The hardest part of making a game is writing the code, not the artwork, not the music, its the code.
I strongly disagree with this. I've been working on a rpg for quite a while now, and if all that was called for were code, we'd be long done. Because of code reuse, the coding has become a fairly trivial matter. Graphic loading and blitting, a few lines thrown to sdl. Same with movie and sound playback. It's the artists on the project who've been getting the brunt of the work, trying to create something that a player won't exclaim "Ew, OLD!" upon their first look at a screenshot.
But at least you get the game eventually, and you can bet that Bioware will have portability at the top of the priority list next time around.
Not to sound overly critical here, but we're not ever going to be getting Neverwinter Nights. We're getting a portion of it, the engine without the ability to display the cutscenes. I'm happy to even be getting that much, but I'm not going to start aplauding them for a half assed job. You're free to place bets on Bioware's having learned a lesson in portability if you want, but none of their actions have shown me a company with any clue about crossplatform development. If they're foolish enough to try another crossplatform game, my bet is that it's going to be again written with DirectX, that again they'll go into it with next to no research on the other targets, and that they'll aproach the situation in terms of porting instead of developing something which can compile and run on any of their supported platforms at any time in the development cycle.
Does this work "out of the box" with any of the released major distributions (not beta or rc)?
The beta releases have been working fine for me in Debian Unstable, and I did not need to install anything extra to get it running. If it's working here, I'd expect similar from other modern distros.
Heck, he or she doesn't even know where to unpack winex, if you gave him a version already compiled for his system.
And they shouldn't have to. Installing wineX should be as simple as downloading the rpm, clicking it once in a window manager, and hitting yes.
I don't have the time or inclination to babysit Random J Gamer on the phone each time he has a problem compiling some library, and every time he can't figure out how to run some game in winex.
This might sound harsh, but ask him to pay you for your time. Yes, one comes off as a jerk sometimes doing this with friends. People need to realise though, that computer tech support is a job, and that asking us to do it unpaid is as rude as asking someone to perform surgery on you for free simply because they're your friend.
... if you don't have anything better to do than spend a week configuring the damn thing to even run at all.
A week? On any distro a non geek should be running, it should simply involve clicking once then putting in the root password. At worst, mention that the package manager needs to automatically download and install a few other libs to go along with it. Installation of nvidia drivers is another matter, but one which isn't an issue anymore since the licencing change which will allow their inclusion on free distros.
You forgot to put the word badly after that. That thing was such a disapointment, especially given what a big fan of the mega drive I was back in the day. Finally, a console company seemed to really get it, and realise that their old games still had value. Instead anyone who bought it was tortured by the single worst sound emulation ever seen on a comercial emulator.
IRC (which I may not) several games spanned a couple floppies.. don't remember how you knew when to change
I have one of these copiers for the snes, called the wildcardDX2. For it at least you'd simply load all the floppies into memory before the game started. While expensive, I found the device quite worth the money I paid for it. Having imported a number of rpgs from Japan, there was just something very cool about being able to dump, apply a translation patch, and then play it on a real snes. Especially back in the days when snes emulation was still rather primitive.
I'm still very annoyed by this, and trying to decide what to do with my site. I'm working on a little 2D rpg engine, and have some of the demo sprites previewed for download in mng format. While it does run in windows, Linux was my primary target, so losing IE support for the site was not that big of a deal. So now I'm stuck with the decision to re-encode the sprites as animated gifs and degrade their color quality to 256 colors, only use a single frame as an example, have some sort of script running on the page to fake animation using pngs, or offer up konqureor (and safari?) as the only supported browser.
Those kinds of sentiments expressed by the author really annoy me as well. Especially when he got into complaining about how rich and bored we all are. Excuse me, we're all rich and bored? Being unemployed is taking care of the rich part for me, and the bored part is being quite well countered by the fun of one tooth boring into the nerves of another, because I don't have the money right now to get it fixed. I'd 'love' to be in the position he so bemoans of needing a little game or doodad to distract me from an annoying job that allowed me health care.
I think it's being somewhat overly kind to bioware to say they managed to get NWN on all three platforms. On Linux Neverwinter is lacking the toolkit, a pretty vital piece of the game in a lot of peoples opinion. It's also become likley that the engine will never be able to playback movies. And then of course on the mac front, there's the same problem with the toolkit. They've managed to get a lot of it working on Mac and Linux, but I wouldn't by any means qualify this as being the full game for anything but windows .
Given the amazing degree of agreement in the discussion of 'Why Johnny Can't Handwrite", I think we need to put cursive right up there before Microsoft.
The difference to me is that there's not windows testing or unstable to use if I don't feel like waiting. And who says it's taken in a good light on Slashdot? Last I checked Debian's release policy is joked about quite often here.
I strongly agree with you. My binder was a huge mess before I started using a pda. The thing was filled with scrateched notes I couldn't read a few days later, papers half falling out after I'd ripped them while in a frantic run to find specific information, and little arrows all over to show what information touched on what other topics.
Now I have all the notes from my last semester tightly organised in a pda, and was able to store all of it in something which fits into my pocket. Having everything so much better organised, and available at any time, really made a difference for me. It's easily one of the best purchases I've ever made.
I recently began using WxPython after deciding it would offer the best cross platform support for my project. The gui for BitTorrent is the first program I've seen written with WxPython that has had such a large userbase. I was wondering what issues you've had with it, and if you still feel that it was the best choice for the job.
if I get into working on the dreamcast, will that help me later in developing games for the platforms where it could actually be fruitful?
In theory, yes. I have not been keeping up with how the development has progressed, but at one point I know kos was planned for porting to the PS2. If you're writing right to the metal with asm this wouldn't be so important, but I could easily see a dreamcast game which used KOS's OpenGL implementation being simple to get working on a ps2 if kos were to be ported. I know it doesn't seem like you'd be able to get very good speed like this, I was pleasantly surprised with just how much speed I was able to get with an attempt to port over a final fantasy style game engine to kos on the dreamcast using OpenGL. Especially since this was my first introduction to OpenGL, and I'd assume my code would be pretty rough.
If anyone has a dreamcast and hasn't checked this out yet, I recomend doing so. It's really surprising how easy it is to pick up if you've done much work with OpenGL. And while I havn't tried doing so yet, apparently even SDL based programs will now compile with it. Even if one dosn't have any big plans for the next epic game, it's a lot of fun in itself to work with the dreamcast.
Re:Cruel Intentions...
on
Shocking Clothing
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Unless anyone can point me to some hard data examining pay in the same job fields betwean men and women, I'm unconvinced of the validity of that 70% salary. I've never looked into it, so have only more myth and hearsay to spread. But as I understand it, the 70% came from woman being paid less combined than men, not being paid less for the same position that a man would receive holding that job. As I understand it, much of that difference came from men working much greater amounts of overtime on average, and on average being willing to take higher paying positions which required moving around the country, or physical danger.
Again though, I'm quite conscious that I don't have any actual facts here either. I would be quite interested if anyone had links to first hand information from where these studies came from.
Slashdot Mirror
it was about super hero powers and trying to create them in humans.
Any idea what it was called? It sounds like a fun watch, and I'd like to keep my eyes open for any repeats.
The hardest part of making a game is writing the code, not the artwork, not the music, its the code.
I strongly disagree with this. I've been working on a rpg for quite a while now, and if all that was called for were code, we'd be long done. Because of code reuse, the coding has become a fairly trivial matter. Graphic loading and blitting, a few lines thrown to sdl. Same with movie and sound playback. It's the artists on the project who've been getting the brunt of the work, trying to create something that a player won't exclaim "Ew, OLD!" upon their first look at a screenshot.
But at least you get the game eventually, and you can bet that Bioware will have portability at the top of the priority list next time around.
Not to sound overly critical here, but we're not ever going to be getting Neverwinter Nights. We're getting a portion of it, the engine without the ability to display the cutscenes. I'm happy to even be getting that much, but I'm not going to start aplauding them for a half assed job. You're free to place bets on Bioware's having learned a lesson in portability if you want, but none of their actions have shown me a company with any clue about crossplatform development. If they're foolish enough to try another crossplatform game, my bet is that it's going to be again written with DirectX, that again they'll go into it with next to no research on the other targets, and that they'll aproach the situation in terms of porting instead of developing something which can compile and run on any of their supported platforms at any time in the development cycle.
Does this work "out of the box" with any of the released major distributions (not beta or rc)?
The beta releases have been working fine for me in Debian Unstable, and I did not need to install anything extra to get it running. If it's working here, I'd expect similar from other modern distros.
Well in this respect the game is considerable stronger with module building tools and what not.
Given that we're not getting the module building tools, this comment somehow is not making me feel better.
Heck, he or she doesn't even know where to unpack winex, if you gave him a version already compiled for his system.
And they shouldn't have to. Installing wineX should be as simple as downloading the rpm, clicking it once in a window manager, and hitting yes.
I don't have the time or inclination to babysit Random J Gamer on the phone each time he has a problem compiling some library, and every time he can't figure out how to run some game in winex.
This might sound harsh, but ask him to pay you for your time. Yes, one comes off as a jerk sometimes doing this with friends. People need to realise though, that computer tech support is a job, and that asking us to do it unpaid is as rude as asking someone to perform surgery on you for free simply because they're your friend.
... if you don't have anything better to do than spend a week configuring the damn thing to even run at all.
A week? On any distro a non geek should be running, it should simply involve clicking once then putting in the root password. At worst, mention that the package manager needs to automatically download and install a few other libs to go along with it. Installation of nvidia drivers is another matter, but one which isn't an issue anymore since the licencing change which will allow their inclusion on free distros.
Look at Sega Smash Pack for Dreamcast
You forgot to put the word badly after that. That thing was such a disapointment, especially given what a big fan of the mega drive I was back in the day. Finally, a console company seemed to really get it, and realise that their old games still had value. Instead anyone who bought it was tortured by the single worst sound emulation ever seen on a comercial emulator.
IRC (which I may not) several games spanned a couple floppies.. don't remember how you knew when to change
I have one of these copiers for the snes, called the wildcardDX2. For it at least you'd simply load all the floppies into memory before the game started. While expensive, I found the device quite worth the money I paid for it. Having imported a number of rpgs from Japan, there was just something very cool about being able to dump, apply a translation patch, and then play it on a real snes. Especially back in the days when snes emulation was still rather primitive.
I'm still very annoyed by this, and trying to decide what to do with my site. I'm working on a little 2D rpg engine, and have some of the demo sprites previewed for download in mng format. While it does run in windows, Linux was my primary target, so losing IE support for the site was not that big of a deal. So now I'm stuck with the decision to re-encode the sprites as animated gifs and degrade their color quality to 256 colors, only use a single frame as an example, have some sort of script running on the page to fake animation using pngs, or offer up konqureor (and safari?) as the only supported browser.
Those kinds of sentiments expressed by the author really annoy me as well. Especially when he got into complaining about how rich and bored we all are. Excuse me, we're all rich and bored? Being unemployed is taking care of the rich part for me, and the bored part is being quite well countered by the fun of one tooth boring into the nerves of another, because I don't have the money right now to get it fixed. I'd 'love' to be in the position he so bemoans of needing a little game or doodad to distract me from an annoying job that allowed me health care.
I think it's being somewhat overly kind to bioware to say they managed to get NWN on all three platforms. On Linux Neverwinter is lacking the toolkit, a pretty vital piece of the game in a lot of peoples opinion. It's also become likley that the engine will never be able to playback movies. And then of course on the mac front, there's the same problem with the toolkit. They've managed to get a lot of it working on Mac and Linux, but I wouldn't by any means qualify this as being the full game for anything but windows .
A project worthy of any Robot finds kitten fan, QNX for the Dreamcast.
It's like seeing God on the back of a cereal box--or getting God as the prize at the bottom.
That idea reminds me of Ubik.
Given the amazing degree of agreement in the discussion of 'Why Johnny Can't Handwrite", I think we need to put cursive right up there before Microsoft.
I have not tried this myself yet, but a while back I stumbled on a page describing how to install Theora in Linux. Here's google's cache of it.
Pre-emptive cutting and pasting just seems a little silly.
That's silly, compared to the alternitive of cutting and pasting from a site after there's nothing to cut and paste from?
The difference to me is that there's not windows testing or unstable to use if I don't feel like waiting. And who says it's taken in a good light on Slashdot? Last I checked Debian's release policy is joked about quite often here.
I strongly agree with you. My binder was a huge mess before I started using a pda. The thing was filled with scrateched notes I couldn't read a few days later, papers half falling out after I'd ripped them while in a frantic run to find specific information, and little arrows all over to show what information touched on what other topics.
Now I have all the notes from my last semester tightly organised in a pda, and was able to store all of it in something which fits into my pocket. Having everything so much better organised, and available at any time, really made a difference for me. It's easily one of the best purchases I've ever made.
I recently began using WxPython after deciding it would offer the best cross platform support for my project. The gui for BitTorrent is the first program I've seen written with WxPython that has had such a large userbase. I was wondering what issues you've had with it, and if you still feel that it was the best choice for the job.
if I get into working on the dreamcast, will that help me later in developing games for the platforms where it could actually be fruitful?
In theory, yes. I have not been keeping up with how the development has progressed, but at one point I know kos was planned for porting to the PS2. If you're writing right to the metal with asm this wouldn't be so important, but I could easily see a dreamcast game which used KOS's OpenGL implementation being simple to get working on a ps2 if kos were to be ported. I know it doesn't seem like you'd be able to get very good speed like this, I was pleasantly surprised with just how much speed I was able to get with an attempt to port over a final fantasy style game engine to kos on the dreamcast using OpenGL. Especially since this was my first introduction to OpenGL, and I'd assume my code would be pretty rough.
If anyone has a dreamcast and hasn't checked this out yet, I recomend doing so. It's really surprising how easy it is to pick up if you've done much work with OpenGL. And while I havn't tried doing so yet, apparently even SDL based programs will now compile with it. Even if one dosn't have any big plans for the next epic game, it's a lot of fun in itself to work with the dreamcast.
When you saw 'goat' on the link to the publisher?
Unless anyone can point me to some hard data examining pay in the same job fields betwean men and women, I'm unconvinced of the validity of that 70% salary. I've never looked into it, so have only more myth and hearsay to spread. But as I understand it, the 70% came from woman being paid less combined than men, not being paid less for the same position that a man would receive holding that job. As I understand it, much of that difference came from men working much greater amounts of overtime on average, and on average being willing to take higher paying positions which required moving around the country, or physical danger.
Again though, I'm quite conscious that I don't have any actual facts here either. I would be quite interested if anyone had links to first hand information from where these studies came from.
More importantly, how would that impact it's ability to kill zombies?