Drupal 6 is absolutely unsupported by the rest of the community so far, so it's a nice 'playground' more than anything worth actually developing a site on. Until the majority of Drupal 5 modules work with 6, Drupal 5 will continue to be 'the way to go' for the vast majority of users.
Unfortunately I didn't figure this out until well after beginning to experiment with 6, but once we got rid of that and went back to 5, Drupal has been a HUGE improvement over the nightmare that zencart and open-commerce are.
If you seriously think that a car alarm would deter anyone from stealing or damaging your car then you are not being 'devalued', you are deluded.
All anyone I know thinks when they hear a car alarm is thoughts of destruction imposed on the owner of said car. Hell most people would be GLAD to have the car stolen so that it would go away and shut the fuck up.
There's a reason cities are starting to ban car alarms - they are just annoying and serve little to no useful purpose whatsoever.
It's easy to say 'ignore' Vista, but if you have software currently on the market, trying to split resources to maintain a version for older versions of windows, and ALSO develop a 'vista compatible' version is a major issue...
This is particularly difficult for smaller developers such as us...and since we're game developers, we have the whole 'DirectX10 versus OpenGL / DirectX9' issue to deal with on top of everything else...
Oh, and then there's the whole new 'Games for Windows' issues that are thrown into the mix...
I-Robot was a special case - it wasn't SUPPOSED to be based on the story, was written & created completely independently, and then the movie studio threw the license onto it afterwards.
There should be some kind of law about abusing licenses...*cough**shadowrun**cough
Re:One Third of Germans Support National Socialism
on
Listing of Vista Drivers
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
Ubisoft is becoming as bad (or worse) than EA as of late though - GRAW1 community is desperate for support / patches, and what does Ubisoft do? ignore them and release graw2 - so instead of fixing the game they already have, they release another game and expect us to pay $60 for a half-baked game done in a ridiculously short period of time.
Now they have 3 games that are almost identical (GRAW / RainbowSix / Splinter Cel), all use the same engine, and might as well be the same game except there's a different character model.
It's as bad as the madden yearly-releases of games, except with Madden you get dozens of characters to choose from out of the box, instead of having to buy a whole new game for a new character skin...
It's already been announced that Rogers has the exclusive here in Canada for the iPhone...the funny part is that Rogers is the only cel provider that invested into their GSM network, so they kinda won by default.
BUT - the big difference between ALL of the other pda type phone-devices like blackberries, treo's etc and the iPhone is that Jobs has specifically stated that there will be NO 3rd party application development allowed for it.
So where people can tweak their crackberries to their hearts content, this iPhone is whatever Apple says that it is, and nothing more.
This is a non-starter for me - no matter how cool it is, if I can't make my own applications for it or install my own custom applications for it, then it's useless.
The issue here is that Apple is TRYING to make a phone (ie locked hardware / software platform, closed development system) when they are ACTUALLY making a PDA / CE device, which implies open development platform by it's very nature as far as I'm concerned.
Not to mention the fact that the whole 'Games for Windows' platform that microsoft is hyping so badly has a number of mandatory requirements, the FIRST of which is that the game MUST use DirectX as the default renderer for the game.
This excludes any OpenGL game from being able to get certified with the 'Games for Windows' program.
This is beyond Vendor Lockin, it's antitrust lawsuits begging to happen.
Forcing developers to use DirectX is HORRIBLE for games in general. I'm not arguing the 'DirectX versus OpenGL' featureset list - this is a matter of choice.
Any vendor that limits our choice as developers and your choice as game-consumers is BAD. This is a bad decision and a drastic situation for the gaming industry on PC, period.
The problem with linux isn't installing the software that comes in whatever Distro's 'normal' list of applications.
It's when you want to install something that ISN'T in that official list. With windows, I can go onto the net and find a random utility or application that I think might be interesting or useful to try out, download it and install it without spending days on the task.
With linux, you find a cool application online that you might want to use, and suddenly have to go looking for a 'potential' distro-specific build of said application. Download it, try to install...it barfs because of 'x' random prerequisite library / file / whatever is different than what the application is expecting...
The simple fact that so many linux applications have to be built from source in order for them to work for a major distro is just ridiculous.
Linux needs a common executable format that JUST WORKS across multiple distro's. This means that the executable or application should NOT require specific custom libraries or prereq's to be on the machine previously. It should NOT require a custom version of a kernel, driver or whatever-broke-this-time...
As a game developer, we really WANT to provide our games and middleware for Linux, but every time we go through the process of trying to even setup an development environment where we can run the application, I am just horrified at how convoluted installing a real 3d driver into linux is...
Spending days trying to get the OS to recognize and install a real driver for the hardware is NOT user-friendly no matter how you look at it. The whole argument against bundling closed-source drivers is a killer for linux on the desktop. Average users could care less about things like this, they just want the shit to work.
I've tried with numerous Distro's and the experience has been horrific every single time. When rocket scientist programmers (who might not be linux-gurus, but ARE very familiar with cross-platform application development) have to spend days trouble shooting installation of a video driver, the platform as a whole is flat-out broken.
Linux never had a desktop bubble, and unfortunately as more time goes by, the whole community becomes more and more fragmented. It's a great idea, but someone needs to step up and create a 'Linux OS', just like Apple and Microsoft do.
Linspire is probably the closest thing to a true desktop OS, and they are doing the right things that SOMEONE needs to do to get their OS more exposure, namely:
1) Retail 2) OEM deals
Without both of these, Linux is dead on arrival for the desktop.
Not only as a reason to force people to upgrade, but as a reason to ensure that people move to Vista and STAY on Vista.
Not that I imagine it will take long for Linux et al to come up with drivers and a better implementation than Vista does for this hardware (if it isn't already supported).
if it's based on their standard DRM stuff you recieve your license the first time the movie is played - WiMP goes onto the net and grabs the license...so in 'theory' it wouldn't start until you actually finish the download.
which is the biggest area of issues with this new service apparently - simply getting a download to complete is the hard part...
not to mention that he doesn't actually 'run' a single application after it's booted - sure fedora might have installed it's standard suite of applications, but do any of them run?
mind you getting x to run, period is fairly impressive.
reminds me of numerous linux experiments i've been involved with in the past though - setting up the base environment is easy enough, until you want to actually DO anything - like install real video drivers etc...then things become a nightmare...
By the end of September 2006, there were 8,181 PS2 titles released worldwide (4,554 in Asia, 1,319 in North America, and 2,308 in Europe),[7] accounting for cumulative production shipments of 1.127 billion units.
Having issues with 130 or so games is PRETTY GOOD as far as backwards compatibility goes. Compare this to the 'how many?' original xbox games that play on the 360 - even now. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft's version of backwards compatibility is a hilarious, hideous implementation...
You're still looking at just over 1% of ps2 games having issues...basically a rounding error - but NOOO the media (and xbox fanboys) will grasp at any straws that they can in order to try and make sony sound bad..
>>pubs want to take away freedom from the evil doers (Warrantless wiretaps on people overseas)
Um, in case you hadn't noticed, they've taken away freedom from EVERYONE - and not overseas.
let's see:
- unlimited surveillance without judicial oversight - getting rid of habeus corpeus - requiring americans to get clearance before they leave or enter the country
Vista is broken much worse than XP ever was. Simply installing a real video driver is a nightmare - on our ATI cards, we're getting all kinds of blue-screens, zero 'real' OpenGL support and worse.
Even better is the fact that Vista doesn't even recover from a bad video driver installation properly - it's back to windows 95 days - even Linux recovers better from crapped out video driver installs, and this is saying a LOT
Of course, most of the problem is ATI's drivers themselves, but microsoft's insistence on shipping broken OpenGL drivers with Vista is going to make the problem so much worse. No thanx, we'll wait...for linux to get it's shit together...
everyone can say that this article is crap all they want, but actually developing games for linux is truly a nightmare. hundreds of OS's, thousands of mismatched libraries, configurations etc...
all for such a tiny percentage of the gaming audience. it's just not worth it.
however, if sony pulls the linux-on-ps3 thing off and doesn't cripple it like they did for the ps2, then it could be a very good thing for linux gaming
which is why the majority of the industry is going the 'outsourcing way' for the creation of said 'drag-ass' development. it's a LOT cheaper to purchase / contract assets for any game project than it is to hire artists and get them to do it in-house.
especially content that is not specific to the gameplay - ie environments / props that type of thing that is just there to flesh out the gameworld.
gameplay specific content will probably continue to be created by the in-house team, but this means that you can have an in-house team focused on creating kickass 'up-front' content while keeping costs low for the filler content that every game needs these days to create the scale of worlds that gamers have come to accept.
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Drupal 6 is absolutely unsupported by the rest of the community so far, so it's a nice 'playground' more than anything worth actually developing a site on. Until the majority of Drupal 5 modules work with 6, Drupal 5 will continue to be 'the way to go' for the vast majority of users.
Unfortunately I didn't figure this out until well after beginning to experiment with 6, but once we got rid of that and went back to 5, Drupal has been a HUGE improvement over the nightmare that zencart and open-commerce are.
Still not perfect, but a billion times better.
If you seriously think that a car alarm would deter anyone from stealing or damaging your car then you are not being 'devalued', you are deluded.
All anyone I know thinks when they hear a car alarm is thoughts of destruction imposed on the owner of said car. Hell most people would be GLAD to have the car stolen so that it would go away and shut the fuck up.
There's a reason cities are starting to ban car alarms - they are just annoying and serve little to no useful purpose whatsoever.
It's easy to say 'ignore' Vista, but if you have software currently on the market, trying to split resources to maintain a version for older versions of windows, and ALSO develop a 'vista compatible' version is a major issue...
This is particularly difficult for smaller developers such as us...and since we're game developers, we have the whole 'DirectX10 versus OpenGL / DirectX9' issue to deal with on top of everything else...
Oh, and then there's the whole new 'Games for Windows' issues that are thrown into the mix...
I-Robot was a special case - it wasn't SUPPOSED to be based on the story, was written & created completely independently, and then the movie studio threw the license onto it afterwards.
There should be some kind of law about abusing licenses...*cough**shadowrun**cough
die spammer
Ubisoft is becoming as bad (or worse) than EA as of late though - GRAW1 community is desperate for support / patches, and what does Ubisoft do? ignore them and release graw2 - so instead of fixing the game they already have, they release another game and expect us to pay $60 for a half-baked game done in a ridiculously short period of time.
Now they have 3 games that are almost identical (GRAW / RainbowSix / Splinter Cel), all use the same engine, and might as well be the same game except there's a different character model.
It's as bad as the madden yearly-releases of games, except with Madden you get dozens of characters to choose from out of the box, instead of having to buy a whole new game for a new character skin...
It's already been announced that Rogers has the exclusive here in Canada for the iPhone...the funny part is that Rogers is the only cel provider that invested into their GSM network, so they kinda won by default.
not to mention that he's been talking about doing many other mobile games and also potentially DS titles as well...
BUT - the big difference between ALL of the other pda type phone-devices like blackberries, treo's etc and the iPhone is that Jobs has specifically stated that there will be NO 3rd party application development allowed for it.
So where people can tweak their crackberries to their hearts content, this iPhone is whatever Apple says that it is, and nothing more.
This is a non-starter for me - no matter how cool it is, if I can't make my own applications for it or install my own custom applications for it, then it's useless.
The issue here is that Apple is TRYING to make a phone (ie locked hardware / software platform, closed development system) when they are ACTUALLY making a PDA / CE device, which implies open development platform by it's very nature as far as I'm concerned.
Not to mention the fact that the whole 'Games for Windows' platform that microsoft is hyping so badly has a number of mandatory requirements, the FIRST of which is that the game MUST use DirectX as the default renderer for the game.
This excludes any OpenGL game from being able to get certified with the 'Games for Windows' program.
This is beyond Vendor Lockin, it's antitrust lawsuits begging to happen.
Forcing developers to use DirectX is HORRIBLE for games in general. I'm not arguing the 'DirectX versus OpenGL' featureset list - this is a matter of choice.
Any vendor that limits our choice as developers and your choice as game-consumers is BAD. This is a bad decision and a drastic situation for the gaming industry on PC, period.
Looks like 3 more have dropped out as well:
http://braid-game.com/news/?p=21
5 games in total have quit in disgust. Good on em indeed!
The problem with linux isn't installing the software that comes in whatever Distro's 'normal' list of applications.
It's when you want to install something that ISN'T in that official list. With windows, I can go onto the net and find a random utility or application that I think might be interesting or useful to try out, download it and install it without spending days on the task.
With linux, you find a cool application online that you might want to use, and suddenly have to go looking for a 'potential' distro-specific build of said application. Download it, try to install...it barfs because of 'x' random prerequisite library / file / whatever is different than what the application is expecting...
The simple fact that so many linux applications have to be built from source in order for them to work for a major distro is just ridiculous.
Linux needs a common executable format that JUST WORKS across multiple distro's. This means that the executable or application should NOT require specific custom libraries or prereq's to be on the machine previously. It should NOT require a custom version of a kernel, driver or whatever-broke-this-time...
As a game developer, we really WANT to provide our games and middleware for Linux, but every time we go through the process of trying to even setup an development environment where we can run the application, I am just horrified at how convoluted installing a real 3d driver into linux is...
Spending days trying to get the OS to recognize and install a real driver for the hardware is NOT user-friendly no matter how you look at it. The whole argument against bundling closed-source drivers is a killer for linux on the desktop. Average users could care less about things like this, they just want the shit to work.
I've tried with numerous Distro's and the experience has been horrific every single time. When rocket scientist programmers (who might not be linux-gurus, but ARE very familiar with cross-platform application development) have to spend days trouble shooting installation of a video driver, the platform as a whole is flat-out broken.
Linux never had a desktop bubble, and unfortunately as more time goes by, the whole community becomes more and more fragmented. It's a great idea, but someone needs to step up and create a 'Linux OS', just like Apple and Microsoft do.
Linspire is probably the closest thing to a true desktop OS, and they are doing the right things that SOMEONE needs to do to get their OS more exposure, namely:
1) Retail
2) OEM deals
Without both of these, Linux is dead on arrival for the desktop.
Brings a whole new meaning to Microsoft Viruses and their new Robotic Toolkit that they just released...
Not only as a reason to force people to upgrade, but as a reason to ensure that people move to Vista and STAY on Vista.
Not that I imagine it will take long for Linux et al to come up with drivers and a better implementation than Vista does for this hardware (if it isn't already supported).
amen fo' shure
in firefox, the zoom & move isn't working at all for me?
if it's based on their standard DRM stuff you recieve your license the first time the movie is played - WiMP goes onto the net and grabs the license...so in 'theory' it wouldn't start until you actually finish the download.
which is the biggest area of issues with this new service apparently - simply getting a download to complete is the hard part...
not to mention that he doesn't actually 'run' a single application after it's booted - sure fedora might have installed it's standard suite of applications, but do any of them run?
mind you getting x to run, period is fairly impressive.
reminds me of numerous linux experiments i've been involved with in the past though - setting up the base environment is easy enough, until you want to actually DO anything - like install real video drivers etc...then things become a nightmare...
All of this crap is just marketig BS from Microsoft - 'is dx10 backwards compatible, blah blah'
The ONLY important question on Vista is - WHEN DO WE GET REAL OPENGL SUPPORT
As is, OpenGL support is flat-out broken on Vista. Boycott Vista until they provide REAL openGL support.
By the end of September 2006, there were 8,181 PS2 titles released worldwide (4,554 in Asia, 1,319 in North America, and 2,308 in Europe),[7] accounting for cumulative production shipments of 1.127 billion units.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_2
Having issues with 130 or so games is PRETTY GOOD as far as backwards compatibility goes. Compare this to the 'how many?' original xbox games that play on the 360 - even now. Not to mention the fact that Microsoft's version of backwards compatibility is a hilarious, hideous implementation...
You're still looking at just over 1% of ps2 games having issues...basically a rounding error - but NOOO the media (and xbox fanboys) will grasp at any straws that they can in order to try and make sony sound bad..
So funny.
anyone else not seeing the 'reply' buttons for any of the comments now? who's testing in production again...
>>pubs want to take away freedom from the evil doers (Warrantless wiretaps on people overseas)
Um, in case you hadn't noticed, they've taken away freedom from EVERYONE - and not overseas.
let's see:
- unlimited surveillance without judicial oversight
- getting rid of habeus corpeus
- requiring americans to get clearance before they leave or enter the country
i think the 'pubs' have done enough damage thanx
Vista is broken much worse than XP ever was. Simply installing a real video driver is a nightmare - on our ATI cards, we're getting all kinds of blue-screens, zero 'real' OpenGL support and worse.
Even better is the fact that Vista doesn't even recover from a bad video driver installation properly - it's back to windows 95 days - even Linux recovers better from crapped out video driver installs, and this is saying a LOT
Of course, most of the problem is ATI's drivers themselves, but microsoft's insistence on shipping broken OpenGL drivers with Vista is going to make the problem so much worse. No thanx, we'll wait...for linux to get it's shit together...
This is something that very well may save linux gaming, if Sony ships Linux with the Ps3 like early reports mentioned.
It has all of the benchmarks of a perfect development environment:
1) unified hardware
2) unified operating system
3) potentially huge audience
everyone can say that this article is crap all they want, but actually developing games for linux is truly a nightmare. hundreds of OS's, thousands of mismatched libraries, configurations etc...
all for such a tiny percentage of the gaming audience. it's just not worth it.
however, if sony pulls the linux-on-ps3 thing off and doesn't cripple it like they did for the ps2, then it could be a very good thing for linux gaming
which is why the majority of the industry is going the 'outsourcing way' for the creation of said 'drag-ass' development. it's a LOT cheaper to purchase / contract assets for any game project than it is to hire artists and get them to do it in-house.
especially content that is not specific to the gameplay - ie environments / props that type of thing that is just there to flesh out the gameworld.
gameplay specific content will probably continue to be created by the in-house team, but this means that you can have an in-house team focused on creating kickass 'up-front' content while keeping costs low for the filler content that every game needs these days to create the scale of worlds that gamers have come to accept.