I think you're missing the point of these awards. Everything is subjective. Just because you found the writing in HL2 to be lacking, doesn't mean everyone felt the same. Besides, writing is more than just dialogue. It's how you choose to expose the plot and how immersed the player feels. Personally, I think HL2 totally deserved this award. Like a really good suspense novel, I was so engrossed in the plot that I couldn't put it down. It expanded on, and deepened the plot of the original game, but left us hanging and wanting more at the end.
And as for visuals, keep in mind the award is for "visual arts," not "most eye-poppingly realistic graphics." MMO graphics are almost always a balancing act between making them look good and making them perform well on a wide range of machine specs. Blizzard went in a completely different direction from most games. Instead of striving for realism, they made everything cartoonish and exaggerated. Despite the low-poly models, the visuals have a great deal of life and charm. The fact that they were able to make it look good and still perform well when there are large numbers of players on screen is both an artistic and technological achievement.
Again, it's all just subjective, but I think all of the awards given were well deserved, if not necessarily what I would have chosen.
That's standard everywhere in the tech industry...
If you think your situation is "standard" and you are happy with it, you have a great deal to learn about a healthy employer/employee relationship. It is attitudes like yours that allow such treatment to continue.
Overtime happens, yes. But I've been working in the software (not games) development industry for about 7 years now, and I've only had one employer that asked me to work unreasonable amounts of overtime. I define "unreasonable" as regularly having to stay more than an hour late, and working weekends for more than 2 weeks in a row. Turnover was high, and I made it clear to my supervisor that if things didn't change I would be the next to go. They were having trouble finding people to fill open positions, and quickly stopped asking us to come in on weekends because they couldn't afford to lose more of us. I still left the job a couple months later, but mostly because I got a much better offer.
I have a Win2K machine that my wife uses for web surfing, document editing, etc. I also run Apache on it to host my personal web site. The machine has been running 24/7 for several months. The last reboot was due to a power failure. My XP box gets rebooted more frequently, but that's mostly because of hardware upgrades, or the odd crash when I'm playing a game. Otherwise, it is normally running 24/7, usually for several weeks at a time.
Well, for instance, I got one of the cheapest phones Verizon offers. It handles midi format, but in order to connect it to a computer to download tones, I'd have to pay $50 for an adapter. My only other option is to pay a small fee to use the GetItNow functionality to download straight to my phone via Verizon's network.
Before I bought a custom ring-tone, I would hear the same default tones all the time when someone else's phone was ringing, and kept thinking it was mine.
How is this different, than say, preventing children from seeing a rated R movie without their parent?
It's different because there's no law that says a child can't go to a rated R movie. The theater owners make such decisions themselves, without having to be told by the government how to run their business. There is no proof that selling violent games to minors is harmful, and making it illegal is an over-reaction. It would be more helpful to work with retailers to educate parents about the rating system.
Oh, in addition, I don't see the point of a law suit. You can't claim you've suffered any great damage from the incident, and the costs would be much higher than just going out and buying a new copy of the game.
Interesting... you are correct that transfer of an authentication key is not expressly prohibited anywhere in the EULA or terms of use. Of course, it is not expressly allowed, either. In fact, searching the WoW support site, I find no mention anywhere of their position on transfer of ownership, except that they say you cannot sell an account to someone else. As you've pointed out, you only want to create a new account. I think the problem is that they don't explicitly point out anywhere that once an authentication key has been used to create an account, it is permanently associated with that account. Accounts are not deleted when a person cancels their subscription, at least not for a fairly long period of time. This way, if a person wants to come back later and play again, they can keep their characters. I suspect that whoever you bought the game from will need to go through some special process to get their account permanently deleted before you can create a new one with the auth key.
Latency is not a huge issue for VoIP. It will only cause a noticeable delay between when you speak and the person on the other end of the line hears you. The thing you have to watch for is packet loss. VoIP typically travels over UDP, which means there is no guarantee of packet delivery, so anything over about 5% packet loss can have a significant impact on audio quality.
Because they didn't originally plan to port it to other operating systems, and because DirectX is more than just graphics handling. It also handles sound, controllers, and networking, and wraps the whole thing up in a single, unified API. There are similar APIs that are cross-platform, but they are less mature and less stable.
Gentlemen, this game is mind-numbingly straightforward to code. We're talking IJKL controls moving sprites around the screen. Throw out the 20 year old code.
I don't think they're talking about bit blitting and sprite handling, here. The game is being re-worked to render in DirectX. That leaves core game logic, which is probably copyrighted. Since they're doing all this with the cooperation of the game's original developer, I imagine they'd like to stay on his good side.
I don't think it tops the list, but it certainly had some creative elements that made for a very fun game. Not least of which is the fact that they didn't just toss in a physics engine and say, "Look, you can knock over the barrels, wheeeeeeeee!" They actually worked to make the physics simulation an integral part of the gameplay by including many puzzles that utilized it as part of the solution.
The required hit rate was 5 out of 7 because she was told ahead of time what to look for. She just had to match each problem with the proper patient. If the claims about her powers are true (that she can see things at a cellular level, and her diagnosis accuracy is 100%), then she should have had no problem with this.
But, instead, she mis-diagnosed some of the more obvious problems, including the patient who had a missing section of skull covered by a metal plate. The fact that she got 4 out of 7 right can be laid down to luck and a little knowledge of medicine. The fact that she actually broke several of the agreed-upon rules during the study (talking to her teenage friend and an unknown person on the other end of a cell phone) doesn't help her case any.
Please read the entire post before responding with glib remarks.
Admittedly, I did leave out some details in the name of brevity. To clarify: The hardware I purchased and had problems with included the wireless network card, which I originally thought there were Linux drivers for. It turned out that I had purchased a newer hardware revision which uses a different chipset. There is very little information concerning the new revision available on any of the pertinent web-sites at this time.
And as I said, I checked to make sure ALSA supported USB audio devices before I purchased one. The fact that it doesn't support 5.1 surround through those devices was buried in a single post in an obscure mailing list archive, and is nowhere to be found in the documentation.
As far as SATA drivers, I found no information about them on the Slackware site, and you're right, that should have been a warning sign in and of itself. In my defense, however, Windows XP detected and installed on the drive without needing any special drivers.
My point in the original post is that it isn't reasonable to expect every user to spend hours and hours researching before they purchase hardware, to make sure everything is going to be well-supported. Such an expectation is exactly the sort of thing that drives users away. The distro I used is inconsiquential. In my many hours of searching for solutions to my problems, I found plenty of posts from users having similar issues with the same and other hardware on other distributions. If I came here saying I'd tried FC3 or Debian, I'm sure someone would post saying I should have tried Gentoo. The simple truth is that if you expect more people to use Linux, there has to be good support for the hardware those people want to use.
Let me tell you a story about why I'll never be a dedicated Linux user. I've been wanting to get into the world of digital video recording for some time now, but I am put off by the idea of paying a monthly fee for a service like Tivo. Instead, I decided to look at my options in the do-it-yourself field. A friend at work is a major Linux advocate, and urged me to give MythTV a try. I figured I'd give it a shot. I'm an intelligent person, and I use Linux and BSD fairly regularly for various functions at work. It couldn't be that hard, right? So I ordered a bunch of hardware to build the box, and burned myself some ISOs of Slackware 10.0, then got down to business. Here's a rough timeline of how things progressed:
Day 1: Couldn't partition my hard drive because the Slackware installation disk doesn't have drivers for SATA disk controllers. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for work-arounds.
Day 2: Located a message board where someone had posted a custom ISO image of Slackware disk 1 with a SATA-enabled kernel. Was able to partition my hard drive and get setup running, but when it came time to pick a kernel to install, it refused to let me insert disk 1 to grab the SATA kernel. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for work-arounds.
Day 3: Finally figured out that I could put the setup process in the background, unmount the CD, eject and re-insert disk 1, then bring setup back to the foreground. Completed setup and got X running. Copied over source for 2.6.10 kernel, which I had burned to a CD. Started doing configuration, and realized there were no Linux drivers available for my wireless network card. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for solutions.
Day 4: Discovered ndiswrapper, a module that allows you to use standard Windows drivers for wireless NICs under Linux. Downloaded and built it with no problems. Tried to load my NIC drivers, and the entire OS immediately locked up. Rebooted and tried a couple more times with the same results. Spent the next 2 days searching the web for solutions.
Day 6: Finally found a single post from someone who had the same hardware revision of the same card, who had been able to get it working using the 2.6.9 kernel. Burned the source to CD and installed it on Linux box, configured, compiled, rebooted, built ndiswrapper and it worked! Unfortunately, I couldn't get an address from DHCP server. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for solutions.
Day 7: Took a day off.
Day 8: Found out that I was using the wrong command to query DHCP (I was foolishly running dhcclient instead of dhcpcd, it's so obvious!), so now DHCP works and I can connect to the net without having to assign a static IP address. I spent the next couple days configuring the video drivers, audio drivers, and getting all the modules to configure correctly at boot-up.
Day 10: Started working on getting the video-capture card drivers working. Ran into a myriad of build errors right off the bat. Did some research and learned I needed to compile some extra features into the kernel before the drivers will build. So I reconfigure, build, install, reboot... and the kernel won't load. Decide to call it a day and have a few stiff drinks before I am tempted to toss the computer out the window.
Day 11: Okay, turned out it wasn't anything tragic, I booted to an older kernel, rebuilt the new kernel, and everything worked fine. But the capture card drivers still wouldn't build. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for solutions.
Day 12: Finally realized that all info I've found about using this particular capture card refers to the fact that the user was using a 2.4 kernel instead of 2.6. So I download the kernel source, configure, build, install, reboot... and now I can build and install the capture card drivers. Unfortunately, there are no drivers available in the kernel source for my motherboard sound chipset. But I figure I can address that problem later. I do a bunch of configuring, ho
He doesn't really mention what he's basing his comparison on. But since it's supposed to be from a developer's point of view, he may have tinkered with the Source SDK and gone over some documentation, without having actually played HL2.
My question exactly. Obviously, the article is meant as a blow at Windows for being virus prolific, but doesn't it also point out the degree to which WINE fails to comply with Windows standards?
I constantly see and hear this attitude from die-hard Linux users that Windows is so virus-ridden that you can't connect it to the internet without contracting 50 bajillion viruses in a matter of seconds. I've never experienced this. Granted, my home network sits behind a NAT router, but I've been running a Win2000 Pro box for over 3 years now, with no protection beyond the NAT and regular Windows updates. It has never once contracted a virus of any kind (and yes, I do occasionally scan it with an up-to-date virus scanner to confirm this). Now spyware is another story altogether, but Spybot keeps that pretty much at bay.
WTF? You see people being set on fire . How on earth can you argue that it doesn't graphically depict adult situations?
I believe the parent was referring to graphic nudity and depictions of sexual acts which are the only things that will earn a game an AO (Adults Only) rating. Generally, you won't find AO games in a game store. Which goes back to an earlier comment about how nudity and sex are somehow considered less morally acceptable than extreme violence here in the US.
In a certain "R" rated movie about a young man who goes with a rock band on the road and writes an article about them, nobody is killed, maimed, shot, tortured and no mass murder last I checked. The worse that happens is that the plane almost crashes. Yet it's rated "R" because there was a nip slip from Kate Hudson.
Well, Almost Famous also had a lot of heavy drug and alcohol use, so that may not be the best counter-example. A better choice might be "Amelie," a delightful French romantic comedy that was given an R rating in the US market solely for "sexual content." Whatever that means.
I don't really think of John Romero as a burn out. He's not a has-been so much as a never-was. He was in the right place at the right time to take some of the credit for Doom. How much was actually deserved is open to interpretation. The fact that he has not been contributed anything worthwhile to the gaming community since he left id speaks volumes about his level of creativity.
Then you have folks like Peter Molyneax (also mentioned in the article). He has some really great game designs under his belt. But the last 8 years or so have been filled with one disappointment after another. Honestly, Pete, if you'd just keep your big trap shut until you have a working demo, you could save yourself a lot of heartache.
Then there are the Sid Meyers of game design, who, while they haven't shown a lot of innovation lately, certainly know how to please the masses by re-working their tried and true formulas into fresh masterpieces. Half Life 2 and the new Pirates were both very derivative of their predecessors, but both added enough fresh gameplay and new features to make me fall in love all over again.
Actually, I'm pretty sure there's code out there for a WoW server emulator. I'm pretty sure it doesn't contain all the content of the official servers (databases for things like items, monsters, NPCs, etc), but it's a start.
Frankly, though, one of the main reasons for playing a massive multiplayer game is the "massive" part. Large numbers of people to interact/compete/cooperate with in a single virtual world. Little Johnny running a server from his home computer doesn't have the bandwidth or processing power to handle more than, say, a few dozen users at once. Anyone who did have the equipment and bandwidth for a significantly sized server, would find out just how expensive running an MMO can be, and why they charge people to play them.
I just have to wonder why they don't release the game, and only allow new character creations to be done on a lower population server.
Because, while this is an excellent solution for the company running the MMO, it is a horrible solution for people actually playing it. If, like me, you are part of a large gaming organization that participates together in several online games, you want to be able to play with your friends on the same server. If WoW instituted a system like FFXI did, where you get automatically assigend to a server, my guild would not be playing, and Blizzard would be short about 600 active subscribers. Well, that may be a bit of a stretch. Some of us would undoubtedly play anyway, but the vast majority would not, because for us, half the game is working together with our guild towards common goals.
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Uh, Eve was launched in early 2003. I think that's what makes it inelligible for a 2004 award.
And as for visuals, keep in mind the award is for "visual arts," not "most eye-poppingly realistic graphics." MMO graphics are almost always a balancing act between making them look good and making them perform well on a wide range of machine specs. Blizzard went in a completely different direction from most games. Instead of striving for realism, they made everything cartoonish and exaggerated. Despite the low-poly models, the visuals have a great deal of life and charm. The fact that they were able to make it look good and still perform well when there are large numbers of players on screen is both an artistic and technological achievement.
Again, it's all just subjective, but I think all of the awards given were well deserved, if not necessarily what I would have chosen.
If you think your situation is "standard" and you are happy with it, you have a great deal to learn about a healthy employer/employee relationship. It is attitudes like yours that allow such treatment to continue.
Overtime happens, yes. But I've been working in the software (not games) development industry for about 7 years now, and I've only had one employer that asked me to work unreasonable amounts of overtime. I define "unreasonable" as regularly having to stay more than an hour late, and working weekends for more than 2 weeks in a row. Turnover was high, and I made it clear to my supervisor that if things didn't change I would be the next to go. They were having trouble finding people to fill open positions, and quickly stopped asking us to come in on weekends because they couldn't afford to lose more of us. I still left the job a couple months later, but mostly because I got a much better offer.
I have a Win2K machine that my wife uses for web surfing, document editing, etc. I also run Apache on it to host my personal web site. The machine has been running 24/7 for several months. The last reboot was due to a power failure. My XP box gets rebooted more frequently, but that's mostly because of hardware upgrades, or the odd crash when I'm playing a game. Otherwise, it is normally running 24/7, usually for several weeks at a time.
Before I bought a custom ring-tone, I would hear the same default tones all the time when someone else's phone was ringing, and kept thinking it was mine.
I just finished reading that book. Good stuff.
It's different because there's no law that says a child can't go to a rated R movie. The theater owners make such decisions themselves, without having to be told by the government how to run their business. There is no proof that selling violent games to minors is harmful, and making it illegal is an over-reaction. It would be more helpful to work with retailers to educate parents about the rating system.
Oh, in addition, I don't see the point of a law suit. You can't claim you've suffered any great damage from the incident, and the costs would be much higher than just going out and buying a new copy of the game.
Interesting... you are correct that transfer of an authentication key is not expressly prohibited anywhere in the EULA or terms of use. Of course, it is not expressly allowed, either. In fact, searching the WoW support site, I find no mention anywhere of their position on transfer of ownership, except that they say you cannot sell an account to someone else. As you've pointed out, you only want to create a new account. I think the problem is that they don't explicitly point out anywhere that once an authentication key has been used to create an account, it is permanently associated with that account. Accounts are not deleted when a person cancels their subscription, at least not for a fairly long period of time. This way, if a person wants to come back later and play again, they can keep their characters. I suspect that whoever you bought the game from will need to go through some special process to get their account permanently deleted before you can create a new one with the auth key.
Latency is not a huge issue for VoIP. It will only cause a noticeable delay between when you speak and the person on the other end of the line hears you. The thing you have to watch for is packet loss. VoIP typically travels over UDP, which means there is no guarantee of packet delivery, so anything over about 5% packet loss can have a significant impact on audio quality.
Because they didn't originally plan to port it to other operating systems, and because DirectX is more than just graphics handling. It also handles sound, controllers, and networking, and wraps the whole thing up in a single, unified API. There are similar APIs that are cross-platform, but they are less mature and less stable.
I don't think they're talking about bit blitting and sprite handling, here. The game is being re-worked to render in DirectX. That leaves core game logic, which is probably copyrighted. Since they're doing all this with the cooperation of the game's original developer, I imagine they'd like to stay on his good side.
I don't think it tops the list, but it certainly had some creative elements that made for a very fun game. Not least of which is the fact that they didn't just toss in a physics engine and say, "Look, you can knock over the barrels, wheeeeeeeee!" They actually worked to make the physics simulation an integral part of the gameplay by including many puzzles that utilized it as part of the solution.
But, instead, she mis-diagnosed some of the more obvious problems, including the patient who had a missing section of skull covered by a metal plate. The fact that she got 4 out of 7 right can be laid down to luck and a little knowledge of medicine. The fact that she actually broke several of the agreed-upon rules during the study (talking to her teenage friend and an unknown person on the other end of a cell phone) doesn't help her case any.
Admittedly, I did leave out some details in the name of brevity. To clarify: The hardware I purchased and had problems with included the wireless network card, which I originally thought there were Linux drivers for. It turned out that I had purchased a newer hardware revision which uses a different chipset. There is very little information concerning the new revision available on any of the pertinent web-sites at this time.
And as I said, I checked to make sure ALSA supported USB audio devices before I purchased one. The fact that it doesn't support 5.1 surround through those devices was buried in a single post in an obscure mailing list archive, and is nowhere to be found in the documentation.
As far as SATA drivers, I found no information about them on the Slackware site, and you're right, that should have been a warning sign in and of itself. In my defense, however, Windows XP detected and installed on the drive without needing any special drivers.
My point in the original post is that it isn't reasonable to expect every user to spend hours and hours researching before they purchase hardware, to make sure everything is going to be well-supported. Such an expectation is exactly the sort of thing that drives users away. The distro I used is inconsiquential. In my many hours of searching for solutions to my problems, I found plenty of posts from users having similar issues with the same and other hardware on other distributions. If I came here saying I'd tried FC3 or Debian, I'm sure someone would post saying I should have tried Gentoo. The simple truth is that if you expect more people to use Linux, there has to be good support for the hardware those people want to use.
Day 1: Couldn't partition my hard drive because the Slackware installation disk doesn't have drivers for SATA disk controllers. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for work-arounds.
Day 2: Located a message board where someone had posted a custom ISO image of Slackware disk 1 with a SATA-enabled kernel. Was able to partition my hard drive and get setup running, but when it came time to pick a kernel to install, it refused to let me insert disk 1 to grab the SATA kernel. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for work-arounds.
Day 3: Finally figured out that I could put the setup process in the background, unmount the CD, eject and re-insert disk 1, then bring setup back to the foreground. Completed setup and got X running. Copied over source for 2.6.10 kernel, which I had burned to a CD. Started doing configuration, and realized there were no Linux drivers available for my wireless network card. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for solutions.
Day 4: Discovered ndiswrapper, a module that allows you to use standard Windows drivers for wireless NICs under Linux. Downloaded and built it with no problems. Tried to load my NIC drivers, and the entire OS immediately locked up. Rebooted and tried a couple more times with the same results. Spent the next 2 days searching the web for solutions.
Day 6: Finally found a single post from someone who had the same hardware revision of the same card, who had been able to get it working using the 2.6.9 kernel. Burned the source to CD and installed it on Linux box, configured, compiled, rebooted, built ndiswrapper and it worked! Unfortunately, I couldn't get an address from DHCP server. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for solutions.
Day 7: Took a day off.
Day 8: Found out that I was using the wrong command to query DHCP (I was foolishly running dhcclient instead of dhcpcd, it's so obvious!), so now DHCP works and I can connect to the net without having to assign a static IP address. I spent the next couple days configuring the video drivers, audio drivers, and getting all the modules to configure correctly at boot-up.
Day 10: Started working on getting the video-capture card drivers working. Ran into a myriad of build errors right off the bat. Did some research and learned I needed to compile some extra features into the kernel before the drivers will build. So I reconfigure, build, install, reboot... and the kernel won't load. Decide to call it a day and have a few stiff drinks before I am tempted to toss the computer out the window.
Day 11: Okay, turned out it wasn't anything tragic, I booted to an older kernel, rebuilt the new kernel, and everything worked fine. But the capture card drivers still wouldn't build. Spent the rest of the day searching the web for solutions.
Day 12: Finally realized that all info I've found about using this particular capture card refers to the fact that the user was using a 2.4 kernel instead of 2.6. So I download the kernel source, configure, build, install, reboot... and now I can build and install the capture card drivers. Unfortunately, there are no drivers available in the kernel source for my motherboard sound chipset. But I figure I can address that problem later. I do a bunch of configuring, ho
It will be included, but you can only drive a silver H2.
He doesn't really mention what he's basing his comparison on. But since it's supposed to be from a developer's point of view, he may have tinkered with the Source SDK and gone over some documentation, without having actually played HL2.
We have always been at war with EA.
I constantly see and hear this attitude from die-hard Linux users that Windows is so virus-ridden that you can't connect it to the internet without contracting 50 bajillion viruses in a matter of seconds. I've never experienced this. Granted, my home network sits behind a NAT router, but I've been running a Win2000 Pro box for over 3 years now, with no protection beyond the NAT and regular Windows updates. It has never once contracted a virus of any kind (and yes, I do occasionally scan it with an up-to-date virus scanner to confirm this). Now spyware is another story altogether, but Spybot keeps that pretty much at bay.
I believe the parent was referring to graphic nudity and depictions of sexual acts which are the only things that will earn a game an AO (Adults Only) rating. Generally, you won't find AO games in a game store. Which goes back to an earlier comment about how nudity and sex are somehow considered less morally acceptable than extreme violence here in the US.
Well, Almost Famous also had a lot of heavy drug and alcohol use, so that may not be the best counter-example. A better choice might be "Amelie," a delightful French romantic comedy that was given an R rating in the US market solely for "sexual content." Whatever that means.
Then you have folks like Peter Molyneax (also mentioned in the article). He has some really great game designs under his belt. But the last 8 years or so have been filled with one disappointment after another. Honestly, Pete, if you'd just keep your big trap shut until you have a working demo, you could save yourself a lot of heartache.
Then there are the Sid Meyers of game design, who, while they haven't shown a lot of innovation lately, certainly know how to please the masses by re-working their tried and true formulas into fresh masterpieces. Half Life 2 and the new Pirates were both very derivative of their predecessors, but both added enough fresh gameplay and new features to make me fall in love all over again.
Frankly, though, one of the main reasons for playing a massive multiplayer game is the "massive" part. Large numbers of people to interact/compete/cooperate with in a single virtual world. Little Johnny running a server from his home computer doesn't have the bandwidth or processing power to handle more than, say, a few dozen users at once. Anyone who did have the equipment and bandwidth for a significantly sized server, would find out just how expensive running an MMO can be, and why they charge people to play them.
Because, while this is an excellent solution for the company running the MMO, it is a horrible solution for people actually playing it. If, like me, you are part of a large gaming organization that participates together in several online games, you want to be able to play with your friends on the same server. If WoW instituted a system like FFXI did, where you get automatically assigend to a server, my guild would not be playing, and Blizzard would be short about 600 active subscribers. Well, that may be a bit of a stretch. Some of us would undoubtedly play anyway, but the vast majority would not, because for us, half the game is working together with our guild towards common goals.