My issue with the mom+pops around Wichita KS is the complete disregard for customer service. They are rude, overprice their titles, and pretty much treat the customer as if they expect you are the source of their shrinkage. They feel less like a game store and more like a seedy pawnshop/check-cashing+loan joint.
Not that this guy was the first to postulate that interconnectedness would change culture irrevocably in the near-future timeframe either. But I think the essay linked above cuts a little closer to the core issue; Businessweek just now caught on to what has been a rolling snowball in the internet world for what, 4 years now?
I'm posting this here in case Kris doesn't like it on his blogger page:
Yeah, his comic is really... totally unoriginal and horribly unfunny. I really don't like how he's become so popular.
"PA nor PVP owns the copyright on any of these concepts -- but we've seen them all before! Each of them! A long time ago! And to my mind anyway, done better!" -Kristofer Straub
I don't think CAD is a bad comic, per se, but I too was astounded by the readership numbers. It's no Penny Arcade by ANY measure, it's not particularly original either (OMG GIRL GAMER, MUST TOUCH BOOBS), but it's a gaming comic and one of the first, and I guess that's enough for some people.
Now I'm a bigtime fanboy/geek. I'm the kid on your block who owned the ST: TNG technical manual and memorized it. The thing that keeps me out of the culture surrounding many of my favorite things (games, comics, movies, geeky tv shows) are conversations/comments like the ones quoted above.
Art, especially entertainment, is a matter of craft. When I read an overdone joke in a webcomic, what carries the creator is their craft- Does it fit the characters (i.e. do the characters make it new)? If there is a visual component, was it drawn in such a way as to make more visceral, or to twist the meaning of a joke around in some way? Does the joke lend itself to some irony based on plot or setting? If not a joke, does this overdone theme do the same things?
This doesn't just apply to jokes and webcomics- how many times can we retell a superhero story (conventional print comicbooks are trying to figure this out)? How many times can we remake some old Star Trek episode in a new series? How many times can we retell the arthurian legend in different ways? How many different ways can the Autobots triumph over the Decepticons, and on how many planets, with how many new kid friends (Whatever happened to the old ones? Were they stepped on?)?
Point being, if all you can do is argue about who was the most "original", who did it first, you're missing the point.
Disclaimer: I'm a fan of the triumvirate of the three most popular gaming webcomincs: PvP, Penny Arcade, and CtrlAltDel. PvP comics in PCGamer magazine lead me to the webcomic phenomenon; links on PvP lead me to discover Penny Arcade, which lead to all the (34) others I read. I don't read Checkerboard Nightmare yet, mostly because I haven't come up with the time in awhile to read the archives of a many-year-old comic. That said, I've liked what I've seen of it.
P.S.
Yeah, the whole thing is a stretch. Its overpriced content, with a pricing scheme that would make the MPAA proud. 12 times 5 makes 60 minutes- why not a 60 minute long feature, delivered on DVD, and sell it for $20 or so? This matches the "OAV" distribution model common to many anime releases.
This was a chance for industry professionals, and individuals with professional skills, to make contacts and learn from each others craft. Blizzcon is a marketting/fan-service event. They have nothing to do with each other.
That said, I just got back from the conference in Austin, and it was awesome.
...so besides Walmart, Best Buy, and Comp USA, there is now only one other chain to buy a new game in my locality (Wichita, KS, 400,000 lost souls). Now many places in the US now have one choice of specialty digital gaming shop.
I'm sure that this will do simply wonderful things to competition... and I'm sure that the bustling market in used titles will begin to slow down as the prices rise, and the sellback payouts drop.
Although on the console side, if I was interested in more than 10 console games across all three of this generation's consoles, I would just start up a Gamefly account.
Its getting harder and harder to buy a PC game these days.
So, slashdotters, what other specialty shop chains are around these days to pick up the slack and restore sanity to the retail PC market?
Not really representative of the series or much of the rest of the movie. Although...
since its the first 9 minutes exactly as seen in the theatre, it doesn't give away any of the rest. Rest assured, there are many good bits to be given away!
I hope this becomes a more common practice in the future; I believe this is a far better hook than a trailer.
Ummm Roborally isn't an Avalon Hill game. It was designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It was published in '94 by Wizards of the Coast. The recent reissue has been published under the Avalon Hill label by Hasbro.
It would be more legally accurate to say that Hasbro has reissued a Hasbro game. Too bad TSR (thus SSI) and everybody belongs to the giant now, too.
...the independent developer community. Folks like Carmack, Romero, Garriot and many others developed games on the various personal computer platforms of their day on a shoestring. These individuals are the ones that, for the most part, made PC gaming great.
In terms of a lot of indie content not being "AAA" grade these days... a lot of the great indie content people seem to be chained by their balls into mod work. If these guys realized their own talent and struck out on their own with a low-cost engine like Torque, or an open source option like CrystalSpace, Nebula, or Rygax, we would see far more successful indie game companies selling their work.
Console manufacturers make money off of these guys through buyouts or licensing once they get really successful. Eventually many companies become "exclusive partners", get locked into multiple-title deals, or otherwise lose their independence from the Big Publisher model of game business. An exception of course is Id, which we all know has a positively unique management situation. Valve also is regaining some cajones in this department.
So there are always indies, and indies are what make PC gaming greatest- past, present, future.
The first thing that comes to mind as a graphics programmer is that since there are theoretically fewer polygons/shader effects/character models/etc. onscreen at any time, one can spend more time rendering those things, thus making them look nicer; or render it at the original detail at a higher framerate. As poor as the engine performs in outdoor areas, this might have been a technical decision.
What if it wasn't? The wannabe game designer in me puzzles. For one, it allows you to more easily target specific parts of an enemy because the enemy occupies more pixels on the screen... on the other hand, the player has a less complete view of the surroundings vs. a wider view aspect. Players these days, with optical mice and whatnot, do not suffer not being able to aim quickly due to technical reasons (poor framerate, sticky mouse ball) anymore though.
The only motive I can puzzle out is that it may make interacting with the NPCs (Alex) more realistic- when we are talking to someone in the real world, eye contact and all, we are truly only looking at the area around their face. Going to a narrower perspective could possibly increase immersion in this way, by providing this focus.
Seriously. Wired is written for and by the idiots who brought us the dot com bust. Seeing as how they couldn't come up with a profitable model for so much as a magazine... it must have seemed natural for them to stoop to low tactics to save their asses. Having fond memories of pulling the wool over the eyes of ignorant venture capitalists, they first imagined hiring Igor and Ivan from the local wing of the Russian Mafia to push up their bottom line (knock off PC World's writers or something). Instead of opting for a civilized, time-tested and honor bound solution, they opted to hire a collection agency.
Remember, collection agencies are run by people to psychotic to be real cops, or even bounty hunters. These are the sorts of people that use tactics like the ones discussed in Kevin Mitnick's book Art of Deception in order to track down people who owe other people money. Instead of breaking their legs like Ivan and Igor, they simply ruin your credit rating.
Very few responses have actually answered this guy's first question: "What books would you recommend to a beginning game developer?"
Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming. I own many game development tomes, and this one replaced 3 1/2 shelf feet of my reference material. This book contains everything the beginning competent programmer needs to get a quick start at programming any sort of game imaginable, and it covers topics from *useful* design patterns and data structures to shader programming.
Game Architecture and Design is another good book, but is a survey of information from design patterns, architecture, game design/ludology, project management, and business practices in games. Probably up your alley but not exactly what you asked for.
As for an introduction to game theory, none is better than Rules of Play. This book is the first extensive critique of the entire field of game theory as it is applied to game design that I have read. Lengthy, and it reads like a textbook (it was designed as one), but engaging.
Take a look at the commercialization of Counterstrike and Day of Defeat. Counterstrike pulled a lot of people into the half life fold, when before the most popular mods were generally for the Quake series. They saw quickly that mods were sustaining the sales of their product.
They also saw the potential of standalone products based off of these mods. Factor in piracy due to Counterstrike's popularity, and you see that they were looking at more effective copy protection. Looking into the future, they saw mod groups turning into the next big development studios. When creating business strategies, you always look for business models along the lines of the One Ring.
Thus Valve toiled away, improving the mod SDK and telling mod developers that were interested in commercializing quality mods. This brought a lot of talent to the Half Life SDK. Working on their next generation engine, they saw the need to make it easier to develop with, if only for their bottom line- and to make the next gen SDK easy to use for modders. Steam, an online distribution system, is the ultimate way to commercialize the mods- and distribute Half Life 2 to those users who are network connected, and whom trust Valve with their credit card number.
Thus Valve is trying, nay, has succeeded, in forging One Steam To Rule Them All. What they haven't done is focused on creating standards in such a way as to bring all developers at least partially into their fold. Thus, they've gone off and created their own corner of the universe.
I have no doubt they'll be the number one publisher of commercial Half Life mods. After all, the Eula and SDK license insure that.
They'll probably sign with a publisher that offers them a great royalty deal, and publishing support on at least two of the console systems, to suuport their physical boxes. If they can get enough mindshare via Steam, boxes on the shelf won't be their biggest source (pun!) of income.
...distribution. These days it is possible for a developer to market their own title. Great leaps in manufacturing technology in this internet age have meant it is much cheaper to produce the physical media than it was in epochs past (early nineties), such as the CD, box, etc. What is barely possible for a newcomer is to break into the distribution channel.
Distributors are the ones that make sure boxes reach the shelves, at the right box width and height, at stores like Wal Mart, CompUSA, and Best Buy. Having the right distributors signed on is more important than having the right publisher.
As for a developer breaking into the distribution channel, I only know of one example: Id. Back when they were operating their own phone/mail order system for Doom, they offered up the shareware for free. I.e., they wanted no royalty take on the shareware copies that sold everywhere. Hence why you could find the shareware at anyplace that sold software, and some places that didn't (I remember a friend's picture from a convenience store in socal from that period, showing doom shareware up for sale next to the bubblegum).
The point of gentoo's portage system, from my point of view, is the elimination of package dependency issues, and compiler version issues.
I've used linux for about 10 years, but only heavily for the last 4. Why? I enjoy using linux because I enjoy the programming environment. It was hell getting to the point I'm at now though......I tried Redhat 5.2/6.x/7.x......I tried various debians......then I settled on Slackware. Every distros fscked up weirdo patches on their kernels, their XFree, their desktop environment and installers. Even the random libraries I used, such as the then-nacient SDL and Allegro had distro-specific patches. Which meant a binary I compiled on my box wouldn't run anywhere else. Ever wonder why small sourceforge projects don't release *ix binaries? Everyone is using their own damn gcc version, their own damn libc. You can't even be sure that a program with nothing but libc dependencies will compile.
Slackware was fine, for awhile. Then they decided to move further and further from each individual projects standard source packages (kde, xfree, kernel) and I was having problems with getting the early nvidia driver to work with several of their kernels.
Portage solves the problem. If a program won't build with the particular version of gcc, or xfree, or whatever library you're using, the ebuild for it will depend on a specific version of the compilation environment and each library.
Everyone who talks about optimization (there are gains, but they are small) is missing the point. The point is that I am taking largely unchanged cvs copies of each project's source when I compile. As a developer, I worry about being up to date- so I build a new version of SDL in the backround while I browse the web, or go on coding. No fuss, no muss, and no worries like Debian has with Ubuntu- incompatible binary issues.
For God's sake, lets leave the incompatible binaries issue to other operating system families. Just build the source from it's source.
Distro leaders take note. *ix users are tired of incompatible binaries.
The Nebula Device
Its license is as permissive as the MIT license.
Its not an engine per se; its a framework for programming your own engine. But that is what most things billed as "3D Engines" actually are.
There is also Nevrax/Nel
technology, which shipped in The Saga of Ryzom MMORPG. The software license is GPL, and it is a competitive cross-platform engine, much like Nebula- however, like Nebula, it is much more of a toolkit, though to a lesser extent.
There are a variety of $100 RAD game tools out there, and it seems like they have always hovered at this price point- you get what you pay for; undocumented, buggy code that is ok for a quick prototype but unviable in the long run.
Excepting Torque. This is an excellent engine for $100 US. The engine shipped in Tribes and Tribes 2, is cross platform, and has a mature toolchain for developing anything that is Tribes-like (predominantly outdoor terrain with buildings and tunnels in it). In fact, if what your developing is basically a Tribes 2 total conversion, the only code you would need to write would be AI and other game-specific code.
"Whatever happened to the genius people who created Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, Quake, and Half Life?"
Shigeru Miyamoto is responsible for the first two. He works on the same franchises at Nintendo to this day.
Quake is a little tougher. Carmack of course, is still doing graphics programming and is pretty much in charge of Id; John Romero, the Lead Designer, left Id (or was canned?), started Ion Storm, and managed to push a whole company down the drain (though not single-handedly with Daikatana- they had some other flops). I'm not sure where Sandy Peterson (an excellent game designer, responsible for many digital and non-digital gaming classics), who did level design for Doom and Quake, is now, but I'm sure he is employed in the industry. American McGee (another Doom/Quake level designer), as we know, went on to produce American McGee's Alice.
Those that put together Half Life are working on the sequel.
I don't believe that McCloud's definition of art as communication necessarily conflicts with Kochalka's. If one is building a world in order to condense all of one's experiences, hopes, and dreams into this alternate reality, the medium must still communicate this in some way to the reader/viewer/player. Whether or not most readers are effectively communicated with probably seperates "great" art from the rest.
Law enforcement agencies are slowly moving towards "non-lethal" technologies to solve the issue of nuetralizing their "problems".
Why not create a relatively non-destructive (in a larger social sense) strain of virii that exploit the holes that other worms, trojans, and virii utilize/open? It could cause the operating system to not boot, or just completely disable the network, not affecting user data. What this would achieve is forcing the L-class user to take their machine to their guru or guru-for-hire to fix the problem, before their machine could inflict any more nastiness on the rest of Netville.
Slashdot Mirror
My issue with the mom+pops around Wichita KS is the complete disregard for customer service. They are rude, overprice their titles, and pretty much treat the customer as if they expect you are the source of their shrinkage. They feel less like a game store and more like a seedy pawnshop/check-cashing+loan joint.
Not that this guy was the first to postulate that interconnectedness would change culture irrevocably in the near-future timeframe either. But I think the essay linked above cuts a little closer to the core issue; Businessweek just now caught on to what has been a rolling snowball in the internet world for what, 4 years now?
I'm posting this here in case Kris doesn't like it on his blogger page:
... totally unoriginal and horribly unfunny. I really don't like how he's become so popular.
Yeah, his comic is really
"PA nor PVP owns the copyright on any of these concepts -- but we've seen them all before! Each of them! A long time ago! And to my mind anyway, done better!" -Kristofer Straub
I don't think CAD is a bad comic, per se, but I too was astounded by the readership numbers. It's no Penny Arcade by ANY measure, it's not particularly original either (OMG GIRL GAMER, MUST TOUCH BOOBS), but it's a gaming comic and one of the first, and I guess that's enough for some people.
Now I'm a bigtime fanboy/geek. I'm the kid on your block who owned the ST: TNG technical manual and memorized it. The thing that keeps me out of the culture surrounding many of my favorite things (games, comics, movies, geeky tv shows) are conversations/comments like the ones quoted above.
Art, especially entertainment, is a matter of craft. When I read an overdone joke in a webcomic, what carries the creator is their craft- Does it fit the characters (i.e. do the characters make it new)? If there is a visual component, was it drawn in such a way as to make more visceral, or to twist the meaning of a joke around in some way? Does the joke lend itself to some irony based on plot or setting? If not a joke, does this overdone theme do the same things?
This doesn't just apply to jokes and webcomics- how many times can we retell a superhero story (conventional print comicbooks are trying to figure this out)? How many times can we remake some old Star Trek episode in a new series? How many times can we retell the arthurian legend in different ways? How many different ways can the Autobots triumph over the Decepticons, and on how many planets, with how many new kid friends (Whatever happened to the old ones? Were they stepped on?)?
Point being, if all you can do is argue about who was the most "original", who did it first, you're missing the point.
Disclaimer: I'm a fan of the triumvirate of the three most popular gaming webcomincs: PvP, Penny Arcade, and CtrlAltDel. PvP comics in PCGamer magazine lead me to the webcomic phenomenon; links on PvP lead me to discover Penny Arcade, which lead to all the (34) others I read. I don't read Checkerboard Nightmare yet, mostly because I haven't come up with the time in awhile to read the archives of a many-year-old comic. That said, I've liked what I've seen of it.
P.S.
Yeah, the whole thing is a stretch. Its overpriced content, with a pricing scheme that would make the MPAA proud. 12 times 5 makes 60 minutes- why not a 60 minute long feature, delivered on DVD, and sell it for $20 or so? This matches the "OAV" distribution model common to many anime releases.
Really, thats what Joe Windowsuser is going to think.
This was a chance for industry professionals, and individuals with professional skills, to make contacts and learn from each others craft. Blizzcon is a marketting/fan-service event. They have nothing to do with each other.
That said, I just got back from the conference in Austin, and it was awesome.
...so besides Walmart, Best Buy, and Comp USA, there is now only one other chain to buy a new game in my locality (Wichita, KS, 400,000 lost souls). Now many places in the US now have one choice of specialty digital gaming shop.
I'm sure that this will do simply wonderful things to competition... and I'm sure that the bustling market in used titles will begin to slow down as the prices rise, and the sellback payouts drop.
Although on the console side, if I was interested in more than 10 console games across all three of this generation's consoles, I would just start up a Gamefly account.
Its getting harder and harder to buy a PC game these days.
So, slashdotters, what other specialty shop chains are around these days to pick up the slack and restore sanity to the retail PC market?
Not really representative of the series or much of the rest of the movie. Although...
since its the first 9 minutes exactly as seen in the theatre, it doesn't give away any of the rest. Rest assured, there are many good bits to be given away!
I hope this becomes a more common practice in the future; I believe this is a far better hook than a trailer.
Flipper! Flipper!
He'll Dart you Faster than lightning
No Dolphin you see
Has more bloodlust than he
Thank the Navy! Navy!
For this stupendous new blunder
stalking there under...
under the sea!
Monorail... Monorail... Guess the good citizens of Seattle checked up on what happened to the monorail in Springfield and all those other poor towns.
Ummm Roborally isn't an Avalon Hill game. It was designed by Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering. It was published in '94 by Wizards of the Coast. The recent reissue has been published under the Avalon Hill label by Hasbro.
It would be more legally accurate to say that Hasbro has reissued a Hasbro game. Too bad TSR (thus SSI) and everybody belongs to the giant now, too.
...the independent developer community. Folks like Carmack, Romero, Garriot and many others developed games on the various personal computer platforms of their day on a shoestring. These individuals are the ones that, for the most part, made PC gaming great.
In terms of a lot of indie content not being "AAA" grade these days... a lot of the great indie content people seem to be chained by their balls into mod work. If these guys realized their own talent and struck out on their own with a low-cost engine like Torque, or an open source option like CrystalSpace, Nebula, or Rygax, we would see far more successful indie game companies selling their work.
Console manufacturers make money off of these guys through buyouts or licensing once they get really successful. Eventually many companies become "exclusive partners", get locked into multiple-title deals, or otherwise lose their independence from the Big Publisher model of game business. An exception of course is Id, which we all know has a positively unique management situation. Valve also is regaining some cajones in this department.
So there are always indies, and indies are what make PC gaming greatest- past, present, future.
The first thing that comes to mind as a graphics programmer is that since there are theoretically fewer polygons/shader effects/character models/etc. onscreen at any time, one can spend more time rendering those things, thus making them look nicer; or render it at the original detail at a higher framerate. As poor as the engine performs in outdoor areas, this might have been a technical decision. What if it wasn't? The wannabe game designer in me puzzles. For one, it allows you to more easily target specific parts of an enemy because the enemy occupies more pixels on the screen... on the other hand, the player has a less complete view of the surroundings vs. a wider view aspect. Players these days, with optical mice and whatnot, do not suffer not being able to aim quickly due to technical reasons (poor framerate, sticky mouse ball) anymore though. The only motive I can puzzle out is that it may make interacting with the NPCs (Alex) more realistic- when we are talking to someone in the real world, eye contact and all, we are truly only looking at the area around their face. Going to a narrower perspective could possibly increase immersion in this way, by providing this focus.
Seriously. Wired is written for and by the idiots who brought us the dot com bust. Seeing as how they couldn't come up with a profitable model for so much as a magazine... it must have seemed natural for them to stoop to low tactics to save their asses. Having fond memories of pulling the wool over the eyes of ignorant venture capitalists, they first imagined hiring Igor and Ivan from the local wing of the Russian Mafia to push up their bottom line (knock off PC World's writers or something). Instead of opting for a civilized, time-tested and honor bound solution, they opted to hire a collection agency.
Remember, collection agencies are run by people to psychotic to be real cops, or even bounty hunters. These are the sorts of people that use tactics like the ones discussed in Kevin Mitnick's book Art of Deception in order to track down people who owe other people money. Instead of breaking their legs like Ivan and Igor, they simply ruin your credit rating.
Very few responses have actually answered this guy's first question: "What books would you recommend to a beginning game developer?"
Core Techniques and Algorithms in Game Programming. I own many game development tomes, and this one replaced 3 1/2 shelf feet of my reference material. This book contains everything the beginning competent programmer needs to get a quick start at programming any sort of game imaginable, and it covers topics from *useful* design patterns and data structures to shader programming.
Game Architecture and Design is another good book, but is a survey of information from design patterns, architecture, game design/ludology, project management, and business practices in games. Probably up your alley but not exactly what you asked for.
As for an introduction to game theory, none is better than Rules of Play. This book is the first extensive critique of the entire field of game theory as it is applied to game design that I have read. Lengthy, and it reads like a textbook (it was designed as one), but engaging.
I'm pretty sure that Microsoft would make a deal with Valve, if only to make them an X Box or XBox 360/2/Next/whatever exclusive.
Valve and Id are probably the only two developers that have that kind of clout these days.
Take a look at the commercialization of Counterstrike and Day of Defeat. Counterstrike pulled a lot of people into the half life fold, when before the most popular mods were generally for the Quake series. They saw quickly that mods were sustaining the sales of their product.
They also saw the potential of standalone products based off of these mods. Factor in piracy due to Counterstrike's popularity, and you see that they were looking at more effective copy protection. Looking into the future, they saw mod groups turning into the next big development studios. When creating business strategies, you always look for business models along the lines of the One Ring.
Thus Valve toiled away, improving the mod SDK and telling mod developers that were interested in commercializing quality mods. This brought a lot of talent to the Half Life SDK. Working on their next generation engine, they saw the need to make it easier to develop with, if only for their bottom line- and to make the next gen SDK easy to use for modders. Steam, an online distribution system, is the ultimate way to commercialize the mods- and distribute Half Life 2 to those users who are network connected, and whom trust Valve with their credit card number.
Thus Valve is trying, nay, has succeeded, in forging One Steam To Rule Them All. What they haven't done is focused on creating standards in such a way as to bring all developers at least partially into their fold. Thus, they've gone off and created their own corner of the universe.
I have no doubt they'll be the number one publisher of commercial Half Life mods. After all, the Eula and SDK license insure that.
They'll probably sign with a publisher that offers them a great royalty deal, and publishing support on at least two of the console systems, to suuport their physical boxes. If they can get enough mindshare via Steam, boxes on the shelf won't be their biggest source (pun!) of income.
...distribution. These days it is possible for a developer to market their own title. Great leaps in manufacturing technology in this internet age have meant it is much cheaper to produce the physical media than it was in epochs past (early nineties), such as the CD, box, etc. What is barely possible for a newcomer is to break into the distribution channel.
Distributors are the ones that make sure boxes reach the shelves, at the right box width and height, at stores like Wal Mart, CompUSA, and Best Buy. Having the right distributors signed on is more important than having the right publisher.
As for a developer breaking into the distribution channel, I only know of one example: Id. Back when they were operating their own phone/mail order system for Doom, they offered up the shareware for free. I.e., they wanted no royalty take on the shareware copies that sold everywhere. Hence why you could find the shareware at anyplace that sold software, and some places that didn't (I remember a friend's picture from a convenience store in socal from that period, showing doom shareware up for sale next to the bubblegum).
The point of gentoo's portage system, from my point of view, is the elimination of package dependency issues, and compiler version issues.
...I tried Redhat 5.2/6.x/7.x... ...I tried various debians... ...then I settled on Slackware. Every distros fscked up weirdo patches on their kernels, their XFree, their desktop environment and installers. Even the random libraries I used, such as the then-nacient SDL and Allegro had distro-specific patches. Which meant a binary I compiled on my box wouldn't run anywhere else. Ever wonder why small sourceforge projects don't release *ix binaries? Everyone is using their own damn gcc version, their own damn libc. You can't even be sure that a program with nothing but libc dependencies will compile.
I've used linux for about 10 years, but only heavily for the last 4. Why? I enjoy using linux because I enjoy the programming environment. It was hell getting to the point I'm at now though...
Slackware was fine, for awhile. Then they decided to move further and further from each individual projects standard source packages (kde, xfree, kernel) and I was having problems with getting the early nvidia driver to work with several of their kernels.
Portage solves the problem. If a program won't build with the particular version of gcc, or xfree, or whatever library you're using, the ebuild for it will depend on a specific version of the compilation environment and each library.
Everyone who talks about optimization (there are gains, but they are small) is missing the point. The point is that I am taking largely unchanged cvs copies of each project's source when I compile. As a developer, I worry about being up to date- so I build a new version of SDL in the backround while I browse the web, or go on coding. No fuss, no muss, and no worries like Debian has with Ubuntu- incompatible binary issues.
For God's sake, lets leave the incompatible binaries issue to other operating system families. Just build the source from it's source.
Distro leaders take note. *ix users are tired of incompatible binaries.
The Nebula Device
Its license is as permissive as the MIT license.
Its not an engine per se; its a framework for programming your own engine. But that is what most things billed as "3D Engines" actually are.
There is also Nevrax/Nel technology, which shipped in The Saga of Ryzom MMORPG. The software license is GPL, and it is a competitive cross-platform engine, much like Nebula- however, like Nebula, it is much more of a toolkit, though to a lesser extent.
There are a variety of $100 RAD game tools out there, and it seems like they have always hovered at this price point- you get what you pay for; undocumented, buggy code that is ok for a quick prototype but unviable in the long run.
Excepting Torque. This is an excellent engine for $100 US. The engine shipped in Tribes and Tribes 2, is cross platform, and has a mature toolchain for developing anything that is Tribes-like (predominantly outdoor terrain with buildings and tunnels in it). In fact, if what your developing is basically a Tribes 2 total conversion, the only code you would need to write would be AI and other game-specific code.
Ever hear of OpenAL? It doesn't fscking care what the underlying sound API is. In runs on Windows and OS/X too. Period.
"Whatever happened to the genius people who created Super Mario Brothers, Zelda, Quake, and Half Life?"
Shigeru Miyamoto is responsible for the first two. He works on the same franchises at Nintendo to this day.
Quake is a little tougher. Carmack of course, is still doing graphics programming and is pretty much in charge of Id; John Romero, the Lead Designer, left Id (or was canned?), started Ion Storm, and managed to push a whole company down the drain (though not single-handedly with Daikatana- they had some other flops). I'm not sure where Sandy Peterson (an excellent game designer, responsible for many digital and non-digital gaming classics), who did level design for Doom and Quake, is now, but I'm sure he is employed in the industry. American McGee (another Doom/Quake level designer), as we know, went on to produce American McGee's Alice.
Those that put together Half Life are working on the sequel.
I don't believe that McCloud's definition of art as communication necessarily conflicts with Kochalka's. If one is building a world in order to condense all of one's experiences, hopes, and dreams into this alternate reality, the medium must still communicate this in some way to the reader/viewer/player. Whether or not most readers are effectively communicated with probably seperates "great" art from the rest.
Law enforcement agencies are slowly moving towards "non-lethal" technologies to solve the issue of nuetralizing their "problems".
Why not create a relatively non-destructive (in a larger social sense) strain of virii that exploit the holes that other worms, trojans, and virii utilize/open? It could cause the operating system to not boot, or just completely disable the network, not affecting user data. What this would achieve is forcing the L-class user to take their machine to their guru or guru-for-hire to fix the problem, before their machine could inflict any more nastiness on the rest of Netville.
...Big Brother Inside
Gentoo as always I'm sure ;-)