You know, I work for a game company in the US, and despite all the bad press out there, if you find the right company it can be quite good. Where I work they put in a lot of effort to try and manage the product so that people don't have to work a lot of hours, by choosing to scale back ideas that may be a bit too work intensive to get done in a reasonable amount of time. They also make a conscious and strong effort to send people home who have been working a lot of hours, and if you are pulling the long hours, they try hard to recognize that. The best part, and this is what makes it work out, is they never ever tell you how many hours to work. They ask you to agree to a set amount of work, and then you manage your own time. There's always overtime and what not, but I had that when I was working a dead end tech job for a big corp, and at least here I believe in the product and am satisfied in my work. I take on more than I should at times and end up working quite a few hours, but that's always my own choice, and I've even been told to cut back on the things I agree to if they feel I'm overdoing it. In short, it's a job like any other, but I'm much happier. Sure, there are game companies that may over use and abuse their employees, but that's a nation wide problem, not a games industry problem. We're just the curent whipping boy for the problem because it's easy to single us out. You think lawyers and doctors and plumbers and phone company employees aren't asked or even expected to work on the weekends??
Yeah, all games do real time rendering. It's the quality of the rendering that goes down with less powerful machines. The definition of rendering is drawing a graphical scene, which is exactly what all game consoles do.
PS2 can do some decent quality real time cutscenes (Xenosaga comes to mind). I imagine the PS3 will look about 10 times better than that, and as we've all seen with the recent Unreal3 videos, ray tracing is NOT the final word in making a scene look very good.
Read, read, and then read some more about how games work, how they are made, etc. Go to sites like Gamasutra.com, flipcode.com and gamedev.net. Practice your skills by writing 3d Demos (getting OpenGL books and reading the DirectX doc tutorials come to mind). Buy Game Programming Gems and read it cover to cover. Get to know people in the game industry, and keep them as contacts (but be nice and friendly). Actively get involved in a mod for any game (Half-Life, Quake3, Unreal Tournament, Tribes2) and whatever you do, stick it to the end. Companies will recognize polish and hard work. Also, play lots of games to try and figure out how they work.
What not to do/expect:
1) Don't expect everyone to help you. Try to figure things out for yourself. The net is your best research tool.
2) Don't expect to get in right away. I busted tail on reading learning and working for several years before I got a break.
3) Don't listen to these trolls who tell you that all the hard work is pointless or that a nice demo won't help. They will, and those that review demos will recognize it for what it is.
4) Don't think that because you are a good coder or have played a lot of games or your friends say you are smart that you deserve a shot. You don't, because all the others trying to get in are the same way. You need to learn about the industry. I finally got in because I didn't expect anyone to help me but me.
I used to work at ditto.com, and while it's no Scour, it's a great tool for finding images from the net. I personally worked on the crawler code with another guy who wrote most of the initial system and got ditto started. It's pretty cool and works well. Use it while you can since it's about to go the way of Scour as well.
A very direct, to the point, and well thought out response. I think we can all agree though that Microsoft isn't about logic, and is all about stampeding anyone in their way. I doubt they will even bat an eyelash at your letter, and instead take it right to court. If they can tell Judge Jackson to his face he's wrong and an idiot, they won't even think twice about doing it to you.
However, I very much wish you the best of luck, and I agree exactly with your letter. Just another case of a corp trying to turn might into right.
Carmack's got it right about this guy. He's basically trying to rewrite the law because it was inconvienent for him. Too bad, that's the price you pay for using the GPL (why not just post the source on the site and let people download it without having to ask HIM for it). He says he doesn't want to obfuscate the code because that's against the spirit of the GPL, but then neither is denying people access to your code, so the real issue here is protecting his own ego and lashing out at the "bad people."
Unfortunatly, if he can make this hold up in court (if it gets there), then the GPL is screwed and we can all pretty much kiss the Open Source movement goodbye. I can see it now, to install RedHat you have to agree that you have no right to the code. Blah.
There's always the issue that most people will find that keeping music on their HD is much more susceptible to loss than if they have a physical disk in their hands. Hell, I just downloaded 8 Gigs of material of Napster this week and burned it onto CD's. Why? Well, ease of transfer between work and home, but also because all it takes is one bad day and there goes the HD and all that music I downloaded.
Physical media will ALWAYS exist, but I suspect in the future it will be as more of a backup device. The big question right now is, who the hell has the time to do this stuff most of the time? I sure don't. We all know that the feasibility of transfering DVDs over the Net is that it isn't, yet the damn movie industry was up in arms because they exepected to loose revenue due to pirates (yeah, it's happened, but only with a small number of zealots).
This is how things work though. They put in as much copy protection as to make it annoying, we crack it and a small amount of us will try before we buy, with another percentage of us outright stealing stuff (I'll admit, I don't own legal copies of all that stuff I downloaded from Napster). However, to Bob and Jane Public, it's just too much damn hassel and they'll continue to pay for the stuff. And some of us will also because we will want a copy that is more permanent than what our virus scanners are protecting us from. In the end, the system will change not a bit, and we'll all be 80 years old and visiting Slashdot 2050 and bitching about how outrageous prices are how the entertainment industry seems to be taking over the world.
I gotta admit, I laughed myself silly at Dreamcast. From Sega Master System (cool) to Saturn (excellent, semi-geeky) to....Dreamcast?? Blah. Why not paint it pink and call it the LoveMachine?
We need cool names for systems like Jaguar, not froo froo names like Dolphin for our future generation of gamers.
Except for the fact that their whole purpose of existence is TO act in our best interests. If they aren't doing that, then what is the point? Why the point is to make corporations feel good. Yet their site claims to act in our interests to protect our privacy. Seems obvious to me then that they are lying to us, and as such are a Bad Thing(tm). It would be no different than if the your doctor started acting in his best interests and not yours. Some doctors do act like that, but the majority of them are then sued for malpractice. Cynicism has nothing to do with it.
This is a very simple problem. Everyone has watched Microsoft thumb their noses at the consumer time and time again, and now that thought process has moved itself into the mainstream, stronger than ever before. It has never been easier for companies to pry into your private life, and we make it easy for them to do that by using their products. It seems to me that now, more than ever before, companies do not care about the consumer. When companies like Ask Jeeves can get stinking rich off of a crappy useless web site, then they have to ask themselves what they gain by paying attention to us "little people." Microsoft keeps on giving us "features" we don't want, and yet they continue to pat themselves on the back. Executives are seeing money rolling in the door, and no punishment comes for doing the wrong thing (Real's stock shot up 40% since this issue, MS's stock continues to go up after the judge's ruling). Why is this? It's becuase the stock market is making the money for these people, not us. Product sales are a small percentage of profits (has Amazon made a profit yet??), whereas stock prices continue to soar. We matter not at all in the corporate world, and as such we are seeing the problems like with Real, and we will continue to see these problems until we stand up and do something about it.
Have that gotten rid of that -horrible- computer synth voice we've had since the days of War Games??? I can see it now, a Russian diplomat walks up to an American diplomat and asks the question that ends the world. "Would you like to play a game?"
Well, I spent a considerable amount of time making sure that Ameritech (midwest baby Bell) could have a phone ordering system that was Y2K compliant. In many cases people's phones would have been cut off because the system would have assumed that they had not paid for their service. So not preparing for it is stupid if you are a programmer type. Hardware people have considerably less to worry about, but should still be double checking with their vendors and updating their firmware/software just in case.
The guy heading up our Y2K readiness at Ameritech had a friend in a Fortune500 company that said that they were completely cutting off their French branch and redirecting their customers in that area because the managers of that office refused to do Y2K testing. Supposedly, that office was being isolated on the company WAN and as soon as something wrong happened there, all management was going to be fired. The reason? Extensive testing in other branches proved that customers would not get proper service without Y2K software fixes. Don't know how true that story is, but it's still something to think about.
I have used Apache recently, and all I know is that it would not run my CGI properly, whereas I had it up and running in IIS in minutes. As far as the MTBR, on the servers doing ASP, you are right, they require reboot more than I would expect, but the machines serving straight HTML have a MTBR of roughly infinity (ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit). In any case, I'm still exploring Apache at home, and I'm hoping the new release will fix the CGI bug, as it seems to suggest it will.
I don't know about *nix and Apache really being better web servers. I'm no professional on this matter, but where I work we have been running just fine on several IIS/NT machines that take a heavy beating at all times of the day, and despite some ASP bugs, everything seems to work fine (once we figured out what we were doing). I'm probably going to get lynched for saying this, but from what I've seen, Apache is just different, not really better.
I think what Talin is experiencing is a standard feeling in the world. I've been a software developer for roughly 3 years now and I haven't been anywhere near developing for a games company except what little I can do in my free time. The experiences he has are everwhere, from Ameritech to Royal Carribean Cruises to small internet companies (all of which I've worked for). This is the way the world works and I can only surmise that he is finally becoming disenfranchised with it at his age of 41. My father was a chemist and expressed the -exact- same sentiments about his industry, and the whole thing about the industry being aimed at the youth, well that is also how the world works. The young come in and conquer the old, pushing them back and doing things differently until they too get burnt out and disillusioned. It is the endless cycle of life unfortunatly. So what to do? Change the world you live in. Work for what you want to work for, and not the people you dislike. I'm only 25 and I already know I don't want to work in a corporate situation anymore, and I don't want to work for anyone else for much longer either. At some point I will start my own company because it is the only way I can be truly happy. Until I can do that, I'm going to continue to deal with other people's crap because that is how I get my paycheck.
Oh, and I'm sure he will get burnt out on e-commerce if he stays there for too longer too.
Slashdot Mirror
You know, I work for a game company in the US, and despite all the bad press out there, if you find the right company it can be quite good. Where I work they put in a lot of effort to try and manage the product so that people don't have to work a lot of hours, by choosing to scale back ideas that may be a bit too work intensive to get done in a reasonable amount of time. They also make a conscious and strong effort to send people home who have been working a lot of hours, and if you are pulling the long hours, they try hard to recognize that. The best part, and this is what makes it work out, is they never ever tell you how many hours to work. They ask you to agree to a set amount of work, and then you manage your own time. There's always overtime and what not, but I had that when I was working a dead end tech job for a big corp, and at least here I believe in the product and am satisfied in my work. I take on more than I should at times and end up working quite a few hours, but that's always my own choice, and I've even been told to cut back on the things I agree to if they feel I'm overdoing it. In short, it's a job like any other, but I'm much happier. Sure, there are game companies that may over use and abuse their employees, but that's a nation wide problem, not a games industry problem. We're just the curent whipping boy for the problem because it's easy to single us out. You think lawyers and doctors and plumbers and phone company employees aren't asked or even expected to work on the weekends??
Yeah, all games do real time rendering. It's the quality of the rendering that goes down with less powerful machines. The definition of rendering is drawing a graphical scene, which is exactly what all game consoles do.
PS2 can do some decent quality real time cutscenes (Xenosaga comes to mind). I imagine the PS3 will look about 10 times better than that, and as we've all seen with the recent Unreal3 videos, ray tracing is NOT the final word in making a scene look very good.
Read, read, and then read some more about how games work, how they are made, etc. Go to sites like Gamasutra.com, flipcode.com and gamedev.net. Practice your skills by writing 3d Demos (getting OpenGL books and reading the DirectX doc tutorials come to mind). Buy Game Programming Gems and read it cover to cover. Get to know people in the game industry, and keep them as contacts (but be nice and friendly). Actively get involved in a mod for any game (Half-Life, Quake3, Unreal Tournament, Tribes2) and whatever you do, stick it to the end. Companies will recognize polish and hard work. Also, play lots of games to try and figure out how they work.
What not to do/expect:
1) Don't expect everyone to help you. Try to figure things out for yourself. The net is your best research tool.
2) Don't expect to get in right away. I busted tail on reading learning and working for several years before I got a break.
3) Don't listen to these trolls who tell you that all the hard work is pointless or that a nice demo won't help. They will, and those that review demos will recognize it for what it is.
4) Don't think that because you are a good coder or have played a lot of games or your friends say you are smart that you deserve a shot. You don't, because all the others trying to get in are the same way. You need to learn about the industry. I finally got in because I didn't expect anyone to help me but me.
I used to work at ditto.com, and while it's no Scour, it's a great tool for finding images from the net. I personally worked on the crawler code with another guy who wrote most of the initial system and got ditto started. It's pretty cool and works well. Use it while you can since it's about to go the way of Scour as well.
A very direct, to the point, and well thought out response. I think we can all agree though that Microsoft isn't about logic, and is all about stampeding anyone in their way. I doubt they will even bat an eyelash at your letter, and instead take it right to court. If they can tell Judge Jackson to his face he's wrong and an idiot, they won't even think twice about doing it to you.
However, I very much wish you the best of luck, and I agree exactly with your letter. Just another case of a corp trying to turn might into right.
Carmack's got it right about this guy. He's basically trying to rewrite the law because it was inconvienent for him. Too bad, that's the price you pay for using the GPL (why not just post the source on the site and let people download it without having to ask HIM for it). He says he doesn't want to obfuscate the code because that's against the spirit of the GPL, but then neither is denying people access to your code, so the real issue here is protecting his own ego and lashing out at the "bad people."
Unfortunatly, if he can make this hold up in court (if it gets there), then the GPL is screwed and we can all pretty much kiss the Open Source movement goodbye. I can see it now, to install RedHat you have to agree that you have no right to the code. Blah.
There's always the issue that most people will find that keeping music on their HD is much more susceptible to loss than if they have a physical disk in their hands. Hell, I just downloaded 8 Gigs of material of Napster this week and burned it onto CD's. Why? Well, ease of transfer between work and home, but also because all it takes is one bad day and there goes the HD and all that music I downloaded.
Physical media will ALWAYS exist, but I suspect in the future it will be as more of a backup device. The big question right now is, who the hell has the time to do this stuff most of the time? I sure don't. We all know that the feasibility of transfering DVDs over the Net is that it isn't, yet the damn movie industry was up in arms because they exepected to loose revenue due to pirates (yeah, it's happened, but only with a small number of zealots).
This is how things work though. They put in as much copy protection as to make it annoying, we crack it and a small amount of us will try before we buy, with another percentage of us outright stealing stuff (I'll admit, I don't own legal copies of all that stuff I downloaded from Napster). However, to Bob and Jane Public, it's just too much damn hassel and they'll continue to pay for the stuff. And some of us will also because we will want a copy that is more permanent than what our virus scanners are protecting us from. In the end, the system will change not a bit, and we'll all be 80 years old and visiting Slashdot 2050 and bitching about how outrageous prices are how the entertainment industry seems to be taking over the world.
Playstation?? Dreamcast??
I gotta admit, I laughed myself silly at Dreamcast. From Sega Master System (cool) to Saturn (excellent, semi-geeky) to....Dreamcast??
Blah. Why not paint it pink and call it the LoveMachine?
We need cool names for systems like Jaguar, not froo froo names like Dolphin for our future generation of gamers.
Except for the fact that their whole purpose of existence is TO act in our best interests. If they aren't doing that, then what is the point? Why the point is to make corporations feel good. Yet their site claims to act in our interests to protect our privacy. Seems obvious to me then that they are lying to us, and as such are a Bad Thing(tm). It would be no different than if the your doctor started acting in his best interests and not yours. Some doctors do act like that, but the majority of them are then sued for malpractice. Cynicism has nothing to do with it.
Have that gotten rid of that -horrible- computer synth voice we've had since the days of War Games??? I can see it now, a Russian diplomat walks up to an American diplomat and asks the question that ends the world.
"Would you like to play a game?"
Well, I spent a considerable amount of time making sure that Ameritech (midwest baby Bell) could have a phone ordering system that was Y2K compliant. In many cases people's phones would have been cut off because the system would have assumed that they had not paid for their service. So not preparing for it is stupid if you are a programmer type. Hardware people have considerably less to worry about, but should still be double checking with their vendors and updating their firmware/software just in case.
The guy heading up our Y2K readiness at Ameritech had a friend in a Fortune500 company that said that they were completely cutting off their French branch and redirecting their customers in that area because the managers of that office refused to do Y2K testing. Supposedly, that office was being isolated on the company WAN and as soon as something wrong happened there, all management was going to be fired. The reason? Extensive testing in other branches proved that customers would not get proper service without Y2K software fixes. Don't know how true that story is, but it's still something to think about.
I have used Apache recently, and all I know is that it would not run my CGI properly, whereas I had it up and running in IIS in minutes. As far as the MTBR, on the servers doing ASP, you are right, they require reboot more than I would expect, but the machines serving straight HTML have a MTBR of roughly infinity (ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit). In any case, I'm still exploring Apache at home, and I'm hoping the new release will fix the CGI bug, as it seems to suggest it will.
I don't know about *nix and Apache really being better web servers. I'm no professional on this matter, but where I work we have been running just fine on several IIS/NT machines that take a heavy beating at all times of the day, and despite some ASP bugs, everything seems to work fine (once we figured out what we were doing). I'm probably going to get lynched for saying this, but from what I've seen, Apache is just different, not really better.
I think what Talin is experiencing is a standard feeling in the world. I've been a software developer for roughly 3 years now and I haven't been anywhere near developing for a games company except what little I can do in my free time. The experiences he has are everwhere, from Ameritech to Royal Carribean Cruises to small internet companies (all of which I've worked for).
This is the way the world works and I can only surmise that he is finally becoming disenfranchised with it at his age of 41. My father was a chemist and expressed the -exact- same sentiments about his industry, and the whole thing about the industry being aimed at the youth, well that is also how the world works.
The young come in and conquer the old, pushing them back and doing things differently until they too get burnt out and disillusioned. It is the endless cycle of life unfortunatly.
So what to do? Change the world you live in. Work for what you want to work for, and not the people you dislike. I'm only 25 and I already know I don't want to work in a corporate situation anymore, and I don't want to work for anyone else for much longer either. At some point I will start my own company because it is the only way I can be truly happy. Until I can do that, I'm going to continue to deal with other people's crap because that is how I get my paycheck.
Oh, and I'm sure he will get burnt out on e-commerce if he stays there for too longer too.