If even a tiny amount of what SK claims is true, Epic deserves to get slammed hard in court.
It depends on the specifics of the contract. I haven't seen it, have you?
What was promised? What was delivered? I'm not going to take SK's word for it just because they think I should... and neither is a court of law. (I hope... the judicial system is pretty ridiculous these days.)
On the other hand, Epic's claims are pretty obvious from SK's complaint itself. They've developed a derivative engine. They want the legal rights to use it without Epic's IP hanging over their heads. They want to not have to pay anything, at all... and in fact want a cut of Gears profits.
Epic's support sucking? I don't doubt it at all. Epic's engine hard to use? I'm sure it is. But more than one thing troubles me about the SK lawsuit... starting with the fact that they want to keep using UE3 for free.
I don't like that the discussion is so polarized on this, really. "SK is incompetent" "Epic is incompetent" blah blah blah... like they can't both be a little bit true. It seems like both parties are at least a little wrong in this situation, but I imagine only one will win this lawsuit.
I get the impression that Gamasutra is hard up for real news sometimes. I want to call Dyack's crusade Quixotian, but I've never read the novel so I'm not sure it'd be accurate. His preaching is odd, though, because he's railing against something that seems quite insignificant to me. On the other hand it's very significant to him, because his game got critically panned an E3 or two ago when they showed a crappy build of a not-anywhere-near-complete game. He can claim it's not about that all he wants, but it's incredibly obvious that it is. It's a bit sad.
Would the game industry be better if reviewers didn't see early copies of games? Would it be any different at all? Probably not much. I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish, but somehow he seems to have convinced himself that this is a life or death choice for the industry. It's all a bit ridiculous. In a month he's gone from "seeing early copies of games is bad" to "the enthusiast press is bad." I'm wondering where his slippery slope ends, but I'm sure quality industry publications like Gamasutra will be sure to keep me informed.
I was wondering if that was an exaggeration, but some random "Cost of Living" calculator put it right on the dot... $80k in San Fran is as good as $45k in Champaign.
That makes me think I might have asked for about $15k too much when I interviewed at V a few years back. Yikes.
It's even more startling considering that I was looking at non-programming jobs in the midwest paying not much lower than $45k... so odd.
There is one game GTA3, it is set in Liberty City. It has two offshoots... GTA:Vice City and GTA:San Andreas, which I have not played, but gather from the titles that they are not set in Liberty City.
I'm a programmer at a game development company and I went through a CS major in a liberal arts school. Maybe I'm misreading it, but your comment seems to imply that a person with a liberal arts BS in CS would be completely unprepared for a career in the game industry, while a person who had successfully graduated from Digipen or Full Sail would be more prepared. Of course, things are not so clear-cut in practice.
The main things game companies want, as I see it, are people who are good problem solvers and fast learners. Usually, fluency in C or C++ is required, but developers will inevitably be working with techniques and libraries that they're not familiar with. This is especially true considering that most consoles use toolkits and APIs that it's hard or impossible to get experience with unless you're in the industry.
Game schools aren't the be all and end all of preparation for a career in the game industry. In fact, they don't really give anyone a practical advantage as far as getting hired. If you're good at problem solving, good at programming, and good at learning you can have a successful career in the game industry. If you're not, you may get into the industry but you'll be culled out sooner or later (or promoted to management... *shudder*).
We've hired a couple guys from Digipen/FullSail. They've ranged from good hires to moderate hires to complete flakes. We've actually had better luck with the guys we've gotten from non-game schools. But that's all anecdotal... school preparation isn't the thing that makes or breaks your ability to perform in the game industry.
I have to agree with those who have pointed out that this article is terrible and full of baseless speculation. For instance, there's this paragraph...
All console manufacturers require developers to follow certain code requirements to ensure basic quality and functionality. Many of the best Xbox developers, such as Ubisoft and Tecmo just to name a few, have gone above and beyond the requirements. In fact, a few have pushed their games to the metal, squeezing out as much performance as possible from Microsoft's system. So, it's likely that the most technically superior games will be backward compatible on Xbox 360.
Usually, games that go "above and beyond" to get extra performance do so by making their code lower-level and more system-specific. If anything, it would make these particular games harder to emulate, as they would be less tied to the D3D API and more tied to the specifics of the Xbox GPU.
So either I completely missed the author's logic, or he's got it 100% backwards.
Last I heard it was verified that the sex minigame could be unlocked in the PS2 version using an Action Replay. No need to chip and modify files... or do you still believe the lie that this was completely a 3rd party modification?
I'm quoting from the ASC Webpage when I say that...
The ASC is not a labor union or guild, but is an educational, cultural and professional organization. Membership is possible by invitation and is extended only to directors of photography with distinguished credits in the industry.
Are those poor cinematographers working without a union? OH NO!!!
But I'm seeing here 3 top game creators saying "Pirate our stuff! We don't care!"
You're seeing a highly respected programmer saying he doesn't care if you pirate his games.
You're seeing an indie game creator say that game rentals are not the same as piracy.
You're seeing a respected game designer say that he doesn't believe piracy affects him.
You have here in order:
One person telling you to pirate games
One person whose comment you're willfully misinterpreting (and who doesn't speak for the commercial game industry anyway)
One person who is delusional
If you think that you have the moral high-ground to pirate games just because Chris Hecker is a hippy, then you're not really thinking straight about the whole issue, are you? Don't you think before you pirate a game Chris Hecker has worked on that you should ask the other 200 people that also worked on it to see if they mind?
Don't you already pirate games? Aren't you just scratching for any excuse to make your blatantly illegal activity seem morally OK?
Your conscience already seems to know what you don't: pirating games is illegal and rips off game publishers and developers. The only person it benefits is you, the ungrateful cheapskate.
It's hard to separate the ignorant crap from the insightful comments in this talk... much like slashdot.
All three comments on piracy were stupid. If Warren Spector actually believes that, he's ignorant or out of touch. The fact that many people tried to pirate HL2 and then bought it when their piracy attempts failed (and then were subsequently banned) proves him wrong. Not just kind of wrong, but ignoring-that-which-is-blatantly-obvious wrong.
Warren Spector is, however, correct in that a digital distribution system would be nice. I'm speaking as a consumer rather than a game developer here. There are better reasons to want it than so you can let your schedules slip... after all open-source development teaches us that the only thing that makes software "finished" is deadlines. Steam is a step in the right direction, but the ability for Valve to arbitrarily shut off your access to the game isn't part of what I would call a good distribution system.
The rest of the talk seemed like people complaining about how The Man is stifling their ability to innovate. The industry is profit oriented... we all understand this. Yes, it affects how games are scheduled, funded, released, and distributed. Yes, this might not be the best thing for developers or consumers. But, if you don't like any of these things and you don't care how big your paycheck is, then you have no excuse not to go indie, right? If you're already indie, I wonder why you're complaining about any of this in the first place.
Why stay in an industry that's forcing you away from doing the things you want to do? Just so you can complain about it? That doesn't seem like a good reason.
They've backed it up with PSP, as far as I'm concerned. The article mentions this... compared to PS2, the PSP is extremely nice to developers. As the toolset matures, it will become even better.
Wow, looking at the jury I see many people with a lot of years in the game industry, and some people whose qualifications are dubious. I wonder about the criteria for inclusion in the jury. IGF says this:
The members of the IGF jury have been selected because they either are game developers themselves or they review/write about games in their daily work. In short, they are professionals in the game industry.
And there is at least one person on the jury that I would say is emphatically not a professional in the game industry, as well as one or two people that are professionals, but don't seem to have much experience.
I have to suggest that they refine their qualifications a little bit.
This was just a Gameshark mod of the PS2 version of DOA2 that has been around *forever*. Some models were still on the disk from being used in cinematics (including a non-explicitly nude Kasumi for the intro cinematic). Some people found a Gameshark code that would let you use some of these models in-game.
I guess this Japanese company just repackaged the game with the Gameshark hack builtin and started selling it. Clearly illegal by any stretch of anyone's imagination, and not too bright on the part of consumers either, when they could have gotten the same thing by buying an official copy and a Gameshark.
Do you know what the best way to speed up load times is when you're reading off a DVD?
To load as much data as once as possible. Huh, that's kinda the exact opposite of what you implied.
It's a safe bet that the same principles apply on the PSP. I don't think there will be many problems, given that longtime Sony developers have 8 or so years of experience in minimizing load times off of rotational media.
It's funny how far people bend over backwards to try to legitimize their filesharing habits. The "philosophy" is simple: filesharing exists because people can conveniently obtain entertainment at no charge.
That's all it is... we used Napster because we were cheapskates, not because of some failure by the entertainment industry. If you want legitimate and convenient music downloading, go use ITunes. The solutions exist... you have no more excuses.
So please, be honest with yourselves... there's no moral high-ground in filesharing.
The Winelib portion is partially true. The Sims and Kohan would be native ports using Winelib, but instead Transgaming just distributed win32 executables and a modified version of WineX to run them. They probably work just as well but if I was in charge I would have used winelib.
I don't think the Loki part is true. Gav and Ryan compare notes like you said and this is probably what you read about (specifically on Medal of Honor), but the overlap between Loki and Transgaming was pretty small, and I'm sure they didn't collaborate on anything.
Regarding the propaganda point, the author mentioned the following in the Linuxgames.com comments about this article:
I'm amused that you think that lack of citation makes things not factual. If you live in the US, I sure hope you don't watch/trust the evening news. Here are some citations about "dubious claims", since you are determined not to trust anything I say:
Dubious claims by Transgaming about Transgaming:
http://www.transgaming.com/about.php
Dubious (as in, just plain false or poorly researched) claims by Transgaming about the game industry, debunked here:
http://timedoctor.org/index.php?id=1798
Transgaming did change their page after the article above was posted. The quote won't link to anything anymore since it was when they had their old website.
I can't find any dubious claims about the native porting process right now, since their website is down, but usually you don't have to look much farther than the Gav States column or the one by the other guy. When they put out The Sims, their claim that their process was better because they could complete a port in 3 months was especially amusing to me, since I had just completed porting a title for Loki in one week.
The part that *is* true is that Ryan and Gav get along. I'm not aware of any contributions made by Transgaming to any Loki technology, and I'm not aware of any native ports that exist because of Transgaming's help. If you care to point out some credible evidence of either of these, please go ahead. However be aware that I am in an excellent position to know things about Loki and the people associated with it.
They contributed to Loki's technology, Gavriel is on good Terms with Ryan (Icculus) and there are many other linux NATIVE technologies that owe their success in part to direct help from Transgaming.
Well, one-third of that is true, so I guess congratulations.
Have you considered the possibility that the author of this article might be a real contributor to the gaming industry in Linux?
1) If it were accurate, it would have said "Name one Bruckheimer film that didn't have a black character acting as a home boy gangsta wise cracking rapper."
2) It doesn't excuse Rockstar's blatant racial stereotyping. GTA3 did it too, and Midnight Club. Rockstar seems to think that humor == racial stereotypes, and it sucks.
I think Rockstar is doing more to tarnish the reputation of the game industry than any other company currently. It's pretty crappy that their games are the ones selling the most.
Slashdot Mirror
It depends on the specifics of the contract. I haven't seen it, have you?
What was promised? What was delivered? I'm not going to take SK's word for it just because they think I should... and neither is a court of law. (I hope... the judicial system is pretty ridiculous these days.)
On the other hand, Epic's claims are pretty obvious from SK's complaint itself. They've developed a derivative engine. They want the legal rights to use it without Epic's IP hanging over their heads. They want to not have to pay anything, at all... and in fact want a cut of Gears profits.
Epic's support sucking? I don't doubt it at all. Epic's engine hard to use? I'm sure it is. But more than one thing troubles me about the SK lawsuit... starting with the fact that they want to keep using UE3 for free.
I don't like that the discussion is so polarized on this, really. "SK is incompetent" "Epic is incompetent" blah blah blah... like they can't both be a little bit true. It seems like both parties are at least a little wrong in this situation, but I imagine only one will win this lawsuit.
I get the impression that Gamasutra is hard up for real news sometimes. I want to call Dyack's crusade Quixotian, but I've never read the novel so I'm not sure it'd be accurate. His preaching is odd, though, because he's railing against something that seems quite insignificant to me. On the other hand it's very significant to him, because his game got critically panned an E3 or two ago when they showed a crappy build of a not-anywhere-near-complete game. He can claim it's not about that all he wants, but it's incredibly obvious that it is. It's a bit sad.
Would the game industry be better if reviewers didn't see early copies of games? Would it be any different at all? Probably not much. I'm not sure what he's trying to accomplish, but somehow he seems to have convinced himself that this is a life or death choice for the industry. It's all a bit ridiculous. In a month he's gone from "seeing early copies of games is bad" to "the enthusiast press is bad." I'm wondering where his slippery slope ends, but I'm sure quality industry publications like Gamasutra will be sure to keep me informed.
I was wondering if that was an exaggeration, but some random "Cost of Living" calculator put it right on the dot... $80k in San Fran is as good as $45k in Champaign.
That makes me think I might have asked for about $15k too much when I interviewed at V a few years back. Yikes.
It's even more startling considering that I was looking at non-programming jobs in the midwest paying not much lower than $45k... so odd.
Well, it's somewhat obvious that the news poster hasn't played GTA3 either, because if he had he'd have known it wasn't based in Liberty City.
Maybe you haven't either? (See http://www.ebgames.com/product.asp?product_id=9382 42)
There is one game GTA3, it is set in Liberty City. It has two offshoots... GTA:Vice City and GTA:San Andreas, which I have not played, but gather from the titles that they are not set in Liberty City.
I'm a programmer at a game development company and I went through a CS major in a liberal arts school. Maybe I'm misreading it, but your comment seems to imply that a person with a liberal arts BS in CS would be completely unprepared for a career in the game industry, while a person who had successfully graduated from Digipen or Full Sail would be more prepared. Of course, things are not so clear-cut in practice.
The main things game companies want, as I see it, are people who are good problem solvers and fast learners. Usually, fluency in C or C++ is required, but developers will inevitably be working with techniques and libraries that they're not familiar with. This is especially true considering that most consoles use toolkits and APIs that it's hard or impossible to get experience with unless you're in the industry.
Game schools aren't the be all and end all of preparation for a career in the game industry. In fact, they don't really give anyone a practical advantage as far as getting hired. If you're good at problem solving, good at programming, and good at learning you can have a successful career in the game industry. If you're not, you may get into the industry but you'll be culled out sooner or later (or promoted to management... *shudder*).
We've hired a couple guys from Digipen/FullSail. They've ranged from good hires to moderate hires to complete flakes. We've actually had better luck with the guys we've gotten from non-game schools. But that's all anecdotal... school preparation isn't the thing that makes or breaks your ability to perform in the game industry.
Usually, games that go "above and beyond" to get extra performance do so by making their code lower-level and more system-specific. If anything, it would make these particular games harder to emulate, as they would be less tied to the D3D API and more tied to the specifics of the Xbox GPU.
So either I completely missed the author's logic, or he's got it 100% backwards.
Just put a similar warning on Action Replays. Problem solved.
Last I heard it was verified that the sex minigame could be unlocked in the PS2 version using an Action Replay. No need to chip and modify files... or do you still believe the lie that this was completely a 3rd party modification?
The ASC is not a labor union or guild, but is an educational, cultural and professional organization. Membership is possible by invitation and is extended only to directors of photography with distinguished credits in the industry.
Are those poor cinematographers working without a union? OH NO!!!
You're seeing a highly respected programmer saying he doesn't care if you pirate his games.
You're seeing an indie game creator say that game rentals are not the same as piracy.
You're seeing a respected game designer say that he doesn't believe piracy affects him.
You have here in order:
If you think that you have the moral high-ground to pirate games just because Chris Hecker is a hippy, then you're not really thinking straight about the whole issue, are you? Don't you think before you pirate a game Chris Hecker has worked on that you should ask the other 200 people that also worked on it to see if they mind?
Don't you already pirate games? Aren't you just scratching for any excuse to make your blatantly illegal activity seem morally OK?
Your conscience already seems to know what you don't: pirating games is illegal and rips off game publishers and developers. The only person it benefits is you, the ungrateful cheapskate.
All three comments on piracy were stupid. If Warren Spector actually believes that, he's ignorant or out of touch. The fact that many people tried to pirate HL2 and then bought it when their piracy attempts failed (and then were subsequently banned) proves him wrong. Not just kind of wrong, but ignoring-that-which-is-blatantly-obvious wrong.
Warren Spector is, however, correct in that a digital distribution system would be nice. I'm speaking as a consumer rather than a game developer here. There are better reasons to want it than so you can let your schedules slip... after all open-source development teaches us that the only thing that makes software "finished" is deadlines. Steam is a step in the right direction, but the ability for Valve to arbitrarily shut off your access to the game isn't part of what I would call a good distribution system.
The rest of the talk seemed like people complaining about how The Man is stifling their ability to innovate. The industry is profit oriented... we all understand this. Yes, it affects how games are scheduled, funded, released, and distributed. Yes, this might not be the best thing for developers or consumers. But, if you don't like any of these things and you don't care how big your paycheck is, then you have no excuse not to go indie, right? If you're already indie, I wonder why you're complaining about any of this in the first place.
Why stay in an industry that's forcing you away from doing the things you want to do? Just so you can complain about it? That doesn't seem like a good reason.
They've backed it up with PSP, as far as I'm concerned. The article mentions this... compared to PS2, the PSP is extremely nice to developers. As the toolset matures, it will become even better.
Shrunk down PS2? It's better than PS2 in a lot of ways. I agree on the analog stick, though. It's pretty painful to use.
The members of the IGF jury have been selected because they either are game developers themselves or they review/write about games in their daily work. In short, they are professionals in the game industry.
And there is at least one person on the jury that I would say is emphatically not a professional in the game industry, as well as one or two people that are professionals, but don't seem to have much experience.
I have to suggest that they refine their qualifications a little bit.
It's using the wrong libGL.so.1. I didn't think people had this problem anymore.
I guess this Japanese company just repackaged the game with the Gameshark hack builtin and started selling it. Clearly illegal by any stretch of anyone's imagination, and not too bright on the part of consumers either, when they could have gotten the same thing by buying an official copy and a Gameshark.
To load as much data as once as possible. Huh, that's kinda the exact opposite of what you implied.
It's a safe bet that the same principles apply on the PSP. I don't think there will be many problems, given that longtime Sony developers have 8 or so years of experience in minimizing load times off of rotational media.
Mine is pre-Microsoft and starts with a t and is upgraded. This leads me to believe it's not alphabetical.
That's all it is... we used Napster because we were cheapskates, not because of some failure by the entertainment industry. If you want legitimate and convenient music downloading, go use ITunes. The solutions exist... you have no more excuses.
So please, be honest with yourselves... there's no moral high-ground in filesharing.
I don't think the Loki part is true. Gav and Ryan compare notes like you said and this is probably what you read about (specifically on Medal of Honor), but the overlap between Loki and Transgaming was pretty small, and I'm sure they didn't collaborate on anything.
The part that *is* true is that Ryan and Gav get along. I'm not aware of any contributions made by Transgaming to any Loki technology, and I'm not aware of any native ports that exist because of Transgaming's help. If you care to point out some credible evidence of either of these, please go ahead. However be aware that I am in an excellent position to know things about Loki and the people associated with it.
They contributed to Loki's technology, Gavriel is on good Terms with Ryan (Icculus) and there are many other linux NATIVE technologies that owe their success in part to direct help from Transgaming.
Well, one-third of that is true, so I guess congratulations.
Have you considered the possibility that the author of this article might be a real contributor to the gaming industry in Linux?
I don't believe SiN and Jagged Alliance are free in any sense of the word.
1) If it were accurate, it would have said "Name one Bruckheimer film that didn't have a black character acting as a home boy gangsta wise cracking rapper."
2) It doesn't excuse Rockstar's blatant racial stereotyping. GTA3 did it too, and Midnight Club. Rockstar seems to think that humor == racial stereotypes, and it sucks.
I think Rockstar is doing more to tarnish the reputation of the game industry than any other company currently. It's pretty crappy that their games are the ones selling the most.