This and the "Microsoft sits down with Windows 7 Phone Jailbreakers" article make two positive articles about Microsoft in one day. Did I accidentally fall through a wormhole and end up in backwards land? Next you'll be telling me Linux will be the core of Windows 8 and Bill Gates thinks vaccines cause autism.
You could remove Java from most people's PCs and the only side effect would be more disk space.
This is pretty much my experience with Java. If I am Joe Q Ignorant User, and every now and then Java is updated, and every time it's updated it displays an ad for OpenOffice.org, I am going to conflate it with those cheesy pop-ups my tech-head son says I shouldn't click on.
To the end user, Java means nothing. And why should it mean anything?
Well, almost nothing. If anything gets in between me and my Minecraft, worlds will end. And I mean that as hard as I can.
Having worked in the US before, too, and being someone who is currently changing jobs, I think the solution is pretty simple -- do not apply to companies in the US. There are plenty of opportunities in Canada and Europe.
Duke Nukem Forever is also going to use Unreal 2.5, Unreal 3, and Crytek! All merged together into one mega-engine! It's the only way to handle Duke! It's so crazy it has to be true!
That would be awesome! First, get a dark, moving, and awe-inspiring script. Then, go through round after round of fund-raising and make a bunch of reports showing how the funds have been used for a series of dark, moving, and awe-inspiring props and special effects for the film. Finally, the night before the big screening, run off with all the money.
I can support this. Who wants to donate? You'll get an Associate Producer credit in the film!
This. Ever since my boss turned me on to RSS, my usual strategy has become looking for the RSS "subscribe" button and not reading the web page. Enduring the red-and-yellow-fest of modern web design is not for me -- even CNN is a ketchup and mustard blink-tag fest compared to my RSS feeds.
Heh, I was going to post this exact thing. Balsa wood, glue, tissue paper, and Bernouilli's Theorem will go a long way and probably won't land you on a government list.
As for reminiscing about activities that *will* get you on a list, I used my "learn about electronics" kit to make hydrogen and then set it on fire. I also used to power it with a voltage convertor I salvaged from an alarm clock in lieu of batteries...
As a Ps2 developer since the launch of the hardware platform, I have nothing but contempt for Sony and their so-called "engineers," and I really wish nothing but death and failure upon them.
That being said, backwards compatibility with the Ps2, Ps3, Xbox, and Xbox 360?! You'd have to be nuts to even consider it. Even if MS bought out Sony (which is problematic given their different markets), it would take a _massive_ engineering effort to emulate the Ps2/Ps3 on a new platform. The Ps2 will have severe problems with VU0/VU1 synchronization and texture uploads; the Ps3 will be worse because it's the same wrong-headed and worthless design taken to the next level.
The Xbox 360 can't emulate anything that doesn't play *very* nice with Direct3D on the Xbox -- why would its successor be any different about the 360, let alone the original Xbox? Where do you think the list of backwards-compatible games came from? popular demand? puh-leeeeze. It's because of technical feasibility and only because of technical feasibility.
In short, I guess I'm saying Microsoft _could_ buy out Sony, but it'd be a pretty stupid waste of money.
Well!... I must apologize for not knowing that Microsoft treating its workers right was "off topic." Hopefully, I will never come across a project managed by anyone who considers such irrelevant details beneath them, such as the mouth-breathing retard who moderated my post.
... CowboyNeal's hot flashes to be made into a film at 11:00.
Seriously, why is this news?
I just got out of a job that turned thorougly repulsive on me -- imagine trying to do what you love and being cluelessly mis-micromanaged into the dirt instead. I was a lead architect, and I quit in thorough disgust.
I feel quite vindicated with the savaging the product's been getting in the press, too. (Well, okay, it's only starting to get savaged, but many happy tomorrows...). Maybe they'll actually start... *gasp*... firing people who can't do their jobs!
I have a friend at Microsoft, and she has it much better than I did. Her manager flat-out told her that if she couldn't get it done in a 40 hour week, let them know and they'll start cutting stuff. Beats the everliving crap out of "hey, we decided you should go from A to F to Q to N to L to Y to C to F (again!) to H to B!! give us your opinion so we can totally ignore it (again!!!) and do what we decided anyway! Good luck taking breaks -- our roving hallway monitors will classify you as a slacker."
Delayed a year?... features cut?... where do I sign? It beats the hell out of (insert mystery game company here). Lucky bastards.
Although that begs the question: would you rather have great games, or HDTV resolution? Microsoft ate up a _lot_ of the 360's hardware power to bring us the latter... and hopefully Nintendo will get us the former by taking the big risk they are.
So, the question then becomes, who cares about the Ps3? they could be 3rd to market, and they'll have a piece of hardware designed by people *completely* out of touch with how games are made.
Funny story: a friend/coworker of mine attended a Sony developer conference (similar to MS's X Fest / Game Fest), and heard a bunch of speeches on such things as parallelizing graphics pipelines. To Sony, everyone was saying "yes, what a great idea!"... but when they went out to lunch with each other, though, it went more like "I can't believe they're doing this... what the hell?!?!" When my friend told one of the hardware engineers that nobody makes games that could utilize the Ps3 hardware at anywhere near the max numbers, the engineer's response was "really?"
But then, as per my previous comment, I may have some embittered Ps2 developer bias:)
As another poster has said, I doubt copy protection is the sole factor here.
I do hope they fail miserably, though. I was a Ps2 developer, and given their level of developer support, I'd easily be able to file complete bankruptcy under "just desserts."
Yeah, I like to wait for DVDs, too, since I got a great home theater setup. There's another factor you're forgetting, though: My home theater is deliciously close to my fridge, which contains all manner of tasty alcoholic beverages... ohh, yes.
Oddly, I'm kind of fuzzy on how a lot of movies end.
> I would love to see a piece on this from the developers point of view.
Well, I recently resigned from a developer after quite a few years there. According to this interview, we've gone from being "experienced" to "inexperienced" with our ability to deliver games, and yet we've gone from "inexperienced" to "experienced" in terms of implementing a lot of the things he associates with experienced developers.
Schedules and processes are important and have their place; however, there are limits and balances to consider. To the extent that game development is a creative process, it is very difficult to schedule. Schedules need wiggle room (particularly for the harder areas), and processes need flexibility.
In my ex-employer's case, we had neither. The schedule was done down to such tight time increments that it was a nightmare to create and maintain, and the processes made it worse. Leads couldn't lead since they were all always in meetings; when they weren't, they were so flooded with authorization requests and status updates (tied to the schedule) that they were generally ineffective even when they could lead. Inflexible processes (ie, not adapted to the strengths/weaknesses of the team) frustrated pretty much everyone.
So, in terms of what the producer was looking for, we had everything he'd expect from an experienced developer, yet the project's a year behind and possibly facing another delay -- probably 3x our longest delay to date.
Of course, I don't know any specifics about the publisher/developer relationship in the article, so I'm not familiar with how he's regarded by his developers. Like anything else, there's good producers and bad producers. Unfortunately, it seems they're a _lot_ harder to tell apart.
The plus side to this, though, is that with all the ex-employees and soon-to-be ex-employees, the possibility of making something really interesting is getting higher and higher.
I'm not sure there's a cause/effect relationship between swearing a lot and having a cramped vocabulary. All words are used in sentences to replace more complex concepts and emotions -- it's the nature of language. I would contend swearing is not a factor. Those with the temerity to develop a command of English will; those who can't not think stuff good.
Pretty fucking simple, really.
Slashdot Mirror
This and the "Microsoft sits down with Windows 7 Phone Jailbreakers" article make two positive articles about Microsoft in one day. Did I accidentally fall through a wormhole and end up in backwards land? Next you'll be telling me Linux will be the core of Windows 8 and Bill Gates thinks vaccines cause autism.
You could remove Java from most people's PCs and the only side effect would be more disk space.
This is pretty much my experience with Java. If I am Joe Q Ignorant User, and every now and then Java is updated, and every time it's updated it displays an ad for OpenOffice.org, I am going to conflate it with those cheesy pop-ups my tech-head son says I shouldn't click on.
To the end user, Java means nothing. And why should it mean anything?
Well, almost nothing. If anything gets in between me and my Minecraft, worlds will end. And I mean that as hard as I can.
Having worked in the US before, too, and being someone who is currently changing jobs, I think the solution is pretty simple -- do not apply to companies in the US. There are plenty of opportunities in Canada and Europe.
Duke Nukem Forever is also going to use Unreal 2.5, Unreal 3, and Crytek! All merged together into one mega-engine! It's the only way to handle Duke! It's so crazy it has to be true!
That would be awesome! First, get a dark, moving, and awe-inspiring script. Then, go through round after round of fund-raising and make a bunch of reports showing how the funds have been used for a series of dark, moving, and awe-inspiring props and special effects for the film. Finally, the night before the big screening, run off with all the money. I can support this. Who wants to donate? You'll get an Associate Producer credit in the film!
This. Ever since my boss turned me on to RSS, my usual strategy has become looking for the RSS "subscribe" button and not reading the web page. Enduring the red-and-yellow-fest of modern web design is not for me -- even CNN is a ketchup and mustard blink-tag fest compared to my RSS feeds.
Heh, I was going to post this exact thing. Balsa wood, glue, tissue paper, and Bernouilli's Theorem will go a long way and probably won't land you on a government list. As for reminiscing about activities that *will* get you on a list, I used my "learn about electronics" kit to make hydrogen and then set it on fire. I also used to power it with a voltage convertor I salvaged from an alarm clock in lieu of batteries ...
Come back when you can recognize a pair, MIT.
but that was like six years ago, so ...
As a Ps2 developer since the launch of the hardware platform, I have nothing but contempt for Sony and their so-called "engineers," and I really wish nothing but death and failure upon them. That being said, backwards compatibility with the Ps2, Ps3, Xbox, and Xbox 360?! You'd have to be nuts to even consider it. Even if MS bought out Sony (which is problematic given their different markets), it would take a _massive_ engineering effort to emulate the Ps2/Ps3 on a new platform. The Ps2 will have severe problems with VU0/VU1 synchronization and texture uploads; the Ps3 will be worse because it's the same wrong-headed and worthless design taken to the next level. The Xbox 360 can't emulate anything that doesn't play *very* nice with Direct3D on the Xbox -- why would its successor be any different about the 360, let alone the original Xbox? Where do you think the list of backwards-compatible games came from? popular demand? puh-leeeeze. It's because of technical feasibility and only because of technical feasibility. In short, I guess I'm saying Microsoft _could_ buy out Sony, but it'd be a pretty stupid waste of money.
I'm sure you meant to say "ultrafast air *bombing*" instead of "travel." .. just a thought.
No wonder I gave up reading slashdot for so long.
Seriously, why is this news?
I just got out of a job that turned thorougly repulsive on me -- imagine trying to do what you love and being cluelessly mis-micromanaged into the dirt instead. I was a lead architect, and I quit in thorough disgust.
I feel quite vindicated with the savaging the product's been getting in the press, too. (Well, okay, it's only starting to get savaged, but many happy tomorrows ...). Maybe they'll actually start ... *gasp* ... firing people who can't do their jobs!
I have a friend at Microsoft, and she has it much better than I did. Her manager flat-out told her that if she couldn't get it done in a 40 hour week, let them know and they'll start cutting stuff. Beats the everliving crap out of "hey, we decided you should go from A to F to Q to N to L to Y to C to F (again!) to H to B!! give us your opinion so we can totally ignore it (again!!!) and do what we decided anyway! Good luck taking breaks -- our roving hallway monitors will classify you as a slacker."
Delayed a year? ... features cut? ... where do I sign? It beats the hell out of (insert mystery game company here). Lucky bastards.
So, the question then becomes, who cares about the Ps3? they could be 3rd to market, and they'll have a piece of hardware designed by people *completely* out of touch with how games are made.
Funny story: a friend/coworker of mine attended a Sony developer conference (similar to MS's X Fest / Game Fest), and heard a bunch of speeches on such things as parallelizing graphics pipelines. To Sony, everyone was saying "yes, what a great idea!" ... but when they went out to lunch with each other, though, it went more like "I can't believe they're doing this ... what the hell?!?!" When my friend told one of the hardware engineers that nobody makes games that could utilize the Ps3 hardware at anywhere near the max numbers, the engineer's response was "really?"
But then, as per my previous comment, I may have some embittered Ps2 developer bias :)
I do hope they fail miserably, though. I was a Ps2 developer, and given their level of developer support, I'd easily be able to file complete bankruptcy under "just desserts."
Oddly, I'm kind of fuzzy on how a lot of movies end.
Well, I recently resigned from a developer after quite a few years there. According to this interview, we've gone from being "experienced" to "inexperienced" with our ability to deliver games, and yet we've gone from "inexperienced" to "experienced" in terms of implementing a lot of the things he associates with experienced developers.
Schedules and processes are important and have their place; however, there are limits and balances to consider. To the extent that game development is a creative process, it is very difficult to schedule. Schedules need wiggle room (particularly for the harder areas), and processes need flexibility.
In my ex-employer's case, we had neither. The schedule was done down to such tight time increments that it was a nightmare to create and maintain, and the processes made it worse. Leads couldn't lead since they were all always in meetings; when they weren't, they were so flooded with authorization requests and status updates (tied to the schedule) that they were generally ineffective even when they could lead. Inflexible processes (ie, not adapted to the strengths/weaknesses of the team) frustrated pretty much everyone.
So, in terms of what the producer was looking for, we had everything he'd expect from an experienced developer, yet the project's a year behind and possibly facing another delay -- probably 3x our longest delay to date.
Of course, I don't know any specifics about the publisher/developer relationship in the article, so I'm not familiar with how he's regarded by his developers. Like anything else, there's good producers and bad producers. Unfortunately, it seems they're a _lot_ harder to tell apart.
The plus side to this, though, is that with all the ex-employees and soon-to-be ex-employees, the possibility of making something really interesting is getting higher and higher.
I'm not sure there's a cause/effect relationship between swearing a lot and having a cramped vocabulary. All words are used in sentences to replace more complex concepts and emotions -- it's the nature of language. I would contend swearing is not a factor. Those with the temerity to develop a command of English will; those who can't not think stuff good. Pretty fucking simple, really.