Oluseyi

First. You're alive! Good to see you.

/me waves

Second. Yeah, but if we did that, it'd be no fun talking about rumors.

Heh. I'm not a fan of rumors because I consider them and speculating over them a huge waste of time. Wait a bit, doing something better (in terms of time utilization) in the meanwhile, and then you get official announcements. *shrug* Then again, I have moved away from technology enthusiasm...

The gamepad certainly does not work "on all most all genres".  Music games?  Dance games?  Motion games?  Racing games?  Flight games?  Sports games?  All have custom controllers.

Almost* My bad. Music? Parapa the Rapper. Dance, ofcourse not. Wiimote? lol... Racing? Erm...Gran Turismo 1-5? Forza 1-3? Im pretty sure the games where great with the gamepad. Flight? PS3 got that covered in Warhawk I think. Sports? We have played sport games for decades now...whats wrong with the gamepad?

You missed his point. The gamepad is a compromise for all of these genres, which is why dedicated input devices like the DDR dance mat, a plethora of racing wheels and pedals, joysticks and throttles and more exist. Do you actually play sports games? The control schemes continue to get more and more byzantine in an attempt to reflect the nuance of the games - the shot stick, FreeStyle™ control in EA Sports games, icon passing... It's a mess that favors long-time gamers and makes games harder for novices to approach.

I find the layout cluttered. Too many boxes in too many places with too many icons and too many badges. Also, the moderation tools in forum listings cause things to move around due to  changes to the size of the containing div. Nothing is worse in UI than things arbitrarily moving around.

I don't like that i have to click the drop-downs to activate them (Safari 5.0.3, OS X 10.6.6). Drop downs on the web should drop on hover, close on mouse-out.

I think the social tools were chosen a little indiscriminately (throw everything in). I think Twitter and Facebook were all that were needed; what use is a StumbleUpon badge on a GDNet forum thread?

I hate the quote boxes. They're hideous.

I dislike the new smiley tags. They complicate programmer-y stuff like enumerated lists or parenthetical expressions.

Formatting is problematic for me. Newlines in the edit box aren't properly converted into paragraphs plus vertical margin, so I have to append additional newlines.

Other than that, it's fine. It's a forum; it'll do just fine.

Sirisian, this is part of the problem. I'm supposed to have that kind of authority, but it's been made pretty clear to me that I won't

Then leave. They misrepresented the position, and you're not interested in a lateral move to an inferior organization - feel free to tell them so in plain terms. Advertise that you will begin seeking alternate employment from an organization that means what they say in their ads. Also look into whether you can return to your old job.

If you only want to perform one or two physical simulations/calculations and you're more interested in the learning/building aspect than producing a working game as quickly and efficiently as possible, then write your own. If you want to get to making a finished game, or if you're not particularly interested in the physics aspect itself, or if you're not that good at physics, or pretty much any other reason, use an engine/library.

There are more than enough interesting challenges in the development of even the simplest game that using libraries, engines and so forth is generally a Good Thing™. Happy hacking! [smile]

Quote:

Original post by discman1028 I have heard about your strategy: keeping the message responses quick, but I'm still worried about responding to *all* messages before drawing hurting framerate (even though it hasn't turned into a problem yet).

Set a framerate floor you wish to maintain, and only process other logic until that floor is breached:

while(true)
{
    time_t now = timeGetTime();
    if(now - lastFrameTime < maxRenderInterval) {
        if(PeekMessage(...))
        {
            ...
        }
    }

    // render
}

This way, even if you suddenly have a tremendous number of messages queue, your framerate won't fall below 1 / maxRenderInterval.

Quote:

Original post by GekkoCube But once i get my hands on such a device, it'd be impossible for the fed's to track me down.

Lol, noob. [smile]

Quote:

In fact, as long as im discrete about it, itd be impossible for anybody to know the device is in my pocket.

Lol, nooblar!

Quote:

Besides, once phones around me in the movie theatre are scrambled, those idiots will just assume they can't get a signal. They cant talk on the phone, which means me and a bunch of other folks end up being happy.

And when someone is having a heart attack in the theater, sitting in the front where nobody notices him and he needs to dial 911, but can't, thus dying only to be discovered when the theater closes for the night, will you have enough of a conscience to feel bad?

Quote:

Think of it like Batman.

No. Batman is fiction. His world is contrived to make his side the side of righteousness. The real world is a lot more complex. For instance, someone sitting near you may be called by someone in an emergency, or it might be an expensive international call the person can only afford to make once. Because you don't have the fortitude to stand up and ask the assholes making noise to be quiet and respect the library, you intend to block thousands of legitimate cell phone users daily (though, I'm sure, disabling your jammer so you can use your phone when you want to - assuming you have one).

Grow up. Learn to deal with some inconveniences, and learn to assert yourself. It'll go much further for far less trouble.

Make it small, make it cheap, have a ball.

The "problem" with the idea of an indie RTS is that we assume it to mean a large, expansive game where you are the supreme military commander - and, apparently, chief economic officer - of an entire nation engaged in war against other nation-states. You invest in manpower, then direct that manpower into production, and use the results to power your war machine.

How about a game where you command a small- to medium-sized unit of soldiers - say, infantry - directly? You receive supplies at designated stations based on your performance and the overall war effort's needs, you both direct and lead your men into battle (not necessarily at the very front, since, as commander, your experience is valuable) and you can delegate tasks in a simple hierarchy. This has all the key RTS elements: resource gathering and conversion are abstracted into your supply lines, the command hierarchy is contracted only to your immediate subordinates, and you still have sufficient character interaction and opportunity for narrative.

Best of all, for an indie developer, you can build the game to support additional combat missions/scenarios/theaters, meaning that you can release content packs at full price ($5 to $15) without having to build the entire game from scratch, and it will be justified because of the balance of scope and cost.

I don't know, it's always made sense to me. Maybe I'm wired different, though.

Holy Workplace Crunch, Batman! Hopefully, you guys have been reading ahead while various things have slowed this workshop to a crawl. Let's see if we can't pick up and sustain the pace again. Our assignment this week is to draw a moderately complex piece of household furniture using recognition of "negative spaces." Rather than trying to draw the solid forms of your subject alone, take note of the shape and size of the "empty" spaces between spokes and arms and legs and surfaces. Assignment: Armchair, Task chair, Chaise Find yourself a chair of medium dimensions, but with arms. Not heavy, cloth-wrapped and stuffed arms, but slender arms that might be ornate for a wood chair or the arms of an office/task chair. Orient the chair such that it is at an angle to you - that the back of the chair is not parallel to your chest. This will give you more interesting negative spaces, especially if the chair has spokes for its back. Feel free to move the chair around to get a better composition. You want to draw something interesting, after all. Moving it closer or further away might help, too. Take your time. As you look over the dimensions of your chair, pay particular attention to the shape, size and contours of the spaces underneath or in-between parts of the chair. Draw these spaces. When you're done, you should find a pretty good rendition of the chair. As with most of our techniques, the objective is to distract you from your "verbal" or "left-brain" processing of what the object looks like cognitively and focus on the "right-brain" intangibles of abstract line characteristics. Enjoy!