daredevildave

"most PC vendors wouldn't know good industrial design if you hit them over the head with it"

I've often wondered about this, surely the PC market is large enough that someone could come in with exceptionally well-designed machines, pre-built, running Windows, that had the "it just works" nature of a Mac. Is Windows really so broken as to prevent that?

I guess I'm thinking something like Alienware used to be only more focussed on overall usability rather than gaming oomph.

Write this as e^(iπ) + 1 = 0 and you have my favourite equation.

It relates all the fundamental mathematical numbers: e, i, π, 1 and 0.

I agree, there is no way a to-the-metal game engine will be written in any apart from C/C++ for a while. However, there is no reason why the higher level logic of the game ( the bit that is done by the designers/gameplay programmers ) shouldn't be done in a higher level language.

Unit testing is an excellent technique for any development environment but is sadly rare in the games industry.

Iterating on disc products is not simple :) Though a lot of metrics could be gathered for use on a sequel. During development though iterative development should be ( and often isn't ) absolutely fundamental. Trying to "create fun" is an incredibly difficult task and can only be done with plenty of feedback.

Not quite the same thing, you are talking about QAing the product.

Test driven development or more simply unit testing code, is writing automated tests that ensure your code at the smallest unit you can access ( e.g. a single method ) is doing what you expect under all conditions.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test-driven_development and: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_test

I'm not sure I agree with the whining part, there is also an awful lot game developers could learn from web developers.

For example: - Test driven development - Deploy, measure, iterate practices - High level languages

Most of which are rare in the games industry but seem to be very successful in the web industry.