Messages

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: May 29, 2011, 07:45:54 PM »

I was of course thinking of only the projects with notability, or at least clear potential for notability. Well planned out, well designed, solid foundation, skilled programmers and artists willing to work...only for it to just stop. Doesn't happen just to games...

Roguelikes are an even different beast, anyone with appropriate mathematical and technical interests can be kept entertained for days just tweaking the level generation algorithms xD

And sure there are alternatives. And there are alternative ways to generate profits, like putting ads inside the program itself (a practice that has took the mobile phone app market by storm ^.^). But you still need people with skills, and people traditionally work on a flat commission instead of a % of profits basis. It grants economic security for the time invested.

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: May 23, 2011, 01:26:54 AM »

Thirdly, I have not once stated anywhere that I develop software just for the money. Nowhere. If you think that no one could possibly make money doing something that they love doing and be happy, you are sorely mistaken, despite your own failure.

I did say that I wish to be a programmer to make a living off of a career that does not bore me. It's not so much trying to buy happiness as being paid and doing something I find interesting at the same time ^^

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: May 17, 2011, 05:47:12 PM »

1) The uploading is illegal distribution. The downloading or receiving of a copy is about on par ethically with the intentional purchasing of stolen equipment. Legally I'm not sure what that's called.

The uploading is illegal distribution. The downloading is not illegal at all - at least in the EU several courts have confirmed that. Downloading is never, under no circumstances illegal.

Actually in the UK I believe The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended by the Copyright and Trade Marks (Offences and Enforcement) Act 2002 holds that people who distribute and download copyrighted material without permission face civil actions for potentially thousands of pounds of damages. If you can be proven to be distributing the material further, it becomes a criminal offence and jail time is a possibility.

It's not a case of "crime that put you in jail" or "legal", the third option is "civil actions for thousands of pounds in damages". There does exist a sort-of gentleman's agreement that ISP holders will first notify you that you've been caught and to cease-and-desist, and only if you fail to stop will they give your details over to the copyright holders.

The "becomes free eventually" is to prevent things being left in a position that they can't ever be used because the copyright owner is no longer able to give out permissions. Likewise in the UK we have a concept of orphaned works, where if the copyright owner cannot be determined (as is often the case with photographs found in archives for use in documentaries) it can be used without granted permission.

Anything you create (music, art etc.) is automatically copyrighted to you, at least in the UK and the USA it is. That is it's default state. You can then place it in the public domain, or release it under a licence like GPL.

I own what I create, at least until I decide or have agreed to other conditions (such as for a job, ghost writing, that kind of thing). Otherwise, I see no point in creating.

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: May 16, 2011, 02:19:08 PM »

1) The uploading is illegal distribution. The downloading or receiving of a copy is about on par ethically with the intentional purchasing of stolen equipment. Legally I'm not sure what that's called.

2) But that doesn't happen until long after the owners of the rights have either
a) Abandoned the property completely
b) Died
The argument that since it'll be free eventually it may as well be free immediately is flawed. Everybody will eventually die, should I run around stabbing everybody I see?

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: May 15, 2011, 05:44:11 PM »

Linux (which I do use alongside Windows) isn't "I'm going to make this cool game!" it's "I'm going to make this OS!". Linux is one thing being modified in a million ways. Each games is it's own unique thing. There's a reason most free/open-source video games become abandonware.

I'm not saying free games can't be good or compete with AAA games or just paid games in general, I'm saying it's inevitably rarer that they do. Besides if you're good at something, why do it for free when people are willing to pay? Especially after you've sunk thousands of pounds going to University to study Computer Science...I'm sure as hell not in it for the revolution, but because I want to make enough money to live off doing something that doesn't bore me.

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: May 15, 2011, 01:31:09 AM »

Whilst one thing that is very true with games is that too many cooks spoil the broth, most games do usually need a few cooks...graphics, audio, code, level design and the like are so very different skills you usually need at least one person for each. Free games rarely work or come close to finishing because you need to find people covering so wide a range of skills willing to work for nothing on one project for months. People generally just don't have the willpower for that without some kind of real-world motivation.

I'll be honest: The game I think is the most well-designed and well-made game in history is Portal (the first one). Yahtzee put it best in Zero Punctuation when reviewing Portal 2, that the original game was developed with a small team who had to "cut corners" by trimming it down so it contained exactly what it needed and nothing more. It was incredibly well designed, and amazingly well executed.

I've heard many interviews with developers and managers who have moved over from "AAA titles" to "Indie" development and commented on how much less stressful and more streamlined it is developing Indie titles. in short, I do feel a major problem with modern games is that teams have gotten too big, and seem to almost go out of their way to be big.

Indie developers don't tend to try to be big, they try to hire exactly as many people as are needed to complete a project. I remember one producer saying "If I could make the games that we make, publish and sell them with only 3 people instead of 30, I'd gladly fire 27 of my employees." and that's the attitude I think they need...

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: May 13, 2011, 02:35:29 PM »

The race to the bottom is being accompanied by a race to providers like Valve's Steam, which will also do a better job at solving the piracy problem and personally I'm all for. The sooner software sales go purely digital like games are the better...does anybody even buy PC games on CD any more?

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Programming / Re: Modern Hitman/Spy RL

« on: May 13, 2011, 02:23:46 PM »

I had an idea for something like this after playing Alpha Protocol but the idea was extended to multiple organisations and the politics that results.

Basically you start off working for one of the governments, and then you can either take missions like "assassinate x", "sneak into y and steal z" or whatever, or you can infiltrate another of the agencies or terrorist groups. You can even betray your agency and join the terrorists. You then have to do jobs for both, feed information back to your agency and the like whilst not letting either lose trust in you (ala Splinter Cell: Double Agent). If your agency loses trust they burn you, if the terrorists lose trust they just have you executed.

When burned you can stay with the terrorists, or just become a freelance, and have to do freelance jobs to keep yourself in the money. Of course piss off your government or sell the wrong info to the wrong people can quickly make you a wanted man...

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Portal 2

« on: April 25, 2011, 04:22:19 PM »

So far I've played for 4 hours and am on chapter 7 out of the 10 shown, it'll probably take me a couple of hours to do those 3 chapters that's at least 6 hours of single-player gameplay. Actually that I've only played 4 hours surprised me, it feels longer than that but in a good way. Then again my laptop crashed once or twice (it's fan is terrible and I forgot my cooling pad) so maybe those hours didn't get counted?

Also the emphasis on Portal 1 and 2 didn't feel like they were on the plot. The plot is an amusing and entertaining addition. The emphasis is on the puzzles and figuring out what the heck I'm supposed to do to get from A to B to C.

Even if co-operative is half as short and has no replay value that's still 9 hours of gameplay which isn't too bad...but for all I know co-op does have replay value, I've not tried it yet.

More importantly the game is *fun*, the dialogue does make me laugh out loud and the puzzles have had me scratching my head at times. I tend to make things way too complicated so maybe that's the problem but I think at least 30 minutes of those 4 hours of play were on a series of three chambers -.-

I did see the twist with Wheatley coming but that's just because he was such a likeable character it was inevitable xD

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Programming / Re: Memory Leaks in SDL and OpenGL

« on: April 18, 2011, 10:51:58 PM »

It's possible SDL has memory leaks. Especially 1.3 being as it's still a wip, and especially the more obscure corners of SDL. If OpenGL has memory leaks that's either an issue with your drivers or your code. Again more likely if you use deprecated or obscure functions...

Of course it's also likely you're losing track of a surface or something somewhere in your program. If you're using smart pointers like c++0x/boost's shared_ptr which use reference counting, a common problem people miss is if A has a smart reference to B and B has a smart reference to A, then A and B won't automatically be deleted.

Which means if obj A has a surface, and points to obj B, and obj B has a surface and points to obj A...yeah, that's two surfaces as well as the rest of obj A and obj B's data leaked unless you know this is going to happen so have code to deal with it before-hand.

Of course Ockham's Razor says the simplest explanation is the best, and you've made an easy-to-make minor fuck-up is simpler than your driver developers or the SDL developers have made a major fuck-up xD

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: April 02, 2011, 09:10:01 PM »

Wait, you are saying an advocate would say "I don't like expensive AAA  games, so I'll download them illegally to play for free instead"? That's...okay...what? Does the contradiction not leap out to anybody else?

I don't see where Z said that.

"An advocate of piracy could now say that if I downloaded the game, played it, then maybe I would like it and change my opinion on AAA games and buy the sequel, recommend it to my friends, just send my thanks to the authors, or whatever."

Nowhere did was it even mention buying the game downloaded if it was enjoyed. Maybe that's an oversight on Z's part?

The "if I like it I'll buy it" argument is a better one morally, except bet your bones that market only makes up like 0.1% of pirates

You just made up that statistic.

Yes. Yes I did. I figured that was obvious and it was just to get across the point that those people are most likely not in the majority.

As for the AAA industry as a whole. Well, people are still buying enough AAA games to keep that ball rolling along. Otherwise they'd all fail and well, end of that entire industries economy fails I guess?

What was the point of this remark? Yes. The industry must be doing well enough if it isn't gone. I think we all realized that. This doesn't respond in any way to Z's point that your reasoning means that anyone who doesn't buy games at all is evil, whether they pirate them or not.

I never made that point. I called them selfish, and trying to get something for nothing, but isn't everbody? I call myself selfish and trying to get something for nothing and damnit I'm dragging you all down with me! Heck, if you look I even "offended" people who give to charity.

Unless you are of the opinion anything "morally wrong" is evil? Is it? I always thought evil required something extra...

Unfortunately I don't understand talks of morality very well so I just go by what I think seems to be other people's concept of it. Since stealing seems to fall under morally wrong, and I addressed that in the the whole "stealing a design by using it without permission"  part of an earlier post, I just assumed most people have that concept of morality and find it "wrong" even if willing to do it. The people who don't tend to be zealots, and any honest zealot in my world view is obsessed about...well, to reuse the phrase "stroking their ego" regardless of what they claim. That or they are so afraid of the hypothetical worst-case alternative they have withdrawn completely into the protective shell of their zealously regardless of the world around them.

Now, I'm often the first to just assume people are stupid, and that's what I'm going to assume to explain why games like Call of Duty: Black Ops sell in such numbers despite a near identical game that most of them already own called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 being available...

Maybe people like Black Ops better. You don't know.

I address my "people are stupid" concept a bit further down.

Still, indie games tend to have more niche appeal, and more unique gameplay and graphics.

Do you see the irony in the fact that we're in a forum dedicated to mimicking the gameplay and presentation of Rogue? "More unique" indeed. "Unique" doesn't necessarily mean that a game is more fun anyway.

Indeed I do ^^ But games here still have that niche appeal so hey, that's 1/3? Also the big roguelikes all have something quite unique about them and small ones are generally developed by hobbyists. And we aren't expected to pay money for most of these, they'd just hobbyist projects. It's a lot more forgiveable when you're not trying to sell the result.

I may call that a good thing but since, as established, people are stupid it seems to have it's downsides. Also most indie games people play are good because only the good ones or interesting ones tend to make it onto services like Steam or attract enough attention to be noticed.

What is "good" or "interesting" is merely your opinion. You can't call someone stupid for having a different opinion, and mainstream games get more advertising anyway, so people might like independently-developed games if they only knew about them.

True, and yes I can because I am god *que rock music*. But yeah, my god complex aside I was using the word stupid in the "slow to learn and disliking of change" sense. Since unique gameplay often means some major changes, it's a risk publishers don't like and yes, could cost sales even if it works. Maybe I'm wrong, people aren't slow to learn and disliking of change, but that's a moot point since the publishers seem to assume this anyway ergo the Viewers Are Morons trope.

I do smack down indie games as well. A good percentage of them aren't good at all, but we don't tend to see them because...well, they don't get much attention. It's all about the advertising, like you said.

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: April 02, 2011, 07:51:39 PM »

Wait, you are saying an advocate would say "I don't like expensive AAA  games, so I'll download them illegally to play for free instead"? That's...okay...what? Does the contradiction not leap out to anybody else?

The "if I like it I'll buy it" argument is a better one morally, except bet your bones that market only makes up like 0.1% of pirates and falls apart somewhat with games with demos available and reviews that confirm the game doesn't drop in quality after the demo, or especially when they play a game through to the end and then not buy it (I mean, you finished the damn game! What, were you hoping it'd just get good 10 hours in?)...and still isn't legal. But we have also established legal and moral are not the same thing.

As for the AAA industry as a whole. Well, people are still buying enough AAA games to keep that ball rolling along. Otherwise they'd all fail and well, end of that entire industries economy fails I guess?

Now, I'm often the first to just assume people are stupid, and that's what I'm going to assume to explain why games like Call of Duty: Black Ops sell in such numbers despite a near identical game that most of them already own called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 being available...

Still, indie games tend to have more niche appeal, and more unique gameplay and graphics. I may call that a good thing but since, as established, people are stupid it seems to have it's downsides. Also most indie games people play are good because only the good ones or interesting ones tend to make it onto services like Steam or attract enough attention to be noticed.

If you tried to turn indie games into a full-fledge industry instead of a cottage-industry (which would happen in a situation without the AAA industry) you'd have the same situation you do with AAA just with lower prices. Then competition, mistakes, increasing team sizes to try and do more and raise the scales, general market forces all of that stuff would raise the costs and bring us back to square one...

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Programming / Re: OO roguelike design

« on: April 02, 2011, 07:32:34 PM »

At which point you could easily start going into component systems.

OOP is still obviously very useful for a lot of core engine things, but trying to hard-code everything in a game more simple than space invaders is somewhat of an anti-pattern.

Dungeon Siege used such a system, and a presentation can be seen here: http://scottbilas.com/files/2002/gdc_san_jose/game_objects_slides.pdf

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: April 02, 2011, 06:18:08 PM »

Mr. Morley, I agree with you that software piracy is wrong, but your post isn't helping. It's certainly permissable to feel that way, and I wouldn't object to you expressing the way you feel about it, but what you wrote can only make people upset. It's also completely unreasonable to think that software pirates are psychopaths, as you have no evidence. I'm having a difficult enough time trying to not insult people as it is.

The first part of that post is an explanation of the costs that go down into making big games, the second sheer-bafflement at the "piracy is justice" attitude I've seen before...maybe I was a bit to confrontational but I don't tend to have many if any emotions when I write in debates and that seems to come across as coldly angry. I have that problem sometimes. Present logical point of view, people get horrified like I'm the next Hitler for not bringing warm and fuzzy emotions and kindness into a situation that involves neither :S

I'll admit I (disclaimer: not a confession) may have pirated before, I just don't see the need to try and justify it by making it seem right. I don't mean to insult outright, just be blunt as required to cut through all the bullshit.

I was using Psychopath in the purest medical sense, as-in it's key characteristic of a lack of empathy (which leads to a lack of guilt) and simply presenting and debunking one of the alternative explanations. Then again the gradious sense of self would explain the ego-stroking... In fact, I believe I outright said such people most likely don't have ASPD and for a good reason, such people only care enough to defend themselves when they get caught. (Though obviously some pirates have ASPD, that's just down to statistics).

My conclusion was they're just normal people doing what normal people do, either trying to remove guilt (though the source of that guilt I cannot fathom) and/or ego-stroke and all without giving something up. Seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. After all, charity is also an ego-stroke and/or attempt to remove guilt, but requires giving something up in payment.

From an individual point of view, piracy is more practical than charity. I don't see why people pretend they're doing charity out of anything more than ego-stroking and removing guilt either :S That or 1p coins are bloody annoying and it's easier to drop them in the charity box when you buy a 99p drink xD

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Off-topic (Locked) / Re: Digital Rights and Economics

« on: April 02, 2011, 04:33:10 PM »

Modern AAA titles have budgets in the millions.
http://www.planetxbox360.com/article_9268/Game_Development_Budget_Somewhere_Around_25_Million

Approximately $18-25 millions to be precise. Say you expect to sell a million copies. To break even you have to sell those at about $18 each. To break even. On the development budget. Problem is, very few AAA games even sell that well. A safer bet would be $36 estimating half a million copies.

But that's still very rare. In the end, publishers have to raise the cost of games because those games that sell millions of copies have to pay for not only the $18000000-25000000 budget of that game, but the other games that didn't break even. And they still have to make a noticeable profit from that. Remember here I haven't even factored in advertising, production costs, parts of that money took by various other sources, etc. Why do you think Console games cost more than the same game for PC? Simple: a percentage of the profits for Console games go to the producer of the Console.

AAA games are an expensive market to enter, and to work in. Indie games cost a lot less because they are developed by small teams with little initial investment, usually with cheaper middleware, less expensive-to-produce assets etc.

...As for people who think they are somehow morally just, even rightous in pirating software: Welcome to the world of self-delusion. Even if it's not stealing in the letter of the term, it's clearly stealing in the terms intent. It's like using a person's designs for an invention without their permission, since that's effectively all a computer program is: A designs, or set of instructions, for the computer to use to create the various changes required to bring about the invention, i.e run the program. Why do people fool themselves into thinking they aren't in the "moral wrong" by any reasonable sense of morality?.

They are not likely to be caught and punished significantly enough and even if you were the "moral defence" wouldn't be of use to you. The only two reasons to do so are to comfort themselves about the guilt, or to stroke their own ego. I vote the latter since they aren't likely to be caught, so the guilt can't be from that fear, and can't visibly see any sadness caused the action, so no guilt from empathy, so there are no sources of guilt.

That or they are psychopathic so can't feel guilt, but then they'd have no reason to try and defend themselves or justify their actions except as a way of escaping the consequences. Since we've established the "moral defence" is useless...yeah, not Psychopaths.

My guess is they pirate because they are, like all mentally-sound humans, selfish beings driven by selfish impulses who wants as much as possible for as little as possible. They've managed to latch onto a nice one with feeling moral over "piracy", a double-whammy of getting something for nothing and stroking your ego at the same time. Heck, they're still defending themselves now on web debates like this one for a simple reason: to keep stroking.