According to the RealNetworks web page, they've been around since 1995. They have been buffering incoming video while letting you play, pause, rewind, fast forward, and jump to live for quite a while. Doing the same to TV doesn't seem to be all that different. Is RealNetworks paying royalties to some company with a patent on it?
God knows how long their predecessors in streaming video (possibly in research) have been doing similar things. Does anyone have any related info?
People have been buffering streamed data forever. It's hard to believe (though not impossible) that no one ever paused that stream while still recording before 1992. If they did, this is just a logical extension, and probably not patentable.
Of course, I'm sure their patent lawyers realize this and did their research and either concluded that 1) no one had done it before or 2) no one would sue them.:)
If you're as lazy as me, you can get a DC Linux CD image from dcemulation on their DC Linux page. They also link to an image for Padus DiscJuggler on the news page, but I won't link that here.
Note that I am also so lazy that I haven't downloaded said image, or even gotten around to fixing my broken dreamcast.:)
Fair enough -- you've got a good point. We should be able to come up with something more concise than that thing, though.:) How about "now Linux can suck as much as Windows" or "now we can run those superior Windows worms"?
"You have been hit by the UNIX virus! It works on the honor system. Please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random."
I bet this comes up with every wine post, but according to the name, the sourceforge page, and one of the the FAQanswers, WINE is not an emulator. Much like GNU is not UNIX.:)
-Puk
Re:Everything has a good and a bad side...
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2
I was thinking about making some comment about the cars, but then I remembered that they actually have banned cars on the ferry in NYC (I forget which one) until further notice.
Not that a ferry is an airplane. But if you're worried about taking up room, then airplanes should be banned in cars, instead.
-Puk
Re:But really, does *ANYTHING* launch on time?
on
XBox Delayed
·
· Score: 2
"Even" the space shuttle? The space shuttle is a extremely large, complex, expensive piece of equipment upon whose correct functioning lives depend. I would hope it's delayed more often than video game consoles.:)
Not that I don't agree with you -- it does seem like just about everything out there is delayed. IMO, over-zealous marketing is to blame in most cases. Not counting the shuttle, that is.
-Puk
Re:Everything has a good and a bad side...
on
Blaming Encryption
·
· Score: 2
Note that for the most part, they have been banned on airplanes.
-Puk
p.s. I'm not saying the ban is a bad idea, I'm just noting it.
How can the parent to this post be a troll? waldoj has summed up exactly what I wanted to say in a single question.
If you're looking for objective information gathering, then this poll is terrible. What it's good for is the government "proving" that public opinion is in favor of such legislation.
They asked whether they thought backdoors would help prevent attacks. Regardless of whether it actually would, this is far different from asking whether it would be worth the sacrifice it would take in order to achieve that help.
Time for a poor analogy. As someone else pointed out, huge quantities of people die in car accidents every year. Would locking people in their homes 24 hours a day be "somewhat" or "very" helpful in preventing these deaths? Sure! Is it a good idea, and is it worth the price we would pay for it? I really don't think so.
Everything in life is a trade-off, and this stupid poll only shows one side of the question. Mod the parent up, for it makes a very good point.
Oh, please. Your remark about his remark makes your piece look stupid, but I still read the rest of it for it's potentially interesting content.
No one is right all of the time, even our most popular politicians of all time. Read things point by point and determine for yourself if what he saying makes sense. Because he makes one bad point don't automatically invalidate everything else he said. I have a brain to let you determine these things for myself.
Further, I see no need for someone to restrict what they comment on because it's not what they're best known for commenting on. Some people have a good grasp of multiple fields, and interesting opinions on them. When Enstein made commentaries on the societal impact of nuclear technologies, no one told him to shut up because he was a physicist.
I, for instance:
1) Don't particularly believe that Bush should have ended up as president.
2) Totally agree with you that that remark had no business in that article, and was totally irrelevant. Now that Bush is president, I deal with the world on those terms.
3) Find that the rest of RMS's article is very interesting and informative, and resonates with my own personal beliefs.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry to flame, it's not my usual way, but I'm all for people being able to express opinions without being told to shut up because they've been pigeon-holed, or disregarded because of one bad point among many good ones.
Oops. You just made the exact same argument they will use in favor of said law.
Make it illegal to have crypto with no back doors and all law abiding crypto users will use back-door laden crypto and their law abiding messages will be an open book to law enforcement agencies.
Criminals, on the other hand, will continue to use widely available crypto packages with no back door and will still be able to transmit messages without threat of law enforcement decrypting them.
If only criminals use the illegal encryption, then we can arrest said criminals on "no-back-door-encryption-use" charges even if we can't prove they've done anything else wrong (since they've been using this tough encryption stuff). Of course, people with no crimes to hide will use "big brother" encryption, and so are in no danger of being oppressed. *cough*. It's kind of like getting mob bosses on income tax fraud. You do want us to arrest mob bosses, don't you?
The problem is, I don't want big brother reading my emails, even if I'm not doing anything illegal. Do you?
-Puk
p.s. If all of this was the actual intent of your post, please excuse me.:)
Re:That's the hard way of capping your karma
on
When Lego Meet Rubik
·
· Score: 1
I am proud to have capped my karma on that post.
Especially since it was a post donated by my friend the AC.:)
-Puk
Re:That's the hard way of solving the RB
on
When Lego Meet Rubik
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I, for instance, did my rubik's cube three times in the two minutes it took me to write this post. Without looking. Beat that.
I've had sex. With a girl.
In the two minutes it took him to write that post? Definitely slashdot material.
So here we have it -- final proof that Microsoft is innovating. This is their new astroturfing/letter writing software, which can even scan obituaries to find "real" names to use, and rearrange sentences in interesting ways so that it doesn't seem like a machine is doing the writing. Tell me that's not innovative.
Now just watch as they use this argument in one of their law suits.
Heheh. Indeed. I've been so Perl-ized that I even looked at their code to remind me how strings were done in BASIC again, and I still managed to get it wrong.
And as that other guy pointed out, I'm a dumbass. That program really does (again, assuming it works) perform the function of a httpd server, so I shouldn't make fun of that. But it's no more a port of apache than linux is a port of MS-DOS. Still very cool, though.
Assuming it does work (which it looks like it might), calling that a port of apache is like calling INPUT $NAME: PRINT "HELLO "+$NAME a port of MS Word for my Apple II. Sure, it prints some stuff out... Configurable stuff, at that... But...
That site is great -- funny as hell.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry if my BASIC is rusty -- it has been like 15 years.
That's a good point, and in some sense, you're right -- I'm sure, even given textual context, that this program can't always figure out the right intonation for "yeah, right". It takes more -- far more -- than what we have now to figure out how to say "reah, right" correctly in a given context. Out of context (as in a single sentence), it should be able to do pretty well.
However, I still claim that it takes far less than full AI to determine that, from purely textual context. That is, it takes far less than full AI to get pretty good at looking at the same set of text given to a human, and determine the correct intonation for the text. If a human can't figure it out (as I couldn't from your isolated textual "yeah, right"), I don't expect a machine to, ever.
No, I'm not claiming we're there now. I'm only claiming that we won't need a "thinking machine" to get there (the the ability of the average human) -- just one with significantly enhanced ability to analyze language and context. But exactly when we will have achieved "full AI" is, and how our work on AI will progress in general is hardly determined, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.:)
That's patently false. Speech synthesis systems are getting better and better at (or, technically, their creators are getting better at creating systems which) generate speech with very similar intonation to what a human would, based on sentence structure analysis and concatenation of recorded subword units with various intonations (there aren't as many as you might think).
Of course, it would need a corpus of recorded and (possibly automatically) tagged speech from the person they wish to imitate, but that's not that impossible. Every notice how the generated speech on some speech recognizing phone system (such as American Airlines) is getting better and better, with more and more human-like pronunciation and intonation? And these are the production systems -- not the research systems. I'm not saying they're perfect (and, of course, they're dealing with multiple intonations of fully recorded words, not subwords), but the problem is a far cry from "true AI", and the work on it is getting better all the time.
I'm not going to talk about my opinion of how good the film was (I seem to be on par with a lot of people in here in my views).
But did this movie remind anyone else of Blade Runner _in atmosphere_? I'm not talking about plot (someone mentions that up above, but I don't really agree other than one general parallel between the two). But from the commercials on through the actual movie, I found myself thinking of Ridley Scott's film.
I wish I was more awake so I could provide examples better, but once you get past the beginning (which was anti-blade-runnerish and closer to Hollywood than Kubrick) to "David in the woods", the atmosphere suddenly changes to one which reminds me of the dark, sometimes-overwhelming, sometimes-desolate future world of where Deckard lives.
Anyway, just a thought -- keep in mind this was just an oberservation, and not a criticism. I liked the atmosphere of the film, and a great fraction of the film itself.:)
Trademarks are only reserved within a givin industry/field. That means that there might be a "Bjork Bjork Games" and "Bjork Bjork Dry Cleaners". Even if you put them both in line before everyone else, who gets BjorkBjork.biz?
I actually went and saw it with a few friends tonight (coincidence -- someone else's idea). It was exactly as described by the bravehamster.. Lots of fun, lots of references (I'm sure I missed plenty), and greatly enjoyable. It was the same type of movie as the first, and if anything, was even more self-aware and took itself less seriously.
Sort of reminds me of the Evil Dead 1 -> Evil Dead 2 -> Army of Darkness series, where it progresses from a bad attempt at real horror to a great, fun, horror parody. Except this time, they skipped the first movie altogether.
Definitely a fun movie, and definitely worth seeing with no goal other than being entertained for a couple of hours.
That's pair of threads is really interesting. That's a good point about the GPL -- even if they can fudge the issue with MAME, the GPL is pretty explicit about this.
Do you know if anyone has discussed the "removal of screens" vioaltion with regards to mame?
As for your conspiracy theories, I know of a (now defunct) company that planned to do something quite similar, and far more extensive than what you just described. It makes sense -- I'm not even sure it's sinister.
I think the only solution is to beat them. Create an open source, cross platform networking solution for MAME, and make it better than Kaillera.
I haven't seen it yet, but you've described to me exactly why I liked the first movie, even those I would never qualify it as a "quality" movie, whatever that means.
The Mummy never took itself seriously at all. It (mostly) wasn't meant to be scary, shocking, creepy, or to make you think about any sorts of issues... It was a horror romp with an ancient baddie and a sarcastic lead, which made fun of itself constantly and was enjoyable for just that reason.
This has bugged me since Kaillera first came out, but I have never seen mention of it elsewhere, which leads me to believe I'm misunderstanding the whole thing. It seems to me that Kaillera is violating both the spirit and the word of the MAME licence, from their readme.
First, if you look at the source code patches, you'll note that most of the work is done in a Kaillera DLL, and that they just export calls to this. So technically, they're releasing the source cod eto their changes, while not releasing the source code to the actuall functionality of their changes. This seems to be violating the spirit of the license, although maybe not the letter: "Derivative works are allowed, provided their source code is freely available."
The second part is from the 0.72 update post. Here, they brag that they "Disabled startup information, warnings, and copyright with network game." From the MAME readme: "There are some specific modifications to the source code which go against the spirit of the project. They are NOT considered a derivative work, and distribution of executables containing them is strictly forbidden. Such modifications include, but are not limited to:... removing the startup information screens".
Does anyone know more about these issues? Am I totally reaidng it wrong? Open, cross-platform network support has been in my mind for a while, but sadly I have no time to do it alone. When Kaillera first came out, I had high hopes, and it is pretty damned cool and useful, but I'm a bit iffy on the details.
-Puk
p.s. Note that linux support means linux server support. You need to use MAME32 to play. w00t.
Do you want to be a game designer or programmer? This is a very important question.
I am a programmer. I have a couple of degrees in CS (one is generally plenty for game programmers), and plenty of coding experience. I was almost a game programmer, but I changed choices at the last minute. I may some day be a game programmer. Although I am aware and useful enough to contribute to the design process, I will probably never be a full-on game designer. If you want to be a programmer, then program, program, program. Come up with your own projects and code them. Code projects with your friends. Built 2d and 3d game engines, graphical demos, or anything which might constitute a piece of a game. Code projects using D3D and OpenGL. You can build game programming skills to a pretty good degree without a game programming job.
One of my good friend from our (mostly technical) school has a managment degree. He is computer literate, but admittedly couldn't code his way out of a paper bag. He is a game designer. He thinks about the way games work, what makes them fun, what could be done new to make them more fun, or -- much better -- make them sell more. He decides what type of game to make, what features it needs, how the user should control it, how many classes/races/widgets there are, etc. To be a good game designer, you need to design games -- from scratch. Come up with a concept, and describe it in detail (detail, detail) until enough programmers and artists could get together and build it. My friend has a degree from a good school, experience in the field, and a drawer full of fully fleshed out (hundreds of pages) game designs, and the job market is still tough right now, since having game design skills is much harder to quantify or prove than having programming skills, at least until you're well known and established in the industry (and have a few successful games under your belt).
It's up to you which you want to do. I suppose it's possible to do both, but it's very difficult to start with both. So choose one, and just do it until you have the skills to get a job (and can work your way up), get sick of it, or are simply forced to do something else because of the bad games market right now;).
-Puk
p.s. There are, of course, a bunch of other people involved in game design, not the least of which are artists and modelers, product managers (whee), and even lawyers (IANAFL). I was just concentrating on two groups.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not flamebait, that's right.
;)
"Windows vulnerabilities" might be redundant, though.
And I suppose "running windows" is still an oxymoron.
-Puk
According to the RealNetworks web page, they've been around since 1995. They have been buffering incoming video while letting you play, pause, rewind, fast forward, and jump to live for quite a while. Doing the same to TV doesn't seem to be all that different. Is RealNetworks paying royalties to some company with a patent on it?
:)
God knows how long their predecessors in streaming video (possibly in research) have been doing similar things. Does anyone have any related info?
People have been buffering streamed data forever. It's hard to believe (though not impossible) that no one ever paused that stream while still recording before 1992. If they did, this is just a logical extension, and probably not patentable.
Of course, I'm sure their patent lawyers realize this and did their research and either concluded that 1) no one had done it before or 2) no one would sue them.
-Puk
If you're as lazy as me, you can get a DC Linux CD image from dcemulation on their DC Linux page. They also link to an image for Padus DiscJuggler on the news page, but I won't link that here.
:)
Note that I am also so lazy that I haven't downloaded said image, or even gotten around to fixing my broken dreamcast.
-Puk
Fair enough -- you've got a good point. We should be able to come up with something more concise than that thing, though. :) How about "now Linux can suck as much as Windows" or "now we can run those superior Windows worms"?
;)
"You have been hit by the UNIX virus! It works on the honor system. Please forward this message to everyone you know and delete a bunch of your files at random."
Ah, what the hell, it's fine as it is.
-Puk
I bet this comes up with every wine post, but according to the name, the sourceforge page, and one of the the FAQ answers, WINE is not an emulator. Much like GNU is not UNIX. :)
-Puk
I was thinking about making some comment about the cars, but then I remembered that they actually have banned cars on the ferry in NYC (I forget which one) until further notice.
Not that a ferry is an airplane. But if you're worried about taking up room, then airplanes should be banned in cars, instead.
-Puk
"Even" the space shuttle? The space shuttle is a extremely large, complex, expensive piece of equipment upon whose correct functioning lives depend. I would hope it's delayed more often than video game consoles. :)
Not that I don't agree with you -- it does seem like just about everything out there is delayed. IMO, over-zealous marketing is to blame in most cases. Not counting the shuttle, that is.
-Puk
Note that for the most part, they have been banned on airplanes.
-Puk
p.s. I'm not saying the ban is a bad idea, I'm just noting it.
How can the parent to this post be a troll? waldoj has summed up exactly what I wanted to say in a single question.
If you're looking for objective information gathering, then this poll is terrible. What it's good for is the government "proving" that public opinion is in favor of such legislation.
They asked whether they thought backdoors would help prevent attacks. Regardless of whether it actually would, this is far different from asking whether it would be worth the sacrifice it would take in order to achieve that help.
Time for a poor analogy. As someone else pointed out, huge quantities of people die in car accidents every year. Would locking people in their homes 24 hours a day be "somewhat" or "very" helpful in preventing these deaths? Sure! Is it a good idea, and is it worth the price we would pay for it? I really don't think so.
Everything in life is a trade-off, and this stupid poll only shows one side of the question. Mod the parent up, for it makes a very good point.
-Puk
Oh, please. Your remark about his remark makes your piece look stupid, but I still read the rest of it for it's potentially interesting content.
No one is right all of the time, even our most popular politicians of all time. Read things point by point and determine for yourself if what he saying makes sense. Because he makes one bad point don't automatically invalidate everything else he said. I have a brain to let you determine these things for myself.
Further, I see no need for someone to restrict what they comment on because it's not what they're best known for commenting on. Some people have a good grasp of multiple fields, and interesting opinions on them. When Enstein made commentaries on the societal impact of nuclear technologies, no one told him to shut up because he was a physicist.
I, for instance:
1) Don't particularly believe that Bush should have ended up as president.
2) Totally agree with you that that remark had no business in that article, and was totally irrelevant. Now that Bush is president, I deal with the world on those terms.
3) Find that the rest of RMS's article is very interesting and informative, and resonates with my own personal beliefs.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry to flame, it's not my usual way, but I'm all for people being able to express opinions without being told to shut up because they've been pigeon-holed, or disregarded because of one bad point among many good ones.
Oops. You just made the exact same argument they will use in favor of said law.
:)
Make it illegal to have crypto with no back doors and all law abiding crypto users will use back-door laden crypto and their law abiding messages will be an open book to law enforcement agencies.
Criminals, on the other hand, will continue to use widely available crypto packages with no back door and will still be able to transmit messages without threat of law enforcement decrypting them.
If only criminals use the illegal encryption, then we can arrest said criminals on "no-back-door-encryption-use" charges even if we can't prove they've done anything else wrong (since they've been using this tough encryption stuff). Of course, people with no crimes to hide will use "big brother" encryption, and so are in no danger of being oppressed. *cough*. It's kind of like getting mob bosses on income tax fraud. You do want us to arrest mob bosses, don't you?
The problem is, I don't want big brother reading my emails, even if I'm not doing anything illegal. Do you?
-Puk
p.s. If all of this was the actual intent of your post, please excuse me.
I am proud to have capped my karma on that post.
:)
Especially since it was a post donated by my friend the AC.
-Puk
I, for instance, did my rubik's cube three times in the two minutes it took me to write this post. Without looking. Beat that.
I've had sex. With a girl.
In the two minutes it took him to write that post? Definitely slashdot material.
-Puk
So here we have it -- final proof that Microsoft is innovating. This is their new astroturfing/letter writing software, which can even scan obituaries to find "real" names to use, and rearrange sentences in interesting ways so that it doesn't seem like a machine is doing the writing. Tell me that's not innovative.
Now just watch as they use this argument in one of their law suits.
-Puk
Heheh. Indeed. I've been so Perl-ized that I even looked at their code to remind me how strings were done in BASIC again, and I still managed to get it wrong.
And as that other guy pointed out, I'm a dumbass. That program really does (again, assuming it works) perform the function of a httpd server, so I shouldn't make fun of that. But it's no more a port of apache than linux is a port of MS-DOS. Still very cool, though.
-Puk
Assuming it does work (which it looks like it might), calling that a port of apache is like calling INPUT $NAME: PRINT "HELLO "+$NAME a port of MS Word for my Apple II. Sure, it prints some stuff out... Configurable stuff, at that... But...
That site is great -- funny as hell.
-Puk
p.s. Sorry if my BASIC is rusty -- it has been like 15 years.
That's a good point, and in some sense, you're right -- I'm sure, even given textual context, that this program can't always figure out the right intonation for "yeah, right". It takes more -- far more -- than what we have now to figure out how to say "reah, right" correctly in a given context. Out of context (as in a single sentence), it should be able to do pretty well.
:)
However, I still claim that it takes far less than full AI to determine that, from purely textual context. That is, it takes far less than full AI to get pretty good at looking at the same set of text given to a human, and determine the correct intonation for the text. If a human can't figure it out (as I couldn't from your isolated textual "yeah, right"), I don't expect a machine to, ever.
No, I'm not claiming we're there now. I'm only claiming that we won't need a "thinking machine" to get there (the the ability of the average human) -- just one with significantly enhanced ability to analyze language and context. But exactly when we will have achieved "full AI" is, and how our work on AI will progress in general is hardly determined, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
-Puk
That's patently false. Speech synthesis systems are getting better and better at (or, technically, their creators are getting better at creating systems which) generate speech with very similar intonation to what a human would, based on sentence structure analysis and concatenation of recorded subword units with various intonations (there aren't as many as you might think).
m engthesis-jonyi.pdf for som more detailed info on such research. (Other papers and theses at http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/publications/index. html may be relevant as well.)
:P
Of course, it would need a corpus of recorded and (possibly automatically) tagged speech from the person they wish to imitate, but that's not that impossible. Every notice how the generated speech on some speech recognizing phone system (such as American Airlines) is getting better and better, with more and more human-like pronunciation and intonation? And these are the production systems -- not the research systems. I'm not saying they're perfect (and, of course, they're dealing with multiple intonations of fully recorded words, not subwords), but the problem is a far cry from "true AI", and the work on it is getting better all the time.
Check out http://www.sls.lcs.mit.edu/sls/publications/1998/
-Puk
p.s. If this gets modded up, I could cap my karma on this.
I'm not going to talk about my opinion of how good the film was (I seem to be on par with a lot of people in here in my views).
:)
But did this movie remind anyone else of Blade Runner _in atmosphere_? I'm not talking about plot (someone mentions that up above, but I don't really agree other than one general parallel between the two). But from the commercials on through the actual movie, I found myself thinking of Ridley Scott's film.
I wish I was more awake so I could provide examples better, but once you get past the beginning (which was anti-blade-runnerish and closer to Hollywood than Kubrick) to "David in the woods", the atmosphere suddenly changes to one which reminds me of the dark, sometimes-overwhelming, sometimes-desolate future world of where Deckard lives.
Anyway, just a thought -- keep in mind this was just an oberservation, and not a criticism. I liked the atmosphere of the film, and a great fraction of the film itself.
-Puk
Trademarks are only reserved within a givin industry/field. That means that there might be a "Bjork Bjork Games" and "Bjork Bjork Dry Cleaners". Even if you put them both in line before everyone else, who gets BjorkBjork.biz?
-Puk
I actually went and saw it with a few friends tonight (coincidence -- someone else's idea). It was exactly as described by the bravehamster.. Lots of fun, lots of references (I'm sure I missed plenty), and greatly enjoyable. It was the same type of movie as the first, and if anything, was even more self-aware and took itself less seriously.
Sort of reminds me of the Evil Dead 1 -> Evil Dead 2 -> Army of Darkness series, where it progresses from a bad attempt at real horror to a great, fun, horror parody. Except this time, they skipped the first movie altogether.
Definitely a fun movie, and definitely worth seeing with no goal other than being entertained for a couple of hours.
-Puk
That's pair of threads is really interesting. That's a good point about the GPL -- even if they can fudge the issue with MAME, the GPL is pretty explicit about this.
Do you know if anyone has discussed the "removal of screens" vioaltion with regards to mame?
As for your conspiracy theories, I know of a (now defunct) company that planned to do something quite similar, and far more extensive than what you just described. It makes sense -- I'm not even sure it's sinister.
I think the only solution is to beat them. Create an open source, cross platform networking solution for MAME, and make it better than Kaillera.
-Puk
I haven't seen it yet, but you've described to me exactly why I liked the first movie, even those I would never qualify it as a "quality" movie, whatever that means.
The Mummy never took itself seriously at all. It (mostly) wasn't meant to be scary, shocking, creepy, or to make you think about any sorts of issues... It was a horror romp with an ancient baddie and a sarcastic lead, which made fun of itself constantly and was enjoyable for just that reason.
Now I must see the sequel.
-Puk
This has bugged me since Kaillera first came out, but I have never seen mention of it elsewhere, which leads me to believe I'm misunderstanding the whole thing. It seems to me that Kaillera is violating both the spirit and the word of the MAME licence, from their readme.
... removing the startup information screens".
First, if you look at the source code patches, you'll note that most of the work is done in a Kaillera DLL, and that they just export calls to this. So technically, they're releasing the source cod eto their changes, while not releasing the source code to the actuall functionality of their changes. This seems to be violating the spirit of the license, although maybe not the letter: "Derivative works are allowed, provided their source code is freely available."
The second part is from the 0.72 update post. Here, they brag that they "Disabled startup information, warnings, and copyright with network game." From the MAME readme: "There are some specific modifications to the source code which go against the spirit of the project. They are NOT considered a derivative work, and distribution of executables containing them is strictly forbidden. Such modifications include, but are not limited to:
Does anyone know more about these issues? Am I totally reaidng it wrong? Open, cross-platform network support has been in my mind for a while, but sadly I have no time to do it alone. When Kaillera first came out, I had high hopes, and it is pretty damned cool and useful, but I'm a bit iffy on the details.
-Puk
p.s. Note that linux support means linux server support. You need to use MAME32 to play. w00t.
Do you want to be a game designer or programmer? This is a very important question.
;).
I am a programmer. I have a couple of degrees in CS (one is generally plenty for game programmers), and plenty of coding experience. I was almost a game programmer, but I changed choices at the last minute. I may some day be a game programmer. Although I am aware and useful enough to contribute to the design process, I will probably never be a full-on game designer. If you want to be a programmer, then program, program, program. Come up with your own projects and code them. Code projects with your friends. Built 2d and 3d game engines, graphical demos, or anything which might constitute a piece of a game. Code projects using D3D and OpenGL. You can build game programming skills to a pretty good degree without a game programming job.
One of my good friend from our (mostly technical) school has a managment degree. He is computer literate, but admittedly couldn't code his way out of a paper bag. He is a game designer. He thinks about the way games work, what makes them fun, what could be done new to make them more fun, or -- much better -- make them sell more. He decides what type of game to make, what features it needs, how the user should control it, how many classes/races/widgets there are, etc. To be a good game designer, you need to design games -- from scratch. Come up with a concept, and describe it in detail (detail, detail) until enough programmers and artists could get together and build it. My friend has a degree from a good school, experience in the field, and a drawer full of fully fleshed out (hundreds of pages) game designs, and the job market is still tough right now, since having game design skills is much harder to quantify or prove than having programming skills, at least until you're well known and established in the industry (and have a few successful games under your belt).
It's up to you which you want to do. I suppose it's possible to do both, but it's very difficult to start with both. So choose one, and just do it until you have the skills to get a job (and can work your way up), get sick of it, or are simply forced to do something else because of the bad games market right now
-Puk
p.s. There are, of course, a bunch of other people involved in game design, not the least of which are artists and modelers, product managers (whee), and even lawyers (IANAFL). I was just concentrating on two groups.