Don't forget the oh-so-subtle undertones in the story about how humans-are-not-living-in-harmony-with-nature and/or weilding-a-power-too-awesome-for-us-and-may-destro y-us-all.
Oh, please. There's hardly anything that's "standard" when it comes to a PC. I'm not sure what you mean by that - the entire PC architecture is predicated on a very large number of well-established standards, past and present: ISA, PCI, IDE, EIDE, SATA, USB, PS2, VGA, various memory chip standards, etc, etc... All of these standards mean that components can, with some rare exceptions, mix and match freely with nearly any PC device. Pluck a hard drive out of an alienware PC, and it's a good bet it will work just fine in a random Dell or HP computer.
And, although many here are probably loathe to admit it, when it comes to games, Windows-based operating systems are also a very important standard for PCs. The Windows OS, including it's DirectX components (or alternatives such as OpenGL / OpenAL) mean it's relatively simple for a developer to target a pretty wide range of machines, and not have to deal with the intricacies of supporting an astronomical number of possible configurations.
So, yes, nearly every PC is customized in some way, but by no means can you say there's nothing standard about PCs.
Games are just getting too expensive to produce, and it's just not economical to simply release your game exclusively for one platform. Even though it's still early for this generation, we're already seeing a large number of multiplatform games, and, unlike previous generations, the differences in the graphics on the different platforms is almost negligble.
At this rate, if two (or more) different platforms have nearly the same library, why not go the last step and just create a unified console? The developers would probably go for it - less work, more profit. Games are getting more expensive to produce because of the vast amount of high-definition content required to fill them up. Porting a game engine to a specific platform is a large, one-time cost (plus maintenence, of course). Most of the time, content ports pretty well across similarly-specced systems. I don't think developing for a single platform will save you as much as you might imagine.
Anyhow, while I can't speak for other game developers, I certainly am not in favor of a single "standardized" console. I think this would tend to kill innovation and specialization even more than already is happening. I feel that competition in hardware design standards helps to keep the industry fresh and vital, and the current growth and success of the videogame market seems to support that position.
And, to be quite honest, the direct competition among the console makers is the best thing for developers too. Anytime a particular brand becomes too dominant, they invariably become an absolute pain in the arse to work with. I've seen this with Nintendo when they were domimant with the NES and GameBoy, then with Sony with the PSX and PS2. Oddly, it even works within company divisions the same way. Sony's PSP division is much easier to work with than the PS2 was, and it was far easier to work with Nintendo on a GameCube title than it was with a DS (haven't worked on a Wii product, so I can't say there).
If you think about it, just about every other electronics device we use only has one standard - like DVD. When multiple standards are introduced, it just makes a mess of the market, as illustrated by HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. Current electronics technology is only standardized as far as supporting common media. You're talking about electronic devices that are simple content players. There's a pretty significant difference between standardizing simple media content delivery for audio and video than for something as complex as a modern computer game.
Anyhow, we can argue about the merits of this all day, but unless market forces push the industry to one platform (don't see it), or unless for some unfathomable reason some the Japansese, US, and EU governments all degree that we must adhere to the "one true game console standard", it's just not going to happen.
I can't believe this is a "feature" in 2007. This has been a standard element of RPG video games since the 1980's. Is "DragonQuest" 20 years behind the curve in other ways too? You obviously are not familiar with the Dragon Quest series. And I prefer "old school" to "20 years behind the curve", thankyouverymuch.
"but it's hard to develop for..." yeah, yeah. The developers always complained about this, but it was never an issue for the PS1 and PS2, despite the competition having better hardware and better development tools than Sony.
Of course, once games started selling a million copies, the developers got oddly quiet about how "difficult" it was to deal with the PS' architecture... Just because the developers figured it out doesn't mean it wasn't a bitch at the time. I was fortunate to jump to console development fairly late in the PS2 life cycle when most of the tools had matured quite a bit, but I knew a few folks that developed release titles, and so had the toughest time. Our company's engine was cross-platform among Xbox, GC, and PS2. Easily 90% of the optimization work was done on the PS2 version of the engine, trying to get it up to speed with the other two consoles.
One thing many people don't realize is that the PS2 is largely a to-the-metal programming job. Abstraction in the OS is pretty minimal, unlike the Xbox and GC APIs (which are DirectX and OpenGL derivatives, respectively). Early PS2 developers were writing vector unit programs in a custom assembly language (custom C compilers came later). Threaded programming is pretty tough to do in the best cases, but threaded programming in assembly on custom hardware interfacing with C/C++ code with minimal documentation (early docs were all Japanse) and scant samples? Yeah, that's pretty damn hard.
The fact of the matter is that the toughest job for developers is very early in the console's life cycle - constantly changing APIs and hardware revs, poor documentation, lack of mature tool support, etc. The reason you heard developers get "oddly quiet" is because things eventually get figured out and better supported, and they moved on to bigger and better things.
There are two things that make Lua different/better than existing scripting languages, IMO:
1) It's designed to be embedded in applications. 2) It's a data-management language.
Other languages can be embedded, but it's harder to do (at least when I last looked), and I have yet to see an embedded language as lightweight as Lua with equivalent features. It also has the advantage of being a self-describing human-readable data format (plain-text), but it has an advantage that it's ALSO a language. While all languages worth their salt can embed data, Lua is *designed* around this feature. The use of tables as a built-in data type is key here.
If you like, you can think of Lua as a more flexible XML, an easily embedded scripting language, or some combination of both.
I'd tend to agree that there are a lot of hobbyist game programmer out there - probably because there are a pretty large pool of general programmers, and game programming is something that many people like to dabble in. The number of LaMothe books seems to confirm this as well, as these are typically targetted at the amateur market. But characterizing game programmers as "dime-a-dozen" is way off the mark.
One trend that's been interesting to note is that the non-programmer-to-programmer ratio has been steadily increasing over the past decade. The first game I developed required three full-time programmers and one part-time artist. My current company employs over a hundred developers, but only 25 of those are programmers. We have about 50 artists of various flavors (character, prop, world, concept, effects, cutscene, etc). We employ several full-time writers, and well as a dozen game designers and scripters, a small QA team, and a couple of audio guys. The rest are involved in other miscellany - localization, production, etc.
I'd say this is probably a pretty typical ratio for most game development companies. In general, with the increase in processing power comes expectation of filling the world with high-definition content - meaning large expenditures of resources for story, graphics, and audio. We're still coming to grips with the production challenges of this sort of content. While next-generation engines are a relatively straightforward matter to develop, the *real* challenge is creating next-generation content-building tools, allowing the art teams to do more for less. The current games are largely solving the content problem with a combination of brute force and slightly-improved tools. A considerable amount of both programming and content for games is still painstakingly hand-crafted. So, with all of this, you might expect me to claim that development cost sets the price... Partially correct, but it's not the full answer.
Other factors include: willingness of consumer to pay a specified price (Sony may have inadvertently discovered the consumer's upper limit), size of market, and general rate of consumption. There's pretty fierce competition in the industry, though, so if there was some magic bullet answer to getting costs down, I think we'd have seen it by now. My guess is that the numbers simply require this cost in order to have any reasonable chance of making a consistent profit.
Even worse, statistics are abused for the purposes of making a point more dramatically. Here in Washington State, there is currently a controversy of statistics regarding snowpack levels. Syopsis: The numbers being bandied about are that Washington State's snowpack levels have decreased 50% over the past century.
This happens over and over again, but all too often, if the cause seems noble (such as anti-smoking advertising), people are willing to overlook blatent factual errors (otherwise known as *lies*). It's frustrating to me personally, because while I think that certain global warming issues (especially the percentages caused by humans) may be overstated, I don't want to close any sound scientific debate dealing with such potentially serious issues. Even beyond that, limiting pollutants and striving for a small ecological footprint can be nothing but good for the short-term environment, such as the quality of our air or water.
But many well-meaning environmentalists continue to play fast-and-loose* with the facts - thus damaging the credibility of important issues for the general public.
* Probably the only context on the Internet in which this word is used correctly
Being a user of teamspeak, I can tell you how much more I appreciate silent text over screaming 13 year old... Agreed. Whenever I consider online voice chat I think about this guy now: http://server1.plunder.com/994/OnyxiaWipe.swf Warning: Will cause your ears to bleed and sides to split at the same time. WoW experience a bonus, but any online game experience will do.
Still - assigning that moniker to Ledonne is the height of chutzpah, when there are so many talented game creators out there who just quietly make great products for everyone to enjoy. I'm a professional game developer, and so maybe it irks me more than most, but I've never heard of this game or the creator before. It's just that the author is using Gamasutra as a soapbox for self-promotion, oh-so-cleverly masked by promotion of his "discovery" by proxy and his claim of high art, and that's irritating to me.
I'd better be careful before I get modded -1 Troll again. Sheesh.
Ugh... The Gamasutra article starts with a quote, apparently from the creator of this game, claiming to be the world's second most famous game designer, and gets worse, spiraling into a narcissistic look-at-me diatribe about what an important cultural phenom this "work" is.
Nothing but a self-aggrandizing piece of tripe. Sorry, but I wasn't even able to make it to pages 2 and 3. Someone else will have to read the rest of the article. I can't believe this was actually published on Gamasutra. The interview was no less irritating. "The Artist's Way"? Gag.
Did I just wake up grumpy today, or is the article really that annoying? Bah... Get off my lawn!
I'm not saying that Google is some paragon of virtue, but they have money and lawyers. Good lawyers, ones who can put up a fight. They've also got something that Napster never had - public goodwill. Google has been well-established among users of any tech as the ones who "organized the internet". As providers of a very valuable, free service, and as a bright up and coming company, I think Viacom will have a tough sell convincing a jury to punish Google to that extent. Being a young company, Google's "don't be evil" motto hasn't been tainted too badly yet (despite a few minor missteps).
I have to admit, I'm not a Google fan-boy. I love their search engine, but I'd never trust them to hold all my e-mail and documents on their servers any more than I would Sony, Microsoft, Sun, or any large corporation. Even so, my sympathies tend to side with them, because of the ridiculous sniping of "copyright infringement" and crap they have to put up with in the name of providing a valuable public service.
Blizzard's download service is godawful... it's nothing more than a crappy bittorrent service, plagued with problems. On the other hand, you can download the GuildWars client (a few hundred KB) and the entire game will stream to your HD as required on a per-mission basis. If anyone should be licensing their streaming system, it's ArenaNet. I have to wonder about Blizzard's cheap-o approach to conserving bandwidth when a monthly-fee-free game can one-up them...
If the PS3 didn't have HDMI and only had component, there would be no BlueRay because there would be no Protected Video Path....high definition video content is not allowed over component video hardware witout down-sampling. So... the Blu-Ray spec degrades any analog signal. How lovely. This just sounds like a limitation of Blu-Ray, not of component video. Seeing as I own a pretty large HDTV with component inputs, I don't find that a very convincing argument to go out and grab a PS3.
People always want easier cars; cars that drive for them. How about we tell people that you can't have a smart car until your a smart person? Sounds like a plan to me.... driving not a right, it's a privilege and a lot of people do not deserve it. The more the car does, the less the person pays attention. Do you think IQ actually correlates to good driving habits? I'd bet it has more to do with aggressive personalities than anything else. Besides, you're missing the point entirely. Unless you want to live in a society that hands out privileges to just the privileged, the unwashed masses will continue to drive their cars. I fail to see how advanced sensors and computer algorithms that can possibly help avoid accidents and save lives would do harm. I'm pretty sure I don't drive more carelessly because my new car has engineered crumble zones, a collapsible steering column, front and side air bags, and a rigid passenger compartment frame.
I say, the smarter the car, the better it is for all of us.
I'm convinced the in-and-out quick process of professional reviewers is why Oblivion scored so high. After my first 10-15 hours of gameplay, my reactions were the same - almost all positive. Unfortunately, after that, the serious game-balance issues caused by the auto-scaling made me lose interest. It's particularly tragic becase, other than that game-breaker, Oblivion is nearly everything I'd want to see in a computer RPG.
I've always thought that the logical way to use reviews is to find a reviewer that tends to match your general tastes, and weight his/her reviews accordingly. I've always wished that review sites grouped reviews by reviewer, so we could choose who we want to listen to and who we want to ignore. The idea of an "unbiased" review is a fallicy. Everyone brings their own preferences and biases, and I wish gaming sites would actually exploit this fact rather than try to surpress it.
While it's fine and dandy that the film industry is making use of modern technology, I'm wondering if any "bold" filmmaker will ever part from the 24 fps standard.
I can only wonder what a 60 fps film would look like, but I do know that I've had my fill of backwards spinning wagon wheels and nausea inducing camera pans. People can readily (although subconsciously) distinguish between "shot on film" and "shot on video" - it's the frame rate that is the biggest giveaway (24 vs 30). They'll probably initially feel like there's something "wrong" with a 60fps image. Having grown up watching movies and television, both with well established conventions, I suspect many will be quite resistant to anything that pushes these conventions aside too quickly.
Probably the best way is to start with the Pixar-type films for kids and then move on up with that generation...
GDC is more than just about disseminating information, although that's the basic pretense for getting everyone together. Obviously, all that information could simply be transmitted online.
One of the biggest draws for developers is the opportunity to network among their industry peers. For individual developers, it's a chance to meet other devs and industry reps. Smaller game studios have an opportunity to talk to publishers. Vendors can meet-and-greet their clients and potential clients. Game development is a business like anything else, and personal connections are very important. This also gives developers a chance to feel like they're a part of a community as well. The Internet can still be somewhat isolating, and meeting someone in person is still a lot more interesting to most than exchanging e-mails.
Even the presentations are quite a bit different live than when captured digitally. Sitting amongst some of the top AI programmers in the industry and discussing where the state of AI is going was inspiring to me as a young developer. I got a chance to listen to Miyamoto speak - possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. GDC gave me a chance to casually chat with other developers both as a fan of their work and as a collegue. I even took the opportunity to meet up with an artist friend for a session of life-drawing exercises, something I had never tried before. For me, the personal inspiration was just as important as the technical presentation.
That aside, I've found the sessions at GDC to be highly informative and well presented in general - naturally, there are always a few duds - it also depends a great deal on which sessions you choose. Perhaps this is because people are putting their professional reputations on the line when giving a presentation. It's a far cry from the typical fare you see on the net or even in books, which often written by academics or amateur game developers (nothing against these, but it tends to make the material slightly less relevant to professional developers). And, of course, there's the obvious benefit of an interactive Q&A session.
I suppose it's easy to be cynical and dismissive, but I think this is more reflective of an individual's attitude. Just like most endeavors in life, what you get out of GDC depends a great deal on what you're willing to put into it.
It's a little different. You're comparing a fix for a defective product to a patch to change behavior to fit an unforseeable change in timekeeping logic. And, please note that these products aren't even officially being supported anymore (thus, the service charge).
I'm not trying to defend MS, but there's no need to make dodgy comparisons... One can surmise that open-source users will likely have an easier time making this change, seeing as they don't have to rely on a corporation to update their binaries.
Does anyone think that perhaps corporations shouldn't pay taxes at all? In thinking about basic economic realities, I've been leaning in this direction. It sounds like a bit of a radical idea on the surface, but it's always seemed to me that taxing a corporation is really just an indirect tax on anyone who uses that corporations's services or products. In other words, they'll just raise prices to the point that they're making a profit, and thus simply pass along any increased tax burden to the consumer.
It's the same sort of hidden tax as the idea of having employers pay for half of your social security benefits. Where do you think the extra revenue comes to do this? Higher prices on products and lower wages. The government loves to obscure the true source of taxes, especially when they can make it appear that someone else is really paying for them. These are two good examples.
Am I missing something in my logic here? I haven't really heard anyone else talking about this (although I haven't looked all that hard). My suspicion is that this would never fly, if only for the huge political target you'd make yourself for even bringing this up.
When are we all going to get over this whole "my-God-can-beat-up-your-God-so-nyaaah" thing? I would submit the vast majority of violence is perpetrated by governments; and historically, it likely has more to do with power or control (politics or territory) rather than religious differences in most cases. Think about most of our (US) wars: Revolution, War of 1812, Civil War, American Indian Wars, Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War I & II. How many of these were religiously motivated conflicts, or even had a significant religious context at all? Or, perhaps we should point to extreme acts of violence outside the scope of war... How about Stalin's purges? The killing fields in Cambodia? Post-war South Vietnam? Auschwitz?
Naturally, there are religious whackos out there (Muslim extremists, Christian abortion-clinic bombers, KKK nasties, etc...), but we should be careful not to fall into the same trap that we're glibly mocking others for stumbling into - that is, creating a scapegoat...
I understand the distaste for DRM (not to mention it's about as feasible as a perpetual-motion machine), but I don't see the logic in dismissing copyright as well. Can't artists copyright a work but still give people the right to copy and distribute their music?
I suppose this logic works for bands, but what about people who write a song but are not performers themselves? Or, perhaps they just wish to record their music in a studio (maybe even a home studio) rather than performing live? Not all music is even suitable for live performance, in fact. In this scenario, you reward any and all performers, but this seems to leave the songwriter (or non-touring performer) out in the cold a bit.
Just throwing out some food for thought. Er, wait... is that wasteful?
A friend of mine also noticed rampant bait-and-switch. He was an incessant bargain hunter (I'm far too unmotivated), and time and time again he was there on the day the sale started, but they were *always* "sold out". One time, he even managed to be there the moment the store opened, and somehow they still managed to be sold out.
I'm pretty sure there are laws about that sort of thing... Me? I don't think I'd miss them so much.
Slashdot Mirror
That's a rather fancy way of saying "They coded the game using ANSI C++", isn't it?
Don't forget the oh-so-subtle undertones in the story about how humans-are-not-living-in-harmony-with-nature and/or weilding-a-power-too-awesome-for-us-and-may-destro y-us-all.
And, although many here are probably loathe to admit it, when it comes to games, Windows-based operating systems are also a very important standard for PCs. The Windows OS, including it's DirectX components (or alternatives such as OpenGL / OpenAL) mean it's relatively simple for a developer to target a pretty wide range of machines, and not have to deal with the intricacies of supporting an astronomical number of possible configurations.
So, yes, nearly every PC is customized in some way, but by no means can you say there's nothing standard about PCs. Games are just getting too expensive to produce, and it's just not economical to simply release your game exclusively for one platform. Even though it's still early for this generation, we're already seeing a large number of multiplatform games, and, unlike previous generations, the differences in the graphics on the different platforms is almost negligble.
At this rate, if two (or more) different platforms have nearly the same library, why not go the last step and just create a unified console? The developers would probably go for it - less work, more profit. Games are getting more expensive to produce because of the vast amount of high-definition content required to fill them up. Porting a game engine to a specific platform is a large, one-time cost (plus maintenence, of course). Most of the time, content ports pretty well across similarly-specced systems. I don't think developing for a single platform will save you as much as you might imagine.
Anyhow, while I can't speak for other game developers, I certainly am not in favor of a single "standardized" console. I think this would tend to kill innovation and specialization even more than already is happening. I feel that competition in hardware design standards helps to keep the industry fresh and vital, and the current growth and success of the videogame market seems to support that position.
And, to be quite honest, the direct competition among the console makers is the best thing for developers too. Anytime a particular brand becomes too dominant, they invariably become an absolute pain in the arse to work with. I've seen this with Nintendo when they were domimant with the NES and GameBoy, then with Sony with the PSX and PS2. Oddly, it even works within company divisions the same way. Sony's PSP division is much easier to work with than the PS2 was, and it was far easier to work with Nintendo on a GameCube title than it was with a DS (haven't worked on a Wii product, so I can't say there). If you think about it, just about every other electronics device we use only has one standard - like DVD. When multiple standards are introduced, it just makes a mess of the market, as illustrated by HD-DVD/Blu-Ray. Current electronics technology is only standardized as far as supporting common media. You're talking about electronic devices that are simple content players. There's a pretty significant difference between standardizing simple media content delivery for audio and video than for something as complex as a modern computer game.
Anyhow, we can argue about the merits of this all day, but unless market forces push the industry to one platform (don't see it), or unless for some unfathomable reason some the Japansese, US, and EU governments all degree that we must adhere to the "one true game console standard", it's just not going to happen.
Most programmers, as far as I understand, are classified as "exempt" regarding overtime pay.
y /fs17g_salary.htm
http://www.dol.gov/esa/regs/compliance/whd/fairpa
Of course, once games started selling a million copies, the developers got oddly quiet about how "difficult" it was to deal with the PS' architecture... Just because the developers figured it out doesn't mean it wasn't a bitch at the time. I was fortunate to jump to console development fairly late in the PS2 life cycle when most of the tools had matured quite a bit, but I knew a few folks that developed release titles, and so had the toughest time. Our company's engine was cross-platform among Xbox, GC, and PS2. Easily 90% of the optimization work was done on the PS2 version of the engine, trying to get it up to speed with the other two consoles.
One thing many people don't realize is that the PS2 is largely a to-the-metal programming job. Abstraction in the OS is pretty minimal, unlike the Xbox and GC APIs (which are DirectX and OpenGL derivatives, respectively). Early PS2 developers were writing vector unit programs in a custom assembly language (custom C compilers came later). Threaded programming is pretty tough to do in the best cases, but threaded programming in assembly on custom hardware interfacing with C/C++ code with minimal documentation (early docs were all Japanse) and scant samples? Yeah, that's pretty damn hard.
The fact of the matter is that the toughest job for developers is very early in the console's life cycle - constantly changing APIs and hardware revs, poor documentation, lack of mature tool support, etc. The reason you heard developers get "oddly quiet" is because things eventually get figured out and better supported, and they moved on to bigger and better things.
There are two things that make Lua different/better than existing scripting languages, IMO:
1) It's designed to be embedded in applications.
2) It's a data-management language.
Other languages can be embedded, but it's harder to do (at least when I last looked), and I have yet to see an embedded language as lightweight as Lua with equivalent features. It also has the advantage of being a self-describing human-readable data format (plain-text), but it has an advantage that it's ALSO a language. While all languages worth their salt can embed data, Lua is *designed* around this feature. The use of tables as a built-in data type is key here.
If you like, you can think of Lua as a more flexible XML, an easily embedded scripting language, or some combination of both.
The market disagrees with you: http://www.gamecareerguide.com/features/266/are_yo u_in_demand_2006_game_.php
I'd tend to agree that there are a lot of hobbyist game programmer out there - probably because there are a pretty large pool of general programmers, and game programming is something that many people like to dabble in. The number of LaMothe books seems to confirm this as well, as these are typically targetted at the amateur market. But characterizing game programmers as "dime-a-dozen" is way off the mark.
One trend that's been interesting to note is that the non-programmer-to-programmer ratio has been steadily increasing over the past decade. The first game I developed required three full-time programmers and one part-time artist. My current company employs over a hundred developers, but only 25 of those are programmers. We have about 50 artists of various flavors (character, prop, world, concept, effects, cutscene, etc). We employ several full-time writers, and well as a dozen game designers and scripters, a small QA team, and a couple of audio guys. The rest are involved in other miscellany - localization, production, etc.
I'd say this is probably a pretty typical ratio for most game development companies. In general, with the increase in processing power comes expectation of filling the world with high-definition content - meaning large expenditures of resources for story, graphics, and audio. We're still coming to grips with the production challenges of this sort of content. While next-generation engines are a relatively straightforward matter to develop, the *real* challenge is creating next-generation content-building tools, allowing the art teams to do more for less. The current games are largely solving the content problem with a combination of brute force and slightly-improved tools. A considerable amount of both programming and content for games is still painstakingly hand-crafted. So, with all of this, you might expect me to claim that development cost sets the price... Partially correct, but it's not the full answer.
Other factors include: willingness of consumer to pay a specified price (Sony may have inadvertently discovered the consumer's upper limit), size of market, and general rate of consumption. There's pretty fierce competition in the industry, though, so if there was some magic bullet answer to getting costs down, I think we'd have seen it by now. My guess is that the numbers simply require this cost in order to have any reasonable chance of making a consistent profit.
Even worse, statistics are abused for the purposes of making a point more dramatically. Here in Washington State, there is currently a controversy of statistics regarding snowpack levels. Syopsis: The numbers being bandied about are that Washington State's snowpack levels have decreased 50% over the past century.
0 03618979_warming15m.html
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2
This happens over and over again, but all too often, if the cause seems noble (such as anti-smoking advertising), people are willing to overlook blatent factual errors (otherwise known as *lies*). It's frustrating to me personally, because while I think that certain global warming issues (especially the percentages caused by humans) may be overstated, I don't want to close any sound scientific debate dealing with such potentially serious issues. Even beyond that, limiting pollutants and striving for a small ecological footprint can be nothing but good for the short-term environment, such as the quality of our air or water.
But many well-meaning environmentalists continue to play fast-and-loose* with the facts - thus damaging the credibility of important issues for the general public.
* Probably the only context on the Internet in which this word is used correctly
Warning: Will cause your ears to bleed and sides to split at the same time. WoW experience a bonus, but any online game experience will do.
Thanks for the clarification - I stand corrected.
Still - assigning that moniker to Ledonne is the height of chutzpah, when there are so many talented game creators out there who just quietly make great products for everyone to enjoy. I'm a professional game developer, and so maybe it irks me more than most, but I've never heard of this game or the creator before. It's just that the author is using Gamasutra as a soapbox for self-promotion, oh-so-cleverly masked by promotion of his "discovery" by proxy and his claim of high art, and that's irritating to me.
I'd better be careful before I get modded -1 Troll again. Sheesh.
Ugh... The Gamasutra article starts with a quote, apparently from the creator of this game, claiming to be the world's second most famous game designer, and gets worse, spiraling into a narcissistic look-at-me diatribe about what an important cultural phenom this "work" is.
Nothing but a self-aggrandizing piece of tripe. Sorry, but I wasn't even able to make it to pages 2 and 3. Someone else will have to read the rest of the article. I can't believe this was actually published on Gamasutra. The interview was no less irritating. "The Artist's Way"? Gag.
Did I just wake up grumpy today, or is the article really that annoying? Bah... Get off my lawn!
I have to admit, I'm not a Google fan-boy. I love their search engine, but I'd never trust them to hold all my e-mail and documents on their servers any more than I would Sony, Microsoft, Sun, or any large corporation. Even so, my sympathies tend to side with them, because of the ridiculous sniping of "copyright infringement" and crap they have to put up with in the name of providing a valuable public service.
Please mod this "-1, paragraphs are your friend"
I say, the smarter the car, the better it is for all of us.
I'm convinced the in-and-out quick process of professional reviewers is why Oblivion scored so high. After my first 10-15 hours of gameplay, my reactions were the same - almost all positive. Unfortunately, after that, the serious game-balance issues caused by the auto-scaling made me lose interest. It's particularly tragic becase, other than that game-breaker, Oblivion is nearly everything I'd want to see in a computer RPG.
I've always thought that the logical way to use reviews is to find a reviewer that tends to match your general tastes, and weight his/her reviews accordingly. I've always wished that review sites grouped reviews by reviewer, so we could choose who we want to listen to and who we want to ignore. The idea of an "unbiased" review is a fallicy. Everyone brings their own preferences and biases, and I wish gaming sites would actually exploit this fact rather than try to surpress it.
I can only wonder what a 60 fps film would look like, but I do know that I've had my fill of backwards spinning wagon wheels and nausea inducing camera pans. People can readily (although subconsciously) distinguish between "shot on film" and "shot on video" - it's the frame rate that is the biggest giveaway (24 vs 30). They'll probably initially feel like there's something "wrong" with a 60fps image. Having grown up watching movies and television, both with well established conventions, I suspect many will be quite resistant to anything that pushes these conventions aside too quickly.
Probably the best way is to start with the Pixar-type films for kids and then move on up with that generation...
GDC is more than just about disseminating information, although that's the basic pretense for getting everyone together. Obviously, all that information could simply be transmitted online.
One of the biggest draws for developers is the opportunity to network among their industry peers. For individual developers, it's a chance to meet other devs and industry reps. Smaller game studios have an opportunity to talk to publishers. Vendors can meet-and-greet their clients and potential clients. Game development is a business like anything else, and personal connections are very important. This also gives developers a chance to feel like they're a part of a community as well. The Internet can still be somewhat isolating, and meeting someone in person is still a lot more interesting to most than exchanging e-mails.
Even the presentations are quite a bit different live than when captured digitally. Sitting amongst some of the top AI programmers in the industry and discussing where the state of AI is going was inspiring to me as a young developer. I got a chance to listen to Miyamoto speak - possibly a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. GDC gave me a chance to casually chat with other developers both as a fan of their work and as a collegue. I even took the opportunity to meet up with an artist friend for a session of life-drawing exercises, something I had never tried before. For me, the personal inspiration was just as important as the technical presentation.
That aside, I've found the sessions at GDC to be highly informative and well presented in general - naturally, there are always a few duds - it also depends a great deal on which sessions you choose. Perhaps this is because people are putting their professional reputations on the line when giving a presentation. It's a far cry from the typical fare you see on the net or even in books, which often written by academics or amateur game developers (nothing against these, but it tends to make the material slightly less relevant to professional developers). And, of course, there's the obvious benefit of an interactive Q&A session.
I suppose it's easy to be cynical and dismissive, but I think this is more reflective of an individual's attitude. Just like most endeavors in life, what you get out of GDC depends a great deal on what you're willing to put into it.
It's a little different. You're comparing a fix for a defective product to a patch to change behavior to fit an unforseeable change in timekeeping logic. And, please note that these products aren't even officially being supported anymore (thus, the service charge).
I'm not trying to defend MS, but there's no need to make dodgy comparisons... One can surmise that open-source users will likely have an easier time making this change, seeing as they don't have to rely on a corporation to update their binaries.
Does anyone think that perhaps corporations shouldn't pay taxes at all? In thinking about basic economic realities, I've been leaning in this direction. It sounds like a bit of a radical idea on the surface, but it's always seemed to me that taxing a corporation is really just an indirect tax on anyone who uses that corporations's services or products. In other words, they'll just raise prices to the point that they're making a profit, and thus simply pass along any increased tax burden to the consumer.
It's the same sort of hidden tax as the idea of having employers pay for half of your social security benefits. Where do you think the extra revenue comes to do this? Higher prices on products and lower wages. The government loves to obscure the true source of taxes, especially when they can make it appear that someone else is really paying for them. These are two good examples.
Am I missing something in my logic here? I haven't really heard anyone else talking about this (although I haven't looked all that hard). My suspicion is that this would never fly, if only for the huge political target you'd make yourself for even bringing this up.
Naturally, there are religious whackos out there (Muslim extremists, Christian abortion-clinic bombers, KKK nasties, etc...), but we should be careful not to fall into the same trap that we're glibly mocking others for stumbling into - that is, creating a scapegoat...
I understand the distaste for DRM (not to mention it's about as feasible as a perpetual-motion machine), but I don't see the logic in dismissing copyright as well. Can't artists copyright a work but still give people the right to copy and distribute their music?
I suppose this logic works for bands, but what about people who write a song but are not performers themselves? Or, perhaps they just wish to record their music in a studio (maybe even a home studio) rather than performing live? Not all music is even suitable for live performance, in fact. In this scenario, you reward any and all performers, but this seems to leave the songwriter (or non-touring performer) out in the cold a bit.
Just throwing out some food for thought. Er, wait... is that wasteful?
A friend of mine also noticed rampant bait-and-switch. He was an incessant bargain hunter (I'm far too unmotivated), and time and time again he was there on the day the sale started, but they were *always* "sold out". One time, he even managed to be there the moment the store opened, and somehow they still managed to be sold out.
I'm pretty sure there are laws about that sort of thing... Me? I don't think I'd miss them so much.