A typical A-class game costs 3 to 10 million dollars to develop. I'd say that 3 million is too low a figure in today's market, though it was typical several years ago. Let's say 4 million is a base figure. $250,000 is 6% of the total budget. That's it. Six percent.
I'm not saying that the Quake III engine is state of the art, or anywhere near the only choice out there (frankly, it's the only engine that most gamers know about), but in the overall scheme of things, $250,000 isn't that much.
The engine, of course, is only maybe 20% of the work required to make a game. Fanboy-types refuse to believe this, but it's true. Art creation is much more time consuming, for example. And there's lots and lots of coding that has nothing to do with the core engine. I'd estimate that graphics-type code is maybe 10-15% of a typical game. For complex games that are less gameplay-shy than Quake, this could easily be under 5%. The reaction to that is usually "But what else is there besides the graphics?" which is greatly amusing to those of us developing games for a living.
This group is against laws that force you into particular software choices, like
You must use Microsoft Windows.
You must use GPLed software.
This is in response to that silly California law--which geeks seem to support, for unknown reasons--mandating the use of open source software. Certainly that's a dumb and extremist proposition, and even Stallman and Torvalds would be against it.
PCs did not have blitters. PC memory addressing system also made this more difficult. Amigas were easy to program graphic applications on, PCs were not. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Both Amiga and C64 had hardware scrolling, and just by incrementing a single register the screen could be scrolled in single pixel imcrements both horizontally and vertically. The point was that Carmack found a way to achieve the same effect on hardware that was not intended to do that.
Ah, but you're incorrect. Yes, you could move the Amiga's screen around in memory, but it's not like you had the room for a giant bitmap representing an entire level that was 10 screens long and 2 screens high. So you did a limited scroll and blitted "tiles"--using the blitter of course--at the screen edges. This is exactly like the technique used on the PC. State of the art game programming, circa 1987.
Those machines (and the C-64 also) were primarily game playing machines that had specialized buffers and hardware sprites for building scrolling games.
No, the Apple II and Atari ST did not. And even on the Amiga, you still had to use the "only update the edges" trick to get good performance.
I'm not being hard on Carmack here. I just don't think the author of the article knows all that much about game and hardware history.
Good article, but the Commander Keen scrolling trick was old news by then. Lots of Apple II, Atari ST, and Amiga scrolling games did the same thing. Impressive? At the time, yes. But let's not get too carried away with giving Carmack credit for everything.
Apparently he's decided not to fight any war at all. This was flat out just a remarkably naive and stupid article. Why settle for only keeping coders unaware and docile?
You missed the point. What does "coders fighting a war" mean? Usually it means they rant and rave and send a lot of emails and post hotheaded articles to osopinion.com. This doesn't help anything. Most geeks don't realize it, but their rants often come across as shallow and misguided. I mean, we're talking about people who write long, rambling pieces about AMD vs. Intel (case in point).
If you want to rant, fine, but get a non-techie to proofread your stuff, and try to keep it low key. Make sure you're not just echoing the same sentiments you read on Slashdot or some other geek-news site. Don't write unless you have some good insight, and have some broad experiences that keep you from looking like someone who doesn't get out much (hint, and I mean this in all sincerity: if you're 18, and just want to get free music because you don't have a job, then you're the wrong person to be writing on the subject).
This is right up there with Amiga owners getting excited because they saw their favorite computer in the background of some sitcom. Sigh. Advocacy is so completely lame.
The big flaw in this case is that RedHat is easier to install, *when* you have a system that won't cause problems. As long as all your perihperals are supported under Linux, then you're okay. When they aren't, then that's where the trouble is. This isn't a knock on Linux at all, it's just a side effect of the complexity of PC hardware. New hardware comes out left and right, all of which have Windows drivers, and many of which don't have Linux drivers. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has gotten stuck with a video card or printer or scanner that wouldn't work with Linux.
If there's anything keeping Linux from being an acceptable desktop alternative, this is it.
one of the two more influential Free game developers for Linux today
I went to the LGames site and saw versions of Tetris, Breakout, the old memory game, and so on. Now don't get me wrong, I like Linux, and I like games, and I'm not a 3D bigot, but we're talking about stale old stuff here. If this is what an influential developer puts out, then I just don't know.
This kind of think always makes me realize just how little we really know about the brain and the body and just how primitive our research and medical treatments are. This is right up there with some crazy experiment from the 1800s.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but it has to be said:
1. Enough with the negativity about this kind of thing being better left to the professionals. Do you really think that the professionals can do any better? It's not like NASA has been pounding out the new rocket designs. You have to give Carmack credit in that he's experimenting and moving forward rather than getting bogged down in bureacracy and corporate politics.
2. DOOM 3 shouldn't even be mentioned here. It's not like there's any kind of real overlap between rocketry and game development. I love the guy who seems to think that Carmack will now understand physics better so he can put it to good use in DOOM 3. Bizarre.
Many people are showing their lack of knowledge by endlessly citing the GOTO thing--which was a letter, not even a paper. But Dijkstra's main work was in what he called the calculation of programs: developing provably correct programs. Yes, it isn't everyone's cup of tea, and no it isn't completely realistic for most purposes, but it is some brilliant, pioneering work.
Sony makes some awesome hardware, but don't make the mistake of thinking it will be general purpose like an Athlon or Pentium IV. The way this works in the PS2 is that vector instructions can process four values at a time, and there are multiple, almost completely independent, CPUs with these instructions. So we're talking about a custom, multi-processor, highly parallel system. It's going to take special case code to exploit it, it's not like off the shelf Linux will start getting 1 TFlop performance.
This isn't an empty proclamation in the vein of "Usenet is dying" or "Linux on the desktop is dying." Pinball really is dying, and has been for the last four years or so. For the longest time, the two big pinball makers were Williams and Bally. Then Bally/Midway bought Williams, but Williams kept on as the number one name in pinball. Relatively late, Sega and Data East got into pinball. And now of those companies are not producing pinball machines *at all*. The only remaining maker is Stern, which hasn't been any kind of force in pinball or video games for twenty years.
It's as if all TV stations and cable channels folded, except for Lifetime. Would you laugh that off or consider it to be the impending death of television?
This smacks too much of SUV owners, who don't give damn about fuel efficiency, but only want something that looks cool. So now we have people who buy hugely inefficient computers, then resort to water cooling to keep them from burning up. And they justify it because the computer looks cool. Brilliant. You'd think geeks wouldn't want to be in the same class as suburban yuppies.
Maybe I'm not getting the point; was this contest just to make quirky titles from standard, well-defined genres with a gimmick, or to actually make something that is completely different?
There's no room to be picky when it comes to any sort of innovation in game design. With a handful of exceptions, it's the most stagnant "artistic" field I can think of. Almost every game created isn't just somewhat like other games, but trying very hard to be similar to other games, because that's what designers are trained to do, and that's what marketing people can sell.
Yes, there are some similarities to other games in the descriptions, but the games themselves are pretty out there. These days I'll take anything that isn't a 100% blatant rip-off of another game and call it a landmark. And the open source hobbyist games are even worse, sadly. They're obsessed with recreating Boulder Dash and the light cycles segment of Tron and every other 20 year old game they can find. Yuck. That the Indie Game Jam group can come along and out-do every hobbyist game of the last ten years in four days...now that's saying something.
Hundreds, eh? Show me five. And no, finding something on monster.com from 1997 doesn't count.
Okay, five game developers currently hiring:
1. LucasArts 2. The Collective 3. Blue Shift 4. Microsoft Game Studios 5. The Fizz Factor 6. Raven Software
Oh, look, I named six of the top of my head. I'm willing to bet you've never heard of three of these, which shows you don't know a whole lot about the game business.
Why is it that people feel the need to bitch about every story that's posted these days?
Okay, well, you got me there. I'll take my lumps.
My point is that people know about Dave because he had a big web persona during the fanboy glory days that followed the release of Quake, back when.plan file updates make headlines on gaming news sites.
But at the same time, Dave's game development history is pretty weak. He worked on DOOM, yes, but he was just a grunt. Abuse was written by someone else (Jonathan Clark). Golgotha was never completed. I'm not saying that Dave is a bad guy or a knucklehead or anything like that. He's certainly not the loudmouth that Brian Hook turned out to be. So we all know Dave because of his little failed company, and we're all clamoring to work for him. But who knows the names of the people who worked on Grand Theft Auto 3, Final Fantasy X, Age of Empires, Metal Gear Solid 2, Siphon Filter, of Medal of Honor? These are all huge, huge games, each of which sold over a million copies (with the exception of Medal of Honor; I don't know how well it did).
The bottom line is that the fanboy worldview is severely--and intentionally--limited.
It's a shader language, not an all-purpose programming language. It's more like DSP-style programming, for those few people who are familiar with that sort of thing.
You don't need integers, for example, because NVidia's hardware works entirely in floating point. It's not like you could use Cg to parse text files, nor would you want to.
I'm a game developer, and I find it endlessly amusing that internetters love to equate Quake technology with the cutting edge. I guess it begs the question: Do wannabe game programmers and fanboys have any experience with engines that are *not* Quake-like?
For example, look at the amazing stuff done in high-end PlayStation 2 games. There's no way you could get the Quake III engine to do those kinds of things. And yet everyone fawns all over Quake like it's the only game technology available. In reality, it's just that there's a distinct lack of familiarity with what else is available, much as hardcore Linux advocates don't know about OSes other than Linux and Windows, and don't know much at all about OS history prior to 1991.
I guess the angle is that Dave Taylor used to work for id and has been a Linux advocate? Does that make him a great person to work for? There are hundreds of other game companies always hiring. And of course it would make sense in this case to hire someone with:
1. Game development experience. 2. Console programming experience.
And this surely isn't the right place to troll for those.
Design Patterns, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.
The more I read and understand about design patterns, the more I'm convinced that it's an overrated topic. It's more of a way to avoid hanging yourself, given all the rope that a typical OOP language gives you. If you avoid OOP, then all of a sudden you don't find a need for these so-called patterns. This is especially true when using other programming paradigms.
This is an overreaction on a Slashdot editor's part. The article isn't blaming Google for anything, unless you have a personal agenda that you're constantly looking to whip out. The article is actually about social changes brought on by being able to do web searches about a specific person. Many Slashdotters should be thinking about this. If I received someone's resume, I'd certainly run some searches. And if I found out they were a ranting Linux loon, they'd get the boot.
Slashdot Mirror
A typical A-class game costs 3 to 10 million dollars to develop. I'd say that 3 million is too low a figure in today's market, though it was typical several years ago. Let's say 4 million is a base figure. $250,000 is 6% of the total budget. That's it. Six percent.
I'm not saying that the Quake III engine is state of the art, or anywhere near the only choice out there (frankly, it's the only engine that most gamers know about), but in the overall scheme of things, $250,000 isn't that much.
The engine, of course, is only maybe 20% of the work required to make a game. Fanboy-types refuse to believe this, but it's true. Art creation is much more time consuming, for example. And there's lots and lots of coding that has nothing to do with the core engine. I'd estimate that graphics-type code is maybe 10-15% of a typical game. For complex games that are less gameplay-shy than Quake, this could easily be under 5%. The reaction to that is usually "But what else is there besides the graphics?" which is greatly amusing to those of us developing games for a living.
You must use Microsoft Windows.
You must use GPLed software.
This is in response to that silly California law--which geeks seem to support, for unknown reasons--mandating the use of open source software. Certainly that's a dumb and extremist proposition, and even Stallman and Torvalds would be against it.
The article was about a 3D _format_, not the low-level API to implement such a format.
PCs did not have blitters. PC memory addressing system also made this more difficult. Amigas were easy to program graphic applications on, PCs were not. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Reading comprehension: zero.
Both Amiga and C64 had hardware scrolling, and just by incrementing a single register the screen could be scrolled in single pixel imcrements both horizontally and vertically. The point was that Carmack found a way to achieve the same effect on hardware that was not intended to do that.
Ah, but you're incorrect. Yes, you could move the Amiga's screen around in memory, but it's not like you had the room for a giant bitmap representing an entire level that was 10 screens long and 2 screens high. So you did a limited scroll and blitted "tiles"--using the blitter of course--at the screen edges. This is exactly like the technique used on the PC. State of the art game programming, circa 1987.
Those machines (and the C-64 also) were primarily game playing machines that had specialized buffers and hardware sprites for building scrolling games.
No, the Apple II and Atari ST did not. And even on the Amiga, you still had to use the "only update the edges" trick to get good performance.
I'm not being hard on Carmack here. I just don't think the author of the article knows all that much about game and hardware history.
Good article, but the Commander Keen scrolling trick was old news by then. Lots of Apple II, Atari ST, and Amiga scrolling games did the same thing. Impressive? At the time, yes. But let's not get too carried away with giving Carmack credit for everything.
Apparently he's decided not to fight any war at all. This was flat out just a remarkably naive and stupid article. Why settle for only keeping coders unaware and docile?
You missed the point. What does "coders fighting a war" mean? Usually it means they rant and rave and send a lot of emails and post hotheaded articles to osopinion.com. This doesn't help anything. Most geeks don't realize it, but their rants often come across as shallow and misguided. I mean, we're talking about people who write long, rambling pieces about AMD vs. Intel (case in point).
If you want to rant, fine, but get a non-techie to proofread your stuff, and try to keep it low key. Make sure you're not just echoing the same sentiments you read on Slashdot or some other geek-news site. Don't write unless you have some good insight, and have some broad experiences that keep you from looking like someone who doesn't get out much (hint, and I mean this in all sincerity: if you're 18, and just want to get free music because you don't have a job, then you're the wrong person to be writing on the subject).
This is right up there with Amiga owners getting excited because they saw their favorite computer in the background of some sitcom. Sigh. Advocacy is so completely lame.
The big flaw in this case is that RedHat is easier to install, *when* you have a system that won't cause problems. As long as all your perihperals are supported under Linux, then you're okay. When they aren't, then that's where the trouble is. This isn't a knock on Linux at all, it's just a side effect of the complexity of PC hardware. New hardware comes out left and right, all of which have Windows drivers, and many of which don't have Linux drivers. I'm sure I'm not the only person who has gotten stuck with a video card or printer or scanner that wouldn't work with Linux.
If there's anything keeping Linux from being an acceptable desktop alternative, this is it.
one of the two more influential Free game developers for Linux today
I went to the LGames site and saw versions of Tetris, Breakout, the old memory game, and so on. Now don't get me wrong, I like Linux, and I like games, and I'm not a 3D bigot, but we're talking about stale old stuff here. If this is what an influential developer puts out, then I just don't know.
This kind of think always makes me realize just how little we really know about the brain and the body and just how primitive our research and medical treatments are. This is right up there with some crazy experiment from the 1800s.
I know I'm going to get modded down for this, but it has to be said:
1. Enough with the negativity about this kind of thing being better left to the professionals. Do you really think that the professionals can do any better? It's not like NASA has been pounding out the new rocket designs. You have to give Carmack credit in that he's experimenting and moving forward rather than getting bogged down in bureacracy and corporate politics.
2. DOOM 3 shouldn't even be mentioned here. It's not like there's any kind of real overlap between rocketry and game development. I love the guy who seems to think that Carmack will now understand physics better so he can put it to good use in DOOM 3. Bizarre.
For an older view, try:
A Discipline of Programming
for a more refined, later view, read:
Predicate Calculus and Program Semantics
Many people are showing their lack of knowledge by endlessly citing the GOTO thing--which was a letter, not even a paper. But Dijkstra's main work was in what he called the calculation of programs: developing provably correct programs. Yes, it isn't everyone's cup of tea, and no it isn't completely realistic for most purposes, but it is some brilliant, pioneering work.
Foon, AKA Chris Paget,
Stop right there. People who refer to themselves by goofy handles...well, I don't think I need to explain this.
Sony makes some awesome hardware, but don't make the mistake of thinking it will be general purpose like an Athlon or Pentium IV. The way this works in the PS2 is that vector instructions can process four values at a time, and there are multiple, almost completely independent, CPUs with these instructions. So we're talking about a custom, multi-processor, highly parallel system. It's going to take special case code to exploit it, it's not like off the shelf Linux will start getting 1 TFlop performance.
This isn't an empty proclamation in the vein of "Usenet is dying" or "Linux on the desktop is dying." Pinball really is dying, and has been for the last four years or so. For the longest time, the two big pinball makers were Williams and Bally. Then Bally/Midway bought Williams, but Williams kept on as the number one name in pinball. Relatively late, Sega and Data East got into pinball. And now of those companies are not producing pinball machines *at all*. The only remaining maker is Stern, which hasn't been any kind of force in pinball or video games for twenty years.
It's as if all TV stations and cable channels folded, except for Lifetime. Would you laugh that off or consider it to be the impending death of television?
This smacks too much of SUV owners, who don't give damn about fuel efficiency, but only want something that looks cool. So now we have people who buy hugely inefficient computers, then resort to water cooling to keep them from burning up. And they justify it because the computer looks cool. Brilliant. You'd think geeks wouldn't want to be in the same class as suburban yuppies.
Maybe I'm not getting the point; was this contest just to make quirky titles from standard, well-defined genres with a gimmick, or to actually make something that is completely different?
There's no room to be picky when it comes to any sort of innovation in game design. With a handful of exceptions, it's the most stagnant "artistic" field I can think of. Almost every game created isn't just somewhat like other games, but trying very hard to be similar to other games, because that's what designers are trained to do, and that's what marketing people can sell.
Yes, there are some similarities to other games in the descriptions, but the games themselves are pretty out there. These days I'll take anything that isn't a 100% blatant rip-off of another game and call it a landmark. And the open source hobbyist games are even worse, sadly. They're obsessed with recreating Boulder Dash and the light cycles segment of Tron and every other 20 year old game they can find. Yuck. That the Indie Game Jam group can come along and out-do every hobbyist game of the last ten years in four days...now that's saying something.
Hundreds, eh? Show me five. And no, finding something on monster.com from 1997 doesn't count.
Okay, five game developers currently hiring:
1. LucasArts
2. The Collective
3. Blue Shift
4. Microsoft Game Studios
5. The Fizz Factor
6. Raven Software
Oh, look, I named six of the top of my head. I'm willing to bet you've never heard of three of these, which shows you don't know a whole lot about the game business.
Why is it that people feel the need to bitch about every story that's posted these days?
.plan file updates make headlines on gaming news sites.
Okay, well, you got me there. I'll take my lumps.
My point is that people know about Dave because he had a big web persona during the fanboy glory days that followed the release of Quake, back when
But at the same time, Dave's game development history is pretty weak. He worked on DOOM, yes, but he was just a grunt. Abuse was written by someone else (Jonathan Clark). Golgotha was never completed. I'm not saying that Dave is a bad guy or a knucklehead or anything like that. He's certainly not the loudmouth that Brian Hook turned out to be. So we all know Dave because of his little failed company, and we're all clamoring to work for him. But who knows the names of the people who worked on Grand Theft Auto 3, Final Fantasy X, Age of Empires, Metal Gear Solid 2, Siphon Filter, of Medal of Honor? These are all huge, huge games, each of which sold over a million copies (with the exception of Medal of Honor; I don't know how well it did).
The bottom line is that the fanboy worldview is severely--and intentionally--limited.
It's a shader language, not an all-purpose programming language. It's more like DSP-style programming, for those few people who are familiar with that sort of thing.
You don't need integers, for example, because NVidia's hardware works entirely in floating point. It's not like you could use Cg to parse text files, nor would you want to.
I'm a game developer, and I find it endlessly amusing that internetters love to equate Quake technology with the cutting edge. I guess it begs the question: Do wannabe game programmers and fanboys have any experience with engines that are *not* Quake-like?
For example, look at the amazing stuff done in high-end PlayStation 2 games. There's no way you could get the Quake III engine to do those kinds of things. And yet everyone fawns all over Quake like it's the only game technology available. In reality, it's just that there's a distinct lack of familiarity with what else is available, much as hardcore Linux advocates don't know about OSes other than Linux and Windows, and don't know much at all about OS history prior to 1991.
I guess the angle is that Dave Taylor used to work for id and has been a Linux advocate? Does that make him a great person to work for? There are hundreds of other game companies always hiring. And of course it would make sense in this case to hire someone with:
1. Game development experience.
2. Console programming experience.
And this surely isn't the right place to troll for those.
Design Patterns, by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides.
The more I read and understand about design patterns, the more I'm convinced that it's an overrated topic. It's more of a way to avoid hanging yourself, given all the rope that a typical OOP language gives you. If you avoid OOP, then all of a sudden you don't find a need for these so-called patterns. This is especially true when using other programming paradigms.
This is an overreaction on a Slashdot editor's part. The article isn't blaming Google for anything, unless you have a personal agenda that you're constantly looking to whip out. The article is actually about social changes brought on by being able to do web searches about a specific person. Many Slashdotters should be thinking about this. If I received someone's resume, I'd certainly run some searches. And if I found out they were a ranting Linux loon, they'd get the boot.