Current art critics will probably never widely accept video games as art. There was a penny arcade strip which explained this trend throughout history. (Someone will probably reply to this with a link.)
Ultimately games will be widely accepted as art. But it won't happen until the current crop of respected art critics dies of old age, their names are quickly forgotten, and they are replaced by a generation that was raised with games and knows wherein the art lies. Then they will go on to snub there own generation's struggling art form and the circle of life is complete.
What I'm suggesting is that you can't rely on free time when it comes about randomly. You have to set aside the time to make it happen. It was still free time, but it was partitioned off just for this purpose.
For the first 3 months or I would work on it in the evening. I wasn't very focused and work was slow. One day on a whim I went to bed an hour early and got up an hour early and did more in one hour than I had done all week. Maybe I'm easily distracted but this is what worked for me.
You hit it right on the head. The last year of that development time was a port to Steam. It's a neat engine and all but I couldn't use much of my old code and many things had to be rewritten from scratch and it's a bugger to get anything done in Steam. I would have rather used Doom 3 but I really needed large outdoor spaces in a way that engine could not provide.
After the end of that year I hadn't even come close to where I was in the Quake 3 version and I wasn't making progress as quickly. I realized that I was never going to finish if I kept trying to port to the latest engine. In the intervening time before I graduated id open sourced Quake 3 and the choice was clear.
It's true that if you just rely on free time to do work on a mod you'll never get it done.
For almost 5 years I woke up an hour early for work to work on my Quake 3 mod called BASE Conflict. This was the guaranteed only way to get things done with a full time job, part time school, and a wife and kid. Work finally came to a halt sometime after I transferred to WSU and with the increase in school work and I found myself working on homework in the morning rather that debugging UI code. But up until that point I made an amazing amount of progress. I'm currently porting my code to the ioquake3 code base and the patch files created for the port total nearly 400k or somewhere in the realm of 13000 new or changed lines of code.
It also helps to write out a list and keep it where you can see it. After I graduated I didn't really get back into the swing of things until I made a new to do list. If you check my sig you'll see that getting my website back up is somewhere near the top.
The only thing amazing about this code is that someone paid good-enough attention in class to be able to apply what he learned to his job.
Carmack left school after two semesters to work as a freelance programmer. I don't think he made it to Numerical Methods or the equivalent. That makes this code all that much more impressive.
The Wii is interesting because the dev kit is only $2000. That puts it well within the range of an avid hobbiest. If I had a really good idea come to mind about a game using the wiimote I'd consider getting one.
It would be interesting to see what kind of legal agreements come with that dev kit. Can a group a homebrew coders get there hands on one and start churning out free games? Will there be an easy way for us to play these games?
It is largly a myth that Americans have less and less free time. The truth is that TV is getting better and better at causing us to believe that the time we spend watching TV is not free time. Advertising for programs on television try to convince us that we need to know if "Ross" and "What's her name?" get together like it's somehow important.
The problem is that we tend to do that naturally. I checked slashdot.org habitually 3 times a day as though I might miss something life altering. I still visit games.slashdot.org but when I swore off going to the main page I realized that it wasn't that important.
Now I don't watch TV and I visit games.slashdot.org once a day and if I go a week without it it's no big deal. Suddenly I have time to accomplish all those things I thought about doing when was instead of watching TV.
My 14 year old bother inlaw got one of these for a birthday a while back. It had a full version of Contra on it. The Konomi code even worked. There were also a handful of other Nintendo games I recognised. Of note was a topdown shooter that I had played alot when I was younger. Can't remember the name. Although in this bootleg version you couldn't collect powerups. They were letters if I recall.
The other thing was the port on the bottom that gave the impression that you could plug 8bit NES games into the controler. My other bother inlaw was douped into believing that it would work. The cartidges we tried fit perfectly.
Supposedly the controller came with 65000 games but there were only about 25 or so actual games. They were merely repeated over and over like the old 100-in-1 bootleg Nintendo cartridge that had serveral versions of the same games.
I guess as a mod author I never really thought of myself on the same level as an indie developer. And really I'm not. I work on my project for several hours a day but I have no artists or mappers or modelers helping me and I have no asperations of going commercial with it.
Even mod developers can be broken down into specific groups as well. I think when they lump mod authors in with indie developers they are specificly including professional level mods like Urban Terror and Natural Selection.
I'm pretty good at Quake 3 and I stink at Laser Tag. Especially in the finding and using cover department. Although, I don't think my "rocket jump crowd blitz" maneuver works very well in RL Laser Tag. =)
It seems to be on a person-to-person basis. The big problem with analyzing this is you have to see if people are naturally good at something that they have never tried before that is related to a videogame that they do have skill in. You really have no way of knowing if the person would have excelled at the activity without the help of a video game.
A good experiment would be to take two controlled groups of first time marksmen with, say, a pistol. One group with skill at coin op gun games such as Time Crisis and Area 51 and the like. The other group would have no such comparable skill. Send them out to the range and compare the results.
I don't see the correlation, however, between FPS and handgun proficiency, as they are two different types of coordination.
To add my experience to the list: I'm pretty crack at games like Quake 3 but I'm also good at Time Crisis. The first time I went trap shooting and only the second time I had used a firearm I scored 8 out of 10 on the first try.
This one is about perfect. Windows XP even comes with the drivers for it.
I even use my PS2 controllers to play emulated N64 games. I just had to get used to where I moved my Z trigger to.
For games like Street Fighter and the like I recommend using an old PS1 controller as extensive use of the shoulder buttons on the anolog controllers tends to break the hinges making them less responsive.
There is a real chance that this could hose the economy of the more popular MMORPGs. As people move their money from older games to the newer ones inflation will skyrocket and the dropped gold from quests and monsters and such will not be significant enough to persue.
This is after serveral newbs have used this produce wealth not directly attributed to their charecters performace. At least more so then having friends help out.
This will leave new players of MMORPGs in general at a huge disadvantage as they don't have an older game to pull from when inflation is rampant.
You could set up the dhcp to only give out IP's to specific MAC addresses leaving everyone out in the cold. Then only add computers to the list as they are verified clean. Use an off kilter subnet like 10.25.6.* to keep people from guessing it. Also only allow internet access to verified clean machines. Basicly make them as non funtional as possible until you give them the go ahead. Post notices on the dorm doors. Maybe sniff out "unauthorized" IP's and then track them down. Maybe bring a line backer to strangle the little geek into submission. =)
I know this sounds like a hassle but it's the only thing that could force people ot come to you.
"One thing to remember is that the models used for the current renders may not be what's released in the game. They may be using million polygon models, and cut it back to a "more reasonable" ten thousand for actual gameplay. "
The amount of detail is moot with the models we see now. When the models are converted over to the Doom 3 engine format, the level of detail is maintained in the form of height maps. In the first E3 movie one of the artists mentions it specificly calling it the "John Carmack Magic". You get to see a short clip of him working on the new pinky deamon and although it's small it looks just the same as ingame.
"It has a bunch of buttons, but it's got that big red A button smack in the middle. "
They definatly learned their lesson from the SNES pad. Wasn't it like only Street Fighter that actually used all those buttons? And it could be argued up until SSFII that you really didn't need the MED punch and Kick. Ditto the Samuri Showdown ports.
But then, they do need to be available if the designer needs them.
"[Cheaters]Are almost non-existant (I have yet to see one, in my 300+ lan parties I've been too)."
I thought that too until I ran a CS server with a bunch of fy_* maps at a 80 person LAN. I had one definate cheater who had something like 8 head shots in a row. Others seem a little too aware of other players location to just using sounds. The other problem was team stacking. The autoteam balence would kick in and every one in a particular clan would just switch back to the same team.
This was the first CS server I had set up in 2 1/2 years. It was running just StatMe mod and the console on the dedicated machine was a few feet away. I made a few mistakes:
1. I didn't know any admin commands. Like how would I kick someone with a name that used wierd symbols? This is easy to do when you set up a server for the first time and it's really the biggest part of running a server.
2. I didn't let people know I was the admin and start theatening people. Even in light of No 1 that should have been sufficiant.
3. I should have installed admin mod so I could admin_slap people without having to resort to kicking. Also Cheating Death or HLGuard would have been a good idea so I didn't pesonally have to catch them in the act.
4. I had the spectating set to "Your Team Only" so I or anyone else couldn't follow around suspects after I died.
I got up and went looking for the guy using an aim bot but I think he saw me get pissed off and jump up. Right after I started trolling around the room looking for him he disconnected.
"For those people who play counter strike (well), they know that de_dust is probably one of the most unbalanced maps out there....So I am surprised they picked that one, even if it is popular. "
Agreed. I think that de_dust2 would be a better choice. It's still a very popular map, but you don't need incredible speed to control certian potions of it and the connectivity is great. Were as in de_dust everybody just meets at the same two spots and dukes it out every time.
The obvious down side is that de_dust2 would be much more difficult to reproduce.
"Half-Life, for example, feeds information about the location of all players on the entire map to the client."
That's no quite true. The server sends to the client all the players that they could possibly see but none of the players that you couldn't possibly see. Based on the vis data of the map the server figures out a "gray area" between where you can definatly see someone and definately not. This is when it starts sending data.
I have been on a server that had an anti cheat hack that cause you to be sent data for clients that you could only DEFINATLY see. This, of course had the nasty side effect that when you walked around a corner people just appeared out of nowhere. This causes big problems for high pingers, but then, all wall hacks were worthless.
"While it would be more work on the CPU to make the game engine instantly draw a character on-screen from no previous information"
It already does this , but it happens normally before you can ever see them.
Slashdot Mirror
Current art critics will probably never widely accept video games as art. There was a penny arcade strip which explained this trend throughout history. (Someone will probably reply to this with a link.)
Ultimately games will be widely accepted as art. But it won't happen until the current crop of respected art critics dies of old age, their names are quickly forgotten, and they are replaced by a generation that was raised with games and knows wherein the art lies. Then they will go on to snub there own generation's struggling art form and the circle of life is complete.
What I'm suggesting is that you can't rely on free time when it comes about randomly. You have to set aside the time to make it happen. It was still free time, but it was partitioned off just for this purpose.
For the first 3 months or I would work on it in the evening. I wasn't very focused and work was slow. One day on a whim I went to bed an hour early and got up an hour early and did more in one hour than I had done all week. Maybe I'm easily distracted but this is what worked for me.
You hit it right on the head. The last year of that development time was a port to Steam. It's a neat engine and all but I couldn't use much of my old code and many things had to be rewritten from scratch and it's a bugger to get anything done in Steam. I would have rather used Doom 3 but I really needed large outdoor spaces in a way that engine could not provide.
After the end of that year I hadn't even come close to where I was in the Quake 3 version and I wasn't making progress as quickly. I realized that I was never going to finish if I kept trying to port to the latest engine. In the intervening time before I graduated id open sourced Quake 3 and the choice was clear.
It's true that if you just rely on free time to do work on a mod you'll never get it done.
For almost 5 years I woke up an hour early for work to work on my Quake 3 mod called BASE Conflict. This was the guaranteed only way to get things done with a full time job, part time school, and a wife and kid. Work finally came to a halt sometime after I transferred to WSU and with the increase in school work and I found myself working on homework in the morning rather that debugging UI code. But up until that point I made an amazing amount of progress. I'm currently porting my code to the ioquake3 code base and the patch files created for the port total nearly 400k or somewhere in the realm of 13000 new or changed lines of code.
It also helps to write out a list and keep it where you can see it. After I graduated I didn't really get back into the swing of things until I made a new to do list. If you check my sig you'll see that getting my website back up is somewhere near the top.
I don't know about the Final Fantasy properties, but they have brought the smack down on at least two Chrono Trigger fan projects: Chrono Trigger Resurrection and Chrono Trigger Remake
Ack! Obviously not. I was remembering the comments to the Q3 source code release story here on /. where it was falsely attributed to Carmack. My bad.
Carmack left school after two semesters to work as a freelance programmer. I don't think he made it to Numerical Methods or the equivalent. That makes this code all that much more impressive.
The Wii is interesting because the dev kit is only $2000. That puts it well within the range of an avid hobbiest. If I had a really good idea come to mind about a game using the wiimote I'd consider getting one.
It would be interesting to see what kind of legal agreements come with that dev kit. Can a group a homebrew coders get there hands on one and start churning out free games? Will there be an easy way for us to play these games?
Kyle
Seconded.
It is largly a myth that Americans have less and less free time. The truth is that TV is getting better and better at causing us to believe that the time we spend watching TV is not free time. Advertising for programs on television try to convince us that we need to know if "Ross" and "What's her name?" get together like it's somehow important.
The problem is that we tend to do that naturally. I checked slashdot.org habitually 3 times a day as though I might miss something life altering. I still visit games.slashdot.org but when I swore off going to the main page I realized that it wasn't that important.
Now I don't watch TV and I visit games.slashdot.org once a day and if I go a week without it it's no big deal. Suddenly I have time to accomplish all those things I thought about doing when was instead of watching TV.
Kyle
And if they don't do it... I will.
My 14 year old bother inlaw got one of these for a birthday a while back. It had a full version of Contra on it. The Konomi code even worked. There were also a handful of other Nintendo games I recognised. Of note was a topdown shooter that I had played alot when I was younger. Can't remember the name. Although in this bootleg version you couldn't collect powerups. They were letters if I recall.
The other thing was the port on the bottom that gave the impression that you could plug 8bit NES games into the controler. My other bother inlaw was douped into believing that it would work. The cartidges we tried fit perfectly.
Supposedly the controller came with 65000 games but there were only about 25 or so actual games. They were merely repeated over and over like the old 100-in-1 bootleg Nintendo cartridge that had serveral versions of the same games.
I guess as a mod author I never really thought of myself on the same level as an indie developer. And really I'm not. I work on my project for several hours a day but I have no artists or mappers or modelers helping me and I have no asperations of going commercial with it.
Even mod developers can be broken down into specific groups as well. I think when they lump mod authors in with indie developers they are specificly including professional level mods like Urban Terror and Natural Selection.
I'm pretty good at Quake 3 and I stink at Laser Tag. Especially in the finding and using cover department. Although, I don't think my "rocket jump crowd blitz" maneuver works very well in RL Laser Tag. =)
Xistic
It seems to be on a person-to-person basis. The big problem with analyzing this is you have to see if people are naturally good at something that they have never tried before that is related to a videogame that they do have skill in. You really have no way of knowing if the person would have excelled at the activity without the help of a video game.
A good experiment would be to take two controlled groups of first time marksmen with, say, a pistol. One group with skill at coin op gun games such as Time Crisis and Area 51 and the like. The other group would have no such comparable skill. Send them out to the range and compare the results.
I don't see the correlation, however, between FPS and handgun proficiency, as they are two different types of coordination.
To add my experience to the list: I'm pretty crack at games like Quake 3 but I'm also good at Time Crisis. The first time I went trap shooting and only the second time I had used a firearm I scored 8 out of 10 on the first try.
Xistic
This one is about perfect. Windows XP even comes with the drivers for it.
I even use my PS2 controllers to play emulated N64 games. I just had to get used to where I moved my Z trigger to.
For games like Street Fighter and the like I recommend using an old PS1 controller as extensive use of the shoulder buttons on the anolog controllers tends to break the hinges making them less responsive.
There is a real chance that this could hose the economy of the more popular MMORPGs. As people move their money from older games to the newer ones inflation will skyrocket and the dropped gold from quests and monsters and such will not be significant enough to persue.
This is after serveral newbs have used this produce wealth not directly attributed to their charecters performace. At least more so then having friends help out.
This will leave new players of MMORPGs in general at a huge disadvantage as they don't have an older game to pull from when inflation is rampant.
Kyle
Moby is a musician.
No shit?
You could set up the dhcp to only give out IP's to specific MAC addresses leaving everyone out in the cold. Then only add computers to the list as they are verified clean. Use an off kilter subnet like 10.25.6.* to keep people from guessing it. Also only allow internet access to verified clean machines. Basicly make them as non funtional as possible until you give them the go ahead. Post notices on the dorm doors. Maybe sniff out "unauthorized" IP's and then track them down. Maybe bring a line backer to strangle the little geek into submission. =)
I know this sounds like a hassle but it's the only thing that could force people ot come to you.
Kyle
good videos of speed cubing and techniques can be found here.
"One thing to remember is that the models used for the current renders may not be what's released in the game. They may be using million polygon models, and cut it back to a "more reasonable" ten thousand for actual gameplay.
"
The amount of detail is moot with the models we see now. When the models are converted over to the Doom 3 engine format, the level of detail is maintained in the form of height maps. In the first E3 movie one of the artists mentions it specificly calling it the "John Carmack Magic". You get to see a short clip of him working on the new pinky deamon and although it's small it looks just the same as ingame.
Kyle
Don't you mean,
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A Start =)
"It has a bunch of buttons, but it's got that big red A button smack in the middle. "
They definatly learned their lesson from the SNES pad. Wasn't it like only Street Fighter that actually used all those buttons? And it could be argued up until SSFII that you really didn't need the MED punch and Kick. Ditto the Samuri Showdown ports.
But then, they do need to be available if the designer needs them.
"[Cheaters]Are almost non-existant (I have yet to see one, in my 300+ lan parties I've been too)."
I thought that too until I ran a CS server with a bunch of fy_* maps at a 80 person LAN. I had one definate cheater who had something like 8 head shots in a row. Others seem a little too aware of other players location to just using sounds. The other problem was team stacking. The autoteam balence would kick in and every one in a particular clan would just switch back to the same team.
This was the first CS server I had set up in 2 1/2 years. It was running just StatMe mod and the console on the dedicated machine was a few feet away. I made a few mistakes:
1. I didn't know any admin commands. Like how would I kick someone with a name that used wierd symbols? This is easy to do when you set up a server for the first time and it's really the biggest part of running a server.
2. I didn't let people know I was the admin and start theatening people. Even in light of No 1 that should have been sufficiant.
3. I should have installed admin mod so I could admin_slap people without having to resort to kicking. Also Cheating Death or HLGuard would have been a good idea so I didn't pesonally have to catch them in the act.
4. I had the spectating set to "Your Team Only" so I or anyone else couldn't follow around suspects after I died.
I got up and went looking for the guy using an aim bot but I think he saw me get pissed off and jump up. Right after I started trolling around the room looking for him he disconnected.
"For those people who play counter strike (well), they know that de_dust is probably one of the most unbalanced maps out there....So I am surprised they picked that one, even if it is popular. "
Agreed. I think that de_dust2 would be a better choice. It's still a very popular map, but you don't need incredible speed to control certian potions of it and the connectivity is great. Were as in de_dust everybody just meets at the same two spots and dukes it out every time.
The obvious down side is that de_dust2 would be much more difficult to reproduce.
"Half-Life, for example, feeds information about the location of all players on the entire map to the client."
That's no quite true. The server sends to the client all the players that they could possibly see but none of the players that you couldn't possibly see. Based on the vis data of the map the server figures out a "gray area" between where you can definatly see someone and definately not. This is when it starts sending data.
I have been on a server that had an anti cheat hack that cause you to be sent data for clients that you could only DEFINATLY see. This, of course had the nasty side effect that when you walked around a corner people just appeared out of nowhere. This causes big problems for high pingers, but then, all wall hacks were worthless.
"While it would be more work on the CPU to make the game engine instantly draw a character on-screen from no previous information"
It already does this , but it happens normally before you can ever see them.
Xistic