I definately don't disagree with you, but they chose a very poor system of matchmaking for a game that is supposedly "team-based". There's no real support for matching with buddies and finding another group of people to play with.
If you did have a team-matching based game, then I agree it would be silly to do something different for ranking. What you'd want to do is ensure that you and your friends always end up on the same team. You can't really do much boosting when you're on the same team, usually its done by having you kill me 300 times or something. So if you don't give the option of getting on the other team, then this should satisfy the requirements of not having friends on the opposing team.
(And for a tournement play you'd probably use unranked games with different accounts in a controlled environment. Online pro-tournements are fairly dubious because of the high potential for cheating - not that gears of war is really set up for tournements. For a really great online game, its feautreset is pretty low. Maybe in another patch or GoW2...)
Its no surprise they made it harder. A lot of features around ranked matches are set up so you can't call your buddies in and pad your stats for a ranked match. No join-in-progress, invites disabled, etc. are all ways in which live games have restrictions on them that keep your friends from joining. The seriousness in which they are implemented depends on how the leaderboards and such are constructed.
This leaves to wonder if Halo 3 will have a ranked "couch" system like they did for Halo 2, and what kind of restrictions will be put on it. (Can only play a ranked game with 8 players if you have a 4 person party, for instance).
It depends on the job of course. If I'm going to lock someone in the basement and have them watch machines all day then I don't really care if you're an outgoing person. Actually, I'd probably want an introvert because they'd be happier there than someone who liked human contact. But if the job involved managing others or dealing with customers, then I want somenoe who's outgoing, and the question is very relevant.
Why is this flaimbait? I have no problem with the current rating system or making sure that the industry polices itself by ensuring retail outlets don't sell M games to minors. What you don't want is _government_ _oversight_, which I'm guessing would be the "bad side" the parent post refers to. Having church and community groups (and even the occasional nut) involved in the process would help them feel more comfortable with the rating system and that they can regulate "filth" at the local community level where it belongs.
Its software. Generally on a console you want the game to have full access to all the memory on the machine. Having things like an OS, built in UI, etc. will take away from that sort of thing. On the 360 there is a chunk of ram you don't have access to that the OS holds on to for its deal, and on the PS3 you allocate the space yourself for the various system UI widgets. On the Wii if they made the browser launchable with a system call and you had enough memory you could technically free up space and launch the game. Remember, none of these systems have any sort of memory paging, so if that browser goes over the limit then you're toast, and there's definately no where to put your game's memory once the browser kicks in.
There's plenty of positive news about it, mainly centered around its primary use: inventory tracking. Supply chains are already being streamlined around RFID (mainly from tracking large palletes of goods, not so much with the individual item tracking but that's coming).
But mainly RFID is apparently an anagram for EVIL on/. We just need an "RFID gives you cancer" posting here to put a nice bow on it. (see the passport article from earlier - note that passports have their own shielding built in when reading the article). Yes, it can be misused, but so can pretty much every other technology. I'd much rather have/. focus on some of the cooler techs used with this stuff than 20,000 articles about how the government is going to know what sneakers I'm wearing from space or how muggers are going to read the contents of my wallet before going after me.
I'm not sure if he's speaking about games, but I'd say the original XBox SDK beat the shit out of the PS2 right from the start. Sony hasn't even caught up to Xbox 1 with the PS3 SDK (but its much much better than PS2, I think because of IBM's invovlement) and is way behind the 360. The hardware on the otherhand is debatable...
It actually requires Shader 1.1 (Dx 9.0c), which I believe is Xbox 1 (GeForce 2+?) quality hardware. I think any card after 2001-2002 should be able to run it just fine. (My computer at home can't run it either:(, but it has trouble with a lot of indy games (Darwinia crushed it) so I don't really think its XNAs issue. There's enough stuff out there to give you a viable indy market on the Win32, being 3-4 years out from minimum spec. (Its all relative to what you put in your game though - more machines could run a 2d side scroller than an FPS for instance)
I'm not sure what the deal is with the 360, but I imagine you are correct - MS will have to approve your game before anyone can play it on the 360 (at least if you sell it to them and don't distribute it open source). I doubt that will change anytime soon. Having it work on 360 is more of a "cool" factor than anything else.
Well, hopefully you're not allocating arrays in your code segment. Generally if you're overwriting anywhere near where your code lives thats a bad thing.
Given that its an option in the control panel and the bios, and that OEMs had to do something to turn it on, and thus implying that its an on/off switch, the only rational conclusion that one could make is of course...
As someone pointed out, Windows support is there. Or rather, POSIX supports windows. Windows application engineers do NOT support POSIX, and there in lies the problem. (MS certainly isn't making it any easier for them to do so, but there's not a very high barrier to entry if you do want to use it). I also should have clarified that I was thinking about end-user applications as well, and POSIX will only get you half of the way there. There are a ton of windowing "standards", but which one to use? Even on Windows there's at least 4-5 ways I can think of to go at building a GUI program. Look at the religous battles that arrise on the *nix side of things as well. Then there's Apple. Maybe its not a problem that needs to be solved I guess, but it sure would make things easier.
Just a nitpick: Both major GPU companies support DirectX, a majority of games are written to it, so its a "standard", defacto or not. I was pointing out that (for the most part, there are definatley differences) you generally look at how well a GPU performs on the same game, since they both support a "standard" API.
Of course, for the competition of the type that exists between Intel and AMD or AMD/Nvidia you need a common standard to compete with. If all apps ran on the same OS/GUI API then you'd have a true choice in operating systems (this one is more secure, this one faster, this one runs Word twice as fast and handles more DB load, etc). CPUs have x86, GPUs have DirectX/OpenGL, OSs need a standard application interface commmonly accepted by software developers. Otherwise you're comparing not just the OS but all the stuff that goes with it (skins, music players, etc etc etc)
You're right of course in regards to game development (I plan on signing up after I get a 360 at home). I was speaking more from the players who want hobbyist content. Currently the only way to play XNA games created by other people is to load them yourself from the XNA launcher, which you get only as a member of the club. That of course isn't preventing them from having a download option for everyone later on.
Of course, MS hopes that XNA will be the standard you'll want to know, and you can export it to any platform you want as long as its Microsoft:)
Kidding aside, it does seem odd to me that MS decided to charge for access to the club, and at a subscription rate at that. The whole C# express/XNA thing for free seems like a great idea to win the hearts and minds of future developers (get 'em while they're young) and XNA (from my impression) overall is a pretty solid and easy to use toolkit. But charging for one of its coolest features - free direct access to console hardware through a first party SDK? I'm guessing they wanted to prevent exactly what you are describing - a system where people have open access to free content thus canabalizing the XBLA market, or even worse, pay content where MS doesn't get its cut.
If that's truly the reason, then when you think about it, it goes against MS goals with XNA in the first place. One of the reason you'd want to develop a game with it is a) learning, but b) impress your friends. If I can't send my friend something I made, then why bother? For them to worry that someone's free homebrew project is going to eat into profits from a quality for-pay game is sensless. There are a ton of free game sites on the web, yet places like Pogo still do a tidy business.
As far as flash games, the one big draw back I can see for Nintendo is that you can't make something for its best feature - the Wiimote! Hopefully some of the reverse engineering work will fix that out and then we'll see some really cool hobby games.
They sort of have that with XNA Creators Club, but the barrier to entry is high ($49 for 4 months, $99 for a year) and there's no easy download solution just yet (you have to download from a 3rd party and run it yourself). Still, it gives you native access to develop on the console and use the full power of the hardware. Not the top priority for casual games, but the option is still there.
I can guarantee you for a fact that the "extreme 3D" version has nothing to do with the game. Looks like some 3d glasses snake oil or something. There were no extra or special editions put out for the game. There was going to be a sequel, but the game didn't sell very well despite being a mild success with critics (hence the rarity today).
But if you're not going to buy it anyways, what price is good enough? $20? $10? 5? It costs money to make these things no matter what. Again, you don't sound like a casual user. A casual user is someone who wants to play a game, and if its not on Bittorrent he might have to bite the bullet. Like frat guys at a Linux convention, they're here for the beer, not the source or speech.
Put it another way:
Two publishers put out two games at the same time. One has anti-copy protection, the other doesn't. Both cost $50. Our intrepid young gamer Johnny 6Cola has acquired $50 for his birthday and really really wants both games. The copy-free one is on bittorrent, the other is in the store. Which publisher would you rather be? Now in a month, both are on bittorrent, but games have a pretty short shelflife compared to Word or something similar. Another reason why its a different animal as far as copy-protection goes than other software.
And for the time being MS still has a secure system against casual cracks. You can survive without Vista, but maybe someone wants it for XY or Z feature (or the next version of their favorite software might only support Vista, etc). If it takes several hours and a spare box to set this up, they might just bite the bullet and buy it. If the barrier to entry is 5 minutes and is 0 risk (no viruses, etc) all you've got is the moral issue to protect you, and despite the BSA's best efforts people still don't see taking money from Microsoft as wrong:)
Which is good enough. If Joe 6pack has to jump through hoops to pirate, he might just buy the product. Even better, Joe 12pack (twice as smart) might even be more wary of searching sites because of a legitimate fear of fake pirate sites that have viruses.
In games this is even more prevalent - the goal of fighting piracy isn't to prevent the inevetable - somewhere somebody has enough spare time to crack your stuff, but to _delay_ it. If Johnny 6cola can't get his game right away, then he might have to suck it up and buy it. The most sucessful ones have locked out pirates for 30 days or so. If you've been waiting for months for a game, waiting another month might not be an option. (Some of those might be from pirates distributing a game which still has parts of it not working and crashes half way through - even better for publishers). Obviously this is unique to games, as other software publishers want to keep people out for good.
How about those old Tex Murphy games? Somewhat cheezy, but they had fun puzzles and storylines. They suffered a bit from the "OMG CD-ROM interactive movies!" phase, but they were still fun none-the-less. The adventure genre has always benefited from interesting and compelling storylines. (Let's face it, you can replace the story from HalfLife/Halo/Doom/etc with any sciencefiction/horror plotline and it will remain just as fun a game). When the pace of a game is a bit slower, there's a little more you can do with laying out a story. I hope the Sam & Max episodes really do spawn a new era of adventure games. I think given the write toolsets and talented writers & designers you could churn out an episode pretty quickly and cost effectivly, as the scale is reduced. On games I've worked on its always been that last 15% - some feature or portion of the game that's wonky. That level you can't cut that always runs at 5-10 frames under your target FPS, etc. With episodes you could get an engine working and then work on content - pipeline it and have a couple teams working in parallel on small, focused levels.
I think if it was done right episodic gaming could be a real benefit to certain types of games. If you enjoy games that tell stories (different from "interactive fiction"...still a game), you don't really have anything in the game world to choose from except the "novel". There's no short story format for games. If you go the visual entertainment route for your analogy, all we have are gigantic epic films. There's no half-hour sitcom. (Say what you will about the sit-com, there's a few out there that are good:) Where episodic gaming comes in is that you can have a two hour game that tells a story and doesn't leave the player feeling robbed. They know they can tune in next week/month/etc. for the next one, and enjoy the same characters/world/gameplay etc.
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I definately don't disagree with you, but they chose a very poor system of matchmaking for a game that is supposedly "team-based". There's no real support for matching with buddies and finding another group of people to play with. If you did have a team-matching based game, then I agree it would be silly to do something different for ranking. What you'd want to do is ensure that you and your friends always end up on the same team. You can't really do much boosting when you're on the same team, usually its done by having you kill me 300 times or something. So if you don't give the option of getting on the other team, then this should satisfy the requirements of not having friends on the opposing team. (And for a tournement play you'd probably use unranked games with different accounts in a controlled environment. Online pro-tournements are fairly dubious because of the high potential for cheating - not that gears of war is really set up for tournements. For a really great online game, its feautreset is pretty low. Maybe in another patch or GoW2...)
Its no surprise they made it harder. A lot of features around ranked matches are set up so you can't call your buddies in and pad your stats for a ranked match. No join-in-progress, invites disabled, etc. are all ways in which live games have restrictions on them that keep your friends from joining. The seriousness in which they are implemented depends on how the leaderboards and such are constructed.
This leaves to wonder if Halo 3 will have a ranked "couch" system like they did for Halo 2, and what kind of restrictions will be put on it. (Can only play a ranked game with 8 players if you have a 4 person party, for instance).
We found it and cancelled it. That show sucked. Except for the Noxema chick. She was hot.
I think you mean GNU\Copying.
It depends on the job of course. If I'm going to lock someone in the basement and have them watch machines all day then I don't really care if you're an outgoing person. Actually, I'd probably want an introvert because they'd be happier there than someone who liked human contact. But if the job involved managing others or dealing with customers, then I want somenoe who's outgoing, and the question is very relevant.
Why is this flaimbait? I have no problem with the current rating system or making sure that the industry polices itself by ensuring retail outlets don't sell M games to minors. What you don't want is _government_ _oversight_, which I'm guessing would be the "bad side" the parent post refers to. Having church and community groups (and even the occasional nut) involved in the process would help them feel more comfortable with the rating system and that they can regulate "filth" at the local community level where it belongs.
Its software. Generally on a console you want the game to have full access to all the memory on the machine. Having things like an OS, built in UI, etc. will take away from that sort of thing. On the 360 there is a chunk of ram you don't have access to that the OS holds on to for its deal, and on the PS3 you allocate the space yourself for the various system UI widgets. On the Wii if they made the browser launchable with a system call and you had enough memory you could technically free up space and launch the game. Remember, none of these systems have any sort of memory paging, so if that browser goes over the limit then you're toast, and there's definately no where to put your game's memory once the browser kicks in.
There's plenty of positive news about it, mainly centered around its primary use: inventory tracking. Supply chains are already being streamlined around RFID (mainly from tracking large palletes of goods, not so much with the individual item tracking but that's coming).
/. We just need an "RFID gives you cancer" posting here to put a nice bow on it. (see the passport article from earlier - note that passports have their own shielding built in when reading the article). Yes, it can be misused, but so can pretty much every other technology. I'd much rather have /. focus on some of the cooler techs used with this stuff than 20,000 articles about how the government is going to know what sneakers I'm wearing from space or how muggers are going to read the contents of my wallet before going after me.
But mainly RFID is apparently an anagram for EVIL on
Commodore 64 anyone? Its correct to say that its the first console in quite a while, but not ever.
I'm not sure if he's speaking about games, but I'd say the original XBox SDK beat the shit out of the PS2 right from the start. Sony hasn't even caught up to Xbox 1 with the PS3 SDK (but its much much better than PS2, I think because of IBM's invovlement) and is way behind the 360. The hardware on the otherhand is debatable...
Hitting a fish in the head twice with an elephant gun might be a little hard, as there won't be much left to hit the second time. ;)
It actually requires Shader 1.1 (Dx 9.0c), which I believe is Xbox 1 (GeForce 2+?) quality hardware. I think any card after 2001-2002 should be able to run it just fine. (My computer at home can't run it either :(, but it has trouble with a lot of indy games (Darwinia crushed it) so I don't really think its XNAs issue. There's enough stuff out there to give you a viable indy market on the Win32, being 3-4 years out from minimum spec. (Its all relative to what you put in your game though - more machines could run a 2d side scroller than an FPS for instance)
I'm not sure what the deal is with the 360, but I imagine you are correct - MS will have to approve your game before anyone can play it on the 360 (at least if you sell it to them and don't distribute it open source). I doubt that will change anytime soon. Having it work on 360 is more of a "cool" factor than anything else.
Well, hopefully you're not allocating arrays in your code segment. Generally if you're overwriting anywhere near where your code lives thats a bad thing.
Given that its an option in the control panel and the bios, and that OEMs had to do something to turn it on, and thus implying that its an on/off switch, the only rational conclusion that one could make is of course...
NO.
As someone pointed out, Windows support is there. Or rather, POSIX supports windows. Windows application engineers do NOT support POSIX, and there in lies the problem. (MS certainly isn't making it any easier for them to do so, but there's not a very high barrier to entry if you do want to use it). I also should have clarified that I was thinking about end-user applications as well, and POSIX will only get you half of the way there. There are a ton of windowing "standards", but which one to use? Even on Windows there's at least 4-5 ways I can think of to go at building a GUI program. Look at the religous battles that arrise on the *nix side of things as well. Then there's Apple. Maybe its not a problem that needs to be solved I guess, but it sure would make things easier.
Just a nitpick: Both major GPU companies support DirectX, a majority of games are written to it, so its a "standard", defacto or not. I was pointing out that (for the most part, there are definatley differences) you generally look at how well a GPU performs on the same game, since they both support a "standard" API.
Of course, for the competition of the type that exists between Intel and AMD or AMD/Nvidia you need a common standard to compete with. If all apps ran on the same OS/GUI API then you'd have a true choice in operating systems (this one is more secure, this one faster, this one runs Word twice as fast and handles more DB load, etc). CPUs have x86, GPUs have DirectX/OpenGL, OSs need a standard application interface commmonly accepted by software developers. Otherwise you're comparing not just the OS but all the stuff that goes with it (skins, music players, etc etc etc)
You're right of course in regards to game development (I plan on signing up after I get a 360 at home). I was speaking more from the players who want hobbyist content. Currently the only way to play XNA games created by other people is to load them yourself from the XNA launcher, which you get only as a member of the club. That of course isn't preventing them from having a download option for everyone later on.
Of course, MS hopes that XNA will be the standard you'll want to know, and you can export it to any platform you want as long as its Microsoft :)
Kidding aside, it does seem odd to me that MS decided to charge for access to the club, and at a subscription rate at that. The whole C# express/XNA thing for free seems like a great idea to win the hearts and minds of future developers (get 'em while they're young) and XNA (from my impression) overall is a pretty solid and easy to use toolkit. But charging for one of its coolest features - free direct access to console hardware through a first party SDK? I'm guessing they wanted to prevent exactly what you are describing - a system where people have open access to free content thus canabalizing the XBLA market, or even worse, pay content where MS doesn't get its cut.
If that's truly the reason, then when you think about it, it goes against MS goals with XNA in the first place. One of the reason you'd want to develop a game with it is a) learning, but b) impress your friends. If I can't send my friend something I made, then why bother? For them to worry that someone's free homebrew project is going to eat into profits from a quality for-pay game is sensless. There are a ton of free game sites on the web, yet places like Pogo still do a tidy business.
As far as flash games, the one big draw back I can see for Nintendo is that you can't make something for its best feature - the Wiimote! Hopefully some of the reverse engineering work will fix that out and then we'll see some really cool hobby games.
They sort of have that with XNA Creators Club, but the barrier to entry is high ($49 for 4 months, $99 for a year) and there's no easy download solution just yet (you have to download from a 3rd party and run it yourself). Still, it gives you native access to develop on the console and use the full power of the hardware. Not the top priority for casual games, but the option is still there.
I can guarantee you for a fact that the "extreme 3D" version has nothing to do with the game. Looks like some 3d glasses snake oil or something. There were no extra or special editions put out for the game. There was going to be a sequel, but the game didn't sell very well despite being a mild success with critics (hence the rarity today).
But if you're not going to buy it anyways, what price is good enough? $20? $10? 5? It costs money to make these things no matter what. Again, you don't sound like a casual user. A casual user is someone who wants to play a game, and if its not on Bittorrent he might have to bite the bullet. Like frat guys at a Linux convention, they're here for the beer, not the source or speech. Put it another way: Two publishers put out two games at the same time. One has anti-copy protection, the other doesn't. Both cost $50. Our intrepid young gamer Johnny 6Cola has acquired $50 for his birthday and really really wants both games. The copy-free one is on bittorrent, the other is in the store. Which publisher would you rather be? Now in a month, both are on bittorrent, but games have a pretty short shelflife compared to Word or something similar. Another reason why its a different animal as far as copy-protection goes than other software. And for the time being MS still has a secure system against casual cracks. You can survive without Vista, but maybe someone wants it for XY or Z feature (or the next version of their favorite software might only support Vista, etc). If it takes several hours and a spare box to set this up, they might just bite the bullet and buy it. If the barrier to entry is 5 minutes and is 0 risk (no viruses, etc) all you've got is the moral issue to protect you, and despite the BSA's best efforts people still don't see taking money from Microsoft as wrong :)
Which is good enough. If Joe 6pack has to jump through hoops to pirate, he might just buy the product. Even better, Joe 12pack (twice as smart) might even be more wary of searching sites because of a legitimate fear of fake pirate sites that have viruses.
In games this is even more prevalent - the goal of fighting piracy isn't to prevent the inevetable - somewhere somebody has enough spare time to crack your stuff, but to _delay_ it. If Johnny 6cola can't get his game right away, then he might have to suck it up and buy it. The most sucessful ones have locked out pirates for 30 days or so. If you've been waiting for months for a game, waiting another month might not be an option. (Some of those might be from pirates distributing a game which still has parts of it not working and crashes half way through - even better for publishers). Obviously this is unique to games, as other software publishers want to keep people out for good.
How about those old Tex Murphy games? Somewhat cheezy, but they had fun puzzles and storylines. They suffered a bit from the "OMG CD-ROM interactive movies!" phase, but they were still fun none-the-less. The adventure genre has always benefited from interesting and compelling storylines. (Let's face it, you can replace the story from HalfLife/Halo/Doom/etc with any sciencefiction/horror plotline and it will remain just as fun a game). When the pace of a game is a bit slower, there's a little more you can do with laying out a story. I hope the Sam & Max episodes really do spawn a new era of adventure games. I think given the write toolsets and talented writers & designers you could churn out an episode pretty quickly and cost effectivly, as the scale is reduced. On games I've worked on its always been that last 15% - some feature or portion of the game that's wonky. That level you can't cut that always runs at 5-10 frames under your target FPS, etc. With episodes you could get an engine working and then work on content - pipeline it and have a couple teams working in parallel on small, focused levels.
I think if it was done right episodic gaming could be a real benefit to certain types of games. If you enjoy games that tell stories (different from "interactive fiction"...still a game), you don't really have anything in the game world to choose from except the "novel". There's no short story format for games. If you go the visual entertainment route for your analogy, all we have are gigantic epic films. There's no half-hour sitcom. (Say what you will about the sit-com, there's a few out there that are good :) Where episodic gaming comes in is that you can have a two hour game that tells a story and doesn't leave the player feeling robbed. They know they can tune in next week/month/etc. for the next one, and enjoy the same characters/world/gameplay etc.