right now there is a huge barier in the way; People are scared of us. What can we expect, they don't understand us and a member of our group just brutily massecured 13 children.
In order to fix this problem we need to show*them something different. I stress show, not tell. Get together as a group and volenteer to visit elderly, read to chidren, clean up a park, or something less corny that i cant thing of now:) Don't be hostile, acting the same way they do to us will only add to the stereotype they have put on us.
If we force them to look past our appearance they will see that we really are human.
but we are doing it so no-one else will have to again. That is where he completely misses the point. The current system of software development forces us to reinvent the wheel. Work done can only be reused and fixed to the extent that the original author allows. If we were allowed to fix and improve current software then linux would indeed be waste of time. But we can't and
in the long run linux and open software will greatly reduce the amount of wasted time and effort that the author is so worried about.
Linux is the solution, not the problem!
hi,
What type of software was used for these profesional projects? I heard they had renderman running on the freeBSD boxes. What did they use for the modeling? SGI stuff?
Here's my estimate of how many people will ditch work on the 19 to see star wars.
Take the number of screens its going to be showing on during workhours, multiplied times the average number of seats in a theater. Subtract 80% of the number of people that dont have jobs. The rest will be workers, plus some that skipped work hoping that they could get some last minute tickets.
Why would anyone compare the number of people watching star wars with something like the lost world? Even thogth alot of people are going to wait until evening or a couple days after, there will definately be enough fanatics to pack the theaters.