I've tried recruiting testers from among friends and family, but I've run into one problem. Those few people in my circle of friends and family who do play video games don't want to test a game more than once every two weeks. After they die once, they become bored and don't feel like practicing enough to test more difficult missions later in the game.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you should work on that bug first and then they'll want to test it. Unless you're using permadeath, and have a long character creation process, if they're dying once and quitting, then they are either very very infrequent gamers or the game isn't fun enough. Since you're making a game, being fun is a requirement, not being fun is a bug. A game has to be really awful or really frustrating in order to stop a "gamer" restarting the first level to try again. Hell, I've played VVVVVV for a cumulative 17 hours and died thousands of times.
I was saying, "we're not asking for this for the sake of it because we're used to it on the PC, we're asking for this because it's a good idea".
We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC...it's because it's a good fucking idea for PC gamers.
Those articles are nice and all (Joel's ever so cute when he gets a bee in his bonnet), but as I've point out to ildon, it's possible for someone who doesn't care about tweaking settings to start the game and never even see an "Options" dialog. Moreover, they're looking at a very specific domain. Starting up Word, a user who "just wants to type a document" doesn't need to see a whole raft of options. However, a gamer, playing a game that runs sluggishly and wants to dial down anti-aliasing/model quality etc. is going to be extremely frustrated if he can't do that. I don't want to be able to have infinite control over my games, but I can handle something a little more involved than "Low, Medium, High".
Windows is fairly easy to use. Should Microsoft remove the registry and prevent anyone from changing any settings? Should they remove the ability to change the screen resolution? Window transparency?
It can be hidden in an "advanced options" menu, completely obliterating any complaints about a bad or confusing UI.
By "Advanced", do you mean something like "about:config" of Firefox, or do you mean actually testing every combination? The former is confusing; the latter increases your test matrix by one or two orders of magnitude if you attempt to support all combinations of options.
I mean, as in HL2, the main menu has an "Options" menu item. You click on that and are presented with simple options. If you want to turn off anti-aliasing, you can click on "Advanced...". If you are happy with the default settings, you never have to see those options, but if you aren't, you can change them. I don't understand why that is hard to grok? "about:config" is confusing, however, you also almost never need to use it to change options. Most users can use Firefox and never even need to see the contents of the "Options" dialog, let alone "about:config".
As for the test matrix complaint, I hadn't given a moment's thought to "testing every combination" because: a) that's not my job; and b) almost every PC game I've ever played had graphics options that I could change, and not one of them has ever crashed because a particular level of anti-aliasing was incompatible with a particular model quality. Hell, I edited my Quake 3 config file to increase the angle of my field of vision and it didn't crash.
Shit should just work. People shouldn't have to spend 30 minutes fiddling with graphics settings before they can even load up the game. They should be able to click the icon on their desktop, click "start game", and go without hassle.
Stop trolling you troll. They can. You can install a PC game like Half Life 2 and start playing immediately. It defaults to "optimum" settings for your machine. However, if you want to increase the settings at the expense of frame-rate, or decrease the settings because you don't need the eye-candy, you can do that too.
Exhibit A: For anyone who feels the need to alter their video settings in HL2, clicking Options>Video Tab, they see this.
Exhibit B: For anyone who feels they need to monkey with anything more than resolution/brightness, they can click on advanced.
I say again, in what way does this make for a confusing UI? In order to get anything even remotely confusing, you have to go looking for it. Firstly, this isn't the olden-days where you have to summon gaming voodoo and edit a config/bindings file, and it's not going to drive people away from PC gaming. The "advanced" options are available, but hidden, and there is an easy way to revert to the defaults. And the defaults are clearly labelled.
Secondly, I hope companies do stop porting games to PC if they're only going to do a half-arsed job of it as they seem to be doing now.
The most annoying practical problem I have with Steam is that it forgets its password every now and then, even so that little "Save Password" thing is checked. That aside, the forced patches are also an issue, its nice that you can auto-patch your games, but it really sucks that you have to. If the latest patch broke something in the game, you are fucked till the developer fixes it. Games on disc don't have that problem.
You can disable automatic updates for each game.
The biggest problem with Steam and DRM however is the lack of a family&friends mode. If I buy a disc game, I can lend it to a friend, let my brother play it, sell it or whatever. That's essentially how I got to play a large amount of games when I was younger. With Steam I am not allowed to do any of that, once bought it is locked to the account and giving away the account is forbidden by TOS and can potentially lead to a locked account.
Surely this is a problem with *any* online distribution system?
This is about PC GAMING! There's no need to expose these options to console-tards, but PC gamers with vastly differing system specifications want/need as much control as they can get. "low, medium, high, ultra"? Bullshit. I want to be able to fiddle with shadows, anti-aliasing, model-details etc. etc. until I get my optimal frame-rate/experience available on my system. We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC...it's because it's a good fucking idea for PC gamers. It can be hidden in an "advanced options" menu, completely obliterating any complaints about a bad or confusing UI.
"IX: Thou shalt not worship false gaming services"
Steam is the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the realm of online game services. Other than sheer weight, there are actually pretty good reasons why it's so successful. One of them is that, for the most part, it stays out of our way—unlike you, GFWL. When all I want is to play Street Fighter IV, you insist on making me create a profile. Without that profile, my unlocked characters won't be saved. Just brilliant. Did I mention the GFWL log-in screen also pops up after you purchase the game on Steam?
This. A thousand times this. Happened to me when I purchased Bioshock 2 from a bricks and mortar store for the special edition box/artwork/vinyl soundtrack. GFWL pops up and tells me that I have to create an ID in order to be able to save my single-player game. Wait...what? Another one: I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum on Steam when it was on sale. I start it up, and what do I see? GFWL. Today I started the game up and "Click to start", I'm presented with the login screen where I enter my GFWL login (which I use only for the 2 games I own which force it upon me). Then I'm told "There is an update for Games for Windows Live, if you refuse the update, you will exit the game. After updating, you may have to restart your computer. Do you want to update?". Awesome. Thanks for giving me a choice, dickbags. Then "Update complete, exit game and restart to play."
I love Steam. The sales, the library, (the browser overlay for consulting a walkthrough occasionally), the community stuff. I install a game and then run it. And it stays out of my way unless I need it. Games For Windows Live on the other hand, is an abortion that should be cast into the depths of hell. The only analog I've seen is "Mordac: Preventer of Information Services" in the Dilbert cartoons. It's like Microsoft wanted to come up with the most efficient way possible to stop people from enjoying the games they play. Every day spent alive, outside of a fire by the developers of GFWL is a day too many in my book.
Famous for think-of-the-children-ism (while featuring scantily clad teen celebrities), famous for railing against asylum-seekers, famous for generally low standards of journalistic integrity. An odious rag for sure, but I've never seen them out-and-out make up a story of this magnitude.
Hackers who stole the personal details of more than 200,000 Citigroup customers 'broke in through the front door' using an extremely simple technique.
And for the first time it has been revealed how the sophisticated cyber criminals made off with the staggering bounty of names, account numbers, email addresses and transaction histories
They simply logged on to the part of the group's site reserved for credit card customers - and substituted their account numbers which appeared in the browser's address bar with other numbers.
So..which is it? Simple or sophisticated? Or simple?
So anyone who is "courteous" will see that I have "high" number of unread emails and make the decision not to email me. People who aren't "courteous" either won't look, or won't care and just go ahead and send me email. Given that it's the "courteous" people with whom I most want to have contact, this is a sure-fire way to make email worse.
The best thing about email is that it's possible to let it sit unread until such a time when you can deal with it. What does this guy think will happen? My parents see I have a lot of unread email and decide not to email me, they then periodically check over the next month, but my unread messages never drop below "high" because they only ever check at a certain time of day and I only ever clear out my unread messages at a certain time of day. He wants to create a bastard chimera that has the worst parts of instant messaging and email.
When St. Steve returned, he rescued Apple with the iMac, and lo, he did declare:
...the 'i' in iMac to stand for "Internet"; it also represented the product's focus as a personal device ('i' for "individual").[3] Attention was
given to the out-of-box experience: the user needed to go through only two steps to set up and connect to the Internet. "There's no step 3!" was the catch-phrase in a popular iMac commercial narrated by actor Jeff Goldblum.[4] Another commercial, dubbed "Simplicity Shootout", pitted seven-year-old Johann Thomas and his border collie Brodie, with an iMac, against Adam Taggart, a Stanford University MBA student, with an HP Pavilion 8250, in a race to set up their computers. Johann and Brodie finished in 8 minutes and 15 seconds,[5] whereas Adam was still working on it by the end of the commercial. Apple later adopted the 'i' prefix across its consumer hardware and software lines, such as the iPod, iBook, iPhone, iPad and various pieces of software such as the iLife suite and iWork and the company's media player/store, iTunes.
Your incredulity is well placed. Prefixing everything with "i" is just as stupid as it sounds.
Same reason governments don't negotiate with terrorists (or at least not in public)
"That's a bingo!" (Not to mention funding some "terrorists".) Sony is no stranger to that game either, having previously offered a plum job to a hacker, who, as it happens, promptly turned them down because of their treatment of a fellow hacker.
In that case, Moby Dick was clearly plagiarized. There are millions of earlier writings that use the word "whale" somewhere.[citation needed]
Surely this is just pointless hand-waving unless you provide direct links to: Primary. Source.Documents. And no I won't accept links to secondary sources which cite primary sources, why should I have to sift through them all myself?!
Really? Firstly, I don't know about your current desktop PSU, but I'm far more likely to knock the power cable out/jog it before I bump the rocker switch enough to flip it. Moreover, while my current case has the PSU at the bottom, well away from the other cables, even when I had a case with the PSU at the top, it was far enough away that I never had a problem even getting close to it. Also, the cable on most of the modern desktop PSUs I've seen was between the switch and the other cables going in/out of the motherboard, again making it more likely that the cable would be knocked out (or jogged enough to matter) before the rocker switch was knocked off or on. In fact, for this reason, I think it would be far better to have a mechanical lock to prevent knocking out the PSU kettle lead, than to bother recessing a toggle switch in an enclosure...
Secondly, I'd argue that if you're "futzing around" with cabling under a cramped desk with the machine on, it behooves you to either a) take adequate care not to "bump" anything; or b) power down the machine and unplug the cable from the power supply to avoid switching it back on. Most rocker switches I've seen have some resistance in them anyway, so you need a non-trivial amount of pressure to flip them.
tl;dr, My anecdotal evidence: I've never accidentally toggled a power supply off, ever, and I've done more than my fair share of scrambling around under desks (with the lumps on my head to prove it).
It's one of the most commonly used words in the English language. It is the very first word of the summary. It is missing the very first letter. What The Fuck?
John Iovine long time designer/manufacturer of Geiger counters did an interview with Make: about a month ago and his concerns were just the same as yours. There's some interesting insights in the (admittedly short) interview, but it's well worth a read.
We have a couple of good tube suppliers, because we’ve been in the business for a while. One of them just said to me, “We’ve got shoe makers calling us up, yesterday they were making shoes, and today they want to start making Geiger counters.”
I know exactly what he was saying. And, really, anybody can make a working Geiger counter. You just put together a high voltage circuit and detect the pulses. But how accurate is it, and what’s its longevity? It took us years to perfect making a Geiger counter—a good Geiger counter. It’s still like a black art. As with a lot of things, you really have to be in it for a while, and see all the crazy things that can happen, and this enables you to can build some resiliency into the circuit so that it will keep functioning properly.
These people who are just looking to make a quick buck are saying, “I can build a Geiger counter.” Yeah, you can build a Geiger counter, and it will probably work on some level, but you won’t know how to calibrate the thing, or even know that it’s in the ballpark of being accurate.
A person can be a perfectly competent bookkeeper, accountant or any number of other things and yet not be competent (or diligent) enough to keep their machine virus-free.
Did you respond to the wrong post? What evidence is there that he doesn't "understand the technologies at play here"? What he's saying is a perfectly valid reason why he can't use any of the "alternatives" and that reason has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with the fact that his company has standardised on Skype, and because his relatives, on the other side of the world use Skype. Skype is synonymous with "video chat"/"internet telephony" for all the non-technical people I know and it has such critical mass that suggesting that they download a new client just so they can talk to you is going to get you funny looks.
So, if you want to talk to your family (he does) and if you need to talk to your work colleagues (he does) and they use Skype, there are no alternatives. The "why", which you are keen to discuss and which the GP didn't even allude to, is unimportant.
I didn't want to work in the Tax department anyway, I wanted to be a lumberjack. Leaping from tree to tree as I float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia...
In the same way that you don't *need* to fly from Los Angeles to New York when you can drive. You don't *need* to fly to get there, but you do need to fly in order to get there in 5 hours. Similarly, if you don't *need* to be at your most productive, then, as you say, you don't *need* a second monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
I've tried recruiting testers from among friends and family, but I've run into one problem. Those few people in my circle of friends and family who do play video games don't want to test a game more than once every two weeks. After they die once, they become bored and don't feel like practicing enough to test more difficult missions later in the game.
I mean this in the nicest possible way, but you should work on that bug first and then they'll want to test it. Unless you're using permadeath, and have a long character creation process, if they're dying once and quitting, then they are either very very infrequent gamers or the game isn't fun enough. Since you're making a game, being fun is a requirement, not being fun is a bug. A game has to be really awful or really frustrating in order to stop a "gamer" restarting the first level to try again. Hell, I've played VVVVVV for a cumulative 17 hours and died thousands of times.
We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC
What you're used to isn't necessarily usable. Please read this article and scroll down to "The question of preferences", and read this article by Joel Spolsky.
I was saying, "we're not asking for this for the sake of it because we're used to it on the PC, we're asking for this because it's a good idea".
We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC...it's because it's a good fucking idea for PC gamers.
Those articles are nice and all (Joel's ever so cute when he gets a bee in his bonnet), but as I've point out to ildon, it's possible for someone who doesn't care about tweaking settings to start the game and never even see an "Options" dialog. Moreover, they're looking at a very specific domain. Starting up Word, a user who "just wants to type a document" doesn't need to see a whole raft of options. However, a gamer, playing a game that runs sluggishly and wants to dial down anti-aliasing/model quality etc. is going to be extremely frustrated if he can't do that. I don't want to be able to have infinite control over my games, but I can handle something a little more involved than "Low, Medium, High".
Windows is fairly easy to use. Should Microsoft remove the registry and prevent anyone from changing any settings? Should they remove the ability to change the screen resolution? Window transparency?
It can be hidden in an "advanced options" menu, completely obliterating any complaints about a bad or confusing UI.
By "Advanced", do you mean something like "about:config" of Firefox, or do you mean actually testing every combination? The former is confusing; the latter increases your test matrix by one or two orders of magnitude if you attempt to support all combinations of options.
I mean, as in HL2, the main menu has an "Options" menu item. You click on that and are presented with simple options. If you want to turn off anti-aliasing, you can click on "Advanced...". If you are happy with the default settings, you never have to see those options, but if you aren't, you can change them. I don't understand why that is hard to grok? "about:config" is confusing, however, you also almost never need to use it to change options. Most users can use Firefox and never even need to see the contents of the "Options" dialog, let alone "about:config".
As for the test matrix complaint, I hadn't given a moment's thought to "testing every combination" because: a) that's not my job; and b) almost every PC game I've ever played had graphics options that I could change, and not one of them has ever crashed because a particular level of anti-aliasing was incompatible with a particular model quality. Hell, I edited my Quake 3 config file to increase the angle of my field of vision and it didn't crash.
Stop trolling you troll. They can. You can install a PC game like Half Life 2 and start playing immediately. It defaults to "optimum" settings for your machine. However, if you want to increase the settings at the expense of frame-rate, or decrease the settings because you don't need the eye-candy, you can do that too.
Exhibit A: For anyone who feels the need to alter their video settings in HL2, clicking Options>Video Tab, they see this.
Exhibit B: For anyone who feels they need to monkey with anything more than resolution/brightness, they can click on advanced.
I say again, in what way does this make for a confusing UI? In order to get anything even remotely confusing, you have to go looking for it. Firstly, this isn't the olden-days where you have to summon gaming voodoo and edit a config/bindings file, and it's not going to drive people away from PC gaming. The "advanced" options are available, but hidden, and there is an easy way to revert to the defaults. And the defaults are clearly labelled.
Secondly, I hope companies do stop porting games to PC if they're only going to do a half-arsed job of it as they seem to be doing now.
You can disable automatic updates for each game.
Surely this is a problem with *any* online distribution system?
This is about PC GAMING! There's no need to expose these options to console-tards, but PC gamers with vastly differing system specifications want/need as much control as they can get. "low, medium, high, ultra"? Bullshit. I want to be able to fiddle with shadows, anti-aliasing, model-details etc. etc. until I get my optimal frame-rate/experience available on my system. We're not asking for this for the sake of it...because we're used to it on the PC...it's because it's a good fucking idea for PC gamers. It can be hidden in an "advanced options" menu, completely obliterating any complaints about a bad or confusing UI.
Steam has the least intrusive "DRM" I've ever seen. Please explain how it is intrusive.
Point well made, and I know it makes sense, and yet it doesn't stop me melee-ing fresh-air every 2 minutes.
This. A thousand times this. Happened to me when I purchased Bioshock 2 from a bricks and mortar store for the special edition box/artwork/vinyl soundtrack. GFWL pops up and tells me that I have to create an ID in order to be able to save my single-player game. Wait...what? Another one: I bought Batman: Arkham Asylum on Steam when it was on sale. I start it up, and what do I see? GFWL. Today I started the game up and "Click to start", I'm presented with the login screen where I enter my GFWL login (which I use only for the 2 games I own which force it upon me). Then I'm told "There is an update for Games for Windows Live, if you refuse the update, you will exit the game. After updating, you may have to restart your computer. Do you want to update?". Awesome. Thanks for giving me a choice, dickbags. Then "Update complete, exit game and restart to play."
I love Steam. The sales, the library, (the browser overlay for consulting a walkthrough occasionally), the community stuff. I install a game and then run it. And it stays out of my way unless I need it. Games For Windows Live on the other hand, is an abortion that should be cast into the depths of hell. The only analog I've seen is "Mordac: Preventer of Information Services" in the Dilbert cartoons. It's like Microsoft wanted to come up with the most efficient way possible to stop people from enjoying the games they play. Every day spent alive, outside of a fire by the developers of GFWL is a day too many in my book.
Famous for think-of-the-children-ism (while featuring scantily clad teen celebrities), famous for railing against asylum-seekers, famous for generally low standards of journalistic integrity. An odious rag for sure, but I've never seen them out-and-out make up a story of this magnitude.
So..which is it? Simple or sophisticated? Or simple?
So anyone who is "courteous" will see that I have "high" number of unread emails and make the decision not to email me. People who aren't "courteous" either won't look, or won't care and just go ahead and send me email. Given that it's the "courteous" people with whom I most want to have contact, this is a sure-fire way to make email worse.
The best thing about email is that it's possible to let it sit unread until such a time when you can deal with it. What does this guy think will happen? My parents see I have a lot of unread email and decide not to email me, they then periodically check over the next month, but my unread messages never drop below "high" because they only ever check at a certain time of day and I only ever clear out my unread messages at a certain time of day. He wants to create a bastard chimera that has the worst parts of instant messaging and email.
Your incredulity is well placed. Prefixing everything with "i" is just as stupid as it sounds.
Same reason governments don't negotiate with terrorists (or at least not in public)
"That's a bingo!" (Not to mention funding some "terrorists".) Sony is no stranger to that game either, having previously offered a plum job to a hacker, who, as it happens, promptly turned them down because of their treatment of a fellow hacker.
Having checked the top left of this browser window, I feel confident in saying that Firefox will run on Windows.
Colossus was listed, but why not Colosson?
Surely this is just pointless hand-waving unless you provide direct links to: Primary. Source.Documents. And no I won't accept links to secondary sources which cite primary sources, why should I have to sift through them all myself?!
Really? Firstly, I don't know about your current desktop PSU, but I'm far more likely to knock the power cable out/jog it before I bump the rocker switch enough to flip it. Moreover, while my current case has the PSU at the bottom, well away from the other cables, even when I had a case with the PSU at the top, it was far enough away that I never had a problem even getting close to it. Also, the cable on most of the modern desktop PSUs I've seen was between the switch and the other cables going in/out of the motherboard, again making it more likely that the cable would be knocked out (or jogged enough to matter) before the rocker switch was knocked off or on. In fact, for this reason, I think it would be far better to have a mechanical lock to prevent knocking out the PSU kettle lead, than to bother recessing a toggle switch in an enclosure...
Secondly, I'd argue that if you're "futzing around" with cabling under a cramped desk with the machine on, it behooves you to either a) take adequate care not to "bump" anything; or b) power down the machine and unplug the cable from the power supply to avoid switching it back on. Most rocker switches I've seen have some resistance in them anyway, so you need a non-trivial amount of pressure to flip them.
tl;dr, My anecdotal evidence: I've never accidentally toggled a power supply off, ever, and I've done more than my fair share of scrambling around under desks (with the lumps on my head to prove it).
It's one of the most commonly used words in the English language. It is the very first word of the summary. It is missing the very first letter. What The Fuck?
Good. If you grind your bean too often you'll go blind.
We have a couple of good tube suppliers, because we’ve been in the business for a while. One of them just said to me, “We’ve got shoe makers calling us up, yesterday they were making shoes, and today they want to start making Geiger counters.”
I know exactly what he was saying. And, really, anybody can make a working Geiger counter. You just put together a high voltage circuit and detect the pulses. But how accurate is it, and what’s its longevity? It took us years to perfect making a Geiger counter—a good Geiger counter. It’s still like a black art. As with a lot of things, you really have to be in it for a while, and see all the crazy things that can happen, and this enables you to can build some resiliency into the circuit so that it will keep functioning properly.
These people who are just looking to make a quick buck are saying, “I can build a Geiger counter.” Yeah, you can build a Geiger counter, and it will probably work on some level, but you won’t know how to calibrate the thing, or even know that it’s in the ballpark of being accurate.
Oh my goodness, I've obviously been here too long because I totally missed the "than". Cripes.
A person can be a perfectly competent bookkeeper, accountant or any number of other things and yet not be competent (or diligent) enough to keep their machine virus-free.
You misunderstand the technologies at play here.
Did you respond to the wrong post? What evidence is there that he doesn't "understand the technologies at play here"? What he's saying is a perfectly valid reason why he can't use any of the "alternatives" and that reason has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with the fact that his company has standardised on Skype, and because his relatives, on the other side of the world use Skype. Skype is synonymous with "video chat"/"internet telephony" for all the non-technical people I know and it has such critical mass that suggesting that they download a new client just so they can talk to you is going to get you funny looks.
So, if you want to talk to your family (he does) and if you need to talk to your work colleagues (he does) and they use Skype, there are no alternatives. The "why", which you are keen to discuss and which the GP didn't even allude to, is unimportant.
I didn't want to work in the Tax department anyway, I wanted to be a lumberjack. Leaping from tree to tree as I float down the mighty rivers of British Columbia...
In the same way that you don't *need* to fly from Los Angeles to New York when you can drive. You don't *need* to fly to get there, but you do need to fly in order to get there in 5 hours. Similarly, if you don't *need* to be at your most productive, then, as you say, you don't *need* a second monitor.