Unless you're talking about blu-ray (points 3-5), I'd love to hear what you mean. I've been ripping my DVD collection and streaming them from my Windows Home Server. It works equally well on both my PS3 and my Xbox, but I sort of prefer the Xbox's interface, so I typically use that system. Yeah, I wish it supported more video and audio formats, but both systems seem to be fairly limited in that respect.
2: dvd plaback is worse than a PS2
What was your experience with this? The few times I've played DVDs on the 360, it worked just fine. Honestly, though, it's my PS3 that's typically used for DVD playback. I like the Bluetooth remote better than the 360's infrared remote.
3: game will require 4 disks this year 4: no blu-ray. 5: $50 more and u have a blu-ray
Pretty much all the same point here... Yes, the 360 doesn't have blu-ray. Definitely a disadvantage, but honestly, most games are still shipping on a single DVD. It's typically the big RPGs with tons of video that need multiple disks. And yeah, it's sort of a pain, but not THAT big a deal.
6: $50 and you yourself can upgrade the HDD to a 500GB in the future.
Yep, that's a nice feature of the PS3. It would have been nice if the Xbox was user-upgradable as well.
7: $50 more and you have xbox live gold, or a PS3 so all-in all it's a pretty bad deal vs the competition. and unlike others i am not an anonymous coward! so if you feel like i am a troll, just think what of what u are first;)
I own all three consoles, and the Xbox gets about 95% of my play time, and ALL of my online time. Essentially, when playing with my friends, xbox live is the place to be. It's really as simple as that for me.
I hate to be difficult, but from what I remember in my computer science classes optimizing by hand isn't always a good idea. Unless you know exactly what you're doing and what your compiler is doing at every step in the process, the odds are good that you're going to make it slower. Indeed, I think a recent article on slashdot discussed the merits of optimization in video games and the underlying message of the author was that unless you had a routine you used literally a billion times, it wasn't worth it to write the code in assembly. Certainly writing a modern OS in assembly is interesting enough, but it seems like this is more on the level of building a bridge out of toothpicks. Something that you would do for the challenge of it, and not for any practical concern.
I think I'd agree with that assessment. In the commercial games I've worked on, assembly was used in only a few key spots, and almost always were deep in the engine code, such as vector or matrix operations, conversion routines, or things like that. There are some other cases where compilers will just generate plain suboptimal instruction sequences, so some judicious use of inline asm can help, but even that's fairly rare these days. More often than not, large-scale applications (like games) benefit more from algorithmic and structural optimizations rather than assembly programming.
Look at the new Star Wars MMO, or check out the trailer for Guild Wars 2 (released the other day). Neither of those is really a photo-realistic look.
When graphics hardware reached a threshold level, people naturally wanted to see if they could recreate worlds as realistically as possible. Now that we've seen that we can, we realize it's not always desirable. I think game designers are realizing that there's more stylistic choices than 'realistic' as well, and we'll be seeing those results in upcoming MMOs.
It virtualizes fine on my Ubuntu PC. Developing in Vista is bad, I know the pain you fear. All of it. I'm looking forward to working on 7, compared to Vista, I'm just praying for more stability! There's a 50/50 chance I'll be disappointed. Optimistically.
More stable? Honestly, stability hasn't really ever been a problem for me on any NT-based platform (I started with 2000). Any stability issues I *have* had were due to driver bugs, and now MS has pushed more of those stacks out of the kernel (very smart move, IMO). I'm curious what sort of stability issues you're seeing...
I'm wondering if the overall performance has improved. I've noticed that Vista performance is particularly poor during disk activity of any sort. Large amounts of disk I/O will bring my 2.4 GHz quad-core machine to it's knees, even if CPU usage is minimal.
The lost me when I found out the three races' campaigns were going to be spread out over three games. Part of the big interest for me for the original was seeing the war from three perspectives, and getting a chance to control all of them. Frankly, no matter how content much they put into any one of the campaigns, it just seems like it's not going to be as interesting as being able to play all three.
I'll probably wait until they sell the games as a 3-pack for the price of the original, so I suppose it means I've got a pretty big wait ahead of me. Oh well...
I'd be curious to know why in the land where consumers are king, products are often bloated, stripped down and late.
I'd say you would think that because you've likely never lived in a place without an overabundance of inexpensively made goods and amazingly high living standards. Seriously, just shop around, and you can find quality if that's what you're looking for, or you can find cheap and disposable, and just about everything in-between. We have an incredible wealth of options in the market (except for the occasional government sponsored monopoly, like cable).
Honestly, I'm trying to figure out why you think we have it so bad here in the US. Seriously, you're jealous of the EU version of Windows? Or was that a joke that I missed?
The problem is though, that the primary reason many of these countries are still economically and technologically backward, is because they are politically backward.
Most of them are still either Dictatorships, Military Juntas, Communist "people's state" povertyholes, or are in the midst of some kind of civil war.
All the used computers in the world won't help if the people don't have the freedom and capitalistic opportunity to leverage them.
How is this offtopic? -1 disagree?
I actually agree with you, and had thought about mentioning something about that, but thought it would just dilute the point I was trying to get across. So yeah, most normal functions of a healthy society, including capitalism, rely on a stable government.
Well, if a console game performs poorly, it's pretty much going to perform poorly on everyone's machine uniformly. It means the developers / publishers knowingly shipped a sub-par game, and should get appropriately slammed in reviews. Likewise, if they shipped a game with crashing bugs, that means that they can't really blame any configuration issues or unstable drivers that they never tested.
So, no, nothing in life is "ironclad" guaranteed, except death and taxes. But overall, it's much easier deliver a stable, well-performing game on the consoles than on the PC (having developed games for both).
What happens after that? To where do they get... 'exported' again once they are... 'retired' in those third world country? It's very likely that electronics disposal regulations in those third world countries are nearly as strict as they should be. So really what then?
Computers actually have a pretty long shelf-life if you don't count technological obsolescence. It doesn't mean that an older computer won't be useful for someone, but not as much in a 1st world country, where the cost of obsolescence has outstripped the costs and advantages up relatively frequent upgrades. For example, obsolete systems can be more prone to security vulnerabilities, as they aren't being actively maintained as new exploits are discovered. And with a secondary market, a lot of those 'toxic' components can be pulled out and re-used again.
By helping these countries advance in technological prowess, we'll be helping them out of 3rd world status. Wealthier nations tend to be more concerned with the environment. People tend not to care as much about the environment when they're barely making enough to buy food, let alone a computer. It's the same as with the population issue in many ways. The population explosion is leveling off in many developed nations. In undeveloped nations, the reproduction rate is still absurdly high.
The logical answer, it's always seemed to me, is to focus efforts on getting the rest of the world up to speed economically, not to impose our morals and guidelines like lords and masters from on high. A lot of these problems will be easier to solve once people around the world aren't still starving to death.
You see while Doom / C&C and whatever game here were indeed groundbreaking and innovative
See: Castle Wolfenstein & Dune II. Both of those games were refinements on an early premise. Many of the most successful games of all times have been refinements of existing ideas and gameplay mechanics, combined with a few interesting new ideas, and extremely polished execution.
Sorry, treating a initially good idea solely as a cash-cow and milk it for all it's worth is not a feasible business model in the long term.
Final Fantasy begs to differ. Frankly, despite occasional claims to the contrary, it's not a good idea to be *too* innovative, or you may end up losing your audience. People like a balance between established convention and new ideas. And frankly, if players enjoyed a particular mechanic, or a control scheme worked well, why change what worked for no good reason?
The second problem is the utter lack of story telling these days.
Did I mention Final Fantasy? I'm pretty sure there was a story in most of those games, and those stories got more complex and richer as the series progressed. I can think of plenty of games which had strong stories.
Honestly, story-telling in games seems to be on the rise, not the decline. If you look at the games of yesteryear, they were nearly all action-based arcade stuff. Games on early consoles likewise had little room for storytelling. It's only in the last few generation of games that storytelling has integrated itself into games in a significant manner. Have you ever played the Xenosaga games? An epic story told over multiple games with dozens of hours of cutscenes...
Maybe you're talking specifically about the Adventure Game genre? Yeah, I'll admit that one has withered up pretty badly. Hopefully the games Lucasarts are re-releasing on Xbox Live sell well, and it encourages new development.
Best example is World of Warcraft which rakes in over 100 million revenue per month but still the developer think they can get away with a retarder story a 3rd grader would make up. And add this collecting 10 bear asses. Over and over and over again. (Mind the invention of the assless bear in this setting).
Try a game like Guild Wars then. There's comparatively little grind required to get through the main game. And it's got an interesting story told through cutscenes as you progress through the main missions.
That's why this achievement stuff has been added to the xbox - to add a competitive challenge to overcome the shortcoming of ass-brained game stories.
No, I think it's just satisfying the Pavlovian-type satisfaction of seeing points pop up on a screen for doing stuff. It adds the network model of MMOs for allowing you to rate yourself against the community, and... gamer crack. Seriously, the Xbox achievements are probably one of the most brilliant marketing ideas I've seen come out of MS... well, probably ever. Massive, massive payoffs for a tiny development cost.
Painting the entire industry with the same brush is just silly. It's a big market now, so there's going to be a lot of crap that appeals to the lowest common denominator. If you're just willing to look a bit, there are some amazing games out there that will probably appeal to you. But don't expect the entire market to just cater to your personal whims. If you financially support the games you like, then you encourage more development of those games. Ranting on/. won't change a thing.
I'll accept your interpretation if you can clarify the following: How does a startup acquire the capital to "be professional"? And to satisfy "game industry experience", must one have previously worked for a medium to large game developer on a published title before starting his own company?
Generally speaking, one does not start up a console gaming company without having had a lot of previous industry experience and some sort of financial backing. Consoles are where the big boys play, and the console makers are just informing you of that fact. There are a limited supply of development hardware (especially early in it's life), and the console manufacturers want to make sure that those they ship hardware to have a reasonable chance of producing a viable product.
There are other incubators out there for indie game developers: I'd develop a PC game for Steam, or look at creating a community game for Xbox Live (no development console needed).
Actually, I happen to live in one of the countries I mentioned, and I happen to be involved in the related circles. I can tell for certain that all IT companies actually come back over and over again to these 'low cost' outsourcing centres. What surprises me is that no game developers ever do...
It shouldn't surprise you that much. Outsourcing's biggest weakness, IMO, is communication. Game development is, by necessity, a much more fluid process than most types of software development. If a feature is not "fun", it has to be reworked, and that requires flexibility. Flexibility, in turn, requires good communication among programmers, designers, and artists.
In general, outsourcing for games works reasonably well in some limited capacities. Porting a game from one platform to another is one example of something that's commonly contracted or outsourced. For the art side, outsourcing often works best by handing off some of the less artistically-demanding but time-consuming tasks. Many game dev houses also contract external houses for FMV cinematic sequences, as that requires an expertise outside of traditional game-making.
Well, that's where they truly, 10 on a 1-10 scale, suck. I've yet had to see a game that was advertised for that would score less than 70%. In fact, I would usually subtract 60% and divide by 4 to see how the game would rate on a 1-10 score in a more realistic way.
You know, most mags and sites have a ratings guide that help define what those numbers actually mean. I've heard many people complaining about high averages. Frankly, it's probably not reasonable to expect reviews to average at the midpoint. There are a number of reasons why this may be the case:
* Magazines are much more likely to review a larger proportion of AAA games. Among the spectrum of games available, one would expect these to be of higher-than-average quality. * Some reviews utilizing a percentage type grade use school grading as a guideline. In other words, an 80% is essentially a B-, maybe a C+. A 70% would be average, whereas a 50% mark would essentially be a failing grade, not "average".
I read Play magazine, which tends to have very high averages. However, part of reading reviews is understanding the reviewing criteria and scoring system. Play makes no apologies about the high ratings. The reason for those, I've heard them explain, is that the reviewers tend to be fans of the genres they review. Frankly, that makes a lot more sense to me than assigning a game review to some random reviewer who may or may not know or appreciate anything about the game's genre. You just have to know that when reading the review. I suppose some may not like a system like that, but it works for me.
Er, but if you are trying to refactor such terrible code written by your predecessor, then yeah, you'll want to know what those numbers are about, and a new high tech system may be just the trick.:P
True, that. I suppose other industries are based on worst-case scenarios. I still think it's a bit of a stretch for this to be founded as a stand-alone enterprise. If you're going to be a one-trick pony, it needs to be a pretty damn good trick. This sounds more like a side-project for Google or Microsoft.
Hmm, I wonder if they're just hoping they'll get bought out by one of those two for the technology and/or any applicable patents?
Seeing lots of magic numbers in code indicates a failure of good programming practices, not the need for a new high-tech system to decode those numbers. This really seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Try playing Shadows of the Colossus on your PS3 (with software upscaling turned on), then try to play it on your PS2. It's rough. The PS3 actually added a lot of life to games like FF12, which were so horrible looking on the PS2 that I had trouble playing them. It's not a whole lot better, but it does help.
Now you're just being mean. You need to re-read my post.;-) Believe me, I'd love to be able to play those games with software upscaling to take the rough edges off. I have a 20GB PS3, so playing PS2 games on my PS3 is impossible. Sony has completely abandoned even software compatibility in their newer models, so I'd have to buy an older model, which may not even be supported in the future.
It's a little strange. You'd think the PS3 should be powerful enough to simply run a PS2 emulator of the Emotion chip right on the Cell, and provide some sort of thunking / emulation layer for graphics without any special hardware.
As as been pointed out elsewhere, measuring the video game industry on a month by month basis is idiotic. The US and the entire world is in a bit of a slump, but video game sales are still pretty solid overall. Traditional measurements don't account for things like online purchases, or whether or not any majorly anticipated games have been released. Keep in mind that videogame development takes place over *years*. So, those of us (well, at least me) who make games for a living just tend to shake our heads as people talk about monthly "slumps", etc.
I've heard nary a whisper from any of my colleagues and friends in the videogame industry about these new services. Most that I've talked to about it believe it to be somewhere between vaporware and wishful thinking. Yes, eventually this sort of solution may make a lot of sense. But at the moment, it's far more practical for the client to have access to local data and do the job of presentation (rendering the world) for the user. The issue of latency is simply going to be a showstopper. Unless they've figured out some sort of magical solution to turn 150-300ms latency into a snappy user experience, gamers will not flock to these services. And without gamers paving the way, the service won't be going anywhere.
You'll notice that just about every business under the sun is dying to get you to sign up for a *service* instead of purchasing *products*. This seems to be the new matra in software development of all sorts. Subscription-based services mean regular and predictable income. Everyone is looking at the cash Blizzard is raking in, and want a piece of that action. Online services also are just about the only viable protection against piracy, another bugaboo with industry execs and publishers.
This reminds me a lot of DivX - the DVD alternative, not the video codec. It was the movie industy's wet dream. Purchasing DVDs that you didn't actually own. This strikes me as something vaguely similar - a system designed for the benefit of the publishers, not the consumers. As such, it will die a slow, ignominious death as it's largely ignored by those who insist on a top-notch gaming experience.
Not sure why my original post is a troll though - I guess that it could offend someone, though I'm not sure who.
Because there's way too many gamers who, for whatever reason, seem to have tied their sense of self-worth to whichever gaming platform they've chosen. I've never understood that, and likely never will.
Myself, I don't want a cheaper, slimmed down PS3. I want a deluxe mode. I would likely pick up a new console if Sony would create a new PS3 with full hardware PS2 support. Yes, I already have a PS2, but I would love to be able to get rid of it and just play on the newer system. Oddly enough, my PS2 is still getting more gameplay time than my PS3 (I currently have a 20GB model) as I plow through a lot of the great older PS2 titles I missed (some JRPGs, Tales games, Ico & Shadows of the Colossus, etc).
It feels like Sony hasn't had a clear direction with their hardware for a long time. They keep changing models and reducing features (except HD space in later models). I guess this economy is more conducive to less expensive systems, so they felt they had to cost-reduce at the expense of features.
If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on.
Well, that's true. But it's mostly because game complexity has exploded (some publishers/devs pushing games out the doors too early haven't helped either). A modern game (including engine and support library) can now clock in at over a million lines of code. That's a million chances for programmers to get something wrong. And don't forget that plenty of bugs are asset-related - meaning caused by artists perhaps doing something they shouldn't.
In the world of PC gaming, you also have to take into consideration the fact that there are nearly unlimited configuration options for computers. Many people will also blame games when their own systems are malfunctioning (you have no idea how many driver-specific workaround our graphics programmer creates). In crash reports that we get sent to us, we flag users systems that have failed an internal mathematical stress-test, and tend to ignore those. When a computer figures that 1 + 1 = 3, it's pretty hard for a program NOT to crash horribly at some point.
I'm not trying to make excuses for developers who don't properly test and fix their code before release. I know there's plenty of that too, and there's no excuse for shipping a game in that state. But honestly, with the massive scope of modern games, it's unbelievably hard to test the coverage of a feature change you may have worked on across the entire game world.
Back in the day, you installed a game and it worked. The graphics sucked, the game play was horrible, but it worked. How many bugs were there in Wing Commander, or Mech Warrior, or the original Civilization, or Sim City? There weren't any because there wasn't any way to fix them if there were, so the publishers made sure that they were bug free.
Do you seriously believe there were no bugs in those products? Take off the rose-colored classes, my friend. Just because you didn't see any bugs didn't mean they weren't there. We didn't have the great coalescer of information called the Internet back then, so it probably seems that way to you. I absolutely guarantee you that there were plenty of bugs in those products.
Anyone who has spent countless hours creating boot disks and configuring autoexec.bat and config.sys for specific games will remember this well from the DOS / early Windows days. And god help you trying to get audio to work if you didn't have a SoundBlaster card (or one of the popular alternatives). Remember the pain of early networked games, anyone? It was a challenge just getting some of those games to run at all.
Really? There's a reason it's called "pound me in the ass Federal Prison". I suppose you could argue that sending someone off to be tortured and raped for no good reason is not morally equivalent to sending them off to be killed for no good reason, but there isn't _much_ moral difference.
You're aware that he would undoubtedly be sent to a minimum security prison, which is, by definition, NOT where all the rapists and murderers go, right?
I'm with you on the absurdity / wrongness of the law, but I still think that calling this "evil", comparing it to Nazi genocide, blaming the cops who arrested him, etc, doesn't help the issue at all. It simply labels one as an extremist, and provides ammunition for the supporters of these stupid laws.
Which strangely wasn't an issue when everybody was making games for the PS2 which is weaker than the Wii...
Because the technology gaps between the PS2, GC, and Xbox were far less substantial than the gap between the PS3/Xbox360 and the Wii, which is nearly a generation behind in terms of raw horsepower. There's a significant difference between porting a game between roughly equivalent systems and porting to a platform vastly different than the original games. It generally means that most of the assets must either be re-created or altered substantially, and that costs a lot of money.
Add to this the fact that the Wii is a fairly unique console, both in terms of demographics and controllers. It's just not a system that's attractive for simple ports (as demonstrated by the abject failure of most attempts). It seems to be a machine that demands games be specifically tailored for it (or at least substantially modified).
Because I've been developing video games for over a decade, and I'm well aware of the reactions people have to seeing unfinished games, having seen it many, many times.
Id software was great for putting out "Technology previews" which crashed a lot, but sure built sales.
If you produce crap, and people can see its crap, they tend to step around it like a dog-pile on the pavement.
But a good concept demonstrator with wide appeal, even if rough around the edges, will draw customers like flies.
id's "technology previews" are relatively polished pieces of code, despite crashes (crashes are just indicative of beta code, nothing more). I'm talking more about pre-alpha stuff, very early in development.
Let me give you a real-life example: I'm currently working on *insert name of popular game* version 2. We have millions of fans of version 1 of the game, who are eagerly awaiting the next iteration. After about a year of development, all we had to visually show for our work looked like a *massive* step backwards. This was because we were putting in a lot of our work into low-level infrastructure and new tools development.
What would fans have thought, after a year of development, if they had seen a leaked copy of the new "game" that looked and played much worse than the original? It's hard to explain to the lay-person how the process works - how you sometimes have to tear a lot away and start rebuilding core technology, etc. Frankly, there was nothing interesting to see there anyhow.
I'm not arguing against openness in general for companies, but there are plenty of cases where you just don't have anything interesting to show the public. In cases like that, it seems like it would do more harm than good to show products off when they're not looking as good as they could.
I happen to work in the game industry - there is a lot of secrecy in our industry too, by absolute necessity. Most games would get crucified if they got leaked to the press or the public too early in the dev cycle. Most people are not used to filling in the blanks - ignoring the rough edges, or even disregarding the aspects of an early product that just plain suck. That's all part of the development process, but consumers are used to seeing just the slick, final product (well, even that's not guaranteed nowadays unfortunately).
There's also some other very good reasons not to go blathering on about features that haven't even been developed yet: those features might get cut for budgetary, creative, or technical reasons, and then you look like an ass for not delivering on what you promised.
I'm not defending Apple's business practices necessarily, but I'm just saying that throwing your doors open to the press and public isn't the panacea that this guys is making it out to be.
Hollywood has, in theory at least if not in practice, the concept of a job - the director - who is responsible for the final vision of the product, and generally has the authority to carry out this vision.
Western-style game development, in many studios I've worked at at least, has no such equivalent. The lead game designer is often no more than the head of a single department among the four main disciplines of game development (programming, art, design, and audio). Very often, *producers* are actually in charge of the project, and have the final creative say over the game. Producers are typically the lowest rung on the 'management' track, and so, similar to how a fresh-faced Lieutenant just out of the academy outranks a 20-year veteran Sargent, producers tend to outrank game designers. The best producers I've worked with tend to get out of the way of the designers and let them do their jobs (and shield them from upper management when necessary), but it doesn't always happen that way.
My understanding is that Japanese studios have closer concept to the 'director', which is why I think you see more commercial Japanese games that feel more like a director's vision (often much more narrow in focus) and less than a design-by-committee feel. I'll bet a lot of you can think of reasonably large-scale Japanese titles that were so quirky, you can't even imagine trying to convince some publishing executive to make such a game (Katamari Damacy, anyone?).
That's not to denigrate all of the great games Western studios have made - obviously there are a lot of them out there. And of course, Japanese developers produce plenty of uninspired drek as well, but I think there's definitely a different style of development which leads to slightly different results.
Speaking as a developer, I should hope you wouldn't unfairly generalize. We're hiring union talent for all our performances in our upcoming game, and using experienced studios in Hollywood to do the recording. I've personally worked with the studios when writing our in-house tools to make sure all our text is exported in standard 'movie script' formatting, so the actors feel as comfortable as possible with the material. Our writers flew down to California to give direction and motivational help. And as far as I know, actors work pretty normal hours. There are union rules about that - for instance, we can't bring in an actor for just a few pick-up lines. We have to pay them for at least... what is it, half a day minimum, or something like that?
Games already face massive development costs developing the technology and art, both of which are getting more and more complex. Additionally, the non-linear nature of games can mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue. It's already a massive expense that only the biggest studios can afford. I think your union wisely understands that if it started demanding outrageous fees and/or royalties, game developers would be forced to go non-union. I'm not trying to present this as a threat - I think it's just a reality of the marketplace.
Slashdot Mirror
1: media capability's are poor
Unless you're talking about blu-ray (points 3-5), I'd love to hear what you mean. I've been ripping my DVD collection and streaming them from my Windows Home Server. It works equally well on both my PS3 and my Xbox, but I sort of prefer the Xbox's interface, so I typically use that system. Yeah, I wish it supported more video and audio formats, but both systems seem to be fairly limited in that respect.
2: dvd plaback is worse than a PS2
What was your experience with this? The few times I've played DVDs on the 360, it worked just fine. Honestly, though, it's my PS3 that's typically used for DVD playback. I like the Bluetooth remote better than the 360's infrared remote.
3: game will require 4 disks this year 4: no blu-ray. 5: $50 more and u have a blu-ray
Pretty much all the same point here... Yes, the 360 doesn't have blu-ray. Definitely a disadvantage, but honestly, most games are still shipping on a single DVD. It's typically the big RPGs with tons of video that need multiple disks. And yeah, it's sort of a pain, but not THAT big a deal.
6: $50 and you yourself can upgrade the HDD to a 500GB in the future.
Yep, that's a nice feature of the PS3. It would have been nice if the Xbox was user-upgradable as well.
7: $50 more and you have xbox live gold, or a PS3 so all-in all it's a pretty bad deal vs the competition. and unlike others i am not an anonymous coward! so if you feel like i am a troll, just think what of what u are first ;)
I own all three consoles, and the Xbox gets about 95% of my play time, and ALL of my online time. Essentially, when playing with my friends, xbox live is the place to be. It's really as simple as that for me.
I hate to be difficult, but from what I remember in my computer science classes optimizing by hand isn't always a good idea. Unless you know exactly what you're doing and what your compiler is doing at every step in the process, the odds are good that you're going to make it slower. Indeed, I think a recent article on slashdot discussed the merits of optimization in video games and the underlying message of the author was that unless you had a routine you used literally a billion times, it wasn't worth it to write the code in assembly. Certainly writing a modern OS in assembly is interesting enough, but it seems like this is more on the level of building a bridge out of toothpicks. Something that you would do for the challenge of it, and not for any practical concern.
I think I'd agree with that assessment. In the commercial games I've worked on, assembly was used in only a few key spots, and almost always were deep in the engine code, such as vector or matrix operations, conversion routines, or things like that. There are some other cases where compilers will just generate plain suboptimal instruction sequences, so some judicious use of inline asm can help, but even that's fairly rare these days. More often than not, large-scale applications (like games) benefit more from algorithmic and structural optimizations rather than assembly programming.
Look at the new Star Wars MMO, or check out the trailer for Guild Wars 2 (released the other day). Neither of those is really a photo-realistic look.
When graphics hardware reached a threshold level, people naturally wanted to see if they could recreate worlds as realistically as possible. Now that we've seen that we can, we realize it's not always desirable. I think game designers are realizing that there's more stylistic choices than 'realistic' as well, and we'll be seeing those results in upcoming MMOs.
It virtualizes fine on my Ubuntu PC. Developing in Vista is bad, I know the pain you fear. All of it. I'm looking forward to working on 7, compared to Vista, I'm just praying for more stability! There's a 50/50 chance I'll be disappointed. Optimistically.
More stable? Honestly, stability hasn't really ever been a problem for me on any NT-based platform (I started with 2000). Any stability issues I *have* had were due to driver bugs, and now MS has pushed more of those stacks out of the kernel (very smart move, IMO). I'm curious what sort of stability issues you're seeing...
I'm wondering if the overall performance has improved. I've noticed that Vista performance is particularly poor during disk activity of any sort. Large amounts of disk I/O will bring my 2.4 GHz quad-core machine to it's knees, even if CPU usage is minimal.
The lost me when I found out the three races' campaigns were going to be spread out over three games. Part of the big interest for me for the original was seeing the war from three perspectives, and getting a chance to control all of them. Frankly, no matter how content much they put into any one of the campaigns, it just seems like it's not going to be as interesting as being able to play all three.
I'll probably wait until they sell the games as a 3-pack for the price of the original, so I suppose it means I've got a pretty big wait ahead of me. Oh well...
I'd be curious to know why in the land where consumers are king, products are often bloated, stripped down and late.
I'd say you would think that because you've likely never lived in a place without an overabundance of inexpensively made goods and amazingly high living standards. Seriously, just shop around, and you can find quality if that's what you're looking for, or you can find cheap and disposable, and just about everything in-between. We have an incredible wealth of options in the market (except for the occasional government sponsored monopoly, like cable).
Honestly, I'm trying to figure out why you think we have it so bad here in the US. Seriously, you're jealous of the EU version of Windows? Or was that a joke that I missed?
The problem is though, that the primary reason many of these countries are still economically and technologically backward, is because they are politically backward.
Most of them are still either Dictatorships, Military Juntas, Communist "people's state" povertyholes, or are in the midst of some kind of civil war.
All the used computers in the world won't help if the people don't have the freedom and capitalistic opportunity to leverage them.
How is this offtopic? -1 disagree?
I actually agree with you, and had thought about mentioning something about that, but thought it would just dilute the point I was trying to get across. So yeah, most normal functions of a healthy society, including capitalism, rely on a stable government.
Well, if a console game performs poorly, it's pretty much going to perform poorly on everyone's machine uniformly. It means the developers / publishers knowingly shipped a sub-par game, and should get appropriately slammed in reviews. Likewise, if they shipped a game with crashing bugs, that means that they can't really blame any configuration issues or unstable drivers that they never tested.
So, no, nothing in life is "ironclad" guaranteed, except death and taxes. But overall, it's much easier deliver a stable, well-performing game on the consoles than on the PC (having developed games for both).
What happens after that? To where do they get... 'exported' again once they are... 'retired' in those third world country? It's very likely that electronics disposal regulations in those third world countries are nearly as strict as they should be. So really what then?
Computers actually have a pretty long shelf-life if you don't count technological obsolescence. It doesn't mean that an older computer won't be useful for someone, but not as much in a 1st world country, where the cost of obsolescence has outstripped the costs and advantages up relatively frequent upgrades. For example, obsolete systems can be more prone to security vulnerabilities, as they aren't being actively maintained as new exploits are discovered. And with a secondary market, a lot of those 'toxic' components can be pulled out and re-used again.
By helping these countries advance in technological prowess, we'll be helping them out of 3rd world status. Wealthier nations tend to be more concerned with the environment. People tend not to care as much about the environment when they're barely making enough to buy food, let alone a computer. It's the same as with the population issue in many ways. The population explosion is leveling off in many developed nations. In undeveloped nations, the reproduction rate is still absurdly high.
The logical answer, it's always seemed to me, is to focus efforts on getting the rest of the world up to speed economically, not to impose our morals and guidelines like lords and masters from on high. A lot of these problems will be easier to solve once people around the world aren't still starving to death.
You see while Doom / C&C and whatever game here were indeed groundbreaking and innovative
See: Castle Wolfenstein & Dune II. Both of those games were refinements on an early premise. Many of the most successful games of all times have been refinements of existing ideas and gameplay mechanics, combined with a few interesting new ideas, and extremely polished execution.
Sorry, treating a initially good idea solely as a cash-cow and milk it for all it's worth is not a feasible business model in the long term.
Final Fantasy begs to differ. Frankly, despite occasional claims to the contrary, it's not a good idea to be *too* innovative, or you may end up losing your audience. People like a balance between established convention and new ideas. And frankly, if players enjoyed a particular mechanic, or a control scheme worked well, why change what worked for no good reason?
The second problem is the utter lack of story telling these days.
Did I mention Final Fantasy? I'm pretty sure there was a story in most of those games, and those stories got more complex and richer as the series progressed. I can think of plenty of games which had strong stories.
Honestly, story-telling in games seems to be on the rise, not the decline. If you look at the games of yesteryear, they were nearly all action-based arcade stuff. Games on early consoles likewise had little room for storytelling. It's only in the last few generation of games that storytelling has integrated itself into games in a significant manner. Have you ever played the Xenosaga games? An epic story told over multiple games with dozens of hours of cutscenes...
Maybe you're talking specifically about the Adventure Game genre? Yeah, I'll admit that one has withered up pretty badly. Hopefully the games Lucasarts are re-releasing on Xbox Live sell well, and it encourages new development.
Best example is World of Warcraft which rakes in over 100 million revenue per month but still the developer think they can get away with a retarder story a 3rd grader would make up. And add this collecting 10 bear asses. Over and over and over again. (Mind the invention of the assless bear in this setting).
Try a game like Guild Wars then. There's comparatively little grind required to get through the main game. And it's got an interesting story told through cutscenes as you progress through the main missions.
That's why this achievement stuff has been added to the xbox - to add a competitive challenge to overcome the shortcoming of ass-brained game stories.
No, I think it's just satisfying the Pavlovian-type satisfaction of seeing points pop up on a screen for doing stuff. It adds the network model of MMOs for allowing you to rate yourself against the community, and... gamer crack. Seriously, the Xbox achievements are probably one of the most brilliant marketing ideas I've seen come out of MS... well, probably ever. Massive, massive payoffs for a tiny development cost.
Painting the entire industry with the same brush is just silly. It's a big market now, so there's going to be a lot of crap that appeals to the lowest common denominator. If you're just willing to look a bit, there are some amazing games out there that will probably appeal to you. But don't expect the entire market to just cater to your personal whims. If you financially support the games you like, then you encourage more development of those games. Ranting on /. won't change a thing.
I'll accept your interpretation if you can clarify the following: How does a startup acquire the capital to "be professional"? And to satisfy "game industry experience", must one have previously worked for a medium to large game developer on a published title before starting his own company?
Generally speaking, one does not start up a console gaming company without having had a lot of previous industry experience and some sort of financial backing. Consoles are where the big boys play, and the console makers are just informing you of that fact. There are a limited supply of development hardware (especially early in it's life), and the console manufacturers want to make sure that those they ship hardware to have a reasonable chance of producing a viable product.
There are other incubators out there for indie game developers: I'd develop a PC game for Steam, or look at creating a community game for Xbox Live (no development console needed).
Actually, I happen to live in one of the countries I mentioned, and I happen to be involved in the related circles. I can tell for certain that all IT companies actually come back over and over again to these 'low cost' outsourcing centres. What surprises me is that no game developers ever do...
It shouldn't surprise you that much. Outsourcing's biggest weakness, IMO, is communication. Game development is, by necessity, a much more fluid process than most types of software development. If a feature is not "fun", it has to be reworked, and that requires flexibility. Flexibility, in turn, requires good communication among programmers, designers, and artists.
In general, outsourcing for games works reasonably well in some limited capacities. Porting a game from one platform to another is one example of something that's commonly contracted or outsourced. For the art side, outsourcing often works best by handing off some of the less artistically-demanding but time-consuming tasks. Many game dev houses also contract external houses for FMV cinematic sequences, as that requires an expertise outside of traditional game-making.
Well, that's where they truly, 10 on a 1-10 scale, suck. I've yet had to see a game that was advertised for that would score less than 70%. In fact, I would usually subtract 60% and divide by 4 to see how the game would rate on a 1-10 score in a more realistic way.
You know, most mags and sites have a ratings guide that help define what those numbers actually mean. I've heard many people complaining about high averages. Frankly, it's probably not reasonable to expect reviews to average at the midpoint. There are a number of reasons why this may be the case:
* Magazines are much more likely to review a larger proportion of AAA games. Among the spectrum of games available, one would expect these to be of higher-than-average quality.
* Some reviews utilizing a percentage type grade use school grading as a guideline. In other words, an 80% is essentially a B-, maybe a C+. A 70% would be average, whereas a 50% mark would essentially be a failing grade, not "average".
I read Play magazine, which tends to have very high averages. However, part of reading reviews is understanding the reviewing criteria and scoring system. Play makes no apologies about the high ratings. The reason for those, I've heard them explain, is that the reviewers tend to be fans of the genres they review. Frankly, that makes a lot more sense to me than assigning a game review to some random reviewer who may or may not know or appreciate anything about the game's genre. You just have to know that when reading the review. I suppose some may not like a system like that, but it works for me.
Er, but if you are trying to refactor such terrible code written by your predecessor, then yeah, you'll want to know what those numbers are about, and a new high tech system may be just the trick. :P
True, that. I suppose other industries are based on worst-case scenarios. I still think it's a bit of a stretch for this to be founded as a stand-alone enterprise. If you're going to be a one-trick pony, it needs to be a pretty damn good trick. This sounds more like a side-project for Google or Microsoft.
Hmm, I wonder if they're just hoping they'll get bought out by one of those two for the technology and /or any applicable patents?
Seeing lots of magic numbers in code indicates a failure of good programming practices, not the need for a new high-tech system to decode those numbers. This really seems like a solution in search of a problem.
Try playing Shadows of the Colossus on your PS3 (with software upscaling turned on), then try to play it on your PS2. It's rough. The PS3 actually added a lot of life to games like FF12, which were so horrible looking on the PS2 that I had trouble playing them. It's not a whole lot better, but it does help.
Now you're just being mean. You need to re-read my post. ;-) Believe me, I'd love to be able to play those games with software upscaling to take the rough edges off. I have a 20GB PS3, so playing PS2 games on my PS3 is impossible. Sony has completely abandoned even software compatibility in their newer models, so I'd have to buy an older model, which may not even be supported in the future.
It's a little strange. You'd think the PS3 should be powerful enough to simply run a PS2 emulator of the Emotion chip right on the Cell, and provide some sort of thunking / emulation layer for graphics without any special hardware.
As as been pointed out elsewhere, measuring the video game industry on a month by month basis is idiotic. The US and the entire world is in a bit of a slump, but video game sales are still pretty solid overall. Traditional measurements don't account for things like online purchases, or whether or not any majorly anticipated games have been released. Keep in mind that videogame development takes place over *years*. So, those of us (well, at least me) who make games for a living just tend to shake our heads as people talk about monthly "slumps", etc.
I've heard nary a whisper from any of my colleagues and friends in the videogame industry about these new services. Most that I've talked to about it believe it to be somewhere between vaporware and wishful thinking. Yes, eventually this sort of solution may make a lot of sense. But at the moment, it's far more practical for the client to have access to local data and do the job of presentation (rendering the world) for the user. The issue of latency is simply going to be a showstopper. Unless they've figured out some sort of magical solution to turn 150-300ms latency into a snappy user experience, gamers will not flock to these services. And without gamers paving the way, the service won't be going anywhere.
You'll notice that just about every business under the sun is dying to get you to sign up for a *service* instead of purchasing *products*. This seems to be the new matra in software development of all sorts. Subscription-based services mean regular and predictable income. Everyone is looking at the cash Blizzard is raking in, and want a piece of that action. Online services also are just about the only viable protection against piracy, another bugaboo with industry execs and publishers.
This reminds me a lot of DivX - the DVD alternative, not the video codec. It was the movie industy's wet dream. Purchasing DVDs that you didn't actually own. This strikes me as something vaguely similar - a system designed for the benefit of the publishers, not the consumers. As such, it will die a slow, ignominious death as it's largely ignored by those who insist on a top-notch gaming experience.
Not sure why my original post is a troll though - I guess that it could offend someone, though I'm not sure who.
Because there's way too many gamers who, for whatever reason, seem to have tied their sense of self-worth to whichever gaming platform they've chosen. I've never understood that, and likely never will.
Myself, I don't want a cheaper, slimmed down PS3. I want a deluxe mode. I would likely pick up a new console if Sony would create a new PS3 with full hardware PS2 support. Yes, I already have a PS2, but I would love to be able to get rid of it and just play on the newer system. Oddly enough, my PS2 is still getting more gameplay time than my PS3 (I currently have a 20GB model) as I plow through a lot of the great older PS2 titles I missed (some JRPGs, Tales games, Ico & Shadows of the Colossus, etc).
It feels like Sony hasn't had a clear direction with their hardware for a long time. They keep changing models and reducing features (except HD space in later models). I guess this economy is more conducive to less expensive systems, so they felt they had to cost-reduce at the expense of features.
If anything, games have been getting more and more buggy as time goes on.
Well, that's true. But it's mostly because game complexity has exploded (some publishers/devs pushing games out the doors too early haven't helped either). A modern game (including engine and support library) can now clock in at over a million lines of code. That's a million chances for programmers to get something wrong. And don't forget that plenty of bugs are asset-related - meaning caused by artists perhaps doing something they shouldn't.
In the world of PC gaming, you also have to take into consideration the fact that there are nearly unlimited configuration options for computers. Many people will also blame games when their own systems are malfunctioning (you have no idea how many driver-specific workaround our graphics programmer creates). In crash reports that we get sent to us, we flag users systems that have failed an internal mathematical stress-test, and tend to ignore those. When a computer figures that 1 + 1 = 3, it's pretty hard for a program NOT to crash horribly at some point.
I'm not trying to make excuses for developers who don't properly test and fix their code before release. I know there's plenty of that too, and there's no excuse for shipping a game in that state. But honestly, with the massive scope of modern games, it's unbelievably hard to test the coverage of a feature change you may have worked on across the entire game world.
Back in the day, you installed a game and it worked. The graphics sucked, the game play was horrible, but it worked. How many bugs were there in Wing Commander, or Mech Warrior, or the original Civilization, or Sim City? There weren't any because there wasn't any way to fix them if there were, so the publishers made sure that they were bug free.
Do you seriously believe there were no bugs in those products? Take off the rose-colored classes, my friend. Just because you didn't see any bugs didn't mean they weren't there. We didn't have the great coalescer of information called the Internet back then, so it probably seems that way to you. I absolutely guarantee you that there were plenty of bugs in those products.
Anyone who has spent countless hours creating boot disks and configuring autoexec.bat and config.sys for specific games will remember this well from the DOS / early Windows days. And god help you trying to get audio to work if you didn't have a SoundBlaster card (or one of the popular alternatives). Remember the pain of early networked games, anyone? It was a challenge just getting some of those games to run at all.
Really? There's a reason it's called "pound me in the ass Federal Prison". I suppose you could argue that sending someone off to be tortured and raped for no good reason is not morally equivalent to sending them off to be killed for no good reason, but there isn't _much_ moral difference.
You're aware that he would undoubtedly be sent to a minimum security prison, which is, by definition, NOT where all the rapists and murderers go, right?
I'm with you on the absurdity / wrongness of the law, but I still think that calling this "evil", comparing it to Nazi genocide, blaming the cops who arrested him, etc, doesn't help the issue at all. It simply labels one as an extremist, and provides ammunition for the supporters of these stupid laws.
Which strangely wasn't an issue when everybody was making games for the PS2 which is weaker than the Wii...
Because the technology gaps between the PS2, GC, and Xbox were far less substantial than the gap between the PS3/Xbox360 and the Wii, which is nearly a generation behind in terms of raw horsepower. There's a significant difference between porting a game between roughly equivalent systems and porting to a platform vastly different than the original games. It generally means that most of the assets must either be re-created or altered substantially, and that costs a lot of money.
Add to this the fact that the Wii is a fairly unique console, both in terms of demographics and controllers. It's just not a system that's attractive for simple ports (as demonstrated by the abject failure of most attempts). It seems to be a machine that demands games be specifically tailored for it (or at least substantially modified).
And you know this how?
Because I've been developing video games for over a decade, and I'm well aware of the reactions people have to seeing unfinished games, having seen it many, many times.
Id software was great for putting out "Technology previews" which crashed a lot, but sure built sales.
If you produce crap, and people can see its crap, they tend to step around it like a dog-pile on the pavement.
But a good concept demonstrator with wide appeal, even if rough around the edges, will draw customers like flies.
id's "technology previews" are relatively polished pieces of code, despite crashes (crashes are just indicative of beta code, nothing more). I'm talking more about pre-alpha stuff, very early in development.
Let me give you a real-life example: I'm currently working on *insert name of popular game* version 2. We have millions of fans of version 1 of the game, who are eagerly awaiting the next iteration. After about a year of development, all we had to visually show for our work looked like a *massive* step backwards. This was because we were putting in a lot of our work into low-level infrastructure and new tools development.
What would fans have thought, after a year of development, if they had seen a leaked copy of the new "game" that looked and played much worse than the original? It's hard to explain to the lay-person how the process works - how you sometimes have to tear a lot away and start rebuilding core technology, etc. Frankly, there was nothing interesting to see there anyhow.
I'm not arguing against openness in general for companies, but there are plenty of cases where you just don't have anything interesting to show the public. In cases like that, it seems like it would do more harm than good to show products off when they're not looking as good as they could.
I happen to work in the game industry - there is a lot of secrecy in our industry too, by absolute necessity. Most games would get crucified if they got leaked to the press or the public too early in the dev cycle. Most people are not used to filling in the blanks - ignoring the rough edges, or even disregarding the aspects of an early product that just plain suck. That's all part of the development process, but consumers are used to seeing just the slick, final product (well, even that's not guaranteed nowadays unfortunately).
There's also some other very good reasons not to go blathering on about features that haven't even been developed yet: those features might get cut for budgetary, creative, or technical reasons, and then you look like an ass for not delivering on what you promised.
I'm not defending Apple's business practices necessarily, but I'm just saying that throwing your doors open to the press and public isn't the panacea that this guys is making it out to be.
Why is Hollywood so much better at it?
Hollywood has, in theory at least if not in practice, the concept of a job - the director - who is responsible for the final vision of the product, and generally has the authority to carry out this vision.
Western-style game development, in many studios I've worked at at least, has no such equivalent. The lead game designer is often no more than the head of a single department among the four main disciplines of game development (programming, art, design, and audio). Very often, *producers* are actually in charge of the project, and have the final creative say over the game. Producers are typically the lowest rung on the 'management' track, and so, similar to how a fresh-faced Lieutenant just out of the academy outranks a 20-year veteran Sargent, producers tend to outrank game designers. The best producers I've worked with tend to get out of the way of the designers and let them do their jobs (and shield them from upper management when necessary), but it doesn't always happen that way.
My understanding is that Japanese studios have closer concept to the 'director', which is why I think you see more commercial Japanese games that feel more like a director's vision (often much more narrow in focus) and less than a design-by-committee feel. I'll bet a lot of you can think of reasonably large-scale Japanese titles that were so quirky, you can't even imagine trying to convince some publishing executive to make such a game (Katamari Damacy, anyone?).
That's not to denigrate all of the great games Western studios have made - obviously there are a lot of them out there. And of course, Japanese developers produce plenty of uninspired drek as well, but I think there's definitely a different style of development which leads to slightly different results.
Speaking as a developer, I should hope you wouldn't unfairly generalize. We're hiring union talent for all our performances in our upcoming game, and using experienced studios in Hollywood to do the recording. I've personally worked with the studios when writing our in-house tools to make sure all our text is exported in standard 'movie script' formatting, so the actors feel as comfortable as possible with the material. Our writers flew down to California to give direction and motivational help. And as far as I know, actors work pretty normal hours. There are union rules about that - for instance, we can't bring in an actor for just a few pick-up lines. We have to pay them for at least... what is it, half a day minimum, or something like that?
Games already face massive development costs developing the technology and art, both of which are getting more and more complex. Additionally, the non-linear nature of games can mean tens or even hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue. It's already a massive expense that only the biggest studios can afford. I think your union wisely understands that if it started demanding outrageous fees and/or royalties, game developers would be forced to go non-union. I'm not trying to present this as a threat - I think it's just a reality of the marketplace.