I think about the lifestyle cost of being a software developer a lot... Time/Stress versus Money. I think Kevin Spacey made a brilliant choice in American Beauty when he quit his day job and changed to serving fast food at a drive-thru. His wife was pissed cause he stopped bringing home the money, but he LOVED it! I want to do something similar someday, but I kinda like the money for now.
I've worked retail; years and years of retail. I now have a "desk job" as a game developer, and I would never go back to retail.
In fact, not to make any accusations, but I can't think of anyone I know who would choose to return to a retail gig:)
It would be nice to see some 'open sourced' player models, motion captures, sound effects, musics, etc, etc..
I know there are a ton of people versed in 3D modelling out there. Perhaps they can offer up some of their 3D 'doodles' to the OSS community for use in games. Maybe a sort of BSD/GPL liscense for artwork/data?
A really excellent point. If we could organize such efforts, perhaps through something like Creative Commons, I'm certain we'd see more (and higher-quality) open-source games emerge. Think about it -- for every 3d game that wants to feature *people walking around in an environment*, a whole new set of assets need to be generated just to get that fundamental base-line goal accomplished. There's so much work to do before you get to the "making it fun" part, I'm not surprised game developers are hesitant to volunteer their efforts.
We'll be pushing the performance barrier for a long time to come. Sure, nobody needs to run GlQuake at 300 fps, or Quake 3 at 120 fps, but Doom 3 will only run at 30 fps (for example.)
New video card technology means speed in old games and features/visual quality in new games. I can guarantee you that no matter how advanced video cards have gotten in 5 years, artists and designers will still be able to generate content that slows the game to a crawl;)
Deep Space Homer is, in my humble opinion, the best single Simpsons episode. From Barney's tumble across the hard roof of the Pillow Factory to Kent Brockman's welcoming of our new insect overlords, the jokes are unprecedented in their density and quality.
I can't believe this episode didn't even make their list...
Exactly! How can anyone mistake these automated conversions for "art" or even for "something that took more than ten minutes"?
A wee bit off-topic, but I think you should reconsider your restrictive use of the word "art". It's my humble opinion that we should be liberal with the term "art" but conservative with our modifying adjectives. (I.e. "good art", "bad art", "interesting art", etc.)
I agree with him in one sense... not that content is crap, and not with his overall tone or message, but that there is significant value in the filtering process. Not corporate filtering, or automated filtering, but review-based filtering.
I've thought for a long time now that, with advances in technology (home-studio-produced music, professional-quality DV software on PCs, etc.), and with advances in distribution (the Internet), we're moving into a different sort of creative "space" where anyone who wants to make art can make art, and have it be seen by anyone. That's unbelievably cool, but it makes "consumption" more difficult, as it's much harder to find work that interests you.
The solution is reviews. Preferably from as many sources as possible. I see us in a situation where we actively pick reviewers whose taste matches ours, and who gain our trust. These are our filters. This already exists in the medium of web sites -- what are Slashdot, MetaFilter, Plastic, and K5, among many others? They're filters for web content. We don't have time to scour the entire web every day for pages that interest us, so we go sites who've obtained our trust, and we let them filter this content.
what is this?? You have a prozac deficiency? It IS just a happy pill and many ridicule it as such. As you are popping your next pill, ask youself "whose interest am I serving most by consuming this?". (realizing you won't, but just to make a point) A lot of folks have stock in your taking those pills: pharm companies and doctors have a financial interest of course, politicos who...
[snip]
So do I sound like the angry long-term child prescribed ritalin survivor who has gone through depression and found another way out?
Are you aware that banana seeds are one of the most potent poisons that can be had? I eat them all the time... as a part of the whole fruit, alone the seeds are deadly toxic. Please just get off your islolation soapbox. There are 3 sides to every story...
[snip]
...I didn't have to sit in a crowded downtown pharmacy to pay $50/pill for it. I just went and dropped some seeds in my back yard. Grow your own pal, we are everywhere!
1. The reason people who take SSRIs reject the term "happy pills" is because they know that the pills don't make you happy. They make you not crushingly and suicidally depressed. There's a big difference there.
2. And it's not my place to tell anyone how they should be running their life, but your array of self-medication could possibly benefit from two additions: A)a calming agent and B)a focusing agent.;)
For the record, I've been running Mandrake 9 since I got my pre-order DVD in the mail (about 3 months ago), I use ReiserFS, NVidia drivers, and have had no stability problems.
I'm not denying that you're having problems, but they may not be indicative of a larger pattern.
I am still a staunch believer in the fact that "global warming" is something that the Earth will fix on it's own.
That's right, but this is precisely the nature of our short-sightedness. When we talk about "saving the environment", we aren't really talking about some idealistic, altruistic agenda. We're talking about protecting the environment in which we live. If the hole in the ozone layer gets big enough, it's not Earth that will be getting skin cancer, it's you and me!
I'm not a hardcore environmentalist at all, but but I think it's foolish for people to write environmentalists' efforts off because it's all about saving frogs and hugging trees. No. It's about thinking ahead and making sure that we don't ruin the conditions on this globe for our kin.
I don't think we should settle for the margins. Media and a working democracy are very closely linked. Ceding the mainstream media to corporate interests basically cedes government and society to the highest bidder.
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't fight these grand moves toward media unification -- in fact, that fight is critical. I'm just saying that I trust us, the individuals and non-corporate groups, to consistently stay one step ahead of anyone who'd endeavor to control our consumption of art and information. In other words, I'm concerned but not scared:)
The FCC thinks all this has been good and wants to extend this model to all other media that it regulates!
I'm not afraid. As long as there's a norm to react to, counterculture will thrive. When all you have is spoon-fed corporation-constructed pop, it will just inspire underground artists to work that much harder to buck the system and be heard. By the time Unicorp (AOL-Time-Warner-Fox-Disney) owns all of our cable and phone lines, we'll already be hard at work building our home-grown WiFi networks.
It's a perpetual but healthy struggle. It's like a cultural free-market system.
Various people have tried to get me interested in The Brain, but I've never quite warmed up to it. Maybe I'm just using it wrong.
What's the great deal about The Brain? Is there any easy way to describe an initial "project" or organizational need I should tackle with The Brain to really understand its utility? Or a good fan/FAQ site? (not just marketing-speak)
I used PersonalBrain to write the design document for a PS2 game. It's fantastic. It allows you to reduce the amount of redundant data -- in Un*x terms, you often want to use symbolic links rather than raw copies of data. If you're working in a "normal" format (Word, or whatever) you end up having to stack a lot of redundant data because you can't account for the way every bit of information *relates* to every other bit in a linear format.
That said, there are flaws in PersonalBrain, and I'm very excited about newdocms. Once the infrastructure is there, you just need a solid GUI browser and you're gold.
(As an aside, I'm not really familiar with HFS -- does it offer the same sort of robustness you get with a journaling file system?)
So, when titles run even just a year late, the developers have to rush and scramble to make their graphics engine look up to date.. but that introduces new bugs, so they become even more delayed.. then they need to upgrade the engine AGAIN, and repeat ad nauseum.
All the more reason to bank on good game-play rather than flashy graphics from the beginning. This, along with the growing installed base, is one of the things that draws developers to the Game Boy Advance. It's just a raw art and design problem. You aren't going to get engineers finding clever new ways to exploit the hardware (at least, not like you would on a PC or even a modern console.)
If it's cutting-edge technology that's driving your game, as the parent post suggested, you've got the ticking of the technology clock constantly reminding you that you'd better hurry up, better cut those design corners, better add that new feature you saw at E3...
Pretty useless though, IMHO. It didn't have much in the lines of TCP/IP, web surfing, etc. I mean, it would dialup, but..
Really? I could've sworn it had support for most ethernet cards, and a web browser and email client. Hm... I'll have to try it out at home tonight.
Re:A bit OT Re:Expensive pant load!
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 2
I understand your aversion to vegetarian food; I grew up vegetarian and on the rare occasions that I taste meat, I can't stand it. Environmental conditioning and whatnot.
(snip)
The moral is that if you really do feel bad about causing animal suffering by eating meat, you can likely learn to enjoy a vegetarian diet. Changing my tastes took around 3 months in my case, though I'd imagine it varies from person to person.
I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility. I stopped eating red meat about 6 years ago without much difficulty.
My history teacher way back in high school was a Quaker, and while not vegetarian, he went out of his way to get his food only from farms that he'd visited. That way he could guarantee they were cruelty-free. I think I'd be more apt to go this route.
(I know, "cruelty" is a debatable term in this discussion, but I don't personally consider the killing of animals for consumption by other animals to be cruel. I do consider imposing inhumane conditions on animals, and allowing them to suffer, to be cruel.)
Re:Let's hope this means the end of veal
on
Lab-Grown Steak
·
· Score: 2
At any rate, you should still GO VEGAN or at least vegetarian.
On further note, I am not going vegan. I don't think I've ever listened to anything written in all caps.
Yup. Maybe it's old-fashioned American bull-headedness, or maybe it's old-fashioned Taurian bull-headedness, but I'm rarely able to respond with an open mind when someone I don't know tells me what I "should" do.:)
I've been looking for a truly "portable" OS for quite some time - one that I could fit on a single bootable floppy and have a GUI interface. Upon failing to find anything suitable, I have since started writing my own. As I have a penchant for assembly language programming, I'm about halfway done with it.
Damn it! There used to be a fully-functioning QNX OS demo that fit on a floppy and had a nice GUI. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on their site any more. That's a shame; it was really cool.
My first reaction is: why? Why not just be a vegetarian? Hell, millions of Indians are, and they seem to be doing okay, building supercomputers and hand-held computing devices like gangbusters. We need less saturated fat, not an uberexpensive supply of it.
I'm a card-carrying carnivore, but I'm not at all happy about the treatment of animals at farming facilities. I'd be happy to pay a little more for a chicken or turkey product that I knew had never suffered.
(Why not just become a vegetarian? Because I can't stand vegetarian food!;)
You see, there *are* consequences to *not* voting, Virginia.
What else is there really to comment on?
At my own karmic risk, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are also consequences to voting for third-party candidates. If every vote for Nader had instead gone to Gore, Gore would be in the White House today.
Now... I suppose the Nader supporters' point would be that they wouldn't be much happier with Gore in there than Bush -- that there's really not much difference between the two. To which I would respond: If Gore were in the White House, would be still be preparing to invade a sovereign nation without provocation? To stay on-topic, would the U.S. government be removing established health research from NIH sites?
There's a good possibility it won't break $100M. Fellowship of the Ring only did $75M the first weekend.
I'm posting to this thread late (mid-day Monday), but TT did indeed break 100 mil by Sunday eve. Box Office Mojo is reporting a gross of $101,500,000 at the end of the 22nd. Pretty sweet!
I myself saw it Saturday morning, and actually enjoyed it more than Fellowship.
Re:Features in the alpha / beta versions
on
Doom Archive Reopened
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Does anyone know if the beta and alpha versions had any features that were cut out of the final version of Doom?
Here's the Doom Bible (and PDF version)... it seems to detail lots of stuff that was planned but didn't make it in.
Organisation Address.1742 BOLTON VILLAGE LANE
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. NICEVILLE
Organisation Address. 32578
Organisation Address. FL
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES
...and, of course, it's straight out of America's wang... er, I mean, Florida.
Slashdot Mirror
In fact, not to make any accusations, but I can't think of anyone I know who would choose to return to a retail gig
We'll be pushing the performance barrier for a long time to come. Sure, nobody needs to run GlQuake at 300 fps, or Quake 3 at 120 fps, but Doom 3 will only run at 30 fps (for example.)
;)
New video card technology means speed in old games and features/visual quality in new games. I can guarantee you that no matter how advanced video cards have gotten in 5 years, artists and designers will still be able to generate content that slows the game to a crawl
Remember what Sen. Feingold said about a *return* to an era of invasion of privacy and harrassment.
Sorta off-topic, but man Russ Feingold is a class act. If he ran for President, I wouldn't just vote for him, I'd campaign for him.
Deep Space Homer is, in my humble opinion, the best single Simpsons episode. From Barney's tumble across the hard roof of the Pillow Factory to Kent Brockman's welcoming of our new insect overlords, the jokes are unprecedented in their density and quality.
I can't believe this episode didn't even make their list...
I agree with him in one sense... not that content is crap, and not with his overall tone or message, but that there is significant value in the filtering process. Not corporate filtering, or automated filtering, but review-based filtering.
I've thought for a long time now that, with advances in technology (home-studio-produced music, professional-quality DV software on PCs, etc.), and with advances in distribution (the Internet), we're moving into a different sort of creative "space" where anyone who wants to make art can make art, and have it be seen by anyone. That's unbelievably cool, but it makes "consumption" more difficult, as it's much harder to find work that interests you.
The solution is reviews. Preferably from as many sources as possible. I see us in a situation where we actively pick reviewers whose taste matches ours, and who gain our trust. These are our filters. This already exists in the medium of web sites -- what are Slashdot, MetaFilter, Plastic, and K5, among many others? They're filters for web content. We don't have time to scour the entire web every day for pages that interest us, so we go sites who've obtained our trust, and we let them filter this content.
What are we talking about, CS or IT?
/.
Thank you! I'm surprised to see a mistake like this at
[snip]
1. The reason people who take SSRIs reject the term "happy pills" is because they know that the pills don't make you happy. They make you not crushingly and suicidally depressed. There's a big difference there.
2. And it's not my place to tell anyone how they should be running their life, but your array of self-medication could possibly benefit from two additions: A)a calming agent and B)a focusing agent.
For the record, I've been running Mandrake 9 since I got my pre-order DVD in the mail (about 3 months ago), I use ReiserFS, NVidia drivers, and have had no stability problems.
I'm not denying that you're having problems, but they may not be indicative of a larger pattern.
"kill your television" and live life to its fullest
:)
Yeah, we know what you think, Jonathan...
I am still a staunch believer in the fact that "global warming" is something that the Earth will fix on it's own.
That's right, but this is precisely the nature of our short-sightedness. When we talk about "saving the environment", we aren't really talking about some idealistic, altruistic agenda. We're talking about protecting the environment in which we live. If the hole in the ozone layer gets big enough, it's not Earth that will be getting skin cancer, it's you and me!
I'm not a hardcore environmentalist at all, but but I think it's foolish for people to write environmentalists' efforts off because it's all about saving frogs and hugging trees. No. It's about thinking ahead and making sure that we don't ruin the conditions on this globe for our kin.
I don't think we should settle for the margins. Media and a working democracy are very closely linked. Ceding the mainstream media to corporate interests basically cedes government and society to the highest bidder.
:)
I'm not arguing that we shouldn't fight these grand moves toward media unification -- in fact, that fight is critical. I'm just saying that I trust us, the individuals and non-corporate groups, to consistently stay one step ahead of anyone who'd endeavor to control our consumption of art and information. In other words, I'm concerned but not scared
The FCC thinks all this has been good and wants to extend this model to all other media that it regulates!
I'm not afraid. As long as there's a norm to react to, counterculture will thrive. When all you have is spoon-fed corporation-constructed pop, it will just inspire underground artists to work that much harder to buck the system and be heard. By the time Unicorp (AOL-Time-Warner-Fox-Disney) owns all of our cable and phone lines, we'll already be hard at work building our home-grown WiFi networks.
It's a perpetual but healthy struggle. It's like a cultural free-market system.
I used PersonalBrain to write the design document for a PS2 game. It's fantastic. It allows you to reduce the amount of redundant data -- in Un*x terms, you often want to use symbolic links rather than raw copies of data. If you're working in a "normal" format (Word, or whatever) you end up having to stack a lot of redundant data because you can't account for the way every bit of information *relates* to every other bit in a linear format.
That said, there are flaws in PersonalBrain, and I'm very excited about newdocms. Once the infrastructure is there, you just need a solid GUI browser and you're gold.
(As an aside, I'm not really familiar with HFS -- does it offer the same sort of robustness you get with a journaling file system?)
All the more reason to bank on good game-play rather than flashy graphics from the beginning. This, along with the growing installed base, is one of the things that draws developers to the Game Boy Advance. It's just a raw art and design problem. You aren't going to get engineers finding clever new ways to exploit the hardware (at least, not like you would on a PC or even a modern console.)
If it's cutting-edge technology that's driving your game, as the parent post suggested, you've got the ticking of the technology clock constantly reminding you that you'd better hurry up, better cut those design corners, better add that new feature you saw at E3...
I wouldn't rule it out as a possibility. I stopped eating red meat about 6 years ago without much difficulty.
My history teacher way back in high school was a Quaker, and while not vegetarian, he went out of his way to get his food only from farms that he'd visited. That way he could guarantee they were cruelty-free. I think I'd be more apt to go this route.
(I know, "cruelty" is a debatable term in this discussion, but I don't personally consider the killing of animals for consumption by other animals to be cruel. I do consider imposing inhumane conditions on animals, and allowing them to suffer, to be cruel.)
On further note, I am not going vegan. I don't think I've ever listened to anything written in all caps.
Yup. Maybe it's old-fashioned American bull-headedness, or maybe it's old-fashioned Taurian bull-headedness, but I'm rarely able to respond with an open mind when someone I don't know tells me what I "should" do.
Damn it! There used to be a fully-functioning QNX OS demo that fit on a floppy and had a nice GUI. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on their site any more. That's a shame; it was really cool.
My first reaction is: why? Why not just be a vegetarian? Hell, millions of Indians are, and they seem to be doing okay, building supercomputers and hand-held computing devices like gangbusters. We need less saturated fat, not an uberexpensive supply of it.
;)
I'm a card-carrying carnivore, but I'm not at all happy about the treatment of animals at farming facilities. I'd be happy to pay a little more for a chicken or turkey product that I knew had never suffered.
(Why not just become a vegetarian? Because I can't stand vegetarian food!
At my own karmic risk, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that there are also consequences to voting for third-party candidates. If every vote for Nader had instead gone to Gore, Gore would be in the White House today.
Now... I suppose the Nader supporters' point would be that they wouldn't be much happier with Gore in there than Bush -- that there's really not much difference between the two. To which I would respond: If Gore were in the White House, would be still be preparing to invade a sovereign nation without provocation? To stay on-topic, would the U.S. government be removing established health research from NIH sites?
There's a good possibility it won't break $100M. Fellowship of the Ring only did $75M the first weekend.
I'm posting to this thread late (mid-day Monday), but TT did indeed break 100 mil by Sunday eve. Box Office Mojo is reporting a gross of $101,500,000 at the end of the 22nd. Pretty sweet!
I myself saw it Saturday morning, and actually enjoyed it more than Fellowship.
Does anyone know if the beta and alpha versions had any features that were cut out of the final version of Doom?
Here's the Doom Bible (and PDF version)... it seems to detail lots of stuff that was planned but didn't make it in.
Organisation Address.1742 BOLTON VILLAGE LANE
...and, of course, it's straight out of America's wang... er, I mean, Florida.
Organisation Address.
Organisation Address. NICEVILLE
Organisation Address. 32578
Organisation Address. FL
Organisation Address. UNITED STATES