I'm a C++ programmer, you insensitive clod. C/C++ is not limited to Windows, yet there are no better IDE for C++ than Visual Studio (especially with Visual Assist).
I come from Russia and I, together with several of my friends (all of us 25-35 years old), stay away from any "social" network (commonly abbreviated socnet (sotssyet) in Russian) that requires real names. Because we're paranoids, you know...
> If Google+ allowed anonymous use then I would be on it, as would a fair number of others I know.
You are spot on. I created an account under my nickname, got added by several tens of people who recognized me, yet for Google, that wasn't the name "I commonly go by" and my account was suspended. Since you can't reason with them, I justed deleted it.
I agree, but it's easier to port and use C/C++ library in a C/C++ program. Porting the same library to use in Java would just add more work.
By example: OpenGL (ES) is already provided on N900, but you can't use it in Java, you need to find and compile Java's bindings which aren't readily available for Maemo.
My point is: Java is only 'cross-platform' if you limit platforms to "ones supported by Sun/Oracle".
Since when Java/Python/C# can help you access OpenGL, webcam, etc on a different platform?
I have N900 phone, which runs Linux. I want to access its camera. WIth C/C++, I can at least port my own video4linux library in reasonable time, because v4l2 support is there. Java wouldn't help me with that at all.
"Fat" languages may be fine for getting something done in quick and dirty way on few well-supported platforms, but on an obscure platform, you are much more safe sticking to C/C++ - if there's no API to access hardware from that language, there's no way to access it at all.
thing that cured the Czech Republic - several guns aimed at Nicolae Ceausescu's body.
So Czechs killed Romanian dictator? Or were they just posing with his body to scare their own authorities? And Romania posted videos to internet in 1989? Was it.GIF or.FLI? Uh.
Indeed, but how does the argument "it costs money" justify copyright infringement?
It doesn't, but "moral threshold" to commit copyright infringement is significantly lower. You don't see "Car thieves party" anywhere (excluding socialist countries), do you?:)
I wonder what would you do, if Windows cost $5000 per copy.
Use something else? Personally, I can easily afford to buy Windows, but I chose not to. Why would I want to use such a terrible OS?
Oh yeah... I also use (and try to evangelize) Linux in Russia. And even our freaking government does, too. Too bad they hadn't started that in 1990s, when $30/month was an average salary for an average clerk, and paying your yearly wage for an OS was just insane...
Now it's cheaper, only about half of an average monthly wage, but a whole generation grew up using pirated software and you cannot expect that to change "any time soon"...
Actually, there's a third way. Russian gamedev, although not as prominent as western one, manages to live off of much lesser profit margins because PC games (even Western ones) are usually sold for about 10 USD per disc (pirates go even lower, for 2-3 USD per disc, but their quality signicantly differ). This probably wouldn't justify multimillion dollar investments which are currently poured on western gamedev projects, but, having first-hand experience in that industry, I'd say that these money is badly invested anyway (the same situation as in film industry): i.e. you get real work done for maybe 50% of the money, while the rest is wasted on overhead and unnecessary luxury.
Maybe this luxury is essential in attracting certain kinds of people and the overhead is inevitable given how young gamedev business still is, but current situation doesn't look sustainable for me. I believe that lowering both prices and expenses would result in much healthier industry.
I experienced free market in 1990s on some obsolete home computer platform (ZX Spectrum & clones), which happened to gain mass popularity in my country (Russia). Nobody respected any copyrights back then and there was little possibility to use legal means to fight the pirates.
This (quite logically) resulted in a free-for-all situation: consumer-unfriendly DRM (as we would say these days), e.g. games released on floppies which didn't work at all for 10-25% of legal customers because of dirty tricks used for copy protection, no shareware, games being cracked and then re-DRMed for benefit of the cracker - who often broke something in the process (because play-testing took too much time), etc. What's worse, often you could only buy cracked (and broken) version of the game, because original version was not distributed in your region (unless by means of extremely slow and unreliable mail delivery).
So I'd say that less regulation results in more restrictions for end users and more DRM, not less. It also further skewes the situation so average user is totally helpless against large "software distributors" (cracking groups) who could force every kind of DRM on him (yes, you could theoretically crack their protection and re-distribute more user-friendly version, but you cannot compete with throughput and skill of organized crackers who are supplied by dedicated suppliers).
Well, if you call hacks like UtahGLX a solid support...
Overall problem with accelerator card support in Linux is that it's several layers "thicker" than in Windows, and those layers tend to be uncontrollable by neither user nor even developer. E.g.
you can't (couldn't?) have stable binary format for GLSL shaders, you have to compile them on the fly (which is insane, because this means that you can't do stuff they do in Windows, where all shader combinations may take hours of offline compiling)
you can't manage video memory under Linux (without using nascent kernel interfaces at least, which are platform-specific by definition)
graphics stack is not thread-safe, generally speaking, so you can't safely parallelize e.g. resource creation, which is particularly costly (which means: preventing hitches when something "pops in" during the game requires your own - pretty complicated - solution, etc)
This is partially caused by OpenGL being much more higher level than (experienced) game developer needs it to be (and thus affects MacOS X and mobile platforms as well), and compounded by the fact that even (often incosistent) OpenGL features do not get uniform support on all hardware Linux runs.
Hell no. Think about the differences in the ways you do (or better to say, fake) lighting and shadows - whether your "polygon" is static or not makes HUGE difference. It's like saying "vehicle is vehicle, no matter how it gets propelled. Rockets require a bit more fuel and different controls than cars, but that's about it".
Well, we basically agree. Looking for the art first, but not forgetting about financial success is probably the best combination.
I just have a grudge against modern entertainment industry (in which I also work), where business thinking prevails over artistic freedom. People are too risk-averse these days...
I'm not actually arguing against artists being rewarded for their work. It's good, as long as people don't start to measure everything in terms of "it's profitable for me" and "it's an illusory goal which won't bring me any money" (this can happen with non-monetary profits, too).
It always feels bad when you encounter a person with a counter in his/her eyes. Don't know why. I'm a selfish bitch sometimes and probably I don't like the same attitude in other people, too. To sum up - not pursuing tangible (or obviously visible) profits is always noble.
The attitude that certain professionals should simply do what they do for the love of it and not expect some sort of monetary recompense, or worse, should get said money from some other career bugs me.
Part of being an "artist" (as opposed to being just a "professional") is having some irrational motives, distinct from just accumulating power (or money, which is the same in lawful societies).
You are asking questions similar to questions of many of my fellow compatriots (Russians), who can't get it why Western people often pursue some "illusory" goals when it's counter-productive to do so. You know, it's less efficient (and redudant!) to allow everyone to express their minds, as opposed to having designated "thinkers" and "workers" (if you are a software engineer, you can easily find appropriate analogues).
You are actually questioning the very foundation of Western civilization, which is deeply based on idea of "liberal arts" which only free persons were taught (in ancient times, with "practical skills" reserved for slaves) and which were often viewed as impractical/unreasonable waste of time.
When it comes to entertainment out in the real world, it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
Most people aren't. That's what differentiates people who haven't lost the childish curiousity in making something just for fun from those who are only thinking about accumulating power (which is measured in money units in lawful societies) with no clear goal how to use that power (except to accumulate it more).
The most important aspect of this movie is that it shows the world that free software has matured enough to be the tools for some creative people, because normally, creative people - especially in the artists - are picky about the tools they use (they don't want to fight their tools).
Well, just remember that most commercial software packages cost you several thousand bucks per seat (not to mention plugins which are usually sold independently), which is #1 reason for software piracy in CG industries of some (Eastern) European countries.
I could agree with you if you were talking about, say, office software or anything like that, but in CG industry I believe a lot of potential is being held up by Autodesk gaining a monopoly in that field. This locks out the market for smaller companies and individuals, who have to pirate it in order to become proficient with it.
So no, sir, free CG tools being more prominent will result in them being more frequently used in commercial studios and more budget-strained students being able to find a job in those studios, which will eventually lower the prices in that industry (and salaries, too, but that's natural).
There are plenty of independent movies but I usually couldn't care less about them. This one was brought to my attention by being created with open source (and even free) tools. I watched it only because of that fact, otherwise I would have missed it as I miss a lot of other human activities. It is natural that you appreciate it differently when it's 1001th indie movie you watched this month and when it's your first indie movie watched this year.
Metacritic. Only aggregates the reviews, weights by ratings (and it does normalize it, refusing to accept common practice among reviewers to use 50% as minimal score) and publishes the final score.
Well, I'm not sure about phone software, but pirating PC software does help people to survive.
E.g. in Russia, buying 3DS Max or Photoshop, or even Visual Studio was and is out of reach for commoners. Heck, even Windows itself used to be out of reach just ten years ago. Yet without proficiency with this, you only qualify for shit jobs with yearly income below 2000 USD, which is barely enough to survive.
So, dare I say, whole IT industry in countries like Russia heavily relies on piracy, because you won't be able to find skilled personnel otherwise. Some companies use pirated software for their business because law enforcement in Russia is weak and playing fair is not a rational behavior in such conditions (your competition will leapfrog you). The situation is gradually improving over the years, but fighting piracy is still unrealistic in the short term.
And no, FOSS is of nearly no help for these areas. If your employer requires you to know 3DS Max or even specific plugins for it, you can't convert your Blender skills that easily.
So you prefer playing games at 30 fps[1] in 1280x720 resolution[1], without stereo vision, which you won't even be able to emulate (for nostalgy reasons) 10 years from now?
Congratulations.
[1] - Theoretically better rates are possible, but hardly any game developer targets higher figures (sometimes - on PS3 particularly - they are even Ok with upscaling sub-HD resolutions). It's unreasonable to push hardware to its limits because optimizing content creation pipeline pays a lot more than optimizing the performance. On PC it's the same developer-wise, but you can always add more power to your gaming machine.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a console game developer. But I don't think the above will hurt the business I'm in because there's a lot of people who don't even understand what does it mean "maximum 30 frames per second".
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I'm a C++ programmer, you insensitive clod. C/C++ is not limited to Windows, yet there are no better IDE for C++ than Visual Studio (especially with Visual Assist).
I come from Russia and I, together with several of my friends (all of us 25-35 years old), stay away from any "social" network (commonly abbreviated socnet (sotssyet) in Russian) that requires real names. Because we're paranoids, you know...
> If Google+ allowed anonymous use then I would be on it, as would a fair number of others I know.
You are spot on. I created an account under my nickname, got added by several tens of people who recognized me, yet for Google, that wasn't the name "I commonly go by" and my account was suspended. Since you can't reason with them, I justed deleted it.
I agree, but it's easier to port and use C/C++ library in a C/C++ program. Porting the same library to use in Java would just add more work. By example: OpenGL (ES) is already provided on N900, but you can't use it in Java, you need to find and compile Java's bindings which aren't readily available for Maemo.
My point is: Java is only 'cross-platform' if you limit platforms to "ones supported by Sun/Oracle".
Since when Java/Python/C# can help you access OpenGL, webcam, etc on a different platform?
I have N900 phone, which runs Linux. I want to access its camera. WIth C/C++, I can at least port my own video4linux library in reasonable time, because v4l2 support is there. Java wouldn't help me with that at all.
"Fat" languages may be fine for getting something done in quick and dirty way on few well-supported platforms, but on an obscure platform, you are much more safe sticking to C/C++ - if there's no API to access hardware from that language, there's no way to access it at all.
(Sorry, my work blocks most sites so I can't give a more informative reference than that wikipedia article).
Are calls to France cheap at yours?
thing that cured the Czech Republic - several guns aimed at Nicolae Ceausescu's body.
So Czechs killed Romanian dictator? Or were they just posing with his body to scare their own authorities? And Romania posted videos to internet in 1989? Was it .GIF or .FLI? Uh.
Indeed, but how does the argument "it costs money" justify copyright infringement?
It doesn't, but "moral threshold" to commit copyright infringement is significantly lower. You don't see "Car thieves party" anywhere (excluding socialist countries), do you? :)
I wonder what would you do, if Windows cost $5000 per copy.
Use something else? Personally, I can easily afford to buy Windows, but I chose not to. Why would I want to use such a terrible OS?
Oh yeah... I also use (and try to evangelize) Linux in Russia. And even our freaking government does, too. Too bad they hadn't started that in 1990s, when $30/month was an average salary for an average clerk, and paying your yearly wage for an OS was just insane...
Now it's cheaper, only about half of an average monthly wage, but a whole generation grew up using pirated software and you cannot expect that to change "any time soon"...
Do not equate copyright infringement to stealing, these two are different.
I wonder what would you do, if Windows cost $5000 per copy.
This trick now got some scientific proof :)
Actually, there's a third way. Russian gamedev, although not as prominent as western one, manages to live off of much lesser profit margins because PC games (even Western ones) are usually sold for about 10 USD per disc (pirates go even lower, for 2-3 USD per disc, but their quality signicantly differ). This probably wouldn't justify multimillion dollar investments which are currently poured on western gamedev projects, but, having first-hand experience in that industry, I'd say that these money is badly invested anyway (the same situation as in film industry): i.e. you get real work done for maybe 50% of the money, while the rest is wasted on overhead and unnecessary luxury.
Maybe this luxury is essential in attracting certain kinds of people and the overhead is inevitable given how young gamedev business still is, but current situation doesn't look sustainable for me. I believe that lowering both prices and expenses would result in much healthier industry.
I experienced free market in 1990s on some obsolete home computer platform (ZX Spectrum & clones), which happened to gain mass popularity in my country (Russia). Nobody respected any copyrights back then and there was little possibility to use legal means to fight the pirates.
This (quite logically) resulted in a free-for-all situation: consumer-unfriendly DRM (as we would say these days), e.g. games released on floppies which didn't work at all for 10-25% of legal customers because of dirty tricks used for copy protection, no shareware, games being cracked and then re-DRMed for benefit of the cracker - who often broke something in the process (because play-testing took too much time), etc. What's worse, often you could only buy cracked (and broken) version of the game, because original version was not distributed in your region (unless by means of extremely slow and unreliable mail delivery).
So I'd say that less regulation results in more restrictions for end users and more DRM, not less. It also further skewes the situation so average user is totally helpless against large "software distributors" (cracking groups) who could force every kind of DRM on him (yes, you could theoretically crack their protection and re-distribute more user-friendly version, but you cannot compete with throughput and skill of organized crackers who are supplied by dedicated suppliers).
Overall problem with accelerator card support in Linux is that it's several layers "thicker" than in Windows, and those layers tend to be uncontrollable by neither user nor even developer. E.g.
This is partially caused by OpenGL being much more higher level than (experienced) game developer needs it to be (and thus affects MacOS X and mobile platforms as well), and compounded by the fact that even (often incosistent) OpenGL features do not get uniform support on all hardware Linux runs.
I don't see any good solution for this situation.
Hell no. Think about the differences in the ways you do (or better to say, fake) lighting and shadows - whether your "polygon" is static or not makes HUGE difference. It's like saying "vehicle is vehicle, no matter how it gets propelled. Rockets require a bit more fuel and different controls than cars, but that's about it".
Well, we basically agree. Looking for the art first, but not forgetting about financial success is probably the best combination.
I just have a grudge against modern entertainment industry (in which I also work), where business thinking prevails over artistic freedom. People are too risk-averse these days...
I'm not actually arguing against artists being rewarded for their work. It's good, as long as people don't start to measure everything in terms of "it's profitable for me" and "it's an illusory goal which won't bring me any money" (this can happen with non-monetary profits, too).
It always feels bad when you encounter a person with a counter in his/her eyes. Don't know why. I'm a selfish bitch sometimes and probably I don't like the same attitude in other people, too. To sum up - not pursuing tangible (or obviously visible) profits is always noble.
The attitude that certain professionals should simply do what they do for the love of it and not expect some sort of monetary recompense, or worse, should get said money from some other career bugs me.
Part of being an "artist" (as opposed to being just a "professional") is having some irrational motives, distinct from just accumulating power (or money, which is the same in lawful societies).
You are asking questions similar to questions of many of my fellow compatriots (Russians), who can't get it why Western people often pursue some "illusory" goals when it's counter-productive to do so. You know, it's less efficient (and redudant!) to allow everyone to express their minds, as opposed to having designated "thinkers" and "workers" (if you are a software engineer, you can easily find appropriate analogues).
You are actually questioning the very foundation of Western civilization, which is deeply based on idea of "liberal arts" which only free persons were taught (in ancient times, with "practical skills" reserved for slaves) and which were often viewed as impractical/unreasonable waste of time.
Blender can be used not only for rendering... it features an NLE tool, too (and a lot more - there are games written in Blender).
When it comes to entertainment out in the real world, it so happens that most artists just aren't willing to donate their free time for some illusory cause.
Most people aren't. That's what differentiates people who haven't lost the childish curiousity in making something just for fun from those who are only thinking about accumulating power (which is measured in money units in lawful societies) with no clear goal how to use that power (except to accumulate it more).
The most important aspect of this movie is that it shows the world that free software has matured enough to be the tools for some creative people, because normally, creative people - especially in the artists - are picky about the tools they use (they don't want to fight their tools).
Well, just remember that most commercial software packages cost you several thousand bucks per seat (not to mention plugins which are usually sold independently), which is #1 reason for software piracy in CG industries of some (Eastern) European countries.
I could agree with you if you were talking about, say, office software or anything like that, but in CG industry I believe a lot of potential is being held up by Autodesk gaining a monopoly in that field. This locks out the market for smaller companies and individuals, who have to pirate it in order to become proficient with it.
So no, sir, free CG tools being more prominent will result in them being more frequently used in commercial studios and more budget-strained students being able to find a job in those studios, which will eventually lower the prices in that industry (and salaries, too, but that's natural).
There are plenty of independent movies but I usually couldn't care less about them. This one was brought to my attention by being created with open source (and even free) tools. I watched it only because of that fact, otherwise I would have missed it as I miss a lot of other human activities. It is natural that you appreciate it differently when it's 1001th indie movie you watched this month and when it's your first indie movie watched this year.
Metacritic. Only aggregates the reviews, weights by ratings (and it does normalize it, refusing to accept common practice among reviewers to use 50% as minimal score) and publishes the final score.
Well, I'm not sure about phone software, but pirating PC software does help people to survive.
E.g. in Russia, buying 3DS Max or Photoshop, or even Visual Studio was and is out of reach for commoners. Heck, even Windows itself used to be out of reach just ten years ago. Yet without proficiency with this, you only qualify for shit jobs with yearly income below 2000 USD, which is barely enough to survive.
So, dare I say, whole IT industry in countries like Russia heavily relies on piracy, because you won't be able to find skilled personnel otherwise. Some companies use pirated software for their business because law enforcement in Russia is weak and playing fair is not a rational behavior in such conditions (your competition will leapfrog you). The situation is gradually improving over the years, but fighting piracy is still unrealistic in the short term.
And no, FOSS is of nearly no help for these areas. If your employer requires you to know 3DS Max or even specific plugins for it, you can't convert your Blender skills that easily.
So you prefer playing games at 30 fps[1] in 1280x720 resolution[1], without stereo vision, which you won't even be able to emulate (for nostalgy reasons) 10 years from now?
Congratulations.
[1] - Theoretically better rates are possible, but hardly any game developer targets higher figures (sometimes - on PS3 particularly - they are even Ok with upscaling sub-HD resolutions). It's unreasonable to push hardware to its limits because optimizing content creation pipeline pays a lot more than optimizing the performance. On PC it's the same developer-wise, but you can always add more power to your gaming machine.
DISCLAIMER: I'm a console game developer. But I don't think the above will hurt the business I'm in because there's a lot of people who don't even understand what does it mean "maximum 30 frames per second".