Check out Nvu. It takes the Mozilla Composer aspect of the suite and makes it an individual program. It also has a few UI tweaks to make it more Dreamweaver-like and better capable of handling multiple pages at once.
Mozilla is a suite of tools that includes a browser, e-mail program, web site authoring, and IRC chat. Firefox, comparatively, is just the browser component and a few UI and relatively minor functionality differences from the Mozilla suite.
If you find you need the complete suite, that's the way to go. On the other hand, if you're like others who are stuck with Outlook for one reason or another, Firefox is the better choice.
There's truth to what you say. But one has to remember that at the end of the day, a game company is just like any other business in a capitalist society - it has to make money or else it cannot continue making games at the level of quality consumers expect. So yes, one aims at what's popular to cash in on it. As more money is made, the more likely one might choose to invest in smaller "experimental" games. Seems like until you have that foothold, though, there's reason to rely on the tried and true.
I'm a newcomer to the industry, but that's one aspect I find really enjoyable about it. No two days are quite the same. Some complication occurs. New technology comes on-line. New bugs appear.
It's impossible to be bored. There's always plentiful stuff to do.:)
I work in the industry as a game designer. I would hope that a rational game company would never hire you because you seem to have an ego that's bigger than your head.
Game design is all about working out compromises and dealing with unexpected dilemmas and problems. It's just like any other industry. There's no room for selfish ego. People with open minds and who are willing to tolerate new ideas have a good chance. Those who insist on their way or the highway, or likewise believe that they are God's gift to the industry, bark louder than they bite.
You cannot be a "world class" designer if you've never worked in the industry. Or worked on a single mod. Or built a single map. To think of yourself so highly... such a conjecture is as fraudulent claiming to be the world's greatest doctor without ever having seen a patient!
True, but Unreal is more than just the game. It's the whole engine which Epic has licensed to many game companies to serve as a foundation for their titles. Seems like having Linux deveopment would be another bulletpoint feature, but I'd imagine most game houses are strictly Windows.
And as you point out, it's often the game editors that get left behind. UnrealEd still has no Linux functionality, which is mildly ironic considering Epic markets Unreal as a cross-platform engine.
I'm going to refer to aspects of Paint Shop Pro 7 in this.
First, Gimp can keep the multiple windows thing. I think it's great for those with multiple monitors. The ability to drag windows from one screen to another is quite convenient. The only thing I ask is that Gimp group all windows as one entry on the taskbar. I can't see a good reason why Gimp should spam the taskbar with four to five entries.
Establish a distinction between vector and raster via Layers. Gimp has a system where Lines are in a seperate tab than Layers, but can get stroked to appear in a Layer. The problem is that if you want to draw with the Pen tool, like if you're outlining something, you have this needless step of periodically hitting the "Stroke Path" button, selecting "Pencil," and hitting okay. In PSP, I can use the Pen tool directly on a Raster layer. If I want to preserve the individual nodes, I can create a vector line in the Pen tool and use a Vector layer to store it.
Gimp should have a Properties window for each of its tools. The properties window should use sliders for setting options. One of the nuances of the Gimp that annoys me is how you can only pick from pre-created brushes or create your own. To create some non-standard size (like 2x2, for example), you have to walk through creating a whole custom brush. I'd much prefer a slider that ramps from 1 to, say, 255. PSP has sliders for Size, Hardness, Opacity, Step, and Density.
Gimp should have preview windows for its various filter effects and adjustment tools that offer a side-by-side comparison of pre-change and post-change images.
I really wish Gimp had a simplified Pen tool. Granted, PSP8 and up, as well as Photoshop, have really sophisticated ones. But the one in PSP7, particularly with regard to Bezier curves, is very simple. Two clicks set the beginning and end of the line. Two drags set the curve. And it automatically renders it to a raster layer. I don't need a fancy node-line-node-line architecture. If Gimp did this, I'd be ecstatic.
The game's manufacturer, Koei, still makes regular releases of their Romance of Three Kingdoms and Dynasty Warriors series. They are still known for their tactical strategy games. Aerobiz was a very unique game since it dealt with corporate strategy in a way very different from more comtemporary games of that ilk (SimCity, etc) but I haven't heard about any plans to bring it back.
For the uninitiated, Aerobiz and its sequel Aerobiz Supersonic were two games released on the SNES and Genesis. The aim of each was to become the most profitable airline in the industry. You could play the game at different points in time - the dawn of airplanes for business commutes all the way to Concorde-like supersonics. To win, you would have to oversee buying various real-life planes (Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc), slots at worldly airports, and compete directly with three other companies who were also vying for the same assets. You would try to have a hub in each continent and grow the airline from there with large transoceanic flights. If a particular route was not profitable, you could alter its ticket prices, switch to a smaller plane, or other various options. The game actually had a board of directors you could meet with for advice (similar to SimCity's "Advisors"). Additionally, you could diversify your business by purchasing hotels or golf courses in respective cities. Various events, like the Summer Olympics and disasters, like fuel crises, war or worker strikes, would also influence your growing business. One of the features that made Aerobiz unique was that it was multiplayer. Although you had the option of making any number of them AI, the three other corporations could be other players. Granted, it's rather slow-paced and geeky, but it's arguably the closest thing there ever was to a competitive simulation game.
The operative word in my post is "Ideally." The problem is that when a corporation starts to get really big and have a tremendous market share, they tend not to give a rip about reputation.
The difference is that I don't blame Linux for this problem. I blame ATI for their complete and utter inability to produce drivers that are highly compatible and easy to install without significant hassle. Part of it is that ATI offers no installation program. Part of it is that it dstributes exclusively in RPM. And part of it is that ATI's test machine is completely unknown (there seems to be no modern version of Linux that ATI supports without trouble).
Windows would be just as useless if you had to compile your own drivers, didn't have a happy installation program, and had to use an MS-DOS batch file to configure.
If ATI can't be "bothered" to support Linux in a timely fashion, then they should open source the code so the community can do the work they, as a respectable company, should be doing for users. Otherwise, it's a giant F.U. to a small but growing user base.
As it stands right now, I wouldn't buy another ATI card, no matter how phenomenal it might look in Windows.
It depends on the nature of the game, though. Some games have innately more longevity than others. both Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament would be "old" by today's standards, but they are still very popular. Warcraft II was popular for a very long while on Kali until the advent of more Warcraft titles.
I think a good, solid FPS engine has a lot of longevity. But a number of things have to be done. First, to become popular, it is absolutely essential that an actual game be included. This is where a lot of open source engine implementations have been seriously lacking. Sure, it can do fancy graphics and things, but until someone actually tries to produce a comprehensive multiplayer or singleplayer campaign with it, it's useless. If a compelling game is included, and the package is distributed for free, it has been shown it can capture some popularity (like America's Army).
That said, one might argue that Cube should be in the upper pantheon of games. Cube is missing something though, in my opinion. I don't find it particularly fun to play in the face of UT2K4 and whatnot. Granted, that's completely subjective, but given the low population of multiplayer servers, either OSS folks haven't heard of it, or they've come to the same conclusion I have.
The obvious answer - you can't. There is no such thing as a 100% exploit-proof undertaking as significant as a web browser.
There are two sides to the coin:
- Firefox is generally trustworthy because a lot of eyes look at the code and changes are logged in public view. Most developers are benevolent. People have tried to create exploits with the Linux kernel, but they have been weeded out.
- Ideally, Internet Explorer would be generally trustworthy because as a business, Microsoft's reputation rides on the quality of the program. In a capitalist society with an element of competition, commercial demands would force Microsoft to close exploits. However, Microsoft lives in a monopolistic universe. And as we all know, companies that live with little competition generally aren't benevolent and don't give a rip about corporate reputation. When a company has 90% market share with a web browser, they often rest on their laurels and get sloppy about it. Until a vastly superior browser like Firefox effectively turns the tables - say 60/40 - Microsoft probably feels no obligation to react and will continue to act like Firefox is no threat.
I would agree with the first part, but a big question is how much of that is really the fault of Mepis? Most distros have issues with video drivers, particularly ATI. It's well known the many hoops you have to jump through to get any of ATI's proprietary drivers to work on Debian (Mepis, obviously, being Debian-based).
Of course, what I find really mysterious is the test box ATI uses to evaluate its Linux support. If it doesn't work "out of the box" on Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, or Mepis, just what the heck are they coding around? I used to think it was Red Hat-centric, but ever since Fedora Core 2, an arcane series of patches has been needed to make their drivers work. It's absolutely ridiculous and, to tell the truth, I place the blame squarely on ATI. If you can't be bothered to keep your miserable drivers halfway functional, release them to the open source community so it can get some real work done.
Mepis Linux is another good choice. It's also very easy to install to the hard drive if they are impressed with the LiveCD version. It's also just one CD.
http://www.mepis.org
I don't really have a problem with the multiple windows layout. Seperate windows are nice, especially with multiple desktops or monitors. What I do wish Gimp had the option for was amalgamating all of those windows under one button in the Windows taskbar. Having four or five different tabs on the Windows taskbar for essentially the same program makes things cluttered.
As a fellow game designer, I have to agree that "Why spend X dollars on a B-side that isn't neccessarily related to the A-side game at all when you could spend those X dollars to make the A-side game better (or, in most case, bigger)?" is probably the biggest reason why you don't have B-side titles. Trying to make the core game interesting and fun is tough enough by itself, let alone having to ensure that a bunch of little extras are themselves fun. This sort of energy should circle around the main attraction, rather than the sideshow.
That's part of it. UnrealEd has a similar thing going with the concept of static meshes, high-poly decorative objects that are shared between all maps.
But another part of it is reusing entire parts of the world. A random RPG Town could be visited time and again as the quest proceeds. It might be for a weapon that appears there early on, or a particularly omniscient NPC.
Myst has a devoted following and some people must enjoy it for them to keep making it. But, from game one, I never understood what all the hoopla was about. It was as boring as a Hypercard slide show. Oh wait...
Metroid isn't so much about switch-hunting through. The idea is that on the way to get a super item, you notice places you can't reach with your current powers. Once you get that item, you recur on all of those places where it might be useful. And chances are, you'll reach some new place in the world and explore it, find some other item, and be dumped out in a very familiar location in the game.
Backtracking is only bound to get worse in games, I think. As developers fervently try to make every game Final Fantasy length, and as worlds become increasingly more time-consuming to build, developers are going to naturally seek to reuse as much content as they can get away with.
It probably appeals to the same folk who enjoy the fantasy sports on Yahoo though. People who don't like sports or staring at statistics, vicariously living their lives through professional athletes, probably can't ever understand.
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Check out Nvu. It takes the Mozilla Composer aspect of the suite and makes it an individual program. It also has a few UI tweaks to make it more Dreamweaver-like and better capable of handling multiple pages at once.
Mozilla is a suite of tools that includes a browser, e-mail program, web site authoring, and IRC chat. Firefox, comparatively, is just the browser component and a few UI and relatively minor functionality differences from the Mozilla suite.
If you find you need the complete suite, that's the way to go. On the other hand, if you're like others who are stuck with Outlook for one reason or another, Firefox is the better choice.
There's truth to what you say. But one has to remember that at the end of the day, a game company is just like any other business in a capitalist society - it has to make money or else it cannot continue making games at the level of quality consumers expect. So yes, one aims at what's popular to cash in on it. As more money is made, the more likely one might choose to invest in smaller "experimental" games. Seems like until you have that foothold, though, there's reason to rely on the tried and true.
It's impossible to be bored. There's always plentiful stuff to do. :)
Game design is all about working out compromises and dealing with unexpected dilemmas and problems. It's just like any other industry. There's no room for selfish ego. People with open minds and who are willing to tolerate new ideas have a good chance. Those who insist on their way or the highway, or likewise believe that they are God's gift to the industry, bark louder than they bite.
You cannot be a "world class" designer if you've never worked in the industry. Or worked on a single mod. Or built a single map. To think of yourself so highly... such a conjecture is as fraudulent claiming to be the world's greatest doctor without ever having seen a patient!
True, but Unreal is more than just the game. It's the whole engine which Epic has licensed to many game companies to serve as a foundation for their titles. Seems like having Linux deveopment would be another bulletpoint feature, but I'd imagine most game houses are strictly Windows.
And as you point out, it's often the game editors that get left behind. UnrealEd still has no Linux functionality, which is mildly ironic considering Epic markets Unreal as a cross-platform engine.
Otherwise my foolishness might have gotten the best of me and I would have [i]bought[/i] my first acutal music CD in six months.
First, Gimp can keep the multiple windows thing. I think it's great for those with multiple monitors. The ability to drag windows from one screen to another is quite convenient. The only thing I ask is that Gimp group all windows as one entry on the taskbar. I can't see a good reason why Gimp should spam the taskbar with four to five entries.
Establish a distinction between vector and raster via Layers. Gimp has a system where Lines are in a seperate tab than Layers, but can get stroked to appear in a Layer. The problem is that if you want to draw with the Pen tool, like if you're outlining something, you have this needless step of periodically hitting the "Stroke Path" button, selecting "Pencil," and hitting okay. In PSP, I can use the Pen tool directly on a Raster layer. If I want to preserve the individual nodes, I can create a vector line in the Pen tool and use a Vector layer to store it.
Gimp should have a Properties window for each of its tools. The properties window should use sliders for setting options. One of the nuances of the Gimp that annoys me is how you can only pick from pre-created brushes or create your own. To create some non-standard size (like 2x2, for example), you have to walk through creating a whole custom brush. I'd much prefer a slider that ramps from 1 to, say, 255. PSP has sliders for Size, Hardness, Opacity, Step, and Density.
Gimp should have preview windows for its various filter effects and adjustment tools that offer a side-by-side comparison of pre-change and post-change images.
I really wish Gimp had a simplified Pen tool. Granted, PSP8 and up, as well as Photoshop, have really sophisticated ones. But the one in PSP7, particularly with regard to Bezier curves, is very simple. Two clicks set the beginning and end of the line. Two drags set the curve. And it automatically renders it to a raster layer. I don't need a fancy node-line-node-line architecture. If Gimp did this, I'd be ecstatic.
The game's manufacturer, Koei, still makes regular releases of their Romance of Three Kingdoms and Dynasty Warriors series. They are still known for their tactical strategy games. Aerobiz was a very unique game since it dealt with corporate strategy in a way very different from more comtemporary games of that ilk (SimCity, etc) but I haven't heard about any plans to bring it back.
For the uninitiated, Aerobiz and its sequel Aerobiz Supersonic were two games released on the SNES and Genesis. The aim of each was to become the most profitable airline in the industry. You could play the game at different points in time - the dawn of airplanes for business commutes all the way to Concorde-like supersonics. To win, you would have to oversee buying various real-life planes (Boeing, Lockheed, Airbus, etc), slots at worldly airports, and compete directly with three other companies who were also vying for the same assets. You would try to have a hub in each continent and grow the airline from there with large transoceanic flights. If a particular route was not profitable, you could alter its ticket prices, switch to a smaller plane, or other various options. The game actually had a board of directors you could meet with for advice (similar to SimCity's "Advisors"). Additionally, you could diversify your business by purchasing hotels or golf courses in respective cities. Various events, like the Summer Olympics and disasters, like fuel crises, war or worker strikes, would also influence your growing business. One of the features that made Aerobiz unique was that it was multiplayer. Although you had the option of making any number of them AI, the three other corporations could be other players. Granted, it's rather slow-paced and geeky, but it's arguably the closest thing there ever was to a competitive simulation game.
The operative word in my post is "Ideally." The problem is that when a corporation starts to get really big and have a tremendous market share, they tend not to give a rip about reputation.
Apparently ATI's next release is supposed to address that, albeit I have my doubts.
Windows would be just as useless if you had to compile your own drivers, didn't have a happy installation program, and had to use an MS-DOS batch file to configure.
If ATI can't be "bothered" to support Linux in a timely fashion, then they should open source the code so the community can do the work they, as a respectable company, should be doing for users. Otherwise, it's a giant F.U. to a small but growing user base.
As it stands right now, I wouldn't buy another ATI card, no matter how phenomenal it might look in Windows.
I think a good, solid FPS engine has a lot of longevity. But a number of things have to be done. First, to become popular, it is absolutely essential that an actual game be included. This is where a lot of open source engine implementations have been seriously lacking. Sure, it can do fancy graphics and things, but until someone actually tries to produce a comprehensive multiplayer or singleplayer campaign with it, it's useless. If a compelling game is included, and the package is distributed for free, it has been shown it can capture some popularity (like America's Army).
That said, one might argue that Cube should be in the upper pantheon of games. Cube is missing something though, in my opinion. I don't find it particularly fun to play in the face of UT2K4 and whatnot. Granted, that's completely subjective, but given the low population of multiplayer servers, either OSS folks haven't heard of it, or they've come to the same conclusion I have.
There are two sides to the coin:
- Firefox is generally trustworthy because a lot of eyes look at the code and changes are logged in public view. Most developers are benevolent. People have tried to create exploits with the Linux kernel, but they have been weeded out.
- Ideally, Internet Explorer would be generally trustworthy because as a business, Microsoft's reputation rides on the quality of the program. In a capitalist society with an element of competition, commercial demands would force Microsoft to close exploits. However, Microsoft lives in a monopolistic universe. And as we all know, companies that live with little competition generally aren't benevolent and don't give a rip about corporate reputation. When a company has 90% market share with a web browser, they often rest on their laurels and get sloppy about it. Until a vastly superior browser like Firefox effectively turns the tables - say 60/40 - Microsoft probably feels no obligation to react and will continue to act like Firefox is no threat.
Of course, what I find really mysterious is the test box ATI uses to evaluate its Linux support. If it doesn't work "out of the box" on Fedora, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, or Mepis, just what the heck are they coding around? I used to think it was Red Hat-centric, but ever since Fedora Core 2, an arcane series of patches has been needed to make their drivers work. It's absolutely ridiculous and, to tell the truth, I place the blame squarely on ATI. If you can't be bothered to keep your miserable drivers halfway functional, release them to the open source community so it can get some real work done.
Course, I know that's a pipe dream.
Mepis Linux is another good choice. It's also very easy to install to the hard drive if they are impressed with the LiveCD version. It's also just one CD. http://www.mepis.org
I don't really have a problem with the multiple windows layout. Seperate windows are nice, especially with multiple desktops or monitors. What I do wish Gimp had the option for was amalgamating all of those windows under one button in the Windows taskbar. Having four or five different tabs on the Windows taskbar for essentially the same program makes things cluttered.
$5 is a rather far cry from "screwing the customer" when PC game producers can usually extract $20-$30 from each expansion pack.
As a fellow game designer, I have to agree that "Why spend X dollars on a B-side that isn't neccessarily related to the A-side game at all when you could spend those X dollars to make the A-side game better (or, in most case, bigger)?" is probably the biggest reason why you don't have B-side titles. Trying to make the core game interesting and fun is tough enough by itself, let alone having to ensure that a bunch of little extras are themselves fun. This sort of energy should circle around the main attraction, rather than the sideshow.
Frightening part is, you just know someone lost sleep trying to come up with that excuse. ;)
But another part of it is reusing entire parts of the world. A random RPG Town could be visited time and again as the quest proceeds. It might be for a weapon that appears there early on, or a particularly omniscient NPC.
Myst has a devoted following and some people must enjoy it for them to keep making it. But, from game one, I never understood what all the hoopla was about. It was as boring as a Hypercard slide show. Oh wait...
Metroid isn't so much about switch-hunting through. The idea is that on the way to get a super item, you notice places you can't reach with your current powers. Once you get that item, you recur on all of those places where it might be useful. And chances are, you'll reach some new place in the world and explore it, find some other item, and be dumped out in a very familiar location in the game. Backtracking is only bound to get worse in games, I think. As developers fervently try to make every game Final Fantasy length, and as worlds become increasingly more time-consuming to build, developers are going to naturally seek to reuse as much content as they can get away with.
It probably appeals to the same folk who enjoy the fantasy sports on Yahoo though. People who don't like sports or staring at statistics, vicariously living their lives through professional athletes, probably can't ever understand.