Sounds like a neat low-end solution, but I'm always suspicious when the evangelists have to spread FUD like:
"Also included in the Kyro II is 8-layer multisampling that allows for up to 8 textures to be applied in a single pass. Other cards are forced to re-send triangle data for the scene being rendered when multitexturing, eating up precious memory bandwidth. Since the Kyro II features 8-layer multisampling, the chip can process the textures without having to re-send the triangle information."
Guys, if the chip is all that, let it stand out on its virtues alone. Your competition has been multitexturing since the Voodoo II.
And of course:
"Missing from the Kyro II feature set is a T&L engine. Claiming that the current generation of CPUs are far superior at T&L calculations than any graphics part can be, STMicroelectronics choose to leave T&L off the Kyro II."
I could sneeze at this point and mutter the appropriate profanity under my breath. However, I'd much rather see the chip succeed or fail because of its feature set, instead of the ability of Imagination/STMicroelectronics at slinging mud at the competition.
Those benchmarks are really interesting. It would be fantastic to have a successor to 3Dfx, if only to keep Nvidia and ATI on their toes. My chief worry towards their commercial acceptance would be how much of DirectX 8 do these guys support? It's not a fair worry, but I think it's a realistic one. I wish them the best of luck.
I thought the handheld videogames were pretty innovative... In particular, the Lynx pioneered networked videogames a good 8 years before they really caught on...
And while it's been a good 5 years since a game really latched onto me and took control of my life, that's a lot less than 2 decades...
>Brighter & Gorier may sell well, and certainly
>the modern gaming consoles are a good deal more
>impressive than the Atari 400's, numbers-wise,
>but I'm not seeing the content.
This Red Herring is raised continually as a mantra for the problems with the industry, and yet the chart toppers are games like Age of Empires, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and The Sims. None of these games push the envelope graphically or gorily, but instead provide solid (if sometimes even creative) gameplay within established genres.
And despite the success of these simpler games, I agree with Mr. Yamauchi that solid, basic gameplay has taken a backseat to many more complex games with too many sequels. Nobody plays these games. More importantly, no one buys them, and yet they just keep coming.
>IMHO, the best thing that could happen to the
>games industry would be if a bunch of (REAL)
>hackers got together, threw a truly spectacular
>console together, and wrote a killer game for
>it, under the GPL.
Why bother? Their target audience, also mostly hackers, already have computers. Why not instead skip the whole console bit and go straight to the killer game? This is one instance where the better mousetrap is simply waiting to be built.
I do believe this is the daughter of David Thielen, author of numerous columns in Game Developer as well as the (in)famous game _Enemy Nations_. Sounds like troublemaking is in their blood...
The most disturbing aspect of Dogma 2001 is the absence of the word "fun" from every single rule. Ernest Adams seems to be carving out a Jonathan Katz-like niche over on GamaSutra, where he occasionally spews out ill-conceived nonsense like Dogma 2001, which inspires a heated flamewar between his sycophants and his detractors.
It is our destiny to bring forth a Jonathan Katz column on GamaSutra in order to close the circle.
I don't think this will really get any artists' panties in a bunch. Such rules are already in place for radio stations, public venues, and even artists who wish to perform/play a copyrighted work. It seems like only a small step to extending this to Internet downloads. MP3.com is obviously the future.
Now, the RIAA obviously hates the idea of any money slipping out of their fingers and getting sent directly to the artists so of course they're jumping up and down. But they're dinosaurs: large, noisy, and inefficient, and the Internet is a big asteroid. All will turn out well in the end.
Now if only I could figure out how this will affect Natalie Portman, I'd be a rich man.
Section 1. A method is described herein whereby a merchant (hereafter referred to as the egomaniac) associates a level of remuneration for providing the privilege of partaking in a formal transaction (hereafter known as the handshake) with him/herself. The customer (hereafter referred to as the shill) views the name and the associated cost for recording the handshake and can decide whether a shill/egomaniac handshake is desireable.
The recording of the handshake primarily benefits the shill who can now list the egomaniac as an important client on press releases, business plans and yearly reports. Since the egomaniac receives no other benefit than the aforementioned remuneration, it is understood from the outset that the egomaniac has everything to lose and little to gain here.
Section 2 herein describes the enticements that the egomaniac can provide for the shill as a side-benefit of his/her recognizing the value of a handshake with him/her. These enticements are understood to be of no monetary value whatsoever and they should be considered to be a free perk optionally provided by the egomaniac for the benefit of the shill.
The smartest people I know and from whom I've learned the most in my 3 years in Silicon Valley have all been over 40. They all command the big bucks and most of them are millionaires many times over. Many of them dealt with the age issue by becoming consultants past the age of 50. None of them have gone wanting of work.
The complaints in this article are nothing new. A perusal of the Bill Gates biography "Hard Drive" reveals many of the same complaints arising from the early days of Microsoft. Startups are a game mostly designed for the young. Microsoft went out of its way to recruit recent college graduates so they had few preconceived notions about work and so they'd have plenty of energy to burn out in the ensuing years of labor. Things turned out well for them, but I've met a lot of bitter wreckage from companies doing the same sort of thing but which didn't experience Microsoft's success.
In summation, if you come here, you're taking a chance much like the people who came here 150 years ago in search of gold.
The thought of a world where one can take an open API like OpenGL, change the syntax of a couple procedure calls, and retitle the thing a proprietary trade secret is a dangerous and destructive concept. Only a lawyer could come up with something that clueless. Unfortunately, it's going to take more lawyers can clean up the mess.
In my dealings with Microsoft, I have never met anyone braindead enough to agree with the concept. Quite the contrary in fact. This incident tops even Intel's threatening antics towards Thomas Pabst a few year's back over his Pentium II benchmarks.
"One of my teachers is working on protein folding, and has about 45% accuracy using nueral networks and genetic algorithms."
By whose standards? His own I would guess. That's the problem with protein folders as a group: no objectivity. Every year for the past 35 or so one or more of them claims to have a solution. That's why competitions like CASP 4 arose to address this dilemma. No one at that meeting ever makes claims like 45% accuracy at protein folding, but some do issue the occasional nutso press release wherein they claim their method is better than the competition or others improperly exploit their position to force a wacky article into print about a technique of questionable value for solving protein folding which failed to pan out.
"is there any ever protein folding news?"
Well, protein folding is tough, really tough. You may think cracking 512-bit encryption is tough but that's just peanuts compared to protein folding, the inverse attack on the problem first proposed by K. Eric Drexler has turned out to be much more effective, and entire careers have been wasted chasing this dream (which is not to say it isn't WORTH chasing, but just to put things into perspective).
Ye gods! I wrote better encryption than that 20 years ago in high school to protect the source code of my multi-user space shooter. Seriously. Said encryption was never broken (though anyone today would have figured it out in a week) rather a sysadmin started watching my CPU usage and used the root password to go into my home directory whilst I was compiling the thing (the only time it was ever decrypted) and copied the sucker away. Ah those were the days. Still, after receiving one of the most annoying, boring, and tedious C++ proficiency tests from Verant after applying there for employment last Summer, this is a real kicker. Scott Le Grand Lead Coder Scatologic
When the Jaguar was released, we were under the impression that it would be the first networkable console. At least that's what Atari was saying at the time and we were a lot more naive back then.
As things turned out, there was a HORRIBLE bug in the Jaguar's UART and we had to design our own proprietary networking hardware and software to get around it. Unfortunately, Atari suffered from NIH syndrome so they poopooed the thing at the time. This hardware was one of the components of the CatBox. A CatBox allows one to link up to 32 jaguars. Atari released the Jaglink which allowed the connection of two jaguars and they were working on a voice modem with similar capacity except over phone lines.
In a sad twist of fate, after a successful first batch, the maker of the CatBox, took a lot of money from a lot of people for a second batch and never delivered product to them as far as I know.
While I agree with almost everything in this article, I've come to realize that just about every engineer, artist, designer, and producer in the industry agrees as well. They all want to make cool games, but since that involves risk, the suits aren't willing to let them. Yes, there is a minority of superstars who can do anything they want, but that's not the mass of people who inhabit GDC and read Game Developer and GamaSutra. Most are wage slaves who love games and stick around in the hopes that something will change.
But nothing is changing. And the siren song of the dot coms and hardware companies is sucking away many of the best. In my own experience, I've interviewed for lead coder positions 3 times in as many years and there's always been a more a lucrative and creatively free position in engineering fer cryin' out loud than any game position offered.
And don't cry for the suits. While only 1 game in 35 breaks even and only 1 in 4 of those makes the big bucks, the power of being a publisher absorbs much of the loss. Just read the quarterly reports of the REALLY big guys as they gobble up the little guys and there merely big guys. The developer OTOH is forced to design a game he knows no one wants to play, on a schedule that will consume his staff, and for the arbitrary system of milestones covered in the article.
So what to do? Sony says use Middleware and concentrate on the gameplay. Of course, the "Middleware" is currently "Vaporware" and Sony's 2 months away from launching in Japan, but pay no mind to the man behind the curtain. Not surpringly, the developers balk and look forward to harnessing the power of Sony's new widget on the metal and see right through this well-intentioned but impractical scheme.
So what happens next? I'd say thank god for the Dreamcast. Soul Caliber restored my faith in the ability of a company to deliver an excellent game to the consumer even in this day and age. But of course, at only 2 million units sold, the big guys still won't touch it, favoring an unreleased collection of parts in a box called the Playstation 2 because it got all the best hype. Talk about chasing vaporware. Meanwhile, Nintendo hems and haws about a fantastic new machine called the dolphin with a graphics chipset designed by the same guys who tried to pull that awful scam over on Ars Technica and has anybody seen one of these things yet? And then there's Microsoft who isn't working on a console called the X-Box that won't be released in 2001. Yawn, what's next? The T-Buffer?
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
While I agree with almost everything in this article, I've come to realize that just about every engineer, artist, designer, and producer in the industry agrees as well. They all want to make cool games, but since that involves risk, the suits aren't willing to let them. Yes, there is a minority of superstars who can do anything they want, but that's not the mass of people who inhabit GDC and read Game Developer and GamaSutra. Most are wage slaves who love games and stick around in the hopes that something will change.
But nothing is changing. And the siren song of the dot coms and hardware companies is sucking away many of the best. In my own experience, I've interviewed for lead coder positions 3 times in as many years and there's always been a more a lucrative and creatively free position in engineering fer cryin' out loud than any game position offered.
And don't cry for the suits. While only 1 game in 35 breaks even and only 1 in 4 of those makes the big bucks, the power of being a publisher absorbs much of the loss. Just read the quarterly reports of the >REALLYSo what to do? Sony says use Middleware and concentrate on the gameplay. Of course, the "Middleware" is currently "Vaporware" and Sony's 2 months away from launching in Japan, but pay no mind to the man behind the curtain. Not surpringly, the developers balk and look forward to harnessing the power of Sony's new widget on the metal and see right through this well-intentioned but impractical scheme.
So what happens next? I'd say thank god for the Dreamcast. Soul Caliber restored my faith in the ability of a company to deliver an excellent game to the consumer even in this day and age. But of course, at only 2 million units sold, the big guys still won't touch it, favoring an unreleased collection of parts in a box called the Playstation 2 because it got all the best hype. Talk about chasing vaporware. Meanwhile, Nintendo hems and haws about a fantastic new machine called the dolphin with a graphics chipset designed by the same guys who tried to pull that awful scam over on Ars Technica and has anybody seen one of these things yet? And then there's Microsoft who isn't working on a console called the X-Box that won't be released in 2001. Yawn, what's next? The T-Buffer?
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Quark ruled, Quark rules, Quark will rule again...
(Assuming of course that they preserved Richard Benjamin's, Alan Caillou's, and Richard Kelton's DNA). Yeah yeah, Richard Benjamin isn't actually dead, but one look says he ought to be.
In 7 or so episodes, they managed to skewer Star Wars, 2001, Shore Leave, The Ultimate Computer, Mirror Mirror, Amok Time, Flash Gordon, the holiday season in general, The Enemy Within, and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure I'm missing. How dare you equate this to that _holiday_ special whose main drawing point was a little bit of extra footage of Mark Hamill on Tatooine that served to inspire bizarre racial memories of missing Biggs Darkwinder scenes.
Highlights of Quark included Tim Thomerson playing a half-male/half-female character named Gene/Jean who would beat the stuffing out of a bunch of slimy aliens and then immediately check his makeup and whine about breaking a nail, and a dead-on satire of Spock's matin rituals from the vegetable perspective.
Besides, Buck Henry's true brilliance was best exposed in those scarily precognitive Uncle Roy sketches that must have been Patrick Naughton's teen inspiration between marathon coding stretches and dodging bullies. Ever notice how they show all sorts of sketches from the 70s on SNL reruns, but somehow the Uncle Roy stuff is mysteriously missing? Conspiracy I tell you, pure conspiracy!
The Galaxy Ad Infinitum
PS Quark's boss was Dr. Otto "Bob" Palindrome and for bonus points, does anyone else remember the unsold pilot they aired right after they dumped Quark and the grafitti on the side of their space station?
BioEthics: A well-established field
on
Planet Gattaca
·
· Score: 1
Ya know, some people wonder why a large body of us stick around and criticize Jonathan Katz rather than just go away. Here's why.
One, his Columbine columns were quite insightful and they raised the expectation that more insight would come from the individual who could write such material. Two, Katz is front page material here on/. and three, this stuff just gets more and more surreal with today's tirade against scientists and theologians as the source of evil in our society. Sound familiar anyone?
In reality, BioEthics is a well-established field. All of the questions raised murkily in this essay were long ago considered by theologians, bioethicians, and scientists. If Jonathan were to do a web search rather than go to Wired News or watch the BBC, he'd find the debate has been underway for decades.
And if he occasionally read a book (a non-volatile storage medium for you young'uns), then he'd even find out that some of those guys supposedly behind most of human suffering have been much too busy thinking about these very same subjects to subjugate humanity.
>Who was it that made the current technological >revolution possible?
Ross Jeffries?
>College professors.
You mean like the one I caught copying an entire paragraph out of a textbook and claiming it was his own writing or the guy in the NAS who threatened to ruin my career because my data contradicted his NYTimes front page research? I guess you're right though. If it weren't for people like that, I'd probably still be a post-doc in academia rather than at a lucrative Silicon Valley startup.
>Anyone who thinks that the best and the >brightest go into industry and "do" is living in >a hole in the ground
You're right. Some of the worst managers I've ever dealt with were prof hacks who failed the tenure test.
>The majority of college professors, at least in >the large universities are primarily researchers
Who spend so much time scrambling for grant money, excreting out Lowest Publishable Units, and misrepresenting/cooking their data that they have little time to teach.
>who, in fact, often found companies
unwilling to hire them.
>if they feel
lucky.
>it wouldn't interfere with their more important >work.
Which of course is maintaining a sweat shop of post-docs, grad students, and interns.
"tell me that the people don't enjoy a better looking first-person shooter. Maybe you need to play the games some. Unreal was a good jump in graphics over the competition at the time, Halflife changed the face of Multi-Player, and Quake Arena has amassed quite a following with the BETA test! While you think up 'creative' new games that you 'think' are interesting, other companies will produce what I want to play. Sorry, it's called supply and demand, it is business."
Truer words have not been spoken here. I have no problem with people like Sweeney and Carmack breathing new life into the FPS genre. They're experts ya know? However, the fool's game is for everyone else to try and best them by throwing money at the problem. You guys pick 2 maybe 3 FPS games a year to play in this genre tops and the rest lose millions of dollars. How much time have you put into great hits like Sin, Requiem, Trespasser, Space Bunnies Must Die, and Redline? Even rags like PC Accelerator can tell you these games are going to flop 1 year before their release but do the game companies ever cut their losses and try to break into new or even somewhat less worn out territory?
No, they just keep putting 2nd and 3rd rate clones and blame it all on market forces.
Actually, the game industry hit rock bottom in 1997 and things have gotten a bit better since. But the general trend is still chasing the hits and that's always a fool's game.
John Carmack and Tim Sweeney are at the top of their form and just about everyone else in the FPS genre is a wannabee. This is a clear sign to go invest resources somewhere else but instead we get Requiems, Redlines and a zillion other half-assed overbudgeted efforts.
Similarly, I loved Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and I have a soft spot for Total Annihilation, but I'm as sick of this genre as I am of FPS games.
I could go on nitpicking the genres, but why bother? It's the same thing over and over again: someone gets a hit and then the industry is slaved into trying to reinvent the wheel for the next 5 years with inferior talent and there's the real trap.
What's driving this I think is that games cost too much. Get the cost of development down and people will take more chances again rather than chasing hit games in the same manner as Internet stocks. Some of the problem can be addressed by slapping anyone who invested in Ion Storm with a wet fish and the rest of it involves getting serious about development schedules rather than mystically proclaiming game development an art. Using pre-existing engines like that of Quake 2 is a great idea. In the future, there will be more and more of this because the alternative will be simply not to ship. Activision has been recycling their engines for the past 3 years and they do quite well. There are also numerous scene graphs with quite acceptable performance like Viskit. Use them wisely and you'll cut many months out of your schedule.
And if you're kvetching that Carmack's engine looks better, get a clue, in all likelihood, Carmack is smarter than you. Now get over it and make a product that ships. Remember Deer Hunter?
It's pretty old. The project you're mentioning was pursued by Thomas Ray in the early 1990s. His rationalization was that there was no way it could cause a widespread crash of all the computers running his simulation because he wrote his evolving code in an interpreted language. He was incapable of grasping the idea that a bug in the interpreter could cause just as much trouble as writing everything in a native language. The upshot is that people would listen to his talk, then politely point out this shortcoming, and then he would call them all fools (he had a bit of an ego problem too).
Eventually, he got the point...
The Artificial Life community has been doing this stuff since the 1950s but they didn't call it Artificial Life until the 1980s when they decided that if they gave the field a trendy name, people would notice it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a neat low-end solution, but I'm always suspicious when the evangelists have to spread FUD like:
"Also included in the Kyro II is 8-layer multisampling that allows for up to 8 textures to be applied in a single pass. Other cards are forced to re-send triangle data for the scene being rendered when multitexturing, eating up precious memory bandwidth. Since the Kyro II features 8-layer multisampling, the chip can process the textures without having to re-send the triangle information."
Guys, if the chip is all that, let it stand out on its virtues alone. Your competition has been multitexturing since the Voodoo II.
And of course:
"Missing from the Kyro II feature set is a T&L engine. Claiming that the current generation of CPUs are far superior at T&L calculations than any graphics part can be, STMicroelectronics choose to leave T&L off the Kyro II."
I could sneeze at this point and mutter the appropriate profanity under my breath. However, I'd much rather see the chip succeed or fail because of its feature set, instead of the ability of Imagination/STMicroelectronics at slinging mud at the competition.
Those benchmarks are really interesting. It would be fantastic to have a successor to 3Dfx, if only to keep Nvidia and ATI on their toes. My chief worry towards their commercial acceptance would be how much of DirectX 8 do these guys support? It's not a fair worry, but I think it's a realistic one. I wish them the best of luck.
I thought the handheld videogames were pretty innovative... In particular, the Lynx pioneered networked videogames a good 8 years before they really caught on...
And while it's been a good 5 years since a game really latched onto me and took control of my life, that's a lot less than 2 decades...
>Brighter & Gorier may sell well, and certainly
>the modern gaming consoles are a good deal more
>impressive than the Atari 400's, numbers-wise,
>but I'm not seeing the content.
This Red Herring is raised continually as a mantra for the problems with the industry, and yet the chart toppers are games like Age of Empires, Roller Coaster Tycoon, and The Sims. None of these games push the envelope graphically or gorily, but instead provide solid (if sometimes even creative) gameplay within established genres.
And despite the success of these simpler games, I agree with Mr. Yamauchi that solid, basic gameplay has taken a backseat to many more complex games with too many sequels. Nobody plays these games. More importantly, no one buys them, and yet they just keep coming.
>IMHO, the best thing that could happen to the
>games industry would be if a bunch of (REAL)
>hackers got together, threw a truly spectacular
>console together, and wrote a killer game for
>it, under the GPL.
Why bother? Their target audience, also mostly hackers, already have computers. Why not instead skip the whole console bit and go straight to the killer game? This is one instance where the better mousetrap is simply waiting to be built.
I do believe this is the daughter of David Thielen, author of numerous columns in Game Developer as well as the (in)famous game _Enemy Nations_. Sounds like troublemaking is in their blood...
The most disturbing aspect of Dogma 2001 is the absence of the word "fun" from every single rule. Ernest Adams seems to be carving out a Jonathan Katz-like niche over on GamaSutra, where he occasionally spews out ill-conceived nonsense like Dogma 2001, which inspires a heated flamewar between his sycophants and his detractors.
It is our destiny to bring forth a Jonathan Katz column on GamaSutra in order to close the circle.
Now, the RIAA obviously hates the idea of any money slipping out of their fingers and getting sent directly to the artists so of course they're jumping up and down. But they're dinosaurs: large, noisy, and inefficient, and the Internet is a big asteroid. All will turn out well in the end.
Now if only I could figure out how this will affect Natalie Portman, I'd be a rich man.
Step 1. Steal Underwear
Step 2. ???
Step 3. Profit
Section 1. A method is described herein whereby a merchant (hereafter referred to as the egomaniac) associates a level of remuneration for providing the privilege of partaking in a formal transaction (hereafter known as the handshake) with him/herself. The customer (hereafter referred to as the shill) views the name and the associated cost for recording the handshake and can decide whether a shill/egomaniac handshake is desireable.
The recording of the handshake primarily benefits the shill who can now list the egomaniac as an important client on press releases, business plans and yearly reports. Since the egomaniac receives no other benefit than the aforementioned remuneration, it is understood from the outset that the egomaniac has everything to lose and little to gain here.
Section 2 herein describes the enticements that the egomaniac can provide for the shill as a side-benefit of his/her recognizing the value of a handshake with him/her. These enticements are understood to be of no monetary value whatsoever and they should be considered to be a free perk optionally provided by the egomaniac for the benefit of the shill.
The smartest people I know and from whom I've
learned the most in my 3 years in Silicon
Valley have all been over 40. They all command
the big bucks and most of them are millionaires
many times over. Many of them dealt with the
age issue by becoming consultants past the age
of 50. None of them have gone wanting of
work.
The complaints in this article are nothing new.
A perusal of the Bill Gates biography "Hard
Drive" reveals many of the same complaints arising
from the early days of Microsoft. Startups are
a game mostly designed for the young. Microsoft
went out of its way to recruit recent college
graduates so they had few preconceived notions
about work and so they'd have plenty of energy
to burn out in the ensuing years of labor. Things
turned out well for them, but I've met a lot
of bitter wreckage from companies doing the
same sort of thing but which didn't experience
Microsoft's success.
In summation, if you come here, you're taking
a chance much like the people who came here
150 years ago in search of gold.
Knock these guys down, knock them down hard...
The thought of a world where one can take an open API like OpenGL, change the syntax of a couple procedure calls, and retitle the thing a proprietary trade secret is a dangerous and destructive concept. Only a lawyer could come up with something that clueless. Unfortunately, it's going to take more lawyers can clean up the mess.
In my dealings with Microsoft, I have never met anyone braindead enough to agree with the concept.
Quite the contrary in fact. This incident tops even Intel's threatening antics towards Thomas Pabst a few year's back over his Pentium II benchmarks.
Suits, gotta love 'em, no wait, no you don't...
"One of my teachers is working on protein folding, and has about 45% accuracy using nueral networks and genetic algorithms."
By whose standards? His own I would guess. That's the problem with protein folders as a group: no objectivity. Every year for the past 35 or so one or more of them claims to have a solution. That's why competitions like CASP 4 arose to address this dilemma. No one at that meeting ever makes claims like 45% accuracy at protein folding, but some do issue the occasional nutso press release wherein they claim their method is better than the competition or others improperly exploit their position to force a wacky article into print about a technique of questionable value for solving protein folding which failed to pan out.
"is there any ever protein folding news?"
Well, protein folding is tough, really tough. You may think cracking 512-bit encryption is tough but that's just peanuts compared to protein folding, the inverse attack on the problem first proposed by K. Eric Drexler has turned out to be much more effective, and entire careers have been wasted chasing this dream (which is not to say it isn't WORTH chasing, but just to put things into perspective).
Who would win in a fight between Daneel Olivaw
and Marvin The Paranoid Android?
Ye gods! I wrote better encryption than that 20 years ago in high school to protect the source code of my multi-user space shooter. Seriously. Said encryption was never broken (though anyone today would have figured it out in a week) rather a sysadmin started watching my CPU usage and used the root password to go into my home directory whilst I was compiling the thing (the only time it was ever decrypted) and copied the sucker away. Ah those were the days. Still, after receiving one of the most annoying, boring, and tedious C++ proficiency tests from Verant after applying there for employment last Summer, this is a real kicker. Scott Le Grand Lead Coder Scatologic
When the Jaguar was released, we were under the
impression that it would be the first networkable
console. At least that's what Atari was saying
at the time and we were a lot more naive back
then.
As things turned out, there was a HORRIBLE
bug in the Jaguar's UART and we had to design
our own proprietary networking hardware and
software to get around it. Unfortunately, Atari
suffered from NIH syndrome so they poopooed the
thing at the time. This hardware was one of
the components of the CatBox. A CatBox allows
one to link up to 32 jaguars. Atari released
the Jaglink which allowed the connection of
two jaguars and they were working on a voice
modem with similar capacity except over phone
lines.
In a sad twist of fate, after a successful first
batch, the maker of the CatBox, took a lot of
money from a lot of people for a second batch and
never delivered product to them as far as I know.
Scott Le Grand
Lead Coder
BattleSphere
The BattleSphere Shrine
The BattleSphere FAQ
Next Generation's Preview/Review
Enjoy...
Nice post, and don't forget we wrote this :-) starting way back in
thing under Linux
1994.
Scott Le Grand
Lead Coder
BattleSphere
While I agree with almost everything in this article, I've come to realize that just about every engineer, artist, designer, and producer in the industry agrees as well. They all want to make cool games, but since that involves risk, the suits aren't willing to let them. Yes, there is a minority of superstars who can do anything they want, but that's not the mass of people who inhabit GDC and read Game Developer and GamaSutra. Most are wage slaves who love games and stick around in the hopes that something will change.
But nothing is changing. And the siren song of the dot coms and hardware companies is sucking away many of the best. In my own experience, I've interviewed for lead coder positions 3 times in as many years and there's always been a more a lucrative and creatively free position in engineering fer cryin' out loud than any game position offered.
And don't cry for the suits. While only 1 game in 35 breaks even and only 1 in 4 of those makes the big bucks, the power of being a publisher absorbs much of the loss. Just read the quarterly reports of the REALLY big guys as they gobble up the little guys and there merely big guys. The developer OTOH is forced to design a game he knows no one wants to play, on a schedule that will consume his staff, and for the arbitrary system of milestones covered in the article.
So what to do? Sony says use Middleware and concentrate on the gameplay. Of course, the "Middleware" is currently "Vaporware" and Sony's 2 months away from launching in Japan, but pay no mind to the man behind the curtain. Not surpringly, the developers balk and look forward to harnessing the power of Sony's new widget on the metal and see right through this well-intentioned but impractical scheme.
So what happens next? I'd say thank god for the Dreamcast. Soul Caliber restored my faith in the ability of a company to deliver an excellent game to the consumer even in this day and age. But of course, at only 2 million units sold, the big guys still won't touch it, favoring an unreleased collection of parts in a box called the Playstation 2 because it got all the best hype. Talk about chasing vaporware. Meanwhile, Nintendo hems and haws about a fantastic new machine called the dolphin with a graphics chipset designed by the same guys who tried to pull that awful scam over on Ars Technica and has anybody seen one of these things yet? And then there's Microsoft who isn't working on a console called the X-Box that won't be released in 2001. Yawn, what's next? The T-Buffer?
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
While I agree with almost everything in this article, I've come to realize that just about every engineer, artist, designer, and producer in the industry agrees as well. They all want to make cool games, but since that involves risk, the suits aren't willing to let them. Yes, there is a minority of superstars who can do anything they want, but that's not the mass of people who inhabit GDC and read Game Developer and GamaSutra. Most are wage slaves who love games and stick around in the hopes that something will change.
But nothing is changing. And the siren song of the dot coms and hardware companies is sucking away many of the best. In my own experience, I've interviewed for lead coder positions 3 times in as many years and there's always been a more a lucrative and creatively free position in engineering fer cryin' out loud than any game position offered.
And don't cry for the suits. While only 1 game in 35 breaks even and only 1 in 4 of those makes the big bucks, the power of being a publisher absorbs much of the loss. Just read the quarterly reports of the >REALLYSo what to do? Sony says use Middleware and concentrate on the gameplay. Of course, the "Middleware" is currently "Vaporware" and Sony's 2 months away from launching in Japan, but pay no mind to the man behind the curtain. Not surpringly, the developers balk and look forward to harnessing the power of Sony's new widget on the metal and see right through this well-intentioned but impractical scheme.
So what happens next? I'd say thank god for the Dreamcast. Soul Caliber restored my faith in the ability of a company to deliver an excellent game to the consumer even in this day and age. But of course, at only 2 million units sold, the big guys still won't touch it, favoring an unreleased collection of parts in a box called the Playstation 2 because it got all the best hype. Talk about chasing vaporware. Meanwhile, Nintendo hems and haws about a fantastic new machine called the dolphin with a graphics chipset designed by the same guys who tried to pull that awful scam over on Ars Technica and has anybody seen one of these things yet? And then there's Microsoft who isn't working on a console called the X-Box that won't be released in 2001. Yawn, what's next? The T-Buffer?
The more things change, the more they stay the same...
Quark ruled, Quark rules, Quark will rule again...
(Assuming of course that they preserved Richard
Benjamin's, Alan Caillou's, and Richard Kelton's DNA). Yeah yeah, Richard Benjamin isn't actually dead, but one look says he ought to be.
In 7 or so episodes, they managed to skewer Star Wars, 2001, Shore Leave, The Ultimate Computer, Mirror Mirror, Amok Time, Flash Gordon, the holiday season in general, The Enemy Within, and a bunch of other stuff I'm sure I'm missing. How dare you equate this to that _holiday_ special whose main drawing point was a little bit of extra footage of Mark Hamill on Tatooine that served to inspire bizarre racial memories of missing Biggs Darkwinder scenes.
Highlights of Quark included Tim Thomerson playing a half-male/half-female character named Gene/Jean who would beat the stuffing out of a bunch of slimy aliens and then immediately check his makeup and whine about breaking a nail, and a dead-on satire of Spock's matin rituals from
the vegetable perspective.
Besides, Buck Henry's true brilliance was best exposed in those scarily precognitive Uncle Roy sketches that must have been Patrick Naughton's teen inspiration between marathon coding stretches and dodging bullies. Ever notice how they show all sorts of sketches from the 70s on SNL reruns, but somehow the Uncle Roy stuff is mysteriously missing? Conspiracy I tell you, pure conspiracy!
The Galaxy Ad Infinitum
PS Quark's boss was Dr. Otto "Bob" Palindrome and
for bonus points, does anyone else remember the unsold pilot they aired right after they dumped Quark and the grafitti on the side of their space station?
Ya know, some people wonder why a large body of us stick around and criticize Jonathan Katz rather than just go away. Here's why.
One, his Columbine columns were quite insightful and they raised the expectation that more insight would come from the individual who could write such material. Two, Katz is front page material here on /. and three, this stuff just gets more and more surreal with today's tirade against scientists and theologians as the source of evil in our society. Sound familiar anyone?
In reality, BioEthics is a well-established field. All of the questions raised murkily in this essay were long ago considered by theologians, bioethicians, and scientists. If Jonathan were to do a web search rather than go to Wired News or watch the BBC, he'd find the debate has been underway for decades.
And if he occasionally read a book (a non-volatile storage medium for you young'uns), then he'd even find out that some of those guys supposedly behind most of human suffering have been much too busy thinking about these very same subjects to subjugate humanity.
>You don't know anything.
Duh who am I?
>Who was it that made the current technological
>revolution possible?
Ross Jeffries?
>College professors.
You mean like the one I caught copying an entire paragraph out of a textbook and claiming it was his own writing or the guy in the NAS who threatened to ruin my career because my data contradicted his NYTimes front page research? I guess you're right though. If it weren't for people like that, I'd probably still be a post-doc in academia rather than at a lucrative Silicon Valley startup.
>Anyone who thinks that the best and the
>brightest go into industry and "do" is living in >a hole in the ground
You're right. Some of the worst managers I've ever dealt with were prof hacks who failed the tenure test.
>The majority of college professors, at least in
>the large universities are primarily researchers
Who spend so much time scrambling for grant money, excreting out Lowest Publishable Units, and misrepresenting/cooking their data that they have little time to teach.
>who, in fact, often found companies
unwilling to hire them.
>if they feel
lucky.
>it wouldn't interfere with their more important >work.
Which of course is maintaining a sweat shop of post-docs, grad students, and interns.
"tell me that the people don't enjoy a better looking first-person shooter. Maybe you need to play the games some. Unreal was a good jump in graphics over the competition at the time, Halflife changed the face of Multi-Player, and Quake Arena has amassed quite a following with the BETA test! While you think up 'creative' new games that you 'think' are interesting, other companies will produce what I want to play. Sorry, it's called supply and demand, it is business."
Truer words have not been spoken here. I have no problem with people like Sweeney and Carmack breathing new life into the FPS genre. They're experts ya know? However, the fool's game is for everyone else to try and best them by throwing money at the problem. You guys pick 2 maybe 3 FPS games a year to play in this genre tops and the rest lose millions of dollars. How much time have you put into great hits like Sin, Requiem, Trespasser, Space Bunnies Must Die, and Redline? Even rags like PC Accelerator can tell you these games are going to flop 1 year before their release but do the game companies ever cut their losses and try to break into new or even somewhat less worn out territory?
No, they just keep putting 2nd and 3rd rate clones and blame it all on market forces.
Burn, baby burn if you ask me...
Actually, the game industry hit rock bottom in 1997 and things have gotten a bit better since. But the general trend is still chasing the hits and that's always a fool's game.
John Carmack and Tim Sweeney are at the top of their form and just about everyone else in the FPS genre is a wannabee. This is a clear sign to go invest resources somewhere else but instead we get Requiems, Redlines and a zillion other half-assed overbudgeted efforts.
Similarly, I loved Warcraft, Command and Conquer, and I have a soft spot for Total Annihilation, but I'm as sick of this genre as I am of FPS games.
I could go on nitpicking the genres, but why bother? It's the same thing over and over again: someone gets a hit and then the industry is slaved into trying to reinvent the wheel for the next 5 years with inferior talent and there's the real trap.
What's driving this I think is that games cost too much. Get the cost of development down and
people will take more chances again rather than chasing hit games in the same manner as Internet stocks. Some of the problem can be addressed by slapping anyone who invested in Ion Storm with a wet fish and the rest of it involves getting serious about development schedules rather than mystically proclaiming game development an art. Using pre-existing engines like that of Quake 2 is a great idea. In the future, there will be more and more of this because the alternative will be simply not to ship. Activision has been recycling their engines for the past 3 years and they do quite well. There are also numerous scene graphs with quite acceptable performance like Viskit. Use them wisely and you'll cut many months out of your schedule.
And if you're kvetching that Carmack's engine looks better, get a clue, in all likelihood, Carmack is smarter than you. Now get over it and make a product that ships. Remember Deer Hunter?
It's pretty old. The project you're mentioning was pursued by Thomas Ray in the early 1990s. His rationalization was that there was no way it could cause a widespread crash of all the computers running his simulation because he wrote his evolving code in an interpreted language. He was incapable of grasping the idea that a bug in the interpreter could cause just as much trouble as writing everything in a native language. The upshot is that people would listen to his talk, then politely point out this shortcoming, and then he would call them all fools (he had a bit of an ego problem too).
Eventually, he got the point...
The Artificial Life community has been doing this stuff since the 1950s but they didn't call it Artificial Life until the 1980s when they decided that if they gave the field a trendy name, people would notice it.