Blender's game engine seems like a good prototyping tool for artists to test out their animations and interactions before the project's actual game engine is even started, but I'm still convinced that it's too generalized to run at optimal performance for any specific type of game to be THE game engine for an actual game. Then again, computers these days are extremely fast compared to ten years ago, so you could argue that a certain degree of non-optimization is okay. I think we're all guilty of that, and we don't have to pay quite as much attention to detail in our code as we did back when we were programming for 486 25mhz systems in mind (though something about that seems morally wrong). Still, the question of performance pokes at me.
For example, is it guaranteed to draw only the bare minimum of polygons when you're in an indoors environment? Does it "know" when you're outdoors and use the optimal drawing orders for large outdoors areas?
And what about collision detection? That's another hairy subject that has the potential to snail down performance of even simple games (ever play a shmup with hundreds of bullets on the screen, but tends to slow down during those tense moments even on a fast machine? That's the programmer's fault). How does Blender know to internally use "this set of data structures and algorithms for collision detection with Situation And Circumstances X" but "these other data structures and algorithms for collision detection would be better with Situation and Circumstances Y instead"?
Of course, I know Blender is open source, and any of these issues can be resolved by forking your own Blender project for your own needs, but I'm asking strictly about Blender's game engine as it is "out of the box".
Take it from me, a computer science degree definitely won't help you get a job.
Major in something whose industry actually has entry-level job openings. The only computer science jobs out there all say "Minimum 5-8 years industry experience required, must be proficient in Java, SOAP, XML, XHTML, SHTML, ZHTML, ABCDEFGHTMLIJKLMNOP, ORACLE, MYSQL, SQL SERVER, JAVASCRIPT, WEB 3.0 TECHNOLOGIES," and other things that are the complete opposite of what you found interesting and intellectually stimulating about computer science when you enrolled.
Unless you actually like hopping on the WEB! WEB! WEB! bandwagon, in that case then go for it. Otherwise a computer science major is only good for knowing how to better work on your hobby projects in your free time while your actual income ends up being working minimum wage as a cashier at Safeway.
I'm happy coding in any situation up until I stumble into an understanding block. Wish I had actually taken my math courses seriously when I was in college, because now if I can't find a text book or article that says explicitly how to calculate (certain specific unfamiliar, not-often-documented mathematical subject here), then I sure as hell can't figure it out on my own and if I can't find anything after spending a couple of days searching Google and books at the library, I completely ditch whatever I'm working on. I need to find something else to do in life because this shit isn't for me.
The REAL Will Wright left Maxis when they announced the cancellation of SimMars to allocate its development team to help out with The Sims. What was left of him after that was just an empty shell of a once-great man roaming the halls.
I never have watched Star Trek, don't really like the show... but, let me take a wild guess -- is that one of the episodes authored by Harlan Ellison? That kind of premise sounds like something only his beautiful mind could come up with.
Not sure if it's the nVidia video hardware driver (this also happened back when I had an ATI card and their drivers, so I don't think it's an nVidia/ATI thing unless they're both equally incompetent), or OpenGL, or X doing this, or whatever but... any OpenGL application just rendering its stuff, will be all fine-and-dandy at full framerate -- but only if I'm not doing anything. What do I mean by that? Doom 3, for example, has pretty much the same framerates I get in Windows; the environment around me animates fluidly and smoothly... except for when I move the mouse. Then it turns into a slideshow until I stop moving the mouse again. This happens with EVERY 3D APPLICATION, not just Doom 3. I want this to NOT HAPPEN. But, heck, "it might be a configuration issue -- Linux help forums will know how to fix it, right?" No, they don't, I tried, and I am extremely frustrated. I don't know if any Linux developers are even aware of this issue or have any kind of priority on it.
Re:It's not a game....
on
Review: Spore
·
· Score: 1
No, it isn't a toy. I wanted a toy from Spore, but I got a game instead. SimLife and SimCity are toys; there are no winning or losing conditions. Both are indefinite-timed games where anything goes, and you learn this-and-that through tinkering and experimentation. Spore is a game, unfortunately... it isn't a good game. It would have been a great toy if they designed it to be one.
Any time I want to do ANYTHING FUN in the fucking Space stage, the radio chatter speaks up and nags me with HURRRR PIRATES / SPODE FOLLOWERS / DICKHEAD EMPIRES ARE RAIDING YOUR HOME PLANET.
My home star system is an empire full of colonies equipped to hell with self-defense mechanisms. So why does a small armada of piss-ant enemy spaceships wipe out all those defenses with ease if I don't drop whatever I'm doing several dozen stars away to fly back and waste my time fucking around with them? You can't even negotiate peace because it requires you go to the enemy planet to communicate with their leader, but any time you go near the enemy planet you get swarmed by fleets of enemy ships IN THE FUCKING STAR MAP VIEW where you can't even SHOOT BACK TO DEFEND YOURSELF.
I don't mind the occasional pirate/enemy attack but jesus fucking christ it's CONSTANT AND NON-STOP. They profoundly ruined the Space stage this way.
I am hoping this might, maybe, perhaps, hopefully mean a slight chance of Weapons Factory Arena springing back to life again. Because they certainly dropped the ball on the promised Quake4 mod.
This wasn't merely your run-of-the-mill sampling -- this was copying entire melodies and rhythms, measure-for-measure, bar-for-bar, note-for-note. Big difference.
How so? Last I checked, anyone is free to modify Lua to their heart's content and include the modified Lua VM in their program, and they can choose whether or not to release the source. That's even more free than what the GPL states, if you consider Lua's domain. Remember, Lua has been and is still used by many game developers who don't necessarily want modifications done to their games (or at least to their games' code, if not the data), and Lua would probably have failed in that market if it had a restrictive, bossy license like the GPL behind it. Lua is anything but DOA.
I don't know about the base gcc tree (I'm not in Linux at the moment), but the vast majority of header files I see in my/include directory for my mingw-gcc installation that came with Dev-C++ have this blurb:
* This file has no copyright assigned and is placed in the Public Domain.
* This file is a part of the mingw-runtime package.
* No warranty is given; refer to the file DISCLAIMER within the package.
As for the libraries, it's safe to assume those are LGPL. Although I cannot find a LICENSE or *GPL* file anywhere in any relevant subdirectories to be sure.
Alright, that makes sense, even if it's still fundamentally superficial at the core. I can only hope interviewers are at least more lenient for entry-level graduates with no previous industry experience when it comes to being picky about references (or lack thereof). Sure, networking sounds easy to do once you're in the workforce with fellow colleagues who you establish bonds of trust with, but I doubt living in a hick town, a 2 hour drive from the state's major software-heavy metropolitan area, has many gathering places that are packed with high-tech employees to bump shoulders with.
You'll get far more jobs through experience and personal references than with a peice of paper. I can't emphasize the personal reference thing enough. Find someone who knows someone who works where you want to. Meet that person, have them give you a reference. It goes a looooong way.
I'm sorry, but why are references so bloody important to get a job when they're fundamentally superficial in light of a potential-hiree's actual abilities? And some of us think it as rather tactless and shallow to buddy-buddy up with a person just because you want something from them. If being an unctuous manipulator is a more important skill to get employed than your actual skills related to the job in question, I'd rather end up homeless the rest of my life.
Has it occured to anyone that this would be a non-issue if the webmaster of that Hungarian site knew a thing or two about making a robust website in the first place? Responsibility goes both ways.
Slashdot Mirror
How did you bypass Slashdot's faggoty "too many uppercase characters" filter?
Blender's game engine seems like a good prototyping tool for artists to test out their animations and interactions before the project's actual game engine is even started, but I'm still convinced that it's too generalized to run at optimal performance for any specific type of game to be THE game engine for an actual game. Then again, computers these days are extremely fast compared to ten years ago, so you could argue that a certain degree of non-optimization is okay. I think we're all guilty of that, and we don't have to pay quite as much attention to detail in our code as we did back when we were programming for 486 25mhz systems in mind (though something about that seems morally wrong). Still, the question of performance pokes at me.
For example, is it guaranteed to draw only the bare minimum of polygons when you're in an indoors environment? Does it "know" when you're outdoors and use the optimal drawing orders for large outdoors areas?
And what about collision detection? That's another hairy subject that has the potential to snail down performance of even simple games (ever play a shmup with hundreds of bullets on the screen, but tends to slow down during those tense moments even on a fast machine? That's the programmer's fault). How does Blender know to internally use "this set of data structures and algorithms for collision detection with Situation And Circumstances X" but "these other data structures and algorithms for collision detection would be better with Situation and Circumstances Y instead"?
Of course, I know Blender is open source, and any of these issues can be resolved by forking your own Blender project for your own needs, but I'm asking strictly about Blender's game engine as it is "out of the box".
Take it from me, a computer science degree definitely won't help you get a job.
Major in something whose industry actually has entry-level job openings. The only computer science jobs out there all say "Minimum 5-8 years industry experience required, must be proficient in Java, SOAP, XML, XHTML, SHTML, ZHTML, ABCDEFGHTMLIJKLMNOP, ORACLE, MYSQL, SQL SERVER, JAVASCRIPT, WEB 3.0 TECHNOLOGIES," and other things that are the complete opposite of what you found interesting and intellectually stimulating about computer science when you enrolled.
Unless you actually like hopping on the WEB! WEB! WEB! bandwagon, in that case then go for it. Otherwise a computer science major is only good for knowing how to better work on your hobby projects in your free time while your actual income ends up being working minimum wage as a cashier at Safeway.
Fuck...
10/10 A++++ expert troll post, will rage again
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sown
I'm happy coding in any situation up until I stumble into an understanding block. Wish I had actually taken my math courses seriously when I was in college, because now if I can't find a text book or article that says explicitly how to calculate (certain specific unfamiliar, not-often-documented mathematical subject here), then I sure as hell can't figure it out on my own and if I can't find anything after spending a couple of days searching Google and books at the library, I completely ditch whatever I'm working on. I need to find something else to do in life because this shit isn't for me.
The REAL Will Wright left Maxis when they announced the cancellation of SimMars to allocate its development team to help out with The Sims. What was left of him after that was just an empty shell of a once-great man roaming the halls.
Adding comments has been disabled for this video.
Only trolls and intellectual cowards do this with their videos.
Instinct.
Same way I can see the title of a TV show called "Pimp My Ride" and I know I don't like it even without ever seeing it.
I never have watched Star Trek, don't really like the show... but, let me take a wild guess -- is that one of the episodes authored by Harlan Ellison? That kind of premise sounds like something only his beautiful mind could come up with.
Not sure if it's the nVidia video hardware driver (this also happened back when I had an ATI card and their drivers, so I don't think it's an nVidia/ATI thing unless they're both equally incompetent), or OpenGL, or X doing this, or whatever but... any OpenGL application just rendering its stuff, will be all fine-and-dandy at full framerate -- but only if I'm not doing anything. What do I mean by that? Doom 3, for example, has pretty much the same framerates I get in Windows; the environment around me animates fluidly and smoothly... except for when I move the mouse. Then it turns into a slideshow until I stop moving the mouse again. This happens with EVERY 3D APPLICATION, not just Doom 3. I want this to NOT HAPPEN. But, heck, "it might be a configuration issue -- Linux help forums will know how to fix it, right?" No, they don't, I tried, and I am extremely frustrated. I don't know if any Linux developers are even aware of this issue or have any kind of priority on it.
No, it isn't a toy. I wanted a toy from Spore, but I got a game instead. SimLife and SimCity are toys; there are no winning or losing conditions. Both are indefinite-timed games where anything goes, and you learn this-and-that through tinkering and experimentation. Spore is a game, unfortunately... it isn't a good game. It would have been a great toy if they designed it to be one.
Any time I want to do ANYTHING FUN in the fucking Space stage, the radio chatter speaks up and nags me with HURRRR PIRATES / SPODE FOLLOWERS / DICKHEAD EMPIRES ARE RAIDING YOUR HOME PLANET.
My home star system is an empire full of colonies equipped to hell with self-defense mechanisms. So why does a small armada of piss-ant enemy spaceships wipe out all those defenses with ease if I don't drop whatever I'm doing several dozen stars away to fly back and waste my time fucking around with them? You can't even negotiate peace because it requires you go to the enemy planet to communicate with their leader, but any time you go near the enemy planet you get swarmed by fleets of enemy ships IN THE FUCKING STAR MAP VIEW where you can't even SHOOT BACK TO DEFEND YOURSELF.
I don't mind the occasional pirate/enemy attack but jesus fucking christ it's CONSTANT AND NON-STOP. They profoundly ruined the Space stage this way.
Pretty sure the XPS line is targeted toward gamers.
Get more games ported on Linux... I don't know who's picked this torch up ever since Loki went under.
Can it run traditional Q3 modifications?
I am hoping this might, maybe, perhaps, hopefully mean a slight chance of Weapons Factory Arena springing back to life again. Because they certainly dropped the ball on the promised Quake4 mod.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GUDcSeUvkOw
This wasn't merely your run-of-the-mill sampling -- this was copying entire melodies and rhythms, measure-for-measure, bar-for-bar, note-for-note. Big difference.
How so? Last I checked, anyone is free to modify Lua to their heart's content and include the modified Lua VM in their program, and they can choose whether or not to release the source. That's even more free than what the GPL states, if you consider Lua's domain. Remember, Lua has been and is still used by many game developers who don't necessarily want modifications done to their games (or at least to their games' code, if not the data), and Lua would probably have failed in that market if it had a restrictive, bossy license like the GPL behind it. Lua is anything but DOA.
Can't the guy just flee to another country and change citizenship to avoid having to pay that ridiculous and unreasonable amount?
If that's what college is about, I certainly as hell missed the memo.
I don't know about the base gcc tree (I'm not in Linux at the moment), but the vast majority of header files I see in my /include directory for my mingw-gcc installation that came with Dev-C++ have this blurb:
* This file has no copyright assigned and is placed in the Public Domain.
* This file is a part of the mingw-runtime package.
* No warranty is given; refer to the file DISCLAIMER within the package.
As for the libraries, it's safe to assume those are LGPL. Although I cannot find a LICENSE or *GPL* file anywhere in any relevant subdirectories to be sure.
Now, it ain't been too long ago that some studios had the brilliant idea to distribute fakes that only consisted of noise
Is there a way to tell if the Merzbow mp3s I downloaded were fakes?
Alright, that makes sense, even if it's still fundamentally superficial at the core. I can only hope interviewers are at least more lenient for entry-level graduates with no previous industry experience when it comes to being picky about references (or lack thereof). Sure, networking sounds easy to do once you're in the workforce with fellow colleagues who you establish bonds of trust with, but I doubt living in a hick town, a 2 hour drive from the state's major software-heavy metropolitan area, has many gathering places that are packed with high-tech employees to bump shoulders with.
You'll get far more jobs through experience and personal references than with a peice of paper. I can't emphasize the personal reference thing enough. Find someone who knows someone who works where you want to. Meet that person, have them give you a reference. It goes a looooong way.
I'm sorry, but why are references so bloody important to get a job when they're fundamentally superficial in light of a potential-hiree's actual abilities? And some of us think it as rather tactless and shallow to buddy-buddy up with a person just because you want something from them. If being an unctuous manipulator is a more important skill to get employed than your actual skills related to the job in question, I'd rather end up homeless the rest of my life.
That sounds like the famous last words of every rookie police officer.
Has it occured to anyone that this would be a non-issue if the webmaster of that Hungarian site knew a thing or two about making a robust website in the first place? Responsibility goes both ways.