I found myself at an awkward point last year where the two best live shows I saw were from mewithoutyou and the Hidden Cameras. A Christian punk band and a militantly queer Canadian group, respectively.
Good rock is good rock, and Stryper and Creed would suck no matter what their message.
You gotta be careful doing that or you'll get hit by a car yourself.
I'm no expert, but it seems to me you're way better off waiting until the squirrel has left the roadway. Even then your thighs must get really scratched up...
Great read overall, but most articles I've read on this subject miss one important limiting factor when pushing for more photorealistic games: the ability of the artists to deliver.
In the old days of low-poly monsters and low-res textures, any slightly artistic geek could build a model or a level and it would look as good as anybody elses. That is changing as the tools and processing power evolve. The newer games require very high-quality assets that not every artist has the skill to produce. It's no longer enough to be an arty geek, now you need to be a geeky artist.
Imagine you take two people and sit them down with a pencil and a piece of paper. One's just some guy from off the street, the other is a fine arts major from t he local art school. You tell them each to draw a figure using only six lines and in the shortest possible time. They each draw a stick figure, and both look pretty much alike. You then say draw another person, no limit on the number of lines, take a half an hour. You've now removed the limitations that were hiding the disparity of talent, so at the end of that time the first guy has a stick figure (maybe a stick figure with hair) and the art student has a passable portrait of the first guy.
The same thing seems to be happening with game visuals: the improved tools and increased polygon pushing abilities of modern consoles have removed most of the limits that in a way protected less-talented artists, and their limitations are now made more glaring. If you really want to push for photorealism, how long before you get to the point where you need a Francisco Cortina to make your models? There are'nt a whole lot of those guys out there.
Re: the larger "stylized vs. realistic" issue, I think overall it's easier to be "Boris" than it is to be "Frazetta". Mimicing real life is always easier than developing a distinctive and original visual style.
... might just be on purpose. If a thing is somewhat fragile and prone to cosmetic blemishes, you tend to treat it like it's precious, more like a good watch than as just another electronic gizmo.
I abuse the hell out of my Palm, but I treat my iPod with kid gloves.
... Apple is a software company, and they make at least some money by selling software.
Apple is also a hardware company, they make most of their money by selling the only computers that can run the software that they sell (by my estimates Apple currently owns, oh, about 100% of the Macintosh market).
Open-source OS X and you not only lose your OS Revenues, you lose the hardware monopoly.
What's left? iPods and iTunes downloads? Hard to afford the Steve's Gulfstream on that revenue.
Re:Classic tech support advise!
on
Apple's First Flops
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· Score: 2, Informative
I had an Amiga 500 with the 500K RAM expansion, which used to short out against the RF shielding in the case on a daily basis. "Lift up the front right corner about and inch and drop it" was the official Commodore method for dealing with it.
As soon as the function of a laptop changes, they'll change the form.
About two years ago I attended a presentation with one of the heads of IBM's industrial design group, and he had some pretty interesting things to say about why the ThinkPads look the way they do. The one that stuck in my head was that "they're boxy and angular because pretty much all of the interior components are boxy and angular... introducing curves, beveled edges, and round corners would just result in wasted space".
As a long-time PowerBook owner (replete with curves, beveled edges, and round corners) I walked away from the discussion still thinking that the machines were ugly, but recognizing that they were purposely ugly, rather than from trying to look cool and failing miserably.
Stand Alone Complex is a TV show, as are a lot of the other anime series.;-)
But I think I see your point... I watch the Simpsons, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under etc., but I watch them on DVD.
There is a lot of good content on TV still, but I refuse to wade through a million crappy shows to find it and subject myself to a billion aobnoxious ads to watch it.
I don't own a TV, and I wouldn't watch broadcast TV if I did. I don't want ads. I want to watch a show when I want to watch it, not in the arbitrary window where it's been scheduled. I won't pay a monthly cable bill when I'm only interested in >1% of the product.
My buddy Raskolnikov did something like that a while ago, and the guilt drove him nuts.
Re:George Broussard of 3d realms' take on this
on
EA Games: The Human Story
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think it's possible for a small developer to make a good game; unfortumately I don't think a small developer can easily find a development budget, or a publisher willing to gamble on them, or money to market and distribute their title, or space on the shelves of big retailers.
It doesn't matter if you have a great idea for a fun, original game title if you can't get it made. And if you make a fun, original game, it doesn't matter if you can't tell people about it and get a sufficient number of people to buy it to fund another one.
I think we'll be looking increasingly at a two-tier system: truly independent developers making small games for a small audience and corporate developers developing "franchises" into "hits". You'll see the occasional small developer have a hit big enough for them to get acquired by one of the corporates, and I guess it's still possible for another id, Blizzard, etc. to build enough of a warchest and reputation to remain independent, but it's gonna be rare.
The paradigms seem to be: Popcap, Looking Glass, Bungie, EA. Build small games with small overhead, profit. Build great games and go bankrupt. Build great games and hang on long enough to get acquired (and hope to be acquired by a fairly enlightened purchaser). Buy a lot of talent and have them create "safe bets" that sell big.
Never thought I'd see the day when being acquired by MS looks like the best possible likely outcome. Man, am I cynical.
Bungie and MS have been very generous in allowing their fan community to use their IP for non-commercial purposes in the past.
With RvB they seem to be making some allowances for commercial use (RvB sell sponsorships, DVDs, etc.) in exchange for an immense amount of very cheap grassroots marketing.
To smart companies like MS (yeah, yeah, they suck, but they're smart), allowing the RvB crew to make some bucks off of their product in exchange for showcasing it to hundreds of thousands of visitors every week isn't costing MS a dime, and in fact probably recruits a steady stream of new Halo fans.
Compared to the millions MS spends hyping Halo 2 (Halo 2 slurpee cups for chrissakes) I'm guessing it looks like apretty sweet deal.
Thanks for the links, but even with one of these devices I'd need to plug the 'Pod into the Powerbook to retrieve and sort the photos.
Once I dump the files from the camera to the iPod, I'd love to be able to quickly review them and dump the rejects... I know I can do that on my camera, but the interface is clunky and it's sloooow (I have an Olympus E-20). And I'd rather not lug the laptop and a media reader around, not to mention extra batteries.
An iPod with a decent display and decent UI for basic photo management would make it easier for me to be as lazy as I seem to be;-)
... the iPod functions as a portable hard drive with a fast FireWire connection, which influenced my buying decision. I use it to carry files back and forth to clients and school more than I do for playing music.
And if the new iPods can be connected directly to a digital camera to store, sort, review, and manage photos in the field, I'd be able to leave my laptop behind on shoots.
The only time a new feature is a bad thing is if it impairs the access or usage of an existing feature. If Apple can implement picture viewing without changing the UI dramatically, or the input method (click wheel), and doesn't make the form factor too large or the battery life too short, I'm all for it.
A poster further up the thread has it right: it's nearly impossible to make a software product, especially one as large and complex (and insecure) as XP, secure after the fact by patching it. Security is best designed into a product at every level from the very start.
What Microsoft is doing is analogous to me trying to turn my apartment into a bank:
Initially I just put up a sign that says "Bank" and leave the money lying on my sofa. Then when I get tired of people walking in and taking the money I lock my door. Then they kick in my door, so I get a thicker door. So now they climb in through a window, so I close and lock the windows. They break a window, I put up shutters. They cut through the floor, I lay down cement; ceiling, I add an alarm; they cut the electricity, I buy a generator. Maybe at some point I buy a safe, which works until they pick the safe up and roll it out of a hole cut into my wooden walls. This goes on for years, until eventually I get fed up and move out, and have a building built to purpose that's secure as a bank should be.
Where this analogy breaks down is at some point pretty early on customers would stop giving me their money until I got my act together, where they've shown no intention of doing the same to Microsoft.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, so I guess that doesn't make sense in context but I couldn't resist.
Good rock is good rock, and Stryper and Creed would suck no matter what their message.
I'm no expert, but it seems to me you're way better off waiting until the squirrel has left the roadway. Even then your thighs must get really scratched up...
In the old days of low-poly monsters and low-res textures, any slightly artistic geek could build a model or a level and it would look as good as anybody elses. That is changing as the tools and processing power evolve. The newer games require very high-quality assets that not every artist has the skill to produce. It's no longer enough to be an arty geek, now you need to be a geeky artist.
Imagine you take two people and sit them down with a pencil and a piece of paper. One's just some guy from off the street, the other is a fine arts major from t he local art school. You tell them each to draw a figure using only six lines and in the shortest possible time. They each draw a stick figure, and both look pretty much alike. You then say draw another person, no limit on the number of lines, take a half an hour. You've now removed the limitations that were hiding the disparity of talent, so at the end of that time the first guy has a stick figure (maybe a stick figure with hair) and the art student has a passable portrait of the first guy.
The same thing seems to be happening with game visuals: the improved tools and increased polygon pushing abilities of modern consoles have removed most of the limits that in a way protected less-talented artists, and their limitations are now made more glaring. If you really want to push for photorealism, how long before you get to the point where you need a Francisco Cortina to make your models? There are'nt a whole lot of those guys out there.
Re: the larger "stylized vs. realistic" issue, I think overall it's easier to be "Boris" than it is to be "Frazetta". Mimicing real life is always easier than developing a distinctive and original visual style.
We can't post huge pics! The nano is impossibly small!
I abuse the hell out of my Palm, but I treat my iPod with kid gloves.
That's some pretty impressive hardware support.
Apple is also a hardware company, they make most of their money by selling the only computers that can run the software that they sell (by my estimates Apple currently owns, oh, about 100% of the Macintosh market).
Open-source OS X and you not only lose your OS Revenues, you lose the hardware monopoly.
What's left? iPods and iTunes downloads? Hard to afford the Steve's Gulfstream on that revenue.
Just a little bit more.
Or maybe Macc...
I had an Amiga 500 with the 500K RAM expansion, which used to short out against the RF shielding in the case on a daily basis. "Lift up the front right corner about and inch and drop it" was the official Commodore method for dealing with it.
I think my Pismo would have given the IBM guy an infarction ;-)
About two years ago I attended a presentation with one of the heads of IBM's industrial design group, and he had some pretty interesting things to say about why the ThinkPads look the way they do. The one that stuck in my head was that "they're boxy and angular because pretty much all of the interior components are boxy and angular... introducing curves, beveled edges, and round corners would just result in wasted space".
As a long-time PowerBook owner (replete with curves, beveled edges, and round corners) I walked away from the discussion still thinking that the machines were ugly, but recognizing that they were purposely ugly, rather than from trying to look cool and failing miserably.
But I think I see your point... I watch the Simpsons, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under etc., but I watch them on DVD.
There is a lot of good content on TV still, but I refuse to wade through a million crappy shows to find it and subject myself to a billion aobnoxious ads to watch it.
I don't own a TV, and I wouldn't watch broadcast TV if I did. I don't want ads. I want to watch a show when I want to watch it, not in the arbitrary window where it's been scheduled. I won't pay a monthly cable bill when I'm only interested in >1% of the product.
Tell that to Looking Glass Studios.
My buddy Raskolnikov did something like that a while ago, and the guilt drove him nuts.
It doesn't matter if you have a great idea for a fun, original game title if you can't get it made. And if you make a fun, original game, it doesn't matter if you can't tell people about it and get a sufficient number of people to buy it to fund another one.
I think we'll be looking increasingly at a two-tier system: truly independent developers making small games for a small audience and corporate developers developing "franchises" into "hits". You'll see the occasional small developer have a hit big enough for them to get acquired by one of the corporates, and I guess it's still possible for another id, Blizzard, etc. to build enough of a warchest and reputation to remain independent, but it's gonna be rare.
The paradigms seem to be: Popcap, Looking Glass, Bungie, EA. Build small games with small overhead, profit. Build great games and go bankrupt. Build great games and hang on long enough to get acquired (and hope to be acquired by a fairly enlightened purchaser). Buy a lot of talent and have them create "safe bets" that sell big.
Never thought I'd see the day when being acquired by MS looks like the best possible likely outcome. Man, am I cynical.
"Run you pigeons, it's Robert Frost!"
With RvB they seem to be making some allowances for commercial use (RvB sell sponsorships, DVDs, etc.) in exchange for an immense amount of very cheap grassroots marketing.
To smart companies like MS (yeah, yeah, they suck, but they're smart), allowing the RvB crew to make some bucks off of their product in exchange for showcasing it to hundreds of thousands of visitors every week isn't costing MS a dime, and in fact probably recruits a steady stream of new Halo fans.
Compared to the millions MS spends hyping Halo 2 (Halo 2 slurpee cups for chrissakes) I'm guessing it looks like apretty sweet deal.
Once I dump the files from the camera to the iPod, I'd love to be able to quickly review them and dump the rejects... I know I can do that on my camera, but the interface is clunky and it's sloooow (I have an Olympus E-20). And I'd rather not lug the laptop and a media reader around, not to mention extra batteries.
An iPod with a decent display and decent UI for basic photo management would make it easier for me to be as lazy as I seem to be ;-)
And if the new iPods can be connected directly to a digital camera to store, sort, review, and manage photos in the field, I'd be able to leave my laptop behind on shoots.
The only time a new feature is a bad thing is if it impairs the access or usage of an existing feature. If Apple can implement picture viewing without changing the UI dramatically, or the input method (click wheel), and doesn't make the form factor too large or the battery life too short, I'm all for it.
They're actually pretty good, but I can't think of any Windows software that actually adheres to them. Including Windows.
What Microsoft is doing is analogous to me trying to turn my apartment into a bank:
Initially I just put up a sign that says "Bank" and leave the money lying on my sofa. Then when I get tired of people walking in and taking the money I lock my door. Then they kick in my door, so I get a thicker door. So now they climb in through a window, so I close and lock the windows. They break a window, I put up shutters. They cut through the floor, I lay down cement; ceiling, I add an alarm; they cut the electricity, I buy a generator. Maybe at some point I buy a safe, which works until they pick the safe up and roll it out of a hole cut into my wooden walls. This goes on for years, until eventually I get fed up and move out, and have a building built to purpose that's secure as a bank should be.
Where this analogy breaks down is at some point pretty early on customers would stop giving me their money until I got my act together, where they've shown no intention of doing the same to Microsoft.
Oh, wait...
"Just some ancidotal evidence..." Maybe that Seiko dictionary isn't holding up all that well after all :-)