1) Not only is the customer NOT always right, the customer is often dead wrong. (If you think they're always right, sales is just down the hall) 2) Fun is HARD. Much harder than you think. 3) Staring at anything 10+ hours a day for months on end will cause blind-spots in your overall understanding of it - this is why you do focus testing.
There's several MMOs out there that are surviving quite nicely. You don't need to have a multi-million-subscriber base to be successful. As long as the company can pay the bills and keep bringing new content to the players, I'd call it a success. By that definition there's probably a couple dozen successful MMOs out there.
Bad Analogy Time: Just because the Mom & Pop store on the corner doesn't have the revenues of Wal-Mart doesn't mean it's not a successful venture. As long as they make enough to pay the bills and fulfill whatever financial goals they have - who's to say they're not successful?
Depends largely on what kind of project you're looking at to use as a refresher.
If it's some small project, then probably one of the computers you have laying around is sufficient (as long as it can run whichever dev toolset you're planning on using.
As far as testing environments - if you're just practicing, you probably only need a simple environment - like the same desktop used for dev. Or another machine with a clean environment (whatever your primary testing environment) All the way up to a beefy virtual server with multiple images of various environments.
Most it depends on what you're look for out of the experience. Are you looking to replicate what your team is doing? Or just brush up on Dev/Test methodologies?
I'm a father, I have two kids: Fraternal Boy/Girl twins. They've both grown up with a wide array of toys choices for either gender at their disposal at any given moment (yeah, try telling a two-year old that the toys in the room he shares with his sister don't belong to him personally - just doesn't sink in)
As a piece of anecdotal evidence of how hard we're tried to push "gener-approproiate" stereotypes (where's the sarcasm tag when I need it) we answered a casting call for a locally produced TV show (Everwood) that needed babies for filming some scenes - and at the tender age of 3 months old, dressed my son up as a girl and put him on national TV. No, we don't really care what types of toys either of them plays with. For a while my son's favorite move was Snow White and my daughter's favorite movie was Nightmare Before Christmas.
But, 99% of the time, my son is playing with trucks, guns, what have you and my daughter is playing baby-dolls, stuffed animals, her little people princess castle, etc.
Yeah, it's just one piece of anecdotal evidence, but you'd have a hard time convincing me that some gender-differences aren't hard-wired.
I've made a living doing QA for 10+ years now. Especially if you can have both the QA skillset and the Programming skillset, there's a subset of the market that will let you write your own ticket - good test automation guys are HARD to find. They usually are either too much qa (very timid with programming tools) or are too much programmer (without the QA mindset that all really good testers have - the difference between a mediocre tester and a really great tester is an order of magnitude in the type and number of bugs they find. One really good tester is usually worth 4-6 mediocre testers)
If you hit the sweet spot and network, you can find the companies who recognize the worth of test automation and are will to pay for the talent.
I think the current thought-trend of "electronic devices are essentially disposable" is partly to blame for the reluctance to shell out for a good pair of earphones.
I shelled out for a nice pair of earbuds my senior year in high school (~15 years ago) based on the fact that they sounded LOADS better than most contemporary earphones (both buds and over the ear varieties) - and I still use them on a regular basis. I've had to replace the foam pads three times now, but they still work great and the investment (~$80, IIRC) has become a very good value ($5.50/year and dropping).
Although I have to admit I've been contemplating a new pair lately (something from Etymotic Research or maybe a pair of Skullcandy)
As a long time Tester (10+ years) and Programmer, I'm going to go one step further:
Writing GOOD tests is HARD.
First you have to think through the use cases, business logic, etc etc etc
Then once you have the tests written, stop and think: Who is going to test that the code you just wrote (unit tests) is actually doing what you think it's doing.
I write test code for a living, and test code still scares the crap out of me for the simple reason that there's no verification happening on the test code itself apart from what the original author of the code does. Simple syntax errors in your tests may mean that what you think is being tested, is actually not being tested at all, or being verified to the wrong spec!
Unit tests are a Very Good Thing (TM)! But they are NOT the end-all-be-all of testing.
Unreal Tournament 1&2 (and to some extent 2004) had the most human-like AI I've seen in a game. IIRC correctly, we (me, two brothers and a couple of friends) got about 3/4 the way up the difficulty scale eventually, playing us against the AI, and it never felt like we were playing aaginst a bunch of Aim-bots. The AI simply behaved more "human" - seemingly random reactions at times, intelligent use of cover and alternate routes, etc etc
last time I travelled with children (18 month old twins) I brought along a bottle of earplugs with enough for almost the entire plane to pass around - just in case I couldn't keep them reasonably quiet.
Same problem with opening ANY large project
on
Open Sourcing MMOs
·
· Score: 5, Informative
They don't open source old games probably for the exact same reason any large legacy project isn't automatically open sourced - licensing issues. There are probably large swathes of code they don't have the right to release in such a manner. Game companies very rarely write all their own code from the ground up. Instead they take some basic building blocks (graphics engine, sound engine, network engine) and build around that.
In some cases, they simply take an existing game engine, license it and add their own content. Interestingly enough, one of the few game companies that has a reputation for opening the source on their old games is also one of the few game companies with a reputation for completely rewriting the engine from scratch every time (a.k.a. ID Software)
Even if you somehow wave your magic wand and make all the licensing issues in the engine code disappear, you're still left with the same issue for art assets: There are often a large number of licensed art assets (textures, music, etc etc) in a game as well.
"The Mars landers have to content with an unknown environment, where they could be asked to do a wide variety of things, with any number of possible consequences."
Your forgot to add that it has to do so in an environment where physical repair is effectively impossible, making happenings like is reported an actual desirable feature.
I'd like to see one of the Japanese Car Factory robots handle being turned loose in a parking lot full of different types of cars and be asked to weld a specific spot on specific types of cars with minimal user input that's on a minute-long delay.
If you look at the map of the damage, the 1725 figure comes from the slope directly opposite where the honking huge chunk of rock fell 3000' feet to land in the water - which probably displaced all the water straight up and over the spur where the 1725 figure was recorded and then damage along the rest of the bay was more in line with the 100' figure.
IE Application Compatibility Virtual HD - use these free downloads with the freely downloadable Virtual PC Client to test IE6, IE7 and IE8 Beta in a virtual machine.
"It may be time for $TOWNs to own the lines, bid repair out to another party and anyone to sign up to an ISP. "
UTOPIA (utopianet.org) is an attempt to do exactly that - and you wouldn't believe the dirty tactics Comcast and Qwest have been using to fight it (ok, so you probably WOULD believe the tactics they've been using, but still...)
Me and my brother both used to work for the same game studio, and he's also Red-Green colorblind.
Anytime the devs came up with color as a way of differentiating things, we'd drag my bother to the screen and have him test the interface. It was sad, almost to the point of being funny, just how long it took them to make a usable color scheme somtimes
The internet is NOT making us smarter - it's simply making the underlying truth more evident:
The ability to successfully process and analyze information is far more rare than the ability to regurgitate facts. Now the the internet is decreasing the need to memorize mounds of facts, the people who got classified as smart simply because they were able to memorize gobs and gobs of useless facts are no longer as valued. So we're left with the subset who could actually process, analyze and synthesize information to begin with.
Back in the Day, Word Perfect WAS better. But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions, and MS used it's well-documented anti-competitive practices to push their productivity offerings, the net result was harm to Word Perfect's viability.
Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO
"Make your company a good place to work, and you won't have such high turnover."
DING DING DING - We have a winner!
At one company I worked for, they had less than 50 employees and when I joined the company, average tenure for employees was over 10 years! While I worked there, I had discussions with several of the senior engineers who commented they could easily make 20-30k more per year by moving somewhere else, but the work environment was simply too good to pass up.
Yes, I moved on after only a couple short years, but that had more to do with the President of the company basing my salary as a Software Tester on the industry average (and thus below living wage if you're trying to support a family). I still dream about being able to get back on as a programmer (which the Engineering Manager indicated he wanted to make me if I could have just held on for another year or so, but working two jobs gets tiresome - especially when you have another offer on the table for a 30% raise)
Slashdot Mirror
Truisms of Game Design:
1) Not only is the customer NOT always right, the customer is often dead wrong. (If you think they're always right, sales is just down the hall)
2) Fun is HARD. Much harder than you think.
3) Staring at anything 10+ hours a day for months on end will cause blind-spots in your overall understanding of it - this is why you do focus testing.
Define Success.
There's several MMOs out there that are surviving quite nicely. You don't need to have a multi-million-subscriber base to be successful. As long as the company can pay the bills and keep bringing new content to the players, I'd call it a success. By that definition there's probably a couple dozen successful MMOs out there.
Bad Analogy Time: Just because the Mom & Pop store on the corner doesn't have the revenues of Wal-Mart doesn't mean it's not a successful venture. As long as they make enough to pay the bills and fulfill whatever financial goals they have - who's to say they're not successful?
Truly spoken like someone who's never had an 18-month old toddler in the house (or a cat for that matter)
Over results in lots of wasted toilet paper as that's the easiest direction for the toddler or cat to turn it.
Under FTW :)
Depends largely on what kind of project you're looking at to use as a refresher.
If it's some small project, then probably one of the computers you have laying around is sufficient (as long as it can run whichever dev toolset you're planning on using.
As far as testing environments - if you're just practicing, you probably only need a simple environment - like the same desktop used for dev. Or another machine with a clean environment (whatever your primary testing environment) All the way up to a beefy virtual server with multiple images of various environments.
Most it depends on what you're look for out of the experience. Are you looking to replicate what your team is doing? Or just brush up on Dev/Test methodologies?
I'm a father, I have two kids: Fraternal Boy/Girl twins. They've both grown up with a wide array of toys choices for either gender at their disposal at any given moment (yeah, try telling a two-year old that the toys in the room he shares with his sister don't belong to him personally - just doesn't sink in)
As a piece of anecdotal evidence of how hard we're tried to push "gener-approproiate" stereotypes (where's the sarcasm tag when I need it) we answered a casting call for a locally produced TV show (Everwood) that needed babies for filming some scenes - and at the tender age of 3 months old, dressed my son up as a girl and put him on national TV. No, we don't really care what types of toys either of them plays with. For a while my son's favorite move was Snow White and my daughter's favorite movie was Nightmare Before Christmas.
But, 99% of the time, my son is playing with trucks, guns, what have you and my daughter is playing baby-dolls, stuffed animals, her little people princess castle, etc.
Yeah, it's just one piece of anecdotal evidence, but you'd have a hard time convincing me that some gender-differences aren't hard-wired.
I've made a living doing QA for 10+ years now. Especially if you can have both the QA skillset and the Programming skillset, there's a subset of the market that will let you write your own ticket - good test automation guys are HARD to find. They usually are either too much qa (very timid with programming tools) or are too much programmer (without the QA mindset that all really good testers have - the difference between a mediocre tester and a really great tester is an order of magnitude in the type and number of bugs they find. One really good tester is usually worth 4-6 mediocre testers)
If you hit the sweet spot and network, you can find the companies who recognize the worth of test automation and are will to pay for the talent.
I think the current thought-trend of "electronic devices are essentially disposable" is partly to blame for the reluctance to shell out for a good pair of earphones.
I shelled out for a nice pair of earbuds my senior year in high school (~15 years ago) based on the fact that they sounded LOADS better than most contemporary earphones (both buds and over the ear varieties) - and I still use them on a regular basis. I've had to replace the foam pads three times now, but they still work great and the investment (~$80, IIRC) has become a very good value ($5.50/year and dropping).
Although I have to admit I've been contemplating a new pair lately (something from Etymotic Research or maybe a pair of Skullcandy)
As a long time Tester (10+ years) and Programmer, I'm going to go one step further:
Writing GOOD tests is HARD.
First you have to think through the use cases, business logic, etc etc etc
Then once you have the tests written, stop and think: Who is going to test that the code you just wrote (unit tests) is actually doing what you think it's doing.
I write test code for a living, and test code still scares the crap out of me for the simple reason that there's no verification happening on the test code itself apart from what the original author of the code does. Simple syntax errors in your tests may mean that what you think is being tested, is actually not being tested at all, or being verified to the wrong spec!
Unit tests are a Very Good Thing (TM)! But they are NOT the end-all-be-all of testing.
Don't have the time, energy or knowledge to write anything insightful.
But I do want to give one heaping helping of THANK YOU from this geek to you!
Hah, you think six years for a BA is good - I've worked 15 longs years and I'm barely finishing my Associates in CS - take that!!!
Now where's my invite to be a Vice Presidential Candidate?
Unreal Tournament 1&2 (and to some extent 2004) had the most human-like AI I've seen in a game. IIRC correctly, we (me, two brothers and a couple of friends) got about 3/4 the way up the difficulty scale eventually, playing us against the AI, and it never felt like we were playing aaginst a bunch of Aim-bots. The AI simply behaved more "human" - seemingly random reactions at times, intelligent use of cover and alternate routes, etc etc
Am I the only one who keeps reading it "Mr. Dweeb"??
As the father of two-year-old twins, let me assure you that the collection of toddlers doesn't even have to be that big.
With just two toddlers in the room, nap time...isn't.
last time I travelled with children (18 month old twins) I brought along a bottle of earplugs with enough for almost the entire plane to pass around - just in case I couldn't keep them reasonably quiet.
They don't open source old games probably for the exact same reason any large legacy project isn't automatically open sourced - licensing issues. There are probably large swathes of code they don't have the right to release in such a manner. Game companies very rarely write all their own code from the ground up. Instead they take some basic building blocks (graphics engine, sound engine, network engine) and build around that.
In some cases, they simply take an existing game engine, license it and add their own content. Interestingly enough, one of the few game companies that has a reputation for opening the source on their old games is also one of the few game companies with a reputation for completely rewriting the engine from scratch every time (a.k.a. ID Software)
Even if you somehow wave your magic wand and make all the licensing issues in the engine code disappear, you're still left with the same issue for art assets: There are often a large number of licensed art assets (textures, music, etc etc) in a game as well.
"The Mars landers have to content with an unknown environment, where they could be asked to do a wide variety of things, with any number of possible consequences."
Your forgot to add that it has to do so in an environment where physical repair is effectively impossible, making happenings like is reported an actual desirable feature.
I'd like to see one of the Japanese Car Factory robots handle being turned loose in a parking lot full of different types of cars and be asked to weld a specific spot on specific types of cars with minimal user input that's on a minute-long delay.
If you look at the map of the damage, the 1725 figure comes from the slope directly opposite where the honking huge chunk of rock fell 3000' feet to land in the water - which probably displaced all the water straight up and over the spur where the 1725 figure was recorded and then damage along the rest of the bay was more in line with the 100' figure.
Learn to Love:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=21EABB90-958F-4B64-B5F1-73D0A413C8EF&displaylang=en
IE Application Compatibility Virtual HD - use these free downloads with the freely downloadable Virtual PC Client to test IE6, IE7 and IE8 Beta in a virtual machine.
"It may be time for $TOWNs to own the lines, bid repair out to another party and anyone to sign up to an ISP. "
UTOPIA (utopianet.org) is an attempt to do exactly that - and you wouldn't believe the dirty tactics Comcast and Qwest have been using to fight it (ok, so you probably WOULD believe the tactics they've been using, but still...)
Me and my brother both used to work for the same game studio, and he's also Red-Green colorblind.
Anytime the devs came up with color as a way of differentiating things, we'd drag my bother to the screen and have him test the interface. It was sad, almost to the point of being funny, just how long it took them to make a usable color scheme somtimes
The internet is NOT making us smarter - it's simply making the underlying truth more evident:
The ability to successfully process and analyze information is far more rare than the ability to regurgitate facts. Now the the internet is decreasing the need to memorize mounds of facts, the people who got classified as smart simply because they were able to memorize gobs and gobs of useless facts are no longer as valued. So we're left with the subset who could actually process, analyze and synthesize information to begin with.
- That's a wonderful false dichotomy you have there. Brainwashing or being disappeared. Though choice, huh?
- The word is "dissent".
*boggle*Isn't going grammar/spelling-nazi on someone right after you commit a blunder of your own courting some sort of apocalyptic disaster?!
Back in the Day, Word Perfect WAS better. But because you couldn't import files from MS's solutions, and MS used it's well-documented anti-competitive practices to push their productivity offerings, the net result was harm to Word Perfect's viability.
Whether or not Word Perfect could have continued to compete based on merit is a moot point because Microsoft's practices DIDN'T GIVE THEM A CHANCE TO DO SO
"Make your company a good place to work, and you won't have such high turnover."
DING DING DING - We have a winner!
At one company I worked for, they had less than 50 employees and when I joined the company, average tenure for employees was over 10 years! While I worked there, I had discussions with several of the senior engineers who commented they could easily make 20-30k more per year by moving somewhere else, but the work environment was simply too good to pass up.
Yes, I moved on after only a couple short years, but that had more to do with the President of the company basing my salary as a Software Tester on the industry average (and thus below living wage if you're trying to support a family). I still dream about being able to get back on as a programmer (which the Engineering Manager indicated he wanted to make me if I could have just held on for another year or so, but working two jobs gets tiresome - especially when you have another offer on the table for a 30% raise)
And just hope and pray that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DNS_cache_poisoning hasn't happened, or your simple little fix is worthless