While not the perfect solution, Wine does get the job done, and can allow people to play games that they wouldn't otherwise be able to.
It only works sometimes, in some cases, and chances are good that upgrading it will break things.
Not if the developers have been working with the aim of not breaking under Wine. I think the OP was saying to distribute a known good version of Wine with the game, and run it that way, which would mean that there aren't any issue.
This has worked quite well to release Windows games for Mac OS, where they are built against a DirectX compatiability library, allowing companies to release games for both platforms at the same time.
Yeah, Hellgate: London wasn't a particularly great game, which really annoyed me since I bought it on release after hearing that it was done by the same team that worked on Diablo.
Sadly the game mechanics were a bit dull, although not broken as such, and the storyline more or less non-existant. It has so much potential though, with an interesting mix of classes, and randomly generated maps to keep things interesting.
I also like that they made multiplayer more or less a free MMO, but I've yet to be able to login to any of their servers, with them downloading what appears to be a patch, and then telling me to go to the website and download a patch. Every time I've tried I ended up in an infinite loop.
Excellent, with a personality like that, you should get on just fine.
Seriously, stop acting like you're the only person in the world who knows what they're doing. Games design *isn't* about programming, that's not a weakness of the course, it's a weakness of your perception. Design is where you decide what you want to do, not when you sit down and hack out the first thing that comes into your head.
The "CADers" and "Photoshoppers" you talk about are in fact skilled professionals. It may not be your profession, but it does have a name. It's called an "Artist". You'd be pissed off if someone called you a "C++er" I'd guess, so have a bit of respect for other people as well. No, they're not interested in programming or how the engine works (beyond what the limits are), because that's what the developers are there for.
My friends came from all walks of life and I respected their opinions and helped them when I could (homework, food, money). Because of the company I kept no one tried to fight me because I was smart and had good grades. I never resorted to calling anyone stupid. And you learn there is a lot of different smart.
Sounds a bit like my time in school. I was smart (but not the brightest by a long way), and wanted to do well, but that never stopped me getting on with other people.
Not only did it give me a better perspective on life, teaching me that just because you're not the most intelligent person doesn't mean you can't be interesting, it also went a long way to keeping me out of trouble. It helps if people know that even if you probably wouldn't put up much of a fight, some of your friends would be quite happy to jump in and change the balance a bit.
In that case, your developers need to go and learn how to deal with people.
The best person to find out what needs to be implemented is the person who's about to implement it, because they'll have an idea of what needs doing, and probably even be able to find out what the user really wants, and make suggestions as to how their ideas could be improved.
It also means that once they sit down to write the code, they know exactly what's required, and more importantly why it's required.
The more links in the chain between user and developer there are, the more likely it is to turn into a game of Chinese whispers, with the developer having no idea what needs to be done and how.
I'm on the fence about Agile development, because I think a lot of it is sat on the fine line between agile and cowboy, but getting your developers to talk to the users is something I'm completely behind.
There's more then one way to make use of a mailing list.
I wouldn't send spam to one, if only because I saw how useless it is in my last job. We got 7 replies from a list of 5000 people. 4 of those were telling us how they had no interest to begin with, and now have even less, and the other 3 went nowhere.
However, if you can get some more information on the people, your sales team can probably pick out a few that might be interested in your company, and make a call to them offering to have a look at their requirements and see what they can do for them.
All but the most shady of mail providers will kill your account as soon as they realise your spamming, because we can't afford to be blacklisted and have e-mails bouncing for all our customers.
Once that happens, it's up to you to prove that what you were doing wasn't spamming. We can live without your £40/month, but we can't live without the ability to send outgoing e-mails.
The problem is most people (even the ones who claim to love games) just aren't interested in good or original games.
They want the same game they played last week, but with different graphics and character names.
As you say, occasionally a gem will be succesful, with Portal being the best example recently, but I have friends who slated even that (it was "too short", and naturally they wanted "more weapons").
Just look at the number of franchises that are onto their 4th iteration now. We've recently had GTA IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Doom 4 is apparantly in development. They're guaranteed to sell to the same people who bought the last 3 versions, and that's all that really matters to the game studios.
Microsoft's XNA framework gives me a little hope though, since it's opening up game development to hobbyists again, although I doubt we'll see any huge successes from it, since a hobbyist can rarely be good enough to both develop a decent game, and make the artwork required to get past the "does it look pretty" filter most people use when deciding what to play now.
AMD and NVidia are always going to release new cards. It's just the way of the industry.
If you buy a graphics card in the hope that it's going to be the top of the line card for longer then a few months then you're very much mistaken.
Buy a card that will do what you need it to, and then just stick with that until it stops being powerful enough for you. Anyone hoping their computer will be "future proof" is heading towards disappointment very fast.
Under this plan there would always be the option of sending the kids to a better school across town if the nearby school got too bad.
We have this option in the UK, and it's led to the complete opposite result. The good schools get better, and the bad schools get worse.
This is largely a problem of image, because the parents who are well educated want their kids to have a good education, and send them to the good schools. Some will even move house to make sure they're in the right area for their kids to be accepted to the "right" school.
The bad schools just keep getting worse, because there's no longer any smart kids in the mix. My brother is at the same school I went to, and it sounds like hell these days. Nobody there wants to learn, and the teachers are utterly demotivated, and just do the bare minimum.
Respects human rights...check. Unless you're a muslim ofcourse, in which case half the country looks at you like you're about to whip a bomb from beneath the burkha(sp)
Yes, but at least you can't be arrested for it under the Terroism Act.
I was recently questioned by armed police in an airport under that particular act. I'm a white male, with long hair, and was carrying a backpack at the time.
Something tells me they were more suspicious that I was smuggling drugs, then that I was about to blow up Terminal 5.
Have you been reading the Daily Mail this morning?
Yes, it's not quite what it used to be, but that's sensational in the extreme.
There's a lot of CCTV. I'm not really to fussed about that - don't commit crime in view of a camera. It's not like they've installed one in your living room.
Yes, there are some kids around who start fights. That's always been the case, and statistically you're safer now then in the past, it's just that every single stabbing in the country gets headlines. I live on a council estate in east London, and it's no worse then anywhere else, other then the fact kids *look* like they might cause trouble. That's because the media has trained everyone to assume a kid wearing a hood will cause trouble, not because they will.
Bad English? I'm afraid that leaving the country won't save you from that - in case you hadn't noticed there's Internet access in other parts of the world as well.
Football riots are also less common then they used to be. Most football fans enjoy the match, have a few (ok, a lot of) beers, and go home. The recent ones in Manchester were frankly inevitable - if you put several thousand very drunk people in an enclosed space, and then the screen they came to watch stops working minutes into the match, they're not going to be happy, but they also didn't firebomb anyone's houses (unlike the riots I remember from my childhood).
Honestly, I'm not as proud to be British as I used to be, but it's still better then the vast majority of the world. We could do with some work to improve things, but I'm not going to be leaving just yet.
I'd really quite like an option on the ballot sheet saying "There's nobody here I'd trust to run my country for me".
I think if that were there, we'd find that a large chunk of people not voting aren't doing it through a lack of interest, but more because there are no viable options at the moment.
Slashdot Mirror
While not the perfect solution, Wine does get the job done, and can allow people to play games that they wouldn't otherwise be able to.
Not if the developers have been working with the aim of not breaking under Wine. I think the OP was saying to distribute a known good version of Wine with the game, and run it that way, which would mean that there aren't any issue.
This has worked quite well to release Windows games for Mac OS, where they are built against a DirectX compatiability library, allowing companies to release games for both platforms at the same time.
Yeah, Hellgate: London wasn't a particularly great game, which really annoyed me since I bought it on release after hearing that it was done by the same team that worked on Diablo.
Sadly the game mechanics were a bit dull, although not broken as such, and the storyline more or less non-existant. It has so much potential though, with an interesting mix of classes, and randomly generated maps to keep things interesting.
I also like that they made multiplayer more or less a free MMO, but I've yet to be able to login to any of their servers, with them downloading what appears to be a patch, and then telling me to go to the website and download a patch. Every time I've tried I ended up in an infinite loop.
Well, I'd better tell the hundred odd people on my floor to pack up and go home then.
That phrase immediatly put an image in my head of popping up actions like "CLICK", "POW", and "BOOM" every time I click on a window.
Extra credit if it can also respond to vim shortcuts.
Charges? This is being developed in the UK, we don't need any of your antiquated "charges" to lock somebody up.
Just shout terrorist, and the jobs done.
Excellent, with a personality like that, you should get on just fine.
Seriously, stop acting like you're the only person in the world who knows what they're doing. Games design *isn't* about programming, that's not a weakness of the course, it's a weakness of your perception. Design is where you decide what you want to do, not when you sit down and hack out the first thing that comes into your head.
The "CADers" and "Photoshoppers" you talk about are in fact skilled professionals. It may not be your profession, but it does have a name. It's called an "Artist". You'd be pissed off if someone called you a "C++er" I'd guess, so have a bit of respect for other people as well. No, they're not interested in programming or how the engine works (beyond what the limits are), because that's what the developers are there for.
Awesome, where do I get one? And does it support all the features of vi, or just a subset?
It's a Firefox plugin, if you've got installed you already have the source.
Sounds a bit like my time in school. I was smart (but not the brightest by a long way), and wanted to do well, but that never stopped me getting on with other people.
Not only did it give me a better perspective on life, teaching me that just because you're not the most intelligent person doesn't mean you can't be interesting, it also went a long way to keeping me out of trouble. It helps if people know that even if you probably wouldn't put up much of a fight, some of your friends would be quite happy to jump in and change the balance a bit.
http://www.foxtorrent.com/
In that case, your developers need to go and learn how to deal with people.
The best person to find out what needs to be implemented is the person who's about to implement it, because they'll have an idea of what needs doing, and probably even be able to find out what the user really wants, and make suggestions as to how their ideas could be improved.
It also means that once they sit down to write the code, they know exactly what's required, and more importantly why it's required.
The more links in the chain between user and developer there are, the more likely it is to turn into a game of Chinese whispers, with the developer having no idea what needs to be done and how.
I'm on the fence about Agile development, because I think a lot of it is sat on the fine line between agile and cowboy, but getting your developers to talk to the users is something I'm completely behind.
What the hell does that explain, other then that some people can be assholes when driving on the motorway?
No. Especially since you claim to be on an MPLS, which will be routed across your ISPs infrastructure as far as possible.
The demos worked fine for me in the latest RC of Firefox 3.
SproutCore only requires Ruby on the server and developer side, for the end user it's just HTML.
There's more then one way to make use of a mailing list.
I wouldn't send spam to one, if only because I saw how useless it is in my last job. We got 7 replies from a list of 5000 people. 4 of those were telling us how they had no interest to begin with, and now have even less, and the other 3 went nowhere.
However, if you can get some more information on the people, your sales team can probably pick out a few that might be interested in your company, and make a call to them offering to have a look at their requirements and see what they can do for them.
Some?
All but the most shady of mail providers will kill your account as soon as they realise your spamming, because we can't afford to be blacklisted and have e-mails bouncing for all our customers.
Once that happens, it's up to you to prove that what you were doing wasn't spamming. We can live without your £40/month, but we can't live without the ability to send outgoing e-mails.
The problem is most people (even the ones who claim to love games) just aren't interested in good or original games.
They want the same game they played last week, but with different graphics and character names.
As you say, occasionally a gem will be succesful, with Portal being the best example recently, but I have friends who slated even that (it was "too short", and naturally they wanted "more weapons").
Just look at the number of franchises that are onto their 4th iteration now. We've recently had GTA IV, Metal Gear Solid 4, and Doom 4 is apparantly in development. They're guaranteed to sell to the same people who bought the last 3 versions, and that's all that really matters to the game studios.
Microsoft's XNA framework gives me a little hope though, since it's opening up game development to hobbyists again, although I doubt we'll see any huge successes from it, since a hobbyist can rarely be good enough to both develop a decent game, and make the artwork required to get past the "does it look pretty" filter most people use when deciding what to play now.
AMD and NVidia are always going to release new cards. It's just the way of the industry.
If you buy a graphics card in the hope that it's going to be the top of the line card for longer then a few months then you're very much mistaken.
Buy a card that will do what you need it to, and then just stick with that until it stops being powerful enough for you. Anyone hoping their computer will be "future proof" is heading towards disappointment very fast.
Well, 2+ hours if you're lucky. Personally I never made it past the 5th lap without writing off my car.
Wow... I've never seen anyone quite so upset by Star Wars.
Were you raped by Jar Jar Binks as a child or something?
We have this option in the UK, and it's led to the complete opposite result. The good schools get better, and the bad schools get worse.
This is largely a problem of image, because the parents who are well educated want their kids to have a good education, and send them to the good schools. Some will even move house to make sure they're in the right area for their kids to be accepted to the "right" school.
The bad schools just keep getting worse, because there's no longer any smart kids in the mix. My brother is at the same school I went to, and it sounds like hell these days. Nobody there wants to learn, and the teachers are utterly demotivated, and just do the bare minimum.
Yes, but at least you can't be arrested for it under the Terroism Act.
I was recently questioned by armed police in an airport under that particular act. I'm a white male, with long hair, and was carrying a backpack at the time.
Something tells me they were more suspicious that I was smuggling drugs, then that I was about to blow up Terminal 5.
Have you been reading the Daily Mail this morning?
Yes, it's not quite what it used to be, but that's sensational in the extreme.
There's a lot of CCTV. I'm not really to fussed about that - don't commit crime in view of a camera. It's not like they've installed one in your living room.
Yes, there are some kids around who start fights. That's always been the case, and statistically you're safer now then in the past, it's just that every single stabbing in the country gets headlines. I live on a council estate in east London, and it's no worse then anywhere else, other then the fact kids *look* like they might cause trouble. That's because the media has trained everyone to assume a kid wearing a hood will cause trouble, not because they will.
Bad English? I'm afraid that leaving the country won't save you from that - in case you hadn't noticed there's Internet access in other parts of the world as well.
Football riots are also less common then they used to be. Most football fans enjoy the match, have a few (ok, a lot of) beers, and go home. The recent ones in Manchester were frankly inevitable - if you put several thousand very drunk people in an enclosed space, and then the screen they came to watch stops working minutes into the match, they're not going to be happy, but they also didn't firebomb anyone's houses (unlike the riots I remember from my childhood).
Honestly, I'm not as proud to be British as I used to be, but it's still better then the vast majority of the world. We could do with some work to improve things, but I'm not going to be leaving just yet.
I'd really quite like an option on the ballot sheet saying "There's nobody here I'd trust to run my country for me".
I think if that were there, we'd find that a large chunk of people not voting aren't doing it through a lack of interest, but more because there are no viable options at the moment.
Because they're quite happy to say anything that will get them a few votes.
I have a feeling they'd be quite happy to say they'll wear pink tutus to all debates if they thought it would get them elected.