I agree. I remember back in 2000 I heard that one of my graduate classmates from high school sold his Everquest character for $800 or something. My little brother is selling his Diablo 2 character and last I heard the bidding was over $200 on E-bay. I honestly think it's sickening to imagine people willing to spend this much money on something that isn't real. That's just my opinion though.
On another note, I have been avoiding MMORPGs my entire life. I'm absolutely terrified that my soul will be consumed and my real life will be all but destroyed.
I was trying to provide credibility, not self-promote. What I said sounds a lot better from a guy who has (at least to a limited degree) "been there, done that", rather than just some random opinion from someone who has never even attempted game design. So I'm sorry you misinterpreted my intentions. I can't speak for him, but I imagine the poster above me used his project to justify what he said as well.
Now if I really wanted to self-promote, I would have said something like "heY guyz check out teh my nu game!!111one". Maybe next time you should think of the context of the dialogue before you jump to a rash conclusion.
I have my own game project Hero of Allacrost and I also feel I'm also in no need of a text. Although I would lie if I said I haven't read one. When I was much younger (late teens) I bought a game programming book but it was just a bunch of quotes from game dev gurus, and made for very little of a learning experience. I also bought Programming Linux Games thinking there might be some cool tricks in there, but it covered little else of what I already knew and the SDL code given in there is hardly better than the SDL documentation/wiki already available.
I feel that the reason the majority of game projects out there fail is because you have your over-excited teenagers who just played Doom 3/Half-Life 2/World of Warcraft and somehow get the idea that it's easy to make a FPS that pushes the technology envelope, or that MMORPGs are simple games to create. I believe the secondary factors are: lack of motivation, poor leadership, and unrealisitic goals/expectations.
I was afraid too, even though I had used Linux on the campus PCs. I used to have the same problem (immediate infection/total system compromise within hours after hooking up to the net). It was so bad that after re-formatting and installing the online anti-virus software my university provided me, it was already too late. I fearcely battle virsuse for nearly two weeks, then I finally gave up and installed Linux.
Now I thank those viruses, and Windows/M$ for failing to do anything to prevent them from entering my system. Had that not have happened, then it's likely I would still be trapped in Windows.
I'm also a Wesnoth fan. It's one of many things that motivated me to start working on my own free Linux game project, Hero of Allacrost. The Allacrost project started in June 2004 and we've been steadily building things from the ground up. HoA is a 2D RPG similar to the "old school" SNES-style RPG games. We are still a ways from having a playble version, but we have some great artwork finished and released the first screenshots to the game a few days ago.
Back on topic, I have my doubts about game development companies openly embracing Linux any time in the near-future. The production costs are just too high and the revenue too low. If the game development companies started regularly developing games with cross-platform APIs though (OpenGL, SDL) then things could become very different I think.
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I agree. I remember back in 2000 I heard that one of my graduate classmates from high school sold his Everquest character for $800 or something. My little brother is selling his Diablo 2 character and last I heard the bidding was over $200 on E-bay. I honestly think it's sickening to imagine people willing to spend this much money on something that isn't real. That's just my opinion though.
On another note, I have been avoiding MMORPGs my entire life. I'm absolutely terrified that my soul will be consumed and my real life will be all but destroyed.
I was trying to provide credibility, not self-promote. What I said sounds a lot better from a guy who has (at least to a limited degree) "been there, done that", rather than just some random opinion from someone who has never even attempted game design. So I'm sorry you misinterpreted my intentions. I can't speak for him, but I imagine the poster above me used his project to justify what he said as well.
Now if I really wanted to self-promote, I would have said something like "heY guyz check out teh my nu game!!111one". Maybe next time you should think of the context of the dialogue before you jump to a rash conclusion.
I have my own game project Hero of Allacrost and I also feel I'm also in no need of a text. Although I would lie if I said I haven't read one. When I was much younger (late teens) I bought a game programming book but it was just a bunch of quotes from game dev gurus, and made for very little of a learning experience. I also bought Programming Linux Games thinking there might be some cool tricks in there, but it covered little else of what I already knew and the SDL code given in there is hardly better than the SDL documentation/wiki already available.
I feel that the reason the majority of game projects out there fail is because you have your over-excited teenagers who just played Doom 3/Half-Life 2/World of Warcraft and somehow get the idea that it's easy to make a FPS that pushes the technology envelope, or that MMORPGs are simple games to create. I believe the secondary factors are: lack of motivation, poor leadership, and unrealisitic goals/expectations.
I was afraid too, even though I had used Linux on the campus PCs. I used to have the same problem (immediate infection/total system compromise within hours after hooking up to the net). It was so bad that after re-formatting and installing the online anti-virus software my university provided me, it was already too late. I fearcely battle virsuse for nearly two weeks, then I finally gave up and installed Linux. Now I thank those viruses, and Windows/M$ for failing to do anything to prevent them from entering my system. Had that not have happened, then it's likely I would still be trapped in Windows.
I'm also a Wesnoth fan. It's one of many things that motivated me to start working on my own free Linux game project, Hero of Allacrost. The Allacrost project started in June 2004 and we've been steadily building things from the ground up. HoA is a 2D RPG similar to the "old school" SNES-style RPG games. We are still a ways from having a playble version, but we have some great artwork finished and released the first screenshots to the game a few days ago. Back on topic, I have my doubts about game development companies openly embracing Linux any time in the near-future. The production costs are just too high and the revenue too low. If the game development companies started regularly developing games with cross-platform APIs though (OpenGL, SDL) then things could become very different I think.