Except for Sun tries to market JDS as both an enterprise-grade desktop solution and a comprehensive desktop solution. The latter would tell me that I should be able to try it on any typical PC and I should expect it to work, just as Windows does, just as Linux does.
You criticize the reviewer for complaining about the installation problems, calling his work "stupid." Should the reviewer ignore the fact that he found it very difficult, if not impossible, to install on the test machines he tried?
If you, as a video game reviewer, were given a video game that crashed right on the title screen, would you still hammer away at it trying to play the game, or would you eventually write it off as a slipshod product? And when would you throw in the towel? This reviewer tried it on not one, not two, but four machines of varying configurations. But then he plays the devil's advocate - he spends the second page elaborating on how JDS would have performed, giving it the benefit of the doubt. I don't sense the reviewer ranting or condemning JDS on this page, rather I see the reviewer operating under the assumption of if installer worked, what I could expect. That's about all I could ask for and all he could do, I think.
Ever since I tried it several months ago, I've been a big fan of Mepis Linux (http://www.mepis.org). Here are some of the reasons why I'd recommend this distribution for a newcomer to Linux:
No commitment. You don't have to install it and you really only need the first of two CDs to use it. Just toss it into the CD drive and let it start up. Granted, it will be sluggish, but it can give you a broad sense of everything Mepis Linux has to offer.
Easy to install. If you decide you want to install it, that's also a cinch using the Mepis installation program linked right from the desktop.
Great hardware autodetection. If you have dual boot with Windows, it will automatically map those drives. It also will detect most hardware automatically.
Comes with all you need on one CD. Check out OpenOffice, Mozilla, Gimp, and a plethora of other useful Linux programs with just one CD.
Super easy package management with APT-GET. It's like having Download.com at your fingertips. Just click on one or more packages you want to download, press Install, and you're set. No hassling over dependencies, no worries about incompatibilities. Package management as it should be.
Naturally, not all of these things are exclusive of Mepis Linux, but Mepis does headquarter all of them in one easy-to-use installation.
Although it can't compete graphically with a modern FPS, it at least has the looks similar to the old Unreal Tournament. Although I think the player character moves a bit fast and the weapons lack "oomph," it actually has a lot of potential. The way the game editor works is also pretty intriguing.
I think you could conceivably make an interesting FPS based on this engine with some convinction and hard work.
But that does not necessarily delegate the blame to Suse. Ultimately, it's up to Sun because it's their product they are shipping and they have a responsibility to their customers, who are paying a premium for their software, to get the bugs ironed out. Their choice who build on top of Suse was a conscious one.
What difference does it make how a distro functions if you can't even install it? Suffice it to say, Sun not being smart enough to create a reliable installation program that functions on more than 1 out of 4 PCs probably speaks volumes about the product as a whole.
One wonders why EA hasn't resurrected the long dead series. It even had a cartoon all its own, and its overkill violence and fictitious characters would appeal to non-sports fanatics who couldn't tell Shaq O'Neil from Kobe Bryant - but who understand the basic rules of the games no less.;)
The worst thing that can happen is that a whole new subfield of Computer Science based on game design emerges that tries to quantify everything with theory and abstract principles.
What you say is true for some programs, but not others. Excel definitely falls into the latter category. In case you haven't noticed, the vast majority runs Microsoft Office. You can whine and complain about that fact, but you aren't going to change it by implementing your own file format and force people to download your program to read it. People (especially casual users), in the face of a clear and easy alternative, just aren't going to advance the effort.
On the other hand, if you tell them that OpenOffice supports all of MS Office's formats, so they can easily read those files without the need for a $400 office suite, I think that's very appealing for casual users, whose first concern about switching to an OSS alternative is "But will I be able to open all of my old files / files friends send me with it?"
What kind of answer is "No, you can only open and save in our native format" to a new user?
(if you want a nifty feature, you have to make sure Excel has it too.)
Uhm, no. That's what your program's native format is for. Paint Shop Pro does a lot of things differently from Photoshop. That doesn't mean the.PSP format has to be compatible with Photoshop. On the other hand, Paint Shop Pro can read from Photoshop's own.PSD format.
This is no different from what OpenOffice is already doing with its.SX(whatever) files and its support for MS Office files.
When people send me Excel files, I kindly ask them to re-send the file in CSV or some other format.
Considering I've built over 50 maps for various games and am employed as a Game Designer, I think I have a good idea of what "good gameplay" is, thank you.
I don't think it is even possible to construct a games with good gameplay using the Unreal engine.
The hundreds of thousands of Unreal Tournament 2004 owners would beg to differ.
Lots of people: there are lots of visually boring games that have survived for thousands of years.
I didn't know we had video games "thousands of years" ago. Unless you are trying to advance the argument that compares chess or checkers to Quake 3, which is clearly an apples to oranges comparison.
Doom isn't visually any more boring today than when it came out, yet it wouldn't stand a chance today because people would laugh at the graphics.
You answered my own point. Doom does have good gameplay, there's no questioning that. This is why there is still a small but highly dedicated following still playing the game and manipulating the heck out of the code. But you could never convince anyone to buy a new copy of Doom today (GBA version aside), because the graphics just wouldn't hold up by today's standards.
I.e., you need good graphics to rope players in; you need good gameplay to keep them there.
But the news item raised the question of why game programmers burn out and whether there was another way. My response was simple, and whether you like it or not, you haven't actually argued that it is incorrect. I said that the pressure on current game programming comes from a focus on graphics and performance features.
It's because in order to compete graphically, a lot more work needs to be invested into the game not just on the artistic end, but also on the programming backbone that supports what the artists do. This is a necessary evil.
you focus on good gameplay.
But how long can you focus on "good gameplay"? Gameplay itself is an abstract concept. Sure there are dozens of unwritten rules about it. People like finding secrets, to promote movement you put related items apart from one another, you generally don't put the forcefield switch underneath the toilet, etc. But once you have "gameplay" (which is really more about common sense than you acknowledge), what can you do? If you have a solid control setup and solid game mechanics (which can be formulated early on in a game's life), then you have to work to create the world and citizens in that world who can take advantage of all of this (unless you're building yet another Tetris clone).
coming up with a genuinely new and interesting game requires deep insight and a lot of trial-and-error. Commercial companies can't afford to do that.
Or don't want to, considering that weird and exotic game concepts aren't exactly welcomed by players today.
So, they do what they can: hire large numbers of "artists" to repaint the dungeons and hire large numbers of programmers to write new engines that, ultimately, just play the same game as the old ones.
At best, you can recreate a FPS with slightly different graphics, not much different from any of the other FPS.
I think that's a very narrow-minded view. As you tried to do in your original post, you seem intent on pushing the idea that all games of a certain genre are the same. That's just flat out wrong and, until you can grasp that (since it's the pillar your whole argument is built on), I'm arguing with a brick wall. But I'm not going to shed a tear, because I know I'm right and the evidence supports my side.
For the record, you could say the same sweeping thing about Hollywood. "All science-fiction movies are the same." But there's a huge difference between Star Wars and Blade Runner, even though they are both sci-fi. And it's more than just "repainting the walls." Star Wars is about flying through space on a mission to destroy the Death Star.
Neither do chess or go. Graphical complexity is not necessary for a good game.
It certainly is if you want any game, good or bad, to sell. And that's what every game business wants to do - make a profit. Sometimes if you have your nose in open source too long, you forget simple laws of economics.
No one is going to go down to the game store and buy a text-adventure game for $39.99. As a mapper for Unreal Tournament, the following premise holds strongly: You need great visuals to rope the players in; you need great gameplay to keep them there. Recently, great visuals have become increasingly more difficult to produce with developers raising the bar with each new PC title. Others are forced to keep up.
Yes, and this focus on art instead of gameplay is why so many commercial games suck and aren't replayable
Gameplay is relatively simple compared to art. Try an Unreal Tournament map. You'll spend only a few hours concocting the flow and layout of the map. You'll spend countless hours beautifying in. There has to be an emphasis on art. Without art and design sense, a game is drab and uninteresting. Who really cares about gameplay if your surroundings are so boring? These are not mutually exclusive concepts, rather the relationship is symbiotic.
Halo, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex, Enter the Matrix, Star Wars, and all look great, but they have simplistic, uninteresting gameplay (even as far as FPS go).
Uninteresting in your mind. Clearly, strong sales for each of these games proves that not everyone shares your mindset, fortunately.
You're likening Paint Shop Pro to Solitaire and Photoshop to Unreal Tournament 2004?
You obviously haven't used it much, have you?
You clearly missed my argument. Photoshop is not useless. It is overpriced and its feature set overrated compared to what PSP and Gimp offer for hundreds of dollars less. Hundreds of dollars less. Given the plethora of common users who have Photoshop, I have a hard time believing that everyone plunked down $700 for it. If you actually had to BUY Photoshop for that cost, you might think about these cheaper and comparable alternatives instead.
Video games are themselves "active" experiences. The player is engaged and doing things in order to meet an objective. Television is a "passive" experience. Someone else is pulling the strings and you are merely observing the end result.
This is not only why video game-based shows generally don't work well. It's also why video game-based movies tend to fail just the same. Truth is, turning an "active" experience into a "passive" one ends up being boring. Watching someone else play a video game is not interesting when you're capable of playing a video game yourself.
I agree wholeheartedly. Game Over tried so hard to be hip to gaming (yo) that it wound up just being pandering. The crude humor wasn't even that funny. I was glad to see it yanked off the air.
I agree about Paint Shop Pro. Adobe Photoshop is highly overrated, and I doubt people would be singing the praise about it if they actually bought the $700 package. Compared to PSP, which can do almost everything with a price tag of under $100, Photoshop is bloated and very expensive for what you get.
I don't think Gimp is bad. On the contrary, I think Gimp 2.0 has made extremely significant strides in terms of usability and features. Some aspects are still slightly esoteric, but it is vastly improved. Much of what I can do in PSP I can do in Gimp, provided I can find the equivalent function.
The one thing I've found irksome about Gimp, and maybe there is a workaround I'm just not seeing, is that you have to create an entirely new, custom brush every time you need one different from the premade ones. Why even have brush 'templates' at all? Just do what PS and PSP do and provide a slider of some type.:)
It has been in decline for years. Why? Well, one reason is because LucasArts failed to really step up to the plate and make good on its valuable franchises.
Sure, Grim Fandango was great, and we have several incarnations of Monkey Island, but there's been nothing like Maniac Mansion 3, or Sam & Max 2 - not even after Day of the Tentacle and S&M sold so well. They rested on their laurels and now the characters have faded into obscurity. No one knows who Bernard Bernoulli, Conroy Bumpus, or Doctor Fred are.
Syberia and the Myst games miss the point. They are worlds to explore, but they aren't funny. The whole point of DOTT and S&M is that they merged genuinely funny/gross humor into an adventure game context, thus producing something that, on the whole, was very entertaining. Light years beyond the "slide show" worlds of Myst and its ilk.
If LucasArts kept at it and maintained their franchises as Warcraft II and Quake started to swoon gamers, we might not have this problem. Alas, they focused entirely on creating inane and slipshod Star Wars titles to make a quick buck. And who are we to criticize them? George Lucas, I'm certain, is laughing all the way to the bank.
But there is also a lot of overhead that goes into a PC game. When you design a console game, at worst you are dealing with three different system architectures. The PS2, Xbox, and GameCube designs are the same in each one of the respective systems. There's no worrying about supporting that strange audio card, or the user having a competent video card.
Perhaps one good thing about Windows is that because it is so ubiquitous, it is sort of a common basis to work from. But PC can never be as consistent as consoles.
Well, I just wanted to say thanks for a really trippy way to kill about 10 minutes. It's an awesome demo. Even for those who criticize "Oh, but it's using DirectX wah wah wah," it's a very neat technical demonstration. I really liked the shadow effects too, especially when doors opened and light would flood into a dark room. The spiral staircase was also very neat, as was the general look. Oh, have to love the bumpmapping/shiny effects too!
A couple stylistic things I would change, since you are the audio guy:
- I would probably give the weapons better sound effects. They need a bit more "oomph," especially the one that fires the little blue blobs. Lift some sci-fi samples from Descent or something.:)
- The walking sound seems clunky. It sort of sounds like a whole army is marching, rather that one guy briskly walking along. It gets the job done, but it just seems a bit "heavy.";)
Anyhow, thanks for all of the time and effort. I'll be looking forward to playing the next version of this and the next chapter!:D
Slashdot Mirror
But I assume that even if Windows and Mandrake are on seperate drives, Mandrake won't succumb to this same problem?
You criticize the reviewer for complaining about the installation problems, calling his work "stupid." Should the reviewer ignore the fact that he found it very difficult, if not impossible, to install on the test machines he tried?
If you, as a video game reviewer, were given a video game that crashed right on the title screen, would you still hammer away at it trying to play the game, or would you eventually write it off as a slipshod product? And when would you throw in the towel? This reviewer tried it on not one, not two, but four machines of varying configurations. But then he plays the devil's advocate - he spends the second page elaborating on how JDS would have performed, giving it the benefit of the doubt. I don't sense the reviewer ranting or condemning JDS on this page, rather I see the reviewer operating under the assumption of if installer worked, what I could expect. That's about all I could ask for and all he could do, I think.
Naturally, not all of these things are exclusive of Mepis Linux, but Mepis does headquarter all of them in one easy-to-use installation.
I think you could conceivably make an interesting FPS based on this engine with some convinction and hard work.
But that does not necessarily delegate the blame to Suse. Ultimately, it's up to Sun because it's their product they are shipping and they have a responsibility to their customers, who are paying a premium for their software, to get the bugs ironed out. Their choice who build on top of Suse was a conscious one.
What difference does it make how a distro functions if you can't even install it? Suffice it to say, Sun not being smart enough to create a reliable installation program that functions on more than 1 out of 4 PCs probably speaks volumes about the product as a whole.
One wonders why EA hasn't resurrected the long dead series. It even had a cartoon all its own, and its overkill violence and fictitious characters would appeal to non-sports fanatics who couldn't tell Shaq O'Neil from Kobe Bryant - but who understand the basic rules of the games no less. ;)
The worst thing that can happen is that a whole new subfield of Computer Science based on game design emerges that tries to quantify everything with theory and abstract principles.
On the other hand, if you tell them that OpenOffice supports all of MS Office's formats, so they can easily read those files without the need for a $400 office suite, I think that's very appealing for casual users, whose first concern about switching to an OSS alternative is "But will I be able to open all of my old files / files friends send me with it?"
What kind of answer is "No, you can only open and save in our native format" to a new user?
(if you want a nifty feature, you have to make sure Excel has it too.)
Uhm, no. That's what your program's native format is for. Paint Shop Pro does a lot of things differently from Photoshop. That doesn't mean the .PSP format has to be compatible with Photoshop. On the other hand, Paint Shop Pro can read from Photoshop's own .PSD format.
This is no different from what OpenOffice is already doing with its .SX(whatever) files and its support for MS Office files.
When people send me Excel files, I kindly ask them to re-send the file in CSV or some other format.
Your friends must love you for that.
Considering I've built over 50 maps for various games and am employed as a Game Designer, I think I have a good idea of what "good gameplay" is, thank you.
I don't think it is even possible to construct a games with good gameplay using the Unreal engine.
The hundreds of thousands of Unreal Tournament 2004 owners would beg to differ.
Lots of people: there are lots of visually boring games that have survived for thousands of years.
I didn't know we had video games "thousands of years" ago. Unless you are trying to advance the argument that compares chess or checkers to Quake 3, which is clearly an apples to oranges comparison.
Doom isn't visually any more boring today than when it came out, yet it wouldn't stand a chance today because people would laugh at the graphics.
You answered my own point. Doom does have good gameplay, there's no questioning that. This is why there is still a small but highly dedicated following still playing the game and manipulating the heck out of the code. But you could never convince anyone to buy a new copy of Doom today (GBA version aside), because the graphics just wouldn't hold up by today's standards.
I.e., you need good graphics to rope players in; you need good gameplay to keep them there.
But the news item raised the question of why game programmers burn out and whether there was another way. My response was simple, and whether you like it or not, you haven't actually argued that it is incorrect. I said that the pressure on current game programming comes from a focus on graphics and performance features.
It's because in order to compete graphically, a lot more work needs to be invested into the game not just on the artistic end, but also on the programming backbone that supports what the artists do. This is a necessary evil.
you focus on good gameplay.
But how long can you focus on "good gameplay"? Gameplay itself is an abstract concept. Sure there are dozens of unwritten rules about it. People like finding secrets, to promote movement you put related items apart from one another, you generally don't put the forcefield switch underneath the toilet, etc. But once you have "gameplay" (which is really more about common sense than you acknowledge), what can you do? If you have a solid control setup and solid game mechanics (which can be formulated early on in a game's life), then you have to work to create the world and citizens in that world who can take advantage of all of this (unless you're building yet another Tetris clone).
coming up with a genuinely new and interesting game requires deep insight and a lot of trial-and-error. Commercial companies can't afford to do that.
Or don't want to, considering that weird and exotic game concepts aren't exactly welcomed by players today.
So, they do what they can: hire large numbers of "artists" to repaint the dungeons and hire large numbers of programmers to write new engines that, ultimately, just play the same game as the old ones.
At best, you can recreate a FPS with slightly different graphics, not much different from any of the other FPS.
I think that's a very narrow-minded view. As you tried to do in your original post, you seem intent on pushing the idea that all games of a certain genre are the same. That's just flat out wrong and, until you can grasp that (since it's the pillar your whole argument is built on), I'm arguing with a brick wall. But I'm not going to shed a tear, because I know I'm right and the evidence supports my side.
For the record, you could say the same sweeping thing about Hollywood. "All science-fiction movies are the same." But there's a huge difference between Star Wars and Blade Runner, even though they are both sci-fi. And it's more than just "repainting the walls." Star Wars is about flying through space on a mission to destroy the Death Star.
It certainly is if you want any game, good or bad, to sell. And that's what every game business wants to do - make a profit. Sometimes if you have your nose in open source too long, you forget simple laws of economics.
No one is going to go down to the game store and buy a text-adventure game for $39.99. As a mapper for Unreal Tournament, the following premise holds strongly: You need great visuals to rope the players in; you need great gameplay to keep them there. Recently, great visuals have become increasingly more difficult to produce with developers raising the bar with each new PC title. Others are forced to keep up.
Yes, and this focus on art instead of gameplay is why so many commercial games suck and aren't replayable
Gameplay is relatively simple compared to art. Try an Unreal Tournament map. You'll spend only a few hours concocting the flow and layout of the map. You'll spend countless hours beautifying in. There has to be an emphasis on art. Without art and design sense, a game is drab and uninteresting. Who really cares about gameplay if your surroundings are so boring? These are not mutually exclusive concepts, rather the relationship is symbiotic.
Halo, Splinter Cell, Deus Ex, Enter the Matrix, Star Wars, and all look great, but they have simplistic, uninteresting gameplay (even as far as FPS go).
Uninteresting in your mind. Clearly, strong sales for each of these games proves that not everyone shares your mindset, fortunately.
They are just waiting until the next renaming of Firefox.
You obviously haven't used it much, have you?
You clearly missed my argument. Photoshop is not useless. It is overpriced and its feature set overrated compared to what PSP and Gimp offer for hundreds of dollars less. Hundreds of dollars less. Given the plethora of common users who have Photoshop, I have a hard time believing that everyone plunked down $700 for it. If you actually had to BUY Photoshop for that cost, you might think about these cheaper and comparable alternatives instead.
So long as the Koopa Kids don't start singing, everything will be just fine.
Other kooky game-related shows over the years:
Video games are themselves "active" experiences. The player is engaged and doing things in order to meet an objective. Television is a "passive" experience. Someone else is pulling the strings and you are merely observing the end result.
This is not only why video game-based shows generally don't work well. It's also why video game-based movies tend to fail just the same. Truth is, turning an "active" experience into a "passive" one ends up being boring. Watching someone else play a video game is not interesting when you're capable of playing a video game yourself.
I agree wholeheartedly. Game Over tried so hard to be hip to gaming (yo) that it wound up just being pandering. The crude humor wasn't even that funny. I was glad to see it yanked off the air.
I don't think Gimp is bad. On the contrary, I think Gimp 2.0 has made extremely significant strides in terms of usability and features. Some aspects are still slightly esoteric, but it is vastly improved. Much of what I can do in PSP I can do in Gimp, provided I can find the equivalent function.
The one thing I've found irksome about Gimp, and maybe there is a workaround I'm just not seeing, is that you have to create an entirely new, custom brush every time you need one different from the premade ones. Why even have brush 'templates' at all? Just do what PS and PSP do and provide a slider of some type. :)
Sure, Grim Fandango was great, and we have several incarnations of Monkey Island, but there's been nothing like Maniac Mansion 3, or Sam & Max 2 - not even after Day of the Tentacle and S&M sold so well. They rested on their laurels and now the characters have faded into obscurity. No one knows who Bernard Bernoulli, Conroy Bumpus, or Doctor Fred are.
Syberia and the Myst games miss the point. They are worlds to explore, but they aren't funny. The whole point of DOTT and S&M is that they merged genuinely funny/gross humor into an adventure game context, thus producing something that, on the whole, was very entertaining. Light years beyond the "slide show" worlds of Myst and its ilk.
If LucasArts kept at it and maintained their franchises as Warcraft II and Quake started to swoon gamers, we might not have this problem. Alas, they focused entirely on creating inane and slipshod Star Wars titles to make a quick buck. And who are we to criticize them? George Lucas, I'm certain, is laughing all the way to the bank.
Some people are really into dissecting games, however. Agree with the point on having to play Game X, even though Game X sucks. :)
Perhaps one good thing about Windows is that because it is so ubiquitous, it is sort of a common basis to work from. But PC can never be as consistent as consoles.
There has been a port of Earthworm Jim to the GBA already. http://www.gamespot.com/gba/action/earthwormjim/in dex.html
Link to article
They also mention revisiting Kingpin, Earthworm Jim, Dark Alliance, Airborne, and Exhaulted.
A couple stylistic things I would change, since you are the audio guy: :)
- I would probably give the weapons better sound effects. They need a bit more "oomph," especially the one that fires the little blue blobs. Lift some sci-fi samples from Descent or something.
- The walking sound seems clunky. It sort of sounds like a whole army is marching, rather that one guy briskly walking along. It gets the job done, but it just seems a bit "heavy." ;)
Anyhow, thanks for all of the time and effort. I'll be looking forward to playing the next version of this and the next chapter! :D
Interesting bit of history there!