I wonder if this $15 "demo" is going to be in addition to, or instead of, a traditional free demo.
Because, you know, I could kinda see it not feeling like a rip-off if it was in addition to a demo. Play a one- or two-level demo that convinces me this game will be Awesome, then have a chance to spend $15 for a handful of bonus levels that'll add on to the entire game? Not so bad. Or play a free single-level demo, then spend $15 for, like, the first three or four levels of the game, with a discount off of buying the whole thing? Not so bad either.
But having to spend $15 for the privilege of playing what would normally be a free download? Fuck that. I'll go take that $15 and buy a few awesome indy games instead.
(admittedly I swore off paying $50-60 for AAA titles that eat 40+ hours of my life to finish anyway, so I'm not exactly EA's target audience here.)
Maybe everyone does bad things on the Internet; I won't argue with that, though I've never done any of the particular things on your list. Hell, I had to ask Google what Omegle was.
But some people wallow in it, some people make that a large part of their identity. Some people choose to spend a large part of their time on the internet anonymously annoying and pissing off other folks.
And, well, I think I'd prefer it if there wasn't a huge pool for these people to swim in, where they can reassure each other that this is the right and proper thing to do. Better in the long run to have them reprimanded and kicked out of one community after another until they finally get the message that being an asshole on the internet isn't cool.
and while you're at it, why not stream everything you hear to storage at home? Drive space is cheap. Hell, run it through voice recognition while you're at it, have a semi-coherent text transcription of the rest of your life
I'm not saying Adobe's going down the toilet, I'm saying that the wave of drooling on the Flash-less iPad is flushing their dreams of Flash-as-platform. I've been stuck wrestling with Flash for a decade, and there's a distinct note of Adobe wanting Flash to be a universal platform, similar to Sun's longstanding dream of Java's future. Note that more of their tools' UI is done in Flash now; they're eating their own dogfood in that respect.
I do like to suck cock, but I don't see how that's connected with me owning a Mac.
I suspect a lot of history behind this. I first encountered Flash back in 2000 when I started working at Spümcø, doing Internet cartoons. We were an all-Mac shop, and grumbled a lot about the fact that Flash's performance was always better on Windows machines of roughly the same power. Macromedia clearly treated the Mac as a low-priority thing, as the horrible glitchiness of the Mac version of Flash 5 showed; there was a 5.01 release that only existed on the Mac, to fix a ton of horrible crasher bugs in the editor.
So the Flash team clearly didn't give a shit about Mac performance back then. It worked half-assedly and that was good enough for them, it seemed.
This attitude did not change when Adobe bought Macromedia to get ahold of Flash. If anything, it spread to the rest of the company, along with Macromedia's horrible ideas of branding - I'm told the much-unloved CS rebranding was primarily the work of ex-Macromedia people.
So, there is a reason: it's a complicated, nasty pile of decade-old code that barely worked on the Mac in the first place, with nobody in a position of power at Macromedia/Adobe complaining loud enough to make anyone take out the machetes and start cutting their way into the underbrush to fix things until the iPad came out, and Adobe began to see all their dreams of Flash-as-platform swirling down the toilet.
Batman The Dark Knight has been cleverly, and even subversively, lightened up by the run of the enjoyable Batman: The Brave and the Bold. On screen, the cowled hero has mostly remained locked either in clumsy camp or gritty noir, but nothing beyond.
Both versions of the Caped Crusader rule, but Batman could benefit from an anime upgrade or perhaps a temporal distortion that pushes him into Buck Rogers’ timestream. The idea is not necessarily new: From the Bat-anime of Batman: Gotham Knight to the appearance of Bat-mechas in recent animated series, Bat-updates have been flirted with, brilliantly. Let’s go all the way.
I guess these guys were completely oblivious in 1999-2001, when WB was broadcasting Batman Beyond, set in 2039. Or was it not cool because it was made by an American crew or something?
Dude, I've been wanting an iPhone forever but couldn't get one because I wasn't willing to sign a deal with AT&T for two years of an overpriced plan or shell out $900 to skeevygreymarketiphones.com. I just spent $560 (with tax) and I will have a sexy smartphone with no contract in my hot little hands in a few days.
This is a new business model: actually letting the consumer buy the Awesome Phone directly with no carrier subsidy and lock-in
Why not just have consumer DVD players adapted for touchscreens, and stick them in kiosks? My day job involves working on a kiosk put out by a division of the Boston Museum of Science, and it's completely self-contained; so is most everything on the floor.
Burn a new DVD for the new exhibit, dump it in the kiosks near it, you're done, no finicky wiring to set up. KISS.
Does this guy use his machine to play anything else besides FPSs? Most of the people I see arguing for PC over console is that net distribution makes it easier for weird new experiments to find an audience, but he's just going on about Doom, Doom, Doom, and how about five FPSs after it have ever even tried to get narrative into the picture. It's not until like six pages in that I skimmed down and saw a screenshot of EVE with a caption along the lines of "We used a snazzy render of EVE because the real game is so boring."
FPSs bore the hell out of me. Gridrunner Revolution was the best $20 I have ever spent on a game in a long time, and it's only available on Windows.
I dunno. I used to work in the animation industry. I cared passionately about what I was making; it bled over into my personal life, snagged overtime with no trouble, and so on.
I wasn't really that happy.
Nowadays my day job is hacking Actionscript and PHP for a museum. And I spend my own time doing art. For myself.
I'm a lot happier.
Admittedly there are other factors in my happiness - a very good romantic life, more stable finances, regular supply of weed, and so on and so forth - but I am really feeling like my ideal job is one where I am moderately challenged, but I can easily leave all that behind at five o'clock and go back to stuff whose schedules and quality only have to please myself, and my creative partners.
I wonder what Kirby's kids will do with the licensing money for the Kirby co-creations that've become major movie franchises if they win this. It'd be nice to hope that they use a little of it to create a non-profit that helps fund innovation in comics like Eastman did after he ran out of things to spend his TMNT money on; Jack was an amazing fountain of ideas and I think that'd be a great way to honor his memory.
Portal is an exception. I hate FPSs and I paid good money to play that game. It's also pretty much the one single first-person game that isn't about a testosterone-laden game of "RAR I SHOT YOU".
Put all the stuff on physical media, as suggested many times above. But in addition to this, put it on the net. Multiple times.
Make a "sarah'stimecapsule" email account on gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and whatever other free e-mail providers you can find. Write down the account info on a piece of paper that goes into the capsule; email all this data to all of these accounts. Mergers, buyouts, and business collapses may take some of these out, but if you have several then the chance of one of them surviving twenty years increases.
Upload it to places like rapidshare, filefront, sendspace, etc. Spend a few bucks to create an account on the service so it won't get deleted almost immediately. Put those URLs on paper too.
Post it to Google Docs, flickr, picasa, etc. Put the account info down on that paper.
Put it in "the cloud" a couple dozen times, in a couple dozen ways. Maybe one of them will survive. Maybe not.
And when you're storing the physical copy, be redundant as well - get a couple hard drives and throw it on there, burn it to DVD, Blu-Ray, maybe even CD if it's not going to fill forty of those. Drop it onto some USB memory sticks. Those all go in the capsule.
And if you really want to be redundant, get a netbook or laptop and put that in there too. You know it can read all these formats. Take its battery out, include the power brick. Set it up to boot with the appropriate reader programs right there on the desktop.
Hey, wow, adding new chunks of content that are half the size of the original game for free sounds like a GREAT business proposition! Yeah, those console releases suck for wanting to be paid for something that took ~50-60 people several months to make!
Plus, we would've gotten tons of stuff for free from modders working for love if we had the PC version!...so basically, "PC users are really really cheap" is the message I get from this piece.
I never heard the term until people started talking about their MMORPG characters. I was mucking a hell of a lot around 1994-1998 and nobody ever referred to their character as a "toon". It was always "my character" or "one of my alts" when referring to an alternate character. A character might have been a "toon" if they were intended to be a cartoon character who you might see in an American animated short or feature, but the general class of player characters was never called a "toon".
Seeing people refer to their avatars as "toons" is always a disconnect for me, especially when it's in a fairly realistic-looking game. I can only assume that Disney's "Toontown Online" was a lot of people's first MMORPG, and they got in the habit of calling their characters "toons" there.
It always sounds pretty stupid to me unless they are talking about their Toontown Online characters, because to me, "toon" was defined by the 1988 movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".
Games should "look good". What this means can vary a lot. Is your design served best by making it "realistic"? Is it served best by making it highly stylized? Discuss this with your lead artist. What kind of world are you trying to evoke? What kind of mood, what kind of story? Do you want it to be deadly serious, do you want it to be a beautiful dream? Do you want to fly through an electric painting, creating beautiful fireworks, or do you want to simulate something down to the last smear of dirt on a muddy shoe?
You can spend a lot of time getting non-photorealistic render paths optimized and beautiful if you want to go that route. You can spend a lot of time (and money! realism takes a lot more man-hours!) making things realistic. How much time and money do you have? Can you afford hyper-realism? Do you want it, even if you can?
"Realism" is easy to chase. You don't need a strong artistic vision. You can easily guide a large team down this path: "just make it look as realistic as possible, in these restrictions" is pretty easy to articulate. The programmers can dig into research papers, the artists can go outside.
(There can be a hell of a lot of hard work put into this goal; something like Crysis has clearly been polished and loved. But its visual goals are conceptually simple: "make it look real".)
When you're striving for something striking but stylized, you need a unified artistic vision. If you have more than a couple artists on the team, you need one person whose job is pretty much just going around and saying "that's a nice model, but it doesn't quite fit the artistic vision - tweak this, this, and this and pass it by me when you're done." And the programmers have to find ways to support this style. There was a paper making the rounds a while back on the very sophisticated shaders that were developed to give Team Fortress 2 a particular feel to its lighting, for instance. There was a hell of a lot of directed work that went into making it look a certain unrealistic way.
It's "having an IRC window open to the channel all your buddies hang out in all day long", without the part where it is actually happening via this cryptic old protocol called IRC.
Evidently you've never looked at the price of designer furniture. One.
Re:Whiners of all countries, unite!
on
One-Tweet Wonders
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· Score: 1
I finally figured out the appeal of Twitter a while back: it's like keeping an IRC window open allll day long. Except it can go onto your cellfloam as well as your computer if you want it to.
If I wanted to keep a regular stream of distracted chat up with my friends, I might think Twitter was awesome. But I would rather just go off by myself and draw most of the time.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if this $15 "demo" is going to be in addition to, or instead of, a traditional free demo.
Because, you know, I could kinda see it not feeling like a rip-off if it was in addition to a demo. Play a one- or two-level demo that convinces me this game will be Awesome, then have a chance to spend $15 for a handful of bonus levels that'll add on to the entire game? Not so bad. Or play a free single-level demo, then spend $15 for, like, the first three or four levels of the game, with a discount off of buying the whole thing? Not so bad either.
But having to spend $15 for the privilege of playing what would normally be a free download? Fuck that. I'll go take that $15 and buy a few awesome indy games instead.
(admittedly I swore off paying $50-60 for AAA titles that eat 40+ hours of my life to finish anyway, so I'm not exactly EA's target audience here.)
Maybe everyone does bad things on the Internet; I won't argue with that, though I've never done any of the particular things on your list. Hell, I had to ask Google what Omegle was.
But some people wallow in it, some people make that a large part of their identity. Some people choose to spend a large part of their time on the internet anonymously annoying and pissing off other folks.
And, well, I think I'd prefer it if there wasn't a huge pool for these people to swim in, where they can reassure each other that this is the right and proper thing to do. Better in the long run to have them reprimanded and kicked out of one community after another until they finally get the message that being an asshole on the internet isn't cool.
and while you're at it, why not stream everything you hear to storage at home? Drive space is cheap. Hell, run it through voice recognition while you're at it, have a semi-coherent text transcription of the rest of your life
If you're gonna be a cyborg, be a cyborg.
Where do you usually sell it at? *grin*
Thanks for reminding me why online play with random strangers sucks.
I'm not saying Adobe's going down the toilet, I'm saying that the wave of drooling on the Flash-less iPad is flushing their dreams of Flash-as-platform. I've been stuck wrestling with Flash for a decade, and there's a distinct note of Adobe wanting Flash to be a universal platform, similar to Sun's longstanding dream of Java's future. Note that more of their tools' UI is done in Flash now; they're eating their own dogfood in that respect.
I do like to suck cock, but I don't see how that's connected with me owning a Mac.
I suspect a lot of history behind this. I first encountered Flash back in 2000 when I started working at Spümcø, doing Internet cartoons. We were an all-Mac shop, and grumbled a lot about the fact that Flash's performance was always better on Windows machines of roughly the same power. Macromedia clearly treated the Mac as a low-priority thing, as the horrible glitchiness of the Mac version of Flash 5 showed; there was a 5.01 release that only existed on the Mac, to fix a ton of horrible crasher bugs in the editor.
So the Flash team clearly didn't give a shit about Mac performance back then. It worked half-assedly and that was good enough for them, it seemed.
This attitude did not change when Adobe bought Macromedia to get ahold of Flash. If anything, it spread to the rest of the company, along with Macromedia's horrible ideas of branding - I'm told the much-unloved CS rebranding was primarily the work of ex-Macromedia people.
So, there is a reason: it's a complicated, nasty pile of decade-old code that barely worked on the Mac in the first place, with nobody in a position of power at Macromedia/Adobe complaining loud enough to make anyone take out the machetes and start cutting their way into the underbrush to fix things until the iPad came out, and Adobe began to see all their dreams of Flash-as-platform swirling down the toilet.
From the first article:
I guess these guys were completely oblivious in 1999-2001, when WB was broadcasting Batman Beyond, set in 2039. Or was it not cool because it was made by an American crew or something?
Dude, I've been wanting an iPhone forever but couldn't get one because I wasn't willing to sign a deal with AT&T for two years of an overpriced plan or shell out $900 to skeevygreymarketiphones.com. I just spent $560 (with tax) and I will have a sexy smartphone with no contract in my hot little hands in a few days.
This is a new business model: actually letting the consumer buy the Awesome Phone directly with no carrier subsidy and lock-in
It's on Gamasutra. A site about making games. "Let's take this success apart; what can we learn to apply to our own projects?"
Why not just have consumer DVD players adapted for touchscreens, and stick them in kiosks? My day job involves working on a kiosk put out by a division of the Boston Museum of Science, and it's completely self-contained; so is most everything on the floor.
Burn a new DVD for the new exhibit, dump it in the kiosks near it, you're done, no finicky wiring to set up. KISS.
Does this guy use his machine to play anything else besides FPSs? Most of the people I see arguing for PC over console is that net distribution makes it easier for weird new experiments to find an audience, but he's just going on about Doom, Doom, Doom, and how about five FPSs after it have ever even tried to get narrative into the picture. It's not until like six pages in that I skimmed down and saw a screenshot of EVE with a caption along the lines of "We used a snazzy render of EVE because the real game is so boring."
FPSs bore the hell out of me. Gridrunner Revolution was the best $20 I have ever spent on a game in a long time, and it's only available on Windows.
I dunno. I used to work in the animation industry. I cared passionately about what I was making; it bled over into my personal life, snagged overtime with no trouble, and so on.
I wasn't really that happy.
Nowadays my day job is hacking Actionscript and PHP for a museum. And I spend my own time doing art. For myself.
I'm a lot happier.
Admittedly there are other factors in my happiness - a very good romantic life, more stable finances, regular supply of weed, and so on and so forth - but I am really feeling like my ideal job is one where I am moderately challenged, but I can easily leave all that behind at five o'clock and go back to stuff whose schedules and quality only have to please myself, and my creative partners.
Well. This should be interesting.
I wonder what Kirby's kids will do with the licensing money for the Kirby co-creations that've become major movie franchises if they win this. It'd be nice to hope that they use a little of it to create a non-profit that helps fund innovation in comics like Eastman did after he ran out of things to spend his TMNT money on; Jack was an amazing fountain of ideas and I think that'd be a great way to honor his memory.
Portal is an exception. I hate FPSs and I paid good money to play that game. It's also pretty much the one single first-person game that isn't about a testosterone-laden game of "RAR I SHOT YOU".
Put all the stuff on physical media, as suggested many times above. But in addition to this, put it on the net. Multiple times.
Make a "sarah'stimecapsule" email account on gmail, yahoo, hotmail, and whatever other free e-mail providers you can find. Write down the account info on a piece of paper that goes into the capsule; email all this data to all of these accounts. Mergers, buyouts, and business collapses may take some of these out, but if you have several then the chance of one of them surviving twenty years increases.
Upload it to places like rapidshare, filefront, sendspace, etc. Spend a few bucks to create an account on the service so it won't get deleted almost immediately. Put those URLs on paper too.
Post it to Google Docs, flickr, picasa, etc. Put the account info down on that paper.
Put it in "the cloud" a couple dozen times, in a couple dozen ways. Maybe one of them will survive. Maybe not.
And when you're storing the physical copy, be redundant as well - get a couple hard drives and throw it on there, burn it to DVD, Blu-Ray, maybe even CD if it's not going to fill forty of those. Drop it onto some USB memory sticks. Those all go in the capsule.
And if you really want to be redundant, get a netbook or laptop and put that in there too. You know it can read all these formats. Take its battery out, include the power brick. Set it up to boot with the appropriate reader programs right there on the desktop.
Hey, wow, adding new chunks of content that are half the size of the original game for free sounds like a GREAT business proposition! Yeah, those console releases suck for wanting to be paid for something that took ~50-60 people several months to make!
Plus, we would've gotten tons of stuff for free from modders working for love if we had the PC version! ...so basically, "PC users are really really cheap" is the message I get from this piece.
I never heard the term until people started talking about their MMORPG characters. I was mucking a hell of a lot around 1994-1998 and nobody ever referred to their character as a "toon". It was always "my character" or "one of my alts" when referring to an alternate character. A character might have been a "toon" if they were intended to be a cartoon character who you might see in an American animated short or feature, but the general class of player characters was never called a "toon".
Seeing people refer to their avatars as "toons" is always a disconnect for me, especially when it's in a fairly realistic-looking game. I can only assume that Disney's "Toontown Online" was a lot of people's first MMORPG, and they got in the habit of calling their characters "toons" there.
It always sounds pretty stupid to me unless they are talking about their Toontown Online characters, because to me, "toon" was defined by the 1988 movie "Who Framed Roger Rabbit".
To add more:
Games should "look good". What this means can vary a lot. Is your design served best by making it "realistic"? Is it served best by making it highly stylized? Discuss this with your lead artist. What kind of world are you trying to evoke? What kind of mood, what kind of story? Do you want it to be deadly serious, do you want it to be a beautiful dream? Do you want to fly through an electric painting, creating beautiful fireworks, or do you want to simulate something down to the last smear of dirt on a muddy shoe?
You can spend a lot of time getting non-photorealistic render paths optimized and beautiful if you want to go that route. You can spend a lot of time (and money! realism takes a lot more man-hours!) making things realistic. How much time and money do you have? Can you afford hyper-realism? Do you want it, even if you can?
"Realism" is easy to chase. You don't need a strong artistic vision. You can easily guide a large team down this path: "just make it look as realistic as possible, in these restrictions" is pretty easy to articulate. The programmers can dig into research papers, the artists can go outside.
(There can be a hell of a lot of hard work put into this goal; something like Crysis has clearly been polished and loved. But its visual goals are conceptually simple: "make it look real".)
When you're striving for something striking but stylized, you need a unified artistic vision. If you have more than a couple artists on the team, you need one person whose job is pretty much just going around and saying "that's a nice model, but it doesn't quite fit the artistic vision - tweak this, this, and this and pass it by me when you're done." And the programmers have to find ways to support this style. There was a paper making the rounds a while back on the very sophisticated shaders that were developed to give Team Fortress 2 a particular feel to its lighting, for instance. There was a hell of a lot of directed work that went into making it look a certain unrealistic way.
When your restrictions are tighter, visual style becomes more important. The Pokémon games are done on 2D hardware with pixels big enough to see; they are already highly abstracted by the nature of the medium. You pretty much have to stylize and caricature the hell out of things to make them read.
Not every team has an artistic visionary. When you don't have one, "realism" is pretty much your only option.
Exactly. I participate in neither Twitter nor IRC!
It's "having an IRC window open to the channel all your buddies hang out in all day long", without the part where it is actually happening via this cryptic old protocol called IRC.
Evidently you've never looked at the price of designer furniture. One.
I finally figured out the appeal of Twitter a while back: it's like keeping an IRC window open allll day long. Except it can go onto your cellfloam as well as your computer if you want it to.
If I wanted to keep a regular stream of distracted chat up with my friends, I might think Twitter was awesome. But I would rather just go off by myself and draw most of the time.
What to do with the bathwater?
Throw the baby out with it!