Heck different times, the PC has been open since 1982, did it hurt the game quality, no. Back then games were rather cheap to produce, all you needed was one person. Nowadays it is almost impossible for a single person to do a decent game. The people also are more educated about games, so the market has split into high profile/independend/ and hobbyist releases at least on the PC.
The consoles are picking up those developers slowly they have not covered yet with their markets and lower entry barriers, Nintendo was again the last to grasp this, probably they have not gotten it entirely despite wiiware. The handhelds will be next to open themselves, no matter what, Nintendo wont have an easy run with their next gen handheld, like they had with this generation, this time the biggest competitor will be the mobile phones. It will be for Nintendo either open up or give up!
Main problem here is simply you should do your build process on the command line not having it done by the IDE. Period, you can use ides. I nowadays in the java domain use mostly maven and have maven generating the project files for my preferred tools to use. But yet I would never dismiss high level tools. The Microsoft world however is completely different, the entire install, dll, OLE/ActiveX, Registry mess is a mess which should have been cleaned up 10 years ago. But heck 10 years ago Microsoft also recommended to use Visual Sourcesafe while they themselve shunned away from it.
Actually I wont say that, I use low level tools most of the times, but if it comes to certain domains like simply db centric uis with some input masks I long for visual tools. Also I would never ever touch a tool again if I wont get refactoring support to some degree, software systems nowadays are so big that having built in refactoring is almost a must.
No but we would be better of with having factories instead of selling brands someone else produces. Who prevents that someone else to create his own brand in the long run?
That is the problem of the western economic journalism and generally also the western economists they have forgotten to think in long terms usually their memory lasts and foresight lasts only for the next 2 years without taking history into acocount.
IP is vaporware, production is also assembling of knowledge, and in the long run no producer needs any middleman once he has earned enough money he can provide the goods himself, also IP is fading if you do not produce it steadily enough. If you produce you have to do also do some research which means you build up your own ip in the long run and then you can cash in from the others (within the bounds of the system) so if you dont keep some core industries in the country as well as to try to build knowledge upon it you soon will be paying only without getting anything back. The chines pretty much know that, but our western economits dream of clouds (jobless recovery, IP based economy etc... all of those constructs did not work out in the past, why should they now, the rule of the game does not change unless humanity changes)
The funny thing is, the stronger we try to build up our ip laws on a worldwide scale now, the more problem we will have in about 20-30 years to get out of the misery we are building currently for the sake of the quick buck.
Innovation usually follows production in the long run, since the west things we can survive on IP alone we will have a bad wakeup call in about 20-30 years timeframe, no production, no invention period, the patents usually are the last to follow due to the grace period but they are slowly moving towards asia as well.
Urgs sorry, I mixed it up, yes Prophecy was the game which took the series down, the first WC where EA had full control because Roberts had gone and people from EA replaced him and his team. I forgot about the real 4, price of freedom.
Problem is as long as millions buy the same sports game year after year EA wont be gone for good... People have voted with their wallet and that is they shove EA for the same game over and over again millions into their throat every year.
Actually no that is not even the problem no one cares whether the menu item is second to the left except total idiots, the main issue with Gimp is it follows a very old user interface metaphor no one has used since the mid 90s, which is the everything is object oriented metaphor, which means that you have an object and everything is reachable via context menus on the object. NextStep worked like that, and OS/2s Desktop also. Problem is that is not the Desktop Metaphor many users are used to nowadays and no one really follows that one anymore. And simply the way to do things that way feels out of place nowadays in any system.
Add to that that some of the stuff how Gimp does it is really awkward, beginning with the channels layers and anchors and how they work ending with simple stuff like just wanting to draw a line in an image. Most of the awkwardness is legacy which never was dropped but yet it makes the program frustrating to use.
Tried to play the SNES version one day, it was not that bad it mostly was a 1:1 port of the PC version, Wing Commander 1 was a very basic game to begin with limited by the machines of that time. Wing Commander 2 was the one which gave the series its good name and Wing Commander 3 was the one which made it famous. (And Wing 4 killed it thanks to EAs heavy influence which you can contribute to everything which sucked at part 4)
They and Bioware only have their freedom as long as every game sells well, as soon as they produce even one stinker, they are screwed. Happened in the past as well, in case of Origin it was even worse, EA started to talk itself into the decisions even before the first game under their umbrella was released, they did not stand a chance in the first place. Blizzard is in the same position at Activision as Bioware is in EA, as long as they meet the expectations they have a more or less free reign (although I still think the latest DLC stunt they did in Dragon Age was due to EAs influence) but as soon as one of their games does not even lose money but only sells mediocre then watch the middle management of EA moving in slicing the company with stupid decisions to death.
The bad thing is, all the yearly sports titles keep EA afloat without them they would have folded a long time ago, but there are literally millions out there in the world who will buy the same game every year on and on just for the updated statistics. Thanks to those idiots we have to live with EA and thanks to the idiots buying the next incarnation of guitar hero every year, Activision, once a very good publisher pulls the same stunt as EA. EA tried to break out of that cycle recently, because they know, they cannot screw their customers forever that way, and for 1 1/2 years they tried to push new innovative games, now that the first 2-3 did not sell millions they axed another 12 of those projects and reverted to the old formula again of pushing out sports titles every year for the stupid general public who buys that dreck.
Ubisoft while not there is on the same path or at least hopes to follow, Assasins Creed2 is a good indication, again another Ubisoft graphical blender with shallow gameplay as it seems (the usual highly paid press praises it into the 100 range, while the mediocre critics slowly crawl up now)
The sad thing is if you spend enough marketing dollars nowadays you can brainwash the general public that the latest garbage can sell millions as long as the garbage looks good, and the problem is it works every time as long as the press plays along and does their pre release or zero day release reviews which score 90% or higher for something which smells rotten but looks shiny.
Next ones Bioware... they already are bought, I am just waiting for the first game they did not earn their exepectations, that will be the time EAs screw everything up management will take over and after that we probably will see a Baldurs Gate shooter or Dragon Age Football on a yearly basis and after a while it will be shut down.
Wing Commander 4 and Ultima 8 already were developed fully under EA influence, so go figure... Wing Commander 4 sucked, Ultima 8 while not bad per se was branded as Super Mario Avatar!
I think the worst example is Origin, instantly after EA bought Origin things went down the gutters, I will never forgive EA for killing Ultima the game series which is the grandfather of all western rpgs. Without Ultima 7 there neither would be any Gothic or anything from Bethestha.
Add to that that the mac port is pretty buggy while the Linux version is relatively bugfree. I have tried to use Gimp several times on a mac (because I am already used to it somehow even with its awkward parts it is free and has power) but the bugs constantly drove me away, not even the UI which does not follow any standards than its own, but that is ok with me given that it was developed at a time when there were no UI standards to follow in unix and they followed the pure OO UI approach others did at that time as well.
It is not that alone, read Grogging the Gimp, also the way the layers and channels system works is highly redundant often doing the same from different angles, even the book acknowles that some parts of the system are simply old parts they did not drop after they introduced proper layers.
After 10 years of critizism even the Gimp guys see that 50% of their users want another UI, and they currently are working on an additional UI which is better (and they leave the old one for the other 50% of their audience) So I guess justifying the old Gimp UI nowadays is pointless, the new UI is coming the Gimp guys are working on at as we speak.
Actually Copilot8 is available for Android and it is better than my old tomtom PNA... Since I live in Europe I wont even have access to googles solution, neither do I really want it. (roaming everyone)
So what are the holes, sure Javas domain is mostly server side computing and the libraries reflect that, but the only hole I see so far is scientific computing the rest is pretty much complete. Either within the RT itself or outside of it in many of the opensource projects from apache codehouse and java.net.
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Heck different times, the PC has been open since 1982, did it hurt the game quality, no.
Back then games were rather cheap to produce, all you needed was one person. Nowadays it is almost impossible for a single person to do a decent game. The people also are more educated about games, so the market has split into high profile/independend/ and hobbyist releases at least on the PC.
The consoles are picking up those developers slowly they have not covered yet with their markets and lower entry barriers, Nintendo was again the last to grasp this, probably they have not gotten it entirely despite wiiware.
The handhelds will be next to open themselves, no matter what, Nintendo wont have an easy run with their next gen handheld, like they had with this generation, this time the biggest competitor will be the mobile phones.
It will be for Nintendo either open up or give up!
Main problem here is simply you should do your build process on the command line not having it done by the IDE.
Period, you can use ides. I nowadays in the java domain use mostly maven and have maven generating the project files for my preferred tools to use.
But yet I would never dismiss high level tools. The Microsoft world however is completely different, the entire install, dll, OLE/ActiveX, Registry mess is a mess which should have been cleaned up 10 years ago. But heck 10 years ago Microsoft also recommended to use Visual Sourcesafe while they themselve shunned away from it.
Actually I wont say that, I use low level tools most of the times, but if it comes to certain domains like simply db centric uis with some input masks I long for visual tools.
Also I would never ever touch a tool again if I wont get refactoring support to some degree, software systems nowadays are so big that having built in refactoring is almost a must.
No but we would be better of with having factories instead of selling brands someone else produces. Who prevents that someone else to create his own brand in the long run?
That is the problem of the western economic journalism and generally also the western economists they have forgotten to think in long terms usually their memory lasts and foresight lasts only for the next 2 years without taking history into acocount.
IP is vaporware, production is also assembling of knowledge, and in the long run no producer needs any middleman once he has earned enough money he can provide the goods himself, also IP is fading if you do not produce it steadily enough. If you produce you have to do also do some research which means you build up your own ip in the long run and then you can cash in from the others (within the bounds of the system) so if you dont keep some core industries in the country as well as to try to build knowledge upon it you soon will be paying only without getting anything back.
The chines pretty much know that, but our western economits dream of clouds (jobless recovery, IP based economy etc... all of those constructs did not work out in the past, why should they now, the rule of the game does not change unless humanity changes)
The funny thing is, the stronger we try to build up our ip laws on a worldwide scale now, the more problem we will have in about 20-30 years to get out of the misery we are building currently for the sake of the quick buck.
Innovation usually follows production in the long run, since the west things we can survive on IP alone we will have a bad wakeup call in about 20-30 years timeframe, no production, no invention period, the patents usually are the last to follow due to the grace period but they are slowly moving towards asia as well.
And yell: "God shave the queen"
Buy yourself 5 kilos of Marmite..
Urgs sorry, I mixed it up, yes Prophecy was the game which took the series down, the first WC where EA had full control because Roberts had gone and people from EA replaced him and his team.
I forgot about the real 4, price of freedom.
Problem is as long as millions buy the same sports game year after year EA wont be gone for good...
People have voted with their wallet and that is they shove EA for the same game over and over again millions into their throat every year.
Maxis to some degree...
Actually no that is not even the problem no one cares whether the menu item is second to the left except total idiots, the main issue with Gimp is it follows a very old user interface metaphor no one has used since the mid 90s, which is the everything is object oriented metaphor, which means that you have an object and everything is reachable via context menus on the object. NextStep worked like that, and OS/2s Desktop also. Problem is that is not the Desktop Metaphor many users are used to nowadays and no one really follows that one anymore. And simply the way to do things that way feels out of place nowadays in any system.
Add to that that some of the stuff how Gimp does it is really awkward, beginning with the channels layers and anchors and how they work ending with simple stuff like just wanting to draw a line in an image. Most of the awkwardness is legacy which never was dropped but yet it makes the program frustrating to use.
Tried to play the SNES version one day, it was not that bad it mostly was a 1:1 port of the PC version, Wing Commander 1 was a very basic game to begin with limited by the machines of that time. Wing Commander 2 was the one which gave the series its good name and Wing Commander 3 was the one which made it famous. (And Wing 4 killed it thanks to EAs heavy influence which you can contribute to everything which sucked at part 4)
They and Bioware only have their freedom as long as every game sells well, as soon as they produce even one stinker, they are screwed.
Happened in the past as well, in case of Origin it was even worse, EA started to talk itself into the decisions even before the first game under their umbrella was released, they did not stand a chance in the first place.
Blizzard is in the same position at Activision as Bioware is in EA, as long as they meet the expectations they have a more or less free reign (although I still think the latest DLC stunt they did in Dragon Age was due to EAs influence) but as soon as one of their games does not even lose money but only sells mediocre then watch the middle management of EA moving in slicing the company with stupid decisions to death.
The bad thing is, all the yearly sports titles keep EA afloat without them they would have folded a long time ago, but there are literally millions out there in the world who will buy the same game every year on and on just for the updated statistics.
Thanks to those idiots we have to live with EA and thanks to the idiots buying the next incarnation of guitar hero every year, Activision, once a very good publisher pulls the same stunt as EA.
EA tried to break out of that cycle recently, because they know, they cannot screw their customers forever that way, and for 1 1/2 years they tried to push new innovative games, now that the first 2-3 did not sell millions they axed another 12 of those projects and reverted to the old formula again of pushing out sports titles every year for the stupid general public who buys that dreck.
Ubisoft while not there is on the same path or at least hopes to follow, Assasins Creed2 is a good indication, again another Ubisoft graphical blender with shallow gameplay as it seems (the usual highly paid press praises it into the 100 range, while the mediocre critics slowly crawl up now)
The sad thing is if you spend enough marketing dollars nowadays you can brainwash the general public that the latest garbage can sell millions as long as the garbage looks good, and the problem is it works every time as long as the press plays along and does their pre release or zero day release reviews which score 90% or higher for something which smells rotten but looks shiny.
Bioware also was in his assets, and he sold it off to EA while pocketing the money...
Not sure if this is not insider trading.
Next ones Bioware... they already are bought, I am just waiting for the first game they did not earn their exepectations, that will be the time EAs screw everything up management will take over and after that we probably will see a Baldurs Gate shooter or Dragon Age Football on a yearly basis and after a while it will be shut down.
Wing Commander 4 and Ultima 8 already were developed fully under EA influence, so go figure...
Wing Commander 4 sucked, Ultima 8 while not bad per se was branded as Super Mario Avatar!
I think the worst example is Origin, instantly after EA bought Origin things went down the gutters, I will never forgive EA for killing Ultima the game series which is the grandfather of all western rpgs.
Without Ultima 7 there neither would be any Gothic or anything from Bethestha.
Add to that that the mac port is pretty buggy while the Linux version is relatively bugfree. I have tried to use Gimp several times on a mac (because I am already used to it somehow even with its awkward parts it is free and has power) but the bugs constantly drove me away, not even the UI which does not follow any standards than its own, but that is ok with me given that it was developed at a time when there were no UI standards to follow in unix and they followed the pure OO UI approach others did at that time as well.
It is not that alone, read Grogging the Gimp, also the way the layers and channels system works is highly redundant often doing the same from different angles, even the book acknowles that some parts of the system are simply
old parts they did not drop after they introduced proper layers.
After 10 years of critizism even the Gimp guys see that 50% of their users want another UI, and they currently are working on an additional UI which is better (and they leave the old one for the other 50% of their audience)
So I guess justifying the old Gimp UI nowadays is pointless, the new UI is coming the Gimp guys are working on at as we speak.
Jepp especially since he constantly hid himself behind a dreadful UI...
Actually Copilot8 is available for Android and it is better than my old tomtom PNA...
Since I live in Europe I wont even have access to googles solution, neither do I really want it.
(roaming everyone)
So what are the holes, sure Javas domain is mostly server side computing and the libraries reflect that, but the only hole I see so far is scientific computing the rest is pretty much complete.
Either within the RT itself or outside of it in many of the opensource projects from apache codehouse and java.net.