What, do you really think the database will be used for plausible terrorism exercises?
Just think of what database searches will be fired off before the next election. I'm sure the outgoing Bush administration will know more about the democratic challenger than even they know about themselves. And as this program was started in 2001 who knows if it was used last election or not. There was some mighty bad stuff about Kerry that leaked... Not that any politician would abuse a position of power for something as petty as getting re-elected.
This year's prognosis is the same as last: Screwed.
You really don't want artificial intelligence. You want the game to behave in a way that seem plausably intelligent but are actually beatably stupid. It's much more exciting to be swarmed by 7 or 8 nameless mooks who die at the end of your sword than to spend 1/2 hour chasing down one guy who keeps hiding behind cover, shooting you from the back, and running away when injured.
Game AI isn't about AI any more than buildings in games are about livable architecture. AI is part of the illusion, but a small part. You have enemy groups that have goals, and feelings, and tendencies. And it's your job to kill them all. Or make them all like you. Or roll them up into a giant ball. Or what not. But they can't be too good at whatever it is they're trying to do, or the player's actions won't matter.
When AI is good, it takes center stage. It plays like it is the most important thing in the world, and to it... it is. But the player is what matters. And for the player to matter, he cannot generally be working against AI that is too powerful.
THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, it would be good to have better AI for NPC characters working with the player. NPC's that can figure out what the player's goals are. NPC's that can run through a level without bumping into freaking walls (Twenty years later and they STILL DO THAT!). They can't be too intelligent, or the player won't have anything to play, but they shouldn't be completely dumb either... An RTS where the player's commanders on the ground made tactical decisions based upon the enemy they were facing and the location they had been deployed to would be great. Imagine playing a game where you tactically deploy intelligent units, rather than micromanage the dumb shoot-and-runners we have now.
And for story-based games, it would be great to have more complex emotional simulators. Games like Oblivion or Final Fantasy fall down because simple human interactions are actually quite complex, and having characters that may care in heavily pre-scripted ways is a little dry. If you constantly take Tifa's materia and give it to Cloud, those two characters are eventually going to develop animosity. If character B keeps getting killed and character A keeps resurrecting them, a bond of either friendship or jealousy will form, depending on their internal states.
It would also be good to have some form of AI toolkit abstracted out. AI middleware, so to speak. I know they exist, but I also know they suck.
As a side note:
An AI research student came over to one of the companies that I had worked at. He was really excited to talk to the game AI programmer and find out what he did. "Do you use genetic algorithms? Adaptive data structures? Neural network pattern recognition?" The programmer looked over at him. "Uh... kid? We use timers."
When exactly was the last time Apple Corpse did anything? The company exists as a Beatles back catalog holder, and nothing more. It would be impossible to confuse Apple the company and Apple the rights holder because Apple the company actually does things. Apple Corps wouldn't start an internet Download Music Store because that would be actually doing something.
Remember, we're not talking about a giant company fighting a little guy, we're talking about an active company fighting a long-dead rights holder. Should Apple Computers be prevented from revolutionizing the movie business through a new (and long overdue) distribution channel simply because Apple Corps put out some self-indulgent beatles movies in 1974? Should online music publishing be stopped because this rights clearing house who has a similar name feels uncomfortable with it? Should the Apple Stores which have tremendously pushed forward upscale retail design be shut down because Apple record had a store in 1967?
Ok, so that last one isn't so great to humanity. But the point is Apple Corps has long since been a non-entity. They don't DO anything. There would be no confusion between the two because outside of specialized circles looking to use Beatles recordings for things, nobody actually refers to the Apple Corps for any reason. Why should past performance guarantee that nobody with a similar (and honestly kind of generic) name can push into similar space into perpetuity. At this point in their existence, Apple Corps is little more than a cybersquatter.
Let's not forget, the 300 dollar dvd player was unheard of before the PS2. That console really was a driving factor in the wider adoption of the DVD movie standard, and was the first DVD player for a lot of people.
The major standards for videogames over the past few years have been
A: cartridges, a unique videogame phenomenon B: CD's, which didn't catch on in gaming until long after the basic audio CD was standard (though drove PC CD sales). C: DVD's, which consoles had a hand in popularizing.
The company I work at would have used 25 GB capacity on our last game if it were available to us. We would use it next time if it were available to us. Never underestimate how fat data can really be.
Seriously. They contract out both design and manufacturing to the lowest bidder. Their systems are riddled with buggy drivers. Their printers spam your system with buggy updaters that crash all the time... I can't tell you the number of "hpupdmon.exe cannot be closed" I get on clients computers at shutdown time. They are overpriced, run slowly, and are hardly ever stable.
Avoid HP like the plague. Their Lazerjets I hear are still good, and there was nothing wrong with the HP iPod, but those are the only things from the company you should even consider touching.
So allow me to be the one to say "Don't buy that HP. It's an HP. Wait for the QC issues to be fixed in about 20 years."
Also remember, Copyright covers the artistic "expressive" portion of a work, not the informative portion of it.
That's not to say it's OK to go reproducing pictures everywhere. That's just to say that their copyright claims on this image are relatively weak due to their lack of expressiveness.
If you push something down onto thermal grease and it comes out the sides, you put WAY too much on.
Thermal grease is ONLY to smooth out imperfections in the surface. While it has reasonable temperature conductivity properties, it's still a lot worse than a straight metal-to-metal connection, partially due to the lack of electrical conductivity (and therefore, lower overall metal density). When spread appropriately, you should still see the surface of the thing you are coating, along with spots of the grease where the original topography fell below the base surface line (however slightly). Coat both surfaces like this, and you're golden.
Really, what you want is a tiny, tiny drop spread around by a squeegee-like straight edge, like a plastic credit card. Put a little too much on, and your temperatures will rise. Put as much on as it appears in the picture, and your temperatures will be through the roof.
Let's not forget that the site they're going after is this one.
Yes, they're going after a site with Mother Teresa with a Broken Finger and Pizza the Hut on the front page. The one that reviewed the Vore RPG (NSFW... RNSFW), and has a running section called The Horrors of Porn (NSF...NM). Going after them is a lot like shouting at a woodpecker to stop bashing their skulls into a tree, especially with the Legal Threats section so prominently featured on the front page.
Don't get me wrong, I love Something Awful. They're one of the few sites that believe in truth in advertising. I just wouldn't expect them to respond to legal threats in anything other than a deragatory comedy fashion. I expect a review soon that gives Apple's threatening legal letter a score of -48. Worst Legal Threat Letter Ever.
Actually, technically, they're going after the forums. 'cause those people on the forums really listen.
The point is not the gameplay. The point is the experience. If your experience is reduced if you can't get over the fact that the graphics look bad. Or don't evoke the images they are supposed to evoke. Sure, Starcraft has a limited visual experience now, but A: it was amazing for the time and B: there have been a lot of amazing games released since which players just couldn't get into the experience because it was a cheap, unbelieveable 2D sprite engine. Certain games it works for, but to get into the experience of others, you have to kick it up a notch visually.
The same can be said for movies. Anyone can do Clerks. But nobody can do Titanic without a large budget going to visuals. Anyone can create the next Tetris. But nobody can create the next Final Fantasy without reasonably engrossing visuals and expansive, expensive vistas.
Which is not to say that gameplay isn't important. It's just that people know (or think they know) how to do amazing visuals, but nobody knows how to make amazing original games. Even Blizzard, a consistent hitmaker in the industry, basically takes existing genres with major flaws, fixes all of the flaws, and throws in a ton of aesthetic polish.
Now as a side note, you can get a hell of a lot of bang for your buck out of good sound, especially considering how few people do. Sound is subliminal, so it frequently gets forgotten when budgets are getting allocated. But you can spend months prototyping and sketching and modeling and mapping your main enemy to make them seem as massive and powerful as possible, or you can get a sound engineer who will mix a bowling ball dropping onto a piece of steak with someone punching through aluminum foil, and getting the most amazingly visceral reaction from the audience after one afternoon of experimentation.
Make a piercing out of it! An implantable RFID chip dangling by a nipplering. Then you'd really be electropunk, but without getting stuck with outdated technology.
Why, I heard that these videoed-game makers are full of pornographers that call themselves artists. And these pornographers start all of their character models in a naked or semi-naked state!
Can you imagine? They all start as filth! And they continue to be filth underneath their clothes. Just look at the disgusting... disgustingness. I think I'm going to be sick.
Did we expand the definition of developers to include "columnist and game design lecturer" and "director of business relations?"
It's fair to call Earnest Adams a developer. Sure, he did a good chunk of his career on Madden, but there is no shame in doing a stint on serialized sports games. Plus his writing is generally insightful and at times usable in a production environment, which is a good lot more than can be said for many design lecturers. He also co founded the Independent Game Developer's Association and the Game Developer's Conference.
Did I mention he's one of the few game design writers who isn't a complete idiot? Honestly, that's the most shocking achievement.
As for the biz dev guy from highmoon studios... in a company that small, their business people are probably with it. What he says is mostly insightful, so he should be given the benefit of the doubt.
As for Gamasutra's methodology: they sent out a shotgun of e-mails and got some back. Two happened to be from "important" people at one company. They are still separate people, though.
You can have my decision-making encryption power when you pull it from my cold... dead... Hey! What are you doing? It was just a metaphor! A metaphor! Wait! Noooo!
What they forget is that after 50 hours you get less and less work and when you approach 60 hours you get negative return.
Actually, the curve is a little more complicated, which makes it deceptive.
The first 60+ hour week you do is fine. The second week you do it you'll start to see strain and tear in people's performances. The third week people start falling apart and making really dumb mistakes, that other people need to take further time to clean up. The forth week your company is full of idiots, if it wasn't already. The eighth week, your company is full of zombies. Hardly anything gets done.
The problem is that a lot of managers look at week 1, and say "We've got to finish this, so let's push ahead!" And with more drain comes less productivity. And with less productivity comes less hitting goals. And with less hitting goals comes the percieved need to work longer. They want week 1 productivity on week 10, and they're just not going to get it.
Really, the sweet spot is about week 3. There is a burst of creativity and involvement that comes with that first week of crunch, and I recommend having both at least and at most two weeks of crunch every 4 months. But once you get to the end of the first month of crunch... no matter where you are... stop. Go back to 40 for a month. You're going to be late, nothing can help that anymore. Let your team recover, or you're going to get less and less out of them.
I found a company that takes this philosophy seriously, and it is one of the reasons why our developers stick around for years.
Slashdot Mirror
What, do you really think the database will be used for plausible terrorism exercises?
Just think of what database searches will be fired off before the next election. I'm sure the outgoing Bush administration will know more about the democratic challenger than even they know about themselves. And as this program was started in 2001 who knows if it was used last election or not. There was some mighty bad stuff about Kerry that leaked... Not that any politician would abuse a position of power for something as petty as getting re-elected.
This year's prognosis is the same as last: Screwed.
They did show that there is a speaker built into the controller. I wouldn't be surprised if that was Wii, err, why.
Very True.
You really don't want artificial intelligence. You want the game to behave in a way that seem plausably intelligent but are actually beatably stupid. It's much more exciting to be swarmed by 7 or 8 nameless mooks who die at the end of your sword than to spend 1/2 hour chasing down one guy who keeps hiding behind cover, shooting you from the back, and running away when injured.
Game AI isn't about AI any more than buildings in games are about livable architecture. AI is part of the illusion, but a small part. You have enemy groups that have goals, and feelings, and tendencies. And it's your job to kill them all. Or make them all like you. Or roll them up into a giant ball. Or what not. But they can't be too good at whatever it is they're trying to do, or the player's actions won't matter.
When AI is good, it takes center stage. It plays like it is the most important thing in the world, and to it... it is. But the player is what matters. And for the player to matter, he cannot generally be working against AI that is too powerful.
THAT HAVING BEEN SAID, it would be good to have better AI for NPC characters working with the player. NPC's that can figure out what the player's goals are. NPC's that can run through a level without bumping into freaking walls (Twenty years later and they STILL DO THAT!). They can't be too intelligent, or the player won't have anything to play, but they shouldn't be completely dumb either... An RTS where the player's commanders on the ground made tactical decisions based upon the enemy they were facing and the location they had been deployed to would be great. Imagine playing a game where you tactically deploy intelligent units, rather than micromanage the dumb shoot-and-runners we have now.
And for story-based games, it would be great to have more complex emotional simulators. Games like Oblivion or Final Fantasy fall down because simple human interactions are actually quite complex, and having characters that may care in heavily pre-scripted ways is a little dry. If you constantly take Tifa's materia and give it to Cloud, those two characters are eventually going to develop animosity. If character B keeps getting killed and character A keeps resurrecting them, a bond of either friendship or jealousy will form, depending on their internal states.
It would also be good to have some form of AI toolkit abstracted out. AI middleware, so to speak. I know they exist, but I also know they suck.
As a side note:
An AI research student came over to one of the companies that I had worked at. He was really excited to talk to the game AI programmer and find out what he did. "Do you use genetic algorithms? Adaptive data structures? Neural network pattern recognition?" The programmer looked over at him. "Uh... kid? We use timers."
By definition, all androids are male. Which kind of explains why they made it nonfunctional below the waist.
judging by the pictures it looks like we haven't quite reached the other side of the Uncanny Valley yet.
No, but I'm sure we're going to find the Creepy Valley Dwellers soon.
Keanu Reeves?
Motown, Virgin, Sony BMG, Epic, Warner, Moonshine, Rhino, UMG, Blue Note, Epic, RCA, Atlantic, Birdman, Mojo, PolyGram, MGM, Philips, Capitol, Colombia, Geffen, Epitaph, umm... Acme?
Not to contradict your point that Apple Corps is unknown, but labels do a heck of a lot of self-promotion.
When exactly was the last time Apple Corpse did anything? The company exists as a Beatles back catalog holder, and nothing more. It would be impossible to confuse Apple the company and Apple the rights holder because Apple the company actually does things. Apple Corps wouldn't start an internet Download Music Store because that would be actually doing something.
Remember, we're not talking about a giant company fighting a little guy, we're talking about an active company fighting a long-dead rights holder. Should Apple Computers be prevented from revolutionizing the movie business through a new (and long overdue) distribution channel simply because Apple Corps put out some self-indulgent beatles movies in 1974? Should online music publishing be stopped because this rights clearing house who has a similar name feels uncomfortable with it? Should the Apple Stores which have tremendously pushed forward upscale retail design be shut down because Apple record had a store in 1967?
Ok, so that last one isn't so great to humanity. But the point is Apple Corps has long since been a non-entity. They don't DO anything. There would be no confusion between the two because outside of specialized circles looking to use Beatles recordings for things, nobody actually refers to the Apple Corps for any reason. Why should past performance guarantee that nobody with a similar (and honestly kind of generic) name can push into similar space into perpetuity. At this point in their existence, Apple Corps is little more than a cybersquatter.
Let's not forget, the 300 dollar dvd player was unheard of before the PS2. That console really was a driving factor in the wider adoption of the DVD movie standard, and was the first DVD player for a lot of people.
The major standards for videogames over the past few years have been
A: cartridges, a unique videogame phenomenon
B: CD's, which didn't catch on in gaming until long after the basic audio CD was standard (though drove PC CD sales).
C: DVD's, which consoles had a hand in popularizing.
The company I work at would have used 25 GB capacity on our last game if it were available to us. We would use it next time if it were available to us. Never underestimate how fat data can really be.
And if apple did it, it would look more like this than this.
Those glasses will never be cool without a major re-design. They're far too ugly.
Never buy an HP.
Seriously. They contract out both design and manufacturing to the lowest bidder. Their systems are riddled with buggy drivers. Their printers spam your system with buggy updaters that crash all the time... I can't tell you the number of "hpupdmon.exe cannot be closed" I get on clients computers at shutdown time. They are overpriced, run slowly, and are hardly ever stable.
Avoid HP like the plague. Their Lazerjets I hear are still good, and there was nothing wrong with the HP iPod, but those are the only things from the company you should even consider touching.
So allow me to be the one to say "Don't buy that HP. It's an HP. Wait for the QC issues to be fixed in about 20 years."
Also remember, Copyright covers the artistic "expressive" portion of a work, not the informative portion of it.
That's not to say it's OK to go reproducing pictures everywhere. That's just to say that their copyright claims on this image are relatively weak due to their lack of expressiveness.
If you push something down onto thermal grease and it comes out the sides, you put WAY too much on.
Thermal grease is ONLY to smooth out imperfections in the surface. While it has reasonable temperature conductivity properties, it's still a lot worse than a straight metal-to-metal connection, partially due to the lack of electrical conductivity (and therefore, lower overall metal density). When spread appropriately, you should still see the surface of the thing you are coating, along with spots of the grease where the original topography fell below the base surface line (however slightly). Coat both surfaces like this, and you're golden.
Really, what you want is a tiny, tiny drop spread around by a squeegee-like straight edge, like a plastic credit card. Put a little too much on, and your temperatures will rise. Put as much on as it appears in the picture, and your temperatures will be through the roof.
Hmm, I was thinking the opposite. Lawyers are like managers. Engineers needs to understand what they're doing, otherwise they'll ruin the company.
After all, it wasn't engineers that ran HP into the ground.
Then you could get a date while wearing them.
Sadly, with these that will never happen.
Let's not forget that the site they're going after is this one.
Yes, they're going after a site with Mother Teresa with a Broken Finger and Pizza the Hut on the front page. The one that reviewed the Vore RPG (NSFW... RNSFW), and has a running section called The Horrors of Porn (NSF...NM). Going after them is a lot like shouting at a woodpecker to stop bashing their skulls into a tree, especially with the Legal Threats section so prominently featured on the front page.
Don't get me wrong, I love Something Awful. They're one of the few sites that believe in truth in advertising. I just wouldn't expect them to respond to legal threats in anything other than a deragatory comedy fashion. I expect a review soon that gives Apple's threatening legal letter a score of -48. Worst Legal Threat Letter Ever.
Actually, technically, they're going after the forums. 'cause those people on the forums really listen.
The point is not the gameplay. The point is the experience. If your experience is reduced if you can't get over the fact that the graphics look bad. Or don't evoke the images they are supposed to evoke. Sure, Starcraft has a limited visual experience now, but A: it was amazing for the time and B: there have been a lot of amazing games released since which players just couldn't get into the experience because it was a cheap, unbelieveable 2D sprite engine. Certain games it works for, but to get into the experience of others, you have to kick it up a notch visually.
The same can be said for movies. Anyone can do Clerks. But nobody can do Titanic without a large budget going to visuals. Anyone can create the next Tetris. But nobody can create the next Final Fantasy without reasonably engrossing visuals and expansive, expensive vistas.
Which is not to say that gameplay isn't important. It's just that people know (or think they know) how to do amazing visuals, but nobody knows how to make amazing original games. Even Blizzard, a consistent hitmaker in the industry, basically takes existing genres with major flaws, fixes all of the flaws, and throws in a ton of aesthetic polish.
Now as a side note, you can get a hell of a lot of bang for your buck out of good sound, especially considering how few people do. Sound is subliminal, so it frequently gets forgotten when budgets are getting allocated. But you can spend months prototyping and sketching and modeling and mapping your main enemy to make them seem as massive and powerful as possible, or you can get a sound engineer who will mix a bowling ball dropping onto a piece of steak with someone punching through aluminum foil, and getting the most amazingly visceral reaction from the audience after one afternoon of experimentation.
You could just carry the tag. Or wear it.
Make a piercing out of it! An implantable RFID chip dangling by a nipplering. Then you'd really be electropunk, but without getting stuck with outdated technology.
Shouldn't somebody have done something about that?
Any battery is removable.
Why, I heard that these videoed-game makers are full of pornographers that call themselves artists. And these pornographers start all of their character models in a naked or semi-naked state!
Can you imagine? They all start as filth! And they continue to be filth underneath their clothes. Just look at the disgusting... disgustingness. I think I'm going to be sick.
Peapod still delivers in Boston, and they're tied to one of the major grocery store chains here.
Did we expand the definition of developers to include "columnist and game design lecturer" and "director of business relations?"
It's fair to call Earnest Adams a developer. Sure, he did a good chunk of his career on Madden, but there is no shame in doing a stint on serialized sports games. Plus his writing is generally insightful and at times usable in a production environment, which is a good lot more than can be said for many design lecturers. He also co founded the Independent Game Developer's Association and the Game Developer's Conference.
Did I mention he's one of the few game design writers who isn't a complete idiot? Honestly, that's the most shocking achievement.
As for the biz dev guy from highmoon studios... in a company that small, their business people are probably with it. What he says is mostly insightful, so he should be given the benefit of the doubt.
As for Gamasutra's methodology: they sent out a shotgun of e-mails and got some back. Two happened to be from "important" people at one company. They are still separate people, though.
You can have my decision-making encryption power when you pull it from my cold... dead... Hey! What are you doing? It was just a metaphor! A metaphor! Wait! Noooo!
$#$#%... [signal lost]
What they forget is that after 50 hours you get less and less work and when you approach 60 hours you get negative return.
Actually, the curve is a little more complicated, which makes it deceptive.
The first 60+ hour week you do is fine.
The second week you do it you'll start to see strain and tear in people's performances.
The third week people start falling apart and making really dumb mistakes, that other people need to take further time to clean up.
The forth week your company is full of idiots, if it wasn't already.
The eighth week, your company is full of zombies. Hardly anything gets done.
The problem is that a lot of managers look at week 1, and say "We've got to finish this, so let's push ahead!" And with more drain comes less productivity. And with less productivity comes less hitting goals. And with less hitting goals comes the percieved need to work longer. They want week 1 productivity on week 10, and they're just not going to get it.
Really, the sweet spot is about week 3. There is a burst of creativity and involvement that comes with that first week of crunch, and I recommend having both at least and at most two weeks of crunch every 4 months. But once you get to the end of the first month of crunch... no matter where you are... stop. Go back to 40 for a month. You're going to be late, nothing can help that anymore. Let your team recover, or you're going to get less and less out of them.
I found a company that takes this philosophy seriously, and it is one of the reasons why our developers stick around for years.