Not to sound nitpicky, but where do you think the money from the advance came from? That's like saying if a friend gives me $100,000 to buy a house and I pay them back with no interest, I somehow got cheated out of $100,000 and they somehow made $100,000.
Where in the blue hell, did I say I believe in protecting private corporations from anything that makes them look bad? What I said is I believe in protecting private corporatins from using THIER own products to look bad.
I'll slander Microsoft till till the cows come home. Windows is one of the shittiest products I've ever used. But I'm not going to release my own Operating System called Windows. Nor should I have the right to. It would confuse consumers as well. They would buy my Windows thinking it was from Microsoft and therefore "good". If I made a game called DOOM 4, they might think it is a sequel to DOOM 3 from ID and therefore buy it, only to find out it is a 2d puzzle game. If I made the aforementioned Minnie Mouse does Dallas they might think it is a show about shopping or something, Boy would they be in for a surprise!
There is a HUGE difference between what you are talking about and free speech.
Movies and music are not what RMS is talking about. He's interested in computer programs.
Well, that sounds like a double standard. IP is OK as long as it isn't IP that affects HIM? The analogy works, the fact that RMS chooses to ignore that is irrelevant.
The reason I like copyrights is that I don't think that someone should be able to release a game called DOOM, that involves a marine going to hell and beating up the bad guy, or a cartoon mouse named Mickey Mouse. These things deserve protection for the life of the company, becuase after someone has associated DOOM with Id or Mickey Mouse with Disney, any use of such entities reflects back upon the company. For example if someone were to make a cartoon porn movie called Minnie Mouse does Dallas. That would make Disney look bad and there's no reason why it couldn't be a mouse named Betty that looks surprisingly similar to Minnie. A rather perverted example, I know, but it has to be perverted to best illustrate potential damage to Disney.
So, if we don't have the choice of how we release our software, if a "free" license is required (which as many have pointed out, can therefor not be "free") who is going to front the millions of dollars that get sunk into developing a modern commercial game?
What about all of the money that goes into the research for scientific programs, etc.? The bottom line is the cost of duplication isn't the only cost involved. It costs very little to copy Titanic, but it cost something like $200 million to MAKE Titanic. The same goes for software, and to a lesser extent music.
If they are spamming an ad for a website, you can look at their registars whois database and find the owners mailing address.
I say we all send a pizza to his house. After a few million pizza delivery guys after every spam sending attempt he'll give up.
Not to mention the double effect that you can invest in Pizza Hut and watch the stock go WAY up!
Disclaimer: The post was intended for entertainment. I will not be held accountable for any spammers who die from pepperoni overdose!
Actually alot of XBOX games that aren't available for PS2 look better than PS2, but everytime I've looked at games that are for both systems (Test Drive, Soul Caliber to give a couple examples) they looked remarkably the same.
Goodness no. I'm to busy trying to find out what part Yoda plays in Intel vs. AMD to worry about ARM vs. OpenCores!
hehe....Well, there had to be at least ONE bad joke!:)
Thst's pretty much my logic behind it. I plan on redoing my game TutorShooter to use SDL instead of my PowerPak lib and re-releasing it, once again under the GPL, becuase I feel that educational materials be they "Edutainment" or not, should be free if possible. I also feel that Operating Systems should be free, as well as a few other things.
But you don't HAVE to have games, you don't benefit in any way from having a non-educational game with the exception of pleasure and I think it is acceptable to pay to be entertained.
What is really that attitude of the majority of Linux users regarding commercial games? At present I am writing a shareware game which will be released for Linux, Windows and possibly OS X.
Of course the shareware game profits would be used to build bigger and better games with contracted artwork and possibly licensed engines.
I'm doing the Linux port because I prefer to develop in Linux and the libraries are all cross-platform, but I don't really expect the Linux port to sell well. I also expect to get flamed for not releasing source.
It occurs to me that startup companies could offer a great deal to Linux, but the community seems only interested in giving money to established companies and complaining that the new guys want to charge money. Almost every commercial/shareware game on happypenguin for example has a comment saying "it would be better with source code" or "I refuse to use it because its not free".
I have a voodoo 2. I haven't tried to run UltraHLE in a long time, so I make no promises about the current Wine. I believe Linuxgames.com has a tutorial for this. But I'll tell you my experience.
I have Windows 98 on a seperate partition, I don't know if that makes a difference to whether or not it works. One thing I did have to do is put the rom files I wanted to run in the C:\ directory because for some reason the UltraHLE program under Wine didn't like the spaces in
"C:\Program Files\etc,etc."
But your mileage may vary.
Well, from a performance standpoint I can say that UltraHLE runs slightly better under wine than Windows and Terragen renders almost twice as fast for me under wine than Windows.
I've had no real problems speed-wise with the tomb-raider demo (although it eventually crashed hard), the Alice demo (same thing, but that also crashes at the same spot in Windows) or Monster Truck Madness.
But in general I agree, Terragen's user interface is screwed up and that should be something they have down pat by now. I consistently tried new wine builds for a while but don't bother with it to much anymore
NOTE: Just like the original poster I'm not taking shots at the wine developers, porting the entire Windows API is a HUGE undertaking.
My absolute favorite strategy game of all time is Nobunaga's Ambition on the original NES. I also liked Defender of the Crown on NES (not by koei) and Romance of the Three Kingdoms on NES.
Later versions of the games switched from text based to icon based which I didn't like personally, but the gameplay was still the same.
Koei's Kessen is also mildly fun, but the original turn-based strategy games required you to run your whole country, it was quite a balancing act, and since the bulk of the game wasn't just war, strategy did come into play.
The wars, being turn based as well, were much more "chess-like", than RTS games, although no where near as strategic as chess.
I know Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Defender of the Crown are coming to PS2, I might have to give the most recent incarnations a try. A new Nobunaga is on it's way too.
I was watching TechTV during the Backstreet Boys segment of the Concert for New York and they were doing a special on MS's "House of the Future". I'm sure we've all heard Bill Gates rather (or is that downright?) stupid idea of networking a TV to a Clothes Dryer so that the TV will tell you when your clothes are done. I suppose it's too much to hear the big loud buzzer or just go back after the amount of time you set the timer for, but they now have what could be the most annoying idea ever. Apparently they want to have a microwave that has a barcode reader. You have to scan all your products and the microwave connect to the internet and automatically sets the time to cook the item. Is it just me or is that the stupidest idea ever?! Is it really that difficult to read the label and type a three digit number? Are we not supposed to eat if the network goes down?
I for one hope MS dies long before it sets our living standards, or I might just have to move out of my house into a wigwam.
Speaking as someone who is in the process of developing a commercial software product, I still must side with the users. The problem is you don't get to see the EULA until AFTER you buy the product. I thoroughly believe that MS or any other company should tell you the terms of the deal BEFORE you give them your money, especially when the terms of the deal go outside of the norm, as is the case here.
Also I really don't see were I would want to stop people from selling my game if they wanted. Obviously they could keep a copy and sell the original which would bother me, but I wouldn't want to punish honest users, especially in MS's case when the honest user has actually paid money for an upgrade so you know he isn't using the software anymore.
Of course I also wouldn't get up in arms if they wanted to install my game on more than one computer, as long as they owned the computers, but most companies today seem to mind that as well. It seems ashame that parents should have to buy two copies of a game if two of their children with two seperate computers both want the game.
Personally for cross-platform, I'd prefer Gamecube, which uses OpenGL IIRC. OpenGL would allow a Gamecube, Mac, and Windows (and of course Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, etc, etc, but other developers don't care to much about those now) ports.
Of course the the windowing API would likely be different, unless GameCube uses GLUT, which I doubt, but OpenGL is MUCH more cross-platform than is DirectX. I'd have thought Nintendo might have went that avenue of promotion after MS did.
Of course PC->Console ports usually aren't as good because of the lack of a keyboard/mouse, maybe promoting the ease of porting isn't the best idea afterall!:)
Well aside from sending poison as an email attachment, I agree completely.:)
Not only that but I trust my friends, family and anyone else I would email not to lace their letters with Anthrax. It's the junk mail that might be poison, and they are the ones contacting me, not vice-versa as you pointed out.
I don't use snail-mail at all for sending, but I fail to see how one person dying in Florida is going to cause people all across the country to be afraid of their friends.
I think a big deal is load times actually. If you've seen Red Faction for PS2 (which I just rented yesterday) the load times (or more specifically the frequency of disc accesses) is pathetic.
I've read on IGN that Halo on XBOX has very little load time and had a freind tell me that XBOX has zero load time because of the RAM. I think people might be getting confused about load time though, Load time (as far as I am concerned) is the amount of time it takes to copy the data from the CD to the RAM, alot of RAM would affect the frequency of the load time, but that is still a good thing.
That is the biggest barrier to realism for me though. I was very impressed by the size of the levels in many PS2 games and the continuity makes a really big difference, in the heat of real battle you don't have to wait for your game to load.
The same can be said for QuakeIII and such, the load times even from the hard drive are very very long to enter an arena. The key difference between QuakeIII and Red Faction is that Red Faction makes you wait to load a new section of the arena you are already in. So I would say at this point the biggest thing I would want if for developers to either load the whole level in at once or give some consideration to load time.
Of course if XBOX really has the "Zero load time" that IGN and others are talking about it might go a long way to solve the problem, but somehow I doubt a DVD drive (or hard drive for that matter) is really going to give zero load time for large levels.
I also had a G.I. Joe toy that had rubber and styrophoam projectiles on a base (base as in fort, although base as in foundation applies as well). The base had cardboard pieces setting on a mouse trap type deal. There were two of them and the purpose was to shot your missles and destroy the other guys base. It was a pretty fun game, but we usually just ended up using the launchers for attacks on Lincoln Log houses. It's much more fun when it isn't "legitimate"!:)
Lincoln logs were probably my favorite. If you aimed just right you could destroy your creations (or for much more fun, your friends creations) with the great projectile toys of the 80's, such as He-Man's Battle Tank.:)
I remember having great fun racing with friends to destroy the other guys building first. We would have needed MUCH more powerful projectiles to destroy a lego or erector set building! hehe.
The taliban hasn't asked for EVIDENCE, they've asked for PROOF. There is plenty of evidence floating around, the British have released alot of it to the press. Do you understand the difference between evidence and proof? Evidence is required for trial/extradition. Proof is required for conviction. You don't present the conclusive proof before the trial.
If your brother/cousin whatever were to come to your house suddenly and the cops were to come and say that he was wanted for murder, would you say give me conclusive proof or you can't have my brother/cousin?
Not to mention that both the US and British governements have said they can't give the Taliban all the evidence because that would compromise our intel. We can't for example say "Well, Osama's right hand man is really a double agent" or "We have bugs planted in his quarters" or whatever the case may be.
This is a cut and dry matter, if cops come to my house to arrest me for murder, I cannot demand that they give conclusive proof that I did it before I go with them (I can ask for evidence, which is exactly what the links from the highjackers to Al-Qaeda are). The time for conclusive proof is DURING the trial WITHIN the country that the crime was commited. NOT before the arrest. Furthermore my family couldn't take me into their house and refuse to hand me over to the police until solid proof is given without expecting the police to come raid the house.
The law has always worked this way, Osama and the Taliban aren't being treated any differently than any other entity would be. It's ashame that the US bashers are seeing this as a chance to further their propaganda.
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So you have to not only have internet access, but preferably broadband, just to get a CD? Sounds kinda discriminatory to me. :)
Where in the blue hell, did I say I believe in protecting private corporations from anything that makes them look bad? What I said is I believe in protecting private corporatins from using THIER own products to look bad.
I'll slander Microsoft till till the cows come home. Windows is one of the shittiest products I've ever used. But I'm not going to release my own Operating System called Windows. Nor should I have the right to. It would confuse consumers as well. They would buy my Windows thinking it was from Microsoft and therefore "good". If I made a game called DOOM 4, they might think it is a sequel to DOOM 3 from ID and therefore buy it, only to find out it is a 2d puzzle game. If I made the aforementioned Minnie Mouse does Dallas they might think it is a show about shopping or something, Boy would they be in for a surprise!
There is a HUGE difference between what you are talking about and free speech.
Well, that sounds like a double standard. IP is OK as long as it isn't IP that affects HIM? The analogy works, the fact that RMS chooses to ignore that is irrelevant.
The reason I like copyrights is that I don't think that someone should be able to release a game called DOOM, that involves a marine going to hell and beating up the bad guy, or a cartoon mouse named Mickey Mouse. These things deserve protection for the life of the company, becuase after someone has associated DOOM with Id or Mickey Mouse with Disney, any use of such entities reflects back upon the company.
For example if someone were to make a cartoon porn movie called Minnie Mouse does Dallas. That would make Disney look bad and there's no reason why it couldn't be a mouse named Betty that looks surprisingly similar to Minnie. A rather perverted example, I know, but it has to be perverted to best illustrate potential damage to Disney.
So, if we don't have the choice of how we release our software, if a "free" license is required (which as many have pointed out, can therefor not be "free") who is going to front the millions of dollars that get sunk into developing a modern commercial game? What about all of the money that goes into the research for scientific programs, etc.? The bottom line is the cost of duplication isn't the only cost involved. It costs very little to copy Titanic, but it cost something like $200 million to MAKE Titanic. The same goes for software, and to a lesser extent music.
Nobody is going to pay for the pizzas. It was a joke. I included a disclaimer for the spammers, maybe next I'll include one for the humor impaired.
I say we all send a pizza to his house. After a few million pizza delivery guys after every spam sending attempt he'll give up.
Not to mention the double effect that you can invest in Pizza Hut and watch the stock go WAY up!
Disclaimer: The post was intended for entertainment. I will not be held accountable for any spammers who die from pepperoni overdose!
Actually alot of XBOX games that aren't available for PS2 look better than PS2, but everytime I've looked at games that are for both systems (Test Drive, Soul Caliber to give a couple examples) they looked remarkably the same.
hehe....Well, there had to be at least ONE bad joke!
Thst's pretty much my logic behind it. I plan on redoing my game TutorShooter to use SDL instead of my PowerPak lib and re-releasing it, once again under the GPL, becuase I feel that educational materials be they "Edutainment" or not, should be free if possible. I also feel that Operating Systems should be free, as well as a few other things.
But you don't HAVE to have games, you don't benefit in any way from having a non-educational game with the exception of pleasure and I think it is acceptable to pay to be entertained.
What is really that attitude of the majority of Linux users regarding commercial games? At present I am writing a shareware game which will be released for Linux, Windows and possibly OS X. Of course the shareware game profits would be used to build bigger and better games with contracted artwork and possibly licensed engines.
I'm doing the Linux port because I prefer to develop in Linux and the libraries are all cross-platform, but I don't really expect the Linux port to sell well. I also expect to get flamed for not releasing source.
It occurs to me that startup companies could offer a great deal to Linux, but the community seems only interested in giving money to established companies and complaining that the new guys want to charge money. Almost every commercial/shareware game on happypenguin for example has a comment saying "it would be better with source code" or "I refuse to use it because its not free".
I have Windows 98 on a seperate partition, I don't know if that makes a difference to whether or not it works. One thing I did have to do is put the rom files I wanted to run in the C:\ directory because for some reason the UltraHLE program under Wine didn't like the spaces in
"C:\Program Files\etc,etc."
But your mileage may vary.
I've had no real problems speed-wise with the tomb-raider demo (although it eventually crashed hard), the Alice demo (same thing, but that also crashes at the same spot in Windows) or Monster Truck Madness.
But in general I agree, Terragen's user interface is screwed up and that should be something they have down pat by now. I consistently tried new wine builds for a while but don't bother with it to much anymore
NOTE: Just like the original poster I'm not taking shots at the wine developers, porting the entire Windows API is a HUGE undertaking.
Later versions of the games switched from text based to icon based which I didn't like personally, but the gameplay was still the same.
Koei's Kessen is also mildly fun, but the original turn-based strategy games required you to run your whole country, it was quite a balancing act, and since the bulk of the game wasn't just war, strategy did come into play.
The wars, being turn based as well, were much more "chess-like", than RTS games, although no where near as strategic as chess.
I know Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Defender of the Crown are coming to PS2, I might have to give the most recent incarnations a try. A new Nobunaga is on it's way too.
That Jerry Falwell is going to push to have homosexuality, feminism, paganism, porn, and Rock and Roll punishable as acts of terrorism?
I was watching TechTV during the Backstreet Boys segment of the Concert for New York and they were doing a special on MS's "House of the Future". I'm sure we've all heard Bill Gates rather (or is that downright?) stupid idea of networking a TV to a Clothes Dryer so that the TV will tell you when your clothes are done. I suppose it's too much to hear the big loud buzzer or just go back after the amount of time you set the timer for, but they now have what could be the most annoying idea ever. Apparently they want to have a microwave that has a barcode reader. You have to scan all your products and the microwave connect to the internet and automatically sets the time to cook the item. Is it just me or is that the stupidest idea ever?! Is it really that difficult to read the label and type a three digit number? Are we not supposed to eat if the network goes down?
I for one hope MS dies long before it sets our living standards, or I might just have to move out of my house into a wigwam.
Speaking as someone who is in the process of developing a commercial software product, I still must side with the users. The problem is you don't get to see the EULA until AFTER you buy the product. I thoroughly believe that MS or any other company should tell you the terms of the deal BEFORE you give them your money, especially when the terms of the deal go outside of the norm, as is the case here.
Also I really don't see were I would want to stop people from selling my game if they wanted. Obviously they could keep a copy and sell the original which would bother me, but I wouldn't want to punish honest users, especially in MS's case when the honest user has actually paid money for an upgrade so you know he isn't using the software anymore.
Of course I also wouldn't get up in arms if they wanted to install my game on more than one computer, as long as they owned the computers, but most companies today seem to mind that as well. It seems ashame that parents should have to buy two copies of a game if two of their children with two seperate computers both want the game.
Personally for cross-platform, I'd prefer Gamecube, which uses OpenGL IIRC. OpenGL would allow a Gamecube, Mac, and Windows (and of course Linux, FreeBSD, BeOS, etc, etc, but other developers don't care to much about those now) ports. :)
Of course the the windowing API would likely be different, unless GameCube uses GLUT, which I doubt, but OpenGL is MUCH more cross-platform than is DirectX. I'd have thought Nintendo might have went that avenue of promotion after MS did.
Of course PC->Console ports usually aren't as good because of the lack of a keyboard/mouse, maybe promoting the ease of porting isn't the best idea afterall!
Well aside from sending poison as an email attachment, I agree completely. :)
Not only that but I trust my friends, family and anyone else I would email not to lace their letters with Anthrax. It's the junk mail that might be poison, and they are the ones contacting me, not vice-versa as you pointed out.
I don't use snail-mail at all for sending, but I fail to see how one person dying in Florida is going to cause people all across the country to be afraid of their friends.
I think a big deal is load times actually. If you've seen Red Faction for PS2 (which I just rented yesterday) the load times (or more specifically the frequency of disc accesses) is pathetic.
I've read on IGN that Halo on XBOX has very little load time and had a freind tell me that XBOX has zero load time because of the RAM. I think people might be getting confused about load time though, Load time (as far as I am concerned) is the amount of time it takes to copy the data from the CD to the RAM, alot of RAM would affect the frequency of the load time, but that is still a good thing.
That is the biggest barrier to realism for me though. I was very impressed by the size of the levels in many PS2 games and the continuity makes a really big difference, in the heat of real battle you don't have to wait for your game to load.
The same can be said for QuakeIII and such, the load times even from the hard drive are very very long to enter an arena. The key difference between QuakeIII and Red Faction is that Red Faction makes you wait to load a new section of the arena you are already in. So I would say at this point the biggest thing I would want if for developers to either load the whole level in at once or give some consideration to load time.
Of course if XBOX really has the "Zero load time" that IGN and others are talking about it might go a long way to solve the problem, but somehow I doubt a DVD drive (or hard drive for that matter) is really going to give zero load time for large levels.
I also had a G.I. Joe toy that had rubber and styrophoam projectiles on a base (base as in fort, although base as in foundation applies as well). The base had cardboard pieces setting on a mouse trap type deal. There were two of them and the purpose was to shot your missles and destroy the other guys base. It was a pretty fun game, but we usually just ended up using the launchers for attacks on Lincoln Log houses. It's much more fun when it isn't "legitimate"! :)
I remember having great fun racing with friends to destroy the other guys building first. We would have needed MUCH more powerful projectiles to destroy a lego or erector set building! hehe.
The taliban hasn't asked for EVIDENCE, they've asked for PROOF. There is plenty of evidence floating around, the British have released alot of it to the press. Do you understand the difference between evidence and proof? Evidence is required for trial/extradition. Proof is required for conviction. You don't present the conclusive proof before the trial.
If your brother/cousin whatever were to come to your house suddenly and the cops were to come and say that he was wanted for murder, would you say give me conclusive proof or you can't have my brother/cousin?
Not to mention that both the US and British governements have said they can't give the Taliban all the evidence because that would compromise our intel. We can't for example say "Well, Osama's right hand man is really a double agent" or "We have bugs planted in his quarters" or whatever the case may be.
This is a cut and dry matter, if cops come to my house to arrest me for murder, I cannot demand that they give conclusive proof that I did it before I go with them (I can ask for evidence, which is exactly what the links from the highjackers to Al-Qaeda are). The time for conclusive proof is DURING the trial WITHIN the country that the crime was commited. NOT before the arrest. Furthermore my family couldn't take me into their house and refuse to hand me over to the police until solid proof is given without expecting the police to come raid the house.
The law has always worked this way, Osama and the Taliban aren't being treated any differently than any other entity would be. It's ashame that the US bashers are seeing this as a chance to further their propaganda.