The same trend occured in US record sales when Napster became popular (though it was also helped by a combination of other factors, including a continuing decline in prices which was reversed the next year).
Between a record price increase (record not referring to vinyl) and the suit that eventually shut down Napster, sales were in the toilet quickly enough afterwards.
one can hope that a movie of Ender's Game won't be as we expect it to be.
I think that the biggest problems for Ender's Game, given that Card is working so closely with them on this, will be casting and the work of the film-makers to portray the children as they were portrayed in the book. Ender's Game is somewhat controversial because so many people can't understand that children can think and behave that way, yet it's always been a big hit among certain groups in or near the same age group as the characters because it portrays them in the way they often see themselves. Hollywood has rarely (if ever) portrayed children in the manner that Card did in Ender's Game, and one can only hope that they can do it right this time.
They don't believe a good story can be sold, but an bunch of vapid acting, CGI and action can make up for depth.
Probably one of the most memorable movies of all time, Star Wars: A New Hope challenged that attitude, but Hollywood is a creature of habit and goes back to what it considers "Tried and True"
Something bugs me about the pairing of these sentences. Oh, wait, I figured it out, Star Wars IV contained "vapid acting, [large amounts of special effects], and action", which was only made up for with depth that was only really acheived by what existed outside the movie itself. The movie started the biggest CGI/effects studio in Hollywood, and lead to the creation of Star Wars I & II.
The Senate was not supposed to be the same as the House of Representatives - hence the name difference. The Senate was designated to receive 2 representatives from each State to represent that State's needs and wishes, not the people directly. The State's have a need for representation, too - it prevents too central a government from being allowed. But since the method of electing a Senator was changed in the 30s I guess we just have to live with it.
I understand that, but the point is that even in the current system the Senators are elected by the state's voters as a whole rather than groups of voters as is the case of the House. In the case of California, and I'm sure quite a few other states, the Senate representation is significantly different from the House representation simply because the seats are elected in this manner. Of course, if they were elected by the state government, the situation would again probably be different. The difference being that the state legislature is elected more along the lines of the Representatives in the federal government.
My point is, the Senate was originally intended to represent the State's interests, not the people within the state - at least not directly. The way things are now we may as well have just a Congress or just a Senate; they are both elected in the same manner.
I hope you mean just a House or just a Senate, and the rest of my response is framed in that manner. After all, the Senate is part of Congress.
Senators are voted on by every voting citizen of the state. Representatives (in the House) are voted on by every voting citizen in their district. If I live in District #50 I can't vote for the Representative of District #25. If you take a very large state with a diverse population, like California for example, depending on the way things lean during a particular time period you can get some startling results. For instance, in most of the last decade California has had an even split between Republicans and Democrats in the House, yet has had Democrats as both of the state's Senators. The reason for this is simple: certain regions are very conservative and others are very liberal. Rural areas and particular urban areas (with a heavier lean towards suburbs) have Republicans in the House, while San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland, which combined make up a significant percentage of the population of California, generally have Democrats in the House, especially in their poorer urban areas. The majority of the state in terms of land area usually votes Republican, but since the state has these large cities (San Diego is also a large city, larger than Oakland, but tends to vote Republican) with massive populations concentrated in a small area, the popular vote tends to go Democrat.
All of this is simply to show that the House and Senate are elected in different manners. Additionally, the party of the most recently-elected Senator can be a clue to which party could win the electoral votes of that state in a presidential election, although other statewide votes (such as governor) also have to be considered. This is, of course, why the Republicans are looking at California as a viable state for the first time since Reagan. Additionally, Bush only lost California by a couple of percentage points in the last election (though that was a couple million people that he has to win over). Just think about how much of a difference it would make if California split it's votes the way some other states do. People might actually vote for the President there, considering that in 2000 over half of the voters weren't considered in the final total (Gore didn't win 50% of California, it was something like 48% to Bush's 46%).
I think it reflects that a large part of the audience who grew up with computer games has, er, grown older, and this is the kneejerk reaction of the industry to try to attract them.
If that's the case, it may also be the reason that they're trying to attract them in the first place. These are the types of things that tend to attract teenagers, not gamers who have "grown older". The fluff is nothing new, but those of us that want to see nude or semi-nude girls in our magazines know where to buy magazines dedicated to those pictures.
As the gaming magazines got thinner with each issue and the ratio of content to ads declined I stopped buying them. Frankly, though, the amount of useless crap that found its way into the content didn't help, and that includes all of the useless pictures and interviews with people that no one would even notice in the game industry if they weren't women and willing to have their picture taken with little or no clothing.
If I wanted Maxim, I would've picked it up (after all, it's certainly easier to find than most of the game magazines, especially on the top shelf rather than the bottom shelf). If I really wanted to see naked/half-naked women, I'd stop by the sex shop and find something more appealing to me than photos of random women somehow involved with games.
The point is, it should be illegal. There is no skill that a foreigner would have that an American doesn't already possess.
Yet it's completely possible that no American applied for the position, and therefore they can state quite correctly that they can't find someone qualified for the position here.
The only reason to hire foreigners is because the company is looking for cheap labor.
If a company is looking for cheap labor, they don't bring someone in on an H1B visa. It is more expensive for companies to hire people this way. If you want to do things in a cheap manner, you open an office in a foreign country and employ as many people as you need. If the labor is cheap enough, you make up the costs of operating the office. Alternatively, you farm it out to a company that is already setup in the foreign country and more or less charges you labor + overhead, and then you hope they don't have a habit of using your data against you.
When Kerry gets elected this kind of crap will be put to an end. Stop exporting American jobs to India!!! Vote Kerry and get Bush the hell out of office!
Something tells me that Kerry can't do any more about this than Bush can. Then again, I'm sure if we look around a bit, we can find evidence that Kerry has been on both sides of this issue, too. After all, it's not the first time jobs have been exported from America, nor will it be the last time.
While I'm sure there are 500,000 Americans out there looking for work (actually, about 15x that, but since there are only about 500,000 people in India working for US companies...), I'm not sure how many of them are willing to be AOL and AT&T phone support reps working for $5-10/hour. On the other hand, there are 150,000,000 Americans going to work every day with little reason to worry that their jobs are going to be shipped overseas.
Actually, if you've ever read the crap that comes with the carts, and this has always been so since I first read them, they explicitly say you're not allowed to copy them for fair use, because they will repair or replace for a reasonable price.
Fortunately, that still doesn't prevent fair use copying from being legal. They can put whatever disclaimers and statements they want to in the packaging and at the end of all of the legal statements it still states that it is all subject to local laws and restrictions.
As someone upthread pointed out, this wasn't true for the SNES and N64 where some new games cost $60 or $70.
Again, though, even in the SNES and N64 days, as with the NES days, there was usually a reason for certain carts to be more expensive related to the carts themselves being more expensive. The SNES especially saw a lot of carts getting stuffed with new chips to handle extra processing. I bought my share of $60-70 NES carts, simply because I liked RPGs, and the better ones had battery saves and extra memory, which cost more money.
It is possible that Nintendo tried to do the same thing that many PC game publishers tried in the late 90s, pushing prices up to see what the market would bear, but in the end the prices on all platforms came back down. Nintendo didn't really have a choice once the PlayStation took hold, and people were no longer sympathetic with the idea that they had to offset the cost of an expensive cartridge when the competitor was using cheap optical media.
sorta offtopic, regarding 3-D audio technology (EAX, A3D), does anyone else find them to be highly lacking? For example, in America's Army, I've noticed in the training missions when you are required to listen to someone talking to you, the best sound comes when you've turned your head 90 degrees to the speaker, so one "ear" is directly facing him
It sounds like a problem with the implementation, rather than the technology. That being said, from the day I had to ditch my Aureal 2 based card, I've lamented the fact that EAX is completely pitiful when compared to what A3D2 sounded like on native hardware when implemented properly (ie in Half-Life/TFC).
Something else to consider is whether or not your sound card preferences are properly set for the speaker setup you're using, as it may change the way it puts out the sound based on whether you have it set to 2,4, or more speakers or headphones.
I think the explanation is more likely that id thinks that PC co-op play comes in a distant third to deathmatch and single player, and so has devoted their resources to improving those rather than implementing co-op. The console market seems to be different however, with co-op being a major mode of play, so the decision to implement co-op on the X-box makes sense.
Additionally, either way they play it, they're not putting any more time than necessary to support the people doing the port into co-op play. On the PC side, they know the mod community will do it if there is demand for it. On the XBox side, it'll be a feature that people expect the game to have, given the nature of consoles in general, and past titles like Halo.
They even went to the extent of saying that the mod makers will most likely be the ones to develop any multiplayer beyond 4 players, so it's not really a stretch to think that co-op would fall in the same category. Frankly, given the way Q3 was received (specifically mods like OSP which significantly changed deathmatch for "pro" gamers), and the fact that they've focused most of their statements on the single player side of the game, I'm not surprised to see that they'd leave so much of the multiplayer up to the mod makers, with only a basic framework to get them started.
Not to be a dick, but please don't correct me and then admit you might be wrong. This is pretty bad form. First off, notice I was speaking of Quake3 as was the parent post.
#1) It is bad form if I'm trying to prove to everyone else that I am right despite knowing that I may be wrong, otherwise, I see it as being honest.
#2) I was not correcting you, but simply adding to a statement you had made, as follows:
You stated (as I quoted previously, with emphasis added this time): Even Q3 engine games, with the possible exception of Quake3 itself, ship with seperate executables for single and multiplayer.
I added (again with emphasis added this time): but I don't remember a single one of the Quake games themselves shipping with seperate executables for single and multiplayer.
#3) The Quake games themselves would include Quake 3 itself
If I had wanted to correct you, I would've pointed out games outside of the Quake games themselves that followed this method. The only one I am even 90+% sure of at the moment is not a Quake 3 based game, but rather a Quake based game, so I didn't bother.
Second, as evidence that I know what I am talking about I will provide you a simple test: if you have any modern Quake3 engine game installed on a windows system (Call of Duty seems to be the big one, so I'm sure you have that), notice that the start menu includes seperate shortcuts for single and multiplayer. These shortcuts point to two seperate.exe's. If thats not good enough browse the folders for yourself.
I'll take your word for it, as I don't have Call of Duty myself, and my gaming system had a video card crap out over the weekend. It would be all too convenient for me to try to pull an argument out of my ass when I can't confirm anything for 1-4 days, depending on what it's going to take to get my system up and running again and then find out whether RtCW and BF1942 are Q3 games or not (since those are the only FPS games I have installed other than Q3, Half-Life, and UT2k3 at the moment, and probably the most recent FPS games I have assuming UT2k3 is older). Of course, that could just be a convenient excuse for me not to admit I'm wrong, even though I did admit to the possibility from the outset when discussing the original trilogy.
Its not like the cheats are a handicap where you can give yourself 30% extra life or money or something...
I've seen aimbots that actually have scales for setting the hit percentage (because it makes it harder for people to realize you're cheating). That being said, though, it's AIM, not life, money, armour, ammo, guns, whatever. If you can't AIM, why are you trying to play multiplayer? You'd think that people would figure out they can't aim before they got to the point of trying to play with/against other people.
A better point would be something like seeing through walls or the radars that track where everyone is. It's not really levelling the playing field, it's just giving you more information than the other players have, and taking certain elements (sneaking, hiding, etc) out of the game.
and playing against bots can quickly make up for the skill difference felt in multiplayer games, as you can learn the game without dealing with the excess crap that some players bring to the table.
The two things that really improved my skill in FPS games were playing against Eraser bots in Q2, which I did for about 2 weeks before rejoining the multiplayer population, and joining my clan in TFC. In the 2 weeks playing against the bots my skill level rose an amount that it probably never would have against random pub players. In the time I spent with my clan, it rose even more quickly. The only real limits to an individual's skill in the game are their own physical and mental limitations related to playing the game (eyesight, ability to recognize objects on screen quickly, ability to use the mouse and keyboard accurately, etc) and the skill of the players around them. Initially, you need opponents of nearly equivalent skill to learn the game's basics and get a feel for how things are done, but eventually there is something to learn from almost any opponent, and playing with or against a far more skilled player becomes much more helpful.
That being said, Counterstrike and similar games don't lend well to a trial-and-error style of learning, due to the heavy penalty on death. Additionally, cheating has an impact on the whole cycle, as you end up learning the limitations and behaviors of a player that is cheating, or the bot that player is using, which only really helps against others using the same cheats in the same manner.
agree its more about design than tech, but I want to illustrate one point. Even Q3 engine games, with the possible exception of Quake3 itself, ship with seperate executables for single and multiplayer.
I could be completely wrong, but I don't remember a single one of the Quake games themselves shipping with seperate executables for single and multiplayer. Even Quake more or less launched a server (though not attached to the network) for a single player game. Of course, server executables themselves were generally seperate from the game executable, simply to allow for a server to be run without the graphics code.
But this is still about design. Even when the weapons, powers, etc. are all the same, what works for the single player portion doesn't translate directly to multi or co-op. Design a good single player game AND design a good multiplayer game, don't do one that goes both sorta well. This is just to point out that even when the tech is there, "slapping on" commercial quality co-op play is much more than trivial.
You have to design for 2 or more players in the levels, but more importantly, you have to synch the 2 players to a single instance of the game world, make sure scripted actions are synched between the two players, make sure the monsters are doing the same thing for both players, and so on. With non-networked co-op this stuff isn't hard to manage, since the latency is minimal, everything's running on the same box. The biggest concern is keeping the game running at playable rates with 2 players and split-screen (or 4 players, or however many). Once you put it on the network and let it be routed over the internet, you're back to building an internet multiplayer game and trying to manage the whole thing properly again. In some ways, I think id's better off leaving it to someone to add on as a mod, as people won't really complain about the quality of the mod if it works well enough to add a feature that isn't in the game. People will complain that co-op isn't there to begin with, they've been doing so since FPS games started shipping without co-op (which seems to have been the norm for a while now), but anyone that's not going to buy the game because of that hasn't bought those other FPS games, either (including Half-Life, the best-selling FPS game to date, which only has a mod (which came out significantly later than the game itself) for co-op).
As computer hardware continues to accelerate at this pace, the divide between computing power with hardcore gamers and non-hardcore gamers increase, it will be harder and harder to make PC games. Gaming consumers have so many choices now that its difficult to put a set of hardware specifications as well:
The previous reply scratched the surface on this, but I felt it needed simplification (unfortunately I went a bit long in my own reply): game developers rarely take advantage of the newest hardware. They develop games for the lowest common denominator, make it work on as many computers as possible. It doesn't matter how great your GPU is, because very few games are actually going to use every feature, or even most of the features. This is why you simply see an increase of framerates most of the time, and that not always equal to what the card could manage to spit out.
In the end, this is why new consoles tend to show off games that are better looking than many PC games, yet over time the PC games start to look better than the console. Id is almost unique in that they have a tendency to start coding their games for hardware that is either top of the line or not even shipped yet, so that by the time the game comes out the hardware is available, with 2 or 3 generations of new cards as well. Most aim for the hardware that most people already have, rather than the hardware that won't be cheap until near their release.
If they do any optimizations at all, they're additions to the base code that are enabled only when that particular hardware is present, or when the user enables them. Q3 does a hardware check and gives the user a baseline of settings to work from, but it also changes what rendering code is used beyond what the user can choose. Doom 3 will probably do something very similar. You can read through John Carmack's plan files and see some information on the kind of testing and optimizing he does with his engines, and with almost anyone else it's guaranteed that you're not going to see that kind of work (and this also applies to why so many people license his engines). The average game with a ground-up new engine build is going to be built to basic Direct3D or OpenGL code that will run on almost any card, with certain basic requirements such as supporting the version used and having X amount of RAM. Beyond that, the increases will be minor, with various options turned on and off that are usually available for any supported card, and that 256MB latest-greatest card running the same code that the shared-memory on-board cards are using.
With a console it's easier because you can take advantage of every little feature without worrying about some people not being able to use that feature. With a computer, you code to a generic platform with very few special features, and then add those special features as options, usually later in the process.
Not everyone has that problem, though, and there are other things that can cause it.
For instance, I have absolutely no problem when I'm not sick to begin with and am actually playing any game whatsoever. On the other hand, I absolutely can not watch a demo of any FPS game, even if I recorded the demo myself, for more than 10 minutes without starting to feel sick. Additionally, I can't watch other people play an FPS game for long periods of time without feeling sick.
Some people only have problems with particular games because each game responds to the controls slightly differently and has different settings for various effects when you're walking. The idea that Q3 is "so realistic that your brain says "THIS IS REAL"" is rediculous, because the game looks like someone spewed radioactive goo all over the screen half the time, not "REAL" in the least. It's more like watching a well-rendered CG cartoon before cel-shading became popular.
Some people just have problems with certain styles of motion. Some games have certain levels of "view bob" that bother people, sometimes shutting that feature off completely bothers people. For me, playing the game causes no problems, regardless of the settings or the graphics, but when I don't have direct control over the game it very definitely causes problems, regardless of the graphics capabilities of the game (I've had this problem since Doom came out). My dad hasn't been able to play a single FPS game from Wolf 3D on because playing them at all makes him sick. One of my clanmates couldn't play Counterstrike, not because of the game itself, but because the various spectator modes after you die in the game made her sick.
and to add to that, having skill in a game does not equate to the ability to notice particular differences.
For instance, how many people have noticed that the physics in UT feel more like Quake 1 than the physics in Q2 and Q3? I've played more of either Quake or Q2 than Q3 and UT combined, and probably more Half-Life/TFC than Q2, Q3, and UT combined. It took me a little while to notice it in UT, but it was definitely the way I thought the game played.
If you think this sucks, then you fund their development and distribution costs. As long as Microsoft has the bucks, Microsoft calls the shots.
Microsoft probably doesn't have as much influence with id Software as Activision, which is id's publisher (and funding the development and distribution if id is not doing so themselves). At best, Microsoft may be funding the port to the XBox, simply because it may not be done otherwise.
It's far more likely that the reason the co-op play is going to be XBox-only is simply because the co-op code won't use the network interface, that it will only work with another player sitting beside you, and I don't think I know a single PC FPS player that would be willing to give up the mouse + keyboard combo just to play co-op.
Sorry, as someone pointed out, prices for all consoles has been pretty level at $50 since the NES (possibly the Atari days, but I didn't look at prices back then).
Exactly why I pointed out inflation adjustments, and I made the statement that the prices had been at $50 from the NES days myself. In 20 years the price of a game hasn't gone up, despite inflation and rising production costs. If you consider inflation costs, the price of a game has gone down considerably.
Your argument about more content doesn't seem to fly, either. Saturn games sold for the same price as N64 games, while Saturn games had 10x the storage capacity (this obviously ignores that 1/3-2/3 of a CD might be raw pcm music). Even assuming that 1/2 of the CD is wasted to overly inflated audio (compared to the sampled music of the N64), that only leaves a 6x (64MB vs 433MB) to 13x (32MB to 433MB) increase in possible content. Of that, most of that difference is having more uncompressed gfx. On the newest game, a large bulk of the space is taken up by not having to downgrade the gfx for textures much. The actual amount of programming involved hasn't remotely increased by 6x to 13x. Less texture correction during downgrading means *less* work for programmers and slightly more time for artists.
Price increases on cart based games came whenever a game required more space than was on the standard cart for that system. It didn't matter that the different systems had different cart sizes. The only time optical media has an equivalent price increase is with multi-disc releases or extra packaging, and in most cases the price does not increase for multi-disc releases at all. Downgrading graphics for textures and things of that nature are more of a problem with multi-platform releases. If you're doing a single-console release, all of your textures should be created at the quality level they're going to be displayed with. Of course, with some consoles supporting texture compression and some not, there may be more issues at hand there. In general, though, the textures are higher quality today. Beyond that, there are also the models to consider, and they have also gained in quality, increasing polygon counts and, depending on the platform, adding things like shaders.
Other than that, it depends on the individual game and the platform. Many games are simply including massive amounts of uncompressed music files on DVDs, on top of the graphics and the (relative to the space on the disc) small amount of code.
Now, I'm not claiming that the sort of programming going on now isn't more complex but 3D was on both the N64 and Saturn, so the actual effort to program both isn't very different. The largest part about having more storage is possibly cutting out less of the game or extending to *maybe* two or three times what would otherwise be allowed. Even then, the majority of that work is regurgitating the skill necessary to make the other 1/2 or 1/3 of the game. So, while more time is required, the actual effort required is pretty linearly fixed under a bound 3x what a smaller storage media provides.
Effort doesn't determine production cost, though, and between the PS1 and the PS2, the storage increased almost 7x initially, and then doubled again with double-density discs (used more often on the XBox than the PS2). With a current 3-console release, you may have to adjust your code for each platform and halve the storage space of the content from the XBox to PS2, and cut it to 1/3 again from the PS2 to GameCube. Then again, both the PS2 and Cube can do multi-disc releases (that just hasn't really been done with DVD and the Cube's media so far). Yes, most of the work on current games involves artists rather than coders, but that's more or less my point. You can't really compress the time it takes for artists to work, and there's a limit to how many artists you can hire before you slow yourself down or dilute the artistic value of your game (by having too many different styles of work in the same scene).
I think you are missing the point. The parent poster is pointing out that the production cost reduction has been no benefit to the consumer. The prices stay the same and, in his opinion, we are getting an inferior product.
But, adjusting for inflation, the prices have dropped significantly lower than the change in media cost. Additionally, the production cost of games has increased significantly in that timeframe. Usually if a price (with no adjustments for inflation or anything else) doesn't change for 20 years, it's seen as a good thing unless there have been significant advances that should have driven that cost down. Games are not music. Every cost associated with producing music has been driven down in the last 20 years, while every cost associated with producing games, except for the media on which it is distributed, has been driven up in the last 20 years. Music CD prices have gone up slower than inflation (with every cost decreasing) while game prices have remained the same despite inflation (with every cost increasing).
Slashdot Mirror
The same trend occured in US record sales when Napster became popular (though it was also helped by a combination of other factors, including a continuing decline in prices which was reversed the next year).
Between a record price increase (record not referring to vinyl) and the suit that eventually shut down Napster, sales were in the toilet quickly enough afterwards.
one can hope that a movie of Ender's Game won't be as we expect it to be.
I think that the biggest problems for Ender's Game, given that Card is working so closely with them on this, will be casting and the work of the film-makers to portray the children as they were portrayed in the book. Ender's Game is somewhat controversial because so many people can't understand that children can think and behave that way, yet it's always been a big hit among certain groups in or near the same age group as the characters because it portrays them in the way they often see themselves. Hollywood has rarely (if ever) portrayed children in the manner that Card did in Ender's Game, and one can only hope that they can do it right this time.
They don't believe a good story can be sold, but an bunch of vapid acting, CGI and action can make up for depth.
Probably one of the most memorable movies of all time, Star Wars: A New Hope challenged that attitude, but Hollywood is a creature of habit and goes back to what it considers "Tried and True"
Something bugs me about the pairing of these sentences. Oh, wait, I figured it out, Star Wars IV contained "vapid acting, [large amounts of special effects], and action", which was only made up for with depth that was only really acheived by what existed outside the movie itself. The movie started the biggest CGI/effects studio in Hollywood, and lead to the creation of Star Wars I & II.
The Senate was not supposed to be the same as the House of Representatives - hence the name difference. The Senate was designated to receive 2 representatives from each State to represent that State's needs and wishes, not the people directly. The State's have a need for representation, too - it prevents too central a government from being allowed. But since the method of electing a Senator was changed in the 30s I guess we just have to live with it.
I understand that, but the point is that even in the current system the Senators are elected by the state's voters as a whole rather than groups of voters as is the case of the House. In the case of California, and I'm sure quite a few other states, the Senate representation is significantly different from the House representation simply because the seats are elected in this manner. Of course, if they were elected by the state government, the situation would again probably be different. The difference being that the state legislature is elected more along the lines of the Representatives in the federal government.
My point is, the Senate was originally intended to represent the State's interests, not the people within the state - at least not directly. The way things are now we may as well have just a Congress or just a Senate; they are both elected in the same manner.
I hope you mean just a House or just a Senate, and the rest of my response is framed in that manner. After all, the Senate is part of Congress.
Senators are voted on by every voting citizen of the state. Representatives (in the House) are voted on by every voting citizen in their district. If I live in District #50 I can't vote for the Representative of District #25. If you take a very large state with a diverse population, like California for example, depending on the way things lean during a particular time period you can get some startling results. For instance, in most of the last decade California has had an even split between Republicans and Democrats in the House, yet has had Democrats as both of the state's Senators. The reason for this is simple: certain regions are very conservative and others are very liberal. Rural areas and particular urban areas (with a heavier lean towards suburbs) have Republicans in the House, while San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Oakland, which combined make up a significant percentage of the population of California, generally have Democrats in the House, especially in their poorer urban areas. The majority of the state in terms of land area usually votes Republican, but since the state has these large cities (San Diego is also a large city, larger than Oakland, but tends to vote Republican) with massive populations concentrated in a small area, the popular vote tends to go Democrat.
All of this is simply to show that the House and Senate are elected in different manners. Additionally, the party of the most recently-elected Senator can be a clue to which party could win the electoral votes of that state in a presidential election, although other statewide votes (such as governor) also have to be considered. This is, of course, why the Republicans are looking at California as a viable state for the first time since Reagan. Additionally, Bush only lost California by a couple of percentage points in the last election (though that was a couple million people that he has to win over). Just think about how much of a difference it would make if California split it's votes the way some other states do. People might actually vote for the President there, considering that in 2000 over half of the voters weren't considered in the final total (Gore didn't win 50% of California, it was something like 48% to Bush's 46%).
I think it reflects that a large part of the audience who grew up with computer games has, er, grown older, and this is the kneejerk reaction of the industry to try to attract them.
If that's the case, it may also be the reason that they're trying to attract them in the first place. These are the types of things that tend to attract teenagers, not gamers who have "grown older". The fluff is nothing new, but those of us that want to see nude or semi-nude girls in our magazines know where to buy magazines dedicated to those pictures.
As the gaming magazines got thinner with each issue and the ratio of content to ads declined I stopped buying them. Frankly, though, the amount of useless crap that found its way into the content didn't help, and that includes all of the useless pictures and interviews with people that no one would even notice in the game industry if they weren't women and willing to have their picture taken with little or no clothing.
If I wanted Maxim, I would've picked it up (after all, it's certainly easier to find than most of the game magazines, especially on the top shelf rather than the bottom shelf). If I really wanted to see naked/half-naked women, I'd stop by the sex shop and find something more appealing to me than photos of random women somehow involved with games.
The point is, it should be illegal. There is no skill that a foreigner would have that an American doesn't already possess.
Yet it's completely possible that no American applied for the position, and therefore they can state quite correctly that they can't find someone qualified for the position here.
The only reason to hire foreigners is because the company is looking for cheap labor.
If a company is looking for cheap labor, they don't bring someone in on an H1B visa. It is more expensive for companies to hire people this way. If you want to do things in a cheap manner, you open an office in a foreign country and employ as many people as you need. If the labor is cheap enough, you make up the costs of operating the office. Alternatively, you farm it out to a company that is already setup in the foreign country and more or less charges you labor + overhead, and then you hope they don't have a habit of using your data against you.
When Kerry gets elected this kind of crap will be put to an end. Stop exporting American jobs to India!!! Vote Kerry and get Bush the hell out of office!
Something tells me that Kerry can't do any more about this than Bush can. Then again, I'm sure if we look around a bit, we can find evidence that Kerry has been on both sides of this issue, too. After all, it's not the first time jobs have been exported from America, nor will it be the last time.
While I'm sure there are 500,000 Americans out there looking for work (actually, about 15x that, but since there are only about 500,000 people in India working for US companies...), I'm not sure how many of them are willing to be AOL and AT&T phone support reps working for $5-10/hour. On the other hand, there are 150,000,000 Americans going to work every day with little reason to worry that their jobs are going to be shipped overseas.
Not at all, C# is essentially Microsoft's new version of the Java programming language, and platform.
.Net framework itself.
Which explains why they have J# for Java developers and recommend C# to C/C++ developers (in the cases in which they don't want to use managed C++).
Oh, and C# isn't a platform, that would be the
Actually, if you've ever read the crap that comes with the carts, and this has always been so since I first read them, they explicitly say you're not allowed to copy them for fair use, because they will repair or replace for a reasonable price.
Fortunately, that still doesn't prevent fair use copying from being legal. They can put whatever disclaimers and statements they want to in the packaging and at the end of all of the legal statements it still states that it is all subject to local laws and restrictions.
As someone upthread pointed out, this wasn't true for the SNES and N64 where some new games cost $60 or $70.
Again, though, even in the SNES and N64 days, as with the NES days, there was usually a reason for certain carts to be more expensive related to the carts themselves being more expensive. The SNES especially saw a lot of carts getting stuffed with new chips to handle extra processing. I bought my share of $60-70 NES carts, simply because I liked RPGs, and the better ones had battery saves and extra memory, which cost more money.
It is possible that Nintendo tried to do the same thing that many PC game publishers tried in the late 90s, pushing prices up to see what the market would bear, but in the end the prices on all platforms came back down. Nintendo didn't really have a choice once the PlayStation took hold, and people were no longer sympathetic with the idea that they had to offset the cost of an expensive cartridge when the competitor was using cheap optical media.
sorta offtopic, regarding 3-D audio technology (EAX, A3D), does anyone else find them to be highly lacking? For example, in America's Army, I've noticed in the training missions when you are required to listen to someone talking to you, the best sound comes when you've turned your head 90 degrees to the speaker, so one "ear" is directly facing him
It sounds like a problem with the implementation, rather than the technology. That being said, from the day I had to ditch my Aureal 2 based card, I've lamented the fact that EAX is completely pitiful when compared to what A3D2 sounded like on native hardware when implemented properly (ie in Half-Life/TFC).
Something else to consider is whether or not your sound card preferences are properly set for the speaker setup you're using, as it may change the way it puts out the sound based on whether you have it set to 2,4, or more speakers or headphones.
I think the explanation is more likely that id thinks that PC co-op play comes in a distant third to deathmatch and single player, and so has devoted their resources to improving those rather than implementing co-op. The console market seems to be different however, with co-op being a major mode of play, so the decision to implement co-op on the X-box makes sense.
Additionally, either way they play it, they're not putting any more time than necessary to support the people doing the port into co-op play. On the PC side, they know the mod community will do it if there is demand for it. On the XBox side, it'll be a feature that people expect the game to have, given the nature of consoles in general, and past titles like Halo.
They even went to the extent of saying that the mod makers will most likely be the ones to develop any multiplayer beyond 4 players, so it's not really a stretch to think that co-op would fall in the same category. Frankly, given the way Q3 was received (specifically mods like OSP which significantly changed deathmatch for "pro" gamers), and the fact that they've focused most of their statements on the single player side of the game, I'm not surprised to see that they'd leave so much of the multiplayer up to the mod makers, with only a basic framework to get them started.
PC players can cheat, which is much less common on consoles
Explain that to the guys playing SOCOM or out there figuring out Action Replay codes for almost every XBox Live game in existence.
Not to be a dick, but please don't correct me and then admit you might be wrong. This is pretty bad form. First off, notice I was speaking of Quake3 as was the parent post.
.exe's. If thats not good enough browse the folders for yourself.
#1) It is bad form if I'm trying to prove to everyone else that I am right despite knowing that I may be wrong, otherwise, I see it as being honest.
#2) I was not correcting you, but simply adding to a statement you had made, as follows:
You stated (as I quoted previously, with emphasis added this time):
Even Q3 engine games, with the possible exception of Quake3 itself, ship with seperate executables for single and multiplayer.
I added (again with emphasis added this time):
but I don't remember a single one of the Quake games themselves shipping with seperate executables for single and multiplayer.
#3) The Quake games themselves would include Quake 3 itself
If I had wanted to correct you, I would've pointed out games outside of the Quake games themselves that followed this method. The only one I am even 90+% sure of at the moment is not a Quake 3 based game, but rather a Quake based game, so I didn't bother.
Second, as evidence that I know what I am talking about I will provide you a simple test: if you have any modern Quake3 engine game installed on a windows system (Call of Duty seems to be the big one, so I'm sure you have that), notice that the start menu includes seperate shortcuts for single and multiplayer. These shortcuts point to two seperate
I'll take your word for it, as I don't have Call of Duty myself, and my gaming system had a video card crap out over the weekend. It would be all too convenient for me to try to pull an argument out of my ass when I can't confirm anything for 1-4 days, depending on what it's going to take to get my system up and running again and then find out whether RtCW and BF1942 are Q3 games or not (since those are the only FPS games I have installed other than Q3, Half-Life, and UT2k3 at the moment, and probably the most recent FPS games I have assuming UT2k3 is older). Of course, that could just be a convenient excuse for me not to admit I'm wrong, even though I did admit to the possibility from the outset when discussing the original trilogy.
Its not like the cheats are a handicap where you can give yourself 30% extra life or money or something...
I've seen aimbots that actually have scales for setting the hit percentage (because it makes it harder for people to realize you're cheating). That being said, though, it's AIM, not life, money, armour, ammo, guns, whatever. If you can't AIM, why are you trying to play multiplayer? You'd think that people would figure out they can't aim before they got to the point of trying to play with/against other people.
A better point would be something like seeing through walls or the radars that track where everyone is. It's not really levelling the playing field, it's just giving you more information than the other players have, and taking certain elements (sneaking, hiding, etc) out of the game.
and playing against bots can quickly make up for the skill difference felt in multiplayer games, as you can learn the game without dealing with the excess crap that some players bring to the table.
The two things that really improved my skill in FPS games were playing against Eraser bots in Q2, which I did for about 2 weeks before rejoining the multiplayer population, and joining my clan in TFC. In the 2 weeks playing against the bots my skill level rose an amount that it probably never would have against random pub players. In the time I spent with my clan, it rose even more quickly. The only real limits to an individual's skill in the game are their own physical and mental limitations related to playing the game (eyesight, ability to recognize objects on screen quickly, ability to use the mouse and keyboard accurately, etc) and the skill of the players around them. Initially, you need opponents of nearly equivalent skill to learn the game's basics and get a feel for how things are done, but eventually there is something to learn from almost any opponent, and playing with or against a far more skilled player becomes much more helpful.
That being said, Counterstrike and similar games don't lend well to a trial-and-error style of learning, due to the heavy penalty on death. Additionally, cheating has an impact on the whole cycle, as you end up learning the limitations and behaviors of a player that is cheating, or the bot that player is using, which only really helps against others using the same cheats in the same manner.
PDAs? Eh. I was thinking about game machines here. They can do some okay 3D stuff, though. So yeah, you're right there.
You're talking about a phone and you dismiss PDAs? At least the Tapwave Zodiac has 3D hardware for rendering games, and an analog controller.
I got that feeling until they said it was an RTS game. At that point, it's more like Age Of Mythology, but specific to the Norse mythos.
agree its more about design than tech, but I want to illustrate one point. Even Q3 engine games, with the possible exception of Quake3 itself, ship with seperate executables for single and multiplayer.
I could be completely wrong, but I don't remember a single one of the Quake games themselves shipping with seperate executables for single and multiplayer. Even Quake more or less launched a server (though not attached to the network) for a single player game. Of course, server executables themselves were generally seperate from the game executable, simply to allow for a server to be run without the graphics code.
But this is still about design. Even when the weapons, powers, etc. are all the same, what works for the single player portion doesn't translate directly to multi or co-op. Design a good single player game AND design a good multiplayer game, don't do one that goes both sorta well. This is just to point out that even when the tech is there, "slapping on" commercial quality co-op play is much more than trivial.
You have to design for 2 or more players in the levels, but more importantly, you have to synch the 2 players to a single instance of the game world, make sure scripted actions are synched between the two players, make sure the monsters are doing the same thing for both players, and so on. With non-networked co-op this stuff isn't hard to manage, since the latency is minimal, everything's running on the same box. The biggest concern is keeping the game running at playable rates with 2 players and split-screen (or 4 players, or however many). Once you put it on the network and let it be routed over the internet, you're back to building an internet multiplayer game and trying to manage the whole thing properly again. In some ways, I think id's better off leaving it to someone to add on as a mod, as people won't really complain about the quality of the mod if it works well enough to add a feature that isn't in the game. People will complain that co-op isn't there to begin with, they've been doing so since FPS games started shipping without co-op (which seems to have been the norm for a while now), but anyone that's not going to buy the game because of that hasn't bought those other FPS games, either (including Half-Life, the best-selling FPS game to date, which only has a mod (which came out significantly later than the game itself) for co-op).
As computer hardware continues to accelerate at this pace, the divide between computing power with hardcore gamers and non-hardcore gamers increase, it will be harder and harder to make PC games. Gaming consumers have so many choices now that its difficult to put a set of hardware specifications as well :
The previous reply scratched the surface on this, but I felt it needed simplification (unfortunately I went a bit long in my own reply): game developers rarely take advantage of the newest hardware. They develop games for the lowest common denominator, make it work on as many computers as possible. It doesn't matter how great your GPU is, because very few games are actually going to use every feature, or even most of the features. This is why you simply see an increase of framerates most of the time, and that not always equal to what the card could manage to spit out.
In the end, this is why new consoles tend to show off games that are better looking than many PC games, yet over time the PC games start to look better than the console. Id is almost unique in that they have a tendency to start coding their games for hardware that is either top of the line or not even shipped yet, so that by the time the game comes out the hardware is available, with 2 or 3 generations of new cards as well. Most aim for the hardware that most people already have, rather than the hardware that won't be cheap until near their release.
If they do any optimizations at all, they're additions to the base code that are enabled only when that particular hardware is present, or when the user enables them. Q3 does a hardware check and gives the user a baseline of settings to work from, but it also changes what rendering code is used beyond what the user can choose. Doom 3 will probably do something very similar. You can read through John Carmack's plan files and see some information on the kind of testing and optimizing he does with his engines, and with almost anyone else it's guaranteed that you're not going to see that kind of work (and this also applies to why so many people license his engines). The average game with a ground-up new engine build is going to be built to basic Direct3D or OpenGL code that will run on almost any card, with certain basic requirements such as supporting the version used and having X amount of RAM. Beyond that, the increases will be minor, with various options turned on and off that are usually available for any supported card, and that 256MB latest-greatest card running the same code that the shared-memory on-board cards are using.
With a console it's easier because you can take advantage of every little feature without worrying about some people not being able to use that feature. With a computer, you code to a generic platform with very few special features, and then add those special features as options, usually later in the process.
Not everyone has that problem, though, and there are other things that can cause it.
For instance, I have absolutely no problem when I'm not sick to begin with and am actually playing any game whatsoever. On the other hand, I absolutely can not watch a demo of any FPS game, even if I recorded the demo myself, for more than 10 minutes without starting to feel sick. Additionally, I can't watch other people play an FPS game for long periods of time without feeling sick.
Some people only have problems with particular games because each game responds to the controls slightly differently and has different settings for various effects when you're walking. The idea that Q3 is "so realistic that your brain says "THIS IS REAL"" is rediculous, because the game looks like someone spewed radioactive goo all over the screen half the time, not "REAL" in the least. It's more like watching a well-rendered CG cartoon before cel-shading became popular.
Some people just have problems with certain styles of motion. Some games have certain levels of "view bob" that bother people, sometimes shutting that feature off completely bothers people. For me, playing the game causes no problems, regardless of the settings or the graphics, but when I don't have direct control over the game it very definitely causes problems, regardless of the graphics capabilities of the game (I've had this problem since Doom came out). My dad hasn't been able to play a single FPS game from Wolf 3D on because playing them at all makes him sick. One of my clanmates couldn't play Counterstrike, not because of the game itself, but because the various spectator modes after you die in the game made her sick.
and to add to that, having skill in a game does not equate to the ability to notice particular differences.
For instance, how many people have noticed that the physics in UT feel more like Quake 1 than the physics in Q2 and Q3? I've played more of either Quake or Q2 than Q3 and UT combined, and probably more Half-Life/TFC than Q2, Q3, and UT combined. It took me a little while to notice it in UT, but it was definitely the way I thought the game played.
Of course, how many people really cared?
If you think this sucks, then you fund their development and distribution costs. As long as Microsoft has the bucks, Microsoft calls the shots.
Microsoft probably doesn't have as much influence with id Software as Activision, which is id's publisher (and funding the development and distribution if id is not doing so themselves). At best, Microsoft may be funding the port to the XBox, simply because it may not be done otherwise.
It's far more likely that the reason the co-op play is going to be XBox-only is simply because the co-op code won't use the network interface, that it will only work with another player sitting beside you, and I don't think I know a single PC FPS player that would be willing to give up the mouse + keyboard combo just to play co-op.
Sorry, as someone pointed out, prices for all consoles has been pretty level at $50 since the NES (possibly the Atari days, but I didn't look at prices back then).
Exactly why I pointed out inflation adjustments, and I made the statement that the prices had been at $50 from the NES days myself. In 20 years the price of a game hasn't gone up, despite inflation and rising production costs. If you consider inflation costs, the price of a game has gone down considerably.
Your argument about more content doesn't seem to fly, either. Saturn games sold for the same price as N64 games, while Saturn games had 10x the storage capacity (this obviously ignores that 1/3-2/3 of a CD might be raw pcm music). Even assuming that 1/2 of the CD is wasted to overly inflated audio (compared to the sampled music of the N64), that only leaves a 6x (64MB vs 433MB) to 13x (32MB to 433MB) increase in possible content. Of that, most of that difference is having more uncompressed gfx. On the newest game, a large bulk of the space is taken up by not having to downgrade the gfx for textures much. The actual amount of programming involved hasn't remotely increased by 6x to 13x. Less texture correction during downgrading means *less* work for programmers and slightly more time for artists.
Price increases on cart based games came whenever a game required more space than was on the standard cart for that system. It didn't matter that the different systems had different cart sizes. The only time optical media has an equivalent price increase is with multi-disc releases or extra packaging, and in most cases the price does not increase for multi-disc releases at all. Downgrading graphics for textures and things of that nature are more of a problem with multi-platform releases. If you're doing a single-console release, all of your textures should be created at the quality level they're going to be displayed with. Of course, with some consoles supporting texture compression and some not, there may be more issues at hand there. In general, though, the textures are higher quality today. Beyond that, there are also the models to consider, and they have also gained in quality, increasing polygon counts and, depending on the platform, adding things like shaders.
Other than that, it depends on the individual game and the platform. Many games are simply including massive amounts of uncompressed music files on DVDs, on top of the graphics and the (relative to the space on the disc) small amount of code.
Now, I'm not claiming that the sort of programming going on now isn't more complex but 3D was on both the N64 and Saturn, so the actual effort to program both isn't very different. The largest part about having more storage is possibly cutting out less of the game or extending to *maybe* two or three times what would otherwise be allowed. Even then, the majority of that work is regurgitating the skill necessary to make the other 1/2 or 1/3 of the game. So, while more time is required, the actual effort required is pretty linearly fixed under a bound 3x what a smaller storage media provides.
Effort doesn't determine production cost, though, and between the PS1 and the PS2, the storage increased almost 7x initially, and then doubled again with double-density discs (used more often on the XBox than the PS2). With a current 3-console release, you may have to adjust your code for each platform and halve the storage space of the content from the XBox to PS2, and cut it to 1/3 again from the PS2 to GameCube. Then again, both the PS2 and Cube can do multi-disc releases (that just hasn't really been done with DVD and the Cube's media so far). Yes, most of the work on current games involves artists rather than coders, but that's more or less my point. You can't really compress the time it takes for artists to work, and there's a limit to how many artists you can hire before you slow yourself down or dilute the artistic value of your game (by having too many different styles of work in the same scene).
I think you are missing the point. The parent poster is pointing out that the production cost reduction has been no benefit to the consumer. The prices stay the same and, in his opinion, we are getting an inferior product.
But, adjusting for inflation, the prices have dropped significantly lower than the change in media cost. Additionally, the production cost of games has increased significantly in that timeframe. Usually if a price (with no adjustments for inflation or anything else) doesn't change for 20 years, it's seen as a good thing unless there have been significant advances that should have driven that cost down. Games are not music. Every cost associated with producing music has been driven down in the last 20 years, while every cost associated with producing games, except for the media on which it is distributed, has been driven up in the last 20 years. Music CD prices have gone up slower than inflation (with every cost decreasing) while game prices have remained the same despite inflation (with every cost increasing).