no it wasn't, it was created by radical entertainment here in vancouver.
i'm sure that the licensee had input into the game's development, but creative freedom had to come in somewhere...even though it is a rip off of another game...so much so they got sued...
2 extra harddrives that you apparently have to switch between by pressing a button?
how is this useful in any way for what is supposedly a 'server' modification for the xbox?
last time i checked my servers are all far away at a coloc, not much chance that the techs down there will go running to press 'the button' because i forgot to mount the right harddrive...
doesn't sound useful at all.
the question is when this kind of behavior (patenting blatantly obvious works) becomes criminal - otherwise microsoft will continue to apply (and likely receive) these idiotic patents.
just like acacia's 'web streaming' patent that applies to any file downloaded off the internet.
perhaps they could reduce the tuition so that instead of only the rich spoiled brats that NEED ipods or other crap toys might be able to attend the schools.
i've heard that harvard is upwards of $50,000 a year now, i'm sure these other schools are the same.
how much of that student's tuition goes to crap like ipods and 'napster'?
sure, but like any programming task - isn't what the code looks like, it's whether it 'works' or not.
The simple fact that these guys have gotten it working (as well as they have) when the Rockstar team of 50+ people couldnt' do the same says quite a bit about the indie/hobbyist mindset.
we may not be able to out-develop the big game companies, but we can definitely out-invent them;}
they will never be used in the same sentence as the word 'cool'
microsoft != cool
no matter how much bs they smear onto the box. consumers are smarter than MS gives them credit for - and we don't want the bs drm and will not support products that force us to submit to such privacy/copyright infringing (infringes fair use, etc) software like WiMP 10 and their idiotic media center PC's.
how many people will willingly submit to a lobotomy? sure some might if you offer them candy, but in the end it's still a lobotomy.
microsoft does not offer more 'choices', every ms product that claims they offer more choice, they really mean that ms offers more compatibility with OTHER MS PRODUCTS, which absolutely does not count in the real world.
- MIT license - printed manuals (for those that like them) - CD distributions, commercial support - has been featured in 5 or 6 different 'make games' books published by different companies, including Clayton Crooks most recent 'awesome game creation no programming required', which has 3 chapters covering RF.
features in the wings: - realtime physics system (integrated, just not exposed to the non-programmer/designer types) - enhanced terrain system (again the code is in the engine, it's just not exposed to the designers as much as it could/should be). - more advanced shader support, support for the newer shader models etc...
so don't tell me the tools don't exist because it's a flat-out lie.
we might not be doom3 or farcry quite yet, but those kinds of engines are only required for a very limited set of games that also require massive investments in art resources (ie fps type games).
features include: - normal mapping, compressed textures, fullscreen anti-aliasing, etc - bumpmapping (embm) - other 'shader effects' - configurable weapons systems, hud systems, conversation & message systems - interactive, dynamic scripted camera systems - scripting language with over 600 scripting commands exposing the engine internals to the designer - art pipeline tools VERY similar to quake3/half-life2/doom3 - you can use quark/worldcraft/etc for your editing/texturing
like i said,the tools are out there, the community acknowledgement and support might not be.
our engine was developed by about 3-4 programmers over a period of several years.
if we had serious (ie commercial) developers contributing even 1/10th of their time to providing enhancements or improvements to the engine, this would progress even further.
the engine is being taught at several colleges as part of their game design courses (including several taught by myself) and more than a few universities are looking at the engine for their own game design coursese.
this is exactly what we have been noticing as of late.
the sheer amount of art resources required simply means that you MUST have some kind of funding or resources available to get a commercial-quality game title completed.
what the game industry is completely ignoring is that they could 'jump start' that process by a period of several years by using existing technology as a starting point.
this is the exact reason that companies like ibm, novell and the film industry have begun major initiatives towards developing open-source as the foundation of their businesses.
they are in the business of selling consumer products (ibm->hardware, movie industry-> films), not develop software, exactly the same as the game industry.
the only companies that benefit from the current 'license the big commercial engine for EVERY RELEASE WE EVER MAKE' trend are the big engine companies -> ie epic, unreal, criterion (now ea)
the rest of the industry has to play the never-ending game of catch up, just to get into the ball game...
what if the smaller developers banded together to create the tools - the game engine is the commodity, it shouldn't be the 'make or break' the company decision like it is currently.
>>Yes, you could save $250,000 if you are reusing >>existing tech, but if you are going to be the >>one to push the envelope, instead of rehash >>existing things, you are going to lose money to >>people not licensing things from you.
did the game industry bash valve for 'rehashing existing things' with their quake2 modded engine?
does every single unreal engine developer get blasted for 'rehashing' unreal? (they should perhaps but that's another discussion)
this is a stupid argument. every game ever made is 'rehashing' concepts previously created in other games. if you are creating the entire game content for your game (art assets, animations, bitmaps, etc), then how is it rehashing?
if the INDUSTRY as a whole can spend 6 months enhancing the engine for your game's specific requirements, AND these changes benefit the entire industry, then PERHAPS the game industry as a whole can actually make progress, instead of simply rehashing the same concepts...
considering that it takes a serious AAA developer 12-18 months (using an existing engine) to get a game to release stage (and this is optimistic), why would they NOT want to know that when they get to the point of starting a new project that not only are all of their updates and enhancements now available, but there will likely be a large number of OTHER improvements and enhancements that the rest of the industry has contributed as well...
as well, how does open source prevent you from licensing your custom version of the engine? the entire 'linux industry' is built on this exact concept.
a second point is - if you are a small indie developer that is 'betting the company' on your next game, you have 2 options currently: - completely reinvent the wheel, which will likely take a period of 2 years or longer and millions of dollars
OR
- license your engine from one of a few big middleware companies, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars PER title.
hence why EA just bought criterion. they spend millions a year licensing renderware over and over for every single title (well not every title in EA's case, but for most developers it is), at some point there is no point licensing, might as well just buy the company.
enter open-source into the mix.
instead of having to desperately fight and scramble over the little bit of IP and the brutally short period in which said IP is valuable...which for the game industry tends to be a period of about 3 months, if you are lucky.
then there is the fact that the oh so valuable IP in games, over which such idiocy as the half-life2/doom leak caused such huge uproars...if these developers were using open-source engines, this would have never been an issue.
the art content (ie the 'brand') becomes the value, NOT the commodity (the game engine).
it's only a matter of time before the rest of the industry realizes what the big IT and film companies already have - open source just works.
open-source is completely viable for the game industry - in fact if the industry is to survive in the future beyond one or two massive 'mega-publishers' (like EA owning criterion & renderware etc), the rest of the industry is going to HAVE to shift to open-source to defend themselves against these massive companies.
much like how linux gained it's foot hold in the webserver & OS market. the game industry is just a bit further behind the curve.
how much longer will 'indies' (ie small non-publisher-affiliated dev houses like id) be able to compete against the mega dev studios like rockstar or EA? it's coming to the point where the return on investment is becoming too high, most companies simply can't even enter the market because of the cost of entry.
if you can suddenly shave off $250,000 + off of your startup costs (by using an open-source engine as opposed to licensing the tech), or more (as opposed to developing the tech from the ground up, which could cost millions), why wouldn't developers want to go the open-source route?
the main issue at this point is publisher resistance. publishers are the 'old school' business-mindset like the RIAA and the MPAA - they refuse to acknowledge that open-source exists and that it might be useful to their businesses.
in the game industry, it's all about the IP - if you own the IP then you can make money, whereas publishers look at open-source and are just scared away because of the simple words 'open source'. it implies to them that they don't control things...
It all comes down to the licenses and misconceptions about the requirements of those licenses.
GPL is the death of any game-related project for example. It is the kiss of death to a game library or toolset.
publishers have to know that they can close the source of the product, even for a short period around the release date (that crucial 3-5 months after release) so that they can make their money back...then once the game is out and 'old news' then they are more open to releasing code into the open-source field again.
Open source is slowly creeping into the industry, more from the toolset and libraries side of things, slowly sneaking in from the sidelines. Recent games like chrome used open-source physics engines (ODE), Id releases their old tech as open-source, but this doesn't really count because no one has ever used a gpl'd license and actually released a product with it afterwards...see my above comment about the gpl regarding that...
i personally feel that it's only a matter of time. we were at E3 last year and had really good responses from everyone we spoke with and have been making some great inroads with universities and other schools looking to work game developing into their courseware.
so, yes there ARE projects out there that are 'self-starting' and have been around for several years...it's just a matter of time until the rest of the industry notices and starts paying attention.
1. they laugh at you 2. they ignore you 3. they fight you 4. you win.
so far we're on step 2 - we've been laughed at, we are currently being ignored, next phase is the most interesting, when the 'old-school' mindset tries to drag it's heels avoiding the inevitable.
haven't you seen ocean's 11? they seem to fail to mention the fact that all of those computers wouldn't have come back up after getting hit with an EMP pulse like the one in the movie...
if they seriously hit the city with a massive EMP burst it would have been downtime for alot longer than a few seconds...
microsoft's release schedules have gotten more and more confusing with each patch/update/upgrade (which are all now the same thing apparently)...
it's hilarious - microsoft has been claiming for the past few years that they aren't going to try and step on all of their 'microsoft partners' that use windows media...but then they do this.
what is musicmatch, walmart and the other who-knows how many other online stores supposed to do when the music that they sell is the same as microsofts' format, only ms can obviously undercut them...
this won't hurt apple or the ipod at all, people that buy those wouldn't buy an MS-branded product at all.
MS is never going to exist in the same sentence as 'cool'
sure the screens look good but they don't tell you that they are running at 3 fps because the engine doesn't run on anything close to consumer-level hardware...
what's the point of giving these glowing reviews to an engine that isn't going to be released until 2006 (by their estimate)...
spend some time reviewing the existing tools for machinima developers that are available.
http://www.realityfactory.ca provides a complete machinima game engine under an MIT license, complete source code, scripting language, cinematic camera system, not to mention the interactive possibilities...
of course i'm biased (i'm the project lead), but these articles do nothing to help the machinima community, which is almost exclusively indie (no budget) and needs tools that are affordable and commercial quality...
no kidding...for a company that has spent upwards of $50 million dollars on this game, it's a 'bet the company' deal, and gabe continues to have incident after incident like this.
the guy's a hazard with a computer...does becoming CEO of a company just make people technically incompetent? so wierd. he might be a brilliant game designer or project manager or whatever, but these kinds of things are just inexcusable...
if it was a lower-down on the totem pole, how long would they have kept their job?
i agree, they may have spent years polishing the graphics of the game, but they have done absolutely nothing to improve or make the game more appealing to people that are looking for more than just another fps game...
luckily the singleplayer game looks like it's added alot more in the way of teammates and other scripted events that make the game seem much more in-depth than ever before...
the original halo2 video that was released both looked infinitely better but actually looked fun compared to the same old fps gameplay types (ctf, dm)...
so they've removed one of the flags in this gameplay type (half-ass objective game), it still isn't enough for me...
they've basically spent years making the same game as they had before and has been done hundreds (thousands) of times before...it just doesn't cut it anymore...
this is why i've been addicted to bf:vietnam since it came out, not only does it have the hectic gameplay, but the environments and vehicles add so much to the game...
i spend hours just flying the choppers, who cares about killing, i can go play any game and do the endless run/shoot/kill/die cycle, but the addition of the flying vehicles in bf:vietnam add so much that it's hard to argue...
sure it's basically an advanced mod for bf:1942, but even bf:1942 was unique enough in the gameplay department, hence why it was so popular...
unfortunately bf:vietnam suffers because dice simply doesn't know how to make software - broken ping sorter when the game shipped (inexcusable), the fact that exiting from a multiplayer game to go back to the menu (which should be INSTANTANEOUS in any game) can take upwards of 5+ MINUTES to do....
there's no excuse, just poorly written software...
not to mention that the whole 'guys in armour suits fighting aliens' theme is so lame and overdone that i can't believe people even care about playing them...
there are 2 themes in game today:
1) aliens fighting army guys in battle armour, and 2) army guys...
nothing else gets any kind of good press or sales...it's very sad.
and then gamers wonder why all companies like EA will greenlight are projects that fit into one of these 2 categories (aside from their brutal sports games and their yearly churn and 'more of the same')...
the game industry needs to start from scratch for ideas, they've run out...
luckily we have fable and jade empire to look forward to...but they are both xbox-only, which is the #2 problem that the game industry has...this current obsession with getting 'exclusive' games to one platform - particularly a console platform that has the least market share of any platform...
you can't tell me that these developers (anyone that does xbox only titles) are developing for that platform because it's the 'best platform'...it's MS blatantly bribing developers to create games for their platform, and developers caving in to the almighty dollar...
valve had a 50/50 deal with sierra for distribution of half-life 1, and while i'm sure that they have come up with some kind of deal about what expenses are deducted from the gross before this split, i highly doubt that valve is going to offer the game for any cheaper than the game is in stores.
couple of reasons for this:
1) sierra probably forced them to keep the price similar enough so that it's worthwhile for them to sell the game at retail.
2) half-life1 continues to sell for near-full price (30+$ here in canada) almost 6 years after it was released. i don't consider bundling 2 mods that valve didn't have to pay for development (and that can be downloaded for free) exactly worthwhile of a full-priced game...
whether gamers fall for it (ie buy the game online for the same price as retail) remains to be seen.
i personally think this is the stupidest thing that valve could ever do - how long will it be before their 'encryption' is hacked and hl2 becomes a pirate version (potentially) long before retail.
as well, why the HELL would anyone download a game that they can't play? steam is brutal in it's management of system resources and bandwidth as it is, let alone having it download endless games that you can't play...
yeah the c64 was great, programming every single note's adsr (attack, delay, sustain and release) manually...i don't know how much of my childhood was lost manually sequencing star wars for the game i was making...the whole main theme...ugh...
but was great, it could do things that pc's could only dream of at the time.
exactly. the sheer amount of effort that goes into mods just boggles my mind - these wanna-be developers spend years of their lives trying to make a game, and in the end, only end up making something that they can't sell, can't publish, can't make money on - the big 'reward' for being a mod author seems to be that you might get hired as an employee at one of these companies...
i teach at a school that used to exclusively teach unreal modding as a substitute for learning game design...i'm slowly trying to introduce other engines into the mix - and the school is slowly waking up to the fact that having students spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition so they might make a few thousand in a mod-contest is NOT the way to go...
why not check out one of the many engines that will actually allow the students to publish their games afterwards? at least then they might get something out of their 20-grand-a-year tuition that most of these schools charge...
Slashdot Mirror
no it wasn't, it was created by radical entertainment here in vancouver.
i'm sure that the licensee had input into the game's development, but creative freedom had to come in somewhere...even though it is a rip off of another game...so much so they got sued...
http://www.openvideotoaster.org/
go grab open video toaster and be done with it
http://www.openvideotoaster.org/
video toaster is open source and has been for a while - heck it even has a note on the site that they got 'slashdotted' some time ago as well.
2 extra harddrives that you apparently have to switch between by pressing a button? how is this useful in any way for what is supposedly a 'server' modification for the xbox? last time i checked my servers are all far away at a coloc, not much chance that the techs down there will go running to press 'the button' because i forgot to mount the right harddrive... doesn't sound useful at all.
the question is when this kind of behavior (patenting blatantly obvious works) becomes criminal - otherwise microsoft will continue to apply (and likely receive) these idiotic patents.
just like acacia's 'web streaming' patent that applies to any file downloaded off the internet.
give me freakin break.
no kidding.
perhaps they could reduce the tuition so that instead of only the rich spoiled brats that NEED ipods or other crap toys might be able to attend the schools.
i've heard that harvard is upwards of $50,000 a year now, i'm sure these other schools are the same.
how much of that student's tuition goes to crap like ipods and 'napster'?
just bs. 'higher education' indeed.
sure, but like any programming task - isn't what the code looks like, it's whether it 'works' or not.
;}
The simple fact that these guys have gotten it working (as well as they have) when the Rockstar team of 50+ people couldnt' do the same says quite a bit about the indie/hobbyist mindset.
we may not be able to out-develop the big game companies, but we can definitely out-invent them
no multiplayer support - i recall the rockstar developers specifically saying that they could not get it working from a technical perspective...
;}
interesting that these guys HAVE been (apparently) able to...very cool.
multiplayer gta is just about the coolest idea ever...who needs mmo's when you can just cruise in your own custom vice city
microsoft just doesn't get it
they will never be used in the same sentence as the word 'cool'
microsoft != cool
no matter how much bs they smear onto the box. consumers are smarter than MS gives them credit for - and we don't want the bs drm and will not support products that force us to submit to such privacy/copyright infringing (infringes fair use, etc) software like WiMP 10 and their idiotic media center PC's.
how many people will willingly submit to a lobotomy? sure some might if you offer them candy, but in the end it's still a lobotomy.
microsoft does not offer more 'choices', every ms product that claims they offer more choice, they really mean that ms offers more compatibility with OTHER MS PRODUCTS, which absolutely does not count in the real world.
forgot to mention:
- MIT license
- printed manuals (for those that like them)
- CD distributions, commercial support
- has been featured in 5 or 6 different 'make games' books published by different companies, including Clayton Crooks most recent 'awesome game creation no programming required', which has 3 chapters covering RF.
features in the wings:
- realtime physics system (integrated, just not exposed to the non-programmer/designer types)
- enhanced terrain system (again the code is in the engine, it's just not exposed to the designers as much as it could/should be).
- more advanced shader support, support for the newer shader models etc...
so don't tell me the tools don't exist because it's a flat-out lie.
it's in my forum sig
http://www.realityfactory.ca
we might not be doom3 or farcry quite yet, but those kinds of engines are only required for a very limited set of games that also require massive investments in art resources (ie fps type games).
features include:
- normal mapping, compressed textures, fullscreen anti-aliasing, etc
- bumpmapping (embm)
- other 'shader effects'
- configurable weapons systems, hud systems, conversation & message systems
- interactive, dynamic scripted camera systems
- scripting language with over 600 scripting commands exposing the engine internals to the designer
- art pipeline tools VERY similar to quake3/half-life2/doom3 - you can use quark/worldcraft/etc for your editing/texturing
like i said,the tools are out there, the community acknowledgement and support might not be.
our engine was developed by about 3-4 programmers over a period of several years.
if we had serious (ie commercial) developers contributing even 1/10th of their time to providing enhancements or improvements to the engine, this would progress even further.
the engine is being taught at several colleges as part of their game design courses (including several taught by myself) and more than a few universities are looking at the engine for their own game design coursese.
the options are out there, if you choose to look.
doh, bad memory...invalid page fault...
even so, my point is still valid, was valve derided for using an even OLDER engine than the (at the time) current wave of tech (ie quake 2)...
this is exactly what we have been noticing as of late.
the sheer amount of art resources required simply means that you MUST have some kind of funding or resources available to get a commercial-quality game title completed.
what the game industry is completely ignoring is that they could 'jump start' that process by a period of several years by using existing technology as a starting point.
this is the exact reason that companies like ibm, novell and the film industry have begun major initiatives towards developing open-source as the foundation of their businesses.
they are in the business of selling consumer products (ibm->hardware, movie industry-> films), not develop software, exactly the same as the game industry.
the only companies that benefit from the current 'license the big commercial engine for EVERY RELEASE WE EVER MAKE' trend are the big engine companies -> ie epic, unreal, criterion (now ea)
the rest of the industry has to play the never-ending game of catch up, just to get into the ball game...
what if the smaller developers banded together to create the tools - the game engine is the commodity, it shouldn't be the 'make or break' the company decision like it is currently.
>>Yes, you could save $250,000 if you are reusing
>>existing tech, but if you are going to be the
>>one to push the envelope, instead of rehash
>>existing things, you are going to lose money to
>>people not licensing things from you.
did the game industry bash valve for 'rehashing existing things' with their quake2 modded engine?
does every single unreal engine developer get blasted for 'rehashing' unreal? (they should perhaps but that's another discussion)
this is a stupid argument. every game ever made is 'rehashing' concepts previously created in other games. if you are creating the entire game content for your game (art assets, animations, bitmaps, etc), then how is it rehashing?
if the INDUSTRY as a whole can spend 6 months enhancing the engine for your game's specific requirements, AND these changes benefit the entire industry, then PERHAPS the game industry as a whole can actually make progress, instead of simply rehashing the same concepts...
considering that it takes a serious AAA developer 12-18 months (using an existing engine) to get a game to release stage (and this is optimistic), why would they NOT want to know that when they get to the point of starting a new project that not only are all of their updates and enhancements now available, but there will likely be a large number of OTHER improvements and enhancements that the rest of the industry has contributed as well...
as well, how does open source prevent you from licensing your custom version of the engine? the entire 'linux industry' is built on this exact concept.
a second point is - if you are a small indie developer that is 'betting the company' on your next game, you have 2 options currently:
- completely reinvent the wheel, which will likely take a period of 2 years or longer and millions of dollars
OR
- license your engine from one of a few big middleware companies, costing hundreds of thousands of dollars PER title.
hence why EA just bought criterion. they spend millions a year licensing renderware over and over for every single title (well not every title in EA's case, but for most developers it is), at some point there is no point licensing, might as well just buy the company.
enter open-source into the mix.
instead of having to desperately fight and scramble over the little bit of IP and the brutally short period in which said IP is valuable...which for the game industry tends to be a period of about 3 months, if you are lucky.
then there is the fact that the oh so valuable IP in games, over which such idiocy as the half-life2/doom leak caused such huge uproars...if these developers were using open-source engines, this would have never been an issue.
the art content (ie the 'brand') becomes the value, NOT the commodity (the game engine).
it's only a matter of time before the rest of the industry realizes what the big IT and film companies already have - open source just works.
open-source is completely viable for the game industry - in fact if the industry is to survive in the future beyond one or two massive 'mega-publishers' (like EA owning criterion & renderware etc), the rest of the industry is going to HAVE to shift to open-source to defend themselves against these massive companies.
much like how linux gained it's foot hold in the webserver & OS market. the game industry is just a bit further behind the curve.
how much longer will 'indies' (ie small non-publisher-affiliated dev houses like id) be able to compete against the mega dev studios like rockstar or EA? it's coming to the point where the return on investment is becoming too high, most companies simply can't even enter the market because of the cost of entry.
if you can suddenly shave off $250,000 + off of your startup costs (by using an open-source engine as opposed to licensing the tech), or more (as opposed to developing the tech from the ground up, which could cost millions), why wouldn't developers want to go the open-source route?
the main issue at this point is publisher resistance. publishers are the 'old school' business-mindset like the RIAA and the MPAA - they refuse to acknowledge that open-source exists and that it might be useful to their businesses.
in the game industry, it's all about the IP - if you own the IP then you can make money, whereas publishers look at open-source and are just scared away because of the simple words 'open source'. it implies to them that they don't control things...
It all comes down to the licenses and misconceptions about the requirements of those licenses.
GPL is the death of any game-related project for example. It is the kiss of death to a game library or toolset.
publishers have to know that they can close the source of the product, even for a short period around the release date (that crucial 3-5 months after release) so that they can make their money back...then once the game is out and 'old news' then they are more open to releasing code into the open-source field again.
Open source is slowly creeping into the industry, more from the toolset and libraries side of things, slowly sneaking in from the sidelines. Recent games like chrome used open-source physics engines (ODE), Id releases their old tech as open-source, but this doesn't really count because no one has ever used a gpl'd license and actually released a product with it afterwards...see my above comment about the gpl regarding that...
i personally feel that it's only a matter of time. we were at E3 last year and had really good responses from everyone we spoke with and have been making some great inroads with universities and other schools looking to work game developing into their courseware.
so, yes there ARE projects out there that are 'self-starting' and have been around for several years...it's just a matter of time until the rest of the industry notices and starts paying attention.
1. they laugh at you
2. they ignore you
3. they fight you
4. you win.
so far we're on step 2 - we've been laughed at, we are currently being ignored, next phase is the most interesting, when the 'old-school' mindset tries to drag it's heels avoiding the inevitable.
haven't you seen ocean's 11? they seem to fail to mention the fact that all of those computers wouldn't have come back up after getting hit with an EMP pulse like the one in the movie...
if they seriously hit the city with a massive EMP burst it would have been downtime for alot longer than a few seconds...
microsoft's release schedules have gotten more and more confusing with each patch/update/upgrade (which are all now the same thing apparently)...
it's hilarious - microsoft has been claiming for the past few years that they aren't going to try and step on all of their 'microsoft partners' that use windows media...but then they do this.
what is musicmatch, walmart and the other who-knows how many other online stores supposed to do when the music that they sell is the same as microsofts' format, only ms can obviously undercut them...
this won't hurt apple or the ipod at all, people that buy those wouldn't buy an MS-branded product at all.
MS is never going to exist in the same sentence as 'cool'
exactly, looks great without anything plugged into it, what about when you have 10 cords hangin out the back dragging it down...
but it sure does look purdy
except our 'product' is open-source and binaries are also available for free.
spreading the word about open-source projects is one of the goals of slashdot i would hope...
sure the screens look good but they don't tell you that they are running at 3 fps because the engine doesn't run on anything close to consumer-level hardware...
what's the point of giving these glowing reviews to an engine that isn't going to be released until 2006 (by their estimate)...
spend some time reviewing the existing tools for machinima developers that are available.
http://www.realityfactory.ca provides a complete machinima game engine under an MIT license, complete source code, scripting language, cinematic camera system, not to mention the interactive possibilities...
of course i'm biased (i'm the project lead), but these articles do nothing to help the machinima community, which is almost exclusively indie (no budget) and needs tools that are affordable and commercial quality...
no kidding...for a company that has spent upwards of $50 million dollars on this game, it's a 'bet the company' deal, and gabe continues to have incident after incident like this.
the guy's a hazard with a computer...does becoming CEO of a company just make people technically incompetent? so wierd. he might be a brilliant game designer or project manager or whatever, but these kinds of things are just inexcusable...
if it was a lower-down on the totem pole, how long would they have kept their job?
i agree, they may have spent years polishing the graphics of the game, but they have done absolutely nothing to improve or make the game more appealing to people that are looking for more than just another fps game...
luckily the singleplayer game looks like it's added alot more in the way of teammates and other scripted events that make the game seem much more in-depth than ever before...
the original halo2 video that was released both looked infinitely better but actually looked fun compared to the same old fps gameplay types (ctf, dm)...
so they've removed one of the flags in this gameplay type (half-ass objective game), it still isn't enough for me...
they've basically spent years making the same game as they had before and has been done hundreds (thousands) of times before...it just doesn't cut it anymore...
this is why i've been addicted to bf:vietnam since it came out, not only does it have the hectic gameplay, but the environments and vehicles add so much to the game...
i spend hours just flying the choppers, who cares about killing, i can go play any game and do the endless run/shoot/kill/die cycle, but the addition of the flying vehicles in bf:vietnam add so much that it's hard to argue...
sure it's basically an advanced mod for bf:1942, but even bf:1942 was unique enough in the gameplay department, hence why it was so popular...
unfortunately bf:vietnam suffers because dice simply doesn't know how to make software - broken ping sorter when the game shipped (inexcusable), the fact that exiting from a multiplayer game to go back to the menu (which should be INSTANTANEOUS in any game) can take upwards of 5+ MINUTES to do....
there's no excuse, just poorly written software...
not to mention that the whole 'guys in armour suits fighting aliens' theme is so lame and overdone that i can't believe people even care about playing them...
there are 2 themes in game today:
1) aliens fighting army guys in battle armour, and
2) army guys...
nothing else gets any kind of good press or sales...it's very sad.
and then gamers wonder why all companies like EA will greenlight are projects that fit into one of these 2 categories (aside from their brutal sports games and their yearly churn and 'more of the same')...
the game industry needs to start from scratch for ideas, they've run out...
luckily we have fable and jade empire to look forward to...but they are both xbox-only, which is the #2 problem that the game industry has...this current obsession with getting 'exclusive' games to one platform - particularly a console platform that has the least market share of any platform...
you can't tell me that these developers (anyone that does xbox only titles) are developing for that platform because it's the 'best platform'...it's MS blatantly bribing developers to create games for their platform, and developers caving in to the almighty dollar...
valve had a 50/50 deal with sierra for distribution of half-life 1, and while i'm sure that they have come up with some kind of deal about what expenses are deducted from the gross before this split, i highly doubt that valve is going to offer the game for any cheaper than the game is in stores.
couple of reasons for this:
1) sierra probably forced them to keep the price similar enough so that it's worthwhile for them to sell the game at retail.
2) half-life1 continues to sell for near-full price (30+$ here in canada) almost 6 years after it was released. i don't consider bundling 2 mods that valve didn't have to pay for development (and that can be downloaded for free) exactly worthwhile of a full-priced game...
whether gamers fall for it (ie buy the game online for the same price as retail) remains to be seen.
i personally think this is the stupidest thing that valve could ever do - how long will it be before their 'encryption' is hacked and hl2 becomes a pirate version (potentially) long before retail.
as well, why the HELL would anyone download a game that they can't play? steam is brutal in it's management of system resources and bandwidth as it is, let alone having it download endless games that you can't play...
yeah the c64 was great, programming every single note's adsr (attack, delay, sustain and release) manually...i don't know how much of my childhood was lost manually sequencing star wars for the game i was making...the whole main theme...ugh...
but was great, it could do things that pc's could only dream of at the time.
damn i'm old...
exactly. the sheer amount of effort that goes into mods just boggles my mind - these wanna-be developers spend years of their lives trying to make a game, and in the end, only end up making something that they can't sell, can't publish, can't make money on - the big 'reward' for being a mod author seems to be that you might get hired as an employee at one of these companies...
;}
i teach at a school that used to exclusively teach unreal modding as a substitute for learning game design...i'm slowly trying to introduce other engines into the mix - and the school is slowly waking up to the fact that having students spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in tuition so they might make a few thousand in a mod-contest is NOT the way to go...
why not check out one of the many engines that will actually allow the students to publish their games afterwards? at least then they might get something out of their 20-grand-a-year tuition that most of these schools charge...
anyways, [/end rant]
another big company (that i'm aware of) is squirrel systems, all of their stuff runs off windows NT (ugh)...