It's advertising. I'm making a simple game right now that's taken me all of 5 evenings, using entirely open source software. I haven't played XONG, but the technology doesn't look all that advanced. My own code is composed of a few simple libraries:
All of this is open source, and aside from OpenAL is a BSD or similar license. I could probably release my code right now, after 5 days of work, and let users have their own sandbox to play in (it's only really good for 1 type of game... but still). I would, but I don't feel like dealing with my employer about whether I am/am not allowed to do so, and it's easy to reproduce anyway.
This seems like a good idea, but I honestly can't see it being anything but advertising.
It's true that I rent. But that doesn't change anything. I don't see how I have the right to impose my rules on my neighbors. So long as they aren't dumping anything on my lawn, I don't see what the problem is. And quite honestly, I would be the person with the uncut lawn that everyone bitches about.
But you know what? If someone came over and asked me to cut my lawn and remove whatever garbage I had on it, so that they could get extra money for their house, I would do it for a while. It would be even less of a problem if they did it for me. Because I quite honestly don't care, they are the ones who care.
But if they were to call the authorities and attempt to get the city to force me to do it because they didn't like looking at my lawn? That's when I would put on the war paint.
People need to stop worrying about what the fuck their neighbors do. It's their land, they are free to do whatever they want with it. So the hell what if your resale value goes down?
I highly doubt that Unreal 3 would run better than the Quake 3 engine. Modern does not equal better. Most of the things that newer engines do better are somewhat worthless on a cell phone. You want simplicity and speed on a cell phone, not abstraction and flexibility. I would think that the Quake 3 engine would knock the pants off of Unreal 3.
Exactly. Everyone on our team is good at their job. No amount of "waterfall", "agile", or "spiral" is going to prevent bad code from being written by a bad programmer. Everyone has their own workflow, and their own way of thinking. Encouraging everyone to be their best is the way to go.
The only time that quality is ever sacrificed is when fixing bugs close to a milestone. But as soon as the milestone is over, we generally get a chance to rip out our hacks and do it properly.
Honestly, I think our codebase is pretty good. It's not perfect by any means, but most of the problems reside in architectural details that were put in by someone who really shouldn't have been the engine architect. They are nice on paper (very extensible), but in practice they are slow at runtime and unwieldy to use.
It's a lot of project management nonsense. Basically, there are a few different ways to manage a software project. The idea is that much like building a house, you can assemble the house in many different ways, and some ways will produce a better house in less time.
Personally, I think it's all just a bunch of crap. Any carpenter will tell you that you should assemble the walls before you put the roof on. Any programmer will tell you that you need a filesystem driver before you need a resource management system (although there's really no reason that the two can't be done in parallel, if properly planned out).
In short, this topic reminds me of bickering over how whitespace should be formatted. Completely useless 99% of the time.
Disclaimer: I work in the game industry as a systems programmer. I honestly can't tell you what methodology we use. Spiral maybe? Our publisher wants tangible results, and every programmer is given tasks that are within their area of expertise. We build up our game (which is a constantly shifting target) to the best of our ability.
Thanks for the info. That looks extremely helpful, and I'll likely set that up later tonight. I am aware that Windows Update has a small amount of drivers available. But in my experience they are limited in scope and usually of shoddy quality. But it doesn't matter much when Windows doesn't seem to include NIC drivers.
Nonsense. If anyone targeted Linux, they'd be able to exploit the exact same vulnerability in Firefox. They could then change your wallpaper, mess with your programs, and steal all your data. There's little difference between an unprivileged user and root on a single-user machine. But if they wanted root, they could just stick a gksudo (or whatever) workalike somewhere in your PATH and wait for you to give them your password.
That's exactly my point. You have to break a whole second layer of security to deliver your payload. Sure, they can mess with your programs, steal your data, and cause a mess. But what's much more difficult to do is actually gain control over your computer. Yes, your attack vector might work. But it might not.
So basically you're blaming Windows for a buffer overflow in a program written by an entirely different company?
No, I'm blaming them for what happened in my next paragraph. There will always be exploits in userspace. It irks me when they happen in system space.
It's been trivial to set up a reduced-priviledged account in Windows since Win2k. It's your own damn fault for using an admin account as your primary account.
I haven't tried this in many years, but last time I tried it, it was fucking miserable.
So basically according to your last sentence your entire argument is flawed and disengenuous. You're comparing most likely a modern-day Linux distro to probably a vanilla XP install, which is 9 years old at this point. Yeah, that can't possibly be why you see poorer hardware support in the stock XP install. No, it couldn't be.
Service Pack 3 is newer than a good chunk of my hardware. And it's really insanely stupid that any OS doesn't have a central repository for drivers at this point.
Last night I was browsing the web on my Windows XP partition, which I usually use solely for gaming. It's completely up to date, and I'm running the RC of Firefox 3.6. I was viewing a web page and the browser crashed, and things started popping up, and my desktop wallpaper changed. It seems that Internet Security 2010 was silently installed on my PC through a buffer overflow in some Firefox module (I suspect an adobe plugin, but that's neither here nor there).
You want to know why *nix operating systems have inherently better architecture? You don't have to be an admin to use your computer, and userspace programs don't have the power to do to my PC what IS2010 did to me last night. Windows was always designed to be a single user system, and although that's improving, it's still obviously just stapled on top of the OS, because they don't want to break backward compatibility.
Another pet peeve of mine is Windows' driver support. It's atrocious. Answer me why I can't install Windows and have all my hardware just work? Linux is capable of doing this. But with Windows, I can't even expect my networking to work out of the box. I have to hunt for a driver CD and install the drivers from there. Granted, I'm talking about Windows XP, which is presumably the decade old OS you are talking about. But I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista/7 from coworkers. (Primarily that even once the drivers are installed, the network is unreliable at best).
so I can only assume that a DivX encoded video in an MKV container is not a piece of shit? Sweet. I'm going to convert all my video library from AVI to MKV, and it's going to rule.
Memorizing a 10x10 table is certainly an indicator of intelligence. After all, it requires a lot of brain power to memorize 7*9.
Can you tell me what 17x16 is?
Programming is problem solving at its core. You repeatedly failed to solve a problem. I wouldn't hire you on that basis alone. Calculus might not be required for most programming work. But saying it's completely unrelated to programming is patently ridiculous. It's just math. You follow the rules, and you get your answer. Calculus is something we can teach to a computer. If you couldn't do it, then that means that you would be incapable of teaching a computer to do it. I think it's dangerous to hire a programmer that failed a task so thoroughly. But I think it would be far worse to hire someone who feels justified in failing it.
Initially, I was on the side of the people who said that degrees shouldn't be required. Some of the best programmers I've worked with have been business, economics, or engineering students (a high portion of those being chemical engineers). But you have shown a good piece of the value in a degree. It shows you have been able to accomplish any task given to you (so far).
Most Wii games are shit. But there's a few gems amidst the rough. Mario Galaxy might be the best game this generation. Metroid Prime 3 is worth a play, and if you haven't played Resident Evil 4 yet, the Wii version is the definitive version of the game. There's also Zack and Wiki, Mario Kart, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I hear that they are all good, but I haven't spent a lot of time with them yet.
The Motion Plus is just OK. I got 2 + sports resort and think it is Nintendo Ripof. It doesn't add anything new to the gameplay.
If you are on slashdot, and can't figure out how a gyroscope can add to gameplay (over accelerometers), then you need to have your geek license revoked.
Resident Evil 4 was one of the best selling Wii games. Just because The Conduit and Mad World didn't sell well, does not mean that there's not a market for M rated games. Fact of the matter is that they just weren't very good games, regardless of what the media said.
Honestly, look at that chart. I'm seeing a shitload of hardcore games there (no, I don't judge whether a game is for the hardcore or not by the rating, any more than I judge movies that way). What I'm not seeing a lot of is deca sports and catz, regardless of what the media tells you. The Wii market is starving for hardcore games, and the 3rd parties just simply have not delivered. Nintendo sat this one out and made casual games, because the 3rd parties have been bitching bitterly for years that they can't compete with Nintendo. And what do they do? They follow in Nintendo's footsteps again. Pathetic.
Nintendo just needs to come back and rule the roost again. Metroid: Other M is a good start. New Super Mario Bros Wii, Mario Galaxy 2, and the rumoured new Zelda should do the trick. Hardcore gamers still own their Wiis. They just aren't buying anything because there's fuck all to play.
I'm Canadian. I can't access Hulu, yet I have American TV stations on cable, and they advertise things like how to deal with the IRS, and how to get "greenbacks" for gold. How exactly are these ads targeted toward me?
I think the sound capabilities leaves a lot to wish for.
The DSi has a much improved DAC, allows 16 simultaneous mono voices in hardware (I think, it could be 8 mono)
3D capability leaves a lot to wish for.
True, but it was done this way due to battery reasons. When someone writes a software renderer for DSi, we'll likely see a pretty big jump in graphics (for DSi only)
The DS lite (which plenty of us have bought..) don't do diagonal upper-right movements very well.
What?
Personally I would from the beginning had preferred one screen with the total resolution of the current two there the developers themselves could had decided how they wanted to use it. And of course better 3D capabilities.
Then you would have a PSP. The second screen is an artifact of the design of the system. I think Nintendo really wanted a clamshell, because it makes the system far more portable. You don't need a case, and can slip one into your pocket without ruining the screen. I own a DS, DSi, and PSP. The PSP remains at home, while the DSi comes with me wherever I go. Reason being that it doesn't require a case, and is a good deal smaller.
Also in the case of the DSi I guess one could argue that at least the loss of the GBA slot is something "wrong" with it. That and the very high price, the DS has been around for like 5 years but still kinda cost as much since each new version starts off at a slightly higher price the the current one.
DSi is Nintendo's new handheld. It has 4x the power of the DS, and is a significantly better system in every way. It's a fair price to pay for the new system. The problem is the lack of DSi exclusive games, because Nintendo is currently selling it as a new DS. This is really not the case. Next year, we will likely see the rise of the DSi, after there's an established market. I think Nintendo is just rolling it out slowly because they don't need to rush, and they don't want people to feel cheated.
The bigger issue is that there are many people (myself included), who don't want voice or video in Pidgin. I MIGHT be more receptive to them if they were completely modular, independent plugins so that I don't have to load them. But I love Pidgin for its simplicity, lightness, and stability. Adding video/voice would likely harm those items.
Your argument has just ceased to make any sense. Where exactly does the copyrighted data on PirateBay come from if it's not paid for? Are you suggesting that someone broke into a store to steal a CD, so that he/she could share it with the world?
Slashdot Mirror
My nVidia video card supports OpenGL 3.1 in Linux. I don't have a 4.0 capable card unfortunately, but yes, the drivers are out there.
It's advertising. I'm making a simple game right now that's taken me all of 5 evenings, using entirely open source software. I haven't played XONG, but the technology doesn't look all that advanced. My own code is composed of a few simple libraries:
Ogre (Graphics)
Lua (Scripting)
ToLua (Script Bindings)
OpenAL (Audio)
All of this is open source, and aside from OpenAL is a BSD or similar license. I could probably release my code right now, after 5 days of work, and let users have their own sandbox to play in (it's only really good for 1 type of game... but still). I would, but I don't feel like dealing with my employer about whether I am/am not allowed to do so, and it's easy to reproduce anyway.
This seems like a good idea, but I honestly can't see it being anything but advertising.
Someone is certainly full of themselves.
It's true that I rent. But that doesn't change anything. I don't see how I have the right to impose my rules on my neighbors. So long as they aren't dumping anything on my lawn, I don't see what the problem is. And quite honestly, I would be the person with the uncut lawn that everyone bitches about.
But you know what? If someone came over and asked me to cut my lawn and remove whatever garbage I had on it, so that they could get extra money for their house, I would do it for a while. It would be even less of a problem if they did it for me. Because I quite honestly don't care, they are the ones who care.
But if they were to call the authorities and attempt to get the city to force me to do it because they didn't like looking at my lawn? That's when I would put on the war paint.
People need to stop worrying about what the fuck their neighbors do. It's their land, they are free to do whatever they want with it. So the hell what if your resale value goes down?
I highly doubt that Unreal 3 would run better than the Quake 3 engine. Modern does not equal better. Most of the things that newer engines do better are somewhat worthless on a cell phone. You want simplicity and speed on a cell phone, not abstraction and flexibility. I would think that the Quake 3 engine would knock the pants off of Unreal 3.
Exactly. Everyone on our team is good at their job. No amount of "waterfall", "agile", or "spiral" is going to prevent bad code from being written by a bad programmer. Everyone has their own workflow, and their own way of thinking. Encouraging everyone to be their best is the way to go.
The only time that quality is ever sacrificed is when fixing bugs close to a milestone. But as soon as the milestone is over, we generally get a chance to rip out our hacks and do it properly.
Honestly, I think our codebase is pretty good. It's not perfect by any means, but most of the problems reside in architectural details that were put in by someone who really shouldn't have been the engine architect. They are nice on paper (very extensible), but in practice they are slow at runtime and unwieldy to use.
It's a lot of project management nonsense. Basically, there are a few different ways to manage a software project. The idea is that much like building a house, you can assemble the house in many different ways, and some ways will produce a better house in less time.
Personally, I think it's all just a bunch of crap. Any carpenter will tell you that you should assemble the walls before you put the roof on. Any programmer will tell you that you need a filesystem driver before you need a resource management system (although there's really no reason that the two can't be done in parallel, if properly planned out).
In short, this topic reminds me of bickering over how whitespace should be formatted. Completely useless 99% of the time.
Disclaimer: I work in the game industry as a systems programmer. I honestly can't tell you what methodology we use. Spiral maybe? Our publisher wants tangible results, and every programmer is given tasks that are within their area of expertise. We build up our game (which is a constantly shifting target) to the best of our ability.
Thanks for the info. That looks extremely helpful, and I'll likely set that up later tonight. I am aware that Windows Update has a small amount of drivers available. But in my experience they are limited in scope and usually of shoddy quality. But it doesn't matter much when Windows doesn't seem to include NIC drivers.
Yes, and it makes us all nervous. But we've yet to see them really abuse the knowledge.
Nonsense. If anyone targeted Linux, they'd be able to exploit the exact same vulnerability in Firefox. They could then change your wallpaper, mess with your programs, and steal all your data. There's little difference between an unprivileged user and root on a single-user machine. But if they wanted root, they could just stick a gksudo (or whatever) workalike somewhere in your PATH and wait for you to give them your password.
That's exactly my point. You have to break a whole second layer of security to deliver your payload. Sure, they can mess with your programs, steal your data, and cause a mess. But what's much more difficult to do is actually gain control over your computer. Yes, your attack vector might work. But it might not.
So basically you're blaming Windows for a buffer overflow in a program written by an entirely different company?
No, I'm blaming them for what happened in my next paragraph. There will always be exploits in userspace. It irks me when they happen in system space.
It's been trivial to set up a reduced-priviledged account in Windows since Win2k. It's your own damn fault for using an admin account as your primary account.
I haven't tried this in many years, but last time I tried it, it was fucking miserable.
So basically according to your last sentence your entire argument is flawed and disengenuous. You're comparing most likely a modern-day Linux distro to probably a vanilla XP install, which is 9 years old at this point. Yeah, that can't possibly be why you see poorer hardware support in the stock XP install. No, it couldn't be.
Service Pack 3 is newer than a good chunk of my hardware. And it's really insanely stupid that any OS doesn't have a central repository for drivers at this point.
Last night I was browsing the web on my Windows XP partition, which I usually use solely for gaming. It's completely up to date, and I'm running the RC of Firefox 3.6. I was viewing a web page and the browser crashed, and things started popping up, and my desktop wallpaper changed. It seems that Internet Security 2010 was silently installed on my PC through a buffer overflow in some Firefox module (I suspect an adobe plugin, but that's neither here nor there).
You want to know why *nix operating systems have inherently better architecture? You don't have to be an admin to use your computer, and userspace programs don't have the power to do to my PC what IS2010 did to me last night. Windows was always designed to be a single user system, and although that's improving, it's still obviously just stapled on top of the OS, because they don't want to break backward compatibility.
Another pet peeve of mine is Windows' driver support. It's atrocious. Answer me why I can't install Windows and have all my hardware just work? Linux is capable of doing this. But with Windows, I can't even expect my networking to work out of the box. I have to hunt for a driver CD and install the drivers from there. Granted, I'm talking about Windows XP, which is presumably the decade old OS you are talking about. But I've heard plenty of horror stories about Vista/7 from coworkers. (Primarily that even once the drivers are installed, the network is unreliable at best).
so I can only assume that a DivX encoded video in an MKV container is not a piece of shit? Sweet. I'm going to convert all my video library from AVI to MKV, and it's going to rule.
Memorizing a 10x10 table is certainly an indicator of intelligence. After all, it requires a lot of brain power to memorize 7*9. Can you tell me what 17x16 is?
Are you seriously implying that you are the only one here who's been to a classroom?
Programming is problem solving at its core. You repeatedly failed to solve a problem. I wouldn't hire you on that basis alone. Calculus might not be required for most programming work. But saying it's completely unrelated to programming is patently ridiculous. It's just math. You follow the rules, and you get your answer. Calculus is something we can teach to a computer. If you couldn't do it, then that means that you would be incapable of teaching a computer to do it. I think it's dangerous to hire a programmer that failed a task so thoroughly. But I think it would be far worse to hire someone who feels justified in failing it.
Initially, I was on the side of the people who said that degrees shouldn't be required. Some of the best programmers I've worked with have been business, economics, or engineering students (a high portion of those being chemical engineers). But you have shown a good piece of the value in a degree. It shows you have been able to accomplish any task given to you (so far).
Most Wii games are shit. But there's a few gems amidst the rough. Mario Galaxy might be the best game this generation. Metroid Prime 3 is worth a play, and if you haven't played Resident Evil 4 yet, the Wii version is the definitive version of the game. There's also Zack and Wiki, Mario Kart, and Super Smash Bros. Brawl. I hear that they are all good, but I haven't spent a lot of time with them yet.
The Motion Plus is just OK. I got 2 + sports resort and think it is Nintendo Ripof. It doesn't add anything new to the gameplay.
If you are on slashdot, and can't figure out how a gyroscope can add to gameplay (over accelerometers), then you need to have your geek license revoked.
Resident Evil 4 was one of the best selling Wii games. Just because The Conduit and Mad World didn't sell well, does not mean that there's not a market for M rated games. Fact of the matter is that they just weren't very good games, regardless of what the media said.
http://kotaku.com/5395956/the-10-most-avidly+played-wii-games-in-america-as-of-nov-1
Honestly, look at that chart. I'm seeing a shitload of hardcore games there (no, I don't judge whether a game is for the hardcore or not by the rating, any more than I judge movies that way). What I'm not seeing a lot of is deca sports and catz, regardless of what the media tells you. The Wii market is starving for hardcore games, and the 3rd parties just simply have not delivered. Nintendo sat this one out and made casual games, because the 3rd parties have been bitching bitterly for years that they can't compete with Nintendo. And what do they do? They follow in Nintendo's footsteps again. Pathetic.
Nintendo just needs to come back and rule the roost again. Metroid: Other M is a good start. New Super Mario Bros Wii, Mario Galaxy 2, and the rumoured new Zelda should do the trick. Hardcore gamers still own their Wiis. They just aren't buying anything because there's fuck all to play.
I'm Canadian. I can't access Hulu, yet I have American TV stations on cable, and they advertise things like how to deal with the IRS, and how to get "greenbacks" for gold. How exactly are these ads targeted toward me?
I think the sound capabilities leaves a lot to wish for.
The DSi has a much improved DAC, allows 16 simultaneous mono voices in hardware (I think, it could be 8 mono)
3D capability leaves a lot to wish for.
True, but it was done this way due to battery reasons. When someone writes a software renderer for DSi, we'll likely see a pretty big jump in graphics (for DSi only)
The DS lite (which plenty of us have bought ..) don't do diagonal upper-right movements very well.
What?
Personally I would from the beginning had preferred one screen with the total resolution of the current two there the developers themselves could had decided how they wanted to use it. And of course better 3D capabilities.
Then you would have a PSP. The second screen is an artifact of the design of the system. I think Nintendo really wanted a clamshell, because it makes the system far more portable. You don't need a case, and can slip one into your pocket without ruining the screen. I own a DS, DSi, and PSP. The PSP remains at home, while the DSi comes with me wherever I go. Reason being that it doesn't require a case, and is a good deal smaller.
Also in the case of the DSi I guess one could argue that at least the loss of the GBA slot is something "wrong" with it. That and the very high price, the DS has been around for like 5 years but still kinda cost as much since each new version starts off at a slightly higher price the the current one.
DSi is Nintendo's new handheld. It has 4x the power of the DS, and is a significantly better system in every way. It's a fair price to pay for the new system. The problem is the lack of DSi exclusive games, because Nintendo is currently selling it as a new DS. This is really not the case. Next year, we will likely see the rise of the DSi, after there's an established market. I think Nintendo is just rolling it out slowly because they don't need to rush, and they don't want people to feel cheated.
The bigger issue is that there are many people (myself included), who don't want voice or video in Pidgin. I MIGHT be more receptive to them if they were completely modular, independent plugins so that I don't have to load them. But I love Pidgin for its simplicity, lightness, and stability. Adding video/voice would likely harm those items.
Your argument has just ceased to make any sense. Where exactly does the copyrighted data on PirateBay come from if it's not paid for? Are you suggesting that someone broke into a store to steal a CD, so that he/she could share it with the world?
yes, you are absolutely right, of course. I meant the download of music files from random people on the internet.