FMOD recently dropped OpenAL driver support. In our upcoming game (I pretty much handle all the audio programming), we've decided to go with a software-only mixing solution based via FMOD. It gives us a degree of freedom that we always lacked when supporting hardware solutions. A year or two from now, the CPU impact will be considered negligible, even for software I3DL2 (basically, EAX 2) implementations. And, quite frankly, I get awfully tired of worrying about driver and hardware compatibility issues. You'd think that it wouldn't be so difficult to write a stable audio driver... The fact that buggy audio drivers won't be able to blue-screen Windows Vista is a *good* thing.
The lack of support from Vista and FMOD finally put the nail in the coffin for accelerated audio.
If it's a worthwhile project to society, then let society pony up and support it. If it dies, then it obviously was useful enough to the masses. Don't get me wrong, I'd really, really hate to see it go. But being financially challenged can be very helpful to an organization.
Think about it just a sec... they currently have a lot of incentive to streamline their operation as much as possible (cutting costs, negotiating for better bandwidth / hosting rates, etc). A donation campaign could help to educate the public and provide a lot of free publicity.
The last thing it needs is a government bailout. It provides absolutely zero incentive to actually make improvements (Airline industry anyone?).
Consoles have hardware-accelerated ADPCM compression for normal sfx, but audio streams can certainly be compressed with Vorbis. All the commercial audio libraries support it at this point, or else it's easy enough to add the support yourself. The next-gen engines have plenty of horsepower to spare for vorbis decoders - it's really not that expensive as long as you don't go too crazy with simultaneous decodes.
Our company is switching from mp3 to vorbis for our upcoming projects - it's definitely a better format for a closed system such as games. As is oft-mentioned here, it's a better-sounding codec at lower bitrates, which is important for MMOs, since occasional updates are expected - and saving bandwidth wherever possible certainly matters. And, it has a few technical benefits such as sample-accurate decoding (MP3 decodes in blocks, so you have to write additional kludges to get around this), which is helpful for loops.
It's nice to hear the format is picking up a bit of steam. I've had my eye on it for a long time, and have been impressed with the steady progress that has been made.
No, they deal with much more complex issues, and to a large extend, legal issues. While they do provide some interesting forums for discussions, for the most part, I still find them (or, more appropriately, found the particular class I attended) something of a philosophical sinkhole. That is, as with most ethics-related debates, a fundamentally simple thing tends to quickly get over-complicated and mired in intellectual posturing. We never see that on/. now, do we?;-)
I was hoping the ridiculous nature of some of my questions would indicate that I wasn't being 100% serious. -1 failed humor, I guess.
Hmm, I don't recall any incidents involving Jews launching attacks against German, killing thousands of civilians in the process. And you conveniently left out the fact that time and time again, the US goes out of its way to make it clear that our enemies are *fanatics who wish all infidels to die*, and that we don't believe they speak for the religion of Islam. Muslims are "scapegoats"?
"It is not the state's place to say "Ewww", or "But God says...". It is the state's place to serve its citizens."
The state's power is granted by the citizens to enforce rules to maintain and preserve society, within the limitations outlined by the Constitution. At present, the majority of citizens feel that it is in the best interest of society for children to be raised in a traditional household (one man + one woman). As such, the state both regulates and rewards marriage.
If, in the future, society deems it beneficial to allow other types of unions (gay marriage is the first likely candidate), then it will do so legislatively. Societal norms continuously evolve, and so it may be that raising a child in a household with two men or women will be eventually seen as being equally worthy of protecting and promoting. In the mean time, those who feel that basic rights are being infringed upon by being denied marriage licenses will continue pursuing avenues legally, as is their right to do so.
You're correct, it's absolutely not the place of Government to try to guess what "God says" - that's a theocracy, and no sane person wants that. But it certainly is its duty to protect society, especially when it comes to children, as that's society's most important investment. I think this is why the welfare of children will almost always trump other rights, if only in a limited context.
It could be that Unreal 3 simply has too much overhead to be practical on GameCube, but I have my doubts about that. While the new-gen consoles are very powerful, it's not exactly like the Wii is a complete slouch in terms of processing power. Games tend to be fairly scalable by their very nature. After all, there's nothing that *demands* a certain number of polygons in a scene. I worked at a company that (in a different division) made kids games using the Unreal Engine. They even integrated a software-renderer for the inevitable compatibility problems that would crop up.
My guess is that, as alluded to, Epic felt that the market simply wasn't/wouldn't be there for a middleware engine. It could be that they were predicting the demise of Nintendo's new console, and simply guessed wrong.
If they suddenly realize there *is* a big middleware market, I'd guess you'll see a pretty quick about-turn. It's not all that hard to port an engine that already has proper abstraction layers in place (which Unreal3 surely has, being cross-platform). The GC was one of the more straight-forward systems to develop for, and I'd imagine the Wii is no different (although I'm not developing for it at this point).
I always find "ethics" courses somewhat amusing. If you need a college course or a seminar to determine the difference between right and wrong, then you probably missed a couple of important life lessons somewhere along the way. I blame your parents.
Here's a quick test to determine your computer science ethical awareness level:
Is writing a spam-generating client program evil? [ ]yes [ ] no
Is creating a fleet of zombie Windoze machines to launch DDOS attacks against your enemies' websites considered unacceptable behavior? [ ]yes [ ] no
Might it be considered unethical to hack a banking system to send all those leftover partial-cent calculations to your Swiss banking account? [ ]yes [ ] no
Is it wrong to write a virus that penetrates the US Military network and simulates a massive preemptive nuclear strike, thus triggering World War III and dooming the humans race to annihilation? [ ]yes [ ] no
Regarding leaning software programming on Windows... Why do you discount products like the recently released XNA game studio? Those tools are extremely cutting edge, and allow some pretty sophisticated game development in a relatively short amount of time. Why are you so concerned about compilers coming pre-installed on computers? Who today gets a computer that isn't connected to the Internet? Free compilers are all over the place - it doesn't exactly take a computer scientist, if you'll pardon the pun, to Google and grab one of them.
It's funny, you almost sound like users not knowing what "kill the process" means or understanding the intricacies of the file system is a *bad* thing. From my perspective, I say "hooray", it's about time! I'm *glad* that someone who uses a computer doesn't have to geek up enough to become interested in the technological side of the process - maybe they just want to get some work done. That, to me, speaks to me that computer scientists are on the right track.
"I don't want future generations having to learn it wrong and then relearn it as I am being faced with now because of certain sites and (people) that have been teaching it incorrectly and without my permission."
I'll just file that under "taking yourself waaaay to seriously."
You're right - I stand corrected. But I still can't conceive of how one could go over-budget on advertising in any sort of a reasonably-run enterprise. It just sounds too much to me like corporate excuse-making, I guess. I certainly could be wrong, not being in the marketing biz myself.
Actually, the recent Sony Playstation 3 adds seemed sort of like that as well: "This is the PS3. Everyone knows what this thing is anyhow, so we can just throw random images at you (a baby doll, a Rubik's Cube, crows and eggs, etc), because we're just so damned cool."
Hey, I have a question to those in the know about OS technology. Snarky comments aside (ok, probably not), I'm curious - what exactly *would* you have considered a "breakthrough" or "must-have" feature in Vista? I keep hearing comments from people about how there's nothing really compelling in Vista. In all honestly, my experience with non-Windows operating systems is pretty dated, so I have a hard time imagining what else I'd like an OS to do (besides run programs, network properly, and maintain a file system, which XP does just fine for me).
"Games will probably speed up significantly as well. Imagine the possibilities of having a game engine where each AI character utilizes 100% of a single core? Game designers aren't going to sit around desiging games that run on single core engines, they always push the boundaries and will continue to do so."
You're correct. My company has a small group of developers working on our next-gen engine while the bulk of the company is working on our next product. One of the first systems to be worked on is an integrated framework to help reduce the complexity of safely writing multi-threaded code. Our assumption is that each major subsystem (graphics, audio, physics / collision, AI, etc) is going to have a dedicated core (or at least a large percentage of one), and we're planning innovative features that can take advantage of this distributed computing power.
It definitely feels like the original article is way off base to me - a glorified sales pitch - as was rightly pointed out. Software developers are not morons. We see where the wind is blowing, and are adjusting our ship's sails as we speak.
From the article: "...Startup expenses such as advertising and shipping were higher than the company had anticipated..."
Huh? That's some pretty crappy forcasting if you can't even predict shipping prices. And advertising? Seriously, that's a new one. Generally speaking, advertising dollars are budgeted, aren't they? When the advertising dollars run out, the ads go away.
Seems like they're scrambling to spread the blame around among the various divisions of the company.
"This lack of innovation is simply due to the consolidation that's occurred in the game industry, among many other industries in America. Selling games today is strictly about profit. In the earlier days of video gaming, people were making games out of passion, and the people actually working on the game had more say-so."
While consolidation has helped to produce it's share of "me-too" products, I think it's a bit disingenuous to view the past through rose-colored glasses. Yes, many games were and are produced by individuals who were simply passionate and wanted to create something fun and innovative, but when exactly was the industry as a whole *not* driven by profit? Was Atari or Nintendo not driven by profit? Or perhaps you're talking about early PC games released by Sierra or LucasArts? Or do we have to go further back? Do you remember that for every truly innovated arcade game there were half a dozen crappy clones just attempting to cash in on the craze? How about all the early lawsuits as industry common practice was established (such as 3rd party manufacturing of Atari games)? Do you think those were motivated by artistic purity or by fear of lost profit?
The fact of the matter is that while consolidation has given rise to "me too" sequels, they're also the only reason developers can afford to create games of the technical magnitude and depth you see in today's market. Scoff all you want, but modern games have a pretty significant investment in engineering and artwork, and that doesn't come cheap. Put another way - the future of a game company's employees depends on regular sales. While I'm sure nearly all game developers are passionate about what they do and have a strong desire to innovate, I'd also imagine there's a reasonable desire for regular paychecks as well. It's a tricky balancing act.
I do believe that the future holds bright promise for indie developers. We're already seeing a trickle-down effect of technology. The game developer tools used by the big developers are finding their way into the hands of the indie folks. And of course, the continued proliferation of Internet connectivity and greater bandwidths will mean that distribution and popularity of indie games will be a much more democratic process.
"Unfortunately gaming will always be just a little out of the reach of the physically disabled."
I don't really buy that. Yes, *most* commercial games may well be out of reach, but not "gaming". Games are nothing but software, and software can be dynamically adaptive. If the gamer is struggling with the concept, it can scale back the difficulty. Naturally, the disabled might have a different experience - how does it make it any less *fun* for them though?
Being an audio programmer in the game industry, I've long thought about how it might be possible to create audio-themed games, especially those that could be enjoyed by the blind. Or, put another way - what would I be interested in doing for recreation if I were blind?
How about limited control of an NPC that can join a group of other players in a dungeon romp in a fantasy game? These games already have characters that are blind (such as the Night Elves? in Blizzard's Warcraft III) - having given up their sight in order to gain other powers. They could use combinations of gamepad button presses to trigger spells to aide the other party members or unleash powerful attacks. The AI could assist in guiding the player along with the party. Note - this same concept could be used to allow very young players to join their older siblings in a multiplayer game.
Adventure / mystery games would be a very logical choice. Using only audio, you could develop an insanely deep plot with interesting twists and turns, and give the player a chance to really use their heads to solve puzzles and advance through the story.
You could even get more creative and create musical / audio based puzzle games. Some blind people have actually trained their ears to use a sonar-like device that scans the room and returns a sweeping tone that represents the physicality of the area around them. You could even use this sort of concept to create some pretty interesting games.
So, don't sell game developers short. I'll bet you'll eventually see some pretty innovative stuff out there.
OMG, government funded games? Please tell me you're kidding.
I can see it now. Here's the concept: You have a jar with a crucifix in it. The idea of the game is to pee and fill the jar up before the oppressive right-wing evil wacko religious nutjobs can ban gay marriage and destroy the environment. Wow, isn't that edgy? Isn't that deep?
Go ahead and mod me -1 for libertarian I guess. I just don't think the government has any right to use public funds for such trivial expenditures. It's been the free market that's done us pretty well so far. It's fine if some private foundation wanted to do that, but most of them (as do I) seem to think that money is better spent on things like medical research, education, or even buying (commercial) games for sick kids.
Brought to you by the same moronic do-gooders that imposed low-flow flush toilets on us. Now, I have a toilet that I must flush two to three times per sitting for fear of a backup.
Here's to a new black market - imported lightbulbs.
Honestly, I think part of the lack of excitement is that operating system development is stabilizing. The technology is reached a threshold of predictable evolution rather than generational revolution, and that's just not quite as exciting to watch.
Windows 95 was a pretty big leap from 3.1. And think of the leap from command-line OS's to the first Macintosh (Lisa doesn't count - no one owned one of those). It's pretty much the same with any technology you can think of. As the technology matures, the differences between generations becomes much more subtle - at least to the end-user - and hence a bit less exciting/dramatic (revolutions are the exception, I think).
I believe operating systems are fast approaching this threshold level of maturity. Office applications pretty much reached this point a few years ago (what else does a word processor need?). Video games are among the most technologically demanding of applications, and so still have not reached this point.
I wonder how long the image of a floppy will remain as the icon of "saving"? It's going to make me feel really old when some kid sees a floppy icon and asks "what's that?"
"Wikipedia has been shown to be riddled with errors"
I'm afraid I'm going to have to see a source for that statement.
Humor aside, I definitely agree that the nature of Wikipedia entries (anonymous editing) means that it shouldn't be used for citations, but any prof who doesn't recognize the value of this online resource as a great primer really needs to get dragged into the 21st century.
One thing that Wikipedia has that can also be utilized is the discussion history. It gives an opportunity to see various points of view arguing about various facts/opinions/sections in the article. This can be something of a hint to determine what the most controversial and/or contested portions of an article are.
Insane? Not really. Ebay is just avoiding what is essentially a grey-market area.
I'd guess the potential costs of litigation far outweigh any profits to be made from allowing these actions. It's not like Ebay is lacking in traffic in other, more legitimate transactions. And yes, before someone makes a snarky comment, I'm aware there are plenty of illegitimate ebayers trafficking in other items. That doesn't affect this decision though.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd have to agree with your assessment.
FMOD recently dropped OpenAL driver support. In our upcoming game (I pretty much handle all the audio programming), we've decided to go with a software-only mixing solution based via FMOD. It gives us a degree of freedom that we always lacked when supporting hardware solutions. A year or two from now, the CPU impact will be considered negligible, even for software I3DL2 (basically, EAX 2) implementations. And, quite frankly, I get awfully tired of worrying about driver and hardware compatibility issues. You'd think that it wouldn't be so difficult to write a stable audio driver... The fact that buggy audio drivers won't be able to blue-screen Windows Vista is a *good* thing.
The lack of support from Vista and FMOD finally put the nail in the coffin for accelerated audio.
Good Lord... ask a simple question, get modded Troll? With any luck, the meta-moderation will do its job here. Sucks for you Workaphobia...
Everyone is quick to spend other people's money.
If it's a worthwhile project to society, then let society pony up and support it. If it dies, then it obviously was useful enough to the masses. Don't get me wrong, I'd really, really hate to see it go. But being financially challenged can be very helpful to an organization.
Think about it just a sec... they currently have a lot of incentive to streamline their operation as much as possible (cutting costs, negotiating for better bandwidth / hosting rates, etc). A donation campaign could help to educate the public and provide a lot of free publicity.
The last thing it needs is a government bailout. It provides absolutely zero incentive to actually make improvements (Airline industry anyone?).
Consoles have hardware-accelerated ADPCM compression for normal sfx, but audio streams can certainly be compressed with Vorbis. All the commercial audio libraries support it at this point, or else it's easy enough to add the support yourself. The next-gen engines have plenty of horsepower to spare for vorbis decoders - it's really not that expensive as long as you don't go too crazy with simultaneous decodes.
Our company is switching from mp3 to vorbis for our upcoming projects - it's definitely a better format for a closed system such as games. As is oft-mentioned here, it's a better-sounding codec at lower bitrates, which is important for MMOs, since occasional updates are expected - and saving bandwidth wherever possible certainly matters. And, it has a few technical benefits such as sample-accurate decoding (MP3 decodes in blocks, so you have to write additional kludges to get around this), which is helpful for loops.
It's nice to hear the format is picking up a bit of steam. I've had my eye on it for a long time, and have been impressed with the steady progress that has been made.
No, they deal with much more complex issues, and to a large extend, legal issues. While they do provide some interesting forums for discussions, for the most part, I still find them (or, more appropriately, found the particular class I attended) something of a philosophical sinkhole. That is, as with most ethics-related debates, a fundamentally simple thing tends to quickly get over-complicated and mired in intellectual posturing. We never see that on /. now, do we? ;-)
I was hoping the ridiculous nature of some of my questions would indicate that I wasn't being 100% serious. -1 failed humor, I guess.
Hmm, I don't recall any incidents involving Jews launching attacks against German, killing thousands of civilians in the process. And you conveniently left out the fact that time and time again, the US goes out of its way to make it clear that our enemies are *fanatics who wish all infidels to die*, and that we don't believe they speak for the religion of Islam. Muslims are "scapegoats"?
Sorry, but I don't buy such moral equivalence.
You're going to take these people seriously when for two years running, France is rated tops in the quality of life survey? ;-)0 7_article.html
http://www.internationalliving.com/issues/2007/20
The state's power is granted by the citizens to enforce rules to maintain and preserve society, within the limitations outlined by the Constitution. At present, the majority of citizens feel that it is in the best interest of society for children to be raised in a traditional household (one man + one woman). As such, the state both regulates and rewards marriage.
If, in the future, society deems it beneficial to allow other types of unions (gay marriage is the first likely candidate), then it will do so legislatively. Societal norms continuously evolve, and so it may be that raising a child in a household with two men or women will be eventually seen as being equally worthy of protecting and promoting. In the mean time, those who feel that basic rights are being infringed upon by being denied marriage licenses will continue pursuing avenues legally, as is their right to do so.
You're correct, it's absolutely not the place of Government to try to guess what "God says" - that's a theocracy, and no sane person wants that. But it certainly is its duty to protect society, especially when it comes to children, as that's society's most important investment. I think this is why the welfare of children will almost always trump other rights, if only in a limited context.
It could be that Unreal 3 simply has too much overhead to be practical on GameCube, but I have my doubts about that. While the new-gen consoles are very powerful, it's not exactly like the Wii is a complete slouch in terms of processing power. Games tend to be fairly scalable by their very nature. After all, there's nothing that *demands* a certain number of polygons in a scene. I worked at a company that (in a different division) made kids games using the Unreal Engine. They even integrated a software-renderer for the inevitable compatibility problems that would crop up.
My guess is that, as alluded to, Epic felt that the market simply wasn't/wouldn't be there for a middleware engine. It could be that they were predicting the demise of Nintendo's new console, and simply guessed wrong.
If they suddenly realize there *is* a big middleware market, I'd guess you'll see a pretty quick about-turn. It's not all that hard to port an engine that already has proper abstraction layers in place (which Unreal3 surely has, being cross-platform). The GC was one of the more straight-forward systems to develop for, and I'd imagine the Wii is no different (although I'm not developing for it at this point).
I always find "ethics" courses somewhat amusing. If you need a college course or a seminar to determine the difference between right and wrong, then you probably missed a couple of important life lessons somewhere along the way. I blame your parents.
Here's a quick test to determine your computer science ethical awareness level:
Is writing a spam-generating client program evil?
[ ]yes [ ] no
Is creating a fleet of zombie Windoze machines to launch DDOS attacks against your enemies' websites considered unacceptable behavior?
[ ]yes [ ] no
Might it be considered unethical to hack a banking system to send all those leftover partial-cent calculations to your Swiss banking account?
[ ]yes [ ] no
Is it wrong to write a virus that penetrates the US Military network and simulates a massive preemptive nuclear strike, thus triggering World War III and dooming the humans race to annihilation?
[ ]yes [ ] no
Regarding leaning software programming on Windows... Why do you discount products like the recently released XNA game studio? Those tools are extremely cutting edge, and allow some pretty sophisticated game development in a relatively short amount of time. Why are you so concerned about compilers coming pre-installed on computers? Who today gets a computer that isn't connected to the Internet? Free compilers are all over the place - it doesn't exactly take a computer scientist, if you'll pardon the pun, to Google and grab one of them.
It's funny, you almost sound like users not knowing what "kill the process" means or understanding the intricacies of the file system is a *bad* thing. From my perspective, I say "hooray", it's about time! I'm *glad* that someone who uses a computer doesn't have to geek up enough to become interested in the technological side of the process - maybe they just want to get some work done. That, to me, speaks to me that computer scientists are on the right track.
"I don't want future generations having to learn it wrong and then relearn it as I am being faced with now because of certain sites and (people) that have been teaching it incorrectly and without my permission."
I'll just file that under "taking yourself waaaay to seriously."
That would speak volumes to me (as someone hiring) if I asked about a former employee and got "no comment" in response.
You're right - I stand corrected. But I still can't conceive of how one could go over-budget on advertising in any sort of a reasonably-run enterprise. It just sounds too much to me like corporate excuse-making, I guess. I certainly could be wrong, not being in the marketing biz myself.
Actually, the recent Sony Playstation 3 adds seemed sort of like that as well: "This is the PS3. Everyone knows what this thing is anyhow, so we can just throw random images at you (a baby doll, a Rubik's Cube, crows and eggs, etc), because we're just so damned cool."
Hey, I have a question to those in the know about OS technology. Snarky comments aside (ok, probably not), I'm curious - what exactly *would* you have considered a "breakthrough" or "must-have" feature in Vista? I keep hearing comments from people about how there's nothing really compelling in Vista. In all honestly, my experience with non-Windows operating systems is pretty dated, so I have a hard time imagining what else I'd like an OS to do (besides run programs, network properly, and maintain a file system, which XP does just fine for me).
"Games will probably speed up significantly as well. Imagine the possibilities of having a game engine where each AI character utilizes 100% of a single core? Game designers aren't going to sit around desiging games that run on single core engines, they always push the boundaries and will continue to do so."
You're correct. My company has a small group of developers working on our next-gen engine while the bulk of the company is working on our next product. One of the first systems to be worked on is an integrated framework to help reduce the complexity of safely writing multi-threaded code. Our assumption is that each major subsystem (graphics, audio, physics / collision, AI, etc) is going to have a dedicated core (or at least a large percentage of one), and we're planning innovative features that can take advantage of this distributed computing power.
It definitely feels like the original article is way off base to me - a glorified sales pitch - as was rightly pointed out. Software developers are not morons. We see where the wind is blowing, and are adjusting our ship's sails as we speak.
From the article: "...Startup expenses such as advertising and shipping were higher than the company had anticipated..."
Huh? That's some pretty crappy forcasting if you can't even predict shipping prices. And advertising? Seriously, that's a new one. Generally speaking, advertising dollars are budgeted, aren't they? When the advertising dollars run out, the ads go away.
Seems like they're scrambling to spread the blame around among the various divisions of the company.
"This lack of innovation is simply due to the consolidation that's occurred in the game industry, among many other industries in America. Selling games today is strictly about profit. In the earlier days of video gaming, people were making games out of passion, and the people actually working on the game had more say-so."
While consolidation has helped to produce it's share of "me-too" products, I think it's a bit disingenuous to view the past through rose-colored glasses. Yes, many games were and are produced by individuals who were simply passionate and wanted to create something fun and innovative, but when exactly was the industry as a whole *not* driven by profit? Was Atari or Nintendo not driven by profit? Or perhaps you're talking about early PC games released by Sierra or LucasArts? Or do we have to go further back? Do you remember that for every truly innovated arcade game there were half a dozen crappy clones just attempting to cash in on the craze? How about all the early lawsuits as industry common practice was established (such as 3rd party manufacturing of Atari games)? Do you think those were motivated by artistic purity or by fear of lost profit?
The fact of the matter is that while consolidation has given rise to "me too" sequels, they're also the only reason developers can afford to create games of the technical magnitude and depth you see in today's market. Scoff all you want, but modern games have a pretty significant investment in engineering and artwork, and that doesn't come cheap. Put another way - the future of a game company's employees depends on regular sales. While I'm sure nearly all game developers are passionate about what they do and have a strong desire to innovate, I'd also imagine there's a reasonable desire for regular paychecks as well. It's a tricky balancing act.
I do believe that the future holds bright promise for indie developers. We're already seeing a trickle-down effect of technology. The game developer tools used by the big developers are finding their way into the hands of the indie folks. And of course, the continued proliferation of Internet connectivity and greater bandwidths will mean that distribution and popularity of indie games will be a much more democratic process.
"Unfortunately gaming will always be just a little out of the reach of the physically disabled."
I don't really buy that. Yes, *most* commercial games may well be out of reach, but not "gaming". Games are nothing but software, and software can be dynamically adaptive. If the gamer is struggling with the concept, it can scale back the difficulty. Naturally, the disabled might have a different experience - how does it make it any less *fun* for them though?
Being an audio programmer in the game industry, I've long thought about how it might be possible to create audio-themed games, especially those that could be enjoyed by the blind. Or, put another way - what would I be interested in doing for recreation if I were blind?
How about limited control of an NPC that can join a group of other players in a dungeon romp in a fantasy game? These games already have characters that are blind (such as the Night Elves? in Blizzard's Warcraft III) - having given up their sight in order to gain other powers. They could use combinations of gamepad button presses to trigger spells to aide the other party members or unleash powerful attacks. The AI could assist in guiding the player along with the party. Note - this same concept could be used to allow very young players to join their older siblings in a multiplayer game.
Adventure / mystery games would be a very logical choice. Using only audio, you could develop an insanely deep plot with interesting twists and turns, and give the player a chance to really use their heads to solve puzzles and advance through the story.
You could even get more creative and create musical / audio based puzzle games. Some blind people have actually trained their ears to use a sonar-like device that scans the room and returns a sweeping tone that represents the physicality of the area around them. You could even use this sort of concept to create some pretty interesting games.
So, don't sell game developers short. I'll bet you'll eventually see some pretty innovative stuff out there.
OMG, government funded games? Please tell me you're kidding.
I can see it now. Here's the concept: You have a jar with a crucifix in it. The idea of the game is to pee and fill the jar up before the oppressive right-wing evil wacko religious nutjobs can ban gay marriage and destroy the environment. Wow, isn't that edgy? Isn't that deep?
Go ahead and mod me -1 for libertarian I guess. I just don't think the government has any right to use public funds for such trivial expenditures. It's been the free market that's done us pretty well so far. It's fine if some private foundation wanted to do that, but most of them (as do I) seem to think that money is better spent on things like medical research, education, or even buying (commercial) games for sick kids.
Brought to you by the same moronic do-gooders that imposed low-flow flush toilets on us. Now, I have a toilet that I must flush two to three times per sitting for fear of a backup.
Here's to a new black market - imported lightbulbs.
Sigh...
Honestly, I think part of the lack of excitement is that operating system development is stabilizing. The technology is reached a threshold of predictable evolution rather than generational revolution, and that's just not quite as exciting to watch.
Windows 95 was a pretty big leap from 3.1. And think of the leap from command-line OS's to the first Macintosh (Lisa doesn't count - no one owned one of those). It's pretty much the same with any technology you can think of. As the technology matures, the differences between generations becomes much more subtle - at least to the end-user - and hence a bit less exciting/dramatic (revolutions are the exception, I think).
I believe operating systems are fast approaching this threshold level of maturity. Office applications pretty much reached this point a few years ago (what else does a word processor need?). Video games are among the most technologically demanding of applications, and so still have not reached this point.
I wonder how long the image of a floppy will remain as the icon of "saving"? It's going to make me feel really old when some kid sees a floppy icon and asks "what's that?"
"Wikipedia has been shown to be riddled with errors"
I'm afraid I'm going to have to see a source for that statement.
Humor aside, I definitely agree that the nature of Wikipedia entries (anonymous editing) means that it shouldn't be used for citations, but any prof who doesn't recognize the value of this online resource as a great primer really needs to get dragged into the 21st century.
One thing that Wikipedia has that can also be utilized is the discussion history. It gives an opportunity to see various points of view arguing about various facts/opinions/sections in the article. This can be something of a hint to determine what the most controversial and/or contested portions of an article are.
Insane? Not really. Ebay is just avoiding what is essentially a grey-market area.
I'd guess the potential costs of litigation far outweigh any profits to be made from allowing these actions. It's not like Ebay is lacking in traffic in other, more legitimate transactions. And yes, before someone makes a snarky comment, I'm aware there are plenty of illegitimate ebayers trafficking in other items. That doesn't affect this decision though.