The real villains here are Microsoft and the computer manufacturers for not providing a consistent and customer-friendly experience for new computer buyers.
I believe they tried that once. It was called "Bob", and as I recall, it didn't go over so well.
Re:Motion blur and bloom effects
on
Framerates Matter
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Well, I was a projectionist at a 5-plex (about 20 years ago). No, the frames were not duplicated. As you pointed out, that would be ridiculous. The films area already huge and cumbersome to transport and maintain. And yes, I'm well familiar with the star-cam and shutter mechanism in projectors. On the projectors I ran, the shutter opened twice on the same frame for each full revolution of the cam.
A quote of interest from that article (emphasis mine):
The reason that the shutter must close during pull down is that the projected movie image would be degraded if the moving film were projected onto the screen. Therefore, the projected movie image necessarily "flickers" as the shutter opens and closes. It has been found that a flicker rate of 24 Hz produces a noticeable flicker and is objectionable to the audience. This problem is much less noticeable at a flicker rate of 48 Hz. For this reason, it is common to use a shutter which closes again while the film frame is motionless in the projection gate. From the standpoint of flicker, this results in a good quality movie projection.
Another important aspect of movie projection quality is screen brightness. While closing the shutter twice per frame is good from the standpoint of flicker, it is bad from the standpoint of screen brightness. To achieve high screen brightness while still having a shutter rate of 48 Hz, the duration of the time the shutter is closed in comparison to the time that it is open should be as short as possible. But the length of time the shutter is closed is determined by the time required for film pull down. So screen brightness can be improved by reducing the film pull down time.
I know it's fun to jump on someone you think is wrong, but at the very least, please make sure you're actually correct before you do so.
BTW, 24 or 30 FPS will cause horrible flicker. That's why film projectors flashes each frame twice on the screen, and TV broadcasts interlaced the image, showing half of each frame in 1/60th second increments.
I think we need to make a distinction between the ability to see flicker versus the ability to perceive smooth motion. And again, both film and TV make use of the camera's natural ability to preserve blurred motion, which helps fool our eyes. An algorithmically generated visualizer without that blurring will naturally look worse.
Good call, I was going to mention Atari. They essentially brought the first generation of videogames to the mass market, and then plummeted into obscurity when the videogame market crashed in the 80s. Incidentally, if you ever see a game with "Atari" on the label, know that it has nothing to do with the original company in any way. The name was the only thing they sold.
I'll throw out another one related to gaming, although it certainly wouldn't belong in the top lists anywhere: Sierra On-line. They made a bunch of magnificent games, such as the King's Quest series - some of the earliest PC games I played. The stories from a long-time developer working there were pretty astounding (in a horrible way), so it was no big surprise to me when they finally closed shop.
My mom read to the family after dinner each night when my brother and I were fairly young. I think our favorites were the Narnia series. They were cheapo paperback copies, so the books themselves meant absolutely nothing to me. For me, the memory is what I cherish. I don't think it would have been diminished in any way had she read those from an electronic e-reader of some sort. I suppose it might be different if she read the stories from a quality book, like the one you described. Hopefully you can past those along someday.
It's funny though... if my house were burning down and I could save only one thing, I'd probably take the blanket my grandmother crocheted for me. Even though I have a lot of expensive electronics and other goods, in the end, they're all completely replaceable.
I've been fortunate enough to mentor a couple of prodigies. The key is not to Go Big, or Go Small, or Go Bare Metal, it is to go where their interest lies. If they really want to know about electron migration through a solid state material, Hell, go for it. But if they are interested in how to generate a web page, that's where you start.
I'd definitely agree with this.
My first programming language was AppleBASIC, which I learned around the fifth grade or so (from what I recall). I was entirely self-taught, as no one in my family new anything technology-wise. My dad was mechanically-proficient / my Mom good with numbers... but computers? Forget it. I inherited the Apple II+ after it didn't pan out as a business computer. I learned from a book with a big red cover written (apparently) for kids, and it was fantastic. I wish I could find a copy of it somewhere...
I went the high-level approach. I had no concept of low-level assembly - didn't even know it was an option, and didn't know a thing about binary numbers (it was a mystery as to why the number limitation in programmers was 65,535:). But I don't think I missed anything by learning about that later, when I decided in programming as a career. I'm now a professional videogame programmer, so of course, my language of choice is C++ today (with C# / Python / Lua for tools development).
I've talked to some of my engineering and programmer friends... another one started in assembly language on the Commodore 64. Some of them didn't program until much later in life. Personally, I don't think I would have enjoyed assembly programming - honestly, I still don't even today. So yeah, don't try to dictate how the kid learns. Find out their interest and zero in on that.
The videogame industry is pretty notorious for this, and with fairly good reason. Unfortunately, with unemployment rising and the economy faltering, companies feel a bit more free to demand mandatory overtime from game devs. There is also much less resistance to overtime from young, single programmers with no real family commitments. Most people in the game industry love what they do, so for some, it's not a horrible hardship to work longer hours.
Honestly, I'd start planning an exit strategy. It's always a bit scary to switch jobs, but an employer's attitude toward mandatory overtime is a pretty huge issue for me. On the plus side, you're reaching a threshold of experience which will make it much easier to switch jobs if needed. Believe it or not, there are a few companies out there who don't believe your weekends and evenings automatically belong to the company. It takes a while to ferret them out, though.
I thought "charities" in the US were about agendas with a tax deduction. Then again, I'm not an American, so I may be wrong.
My personal favorite, Child's Play, gives videogames to children's hospitals around the world. I suppose you could call wanting to make kids' time spent in hospitals a little more enjoyable an "agenda" if you really want to.
So...it's just a piece of rotting tissue. Why are we worried about respecting it again?
You're right. Once Heghtay is performed, and Stovokor has been warned of the warrior's arrival, the body is then just an empty shell and may be treated as such.
So you feel that the professors are taking responsibility for destroying a person's college career because she was emotional after a breakup?
From the article:
Despite Tatro's concerns that her ban from campus will mean not being able to participate in the process of reviewing her case, Wolter said that "students are entitled to due process and to participate in the process, as well as an appeals process should they disagree with the outcome."
Tatro hopes that happens quickly: She's already missed an exam and is set to miss several more. She has since set her Facebook profile to private.
I've read a couple of comments about how her college career is "destroyed", etc. That has yet to be determined. I support the professor's decision, but I hope the University doesn't permanently ban her.
Consider this one to grow on, Amanda. Don't publicly threaten to stab others in the throat with an embalming knife. It makes people nervous.
According to the article, the Ms. Tatro complained that for whatever reason, the professor was "taking it personally". Excuse me? She was talking very explicitly about her "Death List #5" and what exactly she would do with her very sharp instrument the following Monday in class.
How is a professor to know who is "just ranting" and who might be mentally unbalanced? I say, a prudent move by the prof.
Super Mario Bros. 3: 393 KB. An Eminem album compressed with Ogg Vorbis or AAC: 70,000 KB.
Ok, now you're just being pedantic. If I release a five hour long audio track filled with white noise, do you think that contains more "information" than either of those products?
That, and there is a powerful oligopoly that opposes amateur or semi-professional outfits self-publishing their games because they're amateur or semi-professional. This oligopoly comprises three companies, none of them named EA.
You're looking for a conspiracy where none exists. Large publishers don't care about competition from amateurs for the same reason automobile manufacturers aren't concerned about small shops that create custom cars. They produce entirely different products, and operate in completely different spaces (obligatory car analogy).
Besides, the amateur and indie market is expanding, if anything, thanks to the online presence the major console-makers have, and thanks to digital distribution platforms (Steam), and companies developing games to non-hardcore demographics (like Popcap).
There's no barrier to self-publishing games on the web nowadays if you really want to eschew all these other systems completely either. But just because you publish a game doesn't mean it's worth anyone's time to play it, or that anyone will find it. Again, that's not a conspiracy. That's just reality.
Why does it cost more to develop and publish a video game than to develop and publish a couple books or a couple record albums? Dedicated amateurs seem to have little or no problem doing that.
Books can easily be written by individuals and published with small teams (as can music). Some types of videogames can also be done in this way. My first videogame (many years ago) was created by three programmers and a single part-time artist in just a few months. When I wrote a book, of course the bulk of the work was done by me alone. My publisher did the work of support, contracting a technical editor, marketing, printing, distribution. That all was undoubtedly handled by a fairly small team of people.
The game I'm currently working on, however, has required an absolutely enormous investment by our parent company. Just to give you an example, I've spent over three years working on this one game. Developing the tools alone (with which the artists are much more productive) have taken up the bulk of that time. And, that's just for one narrow slice of the game. There are well over a hundred other individuals, each with important tasks of their own that will come together in the end. The sheer volume of content our artists are creating for this game is astounding. Dozens and dozens of giant maps, thousands of props, hundreds of fully animated creatures to populate the world, and all created with high fidelity. Beyond that, we have dedicated teams to deal with marketing, community relations, producers, office management, IT, QA, etc. These are all ancillary to the actual creation of the game, but are critical full-time tasks as well.
Modern videogames are the electronic equivalent of other large-scale industrial projects. The only ones who have the pockets to fund such a large team are very large companies. Yes, individuals or small teams can create videogames. But not *these* videogames.
I never claimed that copyright infringement is "stealing" (so far as I can remember), nor do I believe that. Others have made that argument, but I agree with you on that particular point.
Still, there are lots of things that are either morally wrong and/or against the law that aren't "theft", and that don't involve direct actions against another person. How about counterfeiting? Insider trading? Slander or libel? Those sorts of things all have the same sort of indirect consequences to others, and so laws were passed prohibiting them.
According to Wikipedia, an early references to copyright infringement as "piracy" was Daniel Defoe in 1703, refering to unauthorized copies of his book "True-born Englishman"[1].
Tell me, does making copies of dollar bills "not hurt anyone" either? It's not a perfect analogy, but it has the same basic effect of devaluing the original product.
You maintain that making a copy of goods "doesn't hurt anyone". You're correct that copyright infringement doesn't prevent anyone from using the original. After all, it's a perfect digital copy, and an infinite number of copies can theoretically be made. But you're missing the point of copyright altogether, I think. The point is to product the value of the product for the creator in order to provide future incentive for the creation of original property.
Tell me, do you think that so many creative and innovative products are designed and developed (if not manufactured) in the US and other countries with strong IP laws? Why do you think that is? It's because with our free-market + IP-friendly system, a company has a huge incentive to develop and market new and interesting products to consumers, with reasonably assurances that a competing company can't simply copy the idea and design work (the hard part) and undercut the original creator.
I'll admit, I have a dog in this fight. The videogame I'm currently working on is probably going to cost our company well over $50 million dollars over four years to develop. We have over a hundred people employed, and are working extremely hard on this product, and doing some pretty amazing things. We consider the art and code we've development to be worth quite a bit. Again, please tell me... when the game is shipped, does making a copy of the game without re-imbursing us for our work harm us in any way? Or will you tell me the old joke about how we should somehow sell "support" services for our software, or that we're working with an antiquated business model?
Look, I don't care for all aspects of current IP law. The perpetual copyright is clearly unconstitutional, and software patents should be burned at the stake. But there's a very good reason to allow people control over their creations, even when technology allows easy circumvention.
2) I would love to make a deal where each person who posted in this (or any)/. thread making matter-of-fact claims about a patent they hadn't studied in that depth pays me $1, and I pay each person who did the proper research before spouting off $5. I'd be able to retire.
This is Slashdot. Making unsubstantiated claims about a technology or process we know jack-all-nothing about is what we do here. Substitute just about any subject matter and the results will be the same.
Uh... Did I just state a completely unsubstantiated opinion as though it were a documented fact?
The devil is in the details. Living in the basement semi-perpetually, but productively working on, say, Linux kernel is one thing. Doing the same thing for the sake of "winning" WoW is another.
The difference is the Linux guy can look back at what he did and feel a bit more confident that what spent his time on had a slightly more positive impact on the world in general than the WoW guy. Really (and this is coming from a video game programmer), if all you ever really do is stare at a computer screen, regardless of what you're doing, it's still sort of a sad life. There's a big, interesting non-virtual world out there, and it seems a shame not to see as much of it as is feasible in the short amount of time we all have in this life.
On the promise that the "micro-transaction" stuff (that term does not mean what they seem to think it means, though...) would not confer gameplay advantages.
Heh, yeah. $10-20 isn't exactly "micro", but I guess there isn't another good name for those sorts of transactions. It's not really DLC... I've always thought that Anet could have sold a lot more if they had actually made the cost a bit more "micro", like a buck or two. Actually, that brings up an interesting question - what price would you have actually paid to change your necro's face?
GW's storage has always been on the stingy side, especially if you're a pack-rat who likes to collect stuff. But storage doesn't really change the gameplay other than it means you can farm longer without returning to sell your stuff. I guess I always interpreted what they said to mean that it wouldn't give you a *competitive* advantage, such as being able to buy a sword with better stats than you could get in-game, giving you a real advantage in, say, PvP or something. I see the point you're making, though.
Guild Wars? (Not Korean, per se, but owned by NCSoft when they went back on the promise)
Went back on what promise?
You pay for Guild Wars, and can still, to this day, play online without a monthly fee. ArenaNet later introduced micro-transactions for some additional (non-gameplay related) features introduced years later, such as face / name changing services, extra storage space, cosmetic crap, etc.
Does this mean that we're hitting a software complexity wall?
From the perspective of a game programmer, I'd posit that it's not as much a software complexity wall as it is a content creation wall. Creating a fully-realized world in a modern videogame is amazingly time consuming. It's now all about how to reduce the dozens of developer-years required to build the environment (world geometry, props, models, effects, etc) and gameplay content (events, missions, etc). One of the problems has been that with each new generation, we not only have to re-build all our content from scratch, we have to do so with much higher fidelity than ever before.
Yeah, the programming challenges are harder, because we're being asked to do more, but in my experience, on average, the ratio of non-programmers to programmers on a typical development team is growing year by year. In my first commercial game, we had three programmers and one artist on the project. On my current team, the artists, writers, designers, audio guys and producers probably outnumber the programmers by around 3 to 1.
I blame hard deadlines and crunch time, but I'm not sure if that's the real cause, or if it's just a different class of programmer writing video games. The excuse *used* to be optimization, but I don't think that applies nearly as much anymore.
I think the game dev industry is growing up. Part of it has to do with the fact that a mature codebase is pretty valuable nowadays, and modern games are so complicated, those who don't take good software development processes seriously end up with a technical disaster, and it tends to show. It's very rare for a game to be written completely from scratch these days. When I was started, it wasn't all that unusual to start over for each new successive generation of games. Some of the base libraries I'm working on are nearly a decade old - about when the company I currently work for was founded. They're well-tested and highly optimized. We'd be insane to toss these out and start over.
You also have to differentiate between engine code and game code. By it's nature, game code is essentially a one-off project - essentially single-purpose code. Keep in mind that unlike commercial projects, if the requirements for version 2 of the game change, the code can be rewritten. There's no need to preserve old features or functionality unless the new game requires it as well, as each version of the game is essentially a new fork. To some, it looks sloppy to see hard-coded gameplay features, but it makes a bit more sense when you think about it in that light. MMOs do have it a little harder in this aspect, being so long in continuous development, so we have to think about things like preserving file format compatibility and such, similar to other commercial apps.
Engine code is typically treated quite a bit differently. It has to be much more robust than typical game code. A number of games will be using it, so the code has to be both modular and highly optimized, as well as being fairly general purpose. Obviously, that's a fairly difficult combination, so developers typically put a lot more effort into engine code, and tend to be more protective of it.
Oh, and good heavens, yes, we still have to optimize the hell out of our code (oddly enough, I've been doing that all last week). It just happens more often at the architectural and algorithmic level rather than at the functional level like it used to. It's true that we can get away with a lot more, but... we're also doing much more complicated things.
Slashdot Mirror
The real villains here are Microsoft and the computer manufacturers for not providing a consistent and customer-friendly experience for new computer buyers.
I believe they tried that once. It was called "Bob", and as I recall, it didn't go over so well.
Well, I was a projectionist at a 5-plex (about 20 years ago). No, the frames were not duplicated. As you pointed out, that would be ridiculous. The films area already huge and cumbersome to transport and maintain. And yes, I'm well familiar with the star-cam and shutter mechanism in projectors. On the projectors I ran, the shutter opened twice on the same frame for each full revolution of the cam.
Here's a link to a patent that describes a particular star-cam mechanism.
A quote of interest from that article (emphasis mine):
The reason that the shutter must close during pull down is that the projected movie image would be degraded if the moving film were projected onto the screen. Therefore, the projected movie image necessarily "flickers" as the shutter opens and closes. It has been found that a flicker rate of 24 Hz produces a noticeable flicker and is objectionable to the audience. This problem is much less noticeable at a flicker rate of 48 Hz. For this reason, it is common to use a shutter which closes again while the film frame is motionless in the projection gate. From the standpoint of flicker, this results in a good quality movie projection.
Another important aspect of movie projection quality is screen brightness. While closing the shutter twice per frame is good from the standpoint of flicker, it is bad from the standpoint of screen brightness. To achieve high screen brightness while still having a shutter rate of 48 Hz, the duration of the time the shutter is closed in comparison to the time that it is open should be as short as possible. But the length of time the shutter is closed is determined by the time required for film pull down. So screen brightness can be improved by reducing the film pull down time.
I know it's fun to jump on someone you think is wrong, but at the very least, please make sure you're actually correct before you do so.
I really doubt Activision has any power over what Blizzard is doing.
I'd guess about as much power as anyone who signs the paychecks has.
The "Recycle Bin" was a more "PC" term.
BTW, 24 or 30 FPS will cause horrible flicker. That's why film projectors flashes each frame twice on the screen, and TV broadcasts interlaced the image, showing half of each frame in 1/60th second increments.
I think we need to make a distinction between the ability to see flicker versus the ability to perceive smooth motion. And again, both film and TV make use of the camera's natural ability to preserve blurred motion, which helps fool our eyes. An algorithmically generated visualizer without that blurring will naturally look worse.
Good call, I was going to mention Atari. They essentially brought the first generation of videogames to the mass market, and then plummeted into obscurity when the videogame market crashed in the 80s. Incidentally, if you ever see a game with "Atari" on the label, know that it has nothing to do with the original company in any way. The name was the only thing they sold.
I'll throw out another one related to gaming, although it certainly wouldn't belong in the top lists anywhere: Sierra On-line. They made a bunch of magnificent games, such as the King's Quest series - some of the earliest PC games I played. The stories from a long-time developer working there were pretty astounding (in a horrible way), so it was no big surprise to me when they finally closed shop.
My mom read to the family after dinner each night when my brother and I were fairly young. I think our favorites were the Narnia series. They were cheapo paperback copies, so the books themselves meant absolutely nothing to me. For me, the memory is what I cherish. I don't think it would have been diminished in any way had she read those from an electronic e-reader of some sort. I suppose it might be different if she read the stories from a quality book, like the one you described. Hopefully you can past those along someday.
It's funny though... if my house were burning down and I could save only one thing, I'd probably take the blanket my grandmother crocheted for me. Even though I have a lot of expensive electronics and other goods, in the end, they're all completely replaceable.
I've been fortunate enough to mentor a couple of prodigies. The key is not to Go Big, or Go Small, or Go Bare Metal, it is to go where their interest lies. If they really want to know about electron migration through a solid state material, Hell, go for it. But if they are interested in how to generate a web page, that's where you start.
I'd definitely agree with this.
My first programming language was AppleBASIC, which I learned around the fifth grade or so (from what I recall). I was entirely self-taught, as no one in my family new anything technology-wise. My dad was mechanically-proficient / my Mom good with numbers... but computers? Forget it. I inherited the Apple II+ after it didn't pan out as a business computer. I learned from a book with a big red cover written (apparently) for kids, and it was fantastic. I wish I could find a copy of it somewhere...
I went the high-level approach. I had no concept of low-level assembly - didn't even know it was an option, and didn't know a thing about binary numbers (it was a mystery as to why the number limitation in programmers was 65,535 :). But I don't think I missed anything by learning about that later, when I decided in programming as a career. I'm now a professional videogame programmer, so of course, my language of choice is C++ today (with C# / Python / Lua for tools development).
I've talked to some of my engineering and programmer friends... another one started in assembly language on the Commodore 64. Some of them didn't program until much later in life. Personally, I don't think I would have enjoyed assembly programming - honestly, I still don't even today. So yeah, don't try to dictate how the kid learns. Find out their interest and zero in on that.
A common mistake, get over it. Or move where the rain doesn't make you so cranky.
The rain helps keep the Californians away. It's a feature, not a bug.
The videogame industry is pretty notorious for this, and with fairly good reason. Unfortunately, with unemployment rising and the economy faltering, companies feel a bit more free to demand mandatory overtime from game devs. There is also much less resistance to overtime from young, single programmers with no real family commitments. Most people in the game industry love what they do, so for some, it's not a horrible hardship to work longer hours.
Honestly, I'd start planning an exit strategy. It's always a bit scary to switch jobs, but an employer's attitude toward mandatory overtime is a pretty huge issue for me. On the plus side, you're reaching a threshold of experience which will make it much easier to switch jobs if needed. Believe it or not, there are a few companies out there who don't believe your weekends and evenings automatically belong to the company. It takes a while to ferret them out, though.
I thought "charities" in the US were about agendas with a tax deduction. Then again, I'm not an American, so I may be wrong.
My personal favorite, Child's Play, gives videogames to children's hospitals around the world. I suppose you could call wanting to make kids' time spent in hospitals a little more enjoyable an "agenda" if you really want to.
So...it's just a piece of rotting tissue. Why are we worried about respecting it again?
You're right. Once Heghtay is performed, and Stovokor has been warned of the warrior's arrival, the body is then just an empty shell and may be treated as such.
So you feel that the professors are taking responsibility for destroying a person's college career because she was emotional after a breakup?
From the article:
Despite Tatro's concerns that her ban from campus will mean not being able to participate in the process of reviewing her case, Wolter said that "students are entitled to due process and to participate in the process, as well as an appeals process should they disagree with the outcome."
Tatro hopes that happens quickly: She's already missed an exam and is set to miss several more. She has since set her Facebook profile to private.
I've read a couple of comments about how her college career is "destroyed", etc. That has yet to be determined. I support the professor's decision, but I hope the University doesn't permanently ban her.
Consider this one to grow on, Amanda. Don't publicly threaten to stab others in the throat with an embalming knife. It makes people nervous.
According to the article, the Ms. Tatro complained that for whatever reason, the professor was "taking it personally". Excuse me? She was talking very explicitly about her "Death List #5" and what exactly she would do with her very sharp instrument the following Monday in class.
How is a professor to know who is "just ranting" and who might be mentally unbalanced? I say, a prudent move by the prof.
Super Mario Bros. 3: 393 KB. An Eminem album compressed with Ogg Vorbis or AAC: 70,000 KB.
Ok, now you're just being pedantic. If I release a five hour long audio track filled with white noise, do you think that contains more "information" than either of those products?
That, and there is a powerful oligopoly that opposes amateur or semi-professional outfits self-publishing their games because they're amateur or semi-professional. This oligopoly comprises three companies, none of them named EA.
You're looking for a conspiracy where none exists. Large publishers don't care about competition from amateurs for the same reason automobile manufacturers aren't concerned about small shops that create custom cars. They produce entirely different products, and operate in completely different spaces (obligatory car analogy).
Besides, the amateur and indie market is expanding, if anything, thanks to the online presence the major console-makers have, and thanks to digital distribution platforms (Steam), and companies developing games to non-hardcore demographics (like Popcap).
There's no barrier to self-publishing games on the web nowadays if you really want to eschew all these other systems completely either. But just because you publish a game doesn't mean it's worth anyone's time to play it, or that anyone will find it. Again, that's not a conspiracy. That's just reality.
Why does it cost more to develop and publish a video game than to develop and publish a couple books or a couple record albums? Dedicated amateurs seem to have little or no problem doing that.
Books can easily be written by individuals and published with small teams (as can music). Some types of videogames can also be done in this way. My first videogame (many years ago) was created by three programmers and a single part-time artist in just a few months. When I wrote a book, of course the bulk of the work was done by me alone. My publisher did the work of support, contracting a technical editor, marketing, printing, distribution. That all was undoubtedly handled by a fairly small team of people.
The game I'm currently working on, however, has required an absolutely enormous investment by our parent company. Just to give you an example, I've spent over three years working on this one game. Developing the tools alone (with which the artists are much more productive) have taken up the bulk of that time. And, that's just for one narrow slice of the game. There are well over a hundred other individuals, each with important tasks of their own that will come together in the end. The sheer volume of content our artists are creating for this game is astounding. Dozens and dozens of giant maps, thousands of props, hundreds of fully animated creatures to populate the world, and all created with high fidelity. Beyond that, we have dedicated teams to deal with marketing, community relations, producers, office management, IT, QA, etc. These are all ancillary to the actual creation of the game, but are critical full-time tasks as well.
Modern videogames are the electronic equivalent of other large-scale industrial projects. The only ones who have the pockets to fund such a large team are very large companies. Yes, individuals or small teams can create videogames. But not *these* videogames.
If you think that copying a song is stealing
I never claimed that copyright infringement is "stealing" (so far as I can remember), nor do I believe that. Others have made that argument, but I agree with you on that particular point.
Still, there are lots of things that are either morally wrong and/or against the law that aren't "theft", and that don't involve direct actions against another person. How about counterfeiting? Insider trading? Slander or libel? Those sorts of things all have the same sort of indirect consequences to others, and so laws were passed prohibiting them.
According to Wikipedia, an early references to copyright infringement as "piracy" was Daniel Defoe in 1703, refering to unauthorized copies of his book "True-born Englishman"[1].
Tell me, does making copies of dollar bills "not hurt anyone" either? It's not a perfect analogy, but it has the same basic effect of devaluing the original product.
You maintain that making a copy of goods "doesn't hurt anyone". You're correct that copyright infringement doesn't prevent anyone from using the original. After all, it's a perfect digital copy, and an infinite number of copies can theoretically be made. But you're missing the point of copyright altogether, I think. The point is to product the value of the product for the creator in order to provide future incentive for the creation of original property.
Tell me, do you think that so many creative and innovative products are designed and developed (if not manufactured) in the US and other countries with strong IP laws? Why do you think that is? It's because with our free-market + IP-friendly system, a company has a huge incentive to develop and market new and interesting products to consumers, with reasonably assurances that a competing company can't simply copy the idea and design work (the hard part) and undercut the original creator.
I'll admit, I have a dog in this fight. The videogame I'm currently working on is probably going to cost our company well over $50 million dollars over four years to develop. We have over a hundred people employed, and are working extremely hard on this product, and doing some pretty amazing things. We consider the art and code we've development to be worth quite a bit. Again, please tell me... when the game is shipped, does making a copy of the game without re-imbursing us for our work harm us in any way? Or will you tell me the old joke about how we should somehow sell "support" services for our software, or that we're working with an antiquated business model?
Look, I don't care for all aspects of current IP law. The perpetual copyright is clearly unconstitutional, and software patents should be burned at the stake. But there's a very good reason to allow people control over their creations, even when technology allows easy circumvention.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_infringement
2) I would love to make a deal where each person who posted in this (or any) /. thread making matter-of-fact claims about a patent they hadn't studied in that depth pays me $1, and I pay each person who did the proper research before spouting off $5. I'd be able to retire.
This is Slashdot. Making unsubstantiated claims about a technology or process we know jack-all-nothing about is what we do here. Substitute just about any subject matter and the results will be the same.
Uh... Did I just state a completely unsubstantiated opinion as though it were a documented fact?
Damn it...
The devil is in the details. Living in the basement semi-perpetually, but productively working on, say, Linux kernel is one thing. Doing the same thing for the sake of "winning" WoW is another.
The difference is the Linux guy can look back at what he did and feel a bit more confident that what spent his time on had a slightly more positive impact on the world in general than the WoW guy. Really (and this is coming from a video game programmer), if all you ever really do is stare at a computer screen, regardless of what you're doing, it's still sort of a sad life. There's a big, interesting non-virtual world out there, and it seems a shame not to see as much of it as is feasible in the short amount of time we all have in this life.
On the promise that the "micro-transaction" stuff (that term does not mean what they seem to think it means, though...) would not confer gameplay advantages.
Heh, yeah. $10-20 isn't exactly "micro", but I guess there isn't another good name for those sorts of transactions. It's not really DLC... I've always thought that Anet could have sold a lot more if they had actually made the cost a bit more "micro", like a buck or two. Actually, that brings up an interesting question - what price would you have actually paid to change your necro's face?
GW's storage has always been on the stingy side, especially if you're a pack-rat who likes to collect stuff. But storage doesn't really change the gameplay other than it means you can farm longer without returning to sell your stuff. I guess I always interpreted what they said to mean that it wouldn't give you a *competitive* advantage, such as being able to buy a sword with better stats than you could get in-game, giving you a real advantage in, say, PvP or something. I see the point you're making, though.
Guild Wars? (Not Korean, per se, but owned by NCSoft when they went back on the promise)
Went back on what promise?
You pay for Guild Wars, and can still, to this day, play online without a monthly fee. ArenaNet later introduced micro-transactions for some additional (non-gameplay related) features introduced years later, such as face / name changing services, extra storage space, cosmetic crap, etc.
Does this mean that we're hitting a software complexity wall?
From the perspective of a game programmer, I'd posit that it's not as much a software complexity wall as it is a content creation wall. Creating a fully-realized world in a modern videogame is amazingly time consuming. It's now all about how to reduce the dozens of developer-years required to build the environment (world geometry, props, models, effects, etc) and gameplay content (events, missions, etc). One of the problems has been that with each new generation, we not only have to re-build all our content from scratch, we have to do so with much higher fidelity than ever before.
Yeah, the programming challenges are harder, because we're being asked to do more, but in my experience, on average, the ratio of non-programmers to programmers on a typical development team is growing year by year. In my first commercial game, we had three programmers and one artist on the project. On my current team, the artists, writers, designers, audio guys and producers probably outnumber the programmers by around 3 to 1.
I blame hard deadlines and crunch time, but I'm not sure if that's the real cause, or if it's just a different class of programmer writing video games. The excuse *used* to be optimization, but I don't think that applies nearly as much anymore.
I think the game dev industry is growing up. Part of it has to do with the fact that a mature codebase is pretty valuable nowadays, and modern games are so complicated, those who don't take good software development processes seriously end up with a technical disaster, and it tends to show. It's very rare for a game to be written completely from scratch these days. When I was started, it wasn't all that unusual to start over for each new successive generation of games. Some of the base libraries I'm working on are nearly a decade old - about when the company I currently work for was founded. They're well-tested and highly optimized. We'd be insane to toss these out and start over.
You also have to differentiate between engine code and game code. By it's nature, game code is essentially a one-off project - essentially single-purpose code. Keep in mind that unlike commercial projects, if the requirements for version 2 of the game change, the code can be rewritten. There's no need to preserve old features or functionality unless the new game requires it as well, as each version of the game is essentially a new fork. To some, it looks sloppy to see hard-coded gameplay features, but it makes a bit more sense when you think about it in that light. MMOs do have it a little harder in this aspect, being so long in continuous development, so we have to think about things like preserving file format compatibility and such, similar to other commercial apps.
Engine code is typically treated quite a bit differently. It has to be much more robust than typical game code. A number of games will be using it, so the code has to be both modular and highly optimized, as well as being fairly general purpose. Obviously, that's a fairly difficult combination, so developers typically put a lot more effort into engine code, and tend to be more protective of it.
Oh, and good heavens, yes, we still have to optimize the hell out of our code (oddly enough, I've been doing that all last week). It just happens more often at the architectural and algorithmic level rather than at the functional level like it used to. It's true that we can get away with a lot more, but... we're also doing much more complicated things.
F that. Pirating is the only way to keep the industry honest.
I'm proud of you for so nobly sacrificing your virtue for the protection of gamers everywhere!