Well, at least one thing they do for PC game is force developpers/publisher to make CD based versions... Because they don't believe that enough PC gamers have DVD drives yet.
That's what we've been told at the company I work at at least, which is about to release a game that will have one CD based version in north america made just for wal-mart. I don't know if it means that they don't sell DVD based games at all (I'm in europe, so I never been in a wal-mart), but if it does, it may explain why gamers avoid buying their PC games from their.
I don't think that many people are happy with 5+ CDs games nowadays.
In the words of Patrick Le Lay, the asshole CEO of the crappy, highly commercial french TV network TF1 (translated from this article):
"TF1's job is basically to help Coca-cola, for instance, sell its product. For an advertisement message to be perceived, the brain of the viewer must be available. Our shows' vocation is to make it available, that is, entertain and relax it to prepare it between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is available humain brain time."
Yeah, because microsoft is above FUD: "But she did reiterate that the software giant is concerned that the sale of base systems may be linked to the use of counterfeit software."
Which implies that people who don't want to buy windows with their PC are pirates, Theyor not far from it.
The whole thing boils down to "Some people are not buying windows along with their PC ? They must either be pirate, or people who don't understand the value of our offers. You can't possibly not want windows with your PC. This is abnormal."
It reminds me my asshat catechism teacher who told my mother that she should get me to a psychiatrist because I don't believe in god. She probably didn't expect a 8 years old kid to be able to resist her indoctrination.
"However, Windows is slowly becoming like Unix, what with better command shells, scripts, use of XML as config for IIS. Maybe one day, the whole registry is one big XML file."
If you want to store a huge ass amount of randomly accessed data in a single XML file, please be my guest. I'll be over at thedailtwtf.com, busy laughing my ass off.
What about avoiding having such large objects in the first place ?
Slice it down into smaller objects (which is a good idea for culling anyway), translate the vertices so that they are relative to some point located within the object's bounding box (for instance, its center), setup the transformation matrix for that object to translate it back where it belongs, problem solved.
Now perhaps for the position of an object relative to the world you may need to use double if you have a large world and need the precision, but for the object space to homogenous space matrix used to transform the individual vertices, floats should be enough (as it only need enough precision to represent the position of vertices relative to the camera)
(I still get a little annoyed with Lua at times because the default installation doesn't have code for doing simple things like reading the files in directories; handy for loading plugins, etc. Thankfully writing a simple filesystem extension is trivial. I even wrote a simple networking library for lua too:)
Yeah, that's the problem with lua. I think it will improve a lot from now on though, first because there's already a fair amount of useful libraries available for lua, and second because lua 5.1 has a standardized way to load modules, native or not.
It's a matter of taste. The only advantage of python IMO is that it comes with an standardized and large set of libraries. This is not actually an advantage in every situation, though. And there's also plenty of libraries available for lua, only there is no standard package thereof.
There's been SDL bindings around for a lot of languages for a while. Personally, I think lua would be a much more interesting choice than perl for this.
I'm half surprised of the lack of mention of any old thomson 8 bit machines. Granted, it was probably non existant and totally unheard of outside France.
The TO7/70 was built around a 6809 and had a lightpen aswell as a pretty crappy video chip which was really just a crappy framebuffer where you could only have two colors selected among a fixed palette per horizontal 8 pixel rows.
Still, it was what made me discover what a computer was, when I went from thinking that a computer was a mysterious machine to think that it was something that was used to draw on a screen with a lightpen (I was seven at the time, give me a break).
Then the french government launched a big "computer science for all" operation that same year that involved installing a bunch networks of MO5 computers (very similar to the TO7) in schools and high schools. It was pretty neat, they were teaching kids rudiments of programming using logo. That's how I first discovered programming, and I then began coding in basic.
When my father bought an amiga 500 three years later I got really hooked to computer science though, and started doing some assembly programming.
Defensive programming might be necessary for the kind of stuff you want to make. However, there are also a lot of good practices when it comes to coding in C++ that will help you have better, more trustworthy code. Sorry in advance if these seem obvious. It is of course merely my opinion, and some of these advice may be wrong or horribly wrong.
1. If you need to do something that the standard C++ library can do, use the standard library. Don't implement your own containers unless you really, really need to.
2. Never use the stuff from the standard library that were inherited from C. Examples: Use stringstream instead of sprintf. Use file streams instead of fopen and the like. Never use any XXXcpy function (memcpy, strcpy, etc.). If you need to do it, think twice, and then think again. It shouldn't be necessary in most cases.
3. Never do pSomething = new Someclass if you need the instance only in the scope where it is defined. Use Someclass Something, and you won't need to put a delete pSomething in every place where you can leave the function.
4. Pointer arithmetic is bad. You should almost never need to add an integer to a pointer, or to take the difference between two pointers.
5. Casts are dangerous. Always use C++ style casts, like static_cast. C style cast should be avoided. reinterpret_cast or const_cast should be a very, very rare occurence, so think twice if you think you need one.
6. Respect constness everywhere it is needed. And respect it properly, not by using mutable or const_cast liberally (unlike what some people did in the codebase I'm maintaining at work:/)
7. If you have a boolean, use bool. Not int or whatever else.
8. Use smart pointers. With reference counting for objects with shared ownership, or just to automatically delete stuff that goes out of scope. Then you can write SmartPointer = new blabla and don't need to explicitely delete. This simplifies the code in functions because you don't have to delete in every place you leave the function, and in classes because you cannot forget to add the delete in the destructor. And it's the only proper way to work with exceptions. If you want to be strict, block the ampersand operator in classes that you want people to access only through smart pointers, and also forbid constructing or setting a smart pointer from a reference (to prevent errors like making a smart pointer point to an instance on the stack)
9. Beware of large classes and large functions. If you want to be able to trust that the code works, you need classes and functions that perform a single, well-defined task. You can then easily verify that they do what they're supposed to do and not more or less. When you have a class or function with a vague name, a vague purpose and that spans pages of code, you cannot easily audit it to check that it does what it's supposed to do.
When they say "we don't want to manage hobbyists", they most likely mean: "we don't want the competition from hobbyists".
So, either they'd rather not have to invest more to keep on top of the open-source competition and would just prefer it to go away, or they just feel they're unable to.
And of course, fair competition is out of the picture at Microsoft for historical and cultural reasons. They've come all that way by being assholes, why would they want to change their ways now ?
"Still, many commercial applications, games, utilities, OS's, etc are still written in Java (or a combination of Java and other languages)."
Can you cite me a single console game written in Java ? Can you cite me any well-known MMORPG written in Java ? Can you cite me any well-known PC game written in Java ? How many OSes written in Java do you know, or written in major part in Java ?
It's not a common situation indeed. I think one I can think about is PVS visibility determination techniques in 3D. Basically, you split your world into convex volumes, and for each of them, you have a pre-calculated array containing one flag for each other volume in the world, to indicate whether they are visible from this one or not.
When you want to reduce the size of something, it's not necessarily because you have a small system. It may be because you have a lot of data.
I think there are some situations where you want to be able to store a huge array of booleans, and in this case, you definitely don't want to waste space by storing them as bytes.
"And the guys who write those apps are the very ones who hate C++."
Not all of them. I've worked for 6 years as a game developer, and I've seen (and written myself) some pretty horrible stuff. Yet I actually love C++ now, even though I hated it at first.
What I hate are people not thinking thing through before they code and hence writing monstruous code. And most of these monstruosities are not C++ specific. A programmer who is not able to figure out what to put in a separate function or how to make a proper class hierarchy won't magically do better in Java, C#, Python or whatever else.
I currently have an hitachi drive, and I'm pleasantly surprised that it still works fine despite how bad I managed to screw up when I first installed it. Basically, I managed to rip off a part of the isolation joint, which is made of a nasty kind of rubber that tends to disintegrate itself into small particles. So there was basically for a little while (because I didn't realise I did that until I had some doubts and checked) this gaping holes with some nasty rubber particles there, and the unprotected platters right behind this.
I sealed the gap, and the hard-disk still works fine several month later, although if it starts dying on me, I won't be surprised.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at least one thing they do for PC game is force developpers/publisher to make CD based versions... Because they don't believe that enough PC gamers have DVD drives yet.
That's what we've been told at the company I work at at least, which is about to release a game that will have one CD based version in north america made just for wal-mart. I don't know if it means that they don't sell DVD based games at all (I'm in europe, so I never been in a wal-mart), but if it does, it may explain why gamers avoid buying their PC games from their.
I don't think that many people are happy with 5+ CDs games nowadays.
In the words of Patrick Le Lay, the asshole CEO of the crappy, highly commercial french TV network TF1 (translated from this article):
"TF1's job is basically to help Coca-cola, for instance, sell its product. For an advertisement message to be perceived, the brain of the viewer must be available.
Our shows' vocation is to make it available, that is, entertain and relax it to prepare it between two messages. What we sell to Coca-Cola is available humain brain time."
Yeah, because microsoft is above FUD: "But she did reiterate that the software giant is concerned that the sale of base systems may be linked to the use of counterfeit software."
Which implies that people who don't want to buy windows with their PC are pirates, Theyor not far from it.
The whole thing boils down to "Some people are not buying windows along with their PC ? They must either be pirate, or people who don't understand the value of our offers. You can't possibly not want windows with your PC. This is abnormal."
It reminds me my asshat catechism teacher who told my mother that she should get me to a psychiatrist because I don't believe in god. She probably didn't expect a 8 years old kid to be able to resist her indoctrination.
15% is quite a lot.
The day linux takes 15% of the desktop market, you'll see microsoft scrambling to actually turn windows into a good OS.
They don't want Windows for its functionalities, familiarity or whatever.
They want the brand.
Not that it cannot change, cf Firefox.
"However, Windows is slowly becoming like Unix, what with better command shells, scripts, use of XML as config for IIS. Maybe one day, the whole registry is one big XML file."
If you want to store a huge ass amount of randomly accessed data in a single XML file, please be my guest.
I'll be over at thedailtwtf.com, busy laughing my ass off.
"Next time a ceramic mug falls on the ground, you won't have to buy a new coffee"
Here I was hoping that they had found a way to prevent the coffee to be spilled when dropping the mug.
Dropping a mug 15 meters on concrete is not part of my coffee cup usage patterns anyway.
What about avoiding having such large objects in the first place ? Slice it down into smaller objects (which is a good idea for culling anyway), translate the vertices so that they are relative to some point located within the object's bounding box (for instance, its center), setup the transformation matrix for that object to translate it back where it belongs, problem solved. Now perhaps for the position of an object relative to the world you may need to use double if you have a large world and need the precision, but for the object space to homogenous space matrix used to transform the individual vertices, floats should be enough (as it only need enough precision to represent the position of vertices relative to the camera)
A scientific proof that "never do today what can be procrastinated until tomorrow" is the right way of doing things.
Like, select * from searchengines; ?
(I still get a little annoyed with Lua at times because the default installation doesn't have code for doing simple things like reading the files in directories; handy for loading plugins, etc. Thankfully writing a simple filesystem extension is trivial. I even wrote a simple networking library for lua too :)
Yeah, that's the problem with lua. I think it will improve a lot from now on though, first because there's already a fair amount of useful libraries available for lua, and second because lua 5.1 has a standardized way to load modules, native or not.
And yes, there are SDL bindings for lua.
Python is an even better choice.
It's a matter of taste. The only advantage of python IMO is that it comes with an standardized and large set of libraries.
This is not actually an advantage in every situation, though. And there's also plenty of libraries available for lua, only there is no standard package thereof.
There's been SDL bindings around for a lot of languages for a while.
Personally, I think lua would be a much more interesting choice than perl for this.
Yeah, but of course if you had seen the screenshot, you'd know that they're mockups that are as much about usability and functionality than look.
But then, you'd have been at risk to make a relevant post.
I'm half surprised of the lack of mention of any old thomson 8 bit machines.
Granted, it was probably non existant and totally unheard of outside France.
The TO7/70 was built around a 6809 and had a lightpen aswell as a pretty crappy video chip which was really just a crappy framebuffer where you could only have two colors selected among a fixed palette per horizontal 8 pixel rows.
Still, it was what made me discover what a computer was, when I went from thinking that a computer was a mysterious machine to think that it was something that was used to draw on a screen with a lightpen (I was seven at the time, give me a break).
Then the french government launched a big "computer science for all" operation that same year that involved installing a bunch networks of MO5 computers (very similar to the TO7) in schools and high schools. It was pretty neat, they were teaching kids rudiments of programming using logo. That's how I first discovered programming, and I then began coding in basic.
When my father bought an amiga 500 three years later I got really hooked to computer science though, and started doing some assembly programming.
Defensive programming might be necessary for the kind of stuff you want to make.
:/)
However, there are also a lot of good practices when it comes to coding in C++ that will help you have better, more trustworthy code. Sorry in advance if these seem obvious.
It is of course merely my opinion, and some of these advice may be wrong or horribly wrong.
1. If you need to do something that the standard C++ library can do, use the standard library. Don't implement your own containers unless you really, really need to.
2. Never use the stuff from the standard library that were inherited from C. Examples:
Use stringstream instead of sprintf.
Use file streams instead of fopen and the like.
Never use any XXXcpy function (memcpy, strcpy, etc.). If you need to do it, think twice, and then think again. It shouldn't be necessary in most cases.
3. Never do pSomething = new Someclass if you need the instance only in the scope where it is defined.
Use Someclass Something, and you won't need to put a delete pSomething in every place where you can leave the function.
4. Pointer arithmetic is bad. You should almost never need to add an integer to a pointer, or to take the difference between two pointers.
5. Casts are dangerous. Always use C++ style casts, like static_cast. C style cast should be avoided. reinterpret_cast or const_cast should be a very, very rare occurence, so think twice if you think you need one.
6. Respect constness everywhere it is needed. And respect it properly, not by using mutable or const_cast liberally (unlike what some people did in the codebase I'm maintaining at work
7. If you have a boolean, use bool. Not int or whatever else.
8. Use smart pointers. With reference counting for objects with shared ownership, or just to automatically delete stuff that goes out of scope.
Then you can write SmartPointer = new blabla and don't need to explicitely delete. This simplifies the code in functions because you don't have to delete in every place you leave the function, and in classes because you cannot forget to add the delete in the destructor.
And it's the only proper way to work with exceptions.
If you want to be strict, block the ampersand operator in classes that you want people to access only through smart pointers, and also forbid constructing or setting a smart pointer from a reference (to prevent errors like making a smart pointer point to an instance on the stack)
9. Beware of large classes and large functions. If you want to be able to trust that the code works, you need classes and functions that perform a single, well-defined task. You can then easily verify that they do what they're supposed to do and not more or less.
When you have a class or function with a vague name, a vague purpose and that spans pages of code, you cannot easily audit it to check that it does what it's supposed to do.
...Hobbyists reduce DRMs.
When they say "we don't want to manage hobbyists", they most likely mean: "we don't want the competition from hobbyists".
So, either they'd rather not have to invest more to keep on top of the open-source competition and would just prefer it to go away, or they just feel they're unable to.
And of course, fair competition is out of the picture at Microsoft for historical and cultural reasons. They've come all that way by being assholes, why would they want to change their ways now ?
"Sadly, Disney's video games will now suck - they'll all be stupid puzzles."
/Had the lack of pleasure of working on three winnie the pooh video games
Huh ?
They're already like this.
"Still, many commercial applications, games, utilities, OS's, etc are still written in Java (or a combination of Java and other languages)."
Can you cite me a single console game written in Java ?
Can you cite me any well-known MMORPG written in Java ?
Can you cite me any well-known PC game written in Java ?
How many OSes written in Java do you know, or written in major part in Java ?
It's not a common situation indeed.
I think one I can think about is PVS visibility determination techniques in 3D. Basically, you split your world into convex volumes, and for each of them, you have a pre-calculated array containing one flag for each other volume in the world, to indicate whether they are visible from this one or not.
"Bit-arrays: yesyes, I know. Boost contains a class which does that. But I think it would be so much nicer if the language had that feature."
There is vector. The standard define that this is a specialization that packs bool into bits.
When you want to reduce the size of something, it's not necessarily because you have a small system. It may be because you have a lot of data. I think there are some situations where you want to be able to store a huge array of booleans, and in this case, you definitely don't want to waste space by storing them as bytes.
"And the guys who write those apps are the very ones who hate C++."
Not all of them. I've worked for 6 years as a game developer, and I've seen (and written myself) some pretty horrible stuff.
Yet I actually love C++ now, even though I hated it at first.
What I hate are people not thinking thing through before they code and hence writing monstruous code.
And most of these monstruosities are not C++ specific. A programmer who is not able to figure out what to put in a separate function or how to make a proper class hierarchy won't magically do better in Java, C#, Python or whatever else.
I currently have an hitachi drive, and I'm pleasantly surprised that it still works fine despite how bad I managed to screw up when I first installed it.
Basically, I managed to rip off a part of the isolation joint, which is made of a nasty kind of rubber that tends to disintegrate itself into small particles.
So there was basically for a little while (because I didn't realise I did that until I had some doubts and checked) this gaping holes with some nasty rubber particles there, and the unprotected platters right behind this.
I sealed the gap, and the hard-disk still works fine several month later, although if it starts dying on me, I won't be surprised.