"on of the main ideas here is to learn how to be a GOOD programmer, the limitations of the system will force you to code well."
To get the best performance out of limited hardware you are going to have to be a very BAD programmer. Out of code ram for that special effect loop? just change a couple of bytes in a similar one and call it. Need to make sure to update the sound DAC every 100 cycles? put in a call to the DAC check between every other call and in long loops.
The system is great for learning what hardware and APIs do for you, but to be a good programmer you need to work with a complicated system. Different tasks require different skills and game programming have many different tasks. If you program for any of the current consoles you are going to have to learn about writing efficient code, because you will always need to do more with less cycles.
"According to the Standish Group [Sta94], businesses in the United States spend around $250 billion on software development on approximately 200 projects each year."
200 projects sounds extremely low, unless they mean 200 projects per business which is extremely high. How do they define a project? I would guess there are nearly 200 videogames a year so they can't be included in this figure. Does a project need to be >1000000000$ before it is considered as a project in this group?
As far as text documents go I find text to be easier to read when people don't assume a certain display width. I commonly have several applications open and very little screen space left for my notepad text window.
I think people replying to emails with a cutoff of 40-80 characters can be really difficult to read since I usually use a large window to read their emails and that sometimes leaves a whole 2/3rds of the window blank.
Source code should have reasonable but flexible limits. A width of 80 sounds low but as long as the code is readable on a modern monitor I don't find any problems with it. When you start indenting with spaces instead of tabs just to keep within 80 or 72 characters width then it just gets ridiculous.
3) US Phone companies have a ton of mysterious subcharges that's added to your bill every month, including "number portability charge", various items that sounds like taxes but are just added fees.
There are of course valid charges like government taxes and phones-for-those-who-can't-afford-them but I'm talking about the 4-5 other charges (which I get to pay 3 times over on categories like long distance, DSL and phone service).
I've read a couple of articles about the Real-on-iPod issue and I still have not found out whether Real did this by forging the DRM so that the file is still protected from copying but not under iTunes control (?) or if they simply removed the DRM, if they did the latter then there is no issue, but if they actually forged the proprietary DRM then there is an issue of the protection of songs available through the iTunes store, and whether record companies would cease to allow apple sell their songs through it.
You'd think the PDA's of a couple of years ago would be out of date today but my iPaq (which I was planning to replace about now) still performs identically to all the latest PocketPC's (at least as far as I can tell, there's only so much benchmarking you can do with PocketHAL test programs and reading email).
The features I was looking for to upgrade:
* Multiple resolution choices (ok, there are a couple of 640x480 pixels right now) for previewing digital photos. * Increased graphical capabilities (the new graphics chips are slower than older PocketPC's) * A lot more brand-name-publisher games * Virtual desktop * Pressure sensitive touchscreen
I think they are talking about budget games as in the cost to consumer is about $30 per game, not that they try to make the simplest game possible. I've played a few Majesco games and they are definitely more production value than Deer Hunter. I think the $250K figure is for console games, I'd figure the cost for gameboy advance is significantly less and PC games somewhere inbetween the two. Marketing is generally a higher cost than development for videogames.
"I very rarely see reviews of games that cite hours played by the reviewer"
I agree but on the other hand I see a lot of reviews complaining about that games are too short. I find it a positive sign that the reviewer didn't get bored with the game before he finished it, but I would feel a little cheated if I didn't feel like I got gameplay value for what I spent on the game.
This may be real or not, but the real disadvantage of using your thumbs to run a PDA is that the thumb is blocking the view and you need to constantly move your thumb out of the way in order to see what you want to press. A stylus also blocks but it is much smaller and much less frustrating. This is the reason I don't use fingers on my PDA and if my PDA didn't have a stylus I'd use a pen.
Not necessarily. You could just paint in the shadows into the background and when a character stands in the shadow you just use a darker palette to render the sprite, signalling to the player that you are now hidden. The advance in graphics technology just makes the effect better-looking.
I think I can see the point of where realistic graphics harms the gameplay.
For one thing, many icons, target reticles, markers etc. used to assist aiming or lead snowboarders through a better path clash with the real graphics. I have an easier time accepting these helpers if the surrounding graphics is stylized to an extent.
Another thing is the game designer's control over the environment. If the environment is more realistic you have a harder time setting up something as bizarre as a mario carousel platform.
Another thing that may not be directly gameplay related is that if all games are perfectly realistic there is a chance that it would be hard to tell games apart from their look. Right now you can look at two screenshots and usually tell if they belong to two different games.
I don't think it is an argument between good and bad graphics, I think it is an argument between graphics styles, and a well made cartoony style game is not worse than a well made realistic style game.
The last thing I can think of is that games are created with limited resources and time, and if too much time is spent refining the art less time will be available to tune the game, even though different people generally art and tune there is file access requirments and changes in one department requiring changes in the other that prevents these departments from working in paralell.
"when the computer froze and the operator did not notice this soon enough"
Wait... they are allowing operators in what is basically an AI competition between machines? AI non-self-recoverable crash => game loss, no exceptions! I'd still prefer to see an all AI battlebots game though.
I don't know how you define 'protocol', but at least Amiga and SEGA Genesis had individual mouse registers for 2 mice. I wouldn't use either machine for a virtual keyboard with 2 mice but I could have.
So according to their innovations page it has 7 cpus at 10 MHz in parallell, of which one apparently is used for screen management. I'm kind of guessing you'd use one CPU per application, unless you're doing a lot of specialized programming that can run one application in parallell, so you'd look at a performance of about 10 MHz for one program.
Bank Switching is also something I don't think of as innovative, it seems like it is something of a side effect of their power management.
The jackito really seems like a step back in PDA development, you can control any other touchscreen PDA with a single finger or the stylus, having 2 finger control doesn't really sound all that innovative.
I'm getting enough of button pressing when I'm at work so why not change the user interface of the remote to a gesture with a wand?
It couldn't be that hard to make something like a ps2 eye-toy that interprets motions made using a black stick with a white tip, and voice recognition for the device choice. Just say 'TV' and draw the channel number in the air. Move the stick sideways to increase/decrease volume and juggle the stick for hilarious results!
Slap a Harry Potter logo on the box and it's bound to sell millions as well!
I sympathise with you on these issues but I think the situation has become far better than it used to be. Sure, some places may still treat their employees like a cowfarm in california, especially if you work at the only videogame company in the country (like the one in Norway, which is _NOT_ a privilege to work in) but where I have been the last five years or so have all been very careful to keep employees satisfied even if they have to do months of crunch-time and comp-time is common (it may not be more than 10% of time invested but it adds up at the end). If you work in an unfair situation in the game industry you really should start to look around, you might not find anything right away but staying and complaining sends the wrong signal to oppresive employers. And remember that you don't have to wait for your game to get finished to leave, it just helps a little to have one more finished game on your resume. Your manager will probably tell you that you won't get another job in the industry if you do so but that is the smelliest bullshit ever.
Unifying workers have been difficult in the videogame industry. Taking part in any existing union would split up programmers and artists and producers and starting a new union usually has few takers, and would any partner union decide to strike and request partner actions at the time of your deadline you might find yourself in a position where your work-for-hire may be released unfinished or cancelled. At one place I worked the management requested that we join a union and we interviewed a number of representatives from different unions and the result was that 1) we'd lose performance based bonuses 2) we'd adhere to their pay structure (salary based on experience, seniority and education but NOT successful in-time releases) 3) noone could afford the fee 4) if there was a general engineer strike by this union we'd have to strike too at the same time as 5) they would not issue union actions based on 30 kids being unhappy with their working hours.
Now the N64 didn't need much ram because all the textures were stored on the cart and could be accessed VERY fast.
Textures needed to be transferred to ram first, then to the texture cache for the N64. Not really a huge deal since the texture cache was 4 kb including palette so the textures never used up a lot of RAM. Transferring data from ROM was surprisingly slow.
Slashdot Mirror
"on of the main ideas here is to learn how to be a GOOD programmer, the limitations of the system will force you to code well."
To get the best performance out of limited hardware you are going to have to be a very BAD programmer. Out of code ram for that special effect loop? just change a couple of bytes in a similar one and call it. Need to make sure to update the sound DAC every 100 cycles? put in a call to the DAC check between every other call and in long loops.
The system is great for learning what hardware and APIs do for you, but to be a good programmer you need to work with a complicated system. Different tasks require different skills and game programming have many different tasks. If you program for any of the current consoles you are going to have to learn about writing efficient code, because you will always need to do more with less cycles.
Some European countries are Monarchies and do not have presidents... or do you mean precedent?
"According to the Standish Group [Sta94], businesses in the United States spend around $250 billion on software development on approximately 200 projects each year."
200 projects sounds extremely low, unless they mean 200 projects per business which is extremely high. How do they define a project? I would guess there are nearly 200 videogames a year so they can't be included in this figure. Does a project need to be >1000000000$ before it is considered as a project in this group?
As far as text documents go I find text to be easier to read when people don't assume a certain display width. I commonly have several applications open and very little screen space left for my notepad text window.
I think people replying to emails with a cutoff of 40-80 characters can be really difficult to read since I usually use a large window to read their emails and that sometimes leaves a whole 2/3rds of the window blank.
Source code should have reasonable but flexible limits. A width of 80 sounds low but as long as the code is readable on a modern monitor I don't find any problems with it. When you start indenting with spaces instead of tabs just to keep within 80 or 72 characters width then it just gets ridiculous.
what? http://www.devmaster.net/engines/list.php?start=20
3) US Phone companies have a ton of mysterious subcharges that's added to your bill every month, including "number portability charge", various items that sounds like taxes but are just added fees.
There are of course valid charges like government taxes and phones-for-those-who-can't-afford-them but I'm talking about the 4-5 other charges (which I get to pay 3 times over on categories like long distance, DSL and phone service).
I've read a couple of articles about the Real-on-iPod issue and I still have not found out whether Real did this by forging the DRM so that the file is still protected from copying but not under iTunes control (?) or if they simply removed the DRM, if they did the latter then there is no issue, but if they actually forged the proprietary DRM then there is an issue of the protection of songs available through the iTunes store, and whether record companies would cease to allow apple sell their songs through it.
Good news for LithTech, GameBryo, Unreal Engine, Source Engine, id Software licensing and so on. All the other options available to middleware-using developers now that they have a good reason to make a switch.
You'd think the PDA's of a couple of years ago would be out of date today but my iPaq (which I was planning to replace about now) still performs identically to all the latest PocketPC's (at least as far as I can tell, there's only so much benchmarking you can do with PocketHAL test programs and reading email).
The features I was looking for to upgrade:
* Multiple resolution choices (ok, there are a couple of 640x480 pixels right now) for previewing digital photos.
* Increased graphical capabilities (the new graphics chips are slower than older PocketPC's)
* A lot more brand-name-publisher games
* Virtual desktop
* Pressure sensitive touchscreen
I think they are talking about budget games as in the cost to consumer is about $30 per game, not that they try to make the simplest game possible. I've played a few Majesco games and they are definitely more production value than Deer Hunter. I think the $250K figure is for console games, I'd figure the cost for gameboy advance is significantly less and PC games somewhere inbetween the two. Marketing is generally a higher cost than development for videogames.
"I very rarely see reviews of games that cite hours played by the reviewer"
I agree but on the other hand I see a lot of reviews complaining about that games are too short. I find it a positive sign that the reviewer didn't get bored with the game before he finished it, but I would feel a little cheated if I didn't feel like I got gameplay value for what I spent on the game.
This may be real or not, but the real disadvantage of using your thumbs to run a PDA is that the thumb is blocking the view and you need to constantly move your thumb out of the way in order to see what you want to press. A stylus also blocks but it is much smaller and much less frustrating. This is the reason I don't use fingers on my PDA and if my PDA didn't have a stylus I'd use a pen.
It would be simpler to do so if people could just pronounce my name. Seriously. Sa-Mir-Na-na-na-ni-jad. Simple as that.
Not necessarily. You could just paint in the shadows into the background and when a character stands in the shadow you just use a darker palette to render the sprite, signalling to the player that you are now hidden. The advance in graphics technology just makes the effect better-looking.
I think I can see the point of where realistic graphics harms the gameplay.
For one thing, many icons, target reticles, markers etc. used to assist aiming or lead snowboarders through a better path clash with the real graphics. I have an easier time accepting these helpers if the surrounding graphics is stylized to an extent.
Another thing is the game designer's control over the environment. If the environment is more realistic you have a harder time setting up something as bizarre as a mario carousel platform.
Another thing that may not be directly gameplay related is that if all games are perfectly realistic there is a chance that it would be hard to tell games apart from their look. Right now you can look at two screenshots and usually tell if they belong to two different games.
I don't think it is an argument between good and bad graphics, I think it is an argument between graphics styles, and a well made cartoony style game is not worse than a well made realistic style game.
The last thing I can think of is that games are created with limited resources and time, and if too much time is spent refining the art less time will be available to tune the game, even though different people generally art and tune there is file access requirments and changes in one department requiring changes in the other that prevents these departments from working in paralell.
"when the computer froze and the operator did not notice this soon enough"
Wait... they are allowing operators in what is basically an AI competition between machines? AI non-self-recoverable crash => game loss, no exceptions! I'd still prefer to see an all AI battlebots game though.
It's a demo party, so why would they have hotel listings.. people sleep or something?
I don't know how you define 'protocol', but at least Amiga and SEGA Genesis had individual mouse registers for 2 mice. I wouldn't use either machine for a virtual keyboard with 2 mice but I could have.
So according to their innovations page it has 7 cpus at 10 MHz in parallell, of which one apparently is used for screen management. I'm kind of guessing you'd use one CPU per application, unless you're doing a lot of specialized programming that can run one application in parallell, so you'd look at a performance of about 10 MHz for one program.
Bank Switching is also something I don't think of as innovative, it seems like it is something of a side effect of their power management.
The jackito really seems like a step back in PDA development, you can control any other touchscreen PDA with a single finger or the stylus, having 2 finger control doesn't really sound all that innovative.
Oh I agree. Haven't seen a "totally awful in every way" game in years.
Oh yeah? You must have missed this one then...
I'm getting enough of button pressing when I'm at work so why not change the user interface of the remote to a gesture with a wand?
It couldn't be that hard to make something like a ps2 eye-toy that interprets motions made using a black stick with a white tip, and voice recognition for the device choice. Just say 'TV' and draw the channel number in the air. Move the stick sideways to increase/decrease volume and juggle the stick for hilarious results!
Slap a Harry Potter logo on the box and it's bound to sell millions as well!
I sympathise with you on these issues but I think the situation has become far better than it used to be. Sure, some places may still treat their employees like a cowfarm in california, especially if you work at the only videogame company in the country (like the one in Norway, which is _NOT_ a privilege to work in) but where I have been the last five years or so have all been very careful to keep employees satisfied even if they have to do months of crunch-time and comp-time is common (it may not be more than 10% of time invested but it adds up at the end). If you work in an unfair situation in the game industry you really should start to look around, you might not find anything right away but staying and complaining sends the wrong signal to oppresive employers. And remember that you don't have to wait for your game to get finished to leave, it just helps a little to have one more finished game on your resume. Your manager will probably tell you that you won't get another job in the industry if you do so but that is the smelliest bullshit ever.
Unifying workers have been difficult in the videogame industry. Taking part in any existing union would split up programmers and artists and producers and starting a new union usually has few takers, and would any partner union decide to strike and request partner actions at the time of your deadline you might find yourself in a position where your work-for-hire may be released unfinished or cancelled. At one place I worked the management requested that we join a union and we interviewed a number of representatives from different unions and the result was that 1) we'd lose performance based bonuses 2) we'd adhere to their pay structure (salary based on experience, seniority and education but NOT successful in-time releases) 3) noone could afford the fee 4) if there was a general engineer strike by this union we'd have to strike too at the same time as 5) they would not issue union actions based on 30 kids being unhappy with their working hours.
Now the N64 didn't need much ram because all the textures were stored on the cart and could be accessed VERY fast.
Textures needed to be transferred to ram first, then to the texture cache for the N64. Not really a huge deal since the texture cache was 4 kb including palette so the textures never used up a lot of RAM. Transferring data from ROM was surprisingly slow.
In the 80's we had School Daze, but I guess you didn't pay attention.