Inflammatory language? The eloquent ones among us are more than capable of flaming without using any foul language... Only people with an IQ lower than their shoe size have to revert to swear words to get their point across.
And that, of course, is the whole point. There are teeming *idiots* out there who don't have a clue. Would be nice to help weed them out. Heck, a filter that threw out any message with a subject in all caps would probably do it. Or any message with more than five exclamation points.
That said, I think your missing the broader picture. VERY VERY few of the games in question where direct rip-offs, but rather extensions of the originals. Theres a very hard question tied up in this, "What constitutes a 'rip-off'"?
They're fundamentally rip-offs. If you copy the Asteroids design and add a few tidbits, that's hardly reason to claim you're doing something else. And calling the result "Asteroid Shooter" is pretty damn stupid no matter how you look at it.
The bottom line here is that you can't just take someone else's game design, tack on a few things, and claim it as your own. Even if that were legally allowed, it's very questionable artistically. It doesn't take much thought to start with an old game concept and spin it into something very different. Just adding powerups and better graphics shows an embarrassing lack of game design skills.
The games in question were blatant rip-offs to the point where the authors should be completely embarrassed at their lack of original thinking. If you really liked Asteroids, you could start with the Asteroids gameplay, but go off in a different direction. How about helicopters that broke into parts (debris) when shot? Maybe the cargo could come out too, and you can collect it by running over it (say, pieces of mail or packages or suitcases). Or you could do the reverse and have lots of little piece of, say, plutonium, floating around, and if the collide they combine into something more dangerous. Or you could involve different materials, and they react in different ways when they collide: sometimes they create bonus objects, sometimes they create an extra-strong bad guy, sometimes they explode and damage everything within a 5 meter radius. All of these ideas start with Asteroids, but the rapidly change direction. As the designs are fleshed out, they become further and further from Atari's game. In fact, this isn't cloning at all, but starting with a germ of an idea and running with it. This is called "game design."
Contrast this to what some people did that upset Hasbro. They wrote Asteroids, added a few powerups, spiffed up the graphics, and released it with a name like "Asteroid Attack." Or they added ray-traced graphics to Missile Command and released it as "Incoming Missiles!" Now, really, what do you expect here? "Hey, I just wrote a book about a boy wizard named Larry Kotter, and can you _believe_ that some people think I'm ripping off those books by Rowling? She's such a bitch, trying to say I can't do this." Would anyone think this person was anything less than a complete fool?
I know there's a large (or small but vocal?) contingent of people who think that overclocking is Sticking It To The Man, but it's a pretty pithy form of rebellion. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who really benefitted in a measurable way from a 10% speed boost. Does Word load faster? Are you getting 357 frames per second instead of 348 in timedemo? Is your internet connection faster? Are you saving months of time running those complex numeric simulations you're always running, the kind that take months of computer time?
Heck, you already bought your Athlon or Pentium. You're giving money to AMD and Intel; you're not putting one over on them. They love it if you run your CPU too hot and have to get a new one more frequently. So let's stop acting like this is subversive, okay?
I understand the sentiment, but there's a difference between "spartan" and "highly usable." I think Gnome, et al, are going off in the wrong direction. They're interfaces for the sake of being interfaces. Arguably, that's okay, because for many people Linux is the operating system that exists solely to be an operating system:)
So, yes, I'd rather see less cruft devoted to customizing interfaces and fiddling around with a desktop, and more focus on real tasks. But if you take away flashy GUIs from Linux, you don't necessarily end up with more. You end up with something slimmer, faster, and more reliable, but often awkward and misdirected. The next step is to design something that's geared toward what people need out of computers. Jef Raskin has done much work in this area. The OS in the Apple Newton is another good example; it's more radical than most people realize. Open Genera is another OS designed with real problem solving in mind. Unfortunately, we're not seeing much in this direction any more, as being like Windows is seen as much more important (kinda surprising from the subversive Linux crowd, I must say).
I mean, Perl, Python, Java etc. surely have a different perspective on development and on what a developer should concentrate on than C had.
The trick here is that there have been lots of programming languages that focused on less low-level stuff than C--languages that have been around for twenty or thirty years--but C has become so dominant in many ways that lots of people don't realize there was anything else.
The original language that tried to abstract away from the hardware was Lisp, from the late 1950s. Right on its heels was Iverson's APL, which was documented in a book published in 1962. In terms of text processing, SNOBOL and Icon were the precursors of Perl. You'd also need to take a good look at Smalltalk and ML. All of these languages were developed before most Slashdotters were even born:)
As much as I hate to say it, this is the case with most big open source projects. I work on a very large system during the day (400,000+ lines of code), where everyone is in the same building, and team members are constantly breaking things because they didn't full understand why something was the way it was. "It looked like an easy optimization." "I'll just add this special case code in here to make it work." "I didn't realize that I needed to make call X before call Y." "Oh, _that's_ what that field is for." And this is with lots of whiteboard scribbling and explaining. Heaven help us if we couldn't do that.
One of the tenets of open source has always been that anyone can go in and fix a bug or make an improvement. Yes, having the source code available is a *good* thing, because it makes a program less likely to disappear as a result of the whims of business, but the whole supposed truism about ease of fixing bugs is not true. As an experienced programmer, I would be scared as hell to track down a bug inside of a program the size of The Gimp or an X server. The odds of breaking something are extremely high.
Anything good in pop-culture exists because it was created by talented people -- talented people that get ripped off by those same corporations. And I know I'm not alon.
So the scriptwriter for The Matrix didn't get a cent for his contribution? I bet Matt Groening is close to flat broke, too. And all those bands with million selling CDs, they shouldn't quit their day jobs.
Maybe it isn't fair to pin this on most open source advocates, but there are certainly interesting dichotomies in what Slashdot considers "news for nerds." On the one hand, any license that isn't strictly free is shouted down. Borland C++ is branded as free-as-in-beer and therefore unacceptable. Any story that mentions freedom of speech gets hairtrigger responses. Stories about The Man (i.e. Microsoft) are snickered about in a frenzy of populist hooplah.
At the same time, there's a worship of corporately created pop culture: The Simpsons, X-Files, Hollywood movies, big budget anime, The Cartoon Network. Now wait, this isn't corporate-fed culture, it's special stuff created only for geeks in the know, right? Not like other crap, like Friends. That's for the masses.
I think quite a few people would like these to collide, so everything they are interested in can be free of charge. But they are two completely different things, the second of which is created by a system that arguably would not exist if free everything was the order of the day. If you're really anti-corporate, then you should stop watching TV, stop buying CDs from major labels, and stop watching anything but indie films. That's much better than whining about how corporations should spend millions of dollars entertaining you for free.
There's already getting to be a noticible problem of programmers being very poorly rounded (no jokes about diet, please:). In regard to technical subjects, this is already bad enough, with lots of people running around who don't know languages other than C++ or Java, who think that "operating system" = "Linux or Windows," who have never done any reading about human/computer interaction, and so on. In regard to other subjects, I'd call the situation pretty grim, with a majority of geeks poorly read outside of mainstream science fiction, for example. Yes, that is also the stereotype, but there is truth there, and one response of "Well, I don't like science fiction" isn't going to change it.
Why is getting outside the traditional geek circle important? Because not doing so can lead to extreme close-mindedness, as witnessed by all the pointless debates over meaningless tech subjects (Perl vs. Python, Linux vs. Windows, Emacs vs. vi, NVidia vs. 3dfx, Intel vs. AMD). There's also a tremendous creative force outside of the geek community, or at least big enough of a force that the geek community looks pretty weak in comparison. Garage bands with their own style of music. Authors who are compelled to bring their visions to life. In the open source programming world, there's getting to be a disturbing in-bred feeling, with people running in circles cloning things and acting like they're a movement to be reckoned with. More and more, though, the Linux and open source communities are not living up to all the hype that they are getting. You read about Linux in the Wall Street Journal, you read Eric Raymond's writing, and you expect astounding things. But we're not getting any of that. We're getting weird debates about how GUIs are for lusers and command lines for the 3r33+. And there are big sites devoted to Linux games, and we're just seeing (a) ports from PC titles, and (b) lots of riff-raff rehashes of games from twenty years ago or earlier.
Getting out of the circle is important. Programming is relatively easy. Unless you want to get a PhD and get into heavy research, I highly recommend that techie-types go to college and major in something other than computer science. History, literature, or business or liberal arts would be better choices. Seriously.
No. Look at Seaman or The Sims or Crazy Taxi for good examples of original vision. Okay, they are exceptions. There are a couple of reasons such thinking is at a low point:
1. Games cost 2+ million US dollars to make, just on the developer's end. It's pretty difficult to convince a company that they blow big money in marketing for a game that's completely unproven. Will Wright had a devil of a time getting The Sims made, and he's in charge.
2. Most game designers today are products of the video game era. That is, they have been heavily influenced by hit titles for the PlayStation, Super Nintendo, and so on. As a result, RPGs tend to be modeled after Final Fantasy or Secret of Mana, racing games tend to be modeled after The Need for Speed or Wipeout, shooters tend to be modeled after Quake, and so on. In effect, game designers have played too many games and it is affecting their thinking.
Linux provides a big opportunity for the next generation of game designers, but sadly we haven't seen much to get excited about. Indies don't have to work on endless versions of old arcade games or remakes of Commodore 64 titles, but that's all we're seeing.
This card is like a gas guzzling SUV that Slashdotters make fun of soccer moms for driving around town. Any card this piggy with the power doesn't belong on the market.
Ah, moderated down. There are some things that geeks just do not want to have pointed out, apparently:)
Overall balance between power consumption and computing power is getting to be more and more important. Heck, I have a 400MHz machine that I use for heavy duty compiling and I have absolutely no complaints about speed. If I really, really wanted my machine to seem faster, I'd switch to a faster compiler. Using Object Pascal is tempting, because it is compiled on order of 100x faster than Visual C++. Or, I could switch to using an interactive environment (e.g. Lisp, Smalltalk), so I don't have to worry about compilation time at all. Or I could get a compiler that's three times as slow and upgrade to a machine that's twice is fast. Hmmm...what am I missing here?
At the same time, there are people willing to have The Ultimate Graphics Card, even if they need to hook it up to a car battery and use a '75 Pinto for a heat sink. Is that wasteful in the same way that people drive four wheel drive vehicles in Dallas or Chicago because of the free-spirit image? Yes, of course it is. Let's not fool ourselves.
This card is like a gas guzzling SUV that Slashdotters make fun of soccer moms for driving around town. Any card this piggy with the power doesn't belong on the market.
Computers are getting to be the geek equivalent of giant SUVs driven by soccer moms. Seriously. All these people who don't do anything except surf the web and play MP3s and download pr0n and twiddle with their kernels...and they have monstrous machines with four fans and two pound heatsinks. It's starting to get to be very annoying in the same way.
The demoscene was different. It was more about coders pushing the limits of what was expected from home PCs. That side of it was amazing. The general creativity and art direction was pretty bad overall, though. Sometimes it was good, but it was mostly about showing one effect for far too long from every camera angle imaginable. That, and lots of text in unreadable, animating fonts. The demo scene has fallen apart, as demo effects are no longer as impressive as they once were.
Machinima is more about the artistic side of things than the technical. The idea is less to wow with the special effects than to entertain. So far, the mark has been missed--they all suck--but this is worthy of note because it is bringing in a different type of creative person.
It's also very nice to see a new pseudo-medium come along, even if it ends up a novelty. There tends to be much more creativity and experimentation at the beginning than in the subsequent generations. The big problem the game industry is having is that games are now being created by people who grew up playing corporately developed games, so there's too much influence from and reliance on cliche-ridden genre titles (or in simpler terms, "We put a boss at the end of the level because that's how it's supposed to be").
Re:Biggest PC Game sold 2 copies? No.......
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Salon on the XBox
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· Score: 2
From the aritcle on Salon- "The biggest hit PC game will sell maybe 2 million copies. Half-Life is up at that number now." Is this an old Article, or someone purposely leaving out certain things......Diablo II comes to mind. Diablo II has to have gotten up to, or passed over 2 million by now.
True. But the average PC game sells pretty poorly, excepting the occasional hit. Hardcore titles commonly sell a whole lot worse than people expect. There are many games for the PC with lots of name recognition, lots of fans, and sales figures in the middling five digits. Why? Part of the problem is that the constant upgrading by the fanboys and game developers makes most games a weak proposition for the average PC out there. You could also argue that a lot of people get put off by having to fiddle with drivers and patch software. If just bought my first PC, with a snazzy video card recommended by magazines--the GeForce 2--and then bought what was supposed to be an amazing new game--Deus Ex (which has received five star reviews left and right)--then I'd be pretty disappointed to find that the game doesn't run on my machine. There will be a patch, or maybe there is one, but that's completely ridiculous. It is much easier to not have to be my own system administator and to just pick up a console that won't give me problems.
The real question is whether the Xbox is going to continue the rock-solid reputation that has made consoles so popular.
Everyone is forgetting about enterprise applications. You ever wonder why Visual Basic is so popular? It's not because of milling swarms of newbies who are afraid of C. It's because countless corporations use Visual Basic to write custom internal applications. Most of these end up being form-based database front ends with snippets of more traditional code here and there, but they're still programs, and they are heavily relied upon. If you still don't understand, I'm talking about utilities for managing intranets, internal database front ends, phone list managers, employee time trackers, programs for collecting and processing sales data, and so on. This is a big part of the programming world, which is why "enterprise computing" is such a buzzword. Several times I've seen statistics claims that several times more new programs are written for internal corporate use than for the shrinkwrap market. (Microsoft also claims that over 50% of all new programs are written in Visual Basic for the same reason, if you want to believe them.)
I do disagree that 3DFX and nVidia are the top competitors, ATI has been coming out with some of the best cards I've seen in a long time... and I'm not talking about the number crunching triangle drawing ability.
nVidia has some of the absolute worst driver writers I have ever run across. They never got around to supporting multithreaded TNT applications (that is, you can't have multiple threads in an application that uses the TNT, even if only one of those threads makes graphics calls). And the GeForce 1 & 2 drivers are spectacularly broken across the board. They're of the "get it wrong, reinstall Windows" type. Ugh. I'm sticking with either ATI or Matrox, as they know what they're doing.
Ah, there's lots of gloating going on here. Much of it includes "rah, rah, AMD" sentiment, I see. I can understand it, but some caution is well deserved here. The x86 chips that are being released these days are immensely complicated. Windows is buggy, yes, but if someone wrote a less buggy clone of Windows, it is still going to be an overly complex piece of software that I would not stake my life on. AMD is prone to exactly the same issues. It's not like AMD chips are orders of magnitude simpler than what Intel is working on. AMD could easily stumble at any moment, as could anyone working on something so complex. There's a bit of a blind eye toward and AMD problems at the moment, too, just as patches released right after new Linux kernel get spun into "Look at the quick turnaround!" instead of "Critical bugs in Linux kernel!."
Re:A push for new examples of open source success
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NYT On Open Source
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Why? Because the oldest and most successful projects are the best examples, almost by definiton of how open source/free software can succeed.
It is like reading those articles about violent video games that mention DOOM and Mortal Kombat--games from seven and eight years ago. Perl and Apache are stock answers that are trotted out without any thought. They've become trite examples of Open Source that make it seem like nothing new is happening. They are excellent projects, yes, but not good examples of the supposed revolution that has happened in the last few years. One of the touted points of Open Source, mind you, is that it is lighter on its collective feet than corporate developed software. This is gotten across by citing examples of projects that pre-dated the wide awareness of open source?
A push for new examples of open source success
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NYT On Open Source
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· Score: 3
If open source is so big, why do articles--even in techie Linux magazines--always cite the same tired old examples: Perl, Apache, Linux kernel, etc. Heck, those were big examples *before* all the Cathedral & Bazaar publicity.
Talk to any Mac users and you'll notice right away that they have no interest in making everyone in the world us Mac OS,
Hmmmm...my feeling has always been that most Mac owners don't fixate on things like operating systems, and just use their computers. There's small group of advocates, but by far the largest segment of Mac owners are people who have a use for a computer that the Mac fills nicely.
Linux has a much larger percentage of advocates, and they say things like "Linux is the OS for the elite," and "when Linux gets to be too mainstream I'm switching to BSD," and "I don't want easy to install; half the fun is dinking around with your system configuration."
In general, your comments apply are spun around the wrong way:)
Something else to realize is that open source projects tend to slow down as they get bigger. Witness the growing time between Linux kernel updates. Gnome and KDE are improving, but the improvements are slow to come, and meanwhile Microsoft isn't standing still.
The one real problem with the me-too cloning nature of much open source development is that it could be completely wiped out by something really snazzy and unexpected from a company that is doing any kind of R&D (which Microsoft does a lot of). For example, if a future Windows GUI were rewritten to use high-end video cards for *everything* rather than supporting the old GDI, then it would just plow through anything available for Linux. And Microsoft has been talking about this for some time now. Meanwhile, Linux desktops are still trundling toward just being stable and usable (no offense intended; I simply accept the truth).
Slashdot Mirror
Inflammatory language? The eloquent ones among us are more than capable of flaming without using any foul language... Only people with an IQ lower than their shoe size have to revert to swear words to get their point across.
And that, of course, is the whole point. There are teeming *idiots* out there who don't have a clue. Would be nice to help weed them out. Heck, a filter that threw out any message with a subject in all caps would probably do it. Or any message with more than five exclamation points.
That said, I think your missing the broader picture. VERY VERY few of the games in question where direct rip-offs, but rather extensions of the originals. Theres a very hard question tied up in this, "What constitutes a 'rip-off'"?
They're fundamentally rip-offs. If you copy the Asteroids design and add a few tidbits, that's hardly reason to claim you're doing something else. And calling the result "Asteroid Shooter" is pretty damn stupid no matter how you look at it.
The bottom line here is that you can't just take someone else's game design, tack on a few things, and claim it as your own. Even if that were legally allowed, it's very questionable artistically. It doesn't take much thought to start with an old game concept and spin it into something very different. Just adding powerups and better graphics shows an embarrassing lack of game design skills.
Hasbro won't be releasing any new improvements on the old classics.
But they *are*, and it has been quite a successful product line, too.
The games in question were blatant rip-offs to the point where the authors should be completely embarrassed at their lack of original thinking. If you really liked Asteroids, you could start with the Asteroids gameplay, but go off in a different direction. How about helicopters that broke into parts (debris) when shot? Maybe the cargo could come out too, and you can collect it by running over it (say, pieces of mail or packages or suitcases). Or you could do the reverse and have lots of little piece of, say, plutonium, floating around, and if the collide they combine into something more dangerous. Or you could involve different materials, and they react in different ways when they collide: sometimes they create bonus objects, sometimes they create an extra-strong bad guy, sometimes they explode and damage everything within a 5 meter radius. All of these ideas start with Asteroids, but the rapidly change direction. As the designs are fleshed out, they become further and further from Atari's game. In fact, this isn't cloning at all, but starting with a germ of an idea and running with it. This is called "game design."
Contrast this to what some people did that upset Hasbro. They wrote Asteroids, added a few powerups, spiffed up the graphics, and released it with a name like "Asteroid Attack." Or they added ray-traced graphics to Missile Command and released it as "Incoming Missiles!" Now, really, what do you expect here? "Hey, I just wrote a book about a boy wizard named Larry Kotter, and can you _believe_ that some people think I'm ripping off those books by Rowling? She's such a bitch, trying to say I can't do this." Would anyone think this person was anything less than a complete fool?
I know there's a large (or small but vocal?) contingent of people who think that overclocking is Sticking It To The Man, but it's a pretty pithy form of rebellion. You'd be hard pressed to find someone who really benefitted in a measurable way from a 10% speed boost. Does Word load faster? Are you getting 357 frames per second instead of 348 in timedemo? Is your internet connection faster? Are you saving months of time running those complex numeric simulations you're always running, the kind that take months of computer time?
Heck, you already bought your Athlon or Pentium. You're giving money to AMD and Intel; you're not putting one over on them. They love it if you run your CPU too hot and have to get a new one more frequently. So let's stop acting like this is subversive, okay?
I understand the sentiment, but there's a difference between "spartan" and "highly usable." I think Gnome, et al, are going off in the wrong direction. They're interfaces for the sake of being interfaces. Arguably, that's okay, because for many people Linux is the operating system that exists solely to be an operating system :)
So, yes, I'd rather see less cruft devoted to customizing interfaces and fiddling around with a desktop, and more focus on real tasks. But if you take away flashy GUIs from Linux, you don't necessarily end up with more. You end up with something slimmer, faster, and more reliable, but often awkward and misdirected. The next step is to design something that's geared toward what people need out of computers. Jef Raskin has done much work in this area. The OS in the Apple Newton is another good example; it's more radical than most people realize. Open Genera is another OS designed with real problem solving in mind. Unfortunately, we're not seeing much in this direction any more, as being like Windows is seen as much more important (kinda surprising from the subversive Linux crowd, I must say).
I mean, Perl, Python, Java etc. surely have a different perspective on development and on what a developer should concentrate on than C had.
:)
The trick here is that there have been lots of programming languages that focused on less low-level stuff than C--languages that have been around for twenty or thirty years--but C has become so dominant in many ways that lots of people don't realize there was anything else.
The original language that tried to abstract away from the hardware was Lisp, from the late 1950s. Right on its heels was Iverson's APL, which was documented in a book published in 1962. In terms of text processing, SNOBOL and Icon were the precursors of Perl. You'd also need to take a good look at Smalltalk and ML. All of these languages were developed before most Slashdotters were even born
As much as I hate to say it, this is the case with most big open source projects. I work on a very large system during the day (400,000+ lines of code), where everyone is in the same building, and team members are constantly breaking things because they didn't full understand why something was the way it was. "It looked like an easy optimization." "I'll just add this special case code in here to make it work." "I didn't realize that I needed to make call X before call Y." "Oh, _that's_ what that field is for." And this is with lots of whiteboard scribbling and explaining. Heaven help us if we couldn't do that.
One of the tenets of open source has always been that anyone can go in and fix a bug or make an improvement. Yes, having the source code available is a *good* thing, because it makes a program less likely to disappear as a result of the whims of business, but the whole supposed truism about ease of fixing bugs is not true. As an experienced programmer, I would be scared as hell to track down a bug inside of a program the size of The Gimp or an X server. The odds of breaking something are extremely high.
Anything good in pop-culture exists because it was created by talented people -- talented people that get ripped off by those same corporations. And I know I'm not alon.
So the scriptwriter for The Matrix didn't get a cent for his contribution? I bet Matt Groening is close to flat broke, too. And all those bands with million selling CDs, they shouldn't quit their day jobs.
Maybe it isn't fair to pin this on most open source advocates, but there are certainly interesting dichotomies in what Slashdot considers "news for nerds." On the one hand, any license that isn't strictly free is shouted down. Borland C++ is branded as free-as-in-beer and therefore unacceptable. Any story that mentions freedom of speech gets hairtrigger responses. Stories about The Man (i.e. Microsoft) are snickered about in a frenzy of populist hooplah.
At the same time, there's a worship of corporately created pop culture: The Simpsons, X-Files, Hollywood movies, big budget anime, The Cartoon Network. Now wait, this isn't corporate-fed culture, it's special stuff created only for geeks in the know, right? Not like other crap, like Friends. That's for the masses.
I think quite a few people would like these to collide, so everything they are interested in can be free of charge. But they are two completely different things, the second of which is created by a system that arguably would not exist if free everything was the order of the day. If you're really anti-corporate, then you should stop watching TV, stop buying CDs from major labels, and stop watching anything but indie films. That's much better than whining about how corporations should spend millions of dollars entertaining you for free.
There's already getting to be a noticible problem of programmers being very poorly rounded (no jokes about diet, please :). In regard to technical subjects, this is already bad enough, with lots of people running around who don't know languages other than C++ or Java, who think that "operating system" = "Linux or Windows," who have never done any reading about human/computer interaction, and so on. In regard to other subjects, I'd call the situation pretty grim, with a majority of geeks poorly read outside of mainstream science fiction, for example. Yes, that is also the stereotype, but there is truth there, and one response of "Well, I don't like science fiction" isn't going to change it.
Why is getting outside the traditional geek circle important? Because not doing so can lead to extreme close-mindedness, as witnessed by all the pointless debates over meaningless tech subjects (Perl vs. Python, Linux vs. Windows, Emacs vs. vi, NVidia vs. 3dfx, Intel vs. AMD). There's also a tremendous creative force outside of the geek community, or at least big enough of a force that the geek community looks pretty weak in comparison. Garage bands with their own style of music. Authors who are compelled to bring their visions to life. In the open source programming world, there's getting to be a disturbing in-bred feeling, with people running in circles cloning things and acting like they're a movement to be reckoned with. More and more, though, the Linux and open source communities are not living up to all the hype that they are getting. You read about Linux in the Wall Street Journal, you read Eric Raymond's writing, and you expect astounding things. But we're not getting any of that. We're getting weird debates about how GUIs are for lusers and command lines for the 3r33+. And there are big sites devoted to Linux games, and we're just seeing (a) ports from PC titles, and (b) lots of riff-raff rehashes of games from twenty years ago or earlier.
Getting out of the circle is important. Programming is relatively easy. Unless you want to get a PhD and get into heavy research, I highly recommend that techie-types go to college and major in something other than computer science. History, literature, or business or liberal arts would be better choices. Seriously.
Has all creativity died in the gaming industry?
No. Look at Seaman or The Sims or Crazy Taxi for good examples of original vision. Okay, they are exceptions. There are a couple of reasons such thinking is at a low point:
1. Games cost 2+ million US dollars to make, just on the developer's end. It's pretty difficult to convince a company that they blow big money in marketing for a game that's completely unproven. Will Wright had a devil of a time getting The Sims made, and he's in charge.
2. Most game designers today are products of the video game era. That is, they have been heavily influenced by hit titles for the PlayStation, Super Nintendo, and so on. As a result, RPGs tend to be modeled after Final Fantasy or Secret of Mana, racing games tend to be modeled after The Need for Speed or Wipeout, shooters tend to be modeled after Quake, and so on. In effect, game designers have played too many games and it is affecting their thinking.
Linux provides a big opportunity for the next generation of game designers, but sadly we haven't seen much to get excited about. Indies don't have to work on endless versions of old arcade games or remakes of Commodore 64 titles, but that's all we're seeing.
This card is like a gas guzzling SUV that Slashdotters make fun of soccer moms for driving around town. Any card this piggy with the power doesn't belong on the market.
:)
Ah, moderated down. There are some things that geeks just do not want to have pointed out, apparently
Overall balance between power consumption and computing power is getting to be more and more important. Heck, I have a 400MHz machine that I use for heavy duty compiling and I have absolutely no complaints about speed. If I really, really wanted my machine to seem faster, I'd switch to a faster compiler. Using Object Pascal is tempting, because it is compiled on order of 100x faster than Visual C++. Or, I could switch to using an interactive environment (e.g. Lisp, Smalltalk), so I don't have to worry about compilation time at all. Or I could get a compiler that's three times as slow and upgrade to a machine that's twice is fast. Hmmm...what am I missing here?
At the same time, there are people willing to have The Ultimate Graphics Card, even if they need to hook it up to a car battery and use a '75 Pinto for a heat sink. Is that wasteful in the same way that people drive four wheel drive vehicles in Dallas or Chicago because of the free-spirit image? Yes, of course it is. Let's not fool ourselves.
This card is like a gas guzzling SUV that Slashdotters make fun of soccer moms for driving around town. Any card this piggy with the power doesn't belong on the market.
You're talking about the 1993 demoscene. How can you make such statements when you obviously has now knowledge of the current stuff?
I follow the demoscene, though I have no idea why. The modern demoscene is stale, stale, stale. It should have died years ago.
Computers are getting to be the geek equivalent of giant SUVs driven by soccer moms. Seriously. All these people who don't do anything except surf the web and play MP3s and download pr0n and twiddle with their kernels...and they have monstrous machines with four fans and two pound heatsinks. It's starting to get to be very annoying in the same way.
The demoscene was different. It was more about coders pushing the limits of what was expected from home PCs. That side of it was amazing. The general creativity and art direction was pretty bad overall, though. Sometimes it was good, but it was mostly about showing one effect for far too long from every camera angle imaginable. That, and lots of text in unreadable, animating fonts. The demo scene has fallen apart, as demo effects are no longer as impressive as they once were.
Machinima is more about the artistic side of things than the technical. The idea is less to wow with the special effects than to entertain. So far, the mark has been missed--they all suck--but this is worthy of note because it is bringing in a different type of creative person.
It's also very nice to see a new pseudo-medium come along, even if it ends up a novelty. There tends to be much more creativity and experimentation at the beginning than in the subsequent generations. The big problem the game industry is having is that games are now being created by people who grew up playing corporately developed games, so there's too much influence from and reliance on cliche-ridden genre titles (or in simpler terms, "We put a boss at the end of the level because that's how it's supposed to be").
From the aritcle on Salon- "The biggest hit PC game will sell maybe 2 million copies. Half-Life is up at that number now." Is this an old Article, or someone purposely leaving out certain things......Diablo II comes to mind. Diablo II has to have gotten up to, or passed over 2 million by now.
True. But the average PC game sells pretty poorly, excepting the occasional hit. Hardcore titles commonly sell a whole lot worse than people expect. There are many games for the PC with lots of name recognition, lots of fans, and sales figures in the middling five digits. Why? Part of the problem is that the constant upgrading by the fanboys and game developers makes most games a weak proposition for the average PC out there. You could also argue that a lot of people get put off by having to fiddle with drivers and patch software. If just bought my first PC, with a snazzy video card recommended by magazines--the GeForce 2--and then bought what was supposed to be an amazing new game--Deus Ex (which has received five star reviews left and right)--then I'd be pretty disappointed to find that the game doesn't run on my machine. There will be a patch, or maybe there is one, but that's completely ridiculous. It is much easier to not have to be my own system administator and to just pick up a console that won't give me problems.
The real question is whether the Xbox is going to continue the rock-solid reputation that has made consoles so popular.
Everyone is forgetting about enterprise applications. You ever wonder why Visual Basic is so popular? It's not because of milling swarms of newbies who are afraid of C. It's because countless corporations use Visual Basic to write custom internal applications. Most of these end up being form-based database front ends with snippets of more traditional code here and there, but they're still programs, and they are heavily relied upon. If you still don't understand, I'm talking about utilities for managing intranets, internal database front ends, phone list managers, employee time trackers, programs for collecting and processing sales data, and so on. This is a big part of the programming world, which is why "enterprise computing" is such a buzzword. Several times I've seen statistics claims that several times more new programs are written for internal corporate use than for the shrinkwrap market. (Microsoft also claims that over 50% of all new programs are written in Visual Basic for the same reason, if you want to believe them.)
I do disagree that 3DFX and nVidia are the top competitors, ATI has been coming out with some of the best cards I've seen in a long time ... and I'm not talking about the number crunching triangle drawing ability.
nVidia has some of the absolute worst driver writers I have ever run across. They never got around to supporting multithreaded TNT applications (that is, you can't have multiple threads in an application that uses the TNT, even if only one of those threads makes graphics calls). And the GeForce 1 & 2 drivers are spectacularly broken across the board. They're of the "get it wrong, reinstall Windows" type. Ugh. I'm sticking with either ATI or Matrox, as they know what they're doing.
Ah, there's lots of gloating going on here. Much of it includes "rah, rah, AMD" sentiment, I see. I can understand it, but some caution is well deserved here. The x86 chips that are being released these days are immensely complicated. Windows is buggy, yes, but if someone wrote a less buggy clone of Windows, it is still going to be an overly complex piece of software that I would not stake my life on. AMD is prone to exactly the same issues. It's not like AMD chips are orders of magnitude simpler than what Intel is working on. AMD could easily stumble at any moment, as could anyone working on something so complex. There's a bit of a blind eye toward and AMD problems at the moment, too, just as patches released right after new Linux kernel get spun into "Look at the quick turnaround!" instead of "Critical bugs in Linux kernel!."
Why? Because the oldest and most successful projects are the best examples, almost by definiton of how open source/free software can succeed.
It is like reading those articles about violent video games that mention DOOM and Mortal Kombat--games from seven and eight years ago. Perl and Apache are stock answers that are trotted out without any thought. They've become trite examples of Open Source that make it seem like nothing new is happening. They are excellent projects, yes, but not good examples of the supposed revolution that has happened in the last few years. One of the touted points of Open Source, mind you, is that it is lighter on its collective feet than corporate developed software. This is gotten across by citing examples of projects that pre-dated the wide awareness of open source?
If open source is so big, why do articles--even in techie Linux magazines--always cite the same tired old examples: Perl, Apache, Linux kernel, etc. Heck, those were big examples *before* all the Cathedral & Bazaar publicity.
Talk to any Mac users and you'll notice right away that they have no interest in making everyone in the world us Mac OS,
:)
Hmmmm...my feeling has always been that most Mac owners don't fixate on things like operating systems, and just use their computers. There's small group of advocates, but by far the largest segment of Mac owners are people who have a use for a computer that the Mac fills nicely.
Linux has a much larger percentage of advocates, and they say things like "Linux is the OS for the elite," and "when Linux gets to be too mainstream I'm switching to BSD," and "I don't want easy to install; half the fun is dinking around with your system configuration."
In general, your comments apply are spun around the wrong way
Something else to realize is that open source projects tend to slow down as they get bigger. Witness the growing time between Linux kernel updates. Gnome and KDE are improving, but the improvements are slow to come, and meanwhile Microsoft isn't standing still.
The one real problem with the me-too cloning nature of much open source development is that it could be completely wiped out by something really snazzy and unexpected from a company that is doing any kind of R&D (which Microsoft does a lot of). For example, if a future Windows GUI were rewritten to use high-end video cards for *everything* rather than supporting the old GDI, then it would just plow through anything available for Linux. And Microsoft has been talking about this for some time now. Meanwhile, Linux desktops are still trundling toward just being stable and usable (no offense intended; I simply accept the truth).