Quote:Oluseyi.

My apologies.

Quote:More often than not, celebrity designers don't work out nearly as well as celebrity movie directors

Believe me I'm aware of that - I was trying merely to discuss how good certain FAMOUS designers might be at programming (and concluding "maybe good, maybe not, who knows?"), and not necessarily implying that I consider them to be GOOD designers. Some of them yes, some of them no, but which is which is not for here! :-) (Ernest Adams is most definitely a designer btw, or at least he considers himself one and who am I to argue: http://www.designersnotebook.com/).

Quote:People make these pronouncements because they're fundamentally uninformed. They're not aware of what goes into a lot of applications that they're peripherally aware of, and they have no clue how tools they're familiar with are being used in unfamiliar domains. Please, stop. Just because André LaMothe once said game programming was the hardest kind of programming doesn't make it so.

You don't have to agree. But you have to admit that you don't know enough to make that determination.

Really... I do know quite a bit about non-games programming. I've been programming for 20 years, only the last 4 of which has been in games. There are, unquestionably, areas of programming more difficult than games, because they have a requirement to be correct - always - but for the complexity, salaries and budgets available to games/non-games, for any equivalent, games are harder.

If nothing else, consider medical software that uses voxels. Weren't voxels invented for games? Correct me if I'm wrong. Rendering systems for movies? Games are only a few years behind and take 0.16 seconds to render a frame, not 3 hours. The list goes on I feel.

As for LaMothe... actually I feel any quote he made along those lines would tend to detract from, rather than reinforce, my argument...

To the guy who started the thread: if you intend to break into the game dev industry, you should know that there´s no such a thing as a game designer at this point of your evolutive process... period. Perhaps a *programmer* will do for now.

Oluseyi, if I ever get into the industry in any form (cleaner?) I'll have this forum and site partly to thank.

Month's ago, before coming here, I thought that game designer's ultimately just needed a good design: Screenplay, storyboard (not necessarily with good drawings), and a design on how "everything in the game is and what happen's in the game, what the character can do" etc. etc. That's, what, maybe 10% of the job? It's infinitely more hands-on than that. A lot more difficult.

Thank's for the explanation once again.

/Back to programming soon enough.

btw if you haven't seen my post here: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=350145 if you'd like to add anything it would be interesting. By now I get the idea, but if you have anything to say on the subject and in helping a poor n00b even more than you already have... :)

Quote:Original post by SunTzu
Really... I do know quite a bit about non-games programming. I've been programming for 20 years, only the last 4 of which has been in games. There are, unquestionably, areas of programming more difficult than games, because they have a requirement to be correct - always - but for the complexity, salaries and budgets available to games/non-games, for any equivalent, games are harder.

I'm sorry, no insult was intended. I've just seen too many "grand pronouncements" in the For Beginners forum that fly in the face of empirical information.

Quote:If nothing else, consider medical software that uses voxels. Weren't voxels invented for games? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Voxels were not invented for games. They were invented, as with virtually all graphics technologies, in academic isolation from application, and they first found widespread application to medical imaging and geographical information survey. They've seen some limited use in games, but I think the general consensus now is that they're not particularly well suited to the hardware and product nature of most games.

Quote:Rendering systems for movies? Games are only a few years behind and take 0.16 seconds to render a frame, not 3 hours.

That figure lacks specificity. A movie frame can take much longer to render because of the quality and fidelity demanded by the application. Are you familiar with the Uncanny Valley? It doesn't just apply to robots and humanoid approximations. At some level, any environmental object that closely approximates expected appearance but differs in key, nuanced ways will generate the same reaction: observer rejection. A post-processed frame in a film has to be hyper-real, because it is designed for a 50-foot screen, not a 50-inch one, and minor artefacts are incredibly visible at that scale.

Worse, the CGI has to blend in with stock photography seamlessly (when used for effects), and you can't get away with completely static objects (when creating a purely CG feature like Madagascar or Toy Story - something that is the standard in video games).

Honestly, I can't believe you're making the comparison based on time to render alone, especially since you don't factor in all the physical resolution, post-processing and other effects, nor do you specify the level of detail. A video game-quality feature film can be rendered in real time. A film-quality game can't.

Quote:Original post by Blad3
Oluseyi, if I ever get into the industry in any form (cleaner?) I'll have this forum and site partly to thank.

Glad that we can help. [smile]

Quote:btw if you haven't seen my post here: http://www.gamedev.net/community/forums/topic.asp?topic_id=350145 if you'd like to add anything it would be interesting. By now I get the idea, but if you have anything to say on the subject and in helping a poor n00b even more than you already have... :)

I think the community's doing a great job there, so I won't wade in and repeat their advice. I'll try to keep an eye on the thread, though, and correct any dangerous misassertions.

Really, though, I need to get back to working on improving our static resources for beginners. The content on our start page is increasingly out of date, and we want to refresh it in light of advances in game development since its last review. Also, I want to create self-learning content directed at people just like you, including video training modules. I have no timetable for when these will be ready (or even started), but I think a lot of you would find them extremely useful.

Sound's good, for now the forum's are more than good enough.