Ok, so as long as Massive isn't lying all they know is the game you're playing, which level you're playing and your IP to know where you are located. If you're playing XBox live this is pretty much public information anyway thanks to "live presence" which is available to licensed companies as an SDK from Microsoft. Are you afraid that the advertising company track your lack of skill on Barbie Horse Adventure or what? There is a valid issue of the publisher making money in addition to the first sale of the product, but how much do you think that adds up to? I don't think you'll get a $60 value from each person playing the game to make it free, so if the publisher decides to spend the extra money on quality rather than reduce the price is that really so bad? (Note: I'm not saying I agree with a $60 price point, just that it is the price of a premium game these days)
Well, one thing that OnLive does extremely well is present a tiny black box that is less ugly than a cable box and puts a foot in the predictably revenue generating videogame market. Which tecnhologically challenged venture capitalist wouldn't want to get in on this excitement? I mean, the phantom seemed like a good idea at the time and this lets me own all the hardware and rent it to the public... The returns on investment are astronomical!
One important argument against comparing videogame sales month to month and by previous year's same month is that there simply isn't a Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto or God of War released the same month of every year. Each other year the one-big-title publishers take a hit because they released a well received game last year. Same problem with delays - a lot of depreciation of value is amounted to games that are delayed into the next calendar year and the next year the publisher surprisingly make an unbelievable recovery. The videogame industry is doing well, people just don't buy games because there aren't that many hot titles to buy right now (unless you're a die-hard GI Joe fan). Early 2010 you'll see starcraft, god of war, and all other titles delayed this year make the greatest year in history for the industry again.
Hang on a minute, the valve article very specifically speaks of first person shooter games and the details of the article does not seem to relate to an open-world racing game (there is no "track" to speak of, just streets). Lag compensation would do nothing to replicate no-lag racing controls as demonstrated by burnout paradise, while it nicely solves the time of pulling the trigger issue of first person games. Also I'm lost as to why a modern PC would not be able to run burnout paradise locally, and how a PC that couldn't handle that could render a full frame of streaming video at 30 fps.
Has anyone found a powerstrip with individual power switches for each outlet? Ideally one that you can keep in plain sight so that you don't have to reach below something to switch things off? The prongs on power supplies are surprisingly weak so I don't want to pull them out every time I don't use them but every power strip I use have only one switch for all the outlets, not one per power supply (that I want to disable when not in use)
I don't remember the requirements for newer machines, but for SEGA Genesis you were required to display a copyright / trademark notice on a screen that you could not bypass for at least 2 seconds. I think today the initial logos are just there to hide the initial loading time, apart from any fmv playback. Another problem is that some middleware have special licensing requirements that require you to display their logo as well unless you pay extra for the privilege to not do so (like Renderware). The reason Atari 2600 games can start so quickly is that there is no loading time for old cartridge systems (there was a bit of loading for N64 even if it was cartridge based, but it was so quick that you wouldn't think of it as loading, more as level start screens). Anyway, if you can't skip a logo screen immediately and there is no trademark information displayed on the screen, the game is probably loading something.
I've lived in a few places around the world, and walking 1/2 mile from the busstop to your destination isn't far even where it is below freezing 6 months a year. Actually, the colder the place was the farther I had to walk... Now, I also buy almost everything online but that is more because of the horrendous 'service' in US stores ('how can I help you buy more crap today?') and the extreme lack of selection, even in larger stores.
I think "vertical slice" is the paradiggum buzzword of the day. Anyone can be agile or scrum these days, but at the end of the day, who's got the vertical slice? I'd like one vertical slice of AI to go please.
Re:Slightly incorrect research.
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
But saying that the H1B employees are less skilled purely because their salaries are lower is not correct, the H1B employees probably come from countries with far lower average salaries for engieneers than the US, such as every other country in the world. There are prevalent minumum salaries set for the H1B crowd that is set by the government to protect the US workforce so why then are these minimum salaries so low?
The PC might have been more powerful at the time Sonic came out but that doesn't really mean that Doom looked any better than Sonic, the styles are so different that I don't see a clear comparison. You can't even compare the main characters because one of the games don't have a graphical represenation of one.
Why is everyone talking about the sexual content still? The much more important issue is described in Take Two's comment: "hackers created the 'hot coffee' modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game's source code."
The obvious/. question should be: So where can I download this source and does it compile with GCC?
Going through all those publisher meetings and being rejected for that long is beyond human abilities. I've only lasted through the first two, three rounds of repeated rejections for new properties and that was when publishers actually considered them, but I have heard a lot of good things about dealing with Sony Europe so I think this game can really deliver what the developer promises.
The vendor shouldn't need more than my zip code (and country) and my preferred shipping method in order to tell me shipping and tax information. I was trying to find fairly difficult to find lightbulbs (unless you buy in bulk) the other day and it wasn't until the end of the process that I was told that shipping was $18 for my $3 lightbulb.
I think that if I am not given the shipping cost before I enter my email address then it is a good indication of "fraudulent" shipping costs.
While technically true, I don't think that the "HD cost" applies exactly as linear as Nintendo makes it sound like.
As far as textures goes, almost all artists I talk to make them around 512x512 to start with and then scale them down to fit the memory and fill rate requirements for each object. Having larger textures is just a matter of less scaling.
As far as increased number of polygons, a lot of models are made with several levels of detail, and the highest resolution mesh is usually done first and the hard work is trying to make the lower resolution models that look the same. While possibly adding a higher poly LOD level that isn't more than 25% more work.
Much of the increased rendering power will probably go towards full-screen effects and more procedural content that requires no artist time at all.
As far as programming goes, having the ability to draw more objects and more power behind determining which objects to draw and which to ignore is hardly more work.
Having consoles that differ much in performance will be a lot of work though because making a game for all consoles simultaneously will require more people to downsample all the assets including meshes.
Most games for current generation machines look better on HD than SD so there is no immediate need to completely ignore HD tv owners, the higher costs for creating next generation games and higher performance will most likely go towards creating more detail and more content (as in more levels, longer levels, more things to do in levels, less space between gameplay elements in levels) which does not rely on the TV resolution.
They have to upgrade their TVs, from the current $200 with built in VHS (they are like $50 now, but back then they were more expensive) to something that costs around $500. When you buy dev-kits for $20000 you need to cut some corners, and employees will probably get mentally burnt out before they go completely blind from squinting at the crappy tvs they have anyway.
"Will ? games ever be ?y ?" is a bad analogy, it's like saying "Will violent games ever be lethal?", or "Will sport games ever be equivalent to excersize?" (I'm not talking about excersize machines). The real question here is "Will dating games get me laid?"
"Working a "regular" summer job will not help build interpersonal skills. Period. There is nothing about putting ona a fake smile while running the register or dropping a batch of fries in the deep fat fryer that will build you up as a character."
Maybe not as a character, but it will give you patience with your managers and the TPL reports later in life which means gold in the bank come review time ("Even when I ask you to do the most redundant of duties on weekend nights, you're always giving me a smile and ask whether I'd like to supersize that order.")
You mean like the villains in movies that makes a 5 minute speech about their evil plans before they kill you?
But yes, there might be a way to stuff a "Entertainment" value into the weight of an NPC considering its options: "Kill" vs "Do Laundry"? "Do Laundry" has a low entertainment value but the time since the game started is too low to do "Kill" so "Do Laundry" for now.
"For example, in many games enemy units are triggered once you are within a certain distance from them. They will start shooting at you, but once you step outside this invisible circle, they simply turn around as if nothing happened."
You've just described one major game AI problem, and the reason your idea needs more work is that you'd get a game where you walk just close enough to a small group of enemies to engage them, then walk backwards and shoot them from a safe point. This works well in some games and some games only do it for certain enemies but the strategy can become a little boring and to compensate for the strategic players the games that do this are generally tuned so that not walking backwards when you encounter enemies is too hard.
The fact that in most games the enemies won't follow you beyond their range is a design decision that isn't easy to make.
Also, if you include communication between enemies you'd suddently be running into all the enemies at once because once they are alerted they'd all go straight for you.
My point is that any sufficiently competent AI will always be considered a cheater, and any weakening of that AI will always lead to a vulnerability that will make it seem dumb.
The complaints is from one single guy and it is a rant and I respect his opinion and all that, but I don't think those opinions are all that valid. Why?
Focus tests have made it clear that these opinions are not what people are worked up about. Take the smart AI request for example. It is not hard to make an AI that is perfect for most situations, that would take all the information any human player could possibly gather over years of playing the same game, but once they are in the first thing people say are things like "The cheating bastard shot me from behind! That is not videogamy!"
Why do they put Jumping Puzzles (tm) in FPSs? Because when the publisher plays the super-streamlined hardcore FPS the first thing they are going to say is "What do you do APART from running and shooting in the game? Fer crying out loud, it is the mid-zeroes of this century, make me do something else once in a while!"
"Give us something we've never seen before"... How many of you actually bought and played mr mosquito? Sure, the game might not be as fun but if noone buys the odd game once in a while noone is going to bother making them.
I'm not defending the nearly-all games that have design flaws in them, but there are fairly good reasons why games can't evolve as fast as we all want them to and it all boils down to a marketing decision (which may include using cheap developers).
"but they need to properly audition and not just throw the janitor on at the last minute(though some games luck out with asigning staff parts , DMA(now rock star north) infact used their marketing manager for one of the DJs on GTA3."
I don't know, sometimes talent is closer at hand. Check out the work history of this guy who I think did an excellent voiceover job in his latest two projects:
Quite a few developers do have profit sharing plans for their employees but not a lot of games reach the break even point where any money is actually being paid. But even if the actors would get their fair share they work only up to a week whereas most developers put in 100 weeks into a title so the distribution to the voice actor would be in the 1% of what a full team member would get which would be maybe 1% of what the developer would get above their costs to be covered depending on the team size.
I don't think these actors are talking about getting.01% out of 5% of what the publisher takes in per title after a break even of 100000-500000 units sold (guesstimagical hypothetical numbers). I think they are expecting a whole 1% of the sales price which is so unfair that greed does not start to describe it.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, so as long as Massive isn't lying all they know is the game you're playing, which level you're playing and your IP to know where you are located. If you're playing XBox live this is pretty much public information anyway thanks to "live presence" which is available to licensed companies as an SDK from Microsoft. Are you afraid that the advertising company track your lack of skill on Barbie Horse Adventure or what? There is a valid issue of the publisher making money in addition to the first sale of the product, but how much do you think that adds up to? I don't think you'll get a $60 value from each person playing the game to make it free, so if the publisher decides to spend the extra money on quality rather than reduce the price is that really so bad? (Note: I'm not saying I agree with a $60 price point, just that it is the price of a premium game these days)
Well, one thing that OnLive does extremely well is present a tiny black box that is less ugly than a cable box and puts a foot in the predictably revenue generating videogame market. Which tecnhologically challenged venture capitalist wouldn't want to get in on this excitement? I mean, the phantom seemed like a good idea at the time and this lets me own all the hardware and rent it to the public... The returns on investment are astronomical!
One important argument against comparing videogame sales month to month and by previous year's same month is that there simply isn't a Metal Gear Solid, Grand Theft Auto or God of War released the same month of every year. Each other year the one-big-title publishers take a hit because they released a well received game last year. Same problem with delays - a lot of depreciation of value is amounted to games that are delayed into the next calendar year and the next year the publisher surprisingly make an unbelievable recovery. The videogame industry is doing well, people just don't buy games because there aren't that many hot titles to buy right now (unless you're a die-hard GI Joe fan). Early 2010 you'll see starcraft, god of war, and all other titles delayed this year make the greatest year in history for the industry again.
Hang on a minute, the valve article very specifically speaks of first person shooter games and the details of the article does not seem to relate to an open-world racing game (there is no "track" to speak of, just streets). Lag compensation would do nothing to replicate no-lag racing controls as demonstrated by burnout paradise, while it nicely solves the time of pulling the trigger issue of first person games. Also I'm lost as to why a modern PC would not be able to run burnout paradise locally, and how a PC that couldn't handle that could render a full frame of streaming video at 30 fps.
Has anyone found a powerstrip with individual power switches for each outlet? Ideally one that you can keep in plain sight so that you don't have to reach below something to switch things off? The prongs on power supplies are surprisingly weak so I don't want to pull them out every time I don't use them but every power strip I use have only one switch for all the outlets, not one per power supply (that I want to disable when not in use)
I don't remember the requirements for newer machines, but for SEGA Genesis you were required to display a copyright / trademark notice on a screen that you could not bypass for at least 2 seconds. I think today the initial logos are just there to hide the initial loading time, apart from any fmv playback. Another problem is that some middleware have special licensing requirements that require you to display their logo as well unless you pay extra for the privilege to not do so (like Renderware). The reason Atari 2600 games can start so quickly is that there is no loading time for old cartridge systems (there was a bit of loading for N64 even if it was cartridge based, but it was so quick that you wouldn't think of it as loading, more as level start screens). Anyway, if you can't skip a logo screen immediately and there is no trademark information displayed on the screen, the game is probably loading something.
I've lived in a few places around the world, and walking 1/2 mile from the busstop to your destination isn't far even where it is below freezing 6 months a year. Actually, the colder the place was the farther I had to walk... Now, I also buy almost everything online but that is more because of the horrendous 'service' in US stores ('how can I help you buy more crap today?') and the extreme lack of selection, even in larger stores.
If your parents are charging you $40k a year for living in the basement, you're being ripped off and should have them replaced.
I think "vertical slice" is the paradiggum buzzword of the day. Anyone can be agile or scrum these days, but at the end of the day, who's got the vertical slice? I'd like one vertical slice of AI to go please.
But saying that the H1B employees are less skilled purely because their salaries are lower is not correct, the H1B employees probably come from countries with far lower average salaries for engieneers than the US, such as every other country in the world. There are prevalent minumum salaries set for the H1B crowd that is set by the government to protect the US workforce so why then are these minimum salaries so low?
The PC might have been more powerful at the time Sonic came out but that doesn't really mean that Doom looked any better than Sonic, the styles are so different that I don't see a clear comparison. You can't even compare the main characters because one of the games don't have a graphical represenation of one.
Or rather 3 and 3/4 monkey for each king and one monkey to rule them all.
Why is everyone talking about the sexual content still? The much more important issue is described in Take Two's comment: "hackers created the 'hot coffee' modification by disassembling and then combining, recompiling and altering the game's source code."
/. question should be: So where can I download this source and does it compile with GCC?
The obvious
Going through all those publisher meetings and being rejected for that long is beyond human abilities. I've only lasted through the first two, three rounds of repeated rejections for new properties and that was when publishers actually considered them, but I have heard a lot of good things about dealing with Sony Europe so I think this game can really deliver what the developer promises.
The vendor shouldn't need more than my zip code (and country) and my preferred shipping method in order to tell me shipping and tax information. I was trying to find fairly difficult to find lightbulbs (unless you buy in bulk) the other day and it wasn't until the end of the process that I was told that shipping was $18 for my $3 lightbulb.
I think that if I am not given the shipping cost before I enter my email address then it is a good indication of "fraudulent" shipping costs.
Don't forget that there are professional voice actors who are not SAG.
While technically true, I don't think that the "HD cost" applies exactly as linear as Nintendo makes it sound like.
As far as textures goes, almost all artists I talk to make them around 512x512 to start with and then scale them down to fit the memory and fill rate requirements for each object. Having larger textures is just a matter of less scaling.
As far as increased number of polygons, a lot of models are made with several levels of detail, and the highest resolution mesh is usually done first and the hard work is trying to make the lower resolution models that look the same. While possibly adding a higher poly LOD level that isn't more than 25% more work.
Much of the increased rendering power will probably go towards full-screen effects and more procedural content that requires no artist time at all.
As far as programming goes, having the ability to draw more objects and more power behind determining which objects to draw and which to ignore is hardly more work.
Having consoles that differ much in performance will be a lot of work though because making a game for all consoles simultaneously will require more people to downsample all the assets including meshes.
Most games for current generation machines look better on HD than SD so there is no immediate need to completely ignore HD tv owners, the higher costs for creating next generation games and higher performance will most likely go towards creating more detail and more content (as in more levels, longer levels, more things to do in levels, less space between gameplay elements in levels) which does not rely on the TV resolution.
They have to upgrade their TVs, from the current $200 with built in VHS (they are like $50 now, but back then they were more expensive) to something that costs around $500. When you buy dev-kits for $20000 you need to cut some corners, and employees will probably get mentally burnt out before they go completely blind from squinting at the crappy tvs they have anyway.
"Will ? games ever be ?y ?" is a bad analogy, it's like saying "Will violent games ever be lethal?", or "Will sport games ever be equivalent to excersize?" (I'm not talking about excersize machines). The real question here is "Will dating games get me laid?"
"Working a "regular" summer job will not help build interpersonal skills. Period. There is nothing about putting ona a fake smile while running the register or dropping a batch of fries in the deep fat fryer that will build you up as a character."
Maybe not as a character, but it will give you patience with your managers and the TPL reports later in life which means gold in the bank come review time ("Even when I ask you to do the most redundant of duties on weekend nights, you're always giving me a smile and ask whether I'd like to supersize that order.")
You mean like the villains in movies that makes a 5 minute speech about their evil plans before they kill you?
But yes, there might be a way to stuff a "Entertainment" value into the weight of an NPC considering its options: "Kill" vs "Do Laundry"? "Do Laundry" has a low entertainment value but the time since the game started is too low to do "Kill" so "Do Laundry" for now.
"For example, in many games enemy units are triggered once you are within a certain distance from them. They will start shooting at you, but once you step outside this invisible circle, they simply turn around as if nothing happened."
You've just described one major game AI problem, and the reason your idea needs more work is that you'd get a game where you walk just close enough to a small group of enemies to engage them, then walk backwards and shoot them from a safe point. This works well in some games and some games only do it for certain enemies but the strategy can become a little boring and to compensate for the strategic players the games that do this are generally tuned so that not walking backwards when you encounter enemies is too hard.
The fact that in most games the enemies won't follow you beyond their range is a design decision that isn't easy to make.
Also, if you include communication between enemies you'd suddently be running into all the enemies at once because once they are alerted they'd all go straight for you.
My point is that any sufficiently competent AI will always be considered a cheater, and any weakening of that AI will always lead to a vulnerability that will make it seem dumb.
The complaints is from one single guy and it is a rant and I respect his opinion and all that, but I don't think those opinions are all that valid. Why?
Focus tests have made it clear that these opinions are not what people are worked up about. Take the smart AI request for example. It is not hard to make an AI that is perfect for most situations, that would take all the information any human player could possibly gather over years of playing the same game, but once they are in the first thing people say are things like "The cheating bastard shot me from behind! That is not videogamy!"
Why do they put Jumping Puzzles (tm) in FPSs? Because when the publisher plays the super-streamlined hardcore FPS the first thing they are going to say is "What do you do APART from running and shooting in the game? Fer crying out loud, it is the mid-zeroes of this century, make me do something else once in a while!"
"Give us something we've never seen before"... How many of you actually bought and played mr mosquito? Sure, the game might not be as fun but if noone buys the odd game once in a while noone is going to bother making them.
I'm not defending the nearly-all games that have design flaws in them, but there are fairly good reasons why games can't evolve as fast as we all want them to and it all boils down to a marketing decision (which may include using cheap developers).
"but they need to properly audition and not just throw the janitor on at the last minute(though some games luck out with asigning staff parts , DMA(now rock star north) infact used their marketing manager for one of the DJs on GTA3."
I don't know, sometimes talent is closer at hand. Check out the work history of this guy who I think did an excellent voiceover job in his latest two projects:
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0970447/
Quite a few developers do have profit sharing plans for their employees but not a lot of games reach the break even point where any money is actually being paid. But even if the actors would get their fair share they work only up to a week whereas most developers put in 100 weeks into a title so the distribution to the voice actor would be in the 1% of what a full team member would get which would be maybe 1% of what the developer would get above their costs to be covered depending on the team size.
.01% out of 5% of what the publisher takes in per title after a break even of 100000-500000 units sold (guesstimagical hypothetical numbers). I think they are expecting a whole 1% of the sales price which is so unfair that greed does not start to describe it.
I don't think these actors are talking about getting