They just copied the gel on Trauma Center for Nintendo DS!
See? If a tiny Nintendo machine can spread innovative ideas in the mind of researchers, think what the Wii can do, being more powerful... This could be the new frontier on hyping the upcoming consoles. Psst, I heard the PS3 Sixaxis cures diseases if you swing it up in the right pattern!
To my experience with commercial OSS solutions, commercial OSS with a project taken from the community is practically illicit competition. A company can live up with 2 or 3 integrators and sell software made by 10-20 people, manpower-wise. Sure they still have to pay for those 2 or 3 programmers, but it is way less than hiring, sustaining and training a whole staff.
That's why I call it a scam. Starting up a project to be commercial OSS it's a nightmare: you get almost no support by the community till you have something working, especially if you aren't endorsed by one of the well-known OSS VIP who seems to be the only one that can say "I opened a new OSS project to improve my salary and climb the industry ladder" and get people working without salary for them. You are stuck with the same expenses and problems of closed source management, with the added value that a competitor can start integrate your solution once it works and make it better with 10-20% the money you invested in the project, assuming you are able to make it even with all the expenses to win the inertia of starting a business. Sure, given the time patches will start to come in (especially from early adopters, not necessarily by the extended community) but it too much risky to make it commercial open source from the start if you plan to start from scratch. Most of the successful OSS commercial solutions started up from hobby project or are simply integrations of other people work, they are not fair when they define themselves successful commercial enterprises, since they didn't deal with the startup costs and started with something of value by itself.
In addition, for enterprise grade software, OSS makes no difference over proprietary solutions. I now work on a small corporation based on 7 different nations and everywhere, while the platforms used vary from full OSS (my preference) to totally Closed Source, the customer gets always the sources on software developed with full control over it. The added value of OSS for them is on the infrastructure (no money spent on anything is not strictly the software), not on the project itself. Wonder why corporations are moving to SOA? That's the reason, no more clients getting the source code to turn on the less paying maintainer, since they are getting only the services.
Aside several enterprise projects, most of the OSS software reside in the realm of user-oriented utilities. Here, aside for being free, there's still too small interest on the source for the end users. I usually say to our managers that aside to fork a project to add a sterling point on your CV, nobody cares about sources on OSS software for personal use, since the selling points of these applications are cost (the less the better) and functionalities (the more the better). Sure OSS ensures these small projects will be alive even if original devs abandon it, but here more than anywhere its almost impossible to make money: if you want to get paid a bozo can start forking a free version again. If you get commercial someone can still relieve your software and make it better with less hassle, outselling you. There are a lot of commercial implementations of OSS software that are so much polished and user-captivating that outshadow community driven ones, most of them are on dog eat dog mode, continously cannibalizing other competitors in functionalities and sparky features (take a look at the jabber clients). So, if you are the one developing the software AND you are also in need to improve it to remain competitive, you are pretty much rising your internal costs and are more likely to be outsold by competitors that only integrates waiting on the road for code to come. Improvements have less impact than new features, but they are still costly. Planning new versions of your software while improving your current one to remain commercially competitive, if you aren't backed by a license that allows you to ask money from competition, pretty much kills you, otherwise your project will start to stagnate on itself (like many OSS do, to
LOL, you should've been there with Ultima IX, I owned it for aroud six hours before selling it (double priced) to a fanboy-friend of mine that was waiting for his own ordered copy. The fun part is that he was really really happy, even if he never finished the game (I guess most fanboys don't need to play the real thing, since they played it continously in their minds while anticipating).
Strange, since CTRL+ALT+DEL and Penny Arcade issued several webcomics hyping the game I would have expected something better. Of course it's sarcasm.
I wonder how such creative people can so easily hand down their comics to do corporate lip services, even to the point of being accused to copy each other...
Oh wait. Money.
Jackon never took credit saying he created Aragorn or he highly contributed to the official development of the Tolkien's setting. There's a difference, since neither Tolkien Foundation or WOTC licensing programs allows content to flow upwards and strictly assure that products will respect a very specific canon.
Nobody's saying they are bad (they are pointed as good in a wide number of my posts), just saying that there's always something that cannot assure you gaming sites are super partes in an absolute way.
Also, SOE doesn't run massive advertising on the site. My point is not against the sites but against the political choices you are more or less obliged to take when you are under such circumstances.
I really respected the choice of The Escapist to seek advertising outside the gamedom (mostly) to avoid possible retailations against bad press. Funnily enough most of the readers were and still are aginst not gaming-related advertisements.
I apologize for the horrible summary (since I'm not native english, I sort of expected that). I guess that, or the editor has superpowers, or the summary is comprehensible (aside for the idiomatic fiascos).
The point of the summary (and of the article) is: Turbine, one of the major sponsors of MMORPG.COM, tried more or less willingly to gain design credits on a campaign setting they are licensed to use. While many Eberron fans pointed the Warforged discrepancy to the editing staff of MMORPG, they basically ignored them with an official reply, not even bothering to sort things out.
So I asked Baker for clarifications, that was kindly enough to work out my apparently poor english and write back an answer that straighten thing out: Turbine has no control over Baker's world.
This not what DDO staff said at PAX and it's irritating that to make users believe they did some serious work for their pretty shallow and superficial (at least at start) D&D licensed game they have to steal another designer's work that should have to be the base for their own game setting (like Baker pointed out).
End of story.
Sorry again.
and then there's gaming, which is a 100% immersive, active experience.
It is not. Mostly of the time game developers are moving away from a 100% immersive, active experience to a more comfortable passive experience with the illusion of being active. More easy to implement, more easy to control.
Just like many games has nothing to do with real AI (they have a reasonable illusion or mock up of an AI), many games don't really even try to be a 100% immersive and active experience. The more the player is guided and told what to do the more the player will like the game and think he's a genius. A game that will challenge common sense and basic logical thinking usually is referred as too hard or frustrating. Look where MMOGs started and where they are going to and you will have a nice render about where your "100% interactive" experience is going: human terminals following blindly what a game instructs them to do.
Following blindly other people's commands is not immersive or active is just alienating that's why all the problems with factory workers during the industrial revolutions. Gaming is following the same path, depriving gamers of control, yet retaining the same immersion, but without self determination. The brains end.
Sorry for the generalization about the Christian Church.
But you obiuvusly don't live in Italy or in other Latin europe countries.
Even politicians bows to the Pope's will.
By all other means, the Pope si elected because the charge cannot be dynastic for obiouvs reasons, but he is an absolute ruler. Absolute ruleship is a form of dictatorship.
Oh and speaking about the Pope is speaking about an estabilished political figure, ruling a sovereign State, not about Religion.
By my point of view a benevolent dictator is still a dictator.
We should thank Torvalds to keep the questioning open, otherwise it would be like Christian Church: the Pope speaks, the lambs obey.
The article also makes a very saddening statement: the GPL3 is basically written by the companies behind the FSF. The article cites that HP is pushing to have their own interests protected. Do you really think that other GPL-oriented companies (like IBM or Novell) will just stay and look or they will also try to drive the boat towards their coasts?
After all, FSF made just a favour to many commercial distributions (another case of uninterested philantrophism?), claryfying that if you have to fork a distro, you have to redistribute every single packet by yourself, instead of shipping only the relevant, modified ones like GPL says. GPL is too generalized and vague. You can't have a license that has hundreds of pages of "clarifications" continuosly swapped and rewritten to praise an actor or to damage another. Most of the clarifications are just more ambiguos or simply idiotic. Do you know that by FSF interpretation, subclassing or implementing an interface is considered a derivative work? That's makes impossible to use any object oriented library released over LGPL by the term of the license, they will be as plain and simple GPL licensed code. There's a lot of OOP libraries wrongly placed in the LGPL domain. Do you really think that their author bothered about the implications? They just followed the leader. For not good reason and without a clue. Why LGPL3 talks only about header files and libraries? Open source licenses should be technlogy neutral and C/C++ is not the only language out there. Sure our benevolent dictator may pretend that the other technologies are not there gut they will not fade away. Today IT rarely uses anything compiled aside core OS programs and it's hard to find a place for the delusional aims of a puppet in the hands of other non-Microsoft corporations.
Sure A guru's life is expensive and big corporations makes hefty donations. Let Stallman explain to us mortals why Microsoft has to be destroyed and IBM or HP are valiant partners whose interests are to be protected.
HP advanced pressures to make the GPL3 more friendly towards their PATENTS! The world got upside down or what?
All these consideration demonstrates that WOW doesn't kill anything, it's just people that are influenced by marketing and media education or that, more probably, Brian Sullivan\Gamasutra\Game Developer were tipped by Blizzard PR & Marketing to say so.
Netx time I hope they will see a more suitable period to launch a long & compelling game:
not MMOG addicted people get out in the sun on Summer, with or without anything to blame, sales would be low anyway. That was that way since 90s. Only titles that cannot compete for a place in the audience are launched during the summer.
They should have concentrated more to make a real RPG Killer Application, instead of weeping for lost opportunities without any clue.
They are just reselling an old mouse with different performance metrics.
They are gone too far with the performance of their products that they have problems creating new merchandise to sell to hardcore gamers (that almost always is like saying dull fanboy).
Sure, many people will buy for more DPI or more APM, but just today their sensitivity is just way up the scale of a normal human or a pro gamer.
At least they are not (yet) reached the state where they will ship fragile merchandise just to continue to move the stocks.
Why to compare a new generation of CPUs against and overclocked setup of one of the current best chips? Why not taking the test against an AMD chip with a similar NATIVE clocking or, maybe, against a similar X2, since the core duo is a dual core chip?
And once again, it's fair to compare two completely different architectures by the sound of their clocking?
Nobody remembers the ruckus that Intel did when AMD introduced a better architecture that simply ate Pentiums at equal clocking?
Just a pointless piece of hype.
Slashdot Mirror
I smell fishy arguments and last resort PS3 non stop marketing... Falsifying an Emmy Award worldwide wasn't enough?
They just copied the gel on Trauma Center for Nintendo DS!
See? If a tiny Nintendo machine can spread innovative ideas in the mind of researchers, think what the Wii can do, being more powerful... This could be the new frontier on hyping the upcoming consoles. Psst, I heard the PS3 Sixaxis cures diseases if you swing it up in the right pattern!
Of course I'm joking.
To my experience with commercial OSS solutions, commercial OSS with a project taken from the community is practically illicit competition. A company can live up with 2 or 3 integrators and sell software made by 10-20 people, manpower-wise. Sure they still have to pay for those 2 or 3 programmers, but it is way less than hiring, sustaining and training a whole staff.
That's why I call it a scam. Starting up a project to be commercial OSS it's a nightmare: you get almost no support by the community till you have something working, especially if you aren't endorsed by one of the well-known OSS VIP who seems to be the only one that can say "I opened a new OSS project to improve my salary and climb the industry ladder" and get people working without salary for them. You are stuck with the same expenses and problems of closed source management, with the added value that a competitor can start integrate your solution once it works and make it better with 10-20% the money you invested in the project, assuming you are able to make it even with all the expenses to win the inertia of starting a business. Sure, given the time patches will start to come in (especially from early adopters, not necessarily by the extended community) but it too much risky to make it commercial open source from the start if you plan to start from scratch. Most of the successful OSS commercial solutions started up from hobby project or are simply integrations of other people work, they are not fair when they define themselves successful commercial enterprises, since they didn't deal with the startup costs and started with something of value by itself.
In addition, for enterprise grade software, OSS makes no difference over proprietary solutions. I now work on a small corporation based on 7 different nations and everywhere, while the platforms used vary from full OSS (my preference) to totally Closed Source, the customer gets always the sources on software developed with full control over it. The added value of OSS for them is on the infrastructure (no money spent on anything is not strictly the software), not on the project itself. Wonder why corporations are moving to SOA? That's the reason, no more clients getting the source code to turn on the less paying maintainer, since they are getting only the services.
Aside several enterprise projects, most of the OSS software reside in the realm of user-oriented utilities. Here, aside for being free, there's still too small interest on the source for the end users. I usually say to our managers that aside to fork a project to add a sterling point on your CV, nobody cares about sources on OSS software for personal use, since the selling points of these applications are cost (the less the better) and functionalities (the more the better). Sure OSS ensures these small projects will be alive even if original devs abandon it, but here more than anywhere its almost impossible to make money: if you want to get paid a bozo can start forking a free version again. If you get commercial someone can still relieve your software and make it better with less hassle, outselling you. There are a lot of commercial implementations of OSS software that are so much polished and user-captivating that outshadow community driven ones, most of them are on dog eat dog mode, continously cannibalizing other competitors in functionalities and sparky features (take a look at the jabber clients). So, if you are the one developing the software AND you are also in need to improve it to remain competitive, you are pretty much rising your internal costs and are more likely to be outsold by competitors that only integrates waiting on the road for code to come. Improvements have less impact than new features, but they are still costly. Planning new versions of your software while improving your current one to remain commercially competitive, if you aren't backed by a license that allows you to ask money from competition, pretty much kills you, otherwise your project will start to stagnate on itself (like many OSS do, to
Would be nice to see the Mono Project tackle the XNA libraries :)
Well, it's good to know that I'm not the only one to think that the project is highly limited or still largely incomplete.
LOL, you should've been there with Ultima IX, I owned it for aroud six hours before selling it (double priced) to a fanboy-friend of mine that was waiting for his own ordered copy. The fun part is that he was really really happy, even if he never finished the game (I guess most fanboys don't need to play the real thing, since they played it continously in their minds while anticipating).
Strange, since CTRL+ALT+DEL and Penny Arcade issued several webcomics hyping the game I would have expected something better. Of course it's sarcasm. I wonder how such creative people can so easily hand down their comics to do corporate lip services, even to the point of being accused to copy each other... Oh wait. Money.
Jackon never took credit saying he created Aragorn or he highly contributed to the official development of the Tolkien's setting. There's a difference, since neither Tolkien Foundation or WOTC licensing programs allows content to flow upwards and strictly assure that products will respect a very specific canon.
Nobody's saying they are bad (they are pointed as good in a wide number of my posts), just saying that there's always something that cannot assure you gaming sites are super partes in an absolute way.
Also, SOE doesn't run massive advertising on the site. My point is not against the sites but against the political choices you are more or less obliged to take when you are under such circumstances.
I really respected the choice of The Escapist to seek advertising outside the gamedom (mostly) to avoid possible retailations against bad press. Funnily enough most of the readers were and still are aginst not gaming-related advertisements.
Thanks.
I apologize for the horrible summary (since I'm not native english, I sort of expected that). I guess that, or the editor has superpowers, or the summary is comprehensible (aside for the idiomatic fiascos). The point of the summary (and of the article) is: Turbine, one of the major sponsors of MMORPG.COM, tried more or less willingly to gain design credits on a campaign setting they are licensed to use. While many Eberron fans pointed the Warforged discrepancy to the editing staff of MMORPG, they basically ignored them with an official reply, not even bothering to sort things out. So I asked Baker for clarifications, that was kindly enough to work out my apparently poor english and write back an answer that straighten thing out: Turbine has no control over Baker's world. This not what DDO staff said at PAX and it's irritating that to make users believe they did some serious work for their pretty shallow and superficial (at least at start) D&D licensed game they have to steal another designer's work that should have to be the base for their own game setting (like Baker pointed out). End of story. Sorry again.
It is not. Mostly of the time game developers are moving away from a 100% immersive, active experience to a more comfortable passive experience with the illusion of being active. More easy to implement, more easy to control.
Just like many games has nothing to do with real AI (they have a reasonable illusion or mock up of an AI), many games don't really even try to be a 100% immersive and active experience. The more the player is guided and told what to do the more the player will like the game and think he's a genius. A game that will challenge common sense and basic logical thinking usually is referred as too hard or frustrating. Look where MMOGs started and where they are going to and you will have a nice render about where your "100% interactive" experience is going: human terminals following blindly what a game instructs them to do.
Following blindly other people's commands is not immersive or active is just alienating that's why all the problems with factory workers during the industrial revolutions. Gaming is following the same path, depriving gamers of control, yet retaining the same immersion, but without self determination. The brains end.
Sorry for the generalization about the Christian Church.
But you obiuvusly don't live in Italy or in other Latin europe countries.
Even politicians bows to the Pope's will.
By all other means, the Pope si elected because the charge cannot be dynastic for obiouvs reasons, but he is an absolute ruler.
Absolute ruleship is a form of dictatorship.
Oh and speaking about the Pope is speaking about an estabilished political figure, ruling a sovereign State, not about Religion.
By my point of view a benevolent dictator is still a dictator.
We should thank Torvalds to keep the questioning open, otherwise it would be like Christian Church: the Pope speaks, the lambs obey.
The article also makes a very saddening statement: the GPL3 is basically written by the companies behind the FSF. The article cites that HP is pushing to have their own interests protected. Do you really think that other GPL-oriented companies (like IBM or Novell) will just stay and look or they will also try to drive the boat towards their coasts?
After all, FSF made just a favour to many commercial distributions (another case of uninterested philantrophism?), claryfying that if you have to fork a distro, you have to redistribute every single packet by yourself, instead of shipping only the relevant, modified ones like GPL says. GPL is too generalized and vague. You can't have a license that has hundreds of pages of "clarifications" continuosly swapped and rewritten to praise an actor or to damage another. Most of the clarifications are just more ambiguos or simply idiotic. Do you know that by FSF interpretation, subclassing or implementing an interface is considered a derivative work? That's makes impossible to use any object oriented library released over LGPL by the term of the license, they will be as plain and simple GPL licensed code. There's a lot of OOP libraries wrongly placed in the LGPL domain. Do you really think that their author bothered about the implications? They just followed the leader. For not good reason and without a clue. Why LGPL3 talks only about header files and libraries? Open source licenses should be technlogy neutral and C/C++ is not the only language out there. Sure our benevolent dictator may pretend that the other technologies are not there gut they will not fade away. Today IT rarely uses anything compiled aside core OS programs and it's hard to find a place for the delusional aims of a puppet in the hands of other non-Microsoft corporations.
Sure A guru's life is expensive and big corporations makes hefty donations. Let Stallman explain to us mortals why Microsoft has to be destroyed and IBM or HP are valiant partners whose interests are to be protected.
HP advanced pressures to make the GPL3 more friendly towards their PATENTS! The world got upside down or what?
They should've blamed Runescape, which userbase has topped 9 Millions and has an ever growing title awareness between people.
All these consideration demonstrates that WOW doesn't kill anything, it's just people that are influenced by marketing and media education or that, more probably, Brian Sullivan\Gamasutra\Game Developer were tipped by Blizzard PR & Marketing to say so. Netx time I hope they will see a more suitable period to launch a long & compelling game: not MMOG addicted people get out in the sun on Summer, with or without anything to blame, sales would be low anyway. That was that way since 90s. Only titles that cannot compete for a place in the audience are launched during the summer.
They should have concentrated more to make a real RPG Killer Application, instead of weeping for lost opportunities without any clue.
They are just reselling an old mouse with different performance metrics. They are gone too far with the performance of their products that they have problems creating new merchandise to sell to hardcore gamers (that almost always is like saying dull fanboy). Sure, many people will buy for more DPI or more APM, but just today their sensitivity is just way up the scale of a normal human or a pro gamer. At least they are not (yet) reached the state where they will ship fragile merchandise just to continue to move the stocks.
Ops... My fault.
Why to compare a new generation of CPUs against and overclocked setup of one of the current best chips? Why not taking the test against an AMD chip with a similar NATIVE clocking or, maybe, against a similar X2, since the core duo is a dual core chip? And once again, it's fair to compare two completely different architectures by the sound of their clocking? Nobody remembers the ruckus that Intel did when AMD introduced a better architecture that simply ate Pentiums at equal clocking? Just a pointless piece of hype.