I'm generally less interested in video games than I used to be. I have other demands on my time now: big ongoing projects (one of which has a deadline at the end of the month), a love life, a new city to explore, people to go hang out with... I'd really rather try and sit in front of the drawing board to get some art done than grind through another lengthy game that has the same narrative cliches and the same gameplay as every other game I've played in its genre.
It's harder and harder for someone to offer me a new experience. I've played more than enough shitty games in my life; I don't need to play more of them.
Let the new desktops vary according to what needs to be done; the needs of someone who's going to be editing a ton of video files are very different from someone who's going to be writing text in Word. There's only twenty employes, I don't think it's an onerous task for you to sit down with each new person who needs a new machine and talk about what they're going to be doing and how they'll be doing it; what's the setup of their dreams for doing their job if money's no limit, what can you get together that's actually within the budget?
I have a freeform to-do text file on my Mac. I've got it bound to a hotkey in Quicksilver so I can summon it up and start typing pretty easily. This also keeps longer bits of text for Stuff I Might Do Someday. It's more of a "random braindumps" file these days. It's RTF so I can drop in reference imagery now and then.
I also use Astrid on my Android phone as a todo (and shopping) list; I've got it synching with rememberthemilk.com. This is not synched in any way with the aforementioned text file. Sometimes I'll write out some Things To Do in that file, then immediately turn around and cut and paste them into RTM. I keep on meaning to play with some todo programs that could synch with RTM and possibly make this easier, but I haven't bothered.
Long projects tend to end up with a chart quickly scribbled out and taped onto the wall or kept in the appropriate sketchbook (I'm mostly an artist). It helps a lot, halfway through, to look at the pile of checked-off items so I can sit down and draw another one. Said long projects also get directories of their own in my art directory. Well, actually they get directories of their own in the directory for the year I start them, and a link to that in my art directory; I like to file that stuff away by year.
In general I try to keep notes for a project in the same place as the other stuff related to it.
And I try to just not worry about a bunch of stuff. What matters? Keep track of that.
Yes. I moved back down to New Orleans three days before Katrina; everything I'd shipped back was gone. All I had left was what was in my suitcase and the small chunk of my possessions that'd never gotten shipped out to California.
The only thing I really miss, five years later, is about ten years of my personal sketchbooks. And a few books in my library.
You want height? Turn the screen. It probably came with a stand that will let you turn it ninety degrees; if it didn't, you can get tons of monitor mounts that will as long as it's got a VESA mount. (Is anyone making decently-sized flat panels that aren't VESA mounts?)
Maybe your monitor can detect it's been turned and tell the computer; maybe it doesn't. Mine doesn't, so I kludged together a little bit of Applescript to tell the OS about the rotation, and to change the settings on my Wacom tablet and swap out the background while I was at it, then bound it to a hotkey.
Your vision of a world where there's one single point of porting would also have to include a single GUI, unless you want to be in a horrible, horrible hell of every program using different user interface conventions.
Google tried to change this by selling the Nexus One direct to users (I have one of those and am very happy with it!) but this seems to have been a dismal failure, overall.
(and oh god racing games on keyboard. ugh. i've been playing HL2 because a friend bought it for my birthday and the buggy sequence was a total uncontrollable piece of ass because i have to use this stupid WASD shit instead of using a nice analog stick so i have easy, intuitive control over the fucking throttle and steering.)
(funny, too - when my boyfriend played through gta3:san andreas on his windows box, he pretty much eschewed cars in favor of motorcycles because the keyboard rendered cars totally uncontrollable for him. me, i plugged in a controller, and drove around like a crazy motherfucker with my nice analog steering and throttle controls.)
Funny, that first part sounds like what I sound like when I try playing FPSs and bitch about them. Arrgh, I just have DIGITAL control over my motion, I have to press a fucking KEY to walk slow or fast instead of modulating my finger on the joystick, I can only see what's directly in front of my character instead of seeing the world it. And that WASD-shit-ctrl shit twines my fingers into super-awkward configurations.
I dunno, I've watched my boyfriends (who are keyboard-and-mouse guys through and through) play arena shooters with that combination, and they seem to split their attention between 'moving' and 'shooting'; I've never seen them casually do fundamental tactics like 'walk around a cluster of enemies while aiming the laser back at it'. I'll take one of these things and get a controller working with it and kick ass compared to them flailing with the allegedly "superior" keyboard and mouse.
The mouse is good for precisely clicking on one point on the screen. FPSs are largely about precision clicking. Controllers suck at this task! But they excel at games designed around their strengths, of manipulating a couple directional controls at once, of just doing freeform running around and doing single button presses or chords. (I mean, shit, you K+M fanatics are still playing games whose input conventions are designed to deal with keyboards that start beeping frantically and dropping input if you mash down more than four or five keys at once.)
I pity you FPS addicts who will never know the pleasure of weaving your on-screen character through an intricate ballet of running, jumping, dancing, and attacking. There's a real pleasure to choreographing your moves on the fly in a third-person game and watching a superbly-animated character perform them that's totally lost when you're a viewpoint with an arm and a gun hanging somewhere beneath it.
FPS games are designed with a keyboard and mouse in mind; handheld controllers suck for these actions. But if the tables were turned, with games designed around a controller, I suspect you'd find that the PC players would be the ones defeated by an inadequate interface. I mean, boot up MAME and try playing Robotron with a keyboard, see how far you get, then go find a lovingly-maintained cabinet of the same game and feel the joy of grabbing dual joysticks.
I think Sony gets a couple of points for this one. That was an amazingly nice letter given the circumstances; it politely said "hey, um, we totally own the 'Lemmings' brand, and you knew it wasn't PD when you did this stunt. We could sue you into the ground. But we will not if you take it off the net."
So. I'm moving into a group house with some friends. They started using Wave to organize possibilities, comment on them, and vote on them.
But the person who tended to dump possibilities into the wave always just dumped the Craigslist URLs. Pretty hard for me to decide between one long string of random alphanumerics and another. So I started cutting and pasting the actual listings in. Collaborative editing! Awesome!
Well, awesome up until the point where it'd start saying "This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence" and make me reload it, without my changes. Not so awesome. Frustrating, in fact. The kind of frustration that quickly made me want to throw something.
And don't get me started on that horrible, horrible little custom scrollbar...
So I download the.dmg and open it and run the installer.
The "Install" button's ghosted out until I click the "I have read and agree to the terms of the license agreement" checkbox. But where's the agreement? Well, there's a link (with no rollover state, of course) to this page on Adobe's site, with a bewilderingly-long list of links to EULAs. As PDFs.
Nobody ever reads the EULA anyway, but this is ridiculous.
Flash has been sucking on Macs since long before FLV, since long before OSX. I first encountered Flash around 2000, when I started working in web animation. Spümcø was a Mac shop and as we got deeper into Flash we really started to regret that as the Flash editor and player were both significantly slower on Macs than on Windows boxes that were otherwise pretty much equivalent in speed and power; there were some special magic Mac-version-only bugs in the editor that showed up when dealing with the huge source files created at the tail end of making a cartoon.
The whole video thing is a red herring. Flash has sucked on Macs for ten years.
I used Flash professionally around 2000. The Mac version was a total piece of shit - slow, glitchy, with extra Mac-only point releases to fix dire Mac-only crasher bugs in the editor.
Since buying Macromedia, all of Adobe's products have been increasingly worse cycle hogs as they started using the shitty Flash plugin for bits of UI here and there. There's no reason for Illustrator to start using ~10% of my CPU when idle just because I opened up the furshlugginer "Kulerz" panel by accident.
I, for one, am glad to see Adobe finally getting their comeuppance for the half-assed job of Mac support they've been doing. Their arguments of "we don't have the OS hooks" are disingenuous when you look at the in-browser performance of something like the Unity plugin.
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I didn't see anyone getting a pat-down, "enhanced" or otherwise. Just the same old shoes-on-the-xray-belt routine as always.
I'm generally less interested in video games than I used to be. I have other demands on my time now: big ongoing projects (one of which has a deadline at the end of the month), a love life, a new city to explore, people to go hang out with... I'd really rather try and sit in front of the drawing board to get some art done than grind through another lengthy game that has the same narrative cliches and the same gameplay as every other game I've played in its genre.
It's harder and harder for someone to offer me a new experience. I've played more than enough shitty games in my life; I don't need to play more of them.
Let the new desktops vary according to what needs to be done; the needs of someone who's going to be editing a ton of video files are very different from someone who's going to be writing text in Word. There's only twenty employes, I don't think it's an onerous task for you to sit down with each new person who needs a new machine and talk about what they're going to be doing and how they'll be doing it; what's the setup of their dreams for doing their job if money's no limit, what can you get together that's actually within the budget?
I have a freeform to-do text file on my Mac. I've got it bound to a hotkey in Quicksilver so I can summon it up and start typing pretty easily. This also keeps longer bits of text for Stuff I Might Do Someday. It's more of a "random braindumps" file these days. It's RTF so I can drop in reference imagery now and then.
I also use Astrid on my Android phone as a todo (and shopping) list; I've got it synching with rememberthemilk.com. This is not synched in any way with the aforementioned text file. Sometimes I'll write out some Things To Do in that file, then immediately turn around and cut and paste them into RTM. I keep on meaning to play with some todo programs that could synch with RTM and possibly make this easier, but I haven't bothered.
Long projects tend to end up with a chart quickly scribbled out and taped onto the wall or kept in the appropriate sketchbook (I'm mostly an artist). It helps a lot, halfway through, to look at the pile of checked-off items so I can sit down and draw another one. Said long projects also get directories of their own in my art directory. Well, actually they get directories of their own in the directory for the year I start them, and a link to that in my art directory; I like to file that stuff away by year.
In general I try to keep notes for a project in the same place as the other stuff related to it.
And I try to just not worry about a bunch of stuff. What matters? Keep track of that.
Yes. I moved back down to New Orleans three days before Katrina; everything I'd shipped back was gone. All I had left was what was in my suitcase and the small chunk of my possessions that'd never gotten shipped out to California.
The only thing I really miss, five years later, is about ten years of my personal sketchbooks. And a few books in my library.
Stuff's just stuff.
You want height? Turn the screen. It probably came with a stand that will let you turn it ninety degrees; if it didn't, you can get tons of monitor mounts that will as long as it's got a VESA mount. (Is anyone making decently-sized flat panels that aren't VESA mounts?)
Maybe your monitor can detect it's been turned and tell the computer; maybe it doesn't. Mine doesn't, so I kludged together a little bit of Applescript to tell the OS about the rotation, and to change the settings on my Wacom tablet and swap out the background while I was at it, then bound it to a hotkey.
Safari runs on Windows.
Your vision of a world where there's one single point of porting would also have to include a single GUI, unless you want to be in a horrible, horrible hell of every program using different user interface conventions.
Google tried to change this by selling the Nexus One direct to users (I have one of those and am very happy with it!) but this seems to have been a dismal failure, overall.
Quite possibly! Sunnyvale, I think, with a pile of mostly platformers and shmups on Genesis/32X/Saturn/Dreamcast/N64/PS2?
Small world. *grin*
which kinda comes back to my point that keyboard and mouse is really only good for games designed with that control scheme in mind, doesn't it?
(and oh god racing games on keyboard. ugh. i've been playing HL2 because a friend bought it for my birthday and the buggy sequence was a total uncontrollable piece of ass because i have to use this stupid WASD shit instead of using a nice analog stick so i have easy, intuitive control over the fucking throttle and steering.)
(funny, too - when my boyfriend played through gta3:san andreas on his windows box, he pretty much eschewed cars in favor of motorcycles because the keyboard rendered cars totally uncontrollable for him. me, i plugged in a controller, and drove around like a crazy motherfucker with my nice analog steering and throttle controls.)
Funny, that first part sounds like what I sound like when I try playing FPSs and bitch about them. Arrgh, I just have DIGITAL control over my motion, I have to press a fucking KEY to walk slow or fast instead of modulating my finger on the joystick, I can only see what's directly in front of my character instead of seeing the world it. And that WASD-shit-ctrl shit twines my fingers into super-awkward configurations.
I'm +3 Funny at the moment. *shrug*
He lists two titles - Unreal and Gears of War. Which are both about, well, precisely pointing and clicking on things.
I dunno, I've watched my boyfriends (who are keyboard-and-mouse guys through and through) play arena shooters with that combination, and they seem to split their attention between 'moving' and 'shooting'; I've never seen them casually do fundamental tactics like 'walk around a cluster of enemies while aiming the laser back at it'. I'll take one of these things and get a controller working with it and kick ass compared to them flailing with the allegedly "superior" keyboard and mouse.
The mouse is good for precisely clicking on one point on the screen. FPSs are largely about precision clicking. Controllers suck at this task! But they excel at games designed around their strengths, of manipulating a couple directional controls at once, of just doing freeform running around and doing single button presses or chords. (I mean, shit, you K+M fanatics are still playing games whose input conventions are designed to deal with keyboards that start beeping frantically and dropping input if you mash down more than four or five keys at once.)
I pity you FPS addicts who will never know the pleasure of weaving your on-screen character through an intricate ballet of running, jumping, dancing, and attacking. There's a real pleasure to choreographing your moves on the fly in a third-person game and watching a superbly-animated character perform them that's totally lost when you're a viewpoint with an arm and a gun hanging somewhere beneath it.
FPS games are designed with a keyboard and mouse in mind; handheld controllers suck for these actions. But if the tables were turned, with games designed around a controller, I suspect you'd find that the PC players would be the ones defeated by an inadequate interface. I mean, boot up MAME and try playing Robotron with a keyboard, see how far you get, then go find a lovingly-maintained cabinet of the same game and feel the joy of grabbing dual joysticks.
When I replace the 20-month-old Macbook Pro I'm typing this on, I am so gonna spring a bit extra for the matte screen.
I think Sony gets a couple of points for this one. That was an amazingly nice letter given the circumstances; it politely said "hey, um, we totally own the 'Lemmings' brand, and you knew it wasn't PD when you did this stunt. We could sue you into the ground. But we will not if you take it off the net."
So. I'm moving into a group house with some friends. They started using Wave to organize possibilities, comment on them, and vote on them.
But the person who tended to dump possibilities into the wave always just dumped the Craigslist URLs. Pretty hard for me to decide between one long string of random alphanumerics and another. So I started cutting and pasting the actual listings in. Collaborative editing! Awesome!
Well, awesome up until the point where it'd start saying "This wave is experiencing some slight turbulence" and make me reload it, without my changes. Not so awesome. Frustrating, in fact. The kind of frustration that quickly made me want to throw something.
And don't get me started on that horrible, horrible little custom scrollbar...
So I download the .dmg and open it and run the installer.
The "Install" button's ghosted out until I click the "I have read and agree to the terms of the license agreement" checkbox. But where's the agreement? Well, there's a link (with no rollover state, of course) to this page on Adobe's site, with a bewilderingly-long list of links to EULAs. As PDFs.
Nobody ever reads the EULA anyway, but this is ridiculous.
Flash has been sucking on Macs since long before FLV, since long before OSX. I first encountered Flash around 2000, when I started working in web animation. Spümcø was a Mac shop and as we got deeper into Flash we really started to regret that as the Flash editor and player were both significantly slower on Macs than on Windows boxes that were otherwise pretty much equivalent in speed and power; there were some special magic Mac-version-only bugs in the editor that showed up when dealing with the huge source files created at the tail end of making a cartoon.
The whole video thing is a red herring. Flash has sucked on Macs for ten years.
Most downloadable indy games go from $5-$20. $30 is a high price for that kind of thing nowadays.
I used Flash professionally around 2000. The Mac version was a total piece of shit - slow, glitchy, with extra Mac-only point releases to fix dire Mac-only crasher bugs in the editor.
Since buying Macromedia, all of Adobe's products have been increasingly worse cycle hogs as they started using the shitty Flash plugin for bits of UI here and there. There's no reason for Illustrator to start using ~10% of my CPU when idle just because I opened up the furshlugginer "Kulerz" panel by accident.
I, for one, am glad to see Adobe finally getting their comeuppance for the half-assed job of Mac support they've been doing. Their arguments of "we don't have the OS hooks" are disingenuous when you look at the in-browser performance of something like the Unity plugin.
Awesome, that's one less inducement to buy the game instead of pirate it. Well done, Ubisoft!
Maybe we need to reassess our expectations of everyone having a "job", then.
Robots?