You are correct. Likewise, you get all the positive effects of wine from grape juice, because it's the flavonoids, not the alcohol, that's good for you.
I've been seeing this recently. Whenever there's an article about Internet censorship in China -- a subject that's far more relevant to the topic of 'YRO' than are most of the articles we get -- people start to get defensive. And then, I get confused.
When the conservative party in Australia started trying to block content, Slashdot's reaction was "ah, too bad, Australians are getting screwed over by their dirty politicians again." When we talk about the activities of the RIAA or the MPAA in the U.S., we say the same thing. Yet when we say, "Too bad the PRC is restricting its citizens' rightful freedoms," it's "bashing." Why?
Besides, look at the comments. Most aren't even about China: They're about the Bush administration!
I agree wholeheartedly with the parent. This is a hobby project, right? The point is to have fun, and to learn something? In that case, I think you'll have more fun if you don't start with a premade "game engine."
Start from scratch. It sounds intimidating, but that's just because you haven't tried it: You will be amazed at what you can do.
You don't need to spend any money. Compilers are freely-available. Between that, the web as a reference, and your own intelligence and creativity, that's all you need!
Do you know a programming language? If not: You say you can write scripts. If you can learn to write scripts, you can learn to write code. If you need to choose a language, I'd recommend C++ or Java; C++ is probably the most commonly-used language in game development. This site was an important reference for me when I was getting started. Go through all the tutorials. Don't rush to get out of the console: It's a great place to focus on your logic and your algorithms without worrying about interfacing with graphics APIs. It's where you learn how to think about programming.
Then, graphics! I'd suggest you start with some OpenGL programming. That's for a number of reasons. It's not just that OpenGL code is widely portable: Compared to Direct3D code, it's a breeze to write. Carmack himself wrote a piece about how OpenGL programming is a straightforward, enjoyable experience.
Where to start? Try NeHe's tutorials, and its parent site, gamedev.net. That's how I started writing OpenGL code, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
Then, think about what sorts of worlds you want to represent. Landscapes? Indoors? Look up the relevant algorithms and data structures. You care about spatial partitioning schemes, occlusion culling, and LOD. This is where it starts to get advanced. Here, you'll learn more than just to code; you'll learn some actual Computer Science.
You don't need to worry about this now, but when you get to the point where you're ready for it, there's stuff you can google. Spatial partitioning: BSP (older algorithm, computationally beautiful, generally used for indoors), Octtrees (more modern approach, conceptually simpler, lets you efficiently throw stuff at the graphics card), Quadtrees (variant for outdoor environments where the map extends mainly in two dimensions), K-D trees (special case of BSP which behaves more like Oct or Quad-trees). LOD: For outdoor scenes in particular: ROAM, geomipmapping. Occlusion culling and visibility: Portals, precomputed PVS, image-space techniques with occluders.
Just explore, experiment, and have fun. You'll learn a lot.
There was "TA: Kingdoms," which Cavedog made after the first TA, and which I loved.
Unfortunately, Kingdoms never caught on. There were a few reasons for that. When it was released, the hardware requirements were obscene. I was lucky in that I'd just gotten a new computer, and, for the time, it was a beast: PIII 550, 256 MB RAM, TNT2 -- it cost $3k back in the day, and it's still plenty fast enough for everything my family does, six years later. Most people who tried to run the game, unlike me, saw a slideshow in the late game when there were tons of units. That doesn't make for an enjoyable gameplay experience, so, naturally, other people who weren't lucky enough to have top-of-the-line hardware didn't like the game.
Although I didn't realize it at the time because the game ran perfectly for me, TA:K was also rather buggy. That same PIII 550, now running XP instead of 98FE, and now with new drivers for everything, doesn't play the game right anymore. Choppy, garbled sound; graphical anomalies; incorrectly-rendered text. If that's how the game had looked when I first started to play it, I'd have quickly lost interest. For some people, that's how it always looked.
But plenty of games come out that need tons of patches, and plenty of games come out that need to wait for the hardware to catch up. So what really killed TA:K was that support dried up for it. It was the day Cavedog died.
Cavedog went under when a few key developers left for competing companies. Cavedog got bought out by something inappropriate -- Hasbro, or Brady Games, I think -- and, though there were rumors of a Total Annihilation 3, which was to be the sci-fi sequal to Original TA, it never panned out.
Cavedog is dead. Bungie is in chains. Blizzard ran off with an MMORPG. Who will rise up to take their place?
Reality Pump? Earth 2150 was wonderfully ambitious (and is still a favorite; it has naval units, aircraft, customizable units... even underground tunnels!), and 2160 is the most creative RTS I've seen in a while (nevermind the so-bad-it-makes-you-cringe voice-acting and single-player campaign). What other developers are carrying the torch and pushing forward the genre?
Well, there's the Open Source community. TA:Spring is incredible. It's unpolished, but quite pretty on good hardware (or so I am led to believe by screenshots; I've only got a Dell laptop), and the engine is undergoing constant refinement. Right now it's mainly a nostalgic ode to a past classic, but mods do add new gameplay types and units. Will TA:Spring ever become a great classic in its own right?
>Islam itself says that the Prophet Mohammed has said everything that needs to be said. It's a bit tough to innovate when you're told everything has already been discovered!
Sounds suspiciously like what certain religious groups in the US say about the Bible -- the fastest-growing religious groups, I might add.
However, it's true that there are different conventions on each side of the Atlantic for things like this, which may confuse things. In the U.S., Microsoft is developing Vista; in the U.K; they are. Does that affect words like 'group?' Anyone from the UK to comment?
Microsoft also earned their market share. Face it: For grandma, Windows is the superior operating system. It has better hardware compatibility, and it comes with everything she might need built right in -- and with good integration (Outlook, IE, WMP).
Sure, other companies did GUIs first. But Windows ran on IBM PC hardware, and that made it a killer app. Just like there have been tens of dozens of MP3 players on the market before anybody learned the word "iPod."
Heh! Right you are! For all the accusations that Americans are ignorant of the outside world, you should hear the stuff some non-Americans think about the U.S! A Chinese student comes here from Shanghai, and then returns home for a visit halfway through college. Her friends, who have never left China, all say, "You're lucky; you get to eat nothing but pizza and hamburgers!" and "Isn't it scary that they all have guns and shoot each other?" Really happened! People honestly believe this stuff!
Pardon me while I run out to McDonald's in my H2. I'll shoot my next door neighbor just as soon as I get back!
>That's the explanation why USA has such high crime rate. That's explains why you Americans at large has no understanding what's going outside: since you have no culture (but show business) one can hardly expect you to understand way others are living.
When I read your post about the significance of 'SOCIETY' and 'CULTURE,' I was cheering. Yes!! My thoughts exactly!
I am an American.
You're right that many Americans have very little idea what's going on outside the 'States. Many, of course, simply don't care -- but ignorance, innocent or otherwise, is hardly unique to this side of the Atlantic (or Pacific). I used to think much like you seem to: That Americans are fat, stupid, and aggressive, and that I needed to get somewhere else where the grass is greener. But experience has changed the way I think. People from elsewhere are no better. Different, yes -- and perhaps the flaws take different forms -- but certainly no more elevated or enlightened. Please be careful when you perpetuate stereotypes.
That said, I still agree with your point, and I share your fears: As thought and art turn into 'intellectual property,' we lose culture and edge with greedy baby-steps towards anarcho-capitalist dystopia. It's what cyberpunk warns us about; it's the businessman's and the libertarian's fantasy. And at this rate, it's going to happen. I can already feel Adam Smith's invisible hand winding up to smack us.
Yeah, well I first read "General Manager" and thought this was the latest business craze book. Like The Tipping Point or Blink! -- but this time with knights and orcs. WoW does have gold farmers, so it must be able to teach middle management something...
I know what's going on! Google is making a digital bank! It'll be located on the island of Kinakuta in an abandoned Japanese "command center." Quick! Find Goto Dengo!
Amateur HAM radio operators communicated with some of the Apollo missions. HAMS need to position their antennae correctly to do this, which confirms that the signal did come from at least the direction of the moon, and not from some California backlot.
>Use exceptions instead of value checking, dammit! Every time you call a function that "returns 0/false/-1 on error" you are exposing yourself to possible bugs. Try to avoid this wherever possible, and try to keep all your OS-specific calls in one spot.
I've heard this before, and I've got to admit that I don't completely understand it. Is the problem simply that a function might get called without the requisite "was-the-return-negative-one" check to follow it -- and that using exceptions helps to prevent you from making that error? Or is there another point that I'm missing (obviously, exceptions are also advantageous when any number, including -1, could be a valid return.)?
>Law by definition is about contraints and coercion.
It is also about constraints on those who would coerce. In this sense, law is very much about freedom. The Bill of Rights is a set of laws for the U.S. government.
It shocks you, living here, when you hear that pushing cash at your teachers is standard practice -- because everyday Joes in the U.S. aren't expected to bribe everyone just to get by. But I guess there is plenty of palm-grease at the top.
I once had a close friend from Shanghai. Her parents bribed her teachers throughout her education. Everyone's did, she said: It's just what people had to do to be paid any attention in the classroom. And it extended beyond the classroom. Need something from the government? Need service from a company? You bribe somebody. She said it was normal.
As for other business practices: I had another Chinese friend who told me another story: Her father had gone out with a businessman; he came home drunker than she had ever seen him before. When her father came back, stumbling and with slurred speech, he said that he was going to help the businessman to sell human organs. The next morning, after he had sobered up, she asked him if he remembered what he had said the previous night: He didn't. She told about the organ scheme. He looked shocked, and said he wouldn't do such a thing. (But the businessman was.)
Another friend of his father's owned a steel mill in China. He'd started doing "something," (she didn't know what it was) that he knew would reduce the strength of the steel, because it would save him money. It was wrong and she said it bothered her father, but there was nothing to be done.
So: bribery is a way of life, anything that can be bought is, and greed-is-good-capitalism is sweeping through a corrupted social structure in which bribery is a way of life. It's the wild wild west gone east, and a lot of everyday practices aren't pretty. That's "doing business China's way!"
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct. Likewise, you get all the positive effects of wine from grape juice, because it's the flavonoids, not the alcohol, that's good for you.
(That's the percentage that has an STD. And that's just genital herpes...)
Yay college!
I've been seeing this recently. Whenever there's an article about Internet censorship in China -- a subject that's far more relevant to the topic of 'YRO' than are most of the articles we get -- people start to get defensive. And then, I get confused.
When the conservative party in Australia started trying to block content, Slashdot's reaction was "ah, too bad, Australians are getting screwed over by their dirty politicians again." When we talk about the activities of the RIAA or the MPAA in the U.S., we say the same thing. Yet when we say, "Too bad the PRC is restricting its citizens' rightful freedoms," it's "bashing." Why?
Besides, look at the comments. Most aren't even about China: They're about the Bush administration!
I agree wholeheartedly with the parent. This is a hobby project, right? The point is to have fun, and to learn something? In that case, I think you'll have more fun if you don't start with a premade "game engine."
Start from scratch. It sounds intimidating, but that's just because you haven't tried it: You will be amazed at what you can do.
You don't need to spend any money. Compilers are freely-available. Between that, the web as a reference, and your own intelligence and creativity, that's all you need!
Do you know a programming language? If not: You say you can write scripts. If you can learn to write scripts, you can learn to write code. If you need to choose a language, I'd recommend C++ or Java; C++ is probably the most commonly-used language in game development. This site was an important reference for me when I was getting started. Go through all the tutorials. Don't rush to get out of the console: It's a great place to focus on your logic and your algorithms without worrying about interfacing with graphics APIs. It's where you learn how to think about programming.
Then, graphics! I'd suggest you start with some OpenGL programming. That's for a number of reasons. It's not just that OpenGL code is widely portable: Compared to Direct3D code, it's a breeze to write. Carmack himself wrote a piece about how OpenGL programming is a straightforward, enjoyable experience.
Where to start? Try NeHe's tutorials, and its parent site, gamedev.net. That's how I started writing OpenGL code, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
Then, think about what sorts of worlds you want to represent. Landscapes? Indoors? Look up the relevant algorithms and data structures. You care about spatial partitioning schemes, occlusion culling, and LOD. This is where it starts to get advanced. Here, you'll learn more than just to code; you'll learn some actual Computer Science.
You don't need to worry about this now, but when you get to the point where you're ready for it, there's stuff you can google. Spatial partitioning: BSP (older algorithm, computationally beautiful, generally used for indoors), Octtrees (more modern approach, conceptually simpler, lets you efficiently throw stuff at the graphics card), Quadtrees (variant for outdoor environments where the map extends mainly in two dimensions), K-D trees (special case of BSP which behaves more like Oct or Quad-trees). LOD: For outdoor scenes in particular: ROAM, geomipmapping. Occlusion culling and visibility: Portals, precomputed PVS, image-space techniques with occluders.
Just explore, experiment, and have fun. You'll learn a lot.
There was "TA: Kingdoms," which Cavedog made after the first TA, and which I loved.
Unfortunately, Kingdoms never caught on. There were a few reasons for that. When it was released, the hardware requirements were obscene. I was lucky in that I'd just gotten a new computer, and, for the time, it was a beast: PIII 550, 256 MB RAM, TNT2 -- it cost $3k back in the day, and it's still plenty fast enough for everything my family does, six years later. Most people who tried to run the game, unlike me, saw a slideshow in the late game when there were tons of units. That doesn't make for an enjoyable gameplay experience, so, naturally, other people who weren't lucky enough to have top-of-the-line hardware didn't like the game.
Although I didn't realize it at the time because the game ran perfectly for me, TA:K was also rather buggy. That same PIII 550, now running XP instead of 98FE, and now with new drivers for everything, doesn't play the game right anymore. Choppy, garbled sound; graphical anomalies; incorrectly-rendered text. If that's how the game had looked when I first started to play it, I'd have quickly lost interest. For some people, that's how it always looked.
But plenty of games come out that need tons of patches, and plenty of games come out that need to wait for the hardware to catch up. So what really killed TA:K was that support dried up for it. It was the day Cavedog died.
Cavedog went under when a few key developers left for competing companies. Cavedog got bought out by something inappropriate -- Hasbro, or Brady Games, I think -- and, though there were rumors of a Total Annihilation 3, which was to be the sci-fi sequal to Original TA, it never panned out.
Cavedog is dead. Bungie is in chains. Blizzard ran off with an MMORPG. Who will rise up to take their place?
Reality Pump? Earth 2150 was wonderfully ambitious (and is still a favorite; it has naval units, aircraft, customizable units... even underground tunnels!), and 2160 is the most creative RTS I've seen in a while (nevermind the so-bad-it-makes-you-cringe voice-acting and single-player campaign). What other developers are carrying the torch and pushing forward the genre?
Well, there's the Open Source community. TA:Spring is incredible. It's unpolished, but quite pretty on good hardware (or so I am led to believe by screenshots; I've only got a Dell laptop), and the engine is undergoing constant refinement. Right now it's mainly a nostalgic ode to a past classic, but mods do add new gameplay types and units. Will TA:Spring ever become a great classic in its own right?
Basement-dwelling nerds? In college, it's the basement where you find who you're going to hook up with!
>Islam itself says that the Prophet Mohammed has said everything that needs to be said. It's a bit tough to innovate when you're told everything has already been discovered!
Sounds suspiciously like what certain religious groups in the US say about the Bible -- the fastest-growing religious groups, I might add.
>jews were being eradicated in a hollocaust
Jews managed to contribute a lot considering the circumstances. The first person I think of is Einstein; he's not alone.
'Group' is singular; the group is ramping up.
However, it's true that there are different conventions on each side of the Atlantic for things like this, which may confuse things. In the U.S., Microsoft is developing Vista; in the U.K; they are. Does that affect words like 'group?' Anyone from the UK to comment?
Microsoft also earned their market share. Face it: For grandma, Windows is the superior operating system. It has better hardware compatibility, and it comes with everything she might need built right in -- and with good integration (Outlook, IE, WMP).
Sure, other companies did GUIs first. But Windows ran on IBM PC hardware, and that made it a killer app. Just like there have been tens of dozens of MP3 players on the market before anybody learned the word "iPod."
It doesn't matter how vendor lock-in starts.
Heh! Right you are! For all the accusations that Americans are ignorant of the outside world, you should hear the stuff some non-Americans think about the U.S! A Chinese student comes here from Shanghai, and then returns home for a visit halfway through college. Her friends, who have never left China, all say, "You're lucky; you get to eat nothing but pizza and hamburgers!" and "Isn't it scary that they all have guns and shoot each other?" Really happened! People honestly believe this stuff!
Pardon me while I run out to McDonald's in my H2. I'll shoot my next door neighbor just as soon as I get back!
>That's the explanation why USA has such high crime rate. That's explains why you Americans at large has no understanding what's going outside: since you have no culture (but show business) one can hardly expect you to understand way others are living.
When I read your post about the significance of 'SOCIETY' and 'CULTURE,' I was cheering. Yes!! My thoughts exactly!
I am an American.
You're right that many Americans have very little idea what's going on outside the 'States. Many, of course, simply don't care -- but ignorance, innocent or otherwise, is hardly unique to this side of the Atlantic (or Pacific). I used to think much like you seem to: That Americans are fat, stupid, and aggressive, and that I needed to get somewhere else where the grass is greener. But experience has changed the way I think. People from elsewhere are no better. Different, yes -- and perhaps the flaws take different forms -- but certainly no more elevated or enlightened. Please be careful when you perpetuate stereotypes.
That said, I still agree with your point, and I share your fears: As thought and art turn into 'intellectual property,' we lose culture and edge with greedy baby-steps towards anarcho-capitalist dystopia. It's what cyberpunk warns us about; it's the businessman's and the libertarian's fantasy. And at this rate, it's going to happen. I can already feel Adam Smith's invisible hand winding up to smack us.
Me three.
My entire life is one big Rorschach test. You don't want to know what I think I see on roadsigns sometimes...
Yeah, well I first read "General Manager" and thought this was the latest business craze book. Like The Tipping Point or Blink! -- but this time with knights and orcs. WoW does have gold farmers, so it must be able to teach middle management something...
I know what's going on! Google is making a digital bank! It'll be located on the island of Kinakuta in an abandoned Japanese "command center." Quick! Find Goto Dengo!
Amateur HAM radio operators communicated with some of the Apollo missions. HAMS need to position their antennae correctly to do this, which confirms that the signal did come from at least the direction of the moon, and not from some California backlot.
>Use exceptions instead of value checking, dammit! Every time you call a function that "returns 0/false/-1 on error" you are exposing yourself to possible bugs. Try to avoid this wherever possible, and try to keep all your OS-specific calls in one spot.
I've heard this before, and I've got to admit that I don't completely understand it. Is the problem simply that a function might get called without the requisite "was-the-return-negative-one" check to follow it -- and that using exceptions helps to prevent you from making that error? Or is there another point that I'm missing (obviously, exceptions are also advantageous when any number, including -1, could be a valid return.)?
>Law by definition is about contraints and coercion.
It is also about constraints on those who would coerce. In this sense, law is very much about freedom. The Bill of Rights is a set of laws for the U.S. government.
Yep. That was the joke!
"Tjerkstra?" Didn't he invent a pathfinding algorithm?
>If everything you have to offer a girl can be obtained by her in platonic friendship, then why should she go any further than "just friends"?
Exhibit A: Why people have such a hard time having meaningful relationships:
i.e., "Only fuck the people you wouldn't like otherwise."
Fucking. Brilliant.
Good point.
It shocks you, living here, when you hear that pushing cash at your teachers is standard practice -- because everyday Joes in the U.S. aren't expected to bribe everyone just to get by. But I guess there is plenty of palm-grease at the top.
I once had a close friend from Shanghai. Her parents bribed her teachers throughout her education. Everyone's did, she said: It's just what people had to do to be paid any attention in the classroom. And it extended beyond the classroom. Need something from the government? Need service from a company? You bribe somebody. She said it was normal.
As for other business practices: I had another Chinese friend who told me another story: Her father had gone out with a businessman; he came home drunker than she had ever seen him before. When her father came back, stumbling and with slurred speech, he said that he was going to help the businessman to sell human organs. The next morning, after he had sobered up, she asked him if he remembered what he had said the previous night: He didn't. She told about the organ scheme. He looked shocked, and said he wouldn't do such a thing. (But the businessman was.)
Another friend of his father's owned a steel mill in China. He'd started doing "something," (she didn't know what it was) that he knew would reduce the strength of the steel, because it would save him money. It was wrong and she said it bothered her father, but there was nothing to be done.
So: bribery is a way of life, anything that can be bought is, and greed-is-good-capitalism is sweeping through a corrupted social structure in which bribery is a way of life. It's the wild wild west gone east, and a lot of everyday practices aren't pretty. That's "doing business China's way!"
(Anarcho-capitalists, this is your dream!)>[Re:] New York City [...] I don't remember seeing any murderous gangs roaming the streets...
I used to work in the finance district; I saw murderous thugs roaming the streets every day...
Oh, you mean the blue-collar kind.....