That's kindof a bummer. I hadn't heard much about the kiosks until I heard Major Nelson's podcast, and the first bad sign was that -- right out of the gate -- he starts trying to talk down the criticisms by claiming that the kiosks were "unoptimized". Unoptimized? Huh??
This is the same line that some of the Microsoft reps are giving. They aren't saying whether it's the games or the hardware that is supposedly unoptimized, but I call BS on either excuse. It seems doubtful that Microsoft's marketing would be so sloppy with such a high-visibility rollout. My guess is that they didn't anticipate a poor reaction, and that the PR drones are going into damage-control mode.
This wouldn't be the first high-visibility flub - there was the god-awful MTV unveiling episode, and the E3 "press" conference where microsoft filled the room with paid-for shills posing as journalists. On the other hand, a lot of the feedback from X05 was positive, so I was starting to get my hopes up again. Damn.
I agree that it's frustrating( been waiting a long time for Band Brothers), but keep in mind it can be much harder to do simultaneous releases with certain software titles because of localization. For example, an adventure or rpg game could have hundreds of pages of text that needs to be translated, new voice actors and recording sessions, and potentially swapping out assets that may be offensive or not relevant the target cultures. Sure, you could do it simultaneously (and some games do), but it's much, much more work.
On the hardware side, I imagine localization isn't trivial, but it's much easier to translate the various splash screens, error codes and whatnot. I'm guessing the more difficult obstacle is getting production levels and distrubution network locked down. But Nintendo (and Microsoft perhaps), don't feel it'll be a problem.
...chunks of foam are still breaking off of the space shuttle and the heat shielding tiles need to be fixed via spacewalks. Fortunately, the agonizing decision as to whether astronauts should have sex has been laid to rest. Thank goodness, because I was beginning to think that NASA had lost its focus!
Honestly, I'd tell this panel to go fsck themselves, but they can't now anyway... right?
Excellent link from the parent -- I have an electric toothbrush that charges the same way and I've always wondered how efficient it is. Apparently it isn't much worse than traditional adapters used for phones and such: about 70%.
However, if you look at the photo of the splashpower base, it looks as though the base itself uses an AC adapter (the cord appears to have a male DC-power connector). If that's the case then you really have to hits in the chain, and the system is ultimately 50% efficient (.7 for the adapter that powers the base, times.7 for the "remote" charging.) Right?
While I don't disagree at all with the above, "really, really rushed" describes around 99.9% of projects in the game industry at any given time. You're either rushing to meet a launch window, a holiday, or a deliverable deadline that ultimately decides whether you get paid for another x-months.
I imagine that Sony and their first-party software teams feel just as rushed. Sure, they have six more months until launch, but they have they are dealing w/ a different set of variables, and their lackluster showing at TGS only fuels rumors that they are scrambling just as hard.
3. No piracy at all, but you used the word anyway because it sounds more serious that way. Maybe some kind of "grey market" import, or employees secretly flogging defective stock that Sony thought had been dumped in a landfill. Or whatever.
Ah, number three was close, but you forgot option 4: I specifically chose that precise wording to lure you out of your hidey-hole and grace us with your varied interpretations of my choice of the word "pirate". Not that I only had a few minutes left of my lunch and hastefullly wrote "pirated hardware and software" instead of the more appropriate "grey-market hardware and pirated software", oh no no no. You would see through that, wouldn't you? And, yes, while process of chipping a ps2 in order to play the pirated software (as well as and violating Chinese law in order to get said hardware into China) might fall into some people's definition of piracy as well, you proved that my choice of words totally invalidates any point I was trying to make.
My apologies. Time to put all the cards on the table and state my true, dark beliefs: The 360 is being delayed in China because of pirates. Real pirates. And not these "Chinese sailors" of which you speak -- I'm talking about the real-deal Pirates-of-the-Caribbean pirates with gold teeth and striped shirts and those silly triangle shaped hats. Yarrr!!!
I've always thought that piracy was a bigger issue than average income, though I imagine that the relative high price is at least part of the reason for the piracy in the first place. China in the past has turned a blind eye to copyrights and IP. Has this changed? For example, I remember reading that the PS2 didn't officially release in china for several years after it's introduction in Japan, but pirated ps2 hardware and games were widely available.
Another thought: seeing as how Xbox could potentially sold for less cost due to the lack of tariffs and shipping costs (they are manufactured in China in the first place) -- and given the fact that you pretty much would have to sell the product and a substantially lower price to get any kind of widespread adoption -- I wonder if M$ is concerned that the grey market could sell chinese xboxen could at a lower price than the "legal" retail channels.
It seems there is no decent middle-of-the-road. You either have something like the OQO, or you have some piece of junk that desperately tries to be a mac mini and utterly fails because it tries to include legacy cruft(I haven't used the serial/parallel/joystick port in 5 years... why do they insist on including them? Would it kill your business to tell the remaining.5% of dot-matrix printer owners to piss off!?)
Are there any PC makers that are a good system with the form factor of the Mac Mini? I'd love to have a brick-sized PC that I could easily move from a dock at work to a dock at home. I'm not talking about a mobo or case manufacturer, but a complete system.
... how are you going to efficiently test/judge when you factor in *everything* that makes a great programmer ??
I agree that style and design are very important (vital, in fact), but I think you're short-changing the the winners of this contest as well as the testing mechanism. A great programmer is indeed all of the things you described, but it's much harder/costlier to test those angles in an automated fashion. You can't "spin" metrics such as whether it compiles, lines of code, memory usage, and execution time. As such, you can rely on automation to do your testing. On the other hand, how the hell is a machine going to reliably judge how easy-to-understand or supportable your code is, architecture decisions, how well you comment your code, your coding style etc? Those things are arguably subjective, and computers don't do "subjective" all that well. You could sub-out all the judging with humans, but then you've increased the cost/resources needed by an order of magnitude.
So, yeah, the code jam only measured a few aspects of what makes a great programmer, but it's not a trivial aspect. A good mentor can can smooth out the rough spots of a sharp-witted coder who sucks at documentation and style, but it's much harder (is it possible at all?) to make a dim-witted coder sharp-witted, regardless of style and/or meticulously commented code.
The enemy ships in Galaga were controlled via scripts. Take THAT, you punk kids!
Okay, okay... the "scripts" were really just an array of bytes that had opcodes defining where to turn, when to shoot, etc. etc.. I agree that the idea of scripting parts of your game is not a new idea, but the article is still a good read.
Besides, I don't think that anyone (even the author) is trying to sell scripting as a new idea. Rather, I think what *is* new is that general purpose scripting languages are starting to be used. I think this really neat because it gives you a pool of modders who won't have the added learning curve of a new syntax. They already know language xyz so now they can concentrate on the learning the pieces unique to the game. I imagine it also frees up the programmer from rolling their own scripting language, though I don't know if the job of exposing the game engine to the script interpreter is any easier (guessing it would be but dunno). Although, I reckon putting a general purpose scripting language in your game ain't all that new either. Isn't the scripting of Quake3 done with interpreted C?
But who cares if it isn't new, I don't think this means this story shouldn't be on Slashdot. It's geeky and an interesting read, so why not?
Never messed with Lua but if thats all a coroutine does then your comparison is absolutely correct. However, after reading the article it kind of sounds like the threading model of Stackless Python shares more with a Lua coroutine than with threading as how we think about it in the OS world. From the article:
The only solution is non-preemptive multithreading. This necessity also solves many synchronization problems. A non-preemptive environment rarely needs locks and can be deterministic.
Which sounds to me like thread2 doesn't start until thread1 completes execution of a routine (or explicitly calls sleep() ).
Not a knock against Stackless Python, though. In fact, I agree with the author that preemptive threading in the context of scripting a game probably causes more problems than it solves. In a game, you can be more trusting of its processes/threads(aka scripts) than a general pupose OS would be. On the other hand, with games like UT where you can have have multiple "mutators" running simultaneously that were created by the modding community and not an inhouse designer, maybe preemptive threading would be a good idea.
But we are actually still coming out of the last ice age, so we may just be egotistical to think that we have an effect on the planet's climate.
Well, the trite response would be too say that we obiously have an effect on the climate, if only a minuscule effect, but I certainly would agree that we arrogantly put humanity on the wrong side of the equation -- we think of the climate as a function of humanity, when more accuratly it's the other way around. I mean it's not like the dinosaurs caused the climate shift that ultimately took them out, right?
Yeah, I know... gross oversimplification. But my point is that the # of living creatures has fluctuated with the climate (e.g.
I'd be willing to agree that we might have a minimal impact on the earths climate relative to all of the other factors. But that said, it's not like it takes that much of an impact in the first place to tip the scales, which is what the article talks about.
I have virtually nill astronomy education so please correct me, but my understanding is that Venus' closer proximity to the sun would only account for a 5-10% higher temperature than Earth, when just considering the increased amount of energy from the sun. However we know that Venus' temperature is 1000x hotter than earth (the biggest problems with venus probes was that they usually melted, right?). So why is it venus so damn hot? Because that 5% led to more cloud cover on venus than earth, which trapped more heat, causing more evaporation, more clouds, more greenhouse effects, wash, rinse, repeat until you wind up with a planet that can't support any form of life.
I'll spare the fruity "delicate balance" lecture but suffice to say as little effect that we may have, who is to say that it isn't enough to screw things up( or make it better)?
While it's impossible to tell whether this move will work for nintendo, it can definitely be said that it opens interaction possibilities that just aren't possible with either console or PC gaming (which is what Microsoft and Sony have been promising). What's more, it was accomplished without getting sucked into the graphics/cpu arms race.
It's certainly different. Whether it's "Virtual Boy" different or "Nintendo DS" different remains to be seen.
It's hard to reconcile Microsofts statements about "saving" PC gaming with their statements about the future of DirectX.
Initially, Microsoft said that DirectX 9.1 would be the last major version of DirectX, and that it would be replaced by Windows Graphics Foundation (essentially putting app and game graphics development under the same umbrella).
But then they've recently announced that the WGF concept is dead, and there will be, in fact, DirectX 10.
Incredibly, they've further announced that DirectX 10 will not be backwards compatible with directx 7, 8, or even directx 9.1 !!! Apparently the legacy directx API will run in a software compatibility layer and/or emulation, which means that Directx 9.1 games will run slower after you install DirectX 10.
Now, the article is from the inquirer so it could be bogus, but I've read this other places as well. I'm hoping someone here can show that it *is* bogus and/or misquoted, because if it's true I fail to see how this is going to do anything but hasten the death of PC gaming regardless of what Microsoft's marketing department does.
After you factor in the tools like Renderware as well as others, you realize game designers do far less.
Let me guess: you've never created a game, or held a job in the industry, have you? Otherwise you'd recognize the above as patently absurd.
Trust me, designers most certainly do *not* have it easier. Even with middleware tools like renderware & havok, and with design tools like Phototoshop, Maya, and 3ds Max, it's still an unbelievablly work-intensive process to create content for a state-of-the-art title.
For example, consider need for speed vs. gran turismo. Let's suspend the argument of which is a better game (GT kicks ass), and just talk about dev costs. You might have an argument that middleware tools have made it easier on a programmer who is relieved of low-level rendering and physics simulation tasks (though I'd wager that a programmer would disagree), but the amount of work required to create the content (audio, artwork, modeling, level/track design) in Need for Speed for the Xbox 360 exceed GT by an order of magnitude. Newer design tools make artists and designers more productive, but these productivity gains are outstripped by the work required to exploit the capabilities afforded by advances in hardware.
But don't take my word for it. Check out a recent post-mortem from Game Developer magazine (or its Gamasutra site)and compare it to one from 5-10 years back. You'll notice that the development staff (programmers, designes, artists, management) numbers have become huge! Licensing and actor royalties notwithstanding, you're still looking at increased costs.
Is the industry producing crap games? Of course. They produced crap games back then, too. It's just that they cost more to make.
I have a tough time picking a side in this debate, because all of the various arguments -- when you subtract the vitriol, ad hominem attacks, and cynicism -- are good points and shouldn't be easily discarded.
Games will be hard to port, developers need to accept the new reality that performance gains will come from paralellism, Steam-like services provide tremendous benefits, steam-like service have very troubling consequences, and so on...
I'm just going to sidestep the argument(s) by owning all three platforms. My retirement fun can wait;-)
PlanetGamecube recently had a blurb to the effect that it is due to arrive in US soon. We'll see...
Im curious, how do you like the import version? Does the language barrier get in the way of navigation/gameplay or is it one of those games that you can pick up and play regardless? If it get's delayed again I may just import it too.
I have a DS and think it's great, but 250,000 titles inside of one week isn't all that. Halo2 sold around 2 million inuts in one day, and even that wasn't a record (which I believe is one of the mario titles or final fantasy...)
However, Its more notable due to the DS' user base in the US (2 million, right?), but not on the number alone. 1 user in 8 picked it up, which is impressive, and hopefully will be a wake up call to third parties: DS users like it when you exploit the unique abilities of a platform, and don't like it when you port your playstation title and tack "DS" on the end of the name. It's more of a statement of the DS third party selection.
I wonder if we'll see a similar percentage with that music creation game ("Band Brothers" or something... I'm behind my employer's internet fun-blocker). You can create your own music tracks using the stylus and record your own samples/instuments using the built in microphone. I'm picking that up on day one.
I'm inclined to agree with right now, but this wasn't always the situation.
I haven't gone on battle.net in quite ahwhile, but back in the DiabloII/Starcraft heydey BattleNet had some major kinks. It was quite common for the authentication servers to go down, friends would pop in/out of chat rooms, games would drop or take forever to start, and so on. Unfortunately, for people that wanted to play w/ friends over the internet you had no choice -- you couldn't connect to, say, your friends IP for a closed game.
I'm pretty sure this is no longer the case, however. Blizzard released a patch for Starcraft that allows internet gaming via TCP, and I think for DiabloII as well. Pretty sure that Warcraft 3 has had such functionality from day 1.
That said, nowadays it's much harder to argue that Bnetd is required for legitimate use, and if fact the majority of those that use it are trying to get around the CD-Key protection....Not that I have a problem w/ that. I bought War3 fair&square but lost the cd case (and hence, key), so I use a crack. I don't have any ethical qualms about circumventing copy protection to use the products that I own. So yeah, bnetd has legitimate uses, but my guess is that the majority of its users are those evil hacker types that the RIAA keeps telling me about.
Gaming's not dead. It's not dying, either. It just seems that way to people who've been through a few decades of iterative improvments yielding diminishing returns.
You make some good points, but I disagree. I've been around a few decades, and I can tell you that the video game market didn't seem dead in 1983-85, it was dead. And I disagree that "idiots" (which I assume also includes uninformed or otherwise ignorant consumers) will always prop the industry up. You had the same idiot ratio back then as you do now(I'd say even higher... word of mouth was nothing like is now with the Intarweb), but it wasn't enough to keep the industry alive back then. Yes, the market is much bigger now, but so are the production costs. You can't extrapolate 15 years of growth and assume that something can't die. Titanic was thought unsinkable, but hubris and some ice was enough to prove otherwise. For Atari, it was hubris and "ET" for the 2600 (yeah I know, and others).
But there's another problem. As pc gaming continues to decline, the pool of talent shrinks further. If you want to learn PC game development all you need is a PC. However, if you want to develop console games, or even learn how to do it, you're pretty much screwed. Supposing you could afford a development kit ($10,000 -$100,000), you still can't go out and buy one -- you need to be an established publisher or development house. So, a success story like Id software simply wont play out today.
You think that you have poor quality and unoriginal titles now? Just wait 5-10 years when the pool of capable talent shrinks to a fraction of it's size, and the only developers that have access to the state-of-the art are working for EA.
Speaking of EA, I hear they're currently hard at work on the innovations in store for their Madden franchise. No siree, no way will this ship ever sink!
The slashdot and engadget articles mention it being an add on for the DS, but your post and the wikipedia article indicate that it's just a GBA game that is simply DS compatible just like any other single player GBA game.
Do you get any sort of benefit from using the DS? The touch screen gives the potential for easier (much easier) navigation (forget about fast forward, just tap anywhere on the playback timeline), but if it's just a GBA title... yuck.
Because thats about the only pack-in game that you'll get with your "pretty sweet" gaming rig.
Seriously, this is a non-story. So, this is like the third story I've read about the outrage over various aspects of the 360's pricing. But there is nothing new here. News flash: the HD is optional (we knew this), accessories are overpriced (true since the Atari 2600) and retailers are bundling because they predict/hope for a shortage .
Is it a slow newsweek or something? Is it because we're approaching the end of the month and we haven't hit our Microsoft-bashing quota? What is it?
In fact, the only "news" of late is that 360 first-party titles will be $50... which is the exact same price as regular xbox and ps2 games. Where's the story on that??
Too right. The bundling thing was just obnoxious with the PSP. They attempted something like that my local at Toys R' Us. The cheapest bundle that they had was around $400, and it was the only way to pre-order.
So a friend and I stop by on launch day thinking it's a lost cause. Instead, there was an overstaffed crew standing in front a ton of PSP's and even more games. They still had the ads claiming that you needed to purchase a bundle, but by the time we walked in the writing was on the wall and it had just become a "suggestion".
I can see how console makers and retailers benefit from the perception of a shortage because it creates a sense of "gotta have it" hysteria in the consumer base. However, an actual shortage would be disastrous because your profits rely on as big of an installed base as possible. You can do all the hand-waving and gloomy press releases you want warning of a shortage, but on launch day you better be loaded to the gills with product. And that's when supply-and-demand takes over and exposes these bundles as a joke.
I'm surprised that Sony and Microsoft allow retailers to do these things, because people tend to blame the console maker even though it's really the retailer's scheme. Just look at some of the comments here.
The arguments in the parent post and the, er.., "grandparent" are not really mutually exclusive. In fact, I'd say there's a lot of truth in both.
On one hand, I think that the older generation of games tend to decry the games of today as being derivative, uncreative titles that focus more on technology and graphics than gameplay. I think that this is a nostalgic view that glosses over a mountain of crap. In fact, I'd argue that the ratio good/bad games has remained relatively constant. You had franchises with too many sequels, and you had legions of copy-cat titles. It's just that people only remember Pac-Man and Galaga -- they dont remember Pac Man Jr., Super Pac Man, Pac-Man Pinball, and the legion of forgettable Galaga clones.
On the other hand, I think that it's true that video games are getting overly complex and overwrought, and that is part of the reason why development costs are spiraling out of control. The added competition in a larger game industry is part of the reason, but In general I think games are just getting too "big".
I think games like Kamitari Damacy are a model for what other games should be. KD is alot of fun, and easy to learn, but it isn't obsessively focused on realism and it was a relatively quick game to play (I finished it in a weekend). So, Konami was able to price it at $20 in the U.S. and it did quite well.
Huh??? Cell chips are essentially insanely fast PowerPC chips. Apple could have OS X running on a Cell chip in about the same time it takes for them to support any other new PowerPC chip that comes out.
Sorry, I shoulda been more clear. I wasn't trying to say whether it would be fast, slow, or anything else. I dont have any idea until we start seeing it in the "real-world". My point was that the statement "cell can support any os (such as linux or tiger)" isn't all that shocking because virtually *any* desktop-strength processor could make the same claim... it just depends on how much of a hit you will take in duplicating and/or emulating the environment (cpu, chipset, sound hardware, etc) that the target OS expects. MIPS, ARM, x86, Cell, you name it. For x86 it's a pretty big hit (for now at least).
For cell, I imagine it would be easier, but I'm not convinced that you'd get "insanely fast" performance from over, say, a dual-core G5. The central core is (pretty much) a PowerPC processor, surrounded by eight(?) DSP's. However, if I'm not mistaken, these DSP's do not support branch prediction, and can only get instructions fed to them via the main CPU (they can't get it DMA-style from RAM).
So it's not like you've got a 9-way cpu workstation thundering away... you only get benefit when you take advantage of DSP-friendly code like what you see in media players. Alot of people are skeptical that the code mix in your average video game can be efficiently tap Cells architecture. And for something like an OS running a wide range of apps, I'm sure it's an even shakier proposition.
But of course, I have no clue and I could be totally wrong. Personally I'd love to see such a radically different CPU approach turn out to deliver great performance. But nobody knows at this point. Not me, not you, not the media, and not even the game developers (hell, it took 'till the third generation of ps2 games to wrap their brains its Ps2's funky innards).
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That's kindof a bummer. I hadn't heard much about the kiosks until I heard Major Nelson's podcast, and the first bad sign was that -- right out of the gate -- he starts trying to talk down the criticisms by claiming that the kiosks were "unoptimized". Unoptimized? Huh??
This is the same line that some of the Microsoft reps are giving. They aren't saying whether it's the games or the hardware that is supposedly unoptimized, but I call BS on either excuse. It seems doubtful that Microsoft's marketing would be so sloppy with such a high-visibility rollout. My guess is that they didn't anticipate a poor reaction, and that the PR drones are going into damage-control mode.
This wouldn't be the first high-visibility flub - there was the god-awful MTV unveiling episode, and the E3 "press" conference where microsoft filled the room with paid-for shills posing as journalists. On the other hand, a lot of the feedback from X05 was positive, so I was starting to get my hopes up again. Damn.
I agree that it's frustrating( been waiting a long time for Band Brothers), but keep in mind it can be much harder to do simultaneous releases with certain software titles because of localization. For example, an adventure or rpg game could have hundreds of pages of text that needs to be translated, new voice actors and recording sessions, and potentially swapping out assets that may be offensive or not relevant the target cultures. Sure, you could do it simultaneously (and some games do), but it's much, much more work.
On the hardware side, I imagine localization isn't trivial, but it's much easier to translate the various splash screens, error codes and whatnot. I'm guessing the more difficult obstacle is getting production levels and distrubution network locked down. But Nintendo (and Microsoft perhaps), don't feel it'll be a problem.
...chunks of foam are still breaking off of the space shuttle and the heat shielding tiles need to be fixed via spacewalks. Fortunately, the agonizing decision as to whether astronauts should have sex has been laid to rest. Thank goodness, because I was beginning to think that NASA had lost its focus!
Honestly, I'd tell this panel to go fsck themselves, but they can't now anyway... right?
Excellent link from the parent -- I have an electric toothbrush that charges the same way and I've always wondered how efficient it is. Apparently it isn't much worse than traditional adapters used for phones and such: about 70%.
.7 for the "remote" charging.) Right?
However, if you look at the photo of the splashpower base, it looks as though the base itself uses an AC adapter (the cord appears to have a male DC-power connector). If that's the case then you really have to hits in the chain, and the system is ultimately 50% efficient (.7 for the adapter that powers the base, times
While I don't disagree at all with the above, "really, really rushed" describes around 99.9% of projects in the game industry at any given time. You're either rushing to meet a launch window, a holiday, or a deliverable deadline that ultimately decides whether you get paid for another x-months.
I imagine that Sony and their first-party software teams feel just as rushed. Sure, they have six more months until launch, but they have they are dealing w/ a different set of variables, and their lackluster showing at TGS only fuels rumors that they are scrambling just as hard.
Ah, number three was close, but you forgot option 4: I specifically chose that precise wording to lure you out of your hidey-hole and grace us with your varied interpretations of my choice of the word "pirate". Not that I only had a few minutes left of my lunch and hastefullly wrote "pirated hardware and software" instead of the more appropriate "grey-market hardware and pirated software", oh no no no. You would see through that, wouldn't you? And, yes, while process of chipping a ps2 in order to play the pirated software (as well as and violating Chinese law in order to get said hardware into China) might fall into some people's definition of piracy as well, you proved that my choice of words totally invalidates any point I was trying to make.
My apologies. Time to put all the cards on the table and state my true, dark beliefs: The 360 is being delayed in China because of pirates. Real pirates. And not these "Chinese sailors" of which you speak -- I'm talking about the real-deal Pirates-of-the-Caribbean pirates with gold teeth and striped shirts and those silly triangle shaped hats. Yarrr!!!
I've always thought that piracy was a bigger issue than average income, though I imagine that the relative high price is at least part of the reason for the piracy in the first place. China in the past has turned a blind eye to copyrights and IP. Has this changed? For example, I remember reading that the PS2 didn't officially release in china for several years after it's introduction in Japan, but pirated ps2 hardware and games were widely available.
Another thought: seeing as how Xbox could potentially sold for less cost due to the lack of tariffs and shipping costs (they are manufactured in China in the first place) -- and given the fact that you pretty much would have to sell the product and a substantially lower price to get any kind of widespread adoption -- I wonder if M$ is concerned that the grey market could sell chinese xboxen could at a lower price than the "legal" retail channels.
Is there an economist in the house?
It seems there is no decent middle-of-the-road. You either have something like the OQO, or you have some piece of junk that desperately tries to be a mac mini and utterly fails because it tries to include legacy cruft(I haven't used the serial/parallel/joystick port in 5 years... why do they insist on including them? Would it kill your business to tell the remaining .5% of dot-matrix printer owners to piss off!?)
Are there any PC makers that are a good system with the form factor of the Mac Mini? I'd love to have a brick-sized PC that I could easily move from a dock at work to a dock at home. I'm not talking about a mobo or case manufacturer, but a complete system.
... how are you going to efficiently test/judge when you factor in *everything* that makes a great programmer ??
I agree that style and design are very important (vital, in fact), but I think you're short-changing the the winners of this contest as well as the testing mechanism. A great programmer is indeed all of the things you described, but it's much harder/costlier to test those angles in an automated fashion. You can't "spin" metrics such as whether it compiles, lines of code, memory usage, and execution time. As such, you can rely on automation to do your testing. On the other hand, how the hell is a machine going to reliably judge how easy-to-understand or supportable your code is, architecture decisions, how well you comment your code, your coding style etc? Those things are arguably subjective, and computers don't do "subjective" all that well. You could sub-out all the judging with humans, but then you've increased the cost/resources needed by an order of magnitude.
So, yeah, the code jam only measured a few aspects of what makes a great programmer, but it's not a trivial aspect. A good mentor can can smooth out the rough spots of a sharp-witted coder who sucks at documentation and style, but it's much harder (is it possible at all?) to make a dim-witted coder sharp-witted, regardless of style and/or meticulously commented code.
The enemy ships in Galaga were controlled via scripts. Take THAT, you punk kids!
Okay, okay... the "scripts" were really just an array of bytes that had opcodes defining where to turn, when to shoot, etc. etc.. I agree that the idea of scripting parts of your game is not a new idea, but the article is still a good read.
Besides, I don't think that anyone (even the author) is trying to sell scripting as a new idea. Rather, I think what *is* new is that general purpose scripting languages are starting to be used. I think this really neat because it gives you a pool of modders who won't have the added learning curve of a new syntax. They already know language xyz so now they can concentrate on the learning the pieces unique to the game. I imagine it also frees up the programmer from rolling their own scripting language, though I don't know if the job of exposing the game engine to the script interpreter is any easier (guessing it would be but dunno). Although, I reckon putting a general purpose scripting language in your game ain't all that new either. Isn't the scripting of Quake3 done with interpreted C?
But who cares if it isn't new, I don't think this means this story shouldn't be on Slashdot. It's geeky and an interesting read, so why not?
Not a knock against Stackless Python, though. In fact, I agree with the author that preemptive threading in the context of scripting a game probably causes more problems than it solves. In a game, you can be more trusting of its processes/threads(aka scripts) than a general pupose OS would be. On the other hand, with games like UT where you can have have multiple "mutators" running simultaneously that were created by the modding community and not an inhouse designer, maybe preemptive threading would be a good idea.
Well, the trite response would be too say that we obiously have an effect on the climate, if only a minuscule effect, but I certainly would agree that we arrogantly put humanity on the wrong side of the equation -- we think of the climate as a function of humanity, when more accuratly it's the other way around. I mean it's not like the dinosaurs caused the climate shift that ultimately took them out, right?
Yeah, I know... gross oversimplification. But my point is that the # of living creatures has fluctuated with the climate (e.g.
I'd be willing to agree that we might have a minimal impact on the earths climate relative to all of the other factors. But that said, it's not like it takes that much of an impact in the first place to tip the scales, which is what the article talks about.
I have virtually nill astronomy education so please correct me, but my understanding is that Venus' closer proximity to the sun would only account for a 5-10% higher temperature than Earth, when just considering the increased amount of energy from the sun. However we know that Venus' temperature is 1000x hotter than earth (the biggest problems with venus probes was that they usually melted, right?). So why is it venus so damn hot? Because that 5% led to more cloud cover on venus than earth, which trapped more heat, causing more evaporation, more clouds, more greenhouse effects, wash, rinse, repeat until you wind up with a planet that can't support any form of life.
I'll spare the fruity "delicate balance" lecture but suffice to say as little effect that we may have, who is to say that it isn't enough to screw things up( or make it better)?
Here's a video clip: http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2005/09/16/443527.h tml
While it's impossible to tell whether this move will work for nintendo, it can definitely be said that it opens interaction possibilities that just aren't possible with either console or PC gaming (which is what Microsoft and Sony have been promising). What's more, it was accomplished without getting sucked into the graphics/cpu arms race.
It's certainly different. Whether it's "Virtual Boy" different or "Nintendo DS" different remains to be seen.
It's hard to reconcile Microsofts statements about "saving" PC gaming with their statements about the future of DirectX.
Initially, Microsoft said that DirectX 9.1 would be the last major version of DirectX, and that it would be replaced by Windows Graphics Foundation (essentially putting app and game graphics development under the same umbrella).
But then they've recently announced that the WGF concept is dead, and there will be, in fact, DirectX 10.
Incredibly, they've further announced that DirectX 10 will not be backwards compatible with directx 7, 8, or even directx 9.1 !!! Apparently the legacy directx API will run in a software compatibility layer and/or emulation, which means that Directx 9.1 games will run slower after you install DirectX 10.
Now, the article is from the inquirer so it could be bogus, but I've read this other places as well. I'm hoping someone here can show that it *is* bogus and/or misquoted, because if it's true I fail to see how this is going to do anything but hasten the death of PC gaming regardless of what Microsoft's marketing department does.
Let me guess: you've never created a game, or held a job in the industry, have you? Otherwise you'd recognize the above as patently absurd.
Trust me, designers most certainly do *not* have it easier. Even with middleware tools like renderware & havok, and with design tools like Phototoshop, Maya, and 3ds Max, it's still an unbelievablly work-intensive process to create content for a state-of-the-art title.
For example, consider need for speed vs. gran turismo. Let's suspend the argument of which is a better game (GT kicks ass), and just talk about dev costs. You might have an argument that middleware tools have made it easier on a programmer who is relieved of low-level rendering and physics simulation tasks (though I'd wager that a programmer would disagree), but the amount of work required to create the content (audio, artwork, modeling, level/track design) in Need for Speed for the Xbox 360 exceed GT by an order of magnitude. Newer design tools make artists and designers more productive, but these productivity gains are outstripped by the work required to exploit the capabilities afforded by advances in hardware.
But don't take my word for it. Check out a recent post-mortem from Game Developer magazine (or its Gamasutra site)and compare it to one from 5-10 years back. You'll notice that the development staff (programmers, designes, artists, management) numbers have become huge! Licensing and actor royalties notwithstanding, you're still looking at increased costs.
Is the industry producing crap games? Of course. They produced crap games back then, too. It's just that they cost more to make.
I have a tough time picking a side in this debate, because all of the various arguments -- when you subtract the vitriol, ad hominem attacks, and cynicism -- are good points and shouldn't be easily discarded.
Games will be hard to port, developers need to accept the new reality that performance gains will come from paralellism, Steam-like services provide tremendous benefits, steam-like service have very troubling consequences, and so on...
I'm just going to sidestep the argument(s) by owning all three platforms. My retirement fun can wait
PlanetGamecube recently had a blurb to the effect that it is due to arrive in US soon. We'll see...
Im curious, how do you like the import version? Does the language barrier get in the way of navigation/gameplay or is it one of those games that you can pick up and play regardless? If it get's delayed again I may just import it too.
I have a DS and think it's great, but 250,000 titles inside of one week isn't all that. Halo2 sold around 2 million inuts in one day, and even that wasn't a record (which I believe is one of the mario titles or final fantasy...)
However, Its more notable due to the DS' user base in the US (2 million, right?), but not on the number alone. 1 user in 8 picked it up, which is impressive, and hopefully will be a wake up call to third parties: DS users like it when you exploit the unique abilities of a platform, and don't like it when you port your playstation title and tack "DS" on the end of the name. It's more of a statement of the DS third party selection.
I wonder if we'll see a similar percentage with that music creation game ("Band Brothers" or something... I'm behind my employer's internet fun-blocker). You can create your own music tracks using the stylus and record your own samples/instuments using the built in microphone. I'm picking that up on day one.
I'm inclined to agree with right now, but this wasn't always the situation.
...Not that I have a problem w/ that. I bought War3 fair&square but lost the cd case (and hence, key), so I use a crack. I don't have any ethical qualms about circumventing copy protection to use the products that I own. So yeah, bnetd has legitimate uses, but my guess is that the majority of its users are those evil hacker types that the RIAA keeps telling me about.
I haven't gone on battle.net in quite ahwhile, but back in the DiabloII/Starcraft heydey BattleNet had some major kinks. It was quite common for the authentication servers to go down, friends would pop in/out of chat rooms, games would drop or take forever to start, and so on. Unfortunately, for people that wanted to play w/ friends over the internet you had no choice -- you couldn't connect to, say, your friends IP for a closed game.
I'm pretty sure this is no longer the case, however. Blizzard released a patch for Starcraft that allows internet gaming via TCP, and I think for DiabloII as well. Pretty sure that Warcraft 3 has had such functionality from day 1.
That said, nowadays it's much harder to argue that Bnetd is required for legitimate use, and if fact the majority of those that use it are trying to get around the CD-Key protection.
You make some good points, but I disagree. I've been around a few decades, and I can tell you that the video game market didn't seem dead in 1983-85, it was dead. And I disagree that "idiots" (which I assume also includes uninformed or otherwise ignorant consumers) will always prop the industry up. You had the same idiot ratio back then as you do now(I'd say even higher... word of mouth was nothing like is now with the Intarweb), but it wasn't enough to keep the industry alive back then. Yes, the market is much bigger now, but so are the production costs. You can't extrapolate 15 years of growth and assume that something can't die. Titanic was thought unsinkable, but hubris and some ice was enough to prove otherwise. For Atari, it was hubris and "ET" for the 2600 (yeah I know, and others).
But there's another problem. As pc gaming continues to decline, the pool of talent shrinks further. If you want to learn PC game development all you need is a PC. However, if you want to develop console games, or even learn how to do it, you're pretty much screwed. Supposing you could afford a development kit ($10,000 -$100,000), you still can't go out and buy one -- you need to be an established publisher or development house. So, a success story like Id software simply wont play out today.
You think that you have poor quality and unoriginal titles now? Just wait 5-10 years when the pool of capable talent shrinks to a fraction of it's size, and the only developers that have access to the state-of-the art are working for EA.
Speaking of EA, I hear they're currently hard at work on the innovations in store for their Madden franchise. No siree, no way will this ship ever sink!
The slashdot and engadget articles mention it being an add on for the DS, but your post and the wikipedia article indicate that it's just a GBA game that is simply DS compatible just like any other single player GBA game.
Do you get any sort of benefit from using the DS? The touch screen gives the potential for easier (much easier) navigation (forget about fast forward, just tap anywhere on the playback timeline), but if it's just a GBA title... yuck.
Because thats about the only pack-in game that you'll get with your "pretty sweet" gaming rig.
Seriously, this is a non-story. So, this is like the third story I've read about the outrage over various aspects of the 360's pricing. But there is nothing new here. News flash: the HD is optional (we knew this), accessories are overpriced (true since the Atari 2600) and retailers are bundling because they predict/hope for a shortage .
Is it a slow newsweek or something? Is it because we're approaching the end of the month and we haven't hit our Microsoft-bashing quota? What is it?
In fact, the only "news" of late is that 360 first-party titles will be $50... which is the exact same price as regular xbox and ps2 games. Where's the story on that??
Too right. The bundling thing was just obnoxious with the PSP. They attempted something like that my local at Toys R' Us. The cheapest bundle that they had was around $400, and it was the only way to pre-order.
So a friend and I stop by on launch day thinking it's a lost cause. Instead, there was an overstaffed crew standing in front a ton of PSP's and even more games. They still had the ads claiming that you needed to purchase a bundle, but by the time we walked in the writing was on the wall and it had just become a "suggestion".
I can see how console makers and retailers benefit from the perception of a shortage because it creates a sense of "gotta have it" hysteria in the consumer base. However, an actual shortage would be disastrous because your profits rely on as big of an installed base as possible. You can do all the hand-waving and gloomy press releases you want warning of a shortage, but on launch day you better be loaded to the gills with product. And that's when supply-and-demand takes over and exposes these bundles as a joke.
I'm surprised that Sony and Microsoft allow retailers to do these things, because people tend to blame the console maker even though it's really the retailer's scheme. Just look at some of the comments here.
The arguments in the parent post and the, er.., "grandparent" are not really mutually exclusive. In fact, I'd say there's a lot of truth in both.
On one hand, I think that the older generation of games tend to decry the games of today as being derivative, uncreative titles that focus more on technology and graphics than gameplay. I think that this is a nostalgic view that glosses over a mountain of crap. In fact, I'd argue that the ratio good/bad games has remained relatively constant. You had franchises with too many sequels, and you had legions of copy-cat titles. It's just that people only remember Pac-Man and Galaga -- they dont remember Pac Man Jr., Super Pac Man, Pac-Man Pinball, and the legion of forgettable Galaga clones.
On the other hand, I think that it's true that video games are getting overly complex and overwrought, and that is part of the reason why development costs are spiraling out of control. The added competition in a larger game industry is part of the reason, but In general I think games are just getting too "big".
I think games like Kamitari Damacy are a model for what other games should be. KD is alot of fun, and easy to learn, but it isn't obsessively focused on realism and it was a relatively quick game to play (I finished it in a weekend). So, Konami was able to price it at $20 in the U.S. and it did quite well.
Sorry, I shoulda been more clear. I wasn't trying to say whether it would be fast, slow, or anything else. I dont have any idea until we start seeing it in the "real-world". My point was that the statement "cell can support any os (such as linux or tiger)" isn't all that shocking because virtually *any* desktop-strength processor could make the same claim... it just depends on how much of a hit you will take in duplicating and/or emulating the environment (cpu, chipset, sound hardware, etc) that the target OS expects. MIPS, ARM, x86, Cell, you name it. For x86 it's a pretty big hit (for now at least).
For cell, I imagine it would be easier, but I'm not convinced that you'd get "insanely fast" performance from over, say, a dual-core G5. The central core is (pretty much) a PowerPC processor, surrounded by eight(?) DSP's. However, if I'm not mistaken, these DSP's do not support branch prediction, and can only get instructions fed to them via the main CPU (they can't get it DMA-style from RAM).
So it's not like you've got a 9-way cpu workstation thundering away... you only get benefit when you take advantage of DSP-friendly code like what you see in media players. Alot of people are skeptical that the code mix in your average video game can be efficiently tap Cells architecture. And for something like an OS running a wide range of apps, I'm sure it's an even shakier proposition.
But of course, I have no clue and I could be totally wrong. Personally I'd love to see such a radically different CPU approach turn out to deliver great performance. But nobody knows at this point. Not me, not you, not the media, and not even the game developers (hell, it took 'till the third generation of ps2 games to wrap their brains its Ps2's funky innards).