If you can't sleep, learn to meditate. This will rest your mind, among several other things.
I started meditating in college with the Silva method (alpha level meditation -- very light meditation, akin to when you watch tv) After college, I started with the theta level (the point right before sleep) meditation course from: www.probablefutures.com. A year after I got my tech diploma from college, I decided to transfer to university to finish my degree. I continued meditating during that time. When I got to university, the amount of time it took me to finish an exam dropped by 50-75%. When I was in high school and college, I typically took the entire time available to write an exam, and didn't always finish. In university, I finished 17 out of 21 exams first. The next person out took twice as long as I did. The other 4 exams, I finished within 5 minutes of the first person.
The one difference in my lifestyle was meditation.
I remember reading an article written by S.A.S. several years ago, about how they used their own stats software on their business practices. Including training costs, turnover rates, and other factors, they determined that any work beyond 35 hours per week decreased productivity. It would lead to code requiring more bug fixing / rewriting, staff leaving, etc.
Crunch was okay if it was for 2 weeks only. After that, things would deteriorate to the point where everybody would get less done in a day while working OT than if they would have just worked a normal day. You also need recovery time after working OT, in order to return to regular productivity.
From my own experience in the games industry, If you know you'll be working late and you already have been working late for quite awhile, you will be more prone to spread your tasks out more, since you need time to let your brain rest.
All in all, if you want to ship something on time, don't work overtime. Work 35 hours per week (I think that doesn't include lunch).
Looking down all day is hard on the eyes. I always keep the center of my monitors in line with my eyes when I'm looking straight ahead. I use a 30" monitor at home, and my eyes feel great after a full day.
At work I've got my laptop on top of a stack of books, and a larger monitor in the center of my desk so I can look straight at it, also on top of a stack of books. Using a separate kb/mouse. Feels way better than having them sitting on my desk below my line of sight.
>The top of the monitor should be at your eye level
I find it *way* more comfortable to have my eyes looking straight ahead at the MIDDLE of the monitor.
Also, make sure your monitor is far enough away from you. I use a 30" monitor at home, so I have a very deep desk. I can be on my computer for 12 hours a day and feel totally fine. I use a chair with armrests, a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard on a keyboard drawer (so it's lower than the desk), and a logitech g5 laser mouse (glides really nicely and has a nice weight to it).
Download the k-lite codec pack, which includes the Intel Indeo codecs (these somehow don't get installed with Thief on newer windows versions). That should get Thief 1 & 2 running on Win7. I'm running them on Win7 x64.
Thank you for the insult. It had been awhile since I looked at it, since when I did look at it years ago, before getting into the games industry, that was not how I understood the license. At the time, it appeared to be a "you have to give your source code away" license, so I never bothered looking at it again.
I suppose I should have looked it up before posting, so thank you for the reminder.
From what I remember, you can't use SDL commercially, unless you want to give everything you make with it away. Makes it pointless to learn if you want to professionally develop games.
As for OpenGL: It doesn't need to become everything. However, it would be FANTASTIC if it had built in asset-loading functions. Like the ability to load a mesh with a couple lines of code... An SDK for OpenGL would be awesome.
Not to mention it looked as good as anything else at the time... Heck, I remember being quite impressed by how good Ultima 5 looked, and it's still the same level of technology as Ultima 3 & 4. They just got smarter with the colors.
Put some games on the computer that you can play together with them.
When my sister and I were kids, we'd sit with Mom at the computer and play through the King's Quests, Space Quests, and even Leisure Suit Larry 2 & 3. That was loads of fun, and we all got to pitch in ideas for stuff to do. Granted, I think I was closer to 7 or 8 when we started with those.
Dad was more into Dungeons of Daggorath:)
He still remembers how to play it today, and he's not a computer guy at all.
After playing Gothic2 for every waking non-working moment, for about a month, I noticed a HUGE difference in the audio after popping in the X-Fi. Upgraded from the Audigy 2.
After installing Vista, I had to scrap my Creative X-fi since they just wouldn't put out non-crackly drivers for far too long, and replaced it with an Auzentech Prelude (uses the X-Fi chipset). Auzentech made drivers that worked really well. Except for the line-in, apparently. I wonder if they've fixed that yet.
Ah, good old midi. Now I have to run a win98 virtual machine so I can still listen to midis with the Yamaha Sound Synth. Or boot into XP to run dosbox to play the old games with that Yamaha quality midi sound...
If only Yamaha would make a virtual sound synth for Vista/Win7 x64.
I've found that most games I've played just haven't been interesting, for the past 10 years or so. Once in awhile a true gem sneaks through: Deus Ex, NOLF 1, Gothic 2 (still play all of these)
A lot of games just don't feel FUN anymore. It's like the devs sit around saying "How can we make OUR game MORE BROWN (/grittier) than the others?" With all the focus on realism, the designers forget that we play games because we can see realism just by looking away from the screen. Most "gritty" games don't feel fun to play. They highlight quite well, everything that I don't want to experience in my life.
For instance: Mass Effect 2. Brilliantly written. However, I felt terrible every time I played it. I'm not looking for that at all in a game. I'd like to feel like I've just added to my enjoyment of life.
I wish Sierra style games would make a comeback. Dreamcatcher adventure games don't count.
I almost RTFA because of the headline, until I had gleaned from the comments that Intel's not actually threatening the DMCA act by using the HDCP crack.
I think the headline was brilliantly written. It's the article that sucks.
Ah yes, you are right. I do have them set up as pop accounts. I was probably remembering how my hotmail account was set up in the "olden days" of using Outlook Express.
According to Task Manager (win7 x64), Thunderbird takes up roughly 0% CPU time while I just have it running in the background (say, while typing out this comment). When I hit the Check Mail button, the CPU usage peaks at a whopping 9% during the next few seconds, and is then back down to 0% once the email is downloaded. That being said, the only email that requires indexing is that which is downloaded each time I check my email. My other ~150k messages over 2 email addresses, are already indexed. Using http mail (hotmail + gmail, via thunderbird plugins)
Slashdot Mirror
If you can't sleep, learn to meditate. This will rest your mind, among several other things.
I started meditating in college with the Silva method (alpha level meditation -- very light meditation, akin to when you watch tv)
After college, I started with the theta level (the point right before sleep) meditation course from: www.probablefutures.com.
A year after I got my tech diploma from college, I decided to transfer to university to finish my degree. I continued meditating during that time.
When I got to university, the amount of time it took me to finish an exam dropped by 50-75%.
When I was in high school and college, I typically took the entire time available to write an exam, and didn't always finish.
In university, I finished 17 out of 21 exams first. The next person out took twice as long as I did. The other 4 exams, I finished within 5 minutes of the first person.
The one difference in my lifestyle was meditation.
Anyone remember the QNX Floppy OS
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_VlI6IBEJ0 -- They released this in 1999
They've been making incredibly compact embedded OS's for years, that should really be what the mobile phones use.
Congrats to the Menuet peeps for making a more modern OS that compact!
It ate the greater than symbol...
I remember reading an article written by S.A.S. several years ago, about how they used their own stats software on their business practices.
Including training costs, turnover rates, and other factors, they determined that any work beyond 35 hours per week decreased productivity.
It would lead to code requiring more bug fixing / rewriting, staff leaving, etc.
Crunch was okay if it was for 2 weeks only. After that, things would deteriorate to the point where everybody would get less done in a day while working OT than if they would have just worked a normal day. You also need recovery time after working OT, in order to return to regular productivity.
From my own experience in the games industry, If you know you'll be working late and you already have been working late for quite awhile, you will be more prone to spread your tasks out more, since you need time to let your brain rest.
All in all, if you want to ship something on time, don't work overtime. Work 35 hours per week (I think that doesn't include lunch).
Here's a presentation on this very topic:
http://www.slideshare.net/flowtown/rules-of-productivity-2756161
Why is this "new news" every couple of years?
Here's a link that may explain the thought a little better:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ionocraft
I wonder if this could also explain how they fly.
Electrostatic lift will lift light objects, too.
Looking down all day is hard on the eyes. I always keep the center of my monitors in line with my eyes when I'm looking straight ahead.
I use a 30" monitor at home, and my eyes feel great after a full day.
At work I've got my laptop on top of a stack of books, and a larger monitor in the center of my desk so I can look straight at it, also on top of a stack of books. Using a separate kb/mouse. Feels way better than having them sitting on my desk below my line of sight.
>The top of the monitor should be at your eye level
I find it *way* more comfortable to have my eyes looking straight ahead at the MIDDLE of the monitor.
Also, make sure your monitor is far enough away from you. I use a 30" monitor at home, so I have a very deep desk. I can be on my computer for 12 hours a day and feel totally fine. I use a chair with armrests, a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard on a keyboard drawer (so it's lower than the desk), and a logitech g5 laser mouse (glides really nicely and has a nice weight to it).
I wonder if someone will port Wine to Windows. That would be pretty awesome.
Download the k-lite codec pack, which includes the Intel Indeo codecs (these somehow don't get installed with Thief on newer windows versions). That should get Thief 1 & 2 running on Win7.
I'm running them on Win7 x64.
Thank you for the insult. It had been awhile since I looked at it, since when I did look at it years ago, before getting into the games industry, that was not how I understood the license. At the time, it appeared to be a "you have to give your source code away" license, so I never bothered looking at it again.
I suppose I should have looked it up before posting, so thank you for the reminder.
From what I remember, you can't use SDL commercially, unless you want to give everything you make with it away. Makes it pointless to learn
if you want to professionally develop games.
As for OpenGL:
It doesn't need to become everything. However, it would be FANTASTIC if it had built in asset-loading functions.
Like the ability to load a mesh with a couple lines of code... An SDK for OpenGL would be awesome.
Not to mention it looked as good as anything else at the time...
Heck, I remember being quite impressed by how good Ultima 5 looked, and it's still the same level of technology as Ultima 3 & 4.
They just got smarter with the colors.
Well, then there are the physicists that say that Dark Matter is just a fudge-factor for bad mathematics.
www.autodynamics.org
Put some games on the computer that you can play together with them.
When my sister and I were kids, we'd sit with Mom at the computer and play through the King's Quests, Space Quests, and even Leisure Suit Larry 2 & 3.
That was loads of fun, and we all got to pitch in ideas for stuff to do. Granted, I think I was closer to 7 or 8 when we started with those.
Dad was more into Dungeons of Daggorath :)
He still remembers how to play it today, and he's not a computer guy at all.
http://www.abandonia.com/
After playing Gothic2 for every waking non-working moment, for about a month, I noticed a HUGE difference in the audio after popping in the X-Fi. Upgraded from the Audigy 2.
After installing Vista, I had to scrap my Creative X-fi since they just wouldn't put out non-crackly drivers for far too long, and replaced it with an Auzentech Prelude (uses the X-Fi chipset). Auzentech made drivers that worked really well. Except for the line-in, apparently. I wonder if they've fixed that yet.
Daggerfall blew me away when I got the Awe64!
Ah, good old midi.
Now I have to run a win98 virtual machine so I can still listen to midis with the Yamaha Sound Synth.
Or boot into XP to run dosbox to play the old games with that Yamaha quality midi sound...
If only Yamaha would make a virtual sound synth for Vista/Win7 x64.
It's that attention to detail that makes him an audiophile.
Otherwise he'd be one of those people that was fine with onboard audio.
It's all about the finer details.
EXACTLY!
I've found that most games I've played just haven't been interesting, for the past 10 years or so.
Once in awhile a true gem sneaks through:
Deus Ex, NOLF 1, Gothic 2 (still play all of these)
A lot of games just don't feel FUN anymore. It's like the devs sit around saying "How can we make OUR game MORE BROWN (/grittier) than the others?"
With all the focus on realism, the designers forget that we play games because we can see realism just by looking away from the screen. Most "gritty" games don't feel fun to play.
They highlight quite well, everything that I don't want to experience in my life.
For instance: Mass Effect 2. Brilliantly written. However, I felt terrible every time I played it. I'm not looking for that at all in a game. I'd like to feel like I've just added to my enjoyment of life.
I wish Sierra style games would make a comeback. Dreamcatcher adventure games don't count.
I'll definitely be picking up Kaptain Brawe...
I almost RTFA because of the headline, until I had gleaned from the comments that Intel's not actually threatening the DMCA act by using the HDCP crack.
I think the headline was brilliantly written. It's the article that sucks.
Ah yes, you are right. I do have them set up as pop accounts. I was probably remembering how my hotmail account was set up in the "olden days" of using Outlook Express.
"On My Machine":
According to Task Manager (win7 x64), Thunderbird takes up roughly 0% CPU time while I just have it running in the background (say, while typing out this comment).
When I hit the Check Mail button, the CPU usage peaks at a whopping 9% during the next few seconds, and is then back down to 0% once the email is downloaded.
That being said, the only email that requires indexing is that which is downloaded each time I check my email. My other ~150k messages over 2 email addresses, are already indexed.
Using http mail (hotmail + gmail, via thunderbird plugins)
Stop?
No way! Kirk it up with those alien chicks!
Too much information and you get weighed down in the details...