Phantasy Star Online 2 is a really good co-op PvE sci-fi shooter MMORPG. Everything about it is designed for people to work together. It has a lot of really cool features that I have never seen before as well, like the ability to use your friends and alts as NPCs. It also has dynamically generated maps, and an ad-hoc multiparty system. The game is currently released now in Japan, you can play it with an unofficial english patch; the US version should be out early next year.
My entry is a psudo3d mass combat roguelike. There is no story, instead I focused on gameplay. The game uses a custom Flash-like engine I wrote a while back. All game logic is in Lua, and the engine is C++. The engine can be a bit complex to build due to the high number of dependencies, but the precompiled windows version works in wine if you have winetricks.
If DirectX has 47% marketshare on consoles, that means OpenGL has 53% marketshare on consoles. And since OpenGL works on Windows, Mac, and linux, you can target 100% of the marketshare on desktop computers.
The only reason to use DirectX is if Microsoft pays you.
>It'll be interesting to see if the next generation of consoles causes a ripple into the PC game market as well, bumping up the minimum specs new games.
I doubt it - by that time developers will be targeting low powered devices like iPad and the Wii2.
As a professional flash developer for the last 10 years, I can attest to the fact that Flash has some serious design Flaws. I'll spare you the specifics, but it was enough to make me want to develop my own open source 'flash-like' environment so that I would not be constrained by other people's mistakes...
I made a browser game almost ~10 years ago when web 2.0 was still a fresh buzzword. Often times when I show it to people today they will ask if it is written in HTML5. Nope. It is old school AJAX dom manipulation.
I have not seen anything in HTML 5 that couldn't be done using old school AJAX dom manipulation. All html5 is, is a standard to move forward on. Give it another 5 years, and it might be there.
Indie games used to be made by a couple of amateurs with no budget whatsoever. Now they are made by teams of industry veterans with millions of dollars. Looks like Indie finally went mainstream!
I see you are itching to discover firsthand how effective small arms fire is against armored fighting vehicles and close air support? Let me clue you in on something, there is a reason why IEDs kill more US troops then AKs in Afganastan.
To be fair, there are mmo games that have active mod communities. Word of Warcraft has tons of mods, I myself have created a UI mod for Fallen Earth, and the Firefall community has been hard at work creating mods even tho the game is not yet released. It all really depends on the attitude of the developers towards the community, and how much control the devs have over the project. The developers at Red 5 and Gamers 1st studios know they key to making good games is involving the community in the design process and giving the fans what they want.
Also, two out of three games I mentioned are 100% free to play. Not buy to play, not pay to play, but 100% free, as in if you want to right now you could go download and play them from start to finish for free without buying anything. That is better then Skyrim - the main reason I have not yet played Skyrim is that I am too busy playing free mmos like Firefall and Fallen Earth.
An elder scrolls online done right would be the best mmo ever. It could have everything the fans love about the single player game, but with more people playing. It could be classless, it could have 1st person view, it could be moddable, and on top of that it could be free. They could have made the greatest fantasy mmo ever. Unfortunately they decided to instead clone the greatest fantasy mmo ever, World of Warcraft. I think they really dropped the ball on this one.
Remember the whole "Freedom fries" thing? Most people think it was due to France not supporting the US in the 2nd Iraq war, but the truth is much different. The big media anti-French smear campaign started just one week after the French government accused the National Security Agency of using the Echelon spying apparatus to steal trade secrets from the French to give American corporations an advantage. Corporations, I might add, that were deeply involved in the development of Echalon.
The truth is the government wanted 9/11 to happen, just like the government wants the billions of dollars of cocaine coming across the border each year. For more proof see Air America, Iran Contra, Operation Northwoods, Tripod II, etc, etc...the black market funds the black ops, which in turn provides false flag operations to generate support for direct intervention.
Hard science has the most chance of destroying the world. Einstein was great, his inventions gave us an entire genre of science fiction... "post apocalyptic survivalism".
All war since the dawn of time, in fact all human conflict, is driven by control of resources. Since the first caveman clubbing his neighbor to steal his fire and womenfolk, to the Viking raids, Zulu Slave War. War of the Sabines, East India Company, American Indian Wars, Seven Years' War, Wars of the Roses, that whole Warring States thing. Even the more recent conflicts such as World War 2 where Germany invaded the rest of the world for "lebensraum" and Japan invaded China for control of it's oil. Or the Vietnam war where US forces moved to prevent communist states from acquiring control over the resources therein.
Sometimes the resources are different; be it fire, oil, gold, land, slaves, or 'the hearts and minds'. Sometimes the methods are different; be it indirect control through economic methods, or direct control via assassinations, black ops, or outright warfare and military expansionism.The motives have not changed. Only the scale of the conflict and the ingenuity of the brutality involved has changed.
Blame history, not fiction for mankind's distrust of technology. Even the most liberating tech can be used for unspeakable acts, and through the use of technology the scale of destruction can be magnified. The reality of our world is that science has provided us with weapons powerful enough to destroy all living things on earth nearly instantaneously, and the great nations of the world use the terror of this technology to hold entire populations hostage with fear. This is the official state doctrine of our great nation and the way we maintained our superiority over better part of the last century - the terror inflicted by mutually assured destruction.
The worst science fiction writers can imagine pales in comparison to reality.
CD's are made out of chemicals. Also film requires chemicals to develop. Sony's chemical division was part of the end to end supply chain strategy, where Sony was in direct control of all the components it's product require to manufacture the products sold by it's entertainment arms. With digital distribution on the rise, and digital cameras having replaced those that use film there is little need for a chemical division.
>Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.
That is the sort of game I want to make, but it is far too ambitious a project for one person to undertake all at once. So for now I am focusing on developing the underlying technologies required to make a 'lite' version of my 'ultimate' open ended space game. Once I have a stable foundation I will expand it with additional features but until then my design dictates the absolute most simplistic implementation of the core features I think make the genre great - solid shooter mechanics, a rich crafting driven economy, user defined units with infinite customization.
I have been blogging about it for a while here on slashdot but recently created an indiedb page for it as well. Check it out and tell me what you think!
IRC is a good place to network with programmers. FreeNode in specific has a large community of very helpful people who populate the programming channels. slap a snippit of your code up on a pastebin, post the link in a busy programming chan and ask "What am I doing wrong?". Chances are you will get a handful of insightful comments on areas you didn't even know you had a problem with. ^^
I heard unverified rumors that Sony and Microsoft are in talks to combine the xbox 720 and ps4 into a single device. Not too far fetched considering that Sony Viao laptops come preinstalled with Microsoft Windows and can run games made by both Microsoft and Sony. I think this meshes well with the shift in focus Sony has made to transitioning the Playstation brand into a platform instead of a specific device. Just think... The Playstation Phone, Playstation Tablet, Playstation Laptop, and the Playstation PC, all running "The Playstation Network" including an official emulator to play downloaded ps1/2/3 & psn games as well as the ability to use the store like Steam to download and play your games on any device.
It would be epic, but only time will tell if comes to pass or not.
My computer from 2005 had better stats then the 360, how is it a dinosaur but the xbox 360 is still relevant? The release of the 360 effectively halted all advancements in PC gaming technology, as modern cross platform development strategy dictates that any technology driven cutting edge features in cross platform titles need to be homogenized across the divergent systems they are designed to run on.
I highly doubt they will unveil plans for a new device before the holiday shopping season is over - otherwise a potential consumer might hold off on making a purchase until the new system is out. Chances are they will wait until the after major retail outlet return policy has expired before they make their next-next gen plans known...
>Blizzard stopped being Blizzard when ActaVision bought them. They are no longer at all the same company.
That pretty much happens to every company once they are bought out and the leadership is replaced. That is why I laugh at the people who insist that D3 or GW2 are going to be great games... the reality is they are going to be nothing like the games they are named after.
I guess you have never seen the playerbase of F2P Steam games. A few of those PC only Steam games are outright shameful. Global Agenda in particular has the worst community I have ever seen. Every time I turn on voice chat in that game I instantly regret it. Buy2Play games like BF3 at least have that initial barrier to entry that keeps the most degenerate people in line.
In my experience it doesn't matter what platform, it is accessibility. PS3 has some bad and some good communities. A lot of older gamers play Wipeout HD on the ps3, as the fans of the series who started playing when it was first released were playing it in 1995 on DOS. And as Wipeout HD is generally considered to be an oldschool game, and is widely regarded as one of the hardest ps3 games ever made (along withsuper street fighter 2 turbo hd remix, another game from the oldschool era), older gamers tend to be all that plays Wipeout HD.
The UI for the videogame Starfleet Command is not in strict adherence to LCARS design specification guidelines, but is heavily based upon it and highly effective. The sheer volume of data and the speed at which you can manipulate it using this style interface is astounding.
None of my computers have a start menu or icons on the desktop, so the Metro UI concept is fine in theory. I get plenty of real work done on my Linux machines running a minimalist gui, and my Windows machines are configured to operate in exactly the same manner.As long as we are still replace eplorer.exe as the default shell in the registry and run Xoblite or another port of Blackbox instead of windows explorer then I can upgrade my windows machines to windows 8 and my desktop user interface will remain unchanged.
Slashdot Mirror
Phantasy Star Online 2 is a really good co-op PvE sci-fi shooter MMORPG. Everything about it is designed for people to work together. It has a lot of really cool features that I have never seen before as well, like the ability to use your friends and alts as NPCs. It also has dynamically generated maps, and an ad-hoc multiparty system. The game is currently released now in Japan, you can play it with an unofficial english patch; the US version should be out early next year.
No, it was Gamma World that is little more then D&D with guns. Shadowrun is like D&D with guns, except with d6 instead of d20.
My entry is a psudo3d mass combat roguelike. There is no story, instead I focused on gameplay. The game uses a custom Flash-like engine I wrote a while back. All game logic is in Lua, and the engine is C++. The engine can be a bit complex to build due to the high number of dependencies, but the precompiled windows version works in wine if you have winetricks.
You can get the source and installer here :
http://dungeon-tactics.com/
If DirectX has 47% marketshare on consoles, that means OpenGL has 53% marketshare on consoles. And since OpenGL works on Windows, Mac, and linux, you can target 100% of the marketshare on desktop computers.
The only reason to use DirectX is if Microsoft pays you.
>It'll be interesting to see if the next generation of consoles causes a ripple into the PC game market as well, bumping up the minimum specs new games. I doubt it - by that time developers will be targeting low powered devices like iPad and the Wii2.
As a professional flash developer for the last 10 years, I can attest to the fact that Flash has some serious design Flaws. I'll spare you the specifics, but it was enough to make me want to develop my own open source 'flash-like' environment so that I would not be constrained by other people's mistakes...
I made a browser game almost ~10 years ago when web 2.0 was still a fresh buzzword. Often times when I show it to people today they will ask if it is written in HTML5. Nope. It is old school AJAX dom manipulation.
I have not seen anything in HTML 5 that couldn't be done using old school AJAX dom manipulation. All html5 is, is a standard to move forward on. Give it another 5 years, and it might be there.
Indie games used to be made by a couple of amateurs with no budget whatsoever. Now they are made by teams of industry veterans with millions of dollars. Looks like Indie finally went mainstream!
I see you are itching to discover firsthand how effective small arms fire is against armored fighting vehicles and close air support? Let me clue you in on something, there is a reason why IEDs kill more US troops then AKs in Afganastan.
To be fair, there are mmo games that have active mod communities. Word of Warcraft has tons of mods, I myself have created a UI mod for Fallen Earth, and the Firefall community has been hard at work creating mods even tho the game is not yet released. It all really depends on the attitude of the developers towards the community, and how much control the devs have over the project. The developers at Red 5 and Gamers 1st studios know they key to making good games is involving the community in the design process and giving the fans what they want.
Also, two out of three games I mentioned are 100% free to play. Not buy to play, not pay to play, but 100% free, as in if you want to right now you could go download and play them from start to finish for free without buying anything. That is better then Skyrim - the main reason I have not yet played Skyrim is that I am too busy playing free mmos like Firefall and Fallen Earth.
An elder scrolls online done right would be the best mmo ever. It could have everything the fans love about the single player game, but with more people playing. It could be classless, it could have 1st person view, it could be moddable, and on top of that it could be free. They could have made the greatest fantasy mmo ever. Unfortunately they decided to instead clone the greatest fantasy mmo ever, World of Warcraft. I think they really dropped the ball on this one.
If you keep using science then trillions will die over the course of the next century.
Do you really want trillions of dead on your hands!?
Remember the whole "Freedom fries" thing? Most people think it was due to France not supporting the US in the 2nd Iraq war, but the truth is much different. The big media anti-French smear campaign started just one week after the French government accused the National Security Agency of using the Echelon spying apparatus to steal trade secrets from the French to give American corporations an advantage. Corporations, I might add, that were deeply involved in the development of Echalon.
The truth is the government wanted 9/11 to happen, just like the government wants the billions of dollars of cocaine coming across the border each year. For more proof see Air America, Iran Contra, Operation Northwoods, Tripod II, etc, etc...the black market funds the black ops, which in turn provides false flag operations to generate support for direct intervention.
Hard science has the most chance of destroying the world. Einstein was great, his inventions gave us an entire genre of science fiction... "post apocalyptic survivalism".
All war since the dawn of time, in fact all human conflict, is driven by control of resources. Since the first caveman clubbing his neighbor to steal his fire and womenfolk, to the Viking raids, Zulu Slave War. War of the Sabines, East India Company, American Indian Wars, Seven Years' War, Wars of the Roses, that whole Warring States thing. Even the more recent conflicts such as World War 2 where Germany invaded the rest of the world for "lebensraum" and Japan invaded China for control of it's oil. Or the Vietnam war where US forces moved to prevent communist states from acquiring control over the resources therein.
Sometimes the resources are different; be it fire, oil, gold, land, slaves, or 'the hearts and minds'. Sometimes the methods are different; be it indirect control through economic methods, or direct control via assassinations, black ops, or outright warfare and military expansionism.The motives have not changed. Only the scale of the conflict and the ingenuity of the brutality involved has changed.
Blame history, not fiction for mankind's distrust of technology. Even the most liberating tech can be used for unspeakable acts, and through the use of technology the scale of destruction can be magnified. The reality of our world is that science has provided us with weapons powerful enough to destroy all living things on earth nearly instantaneously, and the great nations of the world use the terror of this technology to hold entire populations hostage with fear. This is the official state doctrine of our great nation and the way we maintained our superiority over better part of the last century - the terror inflicted by mutually assured destruction.
The worst science fiction writers can imagine pales in comparison to reality.
CD's are made out of chemicals. Also film requires chemicals to develop. Sony's chemical division was part of the end to end supply chain strategy, where Sony was in direct control of all the components it's product require to manufacture the products sold by it's entertainment arms. With digital distribution on the rise, and digital cameras having replaced those that use film there is little need for a chemical division.
>Have a game that is part space shooty, part RTT or TBT crew management.
That is the sort of game I want to make, but it is far too ambitious a project for one person to undertake all at once. So for now I am focusing on developing the underlying technologies required to make a 'lite' version of my 'ultimate' open ended space game. Once I have a stable foundation I will expand it with additional features but until then my design dictates the absolute most simplistic implementation of the core features I think make the genre great - solid shooter mechanics, a rich crafting driven economy, user defined units with infinite customization.
I have been blogging about it for a while here on slashdot but recently created an indiedb page for it as well. Check it out and tell me what you think!
http://www.indiedb.com/games/zero-point-war
IRC is a good place to network with programmers. FreeNode in specific has a large community of very helpful people who populate the programming channels. slap a snippit of your code up on a pastebin, post the link in a busy programming chan and ask "What am I doing wrong?". Chances are you will get a handful of insightful comments on areas you didn't even know you had a problem with. ^^
I heard unverified rumors that Sony and Microsoft are in talks to combine the xbox 720 and ps4 into a single device. Not too far fetched considering that Sony Viao laptops come preinstalled with Microsoft Windows and can run games made by both Microsoft and Sony. I think this meshes well with the shift in focus Sony has made to transitioning the Playstation brand into a platform instead of a specific device. Just think... The Playstation Phone, Playstation Tablet, Playstation Laptop, and the Playstation PC, all running "The Playstation Network" including an official emulator to play downloaded ps1/2/3 & psn games as well as the ability to use the store like Steam to download and play your games on any device.
It would be epic, but only time will tell if comes to pass or not.
My computer from 2005 had better stats then the 360, how is it a dinosaur but the xbox 360 is still relevant? The release of the 360 effectively halted all advancements in PC gaming technology, as modern cross platform development strategy dictates that any technology driven cutting edge features in cross platform titles need to be homogenized across the divergent systems they are designed to run on.
I highly doubt they will unveil plans for a new device before the holiday shopping season is over - otherwise a potential consumer might hold off on making a purchase until the new system is out. Chances are they will wait until the after major retail outlet return policy has expired before they make their next-next gen plans known...
>Blizzard stopped being Blizzard when ActaVision bought them. They are no longer at all the same company.
That pretty much happens to every company once they are bought out and the leadership is replaced. That is why I laugh at the people who insist that D3 or GW2 are going to be great games... the reality is they are going to be nothing like the games they are named after.
>at some point your team simply can't take it any more and you have to release or burn out all your employees.
Employee burnout is not the worst thing that could happen... wait too long to ship your game and you will find your company doesn't exist anymore.
>I've yet to have annoying teenagers on PC.
I guess you have never seen the playerbase of F2P Steam games. A few of those PC only Steam games are outright shameful. Global Agenda in particular has the worst community I have ever seen. Every time I turn on voice chat in that game I instantly regret it. Buy2Play games like BF3 at least have that initial barrier to entry that keeps the most degenerate people in line.
In my experience it doesn't matter what platform, it is accessibility. PS3 has some bad and some good communities. A lot of older gamers play Wipeout HD on the ps3, as the fans of the series who started playing when it was first released were playing it in 1995 on DOS. And as Wipeout HD is generally considered to be an oldschool game, and is widely regarded as one of the hardest ps3 games ever made (along withsuper street fighter 2 turbo hd remix, another game from the oldschool era), older gamers tend to be all that plays Wipeout HD.
The UI for the videogame Starfleet Command is not in strict adherence to LCARS design specification guidelines, but is heavily based upon it and highly effective. The sheer volume of data and the speed at which you can manipulate it using this style interface is astounding.
http://www.startrek-gamers.com/forum/album_pic.php?pic_id=548
None of my computers have a start menu or icons on the desktop, so the Metro UI concept is fine in theory. I get plenty of real work done on my Linux machines running a minimalist gui, and my Windows machines are configured to operate in exactly the same manner.As long as we are still replace eplorer.exe as the default shell in the registry and run Xoblite or another port of Blackbox instead of windows explorer then I can upgrade my windows machines to windows 8 and my desktop user interface will remain unchanged.