The compatibility stuff (Winforms, etc.) are being separated out from Mono and end users can choose whether to install the ECMA-compliant Mono or the whole deal with the compatibility modules.
Ding ding ding. Sandboxes (which, in a lot of ways, Nethack is) are not non-linear stories.
It also isn't really an example of good game design, except when you want to explicitly target uber-grognard hardcore types. There aren't a lot of those.
Give me the table of contents from a typical textbook, and I can probably assemble a couple of hundred free sources of information that easily surpass the content of the textbook.
Thing is, by the time you do that once, you're not ever wanting to go near it again. It's expensive just to get people who want to collate data and churn it out in textbook format.
I don't agree. I learned quite a bit from my accounting courses, and while I could probably have picked up the basics of modern marketing through other means, having a knowledgeable expert (my professor formerly worked in Apple's marketing department) made the process a lot easier.
And I learned quite a bit from the other courses, too, even those which were just "extended cocktail parties". Social skills are as important--or moreso, for many jobs--than any technical skills you might have.
But then you won't have any professors who want to write textbooks because they want to make money off them, so you'll have fewer-if-any textbooks coming out of your institution, so you look bad, so it's harder to get good professors in general.
(There are some schools where this could be an exception--MIT offers the material for a number of courses online for free--but not all schools will use it or any free materials produced by those free-textbooks-only schools, and those schools have the clientele where, generally, cost of books doesn't much matter to the student.)
But Wesnoth still lacks anything even approaching the polish of a commercially published game, and there doesn't seem to be a huge drive to it. I'd agree that it's probably the highest quality, but that doesn't mean it's within driving distance of a commercial release.
Stuff like FreeCiv is the same way. Good game? Sure! Better under-the-hood than the original? Maybe, if you're feeling generous. Ugly as sin and misunderstanding the end user? Fuck yeah. (Anything that pops up a lobby for a single-player game, as FreeCiv does, Misses The Fucking Point as far as end users go, really.)
I would disagree that games are not different, because games require a significant convergence of a lot of different talent, all willing to go the same way under a leadership that has to be authoritarian and vision-oriented to come up with a quality product. It's not like a desktop app, where "well, this can wait a while." You need the whole thing, working and working well, or none of it is worthwhile.
Tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, anyone? Of course hardware T&L is a driver thing, I was poking fun (you know, that thing normal people have) at the old Quake 3 requirements.
Yes, DarkPlaces supports shaders. It also couldn't have been a particularly easy task to convert a largely fixed-function setup to a shader-based one, which is why I said "has to be hacked at significantly". And any of the GPL'd iD Tech engines suffer from fairly huge technical shortcomings (yes, BSP is a technical shortcoming--modern engines, like ones based on the very awesome and underappreciated OGRE code, support it and significantly better managers, I don't know if any of the GPL Quake clones have done this, as frankly I don't give a damn because I won't use GPL code and I don't keep up with them).
Yes, I know Sauerbraten. It doesn't compete. I'm sorry, because it's a really nifty concept for an engine, but it really doesn't.
Compare Sauerbraten to UE3 and tell me how it goes.
As for Nethack--frankly, and I say this as somebody who loves NetHack and has ascended four times, it doesn't stack up from a gameplay perspective except for the "god dammit I WILL BEAT THIS GAME" people. That's not at all the people who you'd be targeting for the person I replied to's "open source gaming revolution" because they're not the people playing the games.
I like Linux in some capacities (I hate it as a desktop because it doesn't work particularly well for me and advocates try to foist it off on people who don't know better, but it's running on all but two of my server machines). But there's no market share worth noting for targeting for most consumer applications.
Every lawyer I've ever talked to about the GPL and AGPL (some very invested in the open source community) agrees with this viewpoint.
The GPL is a distribution license, and thus probably enforceable (has been, some places). The AGPL has poorly worded extensions to the GPL, and redefine "distribution" to essentially mean "use"--which they may find cute, but does turn it into a use license and an enforcement mess.
There are so many gamers so pissed off with the commercial game world who would leap all over a by-the-gamer-for-the-gamer open source revolution.
Horseshit.
The plain fact of the matter is that you're not going to get the same kind of quality, by any stretch, out of an "open source revolution." I don't suppose you've noticed that virtually all of the open-source FPSes out there are based off very old (originally proprietary) code, do you? Code that has to be hacked at significantly to get much beyond the nVidia TNT2 target that it originally topped out at (oh boy, the GPL'd Quake 3 code has hardware T&L!)? Even the really good open-source FPSes (I'm talking Warsow here) are extremely limited games, and sure as hell don't address what you complain about ("linear storyline").
Open source software is good in some cases. Games are clearly not really one of them. You aren't getting Half-Life 2 out of the open source world, I'm sorry to say. You don't have anything technically equivalent to even Source (and despite Valve making great, quality games, Source really sucks, it's one of the main reasons I'm glad my team is writing our own engine for our games). You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
Sorry, but no, open source is not always the answer. Like right here.
A good project manager is worth an order of magnitude more than a good programmer because they enable the good programmers to do good work without being hassled by things outside of their job of writing and documenting good code.
The fact that there are few good project managers doesn't make this any less true.
It's not. If you turn off UAC you can run admin-privileged applications off of ext2 (I just tested it out).
UAC requires data bits off of NTFS. Don't like it? Don't use NTFS. Like the AC above me said, Linux does the same thing on file systems like vfat or ISO9660.
You can't run an administrator app off of FAT32 in Vista either (I just tried).
When it's something utterly stupid like this (because Vista requires filesystem bits for its security architecture, as does Linux--don't try to run suid executables off of vfat).
When you are using Vista, you use NTFS. That's how it works, because UAC requires it. If you don't want that security, you can disable it (disable UAC and admin-privileged applications work fine, be it FAT or ext2/3). But you don't get to have both.
If my customers said that they wanted a pony for free, I'd tell them they were wrong about that too. Customers who don't understand that, yes, they can be wrong too--those are the customers I fire. I'm not interested in their money.
Yes, I know about ext2IFS and others. I also know that you can't run suid apps on vfat in Linux. How about that?
The security model for both Vista and Linux, as I understand them, require filesystem bits. If you don't have them, it's smarter to fail than to do the wrong thing.
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And what, exactly, is the problem?
The compatibility stuff (Winforms, etc.) are being separated out from Mono and end users can choose whether to install the ECMA-compliant Mono or the whole deal with the compatibility modules.
This "promise" is legally binding in this case, and is sufficient to throw out any lawsuit under these grounds.
Psst. What the hell do you think ECMA 334 and 335 are?
Ding ding ding. Sandboxes (which, in a lot of ways, Nethack is) are not non-linear stories.
It also isn't really an example of good game design, except when you want to explicitly target uber-grognard hardcore types. There aren't a lot of those.
Well said. I kind of feel bad for that bitter little man.
Right, it's just the mid-tier and lower schools where that becomes an issue, unless they're just following the New Trend. And even then...ech.
Those are cool professors. I wish there were more like them. I just don't think there are. :-/
Give me the table of contents from a typical textbook, and I can probably assemble a couple of hundred free sources of information that easily surpass the content of the textbook.
Thing is, by the time you do that once, you're not ever wanting to go near it again. It's expensive just to get people who want to collate data and churn it out in textbook format.
I don't agree. I learned quite a bit from my accounting courses, and while I could probably have picked up the basics of modern marketing through other means, having a knowledgeable expert (my professor formerly worked in Apple's marketing department) made the process a lot easier.
And I learned quite a bit from the other courses, too, even those which were just "extended cocktail parties". Social skills are as important--or moreso, for many jobs--than any technical skills you might have.
But then you won't have any professors who want to write textbooks because they want to make money off them, so you'll have fewer-if-any textbooks coming out of your institution, so you look bad, so it's harder to get good professors in general.
(There are some schools where this could be an exception--MIT offers the material for a number of courses online for free--but not all schools will use it or any free materials produced by those free-textbooks-only schools, and those schools have the clientele where, generally, cost of books doesn't much matter to the student.)
Serious Sam is very much a budget title. And old, to boot.
You can't compare against worst-of-breed. Stack it up against Starcraft 2 when it comes out.
Too bad I'm a developer, moron.
But Wesnoth still lacks anything even approaching the polish of a commercially published game, and there doesn't seem to be a huge drive to it. I'd agree that it's probably the highest quality, but that doesn't mean it's within driving distance of a commercial release.
Stuff like FreeCiv is the same way. Good game? Sure! Better under-the-hood than the original? Maybe, if you're feeling generous. Ugly as sin and misunderstanding the end user? Fuck yeah. (Anything that pops up a lobby for a single-player game, as FreeCiv does, Misses The Fucking Point as far as end users go, really.)
I would disagree that games are not different, because games require a significant convergence of a lot of different talent, all willing to go the same way under a leadership that has to be authoritarian and vision-oriented to come up with a quality product. It's not like a desktop app, where "well, this can wait a while." You need the whole thing, working and working well, or none of it is worthwhile.
Tongue-in-cheek sarcasm, anyone? Of course hardware T&L is a driver thing, I was poking fun (you know, that thing normal people have) at the old Quake 3 requirements.
Yes, DarkPlaces supports shaders. It also couldn't have been a particularly easy task to convert a largely fixed-function setup to a shader-based one, which is why I said "has to be hacked at significantly". And any of the GPL'd iD Tech engines suffer from fairly huge technical shortcomings (yes, BSP is a technical shortcoming--modern engines, like ones based on the very awesome and underappreciated OGRE code, support it and significantly better managers, I don't know if any of the GPL Quake clones have done this, as frankly I don't give a damn because I won't use GPL code and I don't keep up with them).
Yes, I know Sauerbraten. It doesn't compete. I'm sorry, because it's a really nifty concept for an engine, but it really doesn't.
Compare Sauerbraten to UE3 and tell me how it goes.
As for Nethack--frankly, and I say this as somebody who loves NetHack and has ascended four times, it doesn't stack up from a gameplay perspective except for the "god dammit I WILL BEAT THIS GAME" people. That's not at all the people who you'd be targeting for the person I replied to's "open source gaming revolution" because they're not the people playing the games.
No, because in the course of using it you are subject to specific restrictions (the inability to modify it--just like a closed-source EULA).
Then have a community big enough to merit it.
I like Linux in some capacities (I hate it as a desktop because it doesn't work particularly well for me and advocates try to foist it off on people who don't know better, but it's running on all but two of my server machines). But there's no market share worth noting for targeting for most consumer applications.
Every lawyer I've ever talked to about the GPL and AGPL (some very invested in the open source community) agrees with this viewpoint.
The GPL is a distribution license, and thus probably enforceable (has been, some places). The AGPL has poorly worded extensions to the GPL, and redefine "distribution" to essentially mean "use"--which they may find cute, but does turn it into a use license and an enforcement mess.
There are so many gamers so pissed off with the commercial game world who would leap all over a by-the-gamer-for-the-gamer open source revolution.
Horseshit.
The plain fact of the matter is that you're not going to get the same kind of quality, by any stretch, out of an "open source revolution." I don't suppose you've noticed that virtually all of the open-source FPSes out there are based off very old (originally proprietary) code, do you? Code that has to be hacked at significantly to get much beyond the nVidia TNT2 target that it originally topped out at (oh boy, the GPL'd Quake 3 code has hardware T&L!)? Even the really good open-source FPSes (I'm talking Warsow here) are extremely limited games, and sure as hell don't address what you complain about ("linear storyline").
Open source software is good in some cases. Games are clearly not really one of them. You aren't getting Half-Life 2 out of the open source world, I'm sorry to say. You don't have anything technically equivalent to even Source (and despite Valve making great, quality games, Source really sucks, it's one of the main reasons I'm glad my team is writing our own engine for our games). You don't have the kind of incentives to create a focused, quality project because you're not paying them to stay in line (people will just toddle off to play with your code--which is by no means a bad thing, but it kind of makes it hard to make a kickass game when everybody's off dicking around with their own thing).
Sorry, but no, open source is not always the answer. Like right here.
A good project manager is worth an order of magnitude more than a good programmer because they enable the good programmers to do good work without being hassled by things outside of their job of writing and documenting good code.
The fact that there are few good project managers doesn't make this any less true.
Oh, and if an application requests admin rights correctly (via the API), they work even with UAC on non-NTFS drives. (Just tried that out, too.)
Legacy stuff doesn't work? lol boo hoo, put it on NTFS.
It's not. If you turn off UAC you can run admin-privileged applications off of ext2 (I just tested it out).
UAC requires data bits off of NTFS. Don't like it? Don't use NTFS. Like the AC above me said, Linux does the same thing on file systems like vfat or ISO9660.
You can't run an administrator app off of FAT32 in Vista either (I just tried).
When it's something utterly stupid like this (because Vista requires filesystem bits for its security architecture, as does Linux--don't try to run suid executables off of vfat).
When you are using Vista, you use NTFS. That's how it works, because UAC requires it. If you don't want that security, you can disable it (disable UAC and admin-privileged applications work fine, be it FAT or ext2/3). But you don't get to have both.
If my customers said that they wanted a pony for free, I'd tell them they were wrong about that too. Customers who don't understand that, yes, they can be wrong too--those are the customers I fire. I'm not interested in their money.
Yes, I know about ext2IFS and others. I also know that you can't run suid apps on vfat in Linux. How about that?
The security model for both Vista and Linux, as I understand them, require filesystem bits. If you don't have them, it's smarter to fail than to do the wrong thing.