coffeeaddicted

Also to keep people coming back regularly they introduced lots of daily and weekly boni so everyone trying to pause got this feeling of missing out. I guess they got inspired a lot by Zynga for a while.

Yes, around 10%-20% time for design looks correct to me - which is why you have maybe 1-2 designers in a team of 10 people. But the designer still has to work 100% to get stuff done and it can get very stressful as well. And his work is important - because design-errors are early errors which means they are the most expensive ones you can have.

But it's really as in all jobs - the difference between good and bad designers is so absolutely unbelievable huge that if you worked with some bad ones and then meet good ones you hardly believe they are doing even similar jobs.

That depends a lot on the company. I've seen game-designers which took it easy, but I've also worked with good ones which took their job extremely serious.

The good ones are able to catch problems before stuff is coded or modeled. A good designer manages to describe every object needed (including rough sketches what they should look like and describing needed animations), every mission condition (which is very close to coding and needs good understanding what is technically possible). A good designer can describe the GUI pretty much ahead in a way that coders don't have to rework it over and over until it fits (including describing stuff like left-click/right-click/drag&drop/selection box behavior which can get very tricky pretty fast in games). A really good designer might even know excel good enough to calculate all kind of stuff through before even approaching any coders.

A bad designer thinks it's all just about some great idea and throwing in lots of stuff and the team will do the rest. A good designer knows it's 90% about describing details and about removing as much stuff as possible.

Exact same problems in Firefox. Also background scrolling in flash was somewhat smoother.

I would guess it's because the moment you do that you push down the problem to the library/application programmers. They will still have to support old systems and suddenly it's no longer a handful X developers who have to maintain backward compatibility but thousands of application developers all over the world which have this task. And certainly not all application programmers will care so the problem will be pushed on further and hit some users.

The problem with downward compatibility never completely goes away. But the closer it is handled to the base the less people have to care about it.

Now there is on the other hand a point where you could say every application programmer has to do so much extra work because the protocols are outdated and overly complicated that breaking downward compatibility will make the life of the average application developer easier. Not an exactly defined point in time - definitely way less obvious than the moment where compatibility is broken. But I guess that's when the break should (have) happen(ed).

Interesting. I have to admit I haven't tried it for a while, because it was always so bad in the past. But I'm also on Linux and not on MacOSX, maybe the situation there is better.

Third forum where I see this discussed - and same as in the other 2 a lot of the discussion here is again about his choice of his words instead about the content. I don't think that's a good sign.

Especially when you do 3D stuff the overhead for a VM is no longer acceptable. So I'm also dual booting. I wasn't sure which FS would work well and made partitions with ext2, ntfs and fat32. But also using ntfs now as it just works good enough (no filesize limit and with ext2 I had the trouble that it wants fs-checks once in a while and if I booted just then into Windows I couldn't access it... also VS had once troubles with files on ext2 for some unknown reason).

Do we have any idea what it actually _is_ what is getting depleted when we start to run out of energy or concentration? It's something I've wondered about already a few times - I mean I can pretty much feel running out of steam myself. Which means there is some way in which my mind is able to measure whatever it is that it causing this.

People always seem to assume that the typical "human" behavior (speech, reasoning, emotions, making plans) are the hard parts while walking around without bumping into stuff is the trivial thing. But aren't those just the things added by evolution at the last 3 million years or so on top of stuff that evolved for around 500 million years? So "just" being close to robots moving around nicely might already be 90% of the way. To get that far with AI we took around 60 years - so another 16 years is maybe not so little. If you take the evolutionary time-spans as basis we seem to be even closer already.

VS2010 and C::B both don't seem to allow that ordering. So not a solution for me, but certainly could be other IDE's support that.

I also care about const-correctness... but once in a while in a dark hour I wonder if I really saved or lost more time by it so far.

One (maybe stupid?) reason why I really like getter/setters has nothing to do with encapsulation, but that it makes it easier to search for places where a variable is changed. Often you have lots of getFoo and little setFoo functions - so just searching for "Foo" will return lots of results while "setFoo" helps me finding those faster.

Thanks, I had not heard about that before. Although a little sad, as I know a lot of casual users using it right now (even including some young kids). But I guess at least the "Creating Original Art" can be seen as targeting people like game developers.

Yes, that got changed/fixed with c++11. So you can now use >> there.

My guess: Casual users who don't think the interface is too hard and people liking free software. I seem to fall into both groups.

But more generally - a lot of people I know which are starting out with game programming work with The Gimp. Also pretty much anyone who wants to learn serious image manipulation, but not willing to either make illegal copies or spend hundreds of dollars on such an application (don't know, maybe that's not much money for you, but for most people it is a lot). And certainly people on Linux where PS simply isn't available.

Chrome and Firefox would still have about the same numbers, there's not that many Ubuntu PC's out there (Firefox might lose a percent or so).

Two games - Faster Than Light and Project Giana. Also I haven't seen too many project in the game industry yet which were right on time, so as long as the guys still work on it that doesn't worry me too much.

Please do not confuse IP protection with the patent system. For example I love the copyright system while I hate the patent system. You don't copy code accidentally and to use your example - it's still relatively easy to research if names are already used and you don't have to do that often.

But you have a really hard time figuring out if you break some patents while developing software. Even lawyers and courts often have a hard time figuring out if something steps on a patent or not. As software developer where you develop new things every day you can basically only close your eyes and code on hoping you don't trigger too many patent mines. Patents belong as little in writing software as they belong in writing other things like books, articles or speeches.

Also I'm pretty certain that it's a mixture of bots and humans by now. I'm using random questions currently and whenever I change them the amount of registered bots goes down for 1-2 days. Then it slowly comes up again over the week until I think up new questions.

So I guess there's probably someone going over unknown questions regularly and adding new answers.

No, it's not a $100 Android box - it's a 100$ Android console. And I don't know any other Android system specifically designed for that so far. You don't keep your mobile phone or tablet plugged in to your TV and neither do you plug in a game controller into either of them usually. Also generally tablets do not mainly care about improving performance specifically for games, which mean given the choice of faster 3D or improving other hardware parts a typical tablet will not go for 3D. And yes - easy porting games to/from other Android systems is one the big selling points. If you think a computer is a computer then there is pretty much no point for ever buying a game console, nearly everyone has a more powerful PC in the house already.

There is rather a big difference between a board and a consumer product. Most people are not keen on building their own system from scratch - and so far there isn't another 99$ game console out which is pretty much what OUYA seems to be about. Not to mention a console specific software stack. The fact that there is really hardware already around for that price makes me rather optimistic that OUYA isn't just the dream that never can come true which was my biggest fear for it so far (although I worry more about it's software stack).

Maybe there will be Asia clones ones it's out and a success, but so far there aren't. Someone has to be first...

And if it can get even cheaper in the long run with that hardware - that's also not exactly something speaking against it.

You got maybe a point with the games, but even there I'm not too worried. I don't need lots of good titles for a console - give me a handful of fun titles and I'm fine. Even playing supertuxracer on TV would already be enough fun for me to consider getting it :-)

It doesn't decide the president - but it influences which positions the 2 major parties have to cover. Lets say for example democrats are losing because they lost massively votes to the green party - then in the next race they will certainly consider how to get those votes back and might have a greener agenda.

Can't tell about how much everyone reads, but for example all major newspapers in germany do prominently cover that election weeks ahead with lots of information and comparisons of the candidates. This election is watched a lot in europe. As another example - one of the cinemas in my town is reserved tonight for a election night where they show CNN International live from midnight up to 6am in the morning.

I have made a subfolder for the read-later. It's continuosly growing and once in a while I clean up - often just kicking out stuff without reading. It's working nice for just moving the "I might read this later" somewhere. I don't have to think about which subfolder it needs to go in and it's out of the way fast.

One annoying feature in Firefox is that "Bookmark this page" always puts stuff in the last subfolder used. I often end up with bookmarks not just in the wrong subfolder, but also without an idea in which one they have landed. So I create a new bookmark just to figure out where the last one has landed ... sigh

They could have allowed running native applications. Not really sure how they expect to sell the Surface RT when it's competing with the Surface Pro. Except maybe the price of the Pro will be far out (I haven't found a price so far for Pro, it's not yet known?). Also if they had supported XNA for that thing formerly known as Metro they would at least have more games now. I'm rather puzzled why they don't support one of their most popular libraries for game development when introducing a new platform.

I wish Ubuntu (or other distributions) would give out numbers how many people install the proprietary drivers. So many Linux guys seem to dismiss games and 3D (which is certainly also used for VR, architecture, 3D modeling, simulations - and not just for games), so I'm somewhat curious how much it matters on the Linux desktop. At least personally I know more people using proprietary drivers on Linux than not using them, but I guess that's to be expected for a 3D developer ;-)

For me the thought of losing nvidia driver support on Ubuntu is rather scary given the current state of all other 3D drivers (and certainly other Distro's might follow with Wayland). I hope the status of other drivers improves a lot before that switch or 3D on Linux will be set back a lot.

I don't like the design of Unity, but I put up with it for a simple reason - it's been working stable without crashes here from the start. As long as they keep that I'm fine and hope they improve the rest over time.

I got approximately to the middle, but I'm still wondering if I should have tried the original instead of buying a german translation (it's my mother language). Maybe all the enjoyable parts got lost in translation? The part where I gave up was a chapter written with such a heavy dialect that reading each sentence started getting a chore.

It's definitely worse for reading through complete project code. For reading a single-file it's one click more than github which I can live with. It's very nice for getting a quick view on file-based changes, why and when someone did them and I use that interface a lot for that. I find it way easier figuring out file changes there than in github. SF is generally a lot slower (sometimes so horrible slow that browsing is near impossible). GitHub on the other hand sometimes freezes my browser when it has a lot of syntax highlighting to do (not sure if it still does, been a few months since I last run into that).

They have different ways to present code with different design targets and different problems. I prefer GitHub for reading code online without having to check-out, I prefer SF when already working with a project where I have the code locally and using the online interface to hunt for changes.