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Messages - doimus

#16
TBH, neither GM Studio or Unity are in the same field as GLB. For bad or for worse.
#17
The most horrifyng thing about facebook is automatic tagging.
Meaning, as soon as someone tags you in a picture anyhere, FB stores your facial characteristics data. Nice! Who needs fingerprints anyway.  :rtfm:
And I found about it AFTER I was tagged in a photo that I didn't take or put on FB.
#18
Hahah, AMOS for windows is bloody amazing! :)
It's 100% complete & contained retro dev environment. Great stuff! I've never owned an Amiga, but now I'm going to make Pong for it!  :happy:

And Ouya console looks great too!
Only thing that bothers me is the gamepad design. Yes, it follows Xbox model and that's exactly the problem - it eliminates most younger kids from the game (pun intended). It's just too big.
Wii/snes style classic controller is much better for the young ones.
#19
Quote from: bigsofty on 2012-Jul-03
Interesting to see how this will compete with the Nexus. The holy grail for me is a larger A4 format tablet with stylus input.  :doubt:

Totally agree. Bigger tablet with wacom stylus support would be badass. iPad Pro.
Even x86 compatibility and OSX aren't really necessary anymore since there's much more developers and quality software on iOS already.
#20
Quote from: erico on 2012-Jun-28
Here is some article by Matej Jan.

http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/173068/congratulations_your_first_indie_.php?page=1

I think this is the classic mistake many startups make - producing the game they think people will like instead of doing proper market research and finding out what games people actually want to play.

Seriously, how big is the market for game & watch remakes? Seriously??
Now, how much time it takes to realize that? Much less than making the thing, I'd say.

And then they did the other mistake: feature creep.
HD graphics for game&watch, a director, artist and three programmers? Seriously??

And then at the end comes the ultimate indie fallacy(TM): arbitrary throwing of imaginary sums of money.
$50,000 - O RLY?!? For a game&watch remake??

What they're doing is throwing stuff at the wall and hoping that it sticks. Bad business.

From business point of view, a kid that bumps in a forum and yells: "I want to make a RPG like Skyrim, only better!" actually makes more sense. That's how games at EA, Ubisoft, Activision start.  :whistle:
The kid might not have the skill, work capacity and financial resources, but he has the idea. That idea will fail, but at zero cost in time and money.
Much cheaper mistake to learn on.
#21
Oh, I've become so disilusioned with all these homebrew handhelds. There's always some stupid little thing that ruins the experience. Screen tearing on Wiz, cut off pixels on canoo, sound lag on Yinlips, the list goes on and on.
The less "mainstream" the device is, more stupid things show up.
I guess some widespread android phone plus wireless gamepad is stil the best option for retro gaming.
#22
Quote from: Nathan on 2012-Mar-29
Quote from: doimus on 2012-Mar-29
Look what GarageGames and Unity communities look like.... total wreckage.
Just out of interest, what do you mean by this?

Too much noise, too little signal.
I lurked around Unity forums back when they were Mac only engine. It was similar to GLB, with developers responding and users actually helping. Now it's mostly "Can it be done in Unity?" or "Unity vs Unreal vs Whatever". The quality of the community has deteriorated rapidly with user base increase.
With that comes the necessity to hire moderators, product evangelists etc. whose only job is to mentor the user base.
And most importantly, once you reach "critical" user base, you're officially in the race with the competition. Look what Unity did to Garagegames Torque... And with increased competition comes the need for faster product improvement and that means hiring more people again, and that means more costs.

And sooner than later, you're back in the same situation: you need more money to sustain yourself. And then again you need to either expand or increase value. That's economics 101.
#23
I'm totally against marketing and publicizing... why? Because that stuff only serves the business purpose (ie. selling game engine) and NOT users (ie. developing games). Look what GarageGames and Unity communities look like.... total wreckage.

If Gernot's idea is to live off GLBasic only, and is willing to work 24h a day on upkeep (somebody will have to answer all those "can I make MMORPG with GLB, can I??" questions  :D), then by all means, promote it and all that, but if the idea is to just keep it afloat, I'm all for premium model.
That's basically a "1000 true fans" philosophy. Find your loyal base and charge them enough to keep you afloat.
That's how small bookstores or art galeries, or small music bands work. And that's exactly what Apple did in the 90s. Granted, Apple in 2000s has A LOT more money but they must allocate much more resources into keeping the machinery working. It's completely different beast and business practice.
#24
I always wondered how do they check too long, or too difficult games? Do they have to complete each and every game?

For example, one can make an impossibly difficult game that after level 78 turns into one big nasty Coffee Mod.
Or after level 119, it turns into an emulator of 8bit consoles, with roms included.  :P
#25
Good thing about retina displays is that low resolution actually looks better on them.

For example, I'm willing to bet that 640x480 resolution works much better upscaled on retina than 1024x768. More pixels = smoother image.
I guess more and more game developers will take advantage of this. I've just seen some reviews for PS Vita games and many of those do not run at high resolution but are upscaled low res. Just like on home consoles (very few PS3 games run in 1080p).
#26
Regarding the past vs. present issue...

People, we are walking around with multi-core multi-GHz multi-touch phones in our pockets....  :S

Now repeat that 100 times: we are walking around with multi-core multi-GHz multi-touch phones in our pockets....  :S
... that, at least in my case, have C64, NES, SNES, GB, DOS emus on it, nevertheless. Never mind the GPS, internet browser, music apps and well, phone capabilities.

Now, f*ck me, but that's way better than how I imagined future technology quarter a century ago.
OK, we still don't have hovering skateboards, but patience...

#27
OK, reply to myself... it's amazing how ideas appear when you put the question in written form...

For this purpose (pixel bitmaps), I already have the bitmap as two dimensional array - maybe I could add third dimension that would represent undo levels? So app would basically store each undo level as separate image in memory and then revert accordingly. That is for 512x512 bitmap. Is this wasting too much memory? Array contains integers only (palette index value).
#28
I'm trying to wrap my head around this, but I'm kind of lost.
What's the proper way of adding an undo function to an app?

I'm trying to make a simple pixel editor and undo is one of the essential functions such an app should have. But how?
I guess putting all the commands/actions into an array is given. But then what? How do you actually do stuff "in reverse"?

For example, if you paint a white pixel black and then undo it: how do you know that pixel was white before you painted it black?
Or if you draw some complex shape over multiple pixels which can all be of different values...
#29
Off Topic / Re: Raspberry Pi
2012-Feb-28
Wow, Raspberry Pi is already proving its educational value. Just because of it I have now gained a level in banana understanding.
#30
Off Topic / Re: Raspberry Pi
2012-Feb-28
Quote from: erico on 2012-Feb-28
...apple-banana being the best....

WTF is apple-banana?!? :blink: