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Comment Re:What's going on Vimeo? (Score 1) 85

Ugh people that don't know the rules just make me so sick.

People who make kneejerk comments without thinking make me sick. ;) Watch the video that was pulled:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAoW9fjKmo4&fmt=22

It's a design tour exploring the themes of World of Goo and the programming techniques behind it, totally unafilliated with 2dboy.

Comment Re:The Real Reason... (Score 1) 85

I feel bad for Vimeo. They made an innocent video to show what a fun-loving bunch of wacky kids they are at their little Web 2.0 start up. They probably thought that like other various mashups and non-malicious infringements that their video would either fly under the radar or become a success such that the content owner would appreciate the attention drawn to their work and see the positive aspects of it.

You should read this before feeling too sorry for Vimeo: http://blog.wolfire.com/2009/01/vimeowned/

They deleted a number of indie developer's personal videos showing off their games due to copyright violations (I am pretty sure you are allowed to demo your own game). World of Goo and Fez are probably the two most notable examples to have had their videos pulled without warning.

Comment What's going on Vimeo? (Score 3, Informative) 85

I can't really feel bad for Vimeo here. Vimeo is well known for removing indie developer's video game videos without warning (see the Wolfire vimeowned post -- World of Goo and Fez are two other examples). Vimeo claim this is because of some copyright fears -- even though the developers obviously have the rights to show their own games!

Looks like the tables have turned -- maybe if Vimeo had policed actual copyright violations instead of taking down video game developer's videos they would not be in this situation.

Comment Thoughts from a game dev (Score 3, Informative) 286

As someone who has an upcoming indie game appearing on Steam, here are my thoughts.

First of all, there is no shortage of competition for Steam. Steam is definitely the biggest, but they are not doing anything anti-competitve.

Unlike the console market, it is not uncommon to see a game sold on Steam, D2D, Impulse, and the 15+ other contendors simultaneously, from day one, in addition to being sold by the creator directly. In fact, even earlier than day one, due to the trend of preorders.

If Steam pressured developers into exclusive deals (which they could easily do, due to their size), then sure, I would be kind of pissed. The fact of the matter is that Valve isn't doing that -- they are simply acting like a big, friendly store where developers can put their game for sale. They have been great dudes so far.

Comment Re:huh (Score 1) 382

Hold on, I couldn't quite hear you underneath through your suit of tinfoil armor.

Let me get this straight, you're asking how do we know that Chinese manufacturers haven't secretly bugged enough computers in the US so that when signs on, there is a non-trivial chance that he is running industrially sabotaged hardware?

This is absolutely ridiculous, but given that it's a +5, insightful question, here are just a few issues:

- It would require a massive conspiracy, like none we have ever seen.
- Apple, Dell, etc. are not so incompetent in their QA that they would not know that the hardware is somehow phoning home.
- The sum of the worlds nerds are not so dumb that they would not notice all hardware phoning home.
- It is too expensive to bug every machine, natural competition would favor companies who do not install this extra stuff.
- China would face political ruin by trying to pull a stunt like this if it was discovered that they were spying on the world.

Comment Re:Browsers might be ready for GL but not Javascri (Score 3, Informative) 181

While Assembly demo coders might enjoy the challenge of working in such a limited environment, the rest of the world should wait for some real improvements.

Most of your complaints have been addressed in other modules of HTML5. See the media module for native sound support and web workers for threading support.

Regarding debuggers, there are a few excellent debuggers for JavaScript capable of profiling and doing all sorts of stuff. The most notable being WebKit's native Web Inspector and the FireBug extension.

Performance concerns with "fill color" and such are not an issue because they are offloaded to the graphics card.

Full screen mode is controlled by the user agent, not the web page for obvious reasons. Most browsers have support for a full screen mode in some fashion.

Now this is not to say that it's perfect. However, things are looking pretty good. :) This is definitely the future, the question is just how long will it take to get there.

Submission + - Initial WebGL support lands in WebKit (wolfire.com)

appleprophet writes: ""WebGL" is an upcoming standard from the Khronos Group, the same standards body behind OpenCL and OpenGL ES. It defines the use of OpenGL in websites using the standard canvas element. In other words, websites will be able to render hardware accelerated, 3D graphics natively inside of a web page. In the last week, WebKit, the rendering engine behind Safari and Google Chrome, has added initial support for WebGL, which means it probably won't be too long before Macs and iPhones everywhere get OpenGL web apps. This could have big implications for gaming. HTML5 has steadily been encroaching on desktop applications' territory, but I don't think many people expected browser-based, hardware-accelerated graphics this soon."

Comment Re:Humans can defeat humans (Score 2, Interesting) 192

From the rReCAPTCHA FAQ

Are CAPTCHAs secure? I heard spammers are using porn sites to solve them: the CAPTCHAs are sent to a porn site, and the porn site users are asked to solve the CAPTCHA before being able to see a pornographic image.

CAPTCHAs offer great protection against abuse from automated programs. While it might be the case that some spammers have started using porn sites to attack CAPTCHAs (although there is no recorded evidence of this), the amount of damage this can inflict is tiny (so tiny that we haven't even seen this happen!). Whereas it is trivial to write a bot that abuses an unprotected site millions of times a day, redirecting CAPTCHAs to be solved by humans viewing pornography would only allow spammers to abuse systems a few thousand times per day. The economics of this attack just don't add up: every time a porn site shows a CAPTCHA before a porn image, they risk losing a customer to another site that doesn't do this.

Comment We have the technology... (Score 4, Interesting) 478

You can see this already with PC gaming. Digital distributors like Steam have pretty much demolished the brick and mortar stores. My local GameStop barely has a PC game section anymore and it's not because the PC market is shrinking. In fact, it's growing.

Brick and mortar stores are dying and they know it -- for PC games anyway. It's like they are not even trying anymore. I am an independent video game developer, and I tried my best to let GameStop et al sell my company's game, but they do not even return calls. We have not even gotten an email back yet.

Meanwhile, our upcoming title is going to be sold in virtually every single online store -- some of them responded within a day of being contacted. Here's our list so far.

Brick and mortar stores are still clinging on for consoles releases. Retail stores pretty much are the only place to go when you want to buy the latest AAA titles (except Amazon, which is like digital distribution with very high latency).

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