It's also important to point out that Firefly, like Joss's better work, was a "serial," in that later episodes depended upon previous episodes to make any sense. Unfortunately, and dumfoundingly, Fox decided to air the series out-of-order, which led to the complaints that Firefly was "confusing" and "impossible to follow."
In other words, Fox blew their own series because they didn't know what they were doing.
It's also a space western, which is a pretty tough theme to like, but somehow managed to capture the essence of what worked with the episodes of Star Trek that worked. Even though pretty much none of the characters are good guys (the captain kills people who he thinks deserves it, the crew members betray eachother for money, the pilot keeps wearing Hawaiian shirts), they're somehow likable in a bad guy way... Sort of like Han before Lucas bastardized him into a saturday morning cartoon. The old-west themes of cattle rustling and smuggling just add to the charm and the outlaw atmosphere. It was a pretty good step, in other words, to reduce what will likely be a nastily complicated future involving DRM, standards compliances, interoperability problems, technological glitches, and complicated social procedures based upon years of snowballing bureaucracy to something archaically approachable focused more on characters. Not once in the entire 12 episodes was there a spot of technobabble or an episode focused upon getting the holodeck to work. It was all about the characters, which really shined through on the DVD's.
It was good, but Fox blew their chance by thinking that it was The Simpsons. Hopefully the movie will rectify this to some degree. And if the movie does well, they can replay the TV shows. Most people haven't seen them anyway.
Note - requires nasty proprietary combinations of Windows, Media Player, Internet Explorer, and DRM. I've seen the future, and it is locked down. They're also, oddly enough, significantly longer than what was shown on MTV.
These videos do show an impressive amount of physics, which is really what is missing from gaming currently. The graphics don't seem to be enough to wow, and I'm not looking forward to how much that much content will cost to develop, but certainly having that much extra processing power will come in handy. Hopefully it will go to making a better gaming experience rather than just a higher-poly, more normal mapped / enviornment mapped one. Condemned didn't give much hope, but the draw distance and physics in the other games was impressive.
Unfortunately, the most impressive things on new systems seem to be the tech demos. I remember the Xbox ping-pong demo was just stunning, probably moreso than the first round of games, as was the detail on the Dolphin for the Dolphin, or the PS2 shell screen. I'm kind of sad that there aren't any really "wow" demos for the Xbox 360, as a good tech demo is always an impressive, if pointless piece of eye candy.
If they released an official version of Linux for their platforms, it would allow unsigned, uncontrolled code to run on their platforms. They could no longer demand licensing revenue, because people could just release their games under the linux portion of the OS, not that is a significant threat. What's more troubling would be, for example, Microsoft's security model based around not allowing anything unsigned onto their network. An Xbox with full network access running arbitrary code can now do nasty things with billing servers, the services of other people, or simply cheating in online games.
Plus, of course, it's a lot of resources to get Linux to run on a new platform, even though someone always seems willing to do it. And hardware and software exploits are going to be released anyway... flash carts for the DS existed long before Linux ran on it.
If one decides to visit a page, unless Google has a recent cache (not like a Google cache ever goes out-of-date) they'll have to re-download it from the webserver, compress it, and send it to your client. Unless you're on a painfully slow connection, chances are you could have downloaded it yourself basically instantaneously. And downloading a page to Google, diffing with Google's cache of your last recieved file, and sending you the update seems like it would just be faster to go to you directly. If they have a massive pipe, which I'm sure they do, and they can avoid outstripping the servers it feeds from, they might be able to save you a small percentage of time, based upon how much the diff requires, compressed, and how quickly google can download the page and perform the calculation, or if it's local copy is the latest.
Now, prefetching potential branch pages is cool, but I have yet to see an implementation of this tech that I'm impressed with.
All of this leads me to believe that dial-up users, the traditional market for such compress-and-prefetch schemes, will be the ones who actually benefit from this tech. That is, aside from those who side-benefit is better page searches on google with their suddenly dynamic DB.
I thought the GDC sold transcripts / videos of the talks. I wonder if the sales volumes on those things are so low they just gave up and decided to use the talks as attraction to next year's event.
There are a lot of "sim" style games out there. Check out the Tycoon serieses, for one. Heck, some people credit Railrood Tycoon with starting the sim genre, though others point to Populous. There was also the excellent Theme Park game, followed by the mostly forgettable Theme * serieses. Oh, and the very odd Afterlife. A lot of historical RTS games and "god" games are similar to to sim games. Pharoah comes to mind, as does Black and White, Creatures, Settlers, etc.
As a side note, Apple really needs to go to a different naming convention. Longhorn is something I can really get excited about. It's a full upgrade to an OS badly in need of one. Whatever it is, it's A: Major and B: Badly in need. Just look at the name. But OS 10.4? It's a point release. If you go back and look at the system from 10.0 to now, the OS has evolved significantly, probably more than the original Mac OS did between system 6 and system 9. However, it's still just a point release. 10.4 just doesn't sound that impressive. I get the feeling that if Apple tried to release a 10.5 along side of a Longhorn Super-Duper OS Times Infinity, they'll get drowned out in the Ballmer dance.
Now if they redesigned the iPod, that might have a chance of stealing some of Microsoft's thunder.
The main point of his entire rant seemed to be that episodic programming with larger character development arcs provides more compelling fiction than programs that start and end at the same place. When Xander is scared for his life and reaches for Willow's hand, it's a lot more compelling if they've gotten near to a relationship, he burned her badly by going with someone else, then they spent the last 3 episodes working their way to the point where they are speaking again. When Bones takes a jab at Spock, it's meaningless because their relationship never changes.
Being John Malkovich was a popular, excellent movie, and while I'd put it more in the category of fantasy than Sci Fi, if you read Card's books the distinction is academic. Plus the characters to go through an immense arc throughout the film, falling in love, falling out of love, changing... evolving as characters in exactly the way that Homer Simpson doesn't. Again, the focus, as in all good Sci Fi, is on the character evolutions.
Smallville isn't the best series ever by a long shot. But like Buffy it is a popular show that opened people's eyes to what can happen when characters evolve across episodes.
Trek did and does follow an antiquated model, and he's right in thinking that it would only continue to do so. Probably the best bit of Trek, the last few seasons of DS9, took place when Paramount's main people were focused on Voyager and allowed a smaller group of people to create a broader story focused more on large story arcs and developments. The best season of Enterprise has been this last one, when multi episode story arcs were plentiful.
Orson's books reflect this thinking, of course. His most popular work, the Ender's series, follows one character along his evolution from a weak abused nobody kid to a reclusive man hiding from unwanted fame from his past, to an old man accepting of his place in the world. And the latest Ender's book takes place in the same time frame as the original, exploring another character who isn't the hero, but who evolves from a lone troubled genius striking out at anyone or anything that might subjugate him, to being a mature, willing second, giving himself over to a man he believes deserves it.
Oddly enough, I've always felt Asimov was at his best in short stories, but even then his characters were undergoing tremendous evolution within the span of several pages.
In case people were looking, Harmonix's home page. Of course there is a lot more going on that we can't talk about...
Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel
on
We Heart Katamari Preview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I read this and almost cried. Why don't game developers use the same design techniques and standards as other major software developers? Using hard-coded string values? Hard coding the software to run at 60 Hz? Pushing your memory budget so close you cannot fit a few more characters of text? Not only that, but game engines are re-written from scratch for virtually every new game; the wheel is re-invented 12 times a month in any given project.
A lot of it has to do with what you are trying to do with your budget. String lengths aren't checked because that would double the amount of milliseconds the system is spending on text. You can check all of that at export time, but that programmer time might be best spent on another aspect of development. You squeeze the system as hard as you can, and maybe everything including rendering, physics, etc takes 56-59 MS on average. If you reduce the amount of pixels per frame but increase the frame rate, the system may be pushing exactly the same number of pixels, but now you have to update physics 20% more often. Maybe you're using the sound processor to update a part of your physics model because you know *exactly* how much time it needs to spend on rendering your streaming audio, but now your timing is all shot. Maybe you've hardcoded string length because then you can allocate a single text array at the beginning of a level and shave a few cycles off of seek time.
It's not just shoddy code design, and I'm sorry if I made it sound like it was. The programmers I've worked with at game companies have been some of the best I've known or worked with anywhere. But with extreme optimization comes lots of dependencies. It's not a question of being a bad programmer, it's a question of what you're trying to optimize for. And yes, some of that comes down to optimizing for time and not having enough time on any given aspect. I've seen an entire AI system implemented, pretty well I might add, in 3 days by a single coder. You're given a budget, and you want to make the best game possible with that budget, which usually involves pushing things. But a lot of the localization related problems just come from having extremely optimized code and other resources.
And most engines aren't written from scratch, though few are bought. Pretty much every company has a 3D graphics, animation, and gameplay engine they've put through quite a few cycles, even if they're good about making it not look like that's the case.
Re:I'm fed up of hearing about Katamari's sequel
on
We Heart Katamari Preview
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Having gone through the process of localization several times now, you'd be surprised how frequently things bite you. Text string variations, for example. On one of our games, we had to redo the way the engine handled every text string in the game, in order to work with Chinese, Korean and other non-Ascii languages. We had to lengthen maximum text string lengths for some of the more long-winded European languages. On consoles, this little change can (and did) push you over memory budget. The remote people chosen to handle translations often put in text strings longer than we had done or expected, causing subtle memory corruption errors. We changed a lot of artwork as many displays are handled as bitmaps. Heck, the difference between US and Asian Windows machine file heirchies bit us repeatedly, based in no small part around text usage. There is also your rendering engine, which is probably hardcoded in 60 places to run at 60 Hz... We've had major problems with some of our subsystems getting to PAL speeds, to the point where major chunks of the engine were just rewritten. Think about the tricks you would use to cause something to deinterlace crisply, then warp them to work at a different FPS. And of course the videos were broken and had to be resampled. Oh, and there are legal issues around releasing things in certain countries, like no Nazi insignia can appear in German games and strict restrictions around english and other languages appearing in Korean games. And you have to relicense a lot of music and other content for different territories, sometimes with other agencies and sometimes these deals are sour and you just have to redo your soundscape.
You put a million little bandages into a game to get it into E3, and then onto the shelves in time, and you generally don't think about localization until it is too late. You're far too focused on getting something working, fun, and on frame / memory budget in half the time you realistically should have. It's a superhuman effort to get done in time as is. It just doesn't occur to you that the refresh rate of the screen would be anything other than 60 Hz, or that you would need to check the length of hardcoded text strings. Your design team knew it had to be under 127 characters and you hooked them up yourself. You never expected to have text being put in by 14 different development companies with varying degrees of competence, and that you would be responsible for QA'ing the bugs they mysteriously introduce. And that's just a small sample of what happens during localization.
I'm not saying that translating games isn't worth it financially. But it is definitely a pain in the tail. It's just a lot more emotionally rewarding to start on the next game than to get stuck for 6 months fixing bugs because Gaelic's apostrophy happens to use the same extended ASCII as you're using for your escape character. And the process of localization does take 3 - 6 months in a schedule, minimum.
I had been hoping for a library of juice bottles managed by a Lego Mindstorms robot. The recipies would be controlled via a slashdotted website, and it would have competitions for the most ridiculous yet good drink recipe. Every day the site visitors would submit recipes and vote on them, and the owner of the machine would have to drink the one voted up and report on how it tastes (or one of the top 5, if the one voted up is a dupe / near dupe). Alcohol should definitely be involved. An additional Mindstorms robot would be required to put in the parasol.
I find the negative view of windfarms odd. They're beautiful things. You drive down a grassy road and you see hundreds of these giant rotating blades slowly spinning in the wind. The whole experience is a bit surreal, like passing into a 60's music video. These giants are there, always moving but never going anywhere. The constant, rhythmic flow of motion is quite nice juxtaposed against the quick, jerky motion of modern living. No matter how many times I drive by the windfarm on the way to Sacramento, I always enjoy the experience.
Water towers are the same. They're big, surreal bulbs cropping out of tree lines. They ground an area and let you know where you are, and where you are going. They're like the biggest tree in the forest. I've always thought of them as quite pretty.
They're using 64 bit technology. The other guys have dual-memory technology. I have technology on my wrist that allows me to tell time.
Can we please stop calling everything technology? At one point the word had meaning, but it's been so over used now that it means nothing. Now it's just a way to make something look more impressive than it actually is, a for-nerds buzzword. "Our emergent 64 bit technology allows for vertical integration along all of your supply-chain specifications." It's a painfully overused buzzword. 64 bit technology. Plastics technology. SUV technology. Technological technology.
Some things still deserve the term. Pretty much anything fusion-related can be given the term fusion technology. But the term technology is being applied to a lot of things that are just design choices. Win 3.1 could have had 64 bit memory addressing, they just didn't because it would have been a huge wasted of prescious resources. Calling it "64 bit technology" is like saying a car has 4-door technology: it's a design choice, not a radical piece of tech.
And these damn kids keep throwing their frisbies on my lawn.
Pretty much everyone who makes games underestimates the difficulty it will cause the player. Ironically, the players themselves frequently do the same, as no person in their right mind would recommend starting a hobby of Quake 3 by playing intermediate. You should start pretty much every game on dirt easy and work your way up. This is especially true in Quake 3 or any tournament style game, where player skill is not ranked in hours played but in months.
Games should have 4 difficulty levels, "Normal," "Hard," "Crushing," and "Insane." At least that way people would start on a difficulty level actually appropriate to them.
And there have been articles on dynamic difficulty adjustment before. The last rediscovery I remember was around the time Naughty Dog created Crash Bandicoot (which featured a similar system), but that was by no means the first. Unfortunately, not all systems degrade elegantly like that. AI is a perfect example of something that will, but if the challenge is based around static geometry or pre-set patterns elegant downgrading is very authoring-intensive.
Re:"Girly" subject matter is not the answer
on
10 Gateway Games
·
· Score: 1
P.S. I'd love to be a game designer! What do I need to do to become one?
100 games may sound like a lot to sample, but that's just 2 a week for a year. I've basically done this the past two years in a row, not to mention before college...
And I disagree with pretty much all of your statements WRT female gaming. Hang out with female gamers, watch them, listen to how people treat them and interact with them, and watch most modern games through their eyes. Watch how quickly they lose interest in Silent Hill 4 when your job becomes protecting the helpless bandaged woman, or how much they're turned off to SNK vs Capcom 2 by Mai's giant bouncing chest. You may not be sensitive to it because it's not focused on you all of the time, but basically everything the grandparent said is correct.
For more reading, I suggest the excellent Gender Inclusive Game Design, a good book not just about how to make "girl games," but how to make good games that are accessible to more people.
And if there are any women interested in becoming game designers or developers, please do so. While my company is 1/3rd female, that's generally rare in this industry. Your voices are needed.
Actually, you can get an LCD picture frame for about 100 dollars these days. And with digital cameras outselling traditional cameras, the price is worth it. They were just ahead of their time.
Exactly how many thousands of years have software companies been profitably running? A lot of what happened during the Bubble was in reaction to things that were wrong at regular monolithic companies. People do need more room to work than most companies give them. People need to take their mind off of work every now and then. (I remember visiting software development firms in the 80's and ping pong ball guns being present). Studies have shown that the average worker produces the most overall if they're slacking off 20% of the time. Aeron chairs, while gratuitous, are a lot more comfortable than the average office chair. Low light, and the narrow-spectrum light output by cheap flourescent office lights, are responsible for Seasonal Affective Disorder, or more plainly low light exposure levels cause depression. Out of this time we also got RSI-reduction keyboards, nonlinear office layouts, and a refocusing on morale of the individual over the "Office Space" style dronage where nobody cares what they do. There are also the "casual everydays," because a suit doesn't help you do your job as a coder any more than an optimized compiler would help an executive improve vendor relationships. Perks which had been dropping for years were suddenly brought forward as a way to improve worker relations and moral for less money than just paying them. My company is paying less for my health, dental, vision, accidental death and dismemberment, etc than they would have to pay me in cold hard cash to keep me as contented.
Maybe I should, but I don't feel so bad about the venture capitalists. To the average user with a clue, an internet-connected toaster was a joke, not something you would invest millions of dollars in. Even if the tech could be perfected, and it could pretty easily... so what? The investors in a company should know more than the average man on the street, but they allowed themselves to be blinded by greed. Instead of approaching anything rationally, they were driven by the potential for hundreds of trillions of dollars. Some of the ideas were either good or noble yet failed anyway, but many of the investors totally lost perspective and invested in junk. The AOL Time-Warner merger is the perfect example of this. Everyone at AOL knew they hit the proverbial jackpot, and everyone on the street knew Time-Warner was being an idiot.
In case you haven't noticed, companies are still releasing press releases that sound like they're from the bullshit generator.
Oddly enough, most of the major controller innovations that led to the common standard controller design can be attributed to nintendo. They had the first shoulder buttons, the first diamond-pattern buttons, the first standard analog stick, the first rumble pack. Sony beat them to Analog buttons, but dropped the ball in terms of pushing games to use it.
They also have a history of failed launches of tech that was too unique... the Virtual Boy, the Bulky Drive, etc. But if 3D is going to get mass-market at some point, it's probably going to happen at Nintendo first.
The number of MP in a camera does not denote the quality. By and large, the lens does that. The quantity of light the lense can gather, and the quality with which it can focus that light on a CCD generally determines whether or not your photos are good enough to print. Increasing resolution on a camera which relies on a cheap 4mm lens with a 2.5mm focal length is like an airport increasing the size of their gates and walkways despite everyone still being stuck for five hours at the badly understaffed security checkpoint.
The "quality" of most camera phone cameras has increased to that of a cheap webcam 7 years ago. In no way does a 1MP camera phone come close to the quality of a 1MP Elph.
The Mars rovers took some of the greatest, smoothest pictures yet seen with just a 1MP CCD.
Of course, quality will jump tremendously when we switch over from the RGRB CCDs to tri-color CCD's. Slightly offtopic, does anyone know the progress of this? When will we be able to get true 3-color CCD cameras? About two years ago I had heard this would be in about a year...
P.S. I agree with the sentiment that the article, while trying to be inclusive, comes off a bit like a bunch of sexist men who are trying to be inclusive. Most of the female gamers I know are Everquest players, Counterstrike addicts, Katamari Damacy lovers, die-hard Ninja Gaiden fans, Sims players, Castlevania afficianadoes... Basically players with tastes as varied as any others, who like good games and maybe not so into the grossly overt sexualization thing. While there are some things you can do to make a female audience walk away, the only thing you can do to really attract them is to make a great game.
Re:gamecube version?
on
We Love Katamari
·
· Score: 4, Informative
...and it revealed that, like its forebear, the game would be PlayStation 2-exclusive. - TFA
Personally, I want to salute the thousand people trying to run Half Life 2 under an intel i810 on-board graphics card. I remember struggling to get that chipset to work with the first Half Life.
Or that one person trying to get things running on a less than 1 GB HDD.
I can only imagine the great things endowed chairs for software development in the public interest could do. Think of it like this. For a million dollars one could probably update Open Office pretty well, paying 10 software developers for a year to gut the old codebase and update it to something less bloated. Or you could create two endowed chairs, paying two software developers to create or work on software in the public interest for life. And once they die, you pay the next pair for life. And the next.
10 developers for a year or 2 developers for 100 years? The second is far more likely to have lasting positive effects.
Speaking of which, does anyone have a donation link?
Slashdot Mirror
It's also important to point out that Firefly, like Joss's better work, was a "serial," in that later episodes depended upon previous episodes to make any sense. Unfortunately, and dumfoundingly, Fox decided to air the series out-of-order, which led to the complaints that Firefly was "confusing" and "impossible to follow."
In other words, Fox blew their own series because they didn't know what they were doing.
It's also a space western, which is a pretty tough theme to like, but somehow managed to capture the essence of what worked with the episodes of Star Trek that worked. Even though pretty much none of the characters are good guys (the captain kills people who he thinks deserves it, the crew members betray eachother for money, the pilot keeps wearing Hawaiian shirts), they're somehow likable in a bad guy way... Sort of like Han before Lucas bastardized him into a saturday morning cartoon. The old-west themes of cattle rustling and smuggling just add to the charm and the outlaw atmosphere. It was a pretty good step, in other words, to reduce what will likely be a nastily complicated future involving DRM, standards compliances, interoperability problems, technological glitches, and complicated social procedures based upon years of snowballing bureaucracy to something archaically approachable focused more on characters. Not once in the entire 12 episodes was there a spot of technobabble or an episode focused upon getting the holodeck to work. It was all about the characters, which really shined through on the DVD's.
It was good, but Fox blew their chance by thinking that it was The Simpsons. Hopefully the movie will rectify this to some degree. And if the movie does well, they can replay the TV shows. Most people haven't seen them anyway.
http://www.mtv.com/games/video_games/xbox/index.jh tml
Note - requires nasty proprietary combinations of Windows, Media Player, Internet Explorer, and DRM. I've seen the future, and it is locked down. They're also, oddly enough, significantly longer than what was shown on MTV.
These videos do show an impressive amount of physics, which is really what is missing from gaming currently. The graphics don't seem to be enough to wow, and I'm not looking forward to how much that much content will cost to develop, but certainly having that much extra processing power will come in handy. Hopefully it will go to making a better gaming experience rather than just a higher-poly, more normal mapped / enviornment mapped one. Condemned didn't give much hope, but the draw distance and physics in the other games was impressive.
Unfortunately, the most impressive things on new systems seem to be the tech demos. I remember the Xbox ping-pong demo was just stunning, probably moreso than the first round of games, as was the detail on the Dolphin for the Dolphin, or the PS2 shell screen. I'm kind of sad that there aren't any really "wow" demos for the Xbox 360, as a good tech demo is always an impressive, if pointless piece of eye candy.
If they released an official version of Linux for their platforms, it would allow unsigned, uncontrolled code to run on their platforms. They could no longer demand licensing revenue, because people could just release their games under the linux portion of the OS, not that is a significant threat. What's more troubling would be, for example, Microsoft's security model based around not allowing anything unsigned onto their network. An Xbox with full network access running arbitrary code can now do nasty things with billing servers, the services of other people, or simply cheating in online games.
Plus, of course, it's a lot of resources to get Linux to run on a new platform, even though someone always seems willing to do it. And hardware and software exploits are going to be released anyway... flash carts for the DS existed long before Linux ran on it.
If one decides to visit a page, unless Google has a recent cache (not like a Google cache ever goes out-of-date) they'll have to re-download it from the webserver, compress it, and send it to your client. Unless you're on a painfully slow connection, chances are you could have downloaded it yourself basically instantaneously. And downloading a page to Google, diffing with Google's cache of your last recieved file, and sending you the update seems like it would just be faster to go to you directly. If they have a massive pipe, which I'm sure they do, and they can avoid outstripping the servers it feeds from, they might be able to save you a small percentage of time, based upon how much the diff requires, compressed, and how quickly google can download the page and perform the calculation, or if it's local copy is the latest.
Now, prefetching potential branch pages is cool, but I have yet to see an implementation of this tech that I'm impressed with.
All of this leads me to believe that dial-up users, the traditional market for such compress-and-prefetch schemes, will be the ones who actually benefit from this tech. That is, aside from those who side-benefit is better page searches on google with their suddenly dynamic DB.
I thought the GDC sold transcripts / videos of the talks. I wonder if the sales volumes on those things are so low they just gave up and decided to use the talks as attraction to next year's event.
There are a lot of "sim" style games out there. Check out the Tycoon serieses, for one. Heck, some people credit Railrood Tycoon with starting the sim genre, though others point to Populous. There was also the excellent Theme Park game, followed by the mostly forgettable Theme * serieses. Oh, and the very odd Afterlife. A lot of historical RTS games and "god" games are similar to to sim games. Pharoah comes to mind, as does Black and White, Creatures, Settlers, etc.
As a side note, Apple really needs to go to a different naming convention. Longhorn is something I can really get excited about. It's a full upgrade to an OS badly in need of one. Whatever it is, it's A: Major and B: Badly in need. Just look at the name. But OS 10.4? It's a point release. If you go back and look at the system from 10.0 to now, the OS has evolved significantly, probably more than the original Mac OS did between system 6 and system 9. However, it's still just a point release. 10.4 just doesn't sound that impressive. I get the feeling that if Apple tried to release a 10.5 along side of a Longhorn Super-Duper OS Times Infinity, they'll get drowned out in the Ballmer dance.
Now if they redesigned the iPod, that might have a chance of stealing some of Microsoft's thunder.
The main point of his entire rant seemed to be that episodic programming with larger character development arcs provides more compelling fiction than programs that start and end at the same place. When Xander is scared for his life and reaches for Willow's hand, it's a lot more compelling if they've gotten near to a relationship, he burned her badly by going with someone else, then they spent the last 3 episodes working their way to the point where they are speaking again. When Bones takes a jab at Spock, it's meaningless because their relationship never changes.
Being John Malkovich was a popular, excellent movie, and while I'd put it more in the category of fantasy than Sci Fi, if you read Card's books the distinction is academic. Plus the characters to go through an immense arc throughout the film, falling in love, falling out of love, changing... evolving as characters in exactly the way that Homer Simpson doesn't. Again, the focus, as in all good Sci Fi, is on the character evolutions.
Smallville isn't the best series ever by a long shot. But like Buffy it is a popular show that opened people's eyes to what can happen when characters evolve across episodes.
Trek did and does follow an antiquated model, and he's right in thinking that it would only continue to do so. Probably the best bit of Trek, the last few seasons of DS9, took place when Paramount's main people were focused on Voyager and allowed a smaller group of people to create a broader story focused more on large story arcs and developments. The best season of Enterprise has been this last one, when multi episode story arcs were plentiful.
Orson's books reflect this thinking, of course. His most popular work, the Ender's series, follows one character along his evolution from a weak abused nobody kid to a reclusive man hiding from unwanted fame from his past, to an old man accepting of his place in the world. And the latest Ender's book takes place in the same time frame as the original, exploring another character who isn't the hero, but who evolves from a lone troubled genius striking out at anyone or anything that might subjugate him, to being a mature, willing second, giving himself over to a man he believes deserves it.
Oddly enough, I've always felt Asimov was at his best in short stories, but even then his characters were undergoing tremendous evolution within the span of several pages.
Yes.
And thanks.
In case people were looking, Harmonix's home page. Of course there is a lot more going on that we can't talk about...
I read this and almost cried. Why don't game developers use the same design techniques and standards as other major software developers? Using hard-coded string values? Hard coding the software to run at 60 Hz? Pushing your memory budget so close you cannot fit a few more characters of text? Not only that, but game engines are re-written from scratch for virtually every new game; the wheel is re-invented 12 times a month in any given project.
A lot of it has to do with what you are trying to do with your budget. String lengths aren't checked because that would double the amount of milliseconds the system is spending on text. You can check all of that at export time, but that programmer time might be best spent on another aspect of development. You squeeze the system as hard as you can, and maybe everything including rendering, physics, etc takes 56-59 MS on average. If you reduce the amount of pixels per frame but increase the frame rate, the system may be pushing exactly the same number of pixels, but now you have to update physics 20% more often. Maybe you're using the sound processor to update a part of your physics model because you know *exactly* how much time it needs to spend on rendering your streaming audio, but now your timing is all shot. Maybe you've hardcoded string length because then you can allocate a single text array at the beginning of a level and shave a few cycles off of seek time.
It's not just shoddy code design, and I'm sorry if I made it sound like it was. The programmers I've worked with at game companies have been some of the best I've known or worked with anywhere. But with extreme optimization comes lots of dependencies. It's not a question of being a bad programmer, it's a question of what you're trying to optimize for. And yes, some of that comes down to optimizing for time and not having enough time on any given aspect. I've seen an entire AI system implemented, pretty well I might add, in 3 days by a single coder. You're given a budget, and you want to make the best game possible with that budget, which usually involves pushing things. But a lot of the localization related problems just come from having extremely optimized code and other resources.
And most engines aren't written from scratch, though few are bought. Pretty much every company has a 3D graphics, animation, and gameplay engine they've put through quite a few cycles, even if they're good about making it not look like that's the case.
Having gone through the process of localization several times now, you'd be surprised how frequently things bite you. Text string variations, for example. On one of our games, we had to redo the way the engine handled every text string in the game, in order to work with Chinese, Korean and other non-Ascii languages. We had to lengthen maximum text string lengths for some of the more long-winded European languages. On consoles, this little change can (and did) push you over memory budget. The remote people chosen to handle translations often put in text strings longer than we had done or expected, causing subtle memory corruption errors. We changed a lot of artwork as many displays are handled as bitmaps. Heck, the difference between US and Asian Windows machine file heirchies bit us repeatedly, based in no small part around text usage. There is also your rendering engine, which is probably hardcoded in 60 places to run at 60 Hz... We've had major problems with some of our subsystems getting to PAL speeds, to the point where major chunks of the engine were just rewritten. Think about the tricks you would use to cause something to deinterlace crisply, then warp them to work at a different FPS. And of course the videos were broken and had to be resampled. Oh, and there are legal issues around releasing things in certain countries, like no Nazi insignia can appear in German games and strict restrictions around english and other languages appearing in Korean games. And you have to relicense a lot of music and other content for different territories, sometimes with other agencies and sometimes these deals are sour and you just have to redo your soundscape.
You put a million little bandages into a game to get it into E3, and then onto the shelves in time, and you generally don't think about localization until it is too late. You're far too focused on getting something working, fun, and on frame / memory budget in half the time you realistically should have. It's a superhuman effort to get done in time as is. It just doesn't occur to you that the refresh rate of the screen would be anything other than 60 Hz, or that you would need to check the length of hardcoded text strings. Your design team knew it had to be under 127 characters and you hooked them up yourself. You never expected to have text being put in by 14 different development companies with varying degrees of competence, and that you would be responsible for QA'ing the bugs they mysteriously introduce. And that's just a small sample of what happens during localization.
I'm not saying that translating games isn't worth it financially. But it is definitely a pain in the tail. It's just a lot more emotionally rewarding to start on the next game than to get stuck for 6 months fixing bugs because Gaelic's apostrophy happens to use the same extended ASCII as you're using for your escape character. And the process of localization does take 3 - 6 months in a schedule, minimum.
I had been hoping for a library of juice bottles managed by a Lego Mindstorms robot. The recipies would be controlled via a slashdotted website, and it would have competitions for the most ridiculous yet good drink recipe. Every day the site visitors would submit recipes and vote on them, and the owner of the machine would have to drink the one voted up and report on how it tastes (or one of the top 5, if the one voted up is a dupe / near dupe). Alcohol should definitely be involved. An additional Mindstorms robot would be required to put in the parasol.
That's what really bored humans with too little stimulation do.
They would post on Slashdot?
I find the negative view of windfarms odd. They're beautiful things. You drive down a grassy road and you see hundreds of these giant rotating blades slowly spinning in the wind. The whole experience is a bit surreal, like passing into a 60's music video. These giants are there, always moving but never going anywhere. The constant, rhythmic flow of motion is quite nice juxtaposed against the quick, jerky motion of modern living. No matter how many times I drive by the windfarm on the way to Sacramento, I always enjoy the experience.
Water towers are the same. They're big, surreal bulbs cropping out of tree lines. They ground an area and let you know where you are, and where you are going. They're like the biggest tree in the forest. I've always thought of them as quite pretty.
They're using 64 bit technology. The other guys have dual-memory technology. I have technology on my wrist that allows me to tell time.
Can we please stop calling everything technology? At one point the word had meaning, but it's been so over used now that it means nothing. Now it's just a way to make something look more impressive than it actually is, a for-nerds buzzword. "Our emergent 64 bit technology allows for vertical integration along all of your supply-chain specifications." It's a painfully overused buzzword. 64 bit technology. Plastics technology. SUV technology. Technological technology.
Some things still deserve the term. Pretty much anything fusion-related can be given the term fusion technology. But the term technology is being applied to a lot of things that are just design choices. Win 3.1 could have had 64 bit memory addressing, they just didn't because it would have been a huge wasted of prescious resources. Calling it "64 bit technology" is like saying a car has 4-door technology: it's a design choice, not a radical piece of tech.
And these damn kids keep throwing their frisbies on my lawn.
"spell things the way you want" - 12
"spell things correctly - 3,600
Result - people should not be allowed to spell things the way they want.
"Land Rovers Rule" - 1,620 hits
"Land Rovers Suck" - 23 hits
Result - Land Rovers clearly rule
tires - 22,300,000 hits
tyres - 3,800,000 hits
Result - the word is spelled "Tires," except for the 10% of trucks that are gyrls.
Pretty much everyone who makes games underestimates the difficulty it will cause the player. Ironically, the players themselves frequently do the same, as no person in their right mind would recommend starting a hobby of Quake 3 by playing intermediate. You should start pretty much every game on dirt easy and work your way up. This is especially true in Quake 3 or any tournament style game, where player skill is not ranked in hours played but in months.
Games should have 4 difficulty levels, "Normal," "Hard," "Crushing," and "Insane." At least that way people would start on a difficulty level actually appropriate to them.
And there have been articles on dynamic difficulty adjustment before. The last rediscovery I remember was around the time Naughty Dog created Crash Bandicoot (which featured a similar system), but that was by no means the first. Unfortunately, not all systems degrade elegantly like that. AI is a perfect example of something that will, but if the challenge is based around static geometry or pre-set patterns elegant downgrading is very authoring-intensive.
P.S. I'd love to be a game designer! What do I need to do to become one?
Take David Perry's Design Challenge.
100 games may sound like a lot to sample, but that's just 2 a week for a year. I've basically done this the past two years in a row, not to mention before college...
And I disagree with pretty much all of your statements WRT female gaming. Hang out with female gamers, watch them, listen to how people treat them and interact with them, and watch most modern games through their eyes. Watch how quickly they lose interest in Silent Hill 4 when your job becomes protecting the helpless bandaged woman, or how much they're turned off to SNK vs Capcom 2 by Mai's giant bouncing chest. You may not be sensitive to it because it's not focused on you all of the time, but basically everything the grandparent said is correct.
For more reading, I suggest the excellent Gender Inclusive Game Design, a good book not just about how to make "girl games," but how to make good games that are accessible to more people.
And if there are any women interested in becoming game designers or developers, please do so. While my company is 1/3rd female, that's generally rare in this industry. Your voices are needed.
Actually, you can get an LCD picture frame for about 100 dollars these days. And with digital cameras outselling traditional cameras, the price is worth it. They were just ahead of their time.
Exactly how many thousands of years have software companies been profitably running? A lot of what happened during the Bubble was in reaction to things that were wrong at regular monolithic companies. People do need more room to work than most companies give them. People need to take their mind off of work every now and then. (I remember visiting software development firms in the 80's and ping pong ball guns being present). Studies have shown that the average worker produces the most overall if they're slacking off 20% of the time. Aeron chairs, while gratuitous, are a lot more comfortable than the average office chair. Low light, and the narrow-spectrum light output by cheap flourescent office lights, are responsible for Seasonal Affective Disorder, or more plainly low light exposure levels cause depression. Out of this time we also got RSI-reduction keyboards, nonlinear office layouts, and a refocusing on morale of the individual over the "Office Space" style dronage where nobody cares what they do. There are also the "casual everydays," because a suit doesn't help you do your job as a coder any more than an optimized compiler would help an executive improve vendor relationships. Perks which had been dropping for years were suddenly brought forward as a way to improve worker relations and moral for less money than just paying them. My company is paying less for my health, dental, vision, accidental death and dismemberment, etc than they would have to pay me in cold hard cash to keep me as contented.
Maybe I should, but I don't feel so bad about the venture capitalists. To the average user with a clue, an internet-connected toaster was a joke, not something you would invest millions of dollars in. Even if the tech could be perfected, and it could pretty easily... so what? The investors in a company should know more than the average man on the street, but they allowed themselves to be blinded by greed. Instead of approaching anything rationally, they were driven by the potential for hundreds of trillions of dollars. Some of the ideas were either good or noble yet failed anyway, but many of the investors totally lost perspective and invested in junk. The AOL Time-Warner merger is the perfect example of this. Everyone at AOL knew they hit the proverbial jackpot, and everyone on the street knew Time-Warner was being an idiot.
In case you haven't noticed, companies are still releasing press releases that sound like they're from the bullshit generator.
Oddly enough, most of the major controller innovations that led to the common standard controller design can be attributed to nintendo. They had the first shoulder buttons, the first diamond-pattern buttons, the first standard analog stick, the first rumble pack. Sony beat them to Analog buttons, but dropped the ball in terms of pushing games to use it.
They also have a history of failed launches of tech that was too unique... the Virtual Boy, the Bulky Drive, etc. But if 3D is going to get mass-market at some point, it's probably going to happen at Nintendo first.
The number of MP in a camera does not denote the quality. By and large, the lens does that. The quantity of light the lense can gather, and the quality with which it can focus that light on a CCD generally determines whether or not your photos are good enough to print. Increasing resolution on a camera which relies on a cheap 4mm lens with a 2.5mm focal length is like an airport increasing the size of their gates and walkways despite everyone still being stuck for five hours at the badly understaffed security checkpoint.
The "quality" of most camera phone cameras has increased to that of a cheap webcam 7 years ago. In no way does a 1MP camera phone come close to the quality of a 1MP Elph.
The Mars rovers took some of the greatest, smoothest pictures yet seen with just a 1MP CCD.
Of course, quality will jump tremendously when we switch over from the RGRB CCDs to tri-color CCD's. Slightly offtopic, does anyone know the progress of this? When will we be able to get true 3-color CCD cameras? About two years ago I had heard this would be in about a year...
Karaoke Revolution
:).
Not that I'm partial or anything
P.S. I agree with the sentiment that the article, while trying to be inclusive, comes off a bit like a bunch of sexist men who are trying to be inclusive. Most of the female gamers I know are Everquest players, Counterstrike addicts, Katamari Damacy lovers, die-hard Ninja Gaiden fans, Sims players, Castlevania afficianadoes... Basically players with tastes as varied as any others, who like good games and maybe not so into the grossly overt sexualization thing. While there are some things you can do to make a female audience walk away, the only thing you can do to really attract them is to make a great game.
...and it revealed that, like its forebear, the game would be PlayStation 2-exclusive. - TFA
I'd call that a pretty big clue.
Personally, I want to salute the thousand people trying to run Half Life 2 under an intel i810 on-board graphics card. I remember struggling to get that chipset to work with the first Half Life.
Or that one person trying to get things running on a less than 1 GB HDD.
Eternal optimism, I salute you!
I can only imagine the great things endowed chairs for software development in the public interest could do. Think of it like this. For a million dollars one could probably update Open Office pretty well, paying 10 software developers for a year to gut the old codebase and update it to something less bloated. Or you could create two endowed chairs, paying two software developers to create or work on software in the public interest for life. And once they die, you pay the next pair for life. And the next.
10 developers for a year or 2 developers for 100 years? The second is far more likely to have lasting positive effects.
Speaking of which, does anyone have a donation link?