Nobody would have predicted Sonic games on Nintendo hardware 20 years ago.
Tell them you could buy a Sonic game, via Internet download, on the *Microsoft* game console would have blown their mind. Hell, for a long time there, it looked like North America (as a region) would never have a successful game console again.
I wasn't there when he said it, but I read it in Datamation soon after he said it. It was reported from the meeting at which it was said. (But I can't remember which year it was, sorry. Or which convention.)
A simple example is product activation. There is none for OS X.
Yeah, but half their products (iPhones, iPads) *do* have it. And require the use of a huge, bloated, buggy app even if you never want to sync music or addresses to your computer. Functionality that should be handled by a tiny utility.
You also have a sign a long and confusing EULA, one with a terrible user-experience (it hijacks your app download, then doesn't even have the courtesy of automatically resuming it later), an experience just as bad as anything in the Windows world.
Its something that many end users of Windows will hit at some point in their day to day use and upgrades of a Windows OS.
If by "hit" you mean "see a notification that it's done", then yes I guess. But it's not like it interrupts the user experience in anyway-- the user isn't "treated suspiciously" because they never see anything related to activation. It just happens silently in the background.
For example, iTunes can't sync with a iPhone that's plugged into a USB hub. WTF? It's an *application*, it shouldn't even *know*, much less *care*, if the phone is plugged into a hub or directly into the computer. Hooking that deep into the USB stack is something malware does, not legitimate software.
Do you think that ANYONE at Microsoft thought about the Kin, "We think this is the best solution"?
The Kin was an excellent phone, when you remember that it was designed to compete with devices like the Sidekick, *not* smartphones. The reason Slashdotters think it's so horrible is that they thought it was Windows Phone 7, when it was never intended to be, and thus they were comparing it to iPhones and Android.
It was killed by internal Microsoft politics, unfortunately.
WebTV was bought, so...
I'll bet Google engineers have thought that about their products.
Kind of, but Google also had a lot of crappy products that never worked right. For example, their "offline" mode in Google Docs and Gmail *never freakin' worked* for me, *ever*. (It might work now, I don't know-- I kind of gave up trying.) Their Google Desktop Search product was obviously not thought about much, nor was Buzz.
IBM's laptops, T series for example, are an industrial design masterpiece. tank-like, light, simple, just work. They're easy to work on (as far as laptops go). The most useable keyboards in the industry. The best money can buy, IMO.
If only you could get one without that hideous and useless nipple mouse. You know, the part of its "masterpiece industrial design" that gets in the way of your typing, randomly throwing the cursor all over the screen because you had the gall to use a word with a G in it.
Oh yeah. My brother, you just mention the guy's name, and he can go for *hours*.
Sarah Palin, too. I actually kind of enjoy the Palin rage, because it has so many strange, wing-nutty reasons to hate her. Like, she "failed to support" giving away rape-kits. What the hell does "failed to support" mean? I "fail to support" a thousand things every day, 99.9% of them I never even heard of.
If you've seen the new Adobe Creative Suite, you can see the results of using Air to do more than a simple Pandora-like UI. They aren't pretty: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/
Stop suggesting various toolkits, that is NOT what he is looking for.
I read the entire summary and I have no fucking clue what he's looking for. You may be right, but then again, maybe the people talking about UI frameworks are right, too.
For "painting custom objects" I recommend a nice flat white latex, but make sure you put a coating or two of base primer first otherwise your paint may flake in a couple years. There, see? I just answered the question.
I also avoid GTK, but mainly just because it always feels "off" on Windows.
Understatement of the year.
I wouldn't say "feels 'off'", more like "is implemented completely backwards and upside-down and nothing fucking works right, not even something braindead-simple like Open dialogs."
But seriously, WPF can now provide more than enough horsepower for some really flashy UIs - at the cost of portability.
Silverlight applications are portable, so you *kind* of get portability. But this guy only says the final application needs to run in Windows, so yeah... WPF is fine.
Possibly, but the perception is the part that matters. It doesn't help that Mac game releases also generally have > 50% piracy rates if they're priced more than $15.
I always figured we'd be better off using ethernet *as* the port for things like external HDs, printers, displays even possibly. It's a well-designed cable, well-established and specced protocol, omnipresent, and cheap. (Well, cheap compared to this Apple shit, not compared to USB.)
The only drawback is that it requires a "smarter" device on the other end. But in this day and age? What's the incremental cost on adding a network card? $0.10? $0.05?
Even with shooters being the most popular genre typically,
Here in the Real World (i.e. outside of Slashdot and our parents' basement), sports simulations are the most popular genre of game. I mean, no doubt shooters are popular, but Halo 3 has nothing on Madden.
That brings up an interesting point. If a developer knows they're going to make a Mac port, why in the world do they still write their game in Direct3D first?
It's not an either/or problem. You can easily write your game engine to use either, and it's been done before. (For example, pretty much every game engine that exists ever in the last decade.) That way, you get higher performance on DirectX-supporting machines, and compatibility with more platforms, without having to change your core game code. This is how, for example, Gamebryo and Unreal-based games are ported to Mac and PS3.
You have to remember, though, that adding a second platform doubles the QA time, and if you're talking about Macs (and especially Linux), OSes full of users who, for one reason or another, don't play (or don't buy) games, then the financials just don't line up for the port.
You also have something of an image problem, in that DirectX 10+ games really, really do look completely different than DirectX 9 games. So you're stuck either writing a *ton* of code in your GL layer to simulate the DX10 look, or shipping a game that looks radically different on Mac/PS3/whatever.
It's not some horrible nasty conspiracy towards less-popular OSes, like so many people on this site make it out to be, it's a simple equation on the developer's balancesheet.
The motivator for (most) people doing creative work is to have people see/experience their work.
You can make a mod for a PC game, which thousands of people share and talk about, or make a game from scratch on Linux, which not only has a significantly smaller audience, but is actually a harder development process (modding on an existing game lets you re-use a *lot* of stuff you'd have to make yourself on Linux.)
Before writing a post like this, you might want to wait a few minutes for the inevitable corrections to the inevitably wrong Slashdot story comes in. A good 50% of the stories on this site are misleading, and probably 25% of those are blatant lies.
Here's a pro-tip: if it says kdawson either as the editor *or* the submitter, it's complete bullshit. I don't think he's ever gotten a story entirely right in this whole career.
I could have an avatar named 'WaffenPanzer' with SS lightning bolts as a picture and that's totally cool.
And you tried that? And Xbox Live staff told you it was a-ok?
Or are you just pulling "facts" out of your ass in some lame attempt to make some lame point about hypocrisy?
Hey, here's a little pro-tip: this forum isn't full of retards. Tactics like that might work on GameFAQs, but people here have two brain cells to run together.
Activision made Call of Duty. Microsoft is banning people from Xbox Live. Those are two different parties, and their actions don't (necessarily) have anything to do with each other.
Hard concept, I know, but please try to follow along.
Please. Everything he says is spot-on. The only reason this article is even up here is to give Slashdotters a chance to point and say "huur huuur Microsoft is eviiil!" once more.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody would have predicted Sonic games on Nintendo hardware 20 years ago.
Tell them you could buy a Sonic game, via Internet download, on the *Microsoft* game console would have blown their mind. Hell, for a long time there, it looked like North America (as a region) would never have a successful game console again.
I wasn't there when he said it, but I read it in Datamation soon after he said it. It was reported from the meeting at which it was said. (But I can't remember which year it was, sorry. Or which convention.)
Oh well you've convinced me! ... christ.
A simple example is product activation. There is none for OS X.
Yeah, but half their products (iPhones, iPads) *do* have it. And require the use of a huge, bloated, buggy app even if you never want to sync music or addresses to your computer. Functionality that should be handled by a tiny utility.
You also have a sign a long and confusing EULA, one with a terrible user-experience (it hijacks your app download, then doesn't even have the courtesy of automatically resuming it later), an experience just as bad as anything in the Windows world.
Its something that many end users of Windows will hit at some point in their day to day use and upgrades of a Windows OS.
If by "hit" you mean "see a notification that it's done", then yes I guess. But it's not like it interrupts the user experience in anyway-- the user isn't "treated suspiciously" because they never see anything related to activation. It just happens silently in the background.
It has deep hooks... deep.
For example, iTunes can't sync with a iPhone that's plugged into a USB hub. WTF? It's an *application*, it shouldn't even *know*, much less *care*, if the phone is plugged into a hub or directly into the computer. Hooking that deep into the USB stack is something malware does, not legitimate software.
Do you think that ANYONE at Microsoft thought about the Kin, "We think this is the best solution"?
The Kin was an excellent phone, when you remember that it was designed to compete with devices like the Sidekick, *not* smartphones. The reason Slashdotters think it's so horrible is that they thought it was Windows Phone 7, when it was never intended to be, and thus they were comparing it to iPhones and Android.
It was killed by internal Microsoft politics, unfortunately.
WebTV was bought, so...
I'll bet Google engineers have thought that about their products.
Kind of, but Google also had a lot of crappy products that never worked right. For example, their "offline" mode in Google Docs and Gmail *never freakin' worked* for me, *ever*. (It might work now, I don't know-- I kind of gave up trying.) Their Google Desktop Search product was obviously not thought about much, nor was Buzz.
IBM's laptops, T series for example, are an industrial design masterpiece. tank-like, light, simple, just work. They're easy to work on (as far as laptops go). The most useable keyboards in the industry. The best money can buy, IMO.
If only you could get one without that hideous and useless nipple mouse. You know, the part of its "masterpiece industrial design" that gets in the way of your typing, randomly throwing the cursor all over the screen because you had the gall to use a word with a G in it.
Oh yeah. My brother, you just mention the guy's name, and he can go for *hours*.
Sarah Palin, too. I actually kind of enjoy the Palin rage, because it has so many strange, wing-nutty reasons to hate her. Like, she "failed to support" giving away rape-kits. What the hell does "failed to support" mean? I "fail to support" a thousand things every day, 99.9% of them I never even heard of.
If you've seen the new Adobe Creative Suite, you can see the results of using Air to do more than a simple Pandora-like UI. They aren't pretty: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/
Stop suggesting various toolkits, that is NOT what he is looking for.
I read the entire summary and I have no fucking clue what he's looking for. You may be right, but then again, maybe the people talking about UI frameworks are right, too.
For "painting custom objects" I recommend a nice flat white latex, but make sure you put a coating or two of base primer first otherwise your paint may flake in a couple years. There, see? I just answered the question.
I also avoid GTK, but mainly just because it always feels "off" on Windows.
Understatement of the year.
I wouldn't say "feels 'off'", more like "is implemented completely backwards and upside-down and nothing fucking works right, not even something braindead-simple like Open dialogs."
But seriously, WPF can now provide more than enough horsepower for some really flashy UIs - at the cost of portability.
Silverlight applications are portable, so you *kind* of get portability. But this guy only says the final application needs to run in Windows, so yeah... WPF is fine.
Possibly, but the perception is the part that matters. It doesn't help that Mac game releases also generally have > 50% piracy rates if they're priced more than $15.
I always figured we'd be better off using ethernet *as* the port for things like external HDs, printers, displays even possibly. It's a well-designed cable, well-established and specced protocol, omnipresent, and cheap. (Well, cheap compared to this Apple shit, not compared to USB.)
The only drawback is that it requires a "smarter" device on the other end. But in this day and age? What's the incremental cost on adding a network card? $0.10? $0.05?
Please, it's fucking Apple.
You need a $30 adapter to use *ethernet* on the MacBook Airs. It's not like Apple's ever been shy about charging extra for industry standards.
Even with shooters being the most popular genre typically,
Here in the Real World (i.e. outside of Slashdot and our parents' basement), sports simulations are the most popular genre of game. I mean, no doubt shooters are popular, but Halo 3 has nothing on Madden.
There aren't any characters in those images, or videos... just an empty landscape. How does the engine perform with 300 armed ogres running around?
the percentage of hardcore gamers is probably much, much higher on linux.
Hardcore gamers who (generally speaking) don't see anything wrong with pirating software. That little detail is pretty important.
That brings up an interesting point. If a developer knows they're going to make a Mac port, why in the world do they still write their game in Direct3D first?
It's not an either/or problem. You can easily write your game engine to use either, and it's been done before. (For example, pretty much every game engine that exists ever in the last decade.) That way, you get higher performance on DirectX-supporting machines, and compatibility with more platforms, without having to change your core game code. This is how, for example, Gamebryo and Unreal-based games are ported to Mac and PS3.
You have to remember, though, that adding a second platform doubles the QA time, and if you're talking about Macs (and especially Linux), OSes full of users who, for one reason or another, don't play (or don't buy) games, then the financials just don't line up for the port.
You also have something of an image problem, in that DirectX 10+ games really, really do look completely different than DirectX 9 games. So you're stuck either writing a *ton* of code in your GL layer to simulate the DX10 look, or shipping a game that looks radically different on Mac/PS3/whatever.
It's not some horrible nasty conspiracy towards less-popular OSes, like so many people on this site make it out to be, it's a simple equation on the developer's balancesheet.
The motivator for (most) people doing creative work is to have people see/experience their work.
You can make a mod for a PC game, which thousands of people share and talk about, or make a game from scratch on Linux, which not only has a significantly smaller audience, but is actually a harder development process (modding on an existing game lets you re-use a *lot* of stuff you'd have to make yourself on Linux.)
Before writing a post like this, you might want to wait a few minutes for the inevitable corrections to the inevitably wrong Slashdot story comes in. A good 50% of the stories on this site are misleading, and probably 25% of those are blatant lies.
Here's a pro-tip: if it says kdawson either as the editor *or* the submitter, it's complete bullshit. I don't think he's ever gotten a story entirely right in this whole career.
In my state, Verizon was bought-out by Frontier. If you live in Western Washington, and you don't already have FIOS-- you're not getting it. Ever.
He probably *did* reply politely the first 40,000 times it was asked. People lose patience over time, you know.
If I had to deal with constant "debates" from moronic 15-year-olds questioning my decisions, I'd probably be brusque too.
I could have an avatar named 'WaffenPanzer' with SS lightning bolts as a picture and that's totally cool.
And you tried that? And Xbox Live staff told you it was a-ok?
Or are you just pulling "facts" out of your ass in some lame attempt to make some lame point about hypocrisy?
Hey, here's a little pro-tip: this forum isn't full of retards. Tactics like that might work on GameFAQs, but people here have two brain cells to run together.
Activision made Call of Duty. Microsoft is banning people from Xbox Live. Those are two different parties, and their actions don't (necessarily) have anything to do with each other.
Hard concept, I know, but please try to follow along.
Please. Everything he says is spot-on. The only reason this article is even up here is to give Slashdotters a chance to point and say "huur huuur Microsoft is eviiil!" once more.