So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
There is, and it's mentioned in the summary -- Gnash.
The problem is that neither Gnash nor libswf are anywhere near feature-complete, and aren't necessarily any more stable than Adobe's version. As you say:
The disadvantage of not being able to play Flash is mostly on sites like YouTube.
None of the open-source implementations, last I checked, would run YouTube, or any embedded video.
Now, my preferred approach would be to get rid of Flash wherever we possibly can, as the first poster says. YouTube could easily be implemented with the HTML5 Video tag, which is supported in Safari, and in newer builds of Firefox 3 -- and it could fall back to Flash pretty easily, probably even transparently, given the right library.
The problem is, I can't exactly walk into Mountain View saying "You guys realize that Flash is destroying the Web, right? That's pretty evil, right? Um, hello?"
By the way, regarding your sig:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That's not entirely fair. There are many reasons why architecture isn't a good analogy, but I won't go into that now... Instead, I'll simply cite a case of a "woodpecker" destroying civilization.
"Web-based" would kind of imply that it was all done in HTML/SVG and Javascript -- probably with a dozen audio tags for the effects.
And while that would be really cool to attempt, I don't think you could really match Quake 3 visuals, not to mention the difficulty (impossibility!) of porting a C/OpenGL rendering engine to SVG/JavaScript.
No, this would need to be supported by some sort of plugin -- if it was to be cross-platform, my first guess would be Flash 10, and my second guess would be Java. But both of these would, again, imply a full rewrite.
So it's probably an ActiveX control, which certainly would explain why it's Windows-only.
That or it's a client which embeds a browser, in which case, it can hardly be called "web-based".
But if it's true that encrypted video streams can be dumped using an easy to use tool then the guy has a point. Adobe aren't doing as well as some other companies are.
And we should be glad.
Do you know why iTunes does a better job?
It's not because iTunes has better or stronger encryption. (Remember, it has to be able to run this encryption on an iPod, and it drains battery life as it is.)
It's not because iTunes is smarter or trickier about how it hides its keys. (Remember, they have to hit RAM at some point, barring full TCPM, which iTunes doesn't require.)
It's certainly not because people care more about ripping things from YouTube than from iTunes.
It's much simpler:
Apple has actually gone and sued the people cracking it.
That is the missing ingredient -- but honestly, what you are talking about is suing people for tinkering. I really hope Adobe doesn't start doing that.
Indeed, that is the larger problem, and the one which makes me laugh at this.
Let me direct you to a small scam which claims to "encrypt" your HTML: HTML Protector. You know, this actually used to be hard... These clowns just wrap everything in big "unencode" calls, and run some Javascript before the page is loaded to try to block "unauthorized" access. Surprise, surprise, they block Firefox -- Firebug made this trivial to crack.
Anyone will sell you a product which claims to "protect" your content from being stolen by your users, while simultaneously transmitting your content to your users.
None of these products can work, because in the rare cases where they're actually doing real encryption, it relies on both the decryption keys and the ciphertext residing on my machine, along with a program which is designed to put the two together. At this point, perhaps "cracking" is too strong a word -- it's really more like putting a puzzle together.
There are much more reasonable criticisms you could correctly make of David if you wish to do so.
Well, the simple one is jealousy. I don't remember her name, but there was the story where David saw a woman bathing, found out who her husband was, and arranged for him to die.
Well, as long as we're talking about the David and Goliath story, once David grew up to be a general, he was pretty much as bloodthirsty and savage as any other.
Specifically, he would cut off his enemies' foreskins as proof of how many he killed.
Yes, you read that right -- their foreskins.
I know this mostly because my name is David, and I used to be proud of this guy -- until I read the actual story (and not the sugarcoated kids' version, which is still pretty bad.)
To avoid being completely offtopic, I guess I wonder how much we should really be cheering the "little guy"? I love to see the RIAA writhing in agony on the ground, holding its testicles, but this isn't combat. Do we really want to support an "emotional distress" charge?
hardcore game players will... turn off all the extra visual effects that make it hard to see other players (don't need fog, lens flare, smoke effects, high-resolution detail, light haze, high screen resolutions) and which slow down frame rate.
However, if these effects are being used to influence gameplay, you could require them as a baseline.
At which point, if "hardcore" gamers figure out how to disable them, they're no longer "hardcore", they're "cheaters".
As for the rest of us, consider two possibilities: First, console shooters up the ante -- you now have to modify the hardware in order to cheat in this way, and there's no argument that your framerate would be affected (everyone's framerate is affected in the same way).
And second, just WTF did you buy that multi-thousand-dollar gaming rig for, if you're going to turn down all the visuals? (For that matter, if it's a single-player game, what is the point of cheating in that way?)
He had the money to buy the toys that made the difference between "hard-working dead guy" and "superhero".
True, money was a necessity.
However, he also had to be more hardworking and skilled than the average rich dead guy -- and, really, anyone could go into the hills in Japan (or wherever) and train for a few years. And he had to be smart -- remember the cell phone trick? Yes, he paid some guy to come up with the basic idea, but he did have to be familiar with it himself.
Because the benefits of being a Kung-Fu Master wouldn't make much of a difference in people's lives. The abilities of the Jedi would.
Not really -- most of the abilities are combat-oriented. The remaining are:
- Long-term prescience (which is unreliable and easily clouded, and they'd have been better off if they had a better understanding of politics and current events)
- Jedi mind-tricks -- some species have a natural immunity to this, and it only affects the "weak-minded" -- I imagine you'd see people working to develop stronger minds if mind-tricking was common.
I think that actually would tend to go against my earlier point, though.
I agree with you except on Doom vs Half-Life. The basic premise is you control an avatar in a combat setting. Seems to be the same idea in both cases. Everything else is just details.
(Hint: Doom and Half-Life are at least the same genre. Kudos and Sims are not -- Kudos is a turn-based RPG, whereas Sims is a realtime simulation.)
We already have a wireless standard for this purpose. It's called Bluetooth.
USB means you can plug things directly in, and have them either charge, or be entirely powered by the socket. It also means you can physically see where it's plugged into your computer, and short of a freaky tempest attack, it's safe to enter your password on a wired USB keyboard.
Wireless means you don't have to deal with wires, but you do have to deal with batteries. It also means that unless you really understand what's going on, it's very possible that someone else could hijack your keyboard and capture your password.
Oh, and Bluetooth uses roughly the same tech as Wifi, which means that the next proposed upgrade to Bluetooth is finally going to be around the speed of USB 2.0.
I would be OK with firewire going away if Firewire 3200 is outperformed by USB 3.0 without hogging to many clock cycles.
Define "too many" -- in my mind, it ultimately comes down to price. While it's overly-simplistic, a dual-core CPU costs about $50, and a triple-core costs about $100. A cheap firewire adapter is less than $20...
So, if it required a whole extra CPU, it would be a bad deal. But I doubt it requires that -- and at that price, it would have to be using more than $20% of the CPU, all the time, for firewire to make sense.
And that's assuming all other things are equal. In my experience, outside of a few niche high-bandwidth requirements (digital video), everything "USB-like" is either USB or Bluetooth. With USB 3.0, they've got high-bandwidth more than covered, so I imagine I would see far fewer Firewire-only devices.
Well, first, I imagine it would make a USB 3.0 hub support far more of the slower variety.
But consider that USB 2.0 isn't fast enough for standard desktop hard drives, and it's obvious we do need more speed. Whether we need that much more speed is up for debate, but I'd argue that if we're going to spend all that money on an upgrade, we may as well make it as fast as we can, just in case.
He thinks people like Steam for convenience. Maybe. Me, I am just afraid of giving my CC number to an unknown vendor.
Those things combined, yes. But you do have to start somewhere.
While I'm at it, I use Paypal with Steam -- so there's that additional layer. But I would say, interface with every vendor and with every payment system out there.
He needs to explain to people how his games are original. What sets Kudos apart from the Sims?
Well, your response suggests he needs to simply shorten that to a catchphrase that he can plaster everywhere, so that people like you will actually notice. But here:
Kudos is a turn based strategy game where you control someone's life.
The Sims is many things, but it is not turn based. There are other differences, but that was the most obvious, and took me maybe 20 seconds to find.
Now, excuse me while I hijack (pirate!) your thread to respond to the rest of TFA:
People think demos are too short. My demos *are* short, because the marketing man in me sees that you can't give away too much. I've wanted people to feel a bit annoyed when the demo cuts out, so they buy the game to keep playing.
I would say, the solution is to make the game longer, but also to make the demo long enough. The point of the demo isn't to irritate them so that they go buy the game -- it's to lead them on. It's to get them hooked so that they can't easily just stop there.
Take the WoW 10-day trial. Can you really stop after 10 days, abandon your character, and go do something else, if you played at all during those 10 days?
A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating.
I would say, that is a factor, but it's nowhere near as much a factor as how easy it could be to buy those games. Take Penny Arcade's comments -- honestly, at $20 or so, it's not huge.
Then again, lowering his price may help -- after all, Portal cost $20. Let's see -- do I want to play Kudos, or the best game of last year?
I get the impression that if I make Kudos 2 not just lots better than the original, but hugely, overwhelmingly, massively better, well polished, designed and balanced, that a lot of would-be pirates will actually buy it.
Somewhat, yes. But that's not really why you want to make a better game.
You want to make a better game, because if it's good enough, pirates really won't be a dent in the kind of profit you'll be bringing in -- and people will be satisfied. And a satisfied customer is, quite possibly, a repeat customer.
Content is tied to engines. It's ephemeral.... Game engines do depreciate.
Really? I doubt that.
Engines are not ephemeral -- in fact, it's my understanding that the Source Engine, used by everything coming out of Valve since Half-Life 2 (and by at least a few third-parties, and dozens of modders), is actually a more recent evolution of the GoldSrc engine -- that's actually why they're called that -- which was used in Half-Life 1, and, in turn, was based on the QuakeWorld engine, which was, in turn, based on Quake.
And it continues to evolve -- things like HDR and film grain, for example.
So, going by the release dates, that's over ten years of development on the same engine. Sure, it evolved, but so does every open source project -- does the 2.6 Linux kernel really resemble the 2.2 kernel much, except in name?
Now, the content of the games does start to look dated -- although I would argue that Half-Life is still very playable. And that's the part I'm not sure the community would be able to keep updating -- nor should they. Wouldn't you rather play Half-Life 2 than a remake of Half-life?
So, I would argue that the game code could be open, while the content could be closed. If there was a sufficiently standard engine, I imagine it could be developed in an open source way, and kept updated -- but it would take work from those using it; that is, either it would have to be LGPL, or game studios would have to mostly contribute back.
But supposing such an engine existed, I would imagine that attempting to protect the content through DRM could be viewed as just as irritating and unnecessary as trying to protect other forms of media (music and movies) the same way.
It's Moore's Law speeding ahead too quickly for software engineering to iterate rather than start from scratch.
Well, again, look at Valve.
New stuff shows up like shaders or whatnot.
Shaders? Really?
From an API perspective, why should applying a shader be different than applying a texture?
And from an implementation perspective, I'll again point you to engines which have had these things added, and which have worked very well. There are beginners' tutorials for how to add shaders to your -- not even game engine, but 100-line OpenGL demo.
If it's too hard for you to add shaders, then your code is too brittle. It's just a bit more obvious with games.
Again, sentiment.
Sure, but if you want to be completely cold-blooded about it, try this: Think of all the duplicated effort. Right now, there are at least three major, commercial engines that I could name off the top of my head, plus all the specialized versions of these, and the proprietary-and-closely-held properties like the Starbreeze engine...
Now, once you've actually written a complete engine, it may make more sense, in the short term, to try to sell it. However, in the long term, I'm arguing that it's less profitable for the industry as a whole to go down that path -- because you will have competition, and your competition will be doing exactly the same thing you are -- which means both of you are spending more time coding mundane details like scene graphs and less time actually building a shippable game.
Even if a number of studios were to collaborate for a very short term -- the "three years" you mention -- assuming the engine is going to die, that would suggest that a new engine could be built more quickly.
How about trees?
The same holds, only moreso:
There's a company that sells the tree generation graphics to all the game makers
I guess I would have found it to be much more lame if everyone could get to be a Jedi if they just worked really hard.
Out of curiosity, do you like Batman? Because that's one of the things that I love about Batman -- he's human, and he's not even particularly special as a human, beyond having trained very hard.
Want to be a Jedi? No talent? Well if you're rich you can buy your way in by getting the best tutors.
You still wouldn't be as good a Jedi, and it would still take a lot of training and discipline.
Having the only requirement to being a Jedi be "working hard" would effectively kill the mysticism of it. Why isn't everyone a Jedi?
I don't know. Why isn't everyone a Kung-Fu Master? Why doesn't everyone at least have some martial arts or self defense training?
Some of it is skill, and some of that is innate.
And some of it is that everyone has their own lives, and their own problems, most of which can't be solved with Kung-Fu.
blocking UAC is something that should be done by default, particularly if you are a slashdot reader.
Well, no, as a Slashdot reader, the right approach is to simply not install Vista. That said...
There is no reason at all for it to be there.
It's a direct ripoff of sudo, which has been widely considered a Good Thing on Linux and Mac.
Sure, there are some things that suck about the implementation. Sure, it's annoying as hell. And sure, a lot of this is Microsoft's fault -- even indirectly, by making it possible for developers to assume admin rights for so long. Unix wasn't exactly a new concept when Windows was released, nor were limited NT accounts a new concept when Win2K was released.
However, saying that there is no reason for it to be there is intellectually dishonest. Sudo is a good idea -- Microsoft just managed to fuck up their ripoff of it beyond recognition, as usual.
One more thing:
eat up developer hours and show around at section meetings in Redmond.
If you want to bitch about that, bitch about the Start Menu. Do you have any idea how many meetings they had to decide what to put in the shutdown (standby, hibernate, etc) section of the Start Menu? Yes -- many meetings, not even for the whole start menu, but just shutdown.
The midichlorians make perfect sense if you think about what happens to Vader.
Only in the context of the prequels.
Then Obi-Wan laid the smack down on Mustafar, reducing his body mass (and, thus, his midichlorian count) by 50%. After that, Vader was a mechanical wretch, the Emperor's little whipping boy unable to live up to his full potential.
Except, in the context of the original movies, he was absolutely not a "mechanical wretch", nor was he the "Emperor's little whipping boy" -- he was a fearsome Dark Lord, one of the scarier bad guys, second only to the Emperor. And not even in power -- after all, he did kill the Emperor in the end.
That's why the Emperor wanted Luke. He wasn't stunted like Vader was. He had the potential to be far more powerful than Vader.
Vader had to talk him into that, though -- he was all for simply killing Luke before he could be dangerous at all.
Honestly, I think it was more about having another Jedi at all, rather than having a "whole" Jedi.
The prequels aren't as ham-fisted as people like to make out. But Jar Jar still sucks.
Oh, I agree. They got more right than people give them credit for.
But it's not just Jar-Jar -- Lucas has gotten far too much wrong, at this point. Han shot first!
wasn't it always implied that Force sensitivity was inherited? I mean Darth Vader passed along his potential abilities to his son...
Well, yes, but that was a bit more like the idea that traits which might lead to, say, skill as a musician, or as an athlete, might be passed on to a son. And, in certain feudal societies, you were actually born into what you would do for the rest of your life.
But today, well... My father's a stockbroker, but that's no reason I can't go off and train and become, say, an Olympic athlete. (The fact that I'm in my twenties means I missed that chance, but you get the point -- how many Olympic athletes are children of former Olympic athletes?)
Posting anonymously due to embarassasment at caring about this crap...
But the same kind of thing may be true in the real universe. Just because we don't currently know of a biological basis for those who are great artists, writers, mathematicians, composers, etc., doesn't mean there isn't a biological basis for such traits.
Maybe there is, but as of yet, there's no evidence to support that -- and there is, in fact, evidence to the contrary.
Those with no artistic, literary, mathematical, or musical talent are just SOL and will never be great in those fields no matter how hard they try.
I actually haven't seen people like that, outside of Internet trolls. I've seen people who have no artistic, literary, mathematical, or musical motivation, and people who struggle at these things. But I've met very few people who actually can't do these things.
No, they'll never be great in those fields, but the Force makes it absolutely impossible to even be mediocre or bad in those fields.
Regardless, it's not so much that I feel it's unrealistic, it's that I feel it's uninspiring.
Slashdot Mirror
So there is no version of Flash that is open source then?
There is, and it's mentioned in the summary -- Gnash.
The problem is that neither Gnash nor libswf are anywhere near feature-complete, and aren't necessarily any more stable than Adobe's version. As you say:
The disadvantage of not being able to play Flash is mostly on sites like YouTube.
None of the open-source implementations, last I checked, would run YouTube, or any embedded video.
Now, my preferred approach would be to get rid of Flash wherever we possibly can, as the first poster says. YouTube could easily be implemented with the HTML5 Video tag, which is supported in Safari, and in newer builds of Firefox 3 -- and it could fall back to Flash pretty easily, probably even transparently, given the right library.
The problem is, I can't exactly walk into Mountain View saying "You guys realize that Flash is destroying the Web, right? That's pretty evil, right? Um, hello?"
By the way, regarding your sig:
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
That's not entirely fair. There are many reasons why architecture isn't a good analogy, but I won't go into that now... Instead, I'll simply cite a case of a "woodpecker" destroying civilization.
"Web-based" would kind of imply that it was all done in HTML/SVG and Javascript -- probably with a dozen audio tags for the effects.
And while that would be really cool to attempt, I don't think you could really match Quake 3 visuals, not to mention the difficulty (impossibility!) of porting a C/OpenGL rendering engine to SVG/JavaScript.
No, this would need to be supported by some sort of plugin -- if it was to be cross-platform, my first guess would be Flash 10, and my second guess would be Java. But both of these would, again, imply a full rewrite.
So it's probably an ActiveX control, which certainly would explain why it's Windows-only.
That or it's a client which embeds a browser, in which case, it can hardly be called "web-based".
To mods: Whoosh.
To AC: I fully support a filibuster to kill Emacs and GNOME.
We need new blood in political office... people who are a little more 'in' with technology, etc.
"Intelligent Design" Kansas more than anyone.
He's got my $8.34.
Well, I only needed the last one. I actually did it with wget, Firebug, and JQuery.
But if it's true that encrypted video streams can be dumped using an easy to use tool then the guy has a point. Adobe aren't doing as well as some other companies are.
And we should be glad.
Do you know why iTunes does a better job?
It's not because iTunes has better or stronger encryption. (Remember, it has to be able to run this encryption on an iPod, and it drains battery life as it is.)
It's not because iTunes is smarter or trickier about how it hides its keys. (Remember, they have to hit RAM at some point, barring full TCPM, which iTunes doesn't require.)
It's certainly not because people care more about ripping things from YouTube than from iTunes.
It's much simpler:
Apple has actually gone and sued the people cracking it.
That is the missing ingredient -- but honestly, what you are talking about is suing people for tinkering. I really hope Adobe doesn't start doing that.
Whoops. That should be:
These clowns just wrap everything in big "unescape" calls...
Indeed, that is the larger problem, and the one which makes me laugh at this.
Let me direct you to a small scam which claims to "encrypt" your HTML: HTML Protector. You know, this actually used to be hard... These clowns just wrap everything in big "unencode" calls, and run some Javascript before the page is loaded to try to block "unauthorized" access. Surprise, surprise, they block Firefox -- Firebug made this trivial to crack.
Anyone will sell you a product which claims to "protect" your content from being stolen by your users, while simultaneously transmitting your content to your users.
None of these products can work, because in the rare cases where they're actually doing real encryption, it relies on both the decryption keys and the ciphertext residing on my machine, along with a program which is designed to put the two together. At this point, perhaps "cracking" is too strong a word -- it's really more like putting a puzzle together.
Thanks, that gives it a lot of perspective.
There are much more reasonable criticisms you could correctly make of David if you wish to do so.
Well, the simple one is jealousy. I don't remember her name, but there was the story where David saw a woman bathing, found out who her husband was, and arranged for him to die.
Well, as long as we're talking about the David and Goliath story, once David grew up to be a general, he was pretty much as bloodthirsty and savage as any other.
Specifically, he would cut off his enemies' foreskins as proof of how many he killed.
Yes, you read that right -- their foreskins.
I know this mostly because my name is David, and I used to be proud of this guy -- until I read the actual story (and not the sugarcoated kids' version, which is still pretty bad.)
To avoid being completely offtopic, I guess I wonder how much we should really be cheering the "little guy"? I love to see the RIAA writhing in agony on the ground, holding its testicles, but this isn't combat. Do we really want to support an "emotional distress" charge?
It will be interesting to watch, regardless.
hardcore game players will... turn off all the extra visual effects that make it hard to see other players (don't need fog, lens flare, smoke effects, high-resolution detail, light haze, high screen resolutions) and which slow down frame rate.
However, if these effects are being used to influence gameplay, you could require them as a baseline.
At which point, if "hardcore" gamers figure out how to disable them, they're no longer "hardcore", they're "cheaters".
As for the rest of us, consider two possibilities: First, console shooters up the ante -- you now have to modify the hardware in order to cheat in this way, and there's no argument that your framerate would be affected (everyone's framerate is affected in the same way).
And second, just WTF did you buy that multi-thousand-dollar gaming rig for, if you're going to turn down all the visuals? (For that matter, if it's a single-player game, what is the point of cheating in that way?)
He had the money to buy the toys that made the difference between "hard-working dead guy" and "superhero".
True, money was a necessity.
However, he also had to be more hardworking and skilled than the average rich dead guy -- and, really, anyone could go into the hills in Japan (or wherever) and train for a few years. And he had to be smart -- remember the cell phone trick? Yes, he paid some guy to come up with the basic idea, but he did have to be familiar with it himself.
Because the benefits of being a Kung-Fu Master wouldn't make much of a difference in people's lives. The abilities of the Jedi would.
Not really -- most of the abilities are combat-oriented. The remaining are:
- Long-term prescience (which is unreliable and easily clouded, and they'd have been better off if they had a better understanding of politics and current events)
- Jedi mind-tricks -- some species have a natural immunity to this, and it only affects the "weak-minded" -- I imagine you'd see people working to develop stronger minds if mind-tricking was common.
I think that actually would tend to go against my earlier point, though.
I agree with you except on Doom vs Half-Life. The basic premise is you control an avatar in a combat setting. Seems to be the same idea in both cases. Everything else is just details.
(Hint: Doom and Half-Life are at least the same genre. Kudos and Sims are not -- Kudos is a turn-based RPG, whereas Sims is a realtime simulation.)
We already have a wireless standard for this purpose. It's called Bluetooth.
USB means you can plug things directly in, and have them either charge, or be entirely powered by the socket. It also means you can physically see where it's plugged into your computer, and short of a freaky tempest attack, it's safe to enter your password on a wired USB keyboard.
Wireless means you don't have to deal with wires, but you do have to deal with batteries. It also means that unless you really understand what's going on, it's very possible that someone else could hijack your keyboard and capture your password.
Oh, and Bluetooth uses roughly the same tech as Wifi, which means that the next proposed upgrade to Bluetooth is finally going to be around the speed of USB 2.0.
I would be OK with firewire going away if Firewire 3200 is outperformed by USB 3.0 without hogging to many clock cycles.
Define "too many" -- in my mind, it ultimately comes down to price. While it's overly-simplistic, a dual-core CPU costs about $50, and a triple-core costs about $100. A cheap firewire adapter is less than $20...
So, if it required a whole extra CPU, it would be a bad deal. But I doubt it requires that -- and at that price, it would have to be using more than $20% of the CPU, all the time, for firewire to make sense.
And that's assuming all other things are equal. In my experience, outside of a few niche high-bandwidth requirements (digital video), everything "USB-like" is either USB or Bluetooth. With USB 3.0, they've got high-bandwidth more than covered, so I imagine I would see far fewer Firewire-only devices.
Well, first, I imagine it would make a USB 3.0 hub support far more of the slower variety.
But consider that USB 2.0 isn't fast enough for standard desktop hard drives, and it's obvious we do need more speed. Whether we need that much more speed is up for debate, but I'd argue that if we're going to spend all that money on an upgrade, we may as well make it as fast as we can, just in case.
Seriously, how many connectors out there do you know of that let you plug it in any way you feel like?
Oh, I don't know... Ever used headphones?
How about at least some power connectors?
I can't even imagine it being easier to manufacture this little square thing than to manufacture something, you know, round like that.
He thinks people like Steam for convenience. Maybe. Me, I am just afraid of giving my CC number to an unknown vendor.
Those things combined, yes. But you do have to start somewhere.
While I'm at it, I use Paypal with Steam -- so there's that additional layer. But I would say, interface with every vendor and with every payment system out there.
He needs to explain to people how his games are original. What sets Kudos apart from the Sims?
Well, your response suggests he needs to simply shorten that to a catchphrase that he can plaster everywhere, so that people like you will actually notice. But here:
Kudos is a turn based strategy game where you control someone's life.
The Sims is many things, but it is not turn based. There are other differences, but that was the most obvious, and took me maybe 20 seconds to find.
Now, excuse me while I hijack (pirate!) your thread to respond to the rest of TFA:
People think demos are too short. My demos *are* short, because the marketing man in me sees that you can't give away too much. I've wanted people to feel a bit annoyed when the demo cuts out, so they buy the game to keep playing.
I would say, the solution is to make the game longer, but also to make the demo long enough. The point of the demo isn't to irritate them so that they go buy the game -- it's to lead them on. It's to get them hooked so that they can't easily just stop there.
Take the WoW 10-day trial. Can you really stop after 10 days, abandon your character, and go do something else, if you played at all during those 10 days?
A LOT of people cited the cost of games as a major reason for pirating.
I would say, that is a factor, but it's nowhere near as much a factor as how easy it could be to buy those games. Take Penny Arcade's comments -- honestly, at $20 or so, it's not huge.
Then again, lowering his price may help -- after all, Portal cost $20. Let's see -- do I want to play Kudos, or the best game of last year?
I get the impression that if I make Kudos 2 not just lots better than the original, but hugely, overwhelmingly, massively better, well polished, designed and balanced, that a lot of would-be pirates will actually buy it.
Somewhat, yes. But that's not really why you want to make a better game.
You want to make a better game, because if it's good enough, pirates really won't be a dent in the kind of profit you'll be bringing in -- and people will be satisfied. And a satisfied customer is, quite possibly, a repeat customer.
Content is tied to engines. It's ephemeral.... Game engines do depreciate.
Really? I doubt that.
Engines are not ephemeral -- in fact, it's my understanding that the Source Engine, used by everything coming out of Valve since Half-Life 2 (and by at least a few third-parties, and dozens of modders), is actually a more recent evolution of the GoldSrc engine -- that's actually why they're called that -- which was used in Half-Life 1, and, in turn, was based on the QuakeWorld engine, which was, in turn, based on Quake.
And it continues to evolve -- things like HDR and film grain, for example.
So, going by the release dates, that's over ten years of development on the same engine. Sure, it evolved, but so does every open source project -- does the 2.6 Linux kernel really resemble the 2.2 kernel much, except in name?
Now, the content of the games does start to look dated -- although I would argue that Half-Life is still very playable. And that's the part I'm not sure the community would be able to keep updating -- nor should they. Wouldn't you rather play Half-Life 2 than a remake of Half-life?
So, I would argue that the game code could be open, while the content could be closed. If there was a sufficiently standard engine, I imagine it could be developed in an open source way, and kept updated -- but it would take work from those using it; that is, either it would have to be LGPL, or game studios would have to mostly contribute back.
But supposing such an engine existed, I would imagine that attempting to protect the content through DRM could be viewed as just as irritating and unnecessary as trying to protect other forms of media (music and movies) the same way.
It's Moore's Law speeding ahead too quickly for software engineering to iterate rather than start from scratch.
Well, again, look at Valve.
New stuff shows up like shaders or whatnot.
Shaders? Really?
From an API perspective, why should applying a shader be different than applying a texture?
And from an implementation perspective, I'll again point you to engines which have had these things added, and which have worked very well. There are beginners' tutorials for how to add shaders to your -- not even game engine, but 100-line OpenGL demo.
If it's too hard for you to add shaders, then your code is too brittle. It's just a bit more obvious with games.
Again, sentiment.
Sure, but if you want to be completely cold-blooded about it, try this: Think of all the duplicated effort. Right now, there are at least three major, commercial engines that I could name off the top of my head, plus all the specialized versions of these, and the proprietary-and-closely-held properties like the Starbreeze engine...
Now, once you've actually written a complete engine, it may make more sense, in the short term, to try to sell it. However, in the long term, I'm arguing that it's less profitable for the industry as a whole to go down that path -- because you will have competition, and your competition will be doing exactly the same thing you are -- which means both of you are spending more time coding mundane details like scene graphs and less time actually building a shippable game.
Even if a number of studios were to collaborate for a very short term -- the "three years" you mention -- assuming the engine is going to die, that would suggest that a new engine could be built more quickly.
How about trees?
The same holds, only moreso:
There's a company that sells the tree generation graphics to all the game makers
From what I understand, it's an application of
Obi-Wan tells Luke that the Force runs strong in his family implying that there's something different in him from other people.
Good point.
After they meet Han, who is incredibly intelligent and skilled, no attempt is made to train him.
Given Han is not particularly interested or trustworthy, that makes sense.
Darth Vader has trouble targeting him because "the force is strong with this one" but it wasn't with any of the others.
Well, he has been training a bit, at that point.
It could also imply -- both this, and the previous statement -- that the force tends to behave as a living entity, picking favorites.
I guess I would have found it to be much more lame if everyone could get to be a Jedi if they just worked really hard.
Out of curiosity, do you like Batman? Because that's one of the things that I love about Batman -- he's human, and he's not even particularly special as a human, beyond having trained very hard.
Want to be a Jedi? No talent? Well if you're rich you can buy your way in by getting the best tutors.
You still wouldn't be as good a Jedi, and it would still take a lot of training and discipline.
Having the only requirement to being a Jedi be "working hard" would effectively kill the mysticism of it. Why isn't everyone a Jedi?
I don't know. Why isn't everyone a Kung-Fu Master? Why doesn't everyone at least have some martial arts or self defense training?
Some of it is skill, and some of that is innate.
And some of it is that everyone has their own lives, and their own problems, most of which can't be solved with Kung-Fu.
blocking UAC is something that should be done by default, particularly if you are a slashdot reader.
Well, no, as a Slashdot reader, the right approach is to simply not install Vista. That said...
There is no reason at all for it to be there.
It's a direct ripoff of sudo, which has been widely considered a Good Thing on Linux and Mac.
Sure, there are some things that suck about the implementation. Sure, it's annoying as hell. And sure, a lot of this is Microsoft's fault -- even indirectly, by making it possible for developers to assume admin rights for so long. Unix wasn't exactly a new concept when Windows was released, nor were limited NT accounts a new concept when Win2K was released.
However, saying that there is no reason for it to be there is intellectually dishonest. Sudo is a good idea -- Microsoft just managed to fuck up their ripoff of it beyond recognition, as usual.
One more thing:
eat up developer hours and show around at section meetings in Redmond.
If you want to bitch about that, bitch about the Start Menu. Do you have any idea how many meetings they had to decide what to put in the shutdown (standby, hibernate, etc) section of the Start Menu? Yes -- many meetings, not even for the whole start menu, but just shutdown.
The midichlorians make perfect sense if you think about what happens to Vader.
Only in the context of the prequels.
Then Obi-Wan laid the smack down on Mustafar, reducing his body mass (and, thus, his midichlorian count) by 50%. After that, Vader was a mechanical wretch, the Emperor's little whipping boy unable to live up to his full potential.
Except, in the context of the original movies, he was absolutely not a "mechanical wretch", nor was he the "Emperor's little whipping boy" -- he was a fearsome Dark Lord, one of the scarier bad guys, second only to the Emperor. And not even in power -- after all, he did kill the Emperor in the end.
That's why the Emperor wanted Luke. He wasn't stunted like Vader was. He had the potential to be far more powerful than Vader.
Vader had to talk him into that, though -- he was all for simply killing Luke before he could be dangerous at all.
Honestly, I think it was more about having another Jedi at all, rather than having a "whole" Jedi.
The prequels aren't as ham-fisted as people like to make out. But Jar Jar still sucks.
Oh, I agree. They got more right than people give them credit for.
But it's not just Jar-Jar -- Lucas has gotten far too much wrong, at this point. Han shot first!
wasn't it always implied that Force sensitivity was inherited? I mean Darth Vader passed along his potential abilities to his son...
Well, yes, but that was a bit more like the idea that traits which might lead to, say, skill as a musician, or as an athlete, might be passed on to a son. And, in certain feudal societies, you were actually born into what you would do for the rest of your life.
But today, well... My father's a stockbroker, but that's no reason I can't go off and train and become, say, an Olympic athlete. (The fact that I'm in my twenties means I missed that chance, but you get the point -- how many Olympic athletes are children of former Olympic athletes?)
Posting anonymously due to embarassasment at caring about this crap...
You, sir, are pathetic.
But the same kind of thing may be true in the real universe. Just because we don't currently know of a biological basis for those who are great artists, writers, mathematicians, composers, etc., doesn't mean there isn't a biological basis for such traits.
Maybe there is, but as of yet, there's no evidence to support that -- and there is, in fact, evidence to the contrary.
Those with no artistic, literary, mathematical, or musical talent are just SOL and will never be great in those fields no matter how hard they try.
I actually haven't seen people like that, outside of Internet trolls. I've seen people who have no artistic, literary, mathematical, or musical motivation, and people who struggle at these things. But I've met very few people who actually can't do these things.
No, they'll never be great in those fields, but the Force makes it absolutely impossible to even be mediocre or bad in those fields.
Regardless, it's not so much that I feel it's unrealistic, it's that I feel it's uninspiring.