There's a trend towards language platforms, rather than merely languages, which has some pros and cons. I do think that, for example, it'd be nice if C++ had network sockets in the standard library. Yes, it's strictly speaking an OS feature, but it's close enough to standardized that you can provide a portable abstraction layer in the standard library, which would simplify a lot of things. I agree, though, that a GUI is probably not really in that category.
It's named in parallel with language-revision names like Fortran77 and C99, that use the base language plus the last two digits of their revision year. When the process started years ago, though, they didn't know what year it would finish, but expected it to be in the 200x decade, hence "0x". So, C++0x. Now that the finalization has slipped past 2009, it's C++1x. When it actually comes out, it will have a year with no 'x', like C++10 or C++11.
Yeah, I agree; I didn't mean to imply people didn't actually think about these problems and come up with those sorts of insights. But my impression is that there isn't nearly the same sort of discussion and shared knowledge and vocabulary on this subject, even beyond books. Are there even names for all the successful game mechanics used by important games of the past few decades?
The situation may have improved somewhat since then, but Doug Church expressed a similar sentiment in an article back in 1999, so at least some game designers seem to agree...
This may certainly be interesting from a neuroscience point of view, but I would be troubled if anyone's conception of itching really changed because of a discovery about which neural pathways carry the signal. People who believe in a purely physical world governed by physical laws presumably already accept that everything that happens mentally is in some way or another implemented on our wetware. Is this really drawing some veil back: previously we thought itching was a magical sensation that came directly from fairies, but now we know it's "just neurons"? I would also be cautious about any particularly simplistic reductionist view: most of what goes on in the brain is much more complex than pop-science neuroscience discussions like to make out.
One of my personal interests in this era of gaming, which doesn't have a direct analog today, is the arcade->console adaptation route, and the technical, artistic, and gameplay challenges involved. I guess I've always known that such adaptations were common, but until recently I didn't really understand just how deeply such adaptations/ports were affected by the differences between special-purpose arcade hardware and generic and generally underpowered console hardware, and what sorts of heroic efforts porters went to to try to get something even vaguely like the cabinet to run on a home machine (sometimes in vain). That's probably the single thing I found most interesting about a recent book on the Atari VCS that opened my eyes on that. I'd read all sorts of stuff previously about the VCS (aka 2600) hardware, and different stuff about its cultural, business, and social role, but pulling the two together by looking at how the tech affects the culture and vice versa is really fascinating to me. I think ports are a particularly good lens to look at that through, because they focus sharply on how the tech affected what the designer could or couldn't do; the aforementioned book's examples of the disastrous Pac-Man port, on the one hand, and the unfaithful but interesting/successful adaptation of Star Castle into Yars' Revenge, on the other, are particularly thought-provoking.
So I really like that aspect of this article, tracing how Robotron was and wasn't successfully adapted to home machines, and which parts specifically of the arcade version survived the translation and were still compelling in the home version. Although we don't have nearly the same hardware limitations on home machines these days, I think we're in a way still struggling with similar issues about "what worked in the arcade, and how can we adapt it?"--- e.g. the discussion in this article of custom controllers to make the home version more authentic reminds me of our current era's custom controllers (Rock Band's peripherals being the best-selling). And, more broadly, we're trying to figure out whether platforms matter, and if so, how. The Wii has a compelling "what's different" angle for its platform, but is that a one-time, peripheral-only thing? Do the Xbox 360, PC, and PS3 have interesting differences going for them? Do physical arcade cabinets still matter?
More generally, I think it's one way of getting at a sort of design science that's still lacking for games, and I like how this article tries to break that down. Obviously much of game design is not really "science", but other design fields still do carefully analyze existing works, try to identify which elements specifically mattered, etc.; you might be doing something that's artistic/subjective in a lot of respects, but that doesn't mean you have to do it blind. I mean, if I want to learn architecture, there are a lot of books I can buy. I can buy a book specifically on the Bauhaus style, or some sub-style of it, or one particular architect's style. But, despite their huge role in popular culture, I can't buy a book about the design style of, say, Microprose 4X games, analyzing what elements they had in common or didn't, their relationship to other games of the era, how technical aspects influenced the design and vice versa, etc., etc. As a player, I can probably tell you some stuff off the top of my head, and I think there really is a book to be written there--- or an in-depth article on the internet if you can't interest a publisher--- but nobody's written it.
So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying: yes, more of this!
That's true, but journals' reputations still do depend on a perception that the studies they publish are generally high-quality and honest. So I could see a case for these journals suing Wyeth for the damage to their reputations that these papers have caused.
I have a pretty high-latency connection, and I find even non-flash ads really slow down my browsing, since frequently rendering the entire page is held up by the browser trying to DNS-resolve and get some minor bit of data from ads.somewhere.com. Pages loading an HTML file and a few images from one server load a lot faster on high-latency connections than pages that have to hit up 5 servers on 5 different domains to assemble their content. (Yes, HTTP pipelining helps a bit, but the risk of something being held up is still much higher.)
It depends on who they want to get in, I suppose. I agree it's not going to attract many outsiders in that timeframe. But it might convince a few companies that do mobile app development to spend a month of their time on an Android instead of an iPhone app, and that sort of market-share shifting might be what they're really looking for.
Ah yeah, I wasn't working with performance that involves non-electronic musicians with singers, so more focused on the output-only style of electronic music on laptops.
Yeah, that's fair. I suppose what I really wanted to read was an argument about why Linux is particularly well-suited to audio, which I think it is. But an argument that it's "good enough, and cheap" is, as you point out, also legit.
I agree with the premise of this article: Linux is a perfectly good platform for digital audio creation and editing. It might even be better than a Mac, depending on how you weigh different pros and cons. But I unfortunately don't really feel I learned much from this article about why Linux is a good choice. All the apps he mentioned (Audacity, Ardour, etc.) are available for both platforms. And his reasons for switching, like the lack of a tree view in the OS X finder, strike me as weirdly trivial and not music related.
As someone who's done some published research on audio latency/jitter issues in a former life, I'm also somewhat annoyed by how much these sorts of articles focus on tech like JACK and low-latency kernel patches. This used to be a huge issue, but I suspect it shouldn't be nearly as high up anyone's priority list as it used to be--- back in the 2.4.x. series kernels, when the default kernel's clock tick used 10ms granularity and scheduling was flaky, it made a much bigger difference. Today, I suspect this sort of behind-the-scenes performance is only infrequently the bottleneck in anyone's audio performance; when I see actual glitches in performances, they can often be fixed by much more boring scheduling tweaks like "nice -19" on the processes that are bottlenecks in the audio path, or finding bugs in how you're setting up your callbacks.
In any case, these days I see JACK as useful mainly for being a reasonably well supported audio-app-interconnection bus; as he says, the Core Audio of the Linux world. But that doesn't make it hugely unique either.
So I guess I'm in the weird position where I agree with the article's conclusions, and some of its specific points, but overall if I didn't already agree with it, this article wouldn't have sold me on why Linux is great for audio editing. Sorry.:/
Yeah, I was being somewhat facetious, but I suppose I could actually see an argument for the 12" Powerbook being in the netbook category if it were re-introduced today, at an appropriately low price.
Though true, what's interesting about this one? I don't mean that entirely as a rhetorical question: it's possible there really is something interesting here. But I haven't seen a good summary.
Is it just, take a normal bomb, make it really really big, and slog through some tedious but mostly straightforward engineering challenges to get the thing to work? Or is there something that, at a conceptual level, is different when you get to bombs of this size?
That's true, but the regulators don't have to be blind. There are plenty of existing industries in which bad-faith attempts like that to circumvent restrictions are regulated.
That does seem like a truck-sized loophole. I think some variety of loophole will end up in any bill that gets passed, though, because at this point the idea of at least some traffic shaping is accepted pretty widely. It is still possible to concede that while insisting on neutrality with respect to sites--- say that, sure, they can prioritize email over bittorrent, but they can't prioritize foo.com traffic over bar.com because bar.com failed to pay for the high-tier service. I see that sort of source/destination discrimination as more insidious than per-protocol discrimination.
Adapting stories from other media for videogames isn't a new idea. It's just that films have been the usual source, perhaps because they're culturally/commercially closer, especially if you compare the AAA game title to the blockbuster Hollywood film. Films also come with a built-in visual style to adapt, which helps with the recognition. The practice has become prominent enough that the only major general study of adaptation between mediums that I know of actually spends a decent amount of time discussing videogame adaptations of films, film adaptations of videogames, and so on (usually videogames get ignored in these sorts of media-study analyses).
But... they're mostly not that good. I think this could be said even if we try to look at things sympathetically. The aforementioned book argues that adaptations often get a bad critical rap, because there's a certain mystique around "the original", and assumption that a mere adaptation is always a bastardization of the original that can't possibly capture it. But let's accept that argument, and treat adaptations as interesting and legitimate in their own right, trying not to start out with an assumption that all adaptations are bad. Even then, can you really say that adapting films has been a successful way to make videogames? The only ones that come out even reasonably okay imo are sort of "adaptation light"--- where you borrow some visual elements and general setting/characters from the film, but otherwise mostly ignore it. This works best in big-universe films, like Star Wars, where you're not really adapting an actual film so much as a set of ideas.
Will this all fare better for literature? I can see adapting the general setting of a book as plausible. In fact, that's been done successfully in a few interactive fictions, which share with books the text medium (perhaps like graphical videogames share the visual medium with film). I've played some good Lovecraft-mythos IFs, for example, like Anchorhead (this book on IF discusses the issue of IFs being adapted from literature a bit further). But adapting the book itself? Perhaps as the storyline for a linear RPG-style game? Or something more fundamental than that?
I guess what I'm saying with all this in a roundabout way might be something like: yes, interesting idea, but how? Not asking that as a purely skeptical question; I think there may be ways it'd work. There might even be multiple different kind of adaptations that would work. But I think there are a lot of pitfalls. In particular, a sure pitfall is making "this game is an adaptation of 'real literature'" be the selling point for the game.
Proposing to adapt literature to videogames is the starting point, and you need a vision beyond that for why or how. Why is it interesting to adapt literature to a videogame? Why aren't you just writing a novel on the one hand, or making a non-adaptation videogame on the other? I think there might be good answers for why, but I don't see them here, at least not yet--- I don't think the mere idea of making games tackle "serious" subject matter is enough of an answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Also, he has a supervillain-style name. And, hmm.
Hehe, it does seem a pretty good symbol of C++'s syntax: bits of syntax that make sense individually turning into a monstrosity when combined.
There's a trend towards language platforms, rather than merely languages, which has some pros and cons. I do think that, for example, it'd be nice if C++ had network sockets in the standard library. Yes, it's strictly speaking an OS feature, but it's close enough to standardized that you can provide a portable abstraction layer in the standard library, which would simplify a lot of things. I agree, though, that a GUI is probably not really in that category.
It's named in parallel with language-revision names like Fortran77 and C99, that use the base language plus the last two digits of their revision year. When the process started years ago, though, they didn't know what year it would finish, but expected it to be in the 200x decade, hence "0x". So, C++0x. Now that the finalization has slipped past 2009, it's C++1x. When it actually comes out, it will have a year with no 'x', like C++10 or C++11.
Yeah, I agree; I didn't mean to imply people didn't actually think about these problems and come up with those sorts of insights. But my impression is that there isn't nearly the same sort of discussion and shared knowledge and vocabulary on this subject, even beyond books. Are there even names for all the successful game mechanics used by important games of the past few decades?
The situation may have improved somewhat since then, but Doug Church expressed a similar sentiment in an article back in 1999, so at least some game designers seem to agree...
This may certainly be interesting from a neuroscience point of view, but I would be troubled if anyone's conception of itching really changed because of a discovery about which neural pathways carry the signal. People who believe in a purely physical world governed by physical laws presumably already accept that everything that happens mentally is in some way or another implemented on our wetware. Is this really drawing some veil back: previously we thought itching was a magical sensation that came directly from fairies, but now we know it's "just neurons"? I would also be cautious about any particularly simplistic reductionist view: most of what goes on in the brain is much more complex than pop-science neuroscience discussions like to make out.
One of my personal interests in this era of gaming, which doesn't have a direct analog today, is the arcade->console adaptation route, and the technical, artistic, and gameplay challenges involved. I guess I've always known that such adaptations were common, but until recently I didn't really understand just how deeply such adaptations/ports were affected by the differences between special-purpose arcade hardware and generic and generally underpowered console hardware, and what sorts of heroic efforts porters went to to try to get something even vaguely like the cabinet to run on a home machine (sometimes in vain). That's probably the single thing I found most interesting about a recent book on the Atari VCS that opened my eyes on that. I'd read all sorts of stuff previously about the VCS (aka 2600) hardware, and different stuff about its cultural, business, and social role, but pulling the two together by looking at how the tech affects the culture and vice versa is really fascinating to me. I think ports are a particularly good lens to look at that through, because they focus sharply on how the tech affected what the designer could or couldn't do; the aforementioned book's examples of the disastrous Pac-Man port, on the one hand, and the unfaithful but interesting/successful adaptation of Star Castle into Yars' Revenge , on the other, are particularly thought-provoking.
So I really like that aspect of this article, tracing how Robotron was and wasn't successfully adapted to home machines, and which parts specifically of the arcade version survived the translation and were still compelling in the home version. Although we don't have nearly the same hardware limitations on home machines these days, I think we're in a way still struggling with similar issues about "what worked in the arcade, and how can we adapt it?"--- e.g. the discussion in this article of custom controllers to make the home version more authentic reminds me of our current era's custom controllers (Rock Band's peripherals being the best-selling). And, more broadly, we're trying to figure out whether platforms matter, and if so, how. The Wii has a compelling "what's different" angle for its platform, but is that a one-time, peripheral-only thing? Do the Xbox 360, PC, and PS3 have interesting differences going for them? Do physical arcade cabinets still matter?
More generally, I think it's one way of getting at a sort of design science that's still lacking for games, and I like how this article tries to break that down. Obviously much of game design is not really "science", but other design fields still do carefully analyze existing works, try to identify which elements specifically mattered, etc.; you might be doing something that's artistic/subjective in a lot of respects, but that doesn't mean you have to do it blind. I mean, if I want to learn architecture, there are a lot of books I can buy. I can buy a book specifically on the Bauhaus style, or some sub-style of it, or one particular architect's style. But, despite their huge role in popular culture, I can't buy a book about the design style of, say, Microprose 4X games, analyzing what elements they had in common or didn't, their relationship to other games of the era, how technical aspects influenced the design and vice versa, etc., etc. As a player, I can probably tell you some stuff off the top of my head, and I think there really is a book to be written there--- or an in-depth article on the internet if you can't interest a publisher--- but nobody's written it.
So I guess that's a long-winded way of saying: yes, more of this!
That's true, but journals' reputations still do depend on a perception that the studies they publish are generally high-quality and honest. So I could see a case for these journals suing Wyeth for the damage to their reputations that these papers have caused.
I have a pretty high-latency connection, and I find even non-flash ads really slow down my browsing, since frequently rendering the entire page is held up by the browser trying to DNS-resolve and get some minor bit of data from ads.somewhere.com. Pages loading an HTML file and a few images from one server load a lot faster on high-latency connections than pages that have to hit up 5 servers on 5 different domains to assemble their content. (Yes, HTTP pipelining helps a bit, but the risk of something being held up is still much higher.)
Works fine on my 5-year-old PowerBook G4, so I'm guessing it's not really the CPU that's the problem...
As a resident of Santa Cruz, I would expect any authentic "Santa Cruz Operation" to involve growing plants.
It depends on who they want to get in, I suppose. I agree it's not going to attract many outsiders in that timeframe. But it might convince a few companies that do mobile app development to spend a month of their time on an Android instead of an iPhone app, and that sort of market-share shifting might be what they're really looking for.
Ah yeah, I wasn't working with performance that involves non-electronic musicians with singers, so more focused on the output-only style of electronic music on laptops.
The article doesn't mention it, but Linux laptops are actually just as good as Macs for acoustic guitarists, too.
Yeah, that's fair. I suppose what I really wanted to read was an argument about why Linux is particularly well-suited to audio, which I think it is. But an argument that it's "good enough, and cheap" is, as you point out, also legit.
I agree with the premise of this article: Linux is a perfectly good platform for digital audio creation and editing. It might even be better than a Mac, depending on how you weigh different pros and cons. But I unfortunately don't really feel I learned much from this article about why Linux is a good choice. All the apps he mentioned (Audacity, Ardour, etc.) are available for both platforms. And his reasons for switching, like the lack of a tree view in the OS X finder, strike me as weirdly trivial and not music related.
As someone who's done some published research on audio latency/jitter issues in a former life, I'm also somewhat annoyed by how much these sorts of articles focus on tech like JACK and low-latency kernel patches. This used to be a huge issue, but I suspect it shouldn't be nearly as high up anyone's priority list as it used to be--- back in the 2.4.x. series kernels, when the default kernel's clock tick used 10ms granularity and scheduling was flaky, it made a much bigger difference. Today, I suspect this sort of behind-the-scenes performance is only infrequently the bottleneck in anyone's audio performance; when I see actual glitches in performances, they can often be fixed by much more boring scheduling tweaks like "nice -19" on the processes that are bottlenecks in the audio path, or finding bugs in how you're setting up your callbacks.
In any case, these days I see JACK as useful mainly for being a reasonably well supported audio-app-interconnection bus; as he says, the Core Audio of the Linux world. But that doesn't make it hugely unique either.
So I guess I'm in the weird position where I agree with the article's conclusions, and some of its specific points, but overall if I didn't already agree with it, this article wouldn't have sold me on why Linux is great for audio editing. Sorry. :/
Yeah, I was being somewhat facetious, but I suppose I could actually see an argument for the 12" Powerbook being in the netbook category if it were re-introduced today, at an appropriately low price.
Yeah, though admittedly on a newish battery, not using the WiFi, and without the screen at full brightness (i.e. basically "airplane mode").
Is my 12" Powerbook with 5-hour battery life now retroactively a netbook?
Though true, what's interesting about this one? I don't mean that entirely as a rhetorical question: it's possible there really is something interesting here. But I haven't seen a good summary.
Is it just, take a normal bomb, make it really really big, and slog through some tedious but mostly straightforward engineering challenges to get the thing to work? Or is there something that, at a conceptual level, is different when you get to bombs of this size?
That's true, but the regulators don't have to be blind. There are plenty of existing industries in which bad-faith attempts like that to circumvent restrictions are regulated.
That does seem like a truck-sized loophole. I think some variety of loophole will end up in any bill that gets passed, though, because at this point the idea of at least some traffic shaping is accepted pretty widely. It is still possible to concede that while insisting on neutrality with respect to sites--- say that, sure, they can prioritize email over bittorrent, but they can't prioritize foo.com traffic over bar.com because bar.com failed to pay for the high-tier service. I see that sort of source/destination discrimination as more insidious than per-protocol discrimination.
I could've sworn gaming networks have tried that already, haven't they?
Adapting stories from other media for videogames isn't a new idea. It's just that films have been the usual source, perhaps because they're culturally/commercially closer, especially if you compare the AAA game title to the blockbuster Hollywood film. Films also come with a built-in visual style to adapt, which helps with the recognition. The practice has become prominent enough that the only major general study of adaptation between mediums that I know of actually spends a decent amount of time discussing videogame adaptations of films, film adaptations of videogames, and so on (usually videogames get ignored in these sorts of media-study analyses).
But... they're mostly not that good. I think this could be said even if we try to look at things sympathetically. The aforementioned book argues that adaptations often get a bad critical rap, because there's a certain mystique around "the original", and assumption that a mere adaptation is always a bastardization of the original that can't possibly capture it. But let's accept that argument, and treat adaptations as interesting and legitimate in their own right, trying not to start out with an assumption that all adaptations are bad. Even then, can you really say that adapting films has been a successful way to make videogames? The only ones that come out even reasonably okay imo are sort of "adaptation light"--- where you borrow some visual elements and general setting/characters from the film, but otherwise mostly ignore it. This works best in big-universe films, like Star Wars, where you're not really adapting an actual film so much as a set of ideas.
Will this all fare better for literature? I can see adapting the general setting of a book as plausible. In fact, that's been done successfully in a few interactive fictions, which share with books the text medium (perhaps like graphical videogames share the visual medium with film). I've played some good Lovecraft-mythos IFs, for example, like Anchorhead (this book on IF discusses the issue of IFs being adapted from literature a bit further). But adapting the book itself? Perhaps as the storyline for a linear RPG-style game? Or something more fundamental than that?
I guess what I'm saying with all this in a roundabout way might be something like: yes, interesting idea, but how? Not asking that as a purely skeptical question; I think there may be ways it'd work. There might even be multiple different kind of adaptations that would work. But I think there are a lot of pitfalls. In particular, a sure pitfall is making "this game is an adaptation of 'real literature'" be the selling point for the game.
Proposing to adapt literature to videogames is the starting point, and you need a vision beyond that for why or how. Why is it interesting to adapt literature to a videogame? Why aren't you just writing a novel on the one hand, or making a non-adaptation videogame on the other? I think there might be good answers for why, but I don't see them here, at least not yet--- I don't think the mere idea of making games tackle "serious" subject matter is enough of an answer.
Yeah it was the obvious joke, but I rarely get into threads early enough to post the obvious joke, so eh, took it this time. =]