"Some developers would rather quit their job than be forced to use a new editor or IDE."
And some prima-donna developers will presumably find themselves without a job after a couple of resignations based on the code-editor they were required to use. I assume a developer that cared that much would look into what policies were in place regarding using your own preferred development tools vs. being required to use sanctioned tools, before they took a job. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to work with tools you're most comfortable with. That said, you should have some flexibility in terms of using technology you're not familiar with. But if you are familiar with it, and you don't want to use it because it's inferior or slow, more power to you.
I don't know about IDEs or editors, but I've known people who've left jobs because their company decided to switch to a licensed game engine. I've left a job for this reason myself. I did give it a try for about a month, but ultimately the type of work I would be doing everyday in working with it did not fit well with my desired career development path. Too bad though, I liked everything else about the job.
If that sounds 'prima donna' to you, I would suggest that you need to value your work "quality of life" more. To some people, the type of work they're doing and how it gets done is as important as how much you get paid or other concerns like that.
They're just one piece of a big puzzle. This isn't the 80s when squeezing a few extra polygons on the screen meant the difference between 12 and 40. Most of the type of work that the "rock star" people did back in the day is now handled by Engineers at ATI and NVIDIA, with some finishing touches by the DX team.
This certainly trivializes the efforts of the modern game programmer. You are acting as if writing a software triangle rasterizer is all there is to videogame development. I can assure you, programmers still do animation playback and blending, AI, scene visibility calculation, script compilers, and a load of other tasks that are similar to those done back in the day by the "rock star" programmer. Furthermore, the requirements for each of those tasks are much greater, due to the bar being raised so much by previous games. Having the rasterization provided by hardware just means you can focus the same "rock star" programming effort on other areas of the game, it doesn't mean you can get lazy.
That said, your point about the role of artists is spot on. As hardware has advanced, the artist's importance has increased, and will continue to do so. The look of a game these days is owed mostly to artists and animators, since you really can't distinguish them by technology alone anymore. But a good programmer will give the artists the ability to add more art by making the engine efficient, and will allow them to iterate on the art faster by making the tools fast as well.
Story writers... eh, we're really not there yet. But it's coming. Stories in games for the most part are like stories in porn movies: just there so you can have some excuse to have action occur. There are exceptions, like Homeworld and Bioshock, but these are not very common yet.
As far as actors go... I don't really see what they have that commands the money they do. I can't imagine complaining about $1000 a day. I can assure him that nobody else on that team made $1000 a day. Oh, yes, I forgot... he's an ACTOR... they are not held to the standards of mere mortals;)
...filed an application for the first new nuclear power plant in the US in thirty years to build two advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR) at its South Texas nuclear power plant site doubling the 2700 megawatts presently generated at the facility.
Awesome, that's enough power for _TWO_ time-travelling DeLoreans!
You must have been the guy who wrote it, because MusicMatch is AWFUL.
I got my iPod before iTunes was available on the PC, and this is what I had to use instead. It was horribly clunky and slow. iTunes for all it's problems is 100 times better.
If they are underqualified for the position, or are very junior, sometimes I will tell them that they did not get the job, and talk to them about why, and how they could become a more qualified applicant in the future. Sometimes people apply for jobs in an industry that they are new to, and I think the information about what we are looking for in potential candidates is more useful to someone than just being told "Thank you for your time, we'll get back to you if we're interested."
If the person is just not a good fit for whatever reason, and it's not a matter of improving their skills, then usually a "We don't have a position that would fit with your qualifications" would do. Or possibly just thanking them for their time.
If the interview is just bizarrely bad, then a quick "thank you" is probably about the best I can do:P
Re:XML is the best way to store data?
on
Collada
·
· Score: 1
I've only been working on amateur game development, where all the people are spread around the world and have different tools and there isn't really a traditional art pipeline.
In your situation, I definitely can see the benefit of Collada for interchange between different environments. I think going forward your distributed development model will be more the norm, as art outsourcing gets more popular (though I'm guessing the environments won't be quite so heterogenous as what you have to deal with!). But for processing data through a series of closely linked tools, it makes more sense to convert to a faster intermediate format so you don't get eaten up loading and writing files (I'm assuming a tool chain of specialized tools linked by scripts here, if it's a monolithic converter then again it doesn't matter).
Oh, and of course you'd be converting to binary for a runtime format, using XML for that is just crazy talk;)
XML is the best way to store data?
on
Collada
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I worked on a game that was created using a middleware package that used XML as a file format for level layout. As we got into full production, and the levels got populated, it would often take 20-30 minutes to load a level into the editor, most of which time was spent opening a ton of XML files and parsing strings.
Another company I worked for had a proprietary geometry/animation format that was ASCII based and very verbose. The tools to process this data were also very slow, probably at a minimum 10x slower than they needed to be. Most time was spent, yes, loading and parsing ASCII.
Besides this, your file sizes will balloon amazingly, as XML/ASCII doesn't have a very good information density when compared with binary data, which doesn't care about formatting and keywords. This becomes very important when you have game levels with millions of vertices in them.
ASCII format data is great for human readability, but if you want quick iterative development on 3D assets, it is NOT the way to go for production tools. String parsing is very expensive for a variety of reasons. I know you can speed it up with hashing and tricks, but still it's never going to be as fast as a binary format, especially not one that can be loaded into memory and ready to work on with just a few pointer fixups. If you want human readability for debugging, have your tools generate some good log files when a verbose flag is passed in.
Consideration for others also includes just dealing with the fact that you live next to people and you're going to hear them make noise, and not complaining about every last little thing.
I had a downstairs neighbor who would call the landlord and complain that I was "walking too loud". He was upset because the upstairs apartment had been vacant for six months and he got to like not hearing anyone, so it bothered him that there was someone there now. So he tried to get my landlord to kick us out. I lived in another building with thin walls, and I would get complaints from coming home from work and watching TV at a _low_ volume level (I could barely hear it from my couch 8 feet away).
I live in LA and some people here seem to expect that it should be as quiet as rural North Dakota, and are upset when it's not. You don't like hearing your neighbors? Play your radio on a relaxing channel when you go to sleep. Wear earplugs. Move to a building with thicker walls, or buy a house. If that doesn't work, maybe you shouldn't be living in a city.
I'm not saying you should be as loud as you want to, but I think you should be able to live a normal daily life without having to think about if your neighbor is going to call your landlord again because you had someone over for dinner and they could hear you talking.
Wow, what a concept! A digital download music service that actually adds value beyond plain ol' CDs, rather than providing an inferior product to them.
Maybe someday the labels will wise up and do something like this...
They did something almost exactly like that at E3 last year (I think in NVidia's booth) It was actually pretty entertaining, as they had 2 people doing sports commentating, camera switching, etc.
In any case, I think it would be more entertaining to watch on TV than watching people play poker. And people do that.
I think I've actually said something like that myself in response to a bug report.
In my case, it was shorthand for "I don't know what code was causing the problem described, but I do not see the described behavior in the current build."
Communication issues between QA and Dev teams can be amazingly huge, doubly so when the dev is an external studio. Oftentimes I'd get bugs back from the publishers QA department and wonder if they were really testing our game, because they would use completely different terms to describe everything than we would internally. Add to that the fact that publisher QA can be 2-4 builds behind what the devs are using, and things can get confusing really fast... it isn't surprising that a bug would be sent back as "I don't know but it's fixed", because we may have fixed it in the build after the one we sent to QA, and the programmer who receives the bug report later may have never even seen it, and may not be able to reproduce it (since it no longer exists).
Oh please. So you change the name, and all of a sudden everything's different. What's wrong with "video games"?
We saw this kind of thinking before, in the early 90's. "New Media". "Interactive" (not interactive-something, just the one word. People would go around saying "I work in interactive.")
All changing the name does is attract a bunch of wannabe-"visionaries" who can talk a lot about how they're gonna innovate, break the mold, etc, but when the pedal hits the metal, all they end up doing is schlocky low-content low-production-quality derivative crap. Those are the people responsible for the FMV "revolution" in videogames circa 1994. Do we really need that again?
You want a revolution, come up with a new business model. Seamus is part right, I think, in that we need to recognize REAL innovation with awards. But really, the advent of XBox Live direct distribution and low-cost development models will go much further in spurring innovation than any new jargon will. The whole reason there's no innovation in games is that developing them costs a ton of money. Because the risk is already huge, publishers don't want to incur more risk by going out on a limb with content and game mechanics.
Make game creation cheap, open the distribution pipes so that smaller houses can get their games out, and I guarantee you will start seeing innovation.
My point was that Gore actually did win the popular vote in 2000, yet lost the election under highly debatable circumstances. Bush for some reason won the popular vote in 2004 so the burden of proof for any "conspiracy theory" is much higher. Ohio was certainly an important factor in 2004, but it was by no means the only factor; in contrast the situation in Florida was pretty shady all around.
I don't necessarily think Bush played fairly the second time around; however I think his success was mostly due to the old chestnut about "not changing horses midstream": when a country is at war, the people are unlikely to throw out the guy running the war. Kerry apparently didn't make a good case for how he would run things better.
He doesn't _really_ realize it, what he's saying is basically:
"It's true that language changes, but it has to change in the direction I want it to, or it's not valid."
'does violence to the accepted standards of the king's English'. Please. He's not even writing the "King's english", otherwise his sentences would be 5-10 times as long, full of run-on commas, and words would be spelled inconsistently and however he liked without regard for any standard.
We live in an increasingly specialized world, with a need for increasingly specialized language and jargon. It's inevitable that this will leak into the common language. Personally I think the adaptation of language over time is really interesting. Language shapes how you view the world, and changing language allows you to see it in new ways. By wanting to slow the rate of change of language, he basically wants to slow our mind's flexibility to understand new paradigms and concepts.
"Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf. But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers."
With clumsy, heavy-handed metaphors like these, I think he's a part of the problem. All he has to do now is compare someone who writes poorly to Hitler exterminating the Jews, and he'll be all set.
Go back to your cave, Luddite. Language changes, and the older generations always scoff at the changes that the younger create.
Slashdot Mirror
"However, the researchers believe the technology could be refined so that tags were reflective and require no power. "
And some prima-donna developers will presumably find themselves without a job after a couple of resignations based on the code-editor they were required to use. I assume a developer that cared that much would look into what policies were in place regarding using your own preferred development tools vs. being required to use sanctioned tools, before they took a job. I don't think it's unreasonable to want to work with tools you're most comfortable with. That said, you should have some flexibility in terms of using technology you're not familiar with. But if you are familiar with it, and you don't want to use it because it's inferior or slow, more power to you.
I don't know about IDEs or editors, but I've known people who've left jobs because their company decided to switch to a licensed game engine. I've left a job for this reason myself. I did give it a try for about a month, but ultimately the type of work I would be doing everyday in working with it did not fit well with my desired career development path. Too bad though, I liked everything else about the job.
If that sounds 'prima donna' to you, I would suggest that you need to value your work "quality of life" more. To some people, the type of work they're doing and how it gets done is as important as how much you get paid or other concerns like that.
They're just one piece of a big puzzle. This isn't the 80s when squeezing a few extra polygons on the screen meant the difference between 12 and 40. Most of the type of work that the "rock star" people did back in the day is now handled by Engineers at ATI and NVIDIA, with some finishing touches by the DX team.
;)
This certainly trivializes the efforts of the modern game programmer. You are acting as if writing a software triangle rasterizer is all there is to videogame development. I can assure you, programmers still do animation playback and blending, AI, scene visibility calculation, script compilers, and a load of other tasks that are similar to those done back in the day by the "rock star" programmer. Furthermore, the requirements for each of those tasks are much greater, due to the bar being raised so much by previous games. Having the rasterization provided by hardware just means you can focus the same "rock star" programming effort on other areas of the game, it doesn't mean you can get lazy.
That said, your point about the role of artists is spot on. As hardware has advanced, the artist's importance has increased, and will continue to do so. The look of a game these days is owed mostly to artists and animators, since you really can't distinguish them by technology alone anymore. But a good programmer will give the artists the ability to add more art by making the engine efficient, and will allow them to iterate on the art faster by making the tools fast as well.
Story writers... eh, we're really not there yet. But it's coming. Stories in games for the most part are like stories in porn movies: just there so you can have some excuse to have action occur. There are exceptions, like Homeworld and Bioshock, but these are not very common yet.
As far as actors go... I don't really see what they have that commands the money they do. I can't imagine complaining about $1000 a day. I can assure him that nobody else on that team made $1000 a day. Oh, yes, I forgot... he's an ACTOR... they are not held to the standards of mere mortals
-marsh
...filed an application for the first new nuclear power plant in the US in thirty years to build two advanced boiling water reactors (ABWR) at its South Texas nuclear power plant site doubling the 2700 megawatts presently generated at the facility.
Awesome, that's enough power for _TWO_ time-travelling DeLoreans!
NT
You must have been the guy who wrote it, because MusicMatch is AWFUL.
I got my iPod before iTunes was available on the PC, and this is what I had to use instead. It was horribly clunky and slow. iTunes for all it's problems is 100 times better.
DCE == Douchebags Creating Euphemisms
Ahhh yes, I remember when Dennis Miller was actually funny... those were the days...
Nope!
All Call of Duty games are done internally now.
If they are underqualified for the position, or are very junior, sometimes I will tell them that they did not get the job, and talk to them about why, and how they could become a more qualified applicant in the future. Sometimes people apply for jobs in an industry that they are new to, and I think the information about what we are looking for in potential candidates is more useful to someone than just being told "Thank you for your time, we'll get back to you if we're interested."
:P
If the person is just not a good fit for whatever reason, and it's not a matter of improving their skills, then usually a "We don't have a position that would fit with your qualifications" would do. Or possibly just thanking them for their time.
If the interview is just bizarrely bad, then a quick "thank you" is probably about the best I can do
I've only been working on amateur game development, where all the people are spread around the world and have different tools and there isn't really a traditional art pipeline.
;)
In your situation, I definitely can see the benefit of Collada for interchange between different environments. I think going forward your distributed development model will be more the norm, as art outsourcing gets more popular (though I'm guessing the environments won't be quite so heterogenous as what you have to deal with!). But for processing data through a series of closely linked tools, it makes more sense to convert to a faster intermediate format so you don't get eaten up loading and writing files (I'm assuming a tool chain of specialized tools linked by scripts here, if it's a monolithic converter then again it doesn't matter).
Oh, and of course you'd be converting to binary for a runtime format, using XML for that is just crazy talk
I worked on a game that was created using a middleware package that used XML as a file format for level layout. As we got into full production, and the levels got populated, it would often take 20-30 minutes to load a level into the editor, most of which time was spent opening a ton of XML files and parsing strings.
Another company I worked for had a proprietary geometry/animation format that was ASCII based and very verbose. The tools to process this data were also very slow, probably at a minimum 10x slower than they needed to be. Most time was spent, yes, loading and parsing ASCII.
Besides this, your file sizes will balloon amazingly, as XML/ASCII doesn't have a very good information density when compared with binary data, which doesn't care about formatting and keywords. This becomes very important when you have game levels with millions of vertices in them.
ASCII format data is great for human readability, but if you want quick iterative development on 3D assets, it is NOT the way to go for production tools. String parsing is very expensive for a variety of reasons. I know you can speed it up with hashing and tricks, but still it's never going to be as fast as a binary format, especially not one that can be loaded into memory and ready to work on with just a few pointer fixups. If you want human readability for debugging, have your tools generate some good log files when a verbose flag is passed in.
As if it wouldn't be patently obvious it was hacked if something suspicious happened.
Yeah, you're right. If that were to happen, it would come out in other ways, like exit polls would show the other guy winning.
Oh, wait...
Consideration for others also includes just dealing with the fact that you live next to people and you're going to hear them make noise, and not complaining about every last little thing.
I had a downstairs neighbor who would call the landlord and complain that I was "walking too loud". He was upset because the upstairs apartment had been vacant for six months and he got to like not hearing anyone, so it bothered him that there was someone there now. So he tried to get my landlord to kick us out. I lived in another building with thin walls, and I would get complaints from coming home from work and watching TV at a _low_ volume level (I could barely hear it from my couch 8 feet away).
I live in LA and some people here seem to expect that it should be as quiet as rural North Dakota, and are upset when it's not. You don't like hearing your neighbors? Play your radio on a relaxing channel when you go to sleep. Wear earplugs. Move to a building with thicker walls, or buy a house. If that doesn't work, maybe you shouldn't be living in a city.
I'm not saying you should be as loud as you want to, but I think you should be able to live a normal daily life without having to think about if your neighbor is going to call your landlord again because you had someone over for dinner and they could hear you talking.
Divers dive in pairs, and you always have a secondary regulator on your equipment, in case your buddy runs out of air or has an equipment failure.
I don't think that that kind of redundancy is gonna work for the jetpack...
Mod this up!
Wow, what a concept! A digital download music service that actually adds value beyond plain ol' CDs, rather than providing an inferior product to them.
Maybe someday the labels will wise up and do something like this...
I hope they've improved their lag compensation on the game... the vehicle physics would get super flaky with bad latency.
Also, mini loads every time you move between zones SUCK. What the hell, it's a PC game! There's no excuse for that.
They did something almost exactly like that at E3 last year (I think in NVidia's booth) It was actually pretty entertaining, as they had 2 people doing sports commentating, camera switching, etc.
In any case, I think it would be more entertaining to watch on TV than watching people play poker. And people do that.
I think I've actually said something like that myself in response to a bug report.
In my case, it was shorthand for "I don't know what code was causing the problem described, but I do not see the described behavior in the current build."
Communication issues between QA and Dev teams can be amazingly huge, doubly so when the dev is an external studio. Oftentimes I'd get bugs back from the publishers QA department and wonder if they were really testing our game, because they would use completely different terms to describe everything than we would internally. Add to that the fact that publisher QA can be 2-4 builds behind what the devs are using, and things can get confusing really fast... it isn't surprising that a bug would be sent back as "I don't know but it's fixed", because we may have fixed it in the build after the one we sent to QA, and the programmer who receives the bug report later may have never even seen it, and may not be able to reproduce it (since it no longer exists).
Oh please. So you change the name, and all of a sudden everything's different. What's wrong with "video games"?
We saw this kind of thinking before, in the early 90's. "New Media". "Interactive" (not interactive-something, just the one word. People would go around saying "I work in interactive.")
All changing the name does is attract a bunch of wannabe-"visionaries" who can talk a lot about how they're gonna innovate, break the mold, etc, but when the pedal hits the metal, all they end up doing is schlocky low-content low-production-quality derivative crap. Those are the people responsible for the FMV "revolution" in videogames circa 1994. Do we really need that again?
You want a revolution, come up with a new business model. Seamus is part right, I think, in that we need to recognize REAL innovation with awards. But really, the advent of XBox Live direct distribution and low-cost development models will go much further in spurring innovation than any new jargon will. The whole reason there's no innovation in games is that developing them costs a ton of money. Because the risk is already huge, publishers don't want to incur more risk by going out on a limb with content and game mechanics.
Make game creation cheap, open the distribution pipes so that smaller houses can get their games out, and I guarantee you will start seeing innovation.
My point was that Gore actually did win the popular vote in 2000, yet lost the election under highly debatable circumstances. Bush for some reason won the popular vote in 2004 so the burden of proof for any "conspiracy theory" is much higher. Ohio was certainly an important factor in 2004, but it was by no means the only factor; in contrast the situation in Florida was pretty shady all around.
I don't necessarily think Bush played fairly the second time around; however I think his success was mostly due to the old chestnut about "not changing horses midstream": when a country is at war, the people are unlikely to throw out the guy running the war. Kerry apparently didn't make a good case for how he would run things better.
You know, this would be a lot more straightforward if OP had put Gore instead of Kerry.
No contortionate conspiracy claims would be needed.
He doesn't _really_ realize it, what he's saying is basically:
"It's true that language changes, but it has to change in the direction I want it to, or it's not valid."
'does violence to the accepted standards of the king's English'. Please. He's not even writing the "King's english", otherwise his sentences would be 5-10 times as long, full of run-on commas, and words would be spelled inconsistently and however he liked without regard for any standard.
We live in an increasingly specialized world, with a need for increasingly specialized language and jargon. It's inevitable that this will leak into the common language. Personally I think the adaptation of language over time is really interesting. Language shapes how you view the world, and changing language allows you to see it in new ways. By wanting to slow the rate of change of language, he basically wants to slow our mind's flexibility to understand new paradigms and concepts.
"Its speed and informality sing a siren song of incompetent communication, a virtual hooker beckoning to the drunken sailor as he staggers along the wharf.
But it's not enough to simply vomit out of your fingers."
With clumsy, heavy-handed metaphors like these, I think he's a part of the problem.
All he has to do now is compare someone who writes poorly to Hitler exterminating the Jews, and he'll be all set.
Go back to your cave, Luddite. Language changes, and the older generations always scoff at the changes that the younger create.
Good point. Any game that involves pressing buttons to make things happen sucks.