During my CS studies, I was considering to start working in the gaming industry too, but finally decided against it. My naive concept of working for a game studio was that I would sit together with creative guys and think about what cool games we could do and what nice features we could put into and how we could maximize fun.
After talking to people who worked for different german game studios, my picture changed quickly. I found out that what most studios needed were programmers, programmers and programmers. And those kind of programmers who would sit around for 80+ hours per week and hack C code. Not really my understanding of "fun". Sure, there are other guys like the graphic and animation dudes, sound and music, asset management but in non of these would fit my CS background.
So I learned that what I initially was looking for, was becoming the lead game designer. Nothing you could expect to become with no hisotry in creating games plus at least 7 years of experience in the industry. And even if I magically would become a LGD, even he doesn't have all the creative freedoms I had image he would have. One guy told me, that a game they developed was starting out to be something like a sci-fi RPG, but one day they got a call from the publisher who told them, that "with all the LotR stuff going on, we should do something with hobbits and evles".
This might be different in the US, but in Germany you seem to be pretty much the slave of the publisher and and are bound to every shitty idea they come up with that would make the game better selling.. even if in reality it would make it "just another boring FPS".
So my bottom line is: if you love to code and already are a good programmer, go for it. If you want to "design" cool games you might be dissapointed how uncreative the whole process is.
Clearly this is just my personal subjective view, but I'm pretty sure many of the people who "want to become a game designer" have similar faulty expactations.
Good point. On the other hand, were any of those lawsuits successful? If not, then starting to sue thousands of alleged mp3 distributing user would end up in many defeats. In the end the courts would declare that finding a watermarked mp3 on the net is not convincing enough to sentence someone for copyright infringement.
What I never unterstood with the whole watermarking stuff is how they can help to avoid people putting tracks on some P2P network.
if the RIAA tracks down one of your songs you can simply explain it by "my pc got infected by a virus because MS didnt provide a patch for powerpoint. that virus had a P2P module that shared my whole hard drive on the net". alternatively you can say "i was in germany last month where copying tracks for friends is allowed. some of my friends must have given my track to some of their friend and so on. one of them must have been a bad person how put the song with my watermark on a p2p network".
imo if consoles would "kill off" PCs in terms of gaming, that wouldn't be that bad after all. as long as there will be PCs around (and they definitely will for "serious work") there will be a market for games too. it might be a smaller one but this can turn out to be an advantage:
remember back in the early 90s how the situation on the PC-gaming market looked like? there were fewer PC around, but those who owend one often were hardcore gamers. for this reason the games made for the PC were ofter really tough (wizardry7, x-wing, system shock, ultima7 or even indy4).
today there all millions of PCs on the desktops all around the world and the gaming industry mainly targets the occasional gamer. this makes totally sense as for 1 hardcore games there are 10 occasional gamers today contrary to the 90s where the situation was the opposite. sadly this situation lead to "simpler" and less innovative games that are easy to learn and are completed in few hours of gameplay.
my hope is that if the main focus moved on to the consoles that the "few" PC gamer who stick with their system will eventually be rewarded by more demanding games.
so it is possible to "type" a message faster with morse than with a 9-button keypad. but this doesn't say anything about the comfort when doing thas. what would be interesting regarding this comparison are:
- error rates - time needed to recover from errors (i.e. corrections) - learning times - memory load while typing
think about it: do porn sites have shopping carts? no. do online porn customers compare "products" before they pay? no. do they leave the site to "think about it" and come back a week later? definitely not.
so the question is: did the guys who made the study jump to the conclusion that online shoppers don't buy impulsively because they only focused on sites that sell "physical products"? but what about digital products like software, ebooks or information services? it is possible that in this field people do buy impulsively.
according the german automobile club the percentage of car breakdowns caused by malfunction of the car's electric system is raising continously (45,2% in 1998; 49,6% 2001) german article. they compare the complexity of today's cars to that of airplanes and demand that instead of the 'race for innovation' companies should opt for quality and reliability.
so maybe instead of inventing a superintelligent car that won't crash it could be wiser to improve today's technology like ABS, ESP etc.
one additional drawback that LCDs have, is that the image quality is dropping severly, if you dont run it on the "native resolution". while this may be not a great issue when using the LCDs mainly for desktop applictions, but in case of computer games you may want to reduce the screen resolution in order to gain some extra FPS. the reduced screen resolution will lead to blurry images due to interpolation, so you might want to stick with your old CRT if you are a 3d gamer.
another reason why you might want run a game on alower resolution is that in some games, parts of the game screen are fixed in size. thus the "radar map" or the "health bar" might look incredibly small on 1600x1200 while on 800x600 it almost covers half of the screen. interesting side effect of screen resolutions not growing proportionally with screen size in inches.
The upcoming generation of file sharing tools make anonymous sharing pretty simple.
MUTE for instance uses virtual adresses so only your direct neighbours know your real IP. But because every packet you receive from the network is encrypted by the sender node, your direct neighbours can't determine weather you are downloadig legal stuff or not.
If the someone taps one of your neighbour nodes, no harm done, because the network sends the packets to you through several paths, and thus he would have to tap every neighbour node you have, to get all packets and then be able to decrypt your data (strong encryption).
Naturally your neighbours are not geographic neighbours, so if someone wants to prove that you leeched some copyrighted movies, he might end up in tapping several nodes in different counties.
I admit, MUTE is not 100% anonymous but for me 99,99% is just fine. Here is a more detailed description on how MUTE works.
Back in 1999 I built my own low tech water cooling using a normal heatsink covered by sheet i got by cutting a beercan apart. Solderd the beast together and used abundant amount of silicone sealing to be on the safe side.
After weeks of perfect function at some day I noticed some strange artifacts on the screen so I rebooted the box but the artifacts only got worse. So I took a look under my desk and was horrified as the back side of my AGP card was coverd by water. I Ripped the power cable out of the PSU, dried the card with a hair-dryer and to my surprise after reinserting the whole thing everything worked!
After this incident I gave up my ambitions towards DIY water cooling.
Got a FPU as a birthday present, inserted it into the socket, tried to boot -> black screen. Called support and the guy told me about the 90 degrees rotation thing which "*must* be the problem".
Being 15 yrs old I was just wondering why the little white spot on one of the corners of the FPU won't match with the spot on the socket when installed that way but I turned the power on -> Pffffft + 'electric smell' -> Dead FPU (one pin disintegrated) -> Close to tears.
Fortunetly the store gave me a refund as the damage was caused due to the support guy's wrong advice.
Years later I reassambled that old 386 box and found the reason why the FPU didn't work (before i rotated and fried it): the FPU had its own oscillator socket.. but no oscillator installed to it:(
well when I worked for a company and did some PHP, I had to rewrite some old (speak shitty) code from a guy who left the company long ago.
while reviewing his code I found some nice variable names like help1, help2, help4 (dunno what happened to help3), but my favorite var name was 'shit'. escpecially when he did some 'shit++'. so 'shit increment' was the running gag for weeks in our team;)
his error messages were very helpful too 'Here comes the mouse!'
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During my CS studies, I was considering to start working in the gaming industry too, but finally decided against it. My naive concept of working for a game studio was that I would sit together with creative guys and think about what cool games we could do and what nice features we could put into and how we could maximize fun.
.. even if in reality it would make it "just another boring FPS".
After talking to people who worked for different german game studios, my picture changed quickly. I found out that what most studios needed were programmers, programmers and programmers. And those kind of programmers who would sit around for 80+ hours per week and hack C code. Not really my understanding of "fun". Sure, there are other guys like the graphic and animation dudes, sound and music, asset management but in non of these would fit my CS background.
So I learned that what I initially was looking for, was becoming the lead game designer. Nothing you could expect to become with no hisotry in creating games plus at least 7 years of experience in the industry. And even if I magically would become a LGD, even he doesn't have all the creative freedoms I had image he would have. One guy told me, that a game they developed was starting out to be something like a sci-fi RPG, but one day they got a call from the publisher who told them, that "with all the LotR stuff going on, we should do something with hobbits and evles".
This might be different in the US, but in Germany you seem to be pretty much the slave of the publisher and and are bound to every shitty idea they come up with that would make the game better selling
So my bottom line is: if you love to code and already are a good programmer, go for it. If you want to "design" cool games you might be dissapointed how uncreative the whole process is.
Clearly this is just my personal subjective view, but I'm pretty sure many of the people who "want to become a game designer" have similar faulty expactations.
Good point. On the other hand, were any of those lawsuits successful? If not, then starting to sue thousands of alleged mp3 distributing user would end up in many defeats. In the end the courts would declare that finding a watermarked mp3 on the net is not convincing enough to sentence someone for copyright infringement.
What I never unterstood with the whole watermarking stuff is how they can help to avoid people putting tracks on some P2P network.
if the RIAA tracks down one of your songs you can simply explain it by "my pc got infected by a virus because MS didnt provide a patch for powerpoint. that virus had a P2P module that shared my whole hard drive on the net". alternatively you can say "i was in germany last month where copying tracks for friends is allowed. some of my friends must have given my track to some of their friend and so on. one of them must have been a bad person how put the song with my watermark on a p2p network".
how can you avoid this with watermarks?
imo if consoles would "kill off" PCs in terms of gaming, that wouldn't be that bad after all. as long as there will be PCs around (and they definitely will for "serious work") there will be a market for games too. it might be a smaller one but this can turn out to be an advantage:
remember back in the early 90s how the situation on the PC-gaming market looked like? there were fewer PC around, but those who owend one often were hardcore gamers. for this reason the games made for the PC were ofter really tough (wizardry7, x-wing, system shock, ultima7 or even indy4).
today there all millions of PCs on the desktops all around the world and the gaming industry mainly targets the occasional gamer. this makes totally sense as for 1 hardcore games there are 10 occasional gamers today contrary to the 90s where the situation was the opposite. sadly this situation lead to "simpler" and less innovative games that are easy to learn and are completed in few hours of gameplay. my hope is that if the main focus moved on to the consoles that the "few" PC gamer who stick with their system will eventually be rewarded by more demanding games.
so it is possible to "type" a message faster with morse than with a 9-button keypad. but this doesn't say anything about the comfort when doing thas. what would be interesting regarding this comparison are:
- error rates
- time needed to recover from errors (i.e. corrections)
- learning times
- memory load while typing
think about it:
do porn sites have shopping carts? no.
do online porn customers compare "products" before they pay? no.
do they leave the site to "think about it" and come back a week later? definitely not.
so the question is: did the guys who made the study jump to the conclusion that online shoppers don't buy impulsively because they only focused on sites that sell "physical products"? but what about digital products like software, ebooks or information services? it is possible that in this field people do buy impulsively.
according the german automobile club the percentage of car breakdowns caused by malfunction of the car's electric system is raising continously (45,2% in 1998; 49,6% 2001) german article. they compare the complexity of today's cars to that of airplanes and demand that instead of the 'race for innovation' companies should opt for quality and reliability.
so maybe instead of inventing a superintelligent car that won't crash it could be wiser to improve today's technology like ABS, ESP etc.
one additional drawback that LCDs have, is that the image quality is dropping severly, if you dont run it on the "native resolution". while this may be not a great issue when using the LCDs mainly for desktop applictions, but in case of computer games you may want to reduce the screen resolution in order to gain some extra FPS. the reduced screen resolution will lead to blurry images due to interpolation, so you might want to stick with your old CRT if you are a 3d gamer.
another reason why you might want run a game on alower resolution is that in some games, parts of the game screen are fixed in size. thus the "radar map" or the "health bar" might look incredibly small on 1600x1200 while on 800x600 it almost covers half of the screen. interesting side effect of screen resolutions not growing proportionally with screen size in inches.
The upcoming generation of file sharing tools make anonymous sharing pretty simple.
MUTE for instance uses virtual adresses so only your direct neighbours know your real IP. But because every packet you receive from the network is encrypted by the sender node, your direct neighbours can't determine weather you are downloadig legal stuff or not.
If the someone taps one of your neighbour nodes, no harm done, because the network sends the packets to you through several paths, and thus he would have to tap every neighbour node you have, to get all packets and then be able to decrypt your data (strong encryption).
Naturally your neighbours are not geographic neighbours, so if someone wants to prove that you leeched some copyrighted movies, he might end up in tapping several nodes in different counties.
I admit, MUTE is not 100% anonymous but for me 99,99% is just fine. Here is a more detailed description on how MUTE works.
Back in 1999 I built my own low tech water cooling using a normal heatsink covered by sheet i got by cutting a beercan apart. Solderd the beast together and used abundant amount of silicone sealing to be on the safe side.
After weeks of perfect function at some day I noticed some strange artifacts on the screen so I rebooted the box but the artifacts only got worse. So I took a look under my desk and was horrified as the back side of my AGP card was coverd by water. I Ripped the power cable out of the PSU, dried the card with a hair-dryer and to my surprise after reinserting the whole thing everything worked!
After this incident I gave up my ambitions towards DIY water cooling.
Very similar story:
.. but no oscillator installed to it :(
Got a FPU as a birthday present, inserted it into the socket, tried to boot -> black screen. Called support and the guy told me about the 90 degrees rotation thing which "*must* be the problem".
Being 15 yrs old I was just wondering why the little white spot on one of the corners of the FPU won't match with the spot on the socket when installed that way but I turned the power on -> Pffffft + 'electric smell' -> Dead FPU (one pin disintegrated) -> Close to tears.
Fortunetly the store gave me a refund as the damage was caused due to the support guy's wrong advice.
Years later I reassambled that old 386 box and found the reason why the FPU didn't work (before i rotated and fried it): the FPU had its own oscillator socket
enjoyed variable names like varTempOne, var1, var2, var3, generic1, generic2, myVariable
;)
well when I worked for a company and did some PHP, I had to rewrite some old (speak shitty) code from a guy who left the company long ago.
while reviewing his code I found some nice variable names like help1, help2, help4 (dunno what happened to help3), but my favorite var name was 'shit'. escpecially when he did some 'shit++'. so 'shit increment' was the running gag for weeks in our team
his error messages were very helpful too 'Here comes the mouse!'