They ditched that in the iTunes store... after figuring out people preferred not to have it.
It would be worth disclaiming that the only thing I've ever bought from iTunes was actually deleted by one of their software updates with no chance of refund or re-download so I will never use their services again... But the kids around here seem to like it (major university.)
If Apple has done anything for us (consumers) in the last 10 years, it's been demonstrating with iTunes that when consumers have an easy legal avenue for acquiring digital media vs an only slightly more complicated illegal avenue, consumers will tend to go for the legal way. Why? Because Americans (and apparently most Europeans) are willing to pay for convenience. If this was not true, food delivery services which charge 2-3 times as much as traditional sit-down restaurants and 6-10 times as much as home-made food would not have a business at all.
If they build it, we will come. There will still be the grumpy Guses who want everything free-as-in-unicorns and refuse to participate, but that percentage of the population is so vanishingly small as to not even constitute a demographic. People will buy more product from legal avenues if those legal avenues are convenient, structured to encourage compulsive spending and impulse buying, and have a broad enough selection to provide the illusion that you can get anything from them. They'll do that rather than download illegally, even if they don't have the money to buy something, with only rare exception.
For an added bonus, distribution channels which are free of DRM restrictions so they can use the media in whatever fashion they like get half the grumpy Guses as well, in addition to attracting more of the illiterati simply because non-DRM media in compatible formats work on pretty much everything.
It might be worth suggesting that the only valid measure for intelligence should be whether or not you are capable of determining and willing to determine if the input you are given is garbage by comparing it against other input.
Or whether you are capable of adjusting a belief when you discover inconsistencies between realities and your construction of it which forms the basis for that belief.
If you believe Von Braun invented rocketry, you would be expected to revise that belief when learning of hwacha if you were to be considered intelligent. If you instead denied that it ever happened and clung to your belief, you would by that metric be regarded as less intelligent than average.
See Holocaust deniers, biblical literalist creationists and other individuals who cling to ideas solely by denying the truth of all evidence counter to that belief. If, however, either party had by rational process discounted the relevance of that evidence, while some people might consider them a crank, they would nonetheless at least be exhibiting some measure of intelligence by that proposed metric.
Unless we get volunteers for a one way manned Martian mission, I think the money should be put into advanced robot probes.
We won't get any unless we start asking for some and putting up the money to make it a reality.
What good would volunteering now do, when they'll tell you you ought to be ready to roll in 2020? If you're, say, 40 now, in pretty good health, feel like you've accomplished a lot on earth and are ready to cast yourself away to the depths of space never again to see mother earth except via video camera so you decide to volunteer for a one-way mission to build the first Martian colony, then you're told, "OK great, sign here, see you in 10-15 years," that's not exactly productive. In 15 years you'll be 55, might have developed all sorts of health problems which didn't bother you when you were younger and what had seemed like a good amount of time in good health to produce a colony (say, 25 years of good health and another 15-20 of passable health barring cancer or heart problems due to damage) has shrunk to a lot less time.
We'll get volunteers - there's absolutely no doubt of that. We just need to build the mission. If you could launch next month, you could find at least 30 academics, scientists and good old fashioned laborers who would sign up just for the shot at making human history who would have their bags packed in half a day and be asking for their airline ticket to Cape Canaveral.
It sounds like they're either using some sort of self-arranging alloy or a crystallizing compound which contains silver. FTFA:
The ink has also been reformulated so that the molecules precisely align themselves in the best configuration to conduct electricity.
It's a sure bet they're not actually melting silver, again FTFA:
According to Xerox, one of the key benefits of its technology is that it can print with silver ink at a much lower temperature than competing technologies...
You can't lower the melting point of a metal while still keeping it conductive without alloying it with something else (as in Field's metal) or by coming up with a compound which is still a semiconductor, and by their description, sounds as if it crystallizes in such a way that the magnetic poles of its molecules are aligned.
Unless my bare-minimum physics and chemistry educations have failed me, which I fail to consider unlikely.
Speed and turnaround. If this was cheaply available to a home user or at least enthusiastic hobbyist (less cheap, more involved) you could still roll out a prototype and test with a turnaround of a few dozen a day. Further, you could continue reducing the design until you found the smallest space necessary without risking as much money. By its nature, it's most likely quite a bit cheaper once broadly available than PCB services given the difference in the quantity and toxicity of materials. No toxic waste disposal, no huge waste of copper, no supply chain for PCB stock, just some card stock or plastic and some magic xerox ink.
Also, these circuits are flexible. What's the value of flexibility? It increases the durability and portability of your finished product. The deal with printed circuits as well is not to make a PCB where you solder parts onto it. The idea is to actually print the entire circuit onto the material and offload anything which requires soldered components onto the portion of the product which is not required to be flexible. That being said, anything you can lay into silicon which doesn't require exotic materials or nanoscale electromechanical properties can be printed onto any slightly heat-tolerant substrate with this technology. This could include printing a transistor radio into cotton, printing RFID tags directly onto luggage tags (imagine if the airline couldn't misplace your luggage because the luggage cart itself knew what it was supposed to be carrying), a home hobbyist printing out addon chips for their retro hardware (NESin mixed stereo anyone?), printing out a better antenna for your laptop's wifi, printing new control wires onto the back of an e-ink display (say, from Esquire)...
All of this is a way off of course, as they're still talking about printing a molten silver compound onto materials, which doesn't strike me as being the sort of task a home laser printer would be up for, not the least of which would be that it'd completely screw up the duplexer and probably the developer drum. Of course, Xerox developing this ink with a low melting point and reliable crystallization patterns (from TFA) may result in some other breakthroughs whereby this comes home a lot faster. All they need is to find a low-resistance nonmagnetic alloy or conductive polymer which melts at laser printing temperatures and won't gunk up a developer unit. (which may be unobtainium.) Either that or a working material which can be applied by inkjet printers.
I remember in the Seattle area there was a free want ads paper called the Little Nickel where people would advertise BBSes. Also you'd see fliers at bus stops for the larger multi-line boards. The smaller Telegard/Renegade/WWIV board systems were usually word of mouth.
Once you got onto a decent sized board, there was usually a bulletin board devoted to local BBS scene ads where people used some flashy ANSI or nice ASCII art (if ANSI wasn't supported) to advertise their boards. A lot of boards had a log-out screen which advertised local area bulletin boards and people would give out sub-sysop-level preferred access to other board operators who would advertise for them.
File transfer was usually either done via some paid service, a local library system, somebody you knew in the area with university network access, CDs you bought from ads in magazines or BBS compilations, BBS meetup parties or by offering preferred accounts on your board to people who would courier from boards outside your network.
In short, everything worked, but it was slower and harder to find exactly what you wanted without having to pay for access to tons of different systems plus foot the bill for the long-distance dialups.
Most often, for me at least, I got all my geeky information from logging into about 8-10 BBSes in the area two or three times a week and a long distance board that was chock full of good stuff about once a month.
If you could buy a game and describe it as a "2006+" game...
The "Certified for Windows Vista" label and Windows Vista's performance index were supposed to solve this... any game tested on an entry-level 2006 PC with an entry-level NV or ATI GPU of the time should run on the vast majority of PCs still in use, right? And it should be easier for Mac computers, where "any Intel Mac" guarantees at least a minimum level of performance.
Yeah, and that's essentially what I assumed Microsoft was trying to do when they introduced that - turn PC gaming into a sorta-standardized platform. It's a good idea, it's just when people start charging to "certify" hardware that it turns bad. Would be nicer to see some third party which was less directly profit-motivated do it.
Finally, a free 1-level demo should help iron out "will it work?" issues while clarifying the customer's demand for the product.
Absolutely. I miss the good old days of shareware where you got an "episode" free which contained a mostly-complete story arc and then bought the rest of the episodes if you approved. The narrative structure of larger story-driven games makes that a bit difficult to pull off these days, but I'd like to see more developers take the attitude that a demo is supposed to sell people on the whole idea of your game rather than trick you into buying it on the basis of a tiny taste. The PC would be the platform for a renaissance or return of that philosophy of software development - a platform where the risk and cost is reduced even if the potential profits are less than for a console title.
There are a few other means of doing it as well, such as writing as few portions of the code as possible in native code and doing the rest as scripted code.
Apple has been rejecting apps because they're scriptable.
Apple has been doing a number of things which seem pretty shortsighted with the iPhone app store. A lot of what they were doing would make sense if there was any reason to believe that they were trying to mimic Nintendo's success from the 1980s which was largely because of their draconian quality controls on software. Apparently the ever-sticky rule 3.3.2 expressly prohibits software which first downloads then interprets code, so as long as all of the scripts are included with the application, that shouldn't be a problem unless you plan on including a built-in updater.
As far as the speed issue for games in general goes, LUA is a pretty good example of a scripting language which actually is used in significant amount of games despite its limitations because of its speed and low memory usage. It's extremely frustrating to try to do any traditional OO design in LUA due to those limitations, however it's extremely fast and lightweight - the speed hit is virtually negligible and the memory overhead is small. Most open-source projects I've seen which use LUA extensively mingle it with non-hardware-specific native code to do its heavy lifting or things that LUA doesn't do very well at the binding level.
Don't forget that many scripting languages include platform-targetting compilers which can produce binary code. Frets on Fire is entirely written in Python
But back to the topic: The big reason we need to think about all this complexity is because PC gaming hasn't come far enough.
It's certainly finally maturing. I've been a PC gamer for 20 years and have watched countless renaissances come and go, though, so there's obviously some problems that have to be resolved. Obviously the extreme differences between producing Mac native software and Windows native software doesn't help unify PC gaming much. The fact that the Windows platform is factionalizing into dozens of content distribution systems doesn't help much either. Games for Windows Live, Steam, Battle.net, Impulse, Greenhouse, etc etc. It's going to be impossible to sell the PC as a gaming platform unless you can actually sell it as a platform. What this will unfortunately mean is giving somebody the keys and hoping they don't go for a joyride with your future. If you could buy a game and describe it as a "2006+" game, meaning that any computer bought from a platform-compliant vendor in that year or newer is capable of running the game, then you'd have a much more consumer-friendly market.
One of the reasons for the slow acceptance of PC gaming is the prerequisite consumer awareness to actually getting a good experience. I have relatives in Montana who can only barely use a computer, don't really understand anything beyond the idea that newer is usually better unless it's cheap and crappy and that older games might run on their older computer. No way for them to tell without buying it and bringing it home. However, they've got a couple of PS2s and a Gamecube, and they know they can buy anything for those and bring them home and they'll work.
Hell, even for the computer literate PC gamer, if you don't keep up with video technology, you quickly lose track of whether your hardware compares favorably with the recommended "Geforce GTS 250" or whether the whole situation will be a shitstorm on your computer. This is why I was saying that we need an actual platform with simple numbers. We also need a generally stated industry goal to stop trying to hit a moving target and instead try to do what the console manufacturers do - limit the rate of change in the prerequisite hardware. Bad for the PC hardware market, good for the consumer and
The last time I looked into haXe, it mentioned loading assets from a.swf file created with swfmill or Sam Haxe. But unless I have Flash, I can't make vector animations; I can only import PNG and JPEG. If I'm limited to raster assets, I might as well code for JavaScript Canvas to run in Chrome Frame; at least that'll run on an iPhone.
Don't forget about sound.
To which model were you referring?
There are a few other means of doing it as well, such as writing as few portions of the code as possible in native code and doing the rest as scripted code. Generalize the platform-specific calls as much as possible so that you have a very small library of graphics, sound and input functions which require platform-specific code. You're going to have to fix bugs no matter how good your cross-platform libraries are - nobody said game programming was easy, after all.
again, C# translates fairly readily to Objective-C.
Can it be done automatically, so that any changes I make in the C# are reflected in the Objective-C?
Would you trust a tool which claimed to do it automatically without bugs? Again, game development isn't easy. Everybody ends up putting up with the same crap in their development process; the decision as to whether the effort is worth the potential gains is yours.
A web game needs one PC per player, and unless I'm mistaken, developing one needs a lawfully made copy of Adobe Flash.
Actually, there are free alternatives to using Flash to author flash games, strangely. hAxe is a fairly robust Actionscript compiler which can produce fully funtioning SWF movies. Now that the SWF format is an open format, there may be open source alternatives either presently available or in the works.
As far as the single player per PC aspect goes, hotseat and same-keyboard head-to-head is no harder in Flash than it is in a proprietary app, although Flash, Javascript and Silverlight all have no support for joysticks or gamepads.
it seems like everybody and their mother are making programs first on XNA then porting them to the iPhone, and the developer tools for both are free (as long as you already have Windows.)
Both? I thought iPhone SDK needed Mac OS X Leopard or newer on an Intel Mac.
Yes, I misspoke, you probably can't do iPhone development easily on Windows. It is apparently possible, however. Clearly it'd be easier just using Objective C on MacOS and using the official SDK, however.
I personally loathe working with XNA because I dislike having to deal with the slowdown associated with Microsoft's garbage collector
How bad is this slowdown? Does it take tens of milliseconds to finish, causing a noticeable hiccup in game animation? And in what language should I write AI and physics code if I want to be able to share it between, say, an XNA game and a Mac game?
It's not really as bad as I make it out to be, but it is a significant slowdown from a similar program written in unmanaged code (or a better garbage-collected environment like Java). As long as you write your code in such a way that doesn't require large amounts of allocations and deletions (which is a bad idea anyway) you won't notice as significant a slowdown as you would otherwise. As far as how bad it is specifically, it entirely depends on what you're doing. I found I lost 5-10 fps in an unoptimized HLSL-based textured environment with dynamic lighting. For 2d games or simpler shader scenarios, the losses may be reasonably unnoticeable save for the extra ram requirements and slightly slower startup and teardown times.
Apparently C# XNA code isn't too bad to port across to Objective C and the iPhone SDK. I imagine relying too much on heavily Direct3D-specific code might be a bad idea as you'll have to port the rendering to OpenGL, but that's not really a significant barrier for an experienced 3d programmer, especially one working on a smaller title (not thousands of custom-tuned art resources). As far as physics goes, apparently Bullet has both iPhone and XNA flavors and uses the zlib license, so it's definitely friendly with any licensing scheme Microsoft might request for XBLA use. I'm not particularly familiar with AI middleware as I have too much fun writing it myself to borrow, but again, C# translates fairly readily to Objective-C.
There's nothing really to stop you from making a small head-to-head game for Linux, Mac and/or Windows (PC gaming), it's just that you can't expect your audience to have the hardware necessary to play it
To play head-to-head on a console, one needs to buy three gamepads in addition to the one that comes with the console. To play head-to-head on a PC, one needs four gamepads and possibly a hub such as the one that comes with some versions of Rock Band; that's not a huge difference. Decent PC gamepads are hard to find in stores, but I could link from my game's web
Honestly? Probably the web. If the audience is playing a web game, they already expect to be using a keyboard and mouse and not gamepads.
Also, it's pretty hard not to qualify for a "console license" with, say, Xbox Live Arcade, as it seems like everybody and their mother are making programs first on XNA then porting them to the iPhone, and the developer tools for both are free (as long as you already have Windows.) Even a version of Visual Studio which can run XNA code creator is free. I personally loathe working with XNA because I dislike having to deal with the slowdown associated with Microsoft's garbage collector, but it's apparently possible to make many kinds of games which perform well on reasonably modern (3-6 year old) hardware. Just don't expect AAA first-person-shooter graphics.
There's nothing really to stop you from making a small head-to-head game for Linux, Mac and/or Windows (PC gaming), it's just that you can't expect your audience to have the hardware necessary to play it, or to particularly enjoy playing while splitting a keyboard and mouse. This makes designing interfaces that prove comfortable to all of the players, uh, challenging.
Oh, I wanted to add that there are games out there which are doing exactly what you want on the PC. Plug in two keyboards and play Frets on Fire. Apparently you can play Left 4 Dead PC in split-screen co-op. And don't forget the piles and piles of indie games which have multiplayer. Trine is fairly fun single-player but immensely more fun co-op.
For PC head-to-head back in the day I favored the Spy vs. Spy games, Worms, Battle Chess, Archon Ultra, Star Control, Scorched Earth and a few nice short-play hotseat games like Stunts. Later on in the years, we'd play You Don't Know Jack or Trackmania alongside those old classics.
Of course, we'd also hook up the Atari 2600 for games like Frogs & Flies, Warlords and Combat. As the years went by, we'd hook up the SNES for Mario Kart, N64 for Goldeneye, Playstation for Bushido Blade, Dreamcast for Powerstone, and now we pretty much play Burnout Paradise, Ragdoll Kung Fu, PAIN, LittleBigPlanet, a few splitscreen co-op shooters and some decent arcade remakes on the PS3.
The problem with head-to-head gaming on the PC is that there's little point these days - most people don't own a mediacenter PC right now, you're limited on most systems to a single keyboard and a single mouse (in that you cannot expect anybody to have any others) and people don't want to pile around a single little monitor in somebody's den or bedroom when there's a perfectly good TV that they can use with a relatively cheap device with wireless controllers while lounging around the house, or pacing the living room or whatever.
Hotseat and head-to-head gaming is far from dead, it's just that the PC is not quite as relevant as a gaming system as it used to be - the kinds of games we used to only get on PCs are now coming out on consoles as well, or not at all.
Plausibly convincing AI doesn't strictly imply strong or particularly intelligent AI. Most games use inexpensive tricks to make the AI seem more competent than it actually is.
That's not to be underestimated. What is the purpose of video game AI? To convincingly (for the lifetime of the enemy agent) emulate human behavior in a similar circumstance. To engage and challenge the player. Strong AI is a red herring - you're not going to get it out of a video game before everybody else gets it because the AI has to compete for resources with everything else. If you demand strong AI to have fun, you're never going to have fun. What you need to be looking for is adaptive AI which uses default behaviors which more often than not do something realistic - even if that realistic behavior is breathtakingly stupid. So are humans.
Welcome to the modern day shooting gallery, where things shoot back and take cover, but don't move much, and certainly never realize anything so simple as a basic flanking diversion, or that you have grenades and guns and can kill them.
Try Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 for a game which breaks those expectations for you. AI will hide out in ambush, stop firing until they have a better shot at you, use grenades appropriately, will seldom engage in an obviously suicidal rush and will actually use suppressing fire to cover for flanking actions that their companions are engaging in.
Actually, it's probably because the 2d presentation of 3d space denies you of depth perception and along with the lack of physical feedback (vibration, accurately modelled engine noise) allows you to severely misjudge your speed and how well your vehicle is gripping the road.
The only thing inherently worse about driving with a stick than with a wheel and pedals is that it's much easier to accidentally overcorrect, especially if you are unfamiliar with using an analog joystick (in other words you're either not pressing it at all, or you're pressing it as far to the right or left as you can). Well, there's also the stopping issue causing your body to shift and therefore bump the stick, possibly preventing you from stopping.
At low speeds, I don't see these as being much more dangerous than a conventional steering mechanism, especially if there is signal noise filtration (shaky hands? let's ignore that) and a rate-of-turn limiter that scales with speed (simulation of "wheel resistance").
The lack of a steering wheel might increase the risk of back and neck injury in an accident, however, due to the increased space you'd have to move in (even with an airbag).
Slashdot Mirror
They've discovered that the majority of their voters respond best to brain-dead, cackling circus buffoons. Take that how you must.
They ditched that in the iTunes store... after figuring out people preferred not to have it.
It would be worth disclaiming that the only thing I've ever bought from iTunes was actually deleted by one of their software updates with no chance of refund or re-download so I will never use their services again... But the kids around here seem to like it (major university.)
If Apple has done anything for us (consumers) in the last 10 years, it's been demonstrating with iTunes that when consumers have an easy legal avenue for acquiring digital media vs an only slightly more complicated illegal avenue, consumers will tend to go for the legal way. Why? Because Americans (and apparently most Europeans) are willing to pay for convenience. If this was not true, food delivery services which charge 2-3 times as much as traditional sit-down restaurants and 6-10 times as much as home-made food would not have a business at all.
If they build it, we will come. There will still be the grumpy Guses who want everything free-as-in-unicorns and refuse to participate, but that percentage of the population is so vanishingly small as to not even constitute a demographic. People will buy more product from legal avenues if those legal avenues are convenient, structured to encourage compulsive spending and impulse buying, and have a broad enough selection to provide the illusion that you can get anything from them. They'll do that rather than download illegally, even if they don't have the money to buy something, with only rare exception.
For an added bonus, distribution channels which are free of DRM restrictions so they can use the media in whatever fashion they like get half the grumpy Guses as well, in addition to attracting more of the illiterati simply because non-DRM media in compatible formats work on pretty much everything.
And the false positives... and the true positives...
It might be worth suggesting that the only valid measure for intelligence should be whether or not you are capable of determining and willing to determine if the input you are given is garbage by comparing it against other input.
Or whether you are capable of adjusting a belief when you discover inconsistencies between realities and your construction of it which forms the basis for that belief.
If you believe Von Braun invented rocketry, you would be expected to revise that belief when learning of hwacha if you were to be considered intelligent. If you instead denied that it ever happened and clung to your belief, you would by that metric be regarded as less intelligent than average.
See Holocaust deniers, biblical literalist creationists and other individuals who cling to ideas solely by denying the truth of all evidence counter to that belief. If, however, either party had by rational process discounted the relevance of that evidence, while some people might consider them a crank, they would nonetheless at least be exhibiting some measure of intelligence by that proposed metric.
Unless we get volunteers for a one way manned Martian mission, I think the money should be put into advanced robot probes.
We won't get any unless we start asking for some and putting up the money to make it a reality.
What good would volunteering now do, when they'll tell you you ought to be ready to roll in 2020? If you're, say, 40 now, in pretty good health, feel like you've accomplished a lot on earth and are ready to cast yourself away to the depths of space never again to see mother earth except via video camera so you decide to volunteer for a one-way mission to build the first Martian colony, then you're told, "OK great, sign here, see you in 10-15 years," that's not exactly productive. In 15 years you'll be 55, might have developed all sorts of health problems which didn't bother you when you were younger and what had seemed like a good amount of time in good health to produce a colony (say, 25 years of good health and another 15-20 of passable health barring cancer or heart problems due to damage) has shrunk to a lot less time.
We'll get volunteers - there's absolutely no doubt of that. We just need to build the mission. If you could launch next month, you could find at least 30 academics, scientists and good old fashioned laborers who would sign up just for the shot at making human history who would have their bags packed in half a day and be asking for their airline ticket to Cape Canaveral.
It sounds like they're either using some sort of self-arranging alloy or a crystallizing compound which contains silver. FTFA:
The ink has also been reformulated so that the molecules precisely align themselves in the best configuration to conduct electricity.
It's a sure bet they're not actually melting silver, again FTFA:
According to Xerox, one of the key benefits of its technology is that it can print with silver ink at a much lower temperature than competing technologies...
You can't lower the melting point of a metal while still keeping it conductive without alloying it with something else (as in Field's metal) or by coming up with a compound which is still a semiconductor, and by their description, sounds as if it crystallizes in such a way that the magnetic poles of its molecules are aligned.
Unless my bare-minimum physics and chemistry educations have failed me, which I fail to consider unlikely.
Speed and turnaround. If this was cheaply available to a home user or at least enthusiastic hobbyist (less cheap, more involved) you could still roll out a prototype and test with a turnaround of a few dozen a day. Further, you could continue reducing the design until you found the smallest space necessary without risking as much money. By its nature, it's most likely quite a bit cheaper once broadly available than PCB services given the difference in the quantity and toxicity of materials. No toxic waste disposal, no huge waste of copper, no supply chain for PCB stock, just some card stock or plastic and some magic xerox ink.
Also, these circuits are flexible. What's the value of flexibility? It increases the durability and portability of your finished product. The deal with printed circuits as well is not to make a PCB where you solder parts onto it. The idea is to actually print the entire circuit onto the material and offload anything which requires soldered components onto the portion of the product which is not required to be flexible. That being said, anything you can lay into silicon which doesn't require exotic materials or nanoscale electromechanical properties can be printed onto any slightly heat-tolerant substrate with this technology. This could include printing a transistor radio into cotton, printing RFID tags directly onto luggage tags (imagine if the airline couldn't misplace your luggage because the luggage cart itself knew what it was supposed to be carrying), a home hobbyist printing out addon chips for their retro hardware (NES in mixed stereo anyone?), printing out a better antenna for your laptop's wifi, printing new control wires onto the back of an e-ink display (say, from Esquire)...
All of this is a way off of course, as they're still talking about printing a molten silver compound onto materials, which doesn't strike me as being the sort of task a home laser printer would be up for, not the least of which would be that it'd completely screw up the duplexer and probably the developer drum. Of course, Xerox developing this ink with a low melting point and reliable crystallization patterns (from TFA) may result in some other breakthroughs whereby this comes home a lot faster. All they need is to find a low-resistance nonmagnetic alloy or conductive polymer which melts at laser printing temperatures and won't gunk up a developer unit. (which may be unobtainium.) Either that or a working material which can be applied by inkjet printers.
It'll take you back to staring at a screen, probably.
Somebody took exception to him.
"Interspecies erotica," fucko.
I remember in the Seattle area there was a free want ads paper called the Little Nickel where people would advertise BBSes. Also you'd see fliers at bus stops for the larger multi-line boards. The smaller Telegard/Renegade/WWIV board systems were usually word of mouth.
Once you got onto a decent sized board, there was usually a bulletin board devoted to local BBS scene ads where people used some flashy ANSI or nice ASCII art (if ANSI wasn't supported) to advertise their boards. A lot of boards had a log-out screen which advertised local area bulletin boards and people would give out sub-sysop-level preferred access to other board operators who would advertise for them.
File transfer was usually either done via some paid service, a local library system, somebody you knew in the area with university network access, CDs you bought from ads in magazines or BBS compilations, BBS meetup parties or by offering preferred accounts on your board to people who would courier from boards outside your network.
In short, everything worked, but it was slower and harder to find exactly what you wanted without having to pay for access to tons of different systems plus foot the bill for the long-distance dialups.
Most often, for me at least, I got all my geeky information from logging into about 8-10 BBSes in the area two or three times a week and a long distance board that was chock full of good stuff about once a month.
If you could buy a game and describe it as a "2006+" game...
The "Certified for Windows Vista" label and Windows Vista's performance index were supposed to solve this... any game tested on an entry-level 2006 PC with an entry-level NV or ATI GPU of the time should run on the vast majority of PCs still in use, right? And it should be easier for Mac computers, where "any Intel Mac" guarantees at least a minimum level of performance.
Yeah, and that's essentially what I assumed Microsoft was trying to do when they introduced that - turn PC gaming into a sorta-standardized platform. It's a good idea, it's just when people start charging to "certify" hardware that it turns bad. Would be nicer to see some third party which was less directly profit-motivated do it.
Finally, a free 1-level demo should help iron out "will it work?" issues while clarifying the customer's demand for the product.
Absolutely. I miss the good old days of shareware where you got an "episode" free which contained a mostly-complete story arc and then bought the rest of the episodes if you approved. The narrative structure of larger story-driven games makes that a bit difficult to pull off these days, but I'd like to see more developers take the attitude that a demo is supposed to sell people on the whole idea of your game rather than trick you into buying it on the basis of a tiny taste. The PC would be the platform for a renaissance or return of that philosophy of software development - a platform where the risk and cost is reduced even if the potential profits are less than for a console title.
Yes, we call that generalized anxiety disorder. You probably don't want that.
There are a few other means of doing it as well, such as writing as few portions of the code as possible in native code and doing the rest as scripted code.
Apple has been rejecting apps because they're scriptable.
Apple has been doing a number of things which seem pretty shortsighted with the iPhone app store. A lot of what they were doing would make sense if there was any reason to believe that they were trying to mimic Nintendo's success from the 1980s which was largely because of their draconian quality controls on software. Apparently the ever-sticky rule 3.3.2 expressly prohibits software which first downloads then interprets code, so as long as all of the scripts are included with the application, that shouldn't be a problem unless you plan on including a built-in updater.
As far as the speed issue for games in general goes, LUA is a pretty good example of a scripting language which actually is used in significant amount of games despite its limitations because of its speed and low memory usage. It's extremely frustrating to try to do any traditional OO design in LUA due to those limitations, however it's extremely fast and lightweight - the speed hit is virtually negligible and the memory overhead is small. Most open-source projects I've seen which use LUA extensively mingle it with non-hardware-specific native code to do its heavy lifting or things that LUA doesn't do very well at the binding level.
Don't forget that many scripting languages include platform-targetting compilers which can produce binary code. Frets on Fire is entirely written in Python
But back to the topic: The big reason we need to think about all this complexity is because PC gaming hasn't come far enough.
It's certainly finally maturing. I've been a PC gamer for 20 years and have watched countless renaissances come and go, though, so there's obviously some problems that have to be resolved. Obviously the extreme differences between producing Mac native software and Windows native software doesn't help unify PC gaming much. The fact that the Windows platform is factionalizing into dozens of content distribution systems doesn't help much either. Games for Windows Live, Steam, Battle.net, Impulse, Greenhouse, etc etc. It's going to be impossible to sell the PC as a gaming platform unless you can actually sell it as a platform. What this will unfortunately mean is giving somebody the keys and hoping they don't go for a joyride with your future. If you could buy a game and describe it as a "2006+" game, meaning that any computer bought from a platform-compliant vendor in that year or newer is capable of running the game, then you'd have a much more consumer-friendly market.
One of the reasons for the slow acceptance of PC gaming is the prerequisite consumer awareness to actually getting a good experience. I have relatives in Montana who can only barely use a computer, don't really understand anything beyond the idea that newer is usually better unless it's cheap and crappy and that older games might run on their older computer. No way for them to tell without buying it and bringing it home. However, they've got a couple of PS2s and a Gamecube, and they know they can buy anything for those and bring them home and they'll work.
Hell, even for the computer literate PC gamer, if you don't keep up with video technology, you quickly lose track of whether your hardware compares favorably with the recommended "Geforce GTS 250" or whether the whole situation will be a shitstorm on your computer. This is why I was saying that we need an actual platform with simple numbers. We also need a generally stated industry goal to stop trying to hit a moving target and instead try to do what the console manufacturers do - limit the rate of change in the prerequisite hardware. Bad for the PC hardware market, good for the consumer and
The last time I looked into haXe, it mentioned loading assets from a .swf file created with swfmill or Sam Haxe. But unless I have Flash, I can't make vector animations; I can only import PNG and JPEG. If I'm limited to raster assets, I might as well code for JavaScript Canvas to run in Chrome Frame; at least that'll run on an iPhone.
Don't forget about sound.
To which model were you referring?
There are a few other means of doing it as well, such as writing as few portions of the code as possible in native code and doing the rest as scripted code. Generalize the platform-specific calls as much as possible so that you have a very small library of graphics, sound and input functions which require platform-specific code. You're going to have to fix bugs no matter how good your cross-platform libraries are - nobody said game programming was easy, after all.
again, C# translates fairly readily to Objective-C.
Can it be done automatically, so that any changes I make in the C# are reflected in the Objective-C?
Would you trust a tool which claimed to do it automatically without bugs? Again, game development isn't easy. Everybody ends up putting up with the same crap in their development process; the decision as to whether the effort is worth the potential gains is yours.
Honestly? Probably the web.
A web game needs one PC per player, and unless I'm mistaken, developing one needs a lawfully made copy of Adobe Flash.
Actually, there are free alternatives to using Flash to author flash games, strangely. hAxe is a fairly robust Actionscript compiler which can produce fully funtioning SWF movies. Now that the SWF format is an open format, there may be open source alternatives either presently available or in the works.
As far as the single player per PC aspect goes, hotseat and same-keyboard head-to-head is no harder in Flash than it is in a proprietary app, although Flash, Javascript and Silverlight all have no support for joysticks or gamepads.
it seems like everybody and their mother are making programs first on XNA then porting them to the iPhone, and the developer tools for both are free (as long as you already have Windows.)
Both? I thought iPhone SDK needed Mac OS X Leopard or newer on an Intel Mac.
Yes, I misspoke, you probably can't do iPhone development easily on Windows. It is apparently possible, however. Clearly it'd be easier just using Objective C on MacOS and using the official SDK, however.
I personally loathe working with XNA because I dislike having to deal with the slowdown associated with Microsoft's garbage collector
How bad is this slowdown? Does it take tens of milliseconds to finish, causing a noticeable hiccup in game animation? And in what language should I write AI and physics code if I want to be able to share it between, say, an XNA game and a Mac game?
It's not really as bad as I make it out to be, but it is a significant slowdown from a similar program written in unmanaged code (or a better garbage-collected environment like Java). As long as you write your code in such a way that doesn't require large amounts of allocations and deletions (which is a bad idea anyway) you won't notice as significant a slowdown as you would otherwise. As far as how bad it is specifically, it entirely depends on what you're doing. I found I lost 5-10 fps in an unoptimized HLSL-based textured environment with dynamic lighting. For 2d games or simpler shader scenarios, the losses may be reasonably unnoticeable save for the extra ram requirements and slightly slower startup and teardown times.
Apparently C# XNA code isn't too bad to port across to Objective C and the iPhone SDK. I imagine relying too much on heavily Direct3D-specific code might be a bad idea as you'll have to port the rendering to OpenGL, but that's not really a significant barrier for an experienced 3d programmer, especially one working on a smaller title (not thousands of custom-tuned art resources). As far as physics goes, apparently Bullet has both iPhone and XNA flavors and uses the zlib license, so it's definitely friendly with any licensing scheme Microsoft might request for XBLA use. I'm not particularly familiar with AI middleware as I have too much fun writing it myself to borrow, but again, C# translates fairly readily to Objective-C.
There's nothing really to stop you from making a small head-to-head game for Linux, Mac and/or Windows (PC gaming), it's just that you can't expect your audience to have the hardware necessary to play it
To play head-to-head on a console, one needs to buy three gamepads in addition to the one that comes with the console. To play head-to-head on a PC, one needs four gamepads and possibly a hub such as the one that comes with some versions of Rock Band; that's not a huge difference. Decent PC gamepads are hard to find in stores, but I could link from my game's web
So... you're saying driving with a wheel makes it easier to smash brick walls?
Honestly? Probably the web. If the audience is playing a web game, they already expect to be using a keyboard and mouse and not gamepads.
Also, it's pretty hard not to qualify for a "console license" with, say, Xbox Live Arcade, as it seems like everybody and their mother are making programs first on XNA then porting them to the iPhone, and the developer tools for both are free (as long as you already have Windows.) Even a version of Visual Studio which can run XNA code creator is free. I personally loathe working with XNA because I dislike having to deal with the slowdown associated with Microsoft's garbage collector, but it's apparently possible to make many kinds of games which perform well on reasonably modern (3-6 year old) hardware. Just don't expect AAA first-person-shooter graphics.
There's nothing really to stop you from making a small head-to-head game for Linux, Mac and/or Windows (PC gaming), it's just that you can't expect your audience to have the hardware necessary to play it, or to particularly enjoy playing while splitting a keyboard and mouse. This makes designing interfaces that prove comfortable to all of the players, uh, challenging.
Oh, I wanted to add that there are games out there which are doing exactly what you want on the PC. Plug in two keyboards and play Frets on Fire. Apparently you can play Left 4 Dead PC in split-screen co-op. And don't forget the piles and piles of indie games which have multiplayer. Trine is fairly fun single-player but immensely more fun co-op.
For PC head-to-head back in the day I favored the Spy vs. Spy games, Worms, Battle Chess, Archon Ultra, Star Control, Scorched Earth and a few nice short-play hotseat games like Stunts. Later on in the years, we'd play You Don't Know Jack or Trackmania alongside those old classics.
Of course, we'd also hook up the Atari 2600 for games like Frogs & Flies, Warlords and Combat. As the years went by, we'd hook up the SNES for Mario Kart, N64 for Goldeneye, Playstation for Bushido Blade, Dreamcast for Powerstone, and now we pretty much play Burnout Paradise, Ragdoll Kung Fu, PAIN, LittleBigPlanet, a few splitscreen co-op shooters and some decent arcade remakes on the PS3.
The problem with head-to-head gaming on the PC is that there's little point these days - most people don't own a mediacenter PC right now, you're limited on most systems to a single keyboard and a single mouse (in that you cannot expect anybody to have any others) and people don't want to pile around a single little monitor in somebody's den or bedroom when there's a perfectly good TV that they can use with a relatively cheap device with wireless controllers while lounging around the house, or pacing the living room or whatever.
Hotseat and head-to-head gaming is far from dead, it's just that the PC is not quite as relevant as a gaming system as it used to be - the kinds of games we used to only get on PCs are now coming out on consoles as well, or not at all.
Plausibly convincing AI doesn't strictly imply strong or particularly intelligent AI. Most games use inexpensive tricks to make the AI seem more competent than it actually is.
That's not to be underestimated. What is the purpose of video game AI? To convincingly (for the lifetime of the enemy agent) emulate human behavior in a similar circumstance. To engage and challenge the player. Strong AI is a red herring - you're not going to get it out of a video game before everybody else gets it because the AI has to compete for resources with everything else. If you demand strong AI to have fun, you're never going to have fun. What you need to be looking for is adaptive AI which uses default behaviors which more often than not do something realistic - even if that realistic behavior is breathtakingly stupid. So are humans.
Welcome to the modern day shooting gallery, where things shoot back and take cover, but don't move much, and certainly never realize anything so simple as a basic flanking diversion, or that you have grenades and guns and can kill them.
Try Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter 2 for a game which breaks those expectations for you. AI will hide out in ambush, stop firing until they have a better shot at you, use grenades appropriately, will seldom engage in an obviously suicidal rush and will actually use suppressing fire to cover for flanking actions that their companions are engaging in.
The only thing inherently worse about driving with a stick than with a wheel and pedals is that it's much easier to accidentally overcorrect, especially if you are unfamiliar with using an analog joystick (in other words you're either not pressing it at all, or you're pressing it as far to the right or left as you can). Well, there's also the stopping issue causing your body to shift and therefore bump the stick, possibly preventing you from stopping.
At low speeds, I don't see these as being much more dangerous than a conventional steering mechanism, especially if there is signal noise filtration (shaky hands? let's ignore that) and a rate-of-turn limiter that scales with speed (simulation of "wheel resistance").
The lack of a steering wheel might increase the risk of back and neck injury in an accident, however, due to the increased space you'd have to move in (even with an airbag).
The best thing about 3d parties are all the 3d women. All that proprietary "boob-jubbling technology."
No, they build thinner robots and bins.