Yeah, evidently I got banned from Adsense for life because I put some ads on our forums and the kids did the darnedest thing... they actually clicked on them. A whole lot of times. I really didn't have any control over that. So they kept all the money I was to be paid from ALL of my sites (not just the one that the kids were clicking on), and banned me from Adsense, seemingly forever. I would click on the appeal button and ask what is up, and 6 months later they just say "denied".
I tried some of the other ad networks like Chiquita and Bidvertiser, but most of the ads were misleading or for scams and I had to delete them. The ones I did keep, on the most popular of my sites, have earned less than $1 in the entire time they have been up. Basically, Google has a monopoly on online advertising for small websites, so I'm pretty much screwed on ever making money from website advertising ever again.
Thanks for clicking on the ads, kids! Not...
(I wonder if this means that you can royally screw over websites by going and clicking on their ads every day?)
Where is all this money that is supposed to be going "directly with the artists"?
I've tried selling the music (bandcamp, downloadpunk, indiestore, cd baby, amazon, google play, direct sales, consignment shops). I've tried giving it away (personal websites, last.fm, myspace,IUMA, garageband, handing CDs to random people). I've tried doing shows ($300 for the venue, or sell 30 tickets at $10 a piece so that your friends can come see you play 20 minutes at 11pm on a Tuesday). Selling merch? If I'm lucky, I sell maybe 3 CDs in a night. Usually zero.
The only way I make any money off music is by selling a Nintendo DSi/3DS application for making it...
I suppose there is the possibility that my music isn't any good (look up "Timon Marmex" and let me know), but all the best musicians I know aren't making a dime...
Re:I propose we Occupy "Occupy"
on
Occupy Flash?
·
· Score: 1
I agree that HTML5 is awful, but for several other reasons as well. Ever try making a web page in any other version of HTML? Ever have to implement some bizarre hack just to get your page to display properly on every browser? That's HTML. Since there are many browsers and they all get to choose how to implement the standards, there will always be these incompatibilities. This is the future with HTML5. What a future that will be: Programming multiple versions to get around browser incompatibilities will cause the cost of developing animated web content to skyrocket, which means that companies will probably abandon complex projects as being too expensive. That will pretty much set interactivity on the web back about 15 years, and put a lot of developers out of work. Flash is ubiquitous, fairly consistent across platforms, fairly robust in it's features, capable of being developed with completely open-source tools (FlashDevelop anyone), and generally quite stable (I have not had stability issues for years.) Adobe has gone to great lengths to open up the platform. It is pretty much the de-facto platform for web games (why do they always brush this aside and act like Flash only does video?), animations, and any applications that actually need smooth animation. The Chrome app store is pretty much entire flash-based applications. It does lovely streaming video in a number of different formats. I really don't understand why anybody would be against it... unless they had a platform they wanted to control all development for. Don't believe the hype: Flash is awesome!
Yeah, because all anybody does with Flash on the web is play video. Nobody writes games, applications, or animations using Flash at all. Nope. Just videos. Yeah, everything should be done with open standards like HTML 5. Because, as everybody knows, HTML and CSS run exactly the same in every browser.
I used to port Japanese RPG games into English for Working Designs, which were similar if not larger code bases. All the comments were in Japanese, and frequently many of the tools used to build the product and assets were missing.
The way I dealt with it was to only focus on the problem I was trying to solve, and not worry about the rest of the code. The poster who said to backup the code in a VCS was right on... once you know you have a stable base to go back to, you can try all the changes you want.
If you approach the code with a goal, you can then think about likely places where that code would be. Grep is your friend. If the code has embedded strings, you can search for those strings. Otherwise, you can find the handles for those strings, and search for those. If it is some sort of I/O or database access, search on those call names. Frequently there are naming conventions that you can learn and use to find stuff.
The idea the earlier poster said about putting breakpoints in and/or stepping through the code was right, this is also a very useful practice. It is much easier to follow the flow if can step through it, especially with C++, where inheritance can often leave one baffled as to which code will actually run.
Following main (or your language equivalent) and then drilling down is sometimes useful, but it is often easier to find the bottom and work your way back out.
Watchpoints can be really useful. Find a variable with a value that interests you, and put a watchpoint on it so that it will break when that memory is accessed. A great way to see which routines are involved.
If all else fails, pepper the code with print (or logging) statements and see what shows up. Try to narrow down what you are looking for.
Another useful technique is to comment out a section of code and see where the compile breaks to find dependencies.
As you figure stuff out, add comments. Perhaps also keep a file of notes when you find stuff or figure out how things work.
As long as you are focused on solving a particular problem, the code base isn't so unreasonable, because you don't care about most of it. As you knock down each problem, you learn a little more about the structure of the code.
Remember, programming is the art of breaking problems down into smaller problems until they disappear.
I have not tried this, but there is a thing called PHC ( http://www.phpcompiler.org/ ) that purports to compile PHP code. Has anybody tried it? Does it work? Is it useful?
I fully expected that there would be a nuclear holocaust before I graduated college, and if I was *lucky* enough to survive, I'd be scavenging for gasoline and medicine across a bombed out radioactive wasteland. Wasn't that how we were taught the 80's were going to end?
I find myself supremely disappointed, and ill-prepared for the continuation of modern society.
Most companies don't have a dedicated "writer". They have "designers" who happen to write dialog as well as handling their other duties ( making maps, building levels, specing monsters, scripting, etc.)
Designer is the second lowest paid position in the company, just above QA, and below production, sound, art, and programming. That is because there are a million kids who want to design, and are willing to work for free. Also, if you have a resume as a "game designer" there aren't really any other industries you can work in, whereas everybody else has other options.
I've been accused of being a libertarian, but have found that party to be mostly filled with nut jobs. I am an independent voter.
My own general philosophy has been that the US government is incompetent, and as such should do as little as possible, and spend as little of my money as possible to do it.
I'd love socialized health care, but do I really trust the same folks that created the DMV or government schools with my health?
I'm all for protecting legitimate inventions, but is our patent office really accomplishing that?
Why do prices go up? If there was a finite supply of money, as there were more and more people it would become worth more, not less! Well, that is because the US government is constantly printing more money. But where does this money go? Well that is what the political parties fight over. Really, that is all that they are actually about, everything else is just window dressing.
Myself, I wonder why we have to pay taxes when they are just going to print any amount of money that they want, anyway? Is it to maintain the illusion that they don't actually do that?
Wouldn't it be better if they just didn't spend the money in the first place? Obviously, there are some things that DO need to be done by government, but couldn't they do it more efficiently?
Well, being as I live in the Los Angeles metro area, as some of the open-mikes where I play have performers who are very, very good. Check out the webcast of Kulak's Woodshed http://www.kulakswoodshed.com/ on a Monday night (7:30 pm PST): bad players are the exception.
But we've lost a ton of venues in the last couple of years. I'm almost certain Gayle's Perks stopped live music for this reason. What happened to Kava Dume, Highland Grounds, Expresso mi Cultura, Coffee Machine, etc. varies, but I wouldn't be surprised if hundreds or thousands of dollars in ASCAP fees caused them to go out of business or re-evaluate live music for their patrons.
I play a lot of open-mike nights. Of late, many of them have stopped having live music. I'm pretty sure this is at least part of the reason why.
I'm wondering where my cut of the money for the venues I did play is? Even though I played for free, they got paid... that doesn't make any sense. I don't even play covers!
Probably the best thing for the venue to do is to keep meticulous records of what was played... chances are any actual royalties (if any) are less than what ASCAP is asking... perhaps they can even pay the artists directly! ASCAP is just playing the same game as the RIAA... extort a bunch of money with legal threats that are actually groundless.
Actually, isn't that pretty much what Microsoft is doing with their linux patent violation FUD? Do I get extra SlashDot points for tying this into the M$ vs. Linux debate?
I worked for Victor at Working Designs during the Saturn and Playstation one days; I worked on Iron Storm, Dragon Force, Albert Odyssey, Magic Knight Rayearth, Lunar 1 & 2, Vanguard Bandits (Epica Stella) and Silhouette Mirage.
I left the company in the middle of Lunar 2 for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons was that I saw the writing on the wall for the localization industry and realized that I needed to get into original development or my career was sunk.
The game industry simply cannot support small developers or publishers anymore, especially not on consoles. The costs of production and marketing are too high, and it's too easy for a product to get lost on the shelf. There is way too much graft that has to be paid in the retail channel to get them to give your product decent placement, or even to order your product at all... and then they are slow to pay.
Furthermore, the Japanese companies have wised up to the value of their more esoteric games, and now either publish those games themselves, or license them out to larger publisher who can put more marketing muscle behind them.
I'm somewhat surprised that Victor was having trouble getting his titles approved, as he has always had very good relationships with his third-party liason at Sony in the past... perhaps that had changed after I left.
Victor has had a definite positive impact on the industry. Before Victor, game companies frequently changed all the art (or at least, the cover art) on Japanese games to make it more palletable to US audiences. They whipped out very poor translations ("all your base..."), and often removed dubbing and audio tracks completely. They frequently passed over whole genres which were considered too esoteric for the US market.
Victor changed all that. He raised the bar for localized products in just about every way, and proved that there was a market for all of those niche titles, games with anime art, RPGs and strategy games.
I don't think we've seen the last of Victor, although we may never hear from Working Designs again, at least not as a publisher. I suspect Victor will probably end up producing localizations on a contract basis for other publishers... assuming that such work would be satisfying to him. Once you've been in charge, it's hard to go back to taking orders. I can't ever see Victor leaving Redding and accepting a full-time producer position at any company... which is probably the only way he'd get remotely close to the power he had to make the games the way he wanted like at WD.
It's the end of an era, but really, that era ended a long time ago. I'm surprised that he hung on as long as he did.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, evidently I got banned from Adsense for life because I put some ads on our forums and the kids did the darnedest thing... they actually clicked on them. A whole lot of times. I really didn't have any control over that. So they kept all the money I was to be paid from ALL of my sites (not just the one that the kids were clicking on), and banned me from Adsense, seemingly forever. I would click on the appeal button and ask what is up, and 6 months later they just say "denied".
I tried some of the other ad networks like Chiquita and Bidvertiser, but most of the ads were misleading or for scams and I had to delete them. The ones I did keep, on the most popular of my sites, have earned less than $1 in the entire time they have been up. Basically, Google has a monopoly on online advertising for small websites, so I'm pretty much screwed on ever making money from website advertising ever again.
Thanks for clicking on the ads, kids! Not...
(I wonder if this means that you can royally screw over websites by going and clicking on their ads every day?)
Where is all this money that is supposed to be going "directly with the artists"?
I've tried selling the music (bandcamp, downloadpunk, indiestore, cd baby, amazon, google play, direct sales, consignment shops).
I've tried giving it away (personal websites, last.fm, myspace,IUMA, garageband, handing CDs to random people).
I've tried doing shows ($300 for the venue, or sell 30 tickets at $10 a piece so that your friends can come see you play 20 minutes at 11pm on a Tuesday).
Selling merch? If I'm lucky, I sell maybe 3 CDs in a night. Usually zero.
The only way I make any money off music is by selling a Nintendo DSi/3DS application for making it...
I suppose there is the possibility that my music isn't any good (look up "Timon Marmex" and let me know), but all the best musicians I know aren't making a dime...
I agree that HTML5 is awful, but for several other reasons as well. Ever try making a web page in any other version of HTML? Ever have to implement some bizarre hack just to get your page to display properly on every browser? That's HTML. Since there are many browsers and they all get to choose how to implement the standards, there will always be these incompatibilities. This is the future with HTML5.
What a future that will be: Programming multiple versions to get around browser incompatibilities will cause the cost of developing animated web content to skyrocket, which means that companies will probably abandon complex projects as being too expensive. That will pretty much set interactivity on the web back about 15 years, and put a lot of developers out of work.
Flash is ubiquitous, fairly consistent across platforms, fairly robust in it's features, capable of being developed with completely open-source tools (FlashDevelop anyone), and generally quite stable (I have not had stability issues for years.) Adobe has gone to great lengths to open up the platform. It is pretty much the de-facto platform for web games (why do they always brush this aside and act like Flash only does video?), animations, and any applications that actually need smooth animation. The Chrome app store is pretty much entire flash-based applications. It does lovely streaming video in a number of different formats. I really don't understand why anybody would be against it... unless they had a platform they wanted to control all development for.
Don't believe the hype: Flash is awesome!
The simplest definition I use is "Breaking problems into smaller problems until they disappear".
... you've used ITA's search engine. A lot of the major airlines have licensed it for their own websites as well.
Unless you are one of the licensees, I don't think anybody has anything to worry about from this. The tech has already been out there for some time.
Yeah, because all anybody does with Flash on the web is play video. Nobody writes games, applications, or animations using Flash at all. Nope. Just videos. Yeah, everything should be done with open standards like HTML 5. Because, as everybody knows, HTML and CSS run exactly the same in every browser.
Yeah, that will work great...
I used to port Japanese RPG games into English for Working Designs, which were similar if not larger code bases. All the comments were in Japanese, and frequently many of the tools used to build the product and assets were missing.
The way I dealt with it was to only focus on the problem I was trying to solve, and not worry about the rest of the code. The poster who said to backup the code in a VCS was right on... once you know you have a stable base to go back to, you can try all the changes you want.
If you approach the code with a goal, you can then think about likely places where that code would be. Grep is your friend. If the code has embedded strings, you can search for those strings. Otherwise, you can find the handles for those strings, and search for those. If it is some sort of I/O or database access, search on those call names. Frequently there are naming conventions that you can learn and use to find stuff.
The idea the earlier poster said about putting breakpoints in and/or stepping through the code was right, this is also a very useful practice. It is much easier to follow the flow if can step through it, especially with C++, where inheritance can often leave one baffled as to which code will actually run.
Following main (or your language equivalent) and then drilling down is sometimes useful, but it is often easier to find the bottom and work your way back out.
Watchpoints can be really useful. Find a variable with a value that interests you, and put a watchpoint on it so that it will break when that memory is accessed. A great way to see which routines are involved.
If all else fails, pepper the code with print (or logging) statements and see what shows up. Try to narrow down what you are looking for.
Another useful technique is to comment out a section of code and see where the compile breaks to find dependencies.
As you figure stuff out, add comments. Perhaps also keep a file of notes when you find stuff or figure out how things work.
As long as you are focused on solving a particular problem, the code base isn't so unreasonable, because you don't care about most of it. As you knock down each problem, you learn a little more about the structure of the code.
Remember, programming is the art of breaking problems down into smaller problems until they disappear.
After a few months of dealing with clients and management, I think most engineers feel like blowing something up... ;)
I have not tried this, but there is a thing called PHC ( http://www.phpcompiler.org/ ) that purports to compile PHP code. Has anybody tried it? Does it work? Is it useful?
I fully expected that there would be a nuclear holocaust before I graduated college, and if I was *lucky* enough to survive, I'd be scavenging for gasoline and medicine across a bombed out radioactive wasteland. Wasn't that how we were taught the 80's were going to end?
I find myself supremely disappointed, and ill-prepared for the continuation of modern society.
Most companies don't have a dedicated "writer". They have "designers" who happen to write dialog as well as handling their other duties ( making maps, building levels, specing monsters, scripting, etc.)
Designer is the second lowest paid position in the company, just above QA, and below production, sound, art, and programming. That is because there are a million kids who want to design, and are willing to work for free. Also, if you have a resume as a "game designer" there aren't really any other industries you can work in, whereas everybody else has other options.
Are you sure you want to do this?
I've been accused of being a libertarian, but have found that party to be mostly filled with nut jobs. I am an independent voter.
My own general philosophy has been that the US government is incompetent, and as such should do as little as possible, and spend as little of my money as possible to do it.
I'd love socialized health care, but do I really trust the same folks that created the DMV or government schools with my health?
I'm all for protecting legitimate inventions, but is our patent office really accomplishing that?
Why do prices go up? If there was a finite supply of money, as there were more and more people it would become worth more, not less! Well, that is because the US government is constantly printing more money. But where does this money go? Well that is what the political parties fight over. Really, that is all that they are actually about, everything else is just window dressing.
Myself, I wonder why we have to pay taxes when they are just going to print any amount of money that they want, anyway? Is it to maintain the illusion that they don't actually do that?
Wouldn't it be better if they just didn't spend the money in the first place? Obviously, there are some things that DO need to be done by government, but couldn't they do it more efficiently?
Well, being as I live in the Los Angeles metro area, as some of the open-mikes where I play have performers who are very, very good. Check out the webcast of Kulak's Woodshed http://www.kulakswoodshed.com/ on a Monday night (7:30 pm PST): bad players are the exception.
But we've lost a ton of venues in the last couple of years. I'm almost certain Gayle's Perks stopped live music for this reason. What happened to Kava Dume, Highland Grounds, Expresso mi Cultura, Coffee Machine, etc. varies, but I wouldn't be surprised if hundreds or thousands of dollars in ASCAP fees caused them to go out of business or re-evaluate live music for their patrons.
I play a lot of open-mike nights. Of late, many of them have stopped having live music. I'm pretty sure this is at least part of the reason why. I'm wondering where my cut of the money for the venues I did play is? Even though I played for free, they got paid... that doesn't make any sense. I don't even play covers! Probably the best thing for the venue to do is to keep meticulous records of what was played... chances are any actual royalties (if any) are less than what ASCAP is asking... perhaps they can even pay the artists directly! ASCAP is just playing the same game as the RIAA... extort a bunch of money with legal threats that are actually groundless. Actually, isn't that pretty much what Microsoft is doing with their linux patent violation FUD? Do I get extra SlashDot points for tying this into the M$ vs. Linux debate?
I worked for Victor at Working Designs during the Saturn and Playstation one days; I worked on Iron Storm, Dragon Force, Albert Odyssey, Magic Knight Rayearth, Lunar 1 & 2, Vanguard Bandits (Epica Stella) and Silhouette Mirage.
I left the company in the middle of Lunar 2 for a variety of reasons, but one of the main reasons was that I saw the writing on the wall for the localization industry and realized that I needed to get into original development or my career was sunk.
The game industry simply cannot support small developers or publishers anymore, especially not on consoles. The costs of production and marketing are too high, and it's too easy for a product to get lost on the shelf. There is way too much graft that has to be paid in the retail channel to get them to give your product decent placement, or even to order your product at all... and then they are slow to pay.
Furthermore, the Japanese companies have wised up to the value of their more esoteric games, and now either publish those games themselves, or license them out to larger publisher who can put more marketing muscle behind them.
I'm somewhat surprised that Victor was having trouble getting his titles approved, as he has always had very good relationships with his third-party liason at Sony in the past... perhaps that had changed after I left.
Victor has had a definite positive impact on the industry. Before Victor, game companies frequently changed all the art (or at least, the cover art) on Japanese games to make it more palletable to US audiences. They whipped out very poor translations ("all your base..."), and often removed dubbing and audio tracks completely. They frequently passed over whole genres which were considered too esoteric for the US market.
Victor changed all that. He raised the bar for localized products in just about every way, and proved that there was a market for all of those niche titles, games with anime art, RPGs and strategy games.
I don't think we've seen the last of Victor, although we may never hear from Working Designs again, at least not as a publisher. I suspect Victor will probably end up producing localizations on a contract basis for other publishers... assuming that such work would be satisfying to him. Once you've been in charge, it's hard to go back to taking orders. I can't ever see Victor leaving Redding and accepting a full-time producer position at any company... which is probably the only way he'd get remotely close to the power he had to make the games the way he wanted like at WD.
It's the end of an era, but really, that era ended a long time ago. I'm surprised that he hung on as long as he did.
-- Timon Marmex --