It is safer to play the "wait and one up" game but the publicity goes to the innovator.
Right now the innovation and engineering is coming out of Cupertino so they garner all of the attention. Everyone else, in the table/mobile market, is playing wait and see whats good and copy/one up.
If the people your are teaching this to don't already know programming and logic and your are dead set on electronic games then your are going to need a drag and drop style interface for your coding task. You are also going to need integrated physics,some sort of simple ai manipulation, integrated controller input management, some sort of asset management pipeline. This will allow them to focus on the actual design and iterate on a design.
I suggest a 2 course approach.
1st course is real game design research and instruction. This course would be about brainstorming, studying what makes certain types of games fun, categorizing games etc. Rulesets, writing, game mechanics, level design etc. This class is not tied to programming it is about designing a game. During this course you may want to prime the pump by having them do independent research on programming languages and game engines in preperation for course 2 but the course it self is not about software.
Course 2 is about software,scale and development and trade offs etc that are associated to electronic game development. Its about frustration and things not working right the first time. it is about iteration on a product. The finished project should come out of this process. You will have provide some sort of game engine, project control/versioning system for assets and such.
You will be pushing whoever takes these classes because the task of developing games is multi discipline. The part that makes the project a game is going to be off discipline for your art majors. Good luck
Most of black America thought the whole thing was ridiculous. I remember my parents sadly chuckling about the idiocy and self righteous nature of the educators suggesting that the slang of that area be given a name. A really racist name at that!! The fact that we are still talking about it in 2010 is even more ridiculous.
Normally I would be all over trying to persuade everyone else not to give in to this ignorance. I'm gonna let this one ride as I think its more entertaining to read the low score, low brow, flat out racist comments that are sure to flutter around this topic like moths to fire.
This particular move doesn't really seem to have an up side. Average people have never wanted to write their own programs for any other "computer they depend on." Why would a phone be different?
This is a great point. Non developers probably wont spend the time to make a good app and developers wont want to use the tool if it is too limiting. Maybe for high school programming courses or other small hobby task it will be great but anyone wanting to offer real high production apps will be using the android api, java and eclipse to do development. When it comes down to it Google will do more damage to 3rd party developers on there own platform than to Apple with this.
Regardless of our opinion of them as a company, this is a smart move. Backwards compatibility would add "rocks to the rucksack". If they are going to compete in the mobile market a lot of the dogma they have stuck by will have to fall away.
On the short its an api and not for general user consumption.
The fact that non developers are even talking about this is a problematic symptom of our industry's current overexposure with respect libraries, OSs, dev tools etc....
We have invited the media and everyone else to our internal conflict over things that they should really have no interest in with our current infighting and ranting about mobile tech and the mobile market.
Its are fault that non technical people are commenting on whether or not apis are "user friendly". We invited the world to our dysfunction.
Of course HTML5 is not ready to take over for the myriad of niches that flash fills on the web "right now". The big push is to get developer mindset looking and leaning in the HTML5 direction. Tools need to be written, demos need to inspire, and books need to be written. None of will happen really until a real buzz is generated. The buzz is building, but associated more to Flash controversy than HTML 5 technical merit. We need some good solid analogous material to compare and contrast these technologies.
The more I read and talk to people (developers other than myself) about this issue the more I am beginning to realize that the outrage is more from companies who develop content for other larger companies than from developers. Most developers realize that they will have to learn new technologies, APIs, languages, paradigms, etc in there professional careers. In fact most developers expect things to change. From C to C++, Win32/MFC to.NET, Carbon to Cocoa (the list could go on) developers have been updating and reinventing themselves constantly to maintain viability.
I think the outrage and expectation is coming from the media design and development companies used by large commercial companies to create web and kiosk applications. They do not want to spend the dollars to train there current staff on the new technologies and do not want to hire the talent necessary to move forward in the new platform ecosystem. They want the current set of technical expertise they have to remain eternally viable. Flash is the crutch that many of these types of companies lean on. It allows them the biggest bang for there buck and reduces the risk to them. These companies have nice work flows set up around flash and a huge set of already written action script code on which the can leverage new product on regardless of platform quickly.
I think, the complaining and outrage will continue for the near future as these companies reorganize and rebuild there cpodebases to leverage the new technologies and platforms.
Bingo!!
So many people throw this issue around like it is an emotional or philosophical thing between Adobe, Apple and M$.
The point is that Flash (even before Adobe bought it) eroded OS specific (lock in) software sales in every domain there was a flash solution floating around. The technology allows commoditization of hardware/OS. IMHO, if the sponsored IDE had stayed as cheap as it once was most consumer software would be written using Flash, and all big OS vendors would be beholden to it. This was the dream of the java runtime developers at one point and Flash almost realized that dream.
I think Flash as a technology would be much farther along without Adobe, controlled by a small company that was driving it to work well on all of the platforms it is deployed to.
On a side note lots of people are applauding the Google, Adobe cooperation like it is about brotherly luv and providing the user with choice. I don't buy it. Google needs a differentiating factor and having flash support is a big one. Google doesn't care about online store revenue and is not courting developers in the same way as Apple. There business model is different and doesn't depend on those things. They will and should take advantage of the current anti Apple blog climate to emphasis this difference.
Yep. Lots of us tech heads forget that its about the users. I don't have a problem developing for iPhone or Android. I just following the money/users. I want to put products out that people outside of my peer group will use.
Its an enima that once consumed attaches itself to your spinal cord allowing you to "see" a HUD over every part of your life, download books and browse the web as a small glowing apple pulsates on your back. There is a rumored problem with overheating but otherwise....
Ha Ha, All jokes aside I think its going to be a game changer!!
"The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function."
This sentence is quite telling and ultimately the main reason behind the flash of (or lack of flash) in comupter UI's in motion pictures. They are used to drive the plot. Everyone here has surely noticed the cool looking way people "hack" computers in the movies. How about the slowing ticking progress bar and flashing data presented when people are illegally downloading files to a usb drive. In some movies the UI is so 3d and gesture advance as to make the user "dance" to interact with it. This is to present the virtuosity of the user at his craft. In other movies retro monochrome looking console UI's are used to give things an analog grittiness. I find the whole thing quite fascinating. Its a dream job if there ever was one.
The coolness of fictional media UI's does make it hard to design regular UI's for real products. The user expectation is pretty high. I always chuckle a little when I start up my PS3. The main nav is just a menu tree. The eye candy floating in the back has no function use whatsoever but most of the processing during the navigation phase is consumed by presenting the cool liquid effect in the background.
I've been watching "The 1st 48" (US reality show about solving murder cases) for a while. I love how all of the UIs are basically just MS Windows and maybe a web based perp search application because is what cops actually use. I compare this show to CSI all the time and "CSI fan" friends hate me for it.
With CES there must be a worst. I don't fault any of these companies and there "bad" products too much though. They are doing what it takes to get recognition in an industry where sometimes the best products go unseen and unmentioned. Hype/buzz has become the rule of the day, the more you can generate the more successful your product launch will be, whether it is good or bad. I would also venture to say that some products are rushed out of development prematurely specifically for this trade show.
If you are making your platform choice based solely on the primary development language of the platform then you might not be ready for game development. The knowledge and understanding necessary for making something as complicated as a video game transcends programming language.
There seem to be a high percentage of historically "Wet" satellites in our solar system. Earth,Venus, Mars possibly Europa, Titan.......
Are our assumptions about solar system formation and the likely hood of liquid water covered satellites off?
I agree with you on the source, but there was a time that the only place you could get to relevant data was to either wait for it to come to a library or go to a university.
Not to spread doom and gloom but academia has been like this for a very long time.
Colleges and universities are struggling internally. On the one hand schools have to generate revenue which requires advertisement, marketing and "looking" better than other competing schools. On the other hand the primary roles of universities and colleges in society are to increase societies overall intellect and be a lightening rod for research, learning, and understanding.
The internet offers free access to knowledge and is stealing thunder from individual academic institutions. For example, I can communicate almost instantaneously with authors, researchers and professors and get an answer in most cases. I can view lectures and get materials on most subjects. Most educators/professors have blogs and some have tweets. We are not as dependent on academia to facilitate intellectual communication as we once were.
I have compared academia in the US, especially the Ivy League schools, to the luxury car industry. The information rumored in the original post enforces the legitimacy of my comparison. I recently read an small article on luxury vs performance that kinda applies to this topic.
Luxury is about appearing better. Performance is about being better.
We (mankind) are currently lacking in the capability to accurately quantify many natural phenomena. We may not ever, given our nature and the nature of the universe, be able to see somethings as they actually are.
I remember thinking the same thing when Adobe bought out Macromedia. I think there is hope for some of the larger more useful pet projects but Oracles primary is making there a new acquisition profitable. Anything not strong enough to adequately monetize will probably be Open Sourced or shelf-ed.
So what observations can be made from other companies in our industry that have acquired companies with a strong library of technologies? What has lasted and what has fallen by the wayside historically speaking?
I'm saying the the environment for business should be properly constrained, those constraints should be difficult to circumvent and the "entities" competing in the environment be monitored by some governing body not vested in the success of anyone entity working from within the environment.
Given the opportunity it is very hard for any person or company to pass up a chance to change the rules of a game in a way that disadvantages its competition in that game. This is especially true when survival is at stake. We do not and should never condone this type of behavior but we must realize it is natural and (without regard to morality) should be expected. This type behavior is bad for our industry as we have all seen so we must always be aware that some company out there will always try this as a means to advantage and stop it to allow strength to be generated via fierce competition.
Slashdot Mirror
It is safer to play the "wait and one up" game but the publicity goes to the innovator.
Right now the innovation and engineering is coming out of Cupertino so they garner all of the attention. Everyone else, in the table/mobile market, is playing wait and see whats good and copy/one up.
If the people your are teaching this to don't already know programming and logic and your are dead set on electronic games then your are going to need a drag and drop style interface for your coding task. You are also going to need integrated physics,some sort of simple ai manipulation, integrated controller input management, some sort of asset management pipeline. This will allow them to focus on the actual design and iterate on a design. I suggest a 2 course approach. 1st course is real game design research and instruction. This course would be about brainstorming, studying what makes certain types of games fun, categorizing games etc. Rulesets, writing, game mechanics, level design etc. This class is not tied to programming it is about designing a game. During this course you may want to prime the pump by having them do independent research on programming languages and game engines in preperation for course 2 but the course it self is not about software. Course 2 is about software,scale and development and trade offs etc that are associated to electronic game development. Its about frustration and things not working right the first time. it is about iteration on a product. The finished project should come out of this process. You will have provide some sort of game engine, project control/versioning system for assets and such. You will be pushing whoever takes these classes because the task of developing games is multi discipline. The part that makes the project a game is going to be off discipline for your art majors. Good luck
mod +1
Most of black America thought the whole thing was ridiculous. I remember my parents sadly chuckling about the idiocy and self righteous nature of the educators suggesting that the slang of that area be given a name. A really racist name at that!! The fact that we are still talking about it in 2010 is even more ridiculous.
Normally I would be all over trying to persuade everyone else not to give in to this ignorance. I'm gonna let this one ride as I think its more entertaining to read the low score, low brow, flat out racist comments that are sure to flutter around this topic like moths to fire.
This particular move doesn't really seem to have an up side. Average people have never wanted to write their own programs for any other "computer they depend on." Why would a phone be different?
This is a great point. Non developers probably wont spend the time to make a good app and developers wont want to use the tool if it is too limiting. Maybe for high school programming courses or other small hobby task it will be great but anyone wanting to offer real high production apps will be using the android api, java and eclipse to do development. When it comes down to it Google will do more damage to 3rd party developers on there own platform than to Apple with this.
Regardless of our opinion of them as a company, this is a smart move. Backwards compatibility would add "rocks to the rucksack". If they are going to compete in the mobile market a lot of the dogma they have stuck by will have to fall away.
On the short its an api and not for general user consumption.
The fact that non developers are even talking about this is a problematic symptom of our industry's current overexposure with respect libraries, OSs, dev tools etc....
We have invited the media and everyone else to our internal conflict over things that they should really have no interest in with our current infighting and ranting about mobile tech and the mobile market.
Its are fault that non technical people are commenting on whether or not apis are "user friendly". We invited the world to our dysfunction.
Of course HTML5 is not ready to take over for the myriad of niches that flash fills on the web "right now". The big push is to get developer mindset looking and leaning in the HTML5 direction. Tools need to be written, demos need to inspire, and books need to be written. None of will happen really until a real buzz is generated. The buzz is building, but associated more to Flash controversy than HTML 5 technical merit. We need some good solid analogous material to compare and contrast these technologies.
The more I read and talk to people (developers other than myself) about this issue the more I am beginning to realize that the outrage is more from companies who develop content for other larger companies than from developers. Most developers realize that they will have to learn new technologies, APIs, languages, paradigms, etc in there professional careers. In fact most developers expect things to change. From C to C++, Win32/MFC to .NET, Carbon to Cocoa (the list could go on) developers have been updating and reinventing themselves constantly to maintain viability.
I think the outrage and expectation is coming from the media design and development companies used by large commercial companies to create web and kiosk applications. They do not want to spend the dollars to train there current staff on the new technologies and do not want to hire the talent necessary to move forward in the new platform ecosystem. They want the current set of technical expertise they have to remain eternally viable. Flash is the crutch that many of these types of companies lean on. It allows them the biggest bang for there buck and reduces the risk to them. These companies have nice work flows set up around flash and a huge set of already written action script code on which the can leverage new product on regardless of platform quickly.
I think, the complaining and outrage will continue for the near future as these companies reorganize and rebuild there cpodebases to leverage the new technologies and platforms.
Bingo!! So many people throw this issue around like it is an emotional or philosophical thing between Adobe, Apple and M$.
The point is that Flash (even before Adobe bought it) eroded OS specific (lock in) software sales in every domain there was a flash solution floating around. The technology allows commoditization of hardware/OS. IMHO, if the sponsored IDE had stayed as cheap as it once was most consumer software would be written using Flash, and all big OS vendors would be beholden to it. This was the dream of the java runtime developers at one point and Flash almost realized that dream.
I think Flash as a technology would be much farther along without Adobe, controlled by a small company that was driving it to work well on all of the platforms it is deployed to.
On a side note lots of people are applauding the Google, Adobe cooperation like it is about brotherly luv and providing the user with choice. I don't buy it. Google needs a differentiating factor and having flash support is a big one. Google doesn't care about online store revenue and is not courting developers in the same way as Apple. There business model is different and doesn't depend on those things. They will and should take advantage of the current anti Apple blog climate to emphasis this difference.
Yep. Lots of us tech heads forget that its about the users. I don't have a problem developing for iPhone or Android. I just following the money/users. I want to put products out that people outside of my peer group will use.
Its an enima that once consumed attaches itself to your spinal cord allowing you to "see" a HUD over every part of your life, download books and browse the web as a small glowing apple pulsates on your back. There is a rumored problem with overheating but otherwise....
Ha Ha, All jokes aside I think its going to be a game changer!!
"The main point of these fake movie UIs is different than that of real UIs: to tell a story very quickly, not to reveal and enable function."
This sentence is quite telling and ultimately the main reason behind the flash of (or lack of flash) in comupter UI's in motion pictures. They are used to drive the plot. Everyone here has surely noticed the cool looking way people "hack" computers in the movies. How about the slowing ticking progress bar and flashing data presented when people are illegally downloading files to a usb drive. In some movies the UI is so 3d and gesture advance as to make the user "dance" to interact with it. This is to present the virtuosity of the user at his craft. In other movies retro monochrome looking console UI's are used to give things an analog grittiness. I find the whole thing quite fascinating. Its a dream job if there ever was one.
The coolness of fictional media UI's does make it hard to design regular UI's for real products. The user expectation is pretty high. I always chuckle a little when I start up my PS3. The main nav is just a menu tree. The eye candy floating in the back has no function use whatsoever but most of the processing during the navigation phase is consumed by presenting the cool liquid effect in the background.
I've been watching "The 1st 48" (US reality show about solving murder cases) for a while. I love how all of the UIs are basically just MS Windows and maybe a web based perp search application because is what cops actually use. I compare this show to CSI all the time and "CSI fan" friends hate me for it.
With CES there must be a worst. I don't fault any of these companies and there "bad" products too much though. They are doing what it takes to get recognition in an industry where sometimes the best products go unseen and unmentioned. Hype/buzz has become the rule of the day, the more you can generate the more successful your product launch will be, whether it is good or bad. I would also venture to say that some products are rushed out of development prematurely specifically for this trade show.
If you are making your platform choice based solely on the primary development language of the platform then you might not be ready for game development. The knowledge and understanding necessary for making something as complicated as a video game transcends programming language.
There seem to be a high percentage of historically "Wet" satellites in our solar system. Earth,Venus, Mars possibly Europa, Titan....... Are our assumptions about solar system formation and the likely hood of liquid water covered satellites off?
I agree with you on the source, but there was a time that the only place you could get to relevant data was to either wait for it to come to a library or go to a university.
Not to spread doom and gloom but academia has been like this for a very long time.
Colleges and universities are struggling internally. On the one hand schools have to generate revenue which requires advertisement, marketing and "looking" better than other competing schools. On the other hand the primary roles of universities and colleges in society are to increase societies overall intellect and be a lightening rod for research, learning, and understanding.
The internet offers free access to knowledge and is stealing thunder from individual academic institutions. For example, I can communicate almost instantaneously with authors, researchers and professors and get an answer in most cases. I can view lectures and get materials on most subjects. Most educators/professors have blogs and some have tweets. We are not as dependent on academia to facilitate intellectual communication as we once were.
I have compared academia in the US, especially the Ivy League schools, to the luxury car industry. The information rumored in the original post enforces the legitimacy of my comparison. I recently read an small article on luxury vs performance that kinda applies to this topic.
Luxury is about appearing better. Performance is about being better.
We (mankind) are currently lacking in the capability to accurately quantify many natural phenomena. We may not ever, given our nature and the nature of the universe, be able to see somethings as they actually are.
If it weren't for those meddling kids!!!!
But I don't mind LGPL.
I remember thinking the same thing when Adobe bought out Macromedia. I think there is hope for some of the larger more useful pet projects but Oracles primary is making there a new acquisition profitable. Anything not strong enough to adequately monetize will probably be Open Sourced or shelf-ed.
So what observations can be made from other companies in our industry that have acquired companies with a strong library of technologies? What has lasted and what has fallen by the wayside historically speaking?
I'm saying the the environment for business should be properly constrained, those constraints should be difficult to circumvent and the "entities" competing in the environment be monitored by some governing body not vested in the success of anyone entity working from within the environment.
Given the opportunity it is very hard for any person or company to pass up a chance to change the rules of a game in a way that disadvantages its competition in that game. This is especially true when survival is at stake. We do not and should never condone this type of behavior but we must realize it is natural and (without regard to morality) should be expected. This type behavior is bad for our industry as we have all seen so we must always be aware that some company out there will always try this as a means to advantage and stop it to allow strength to be generated via fierce competition.