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Comment Re:View angles (Score 2, Interesting) 567

All monitors are made to be viewed landscape. It's about biology. Our eyes are by nature more accustomed to view wide scenes instead of tall ones. If you feel like flipping your monitor to a vertical format, you probably have a too small monitor. With a properly sized widescreen monitor, two webpages fit nicely side-by-side. Who maximizes browser windows nowdays anyway?

Comment Re:Welcome back to 2005 (Score 1) 442

O'rly? I'm perfectly happy with having an 38-inch TV, as my living room couldn't house a larger screen without it being too invasive. Why would i want 4k if it wouldn't create a noticable quality improvement unless i had a huge screen?

Sooner or later, the physical size of consumers living rooms will determine the upper limit for how highres a screen can be.

Comment Re:Automation and Unemployment (Score 1) 602

It's the very basics of capitalism, if you create too much unemployment, the system will collapse. What you need for sustained growth is a large middle class with jobs and money enough to pay for your products. On the other end, making production cheaper and more efficient while keeping the middle class rich enough to consume is what creates economical growth. Luxury items that used to have high production costs and thus be reserved for the rich gets cheaper and becomes available to the lower classes.

With that said, believing that infinite growth is possible in an infinite world is still both unscientific and retarded. While the economical cost of consumtion of luxury goods might decrease due to efficient production, the same is not always true for the ecological cost. At some point we will have to transform to a society where production efficiency increases no longer means that we buy a larger number of iphones every month, where we instead use increased efficiency to work less and increase spare time.

If you ask an scientist working with climate change, i guss he/she would say that we already have passed that point..

Comment Re:Lame article (Score 2) 150

I am a game developer, and i fully agree. This article didn't teach me much...

Also, it's funny how non-developers looks at the concept of a "game engine". Any time that a game studio releases a tech demo and proclaims "this is our new game engine!" it's almost always the old one with improvements. Might be as little as tweaked shaders and new 3d-art.
A game i worked with got a "best technology" award from a magazine in the end of the last year. What the frak do the reviewers know about our tech anyway? For all i know, we used some quite instable and often non-revolutionary tech to piece together a game that looks different from others.

Comment Re:Let's Be Honest (Score 1) 261

It appears to be much easier to simply spend oodles on marketing and advertising rather then produce something original.

Blame it on the market, history tells us that good games and games that get good reviews does not necessarily sell. Well advertised and hyped games, however, DO sell.

Comment Re:Fuck you, developers. (Score 5, Insightful) 261

As a senior game developer, i can tell you that no game released nowadays is EVER complete. And trying to making a game complete is like trying to write all the digits of Pi. It cant be done, you just have to draw the line somewhere and say "this is good enough". We work until our employers pry our hands from the keyboards and force us work on a new project. Then we sneak back and work a little bit more on the old one either because we are ashamed of the quality or because we love the project. And we HAVE to move on to new projects, otherwise game development would not be economically feasible and there would be no AAA projects such as the ones mentioned in TFA.

And the point of doing minor DLC is not to make money from it directly. The point is to give a promise to the consumers that there will be DLC shortly, and make them hold on to their copies instead of reselling them, which would bring zero money to the publisher. This is not some theory of my own, it is what our publishers tell us when they are ordering us to do minor DLC. Why they charge so much for stuff that would have done it's job perfectly when released for free is beyond my understanding though.
It's funny that the example in TFA where the true strategy was most obvious, the DLC for Alan Wake, was where the author was most happy with the product...

Comment Re:I would approach teaching that course... (Score 2, Insightful) 172

To be a successful artist in game development you need a sturdy technical foundation. No need to be a engineer, but you definitly need to be a geek and have a strong passion for games.

I have been a game developing 3d-artist for many years, and i'd rather hire a geek that became an artist than a "fine artist" that learned to do 3d.

Comment Re:Project Offset (Score 1) 184

Yes they had some impressive tech and good artists, but about every experienced game developer in the field (including me) realized that super-ambitious projects started by a handful of indies in a basement rarely makes it to the shelves nowadays.

If you want to create a hit as an indie startup, you make something like Braid or Limbo.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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