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Businesses

Frustration and Unhappiness In the Games Industry 422

Posted by Soulskill from the i-blame-the-schools dept.
Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander recently wrote an editorial about the atmosphere of irritation and dissatisfaction that pervades all aspects of the video game industry. Developers are often overworked and unfulfilled, gamers have no qualms about voicing their disapproval (sometimes quite warranted, sometimes not), and the media, in trying to please both groups, often fails to satisfy either. Why is there so much strife in an industry ostensibly focused on having fun? From the article: "More and more developer sources I talked to suggested that fatigue, hostility, being at odds with one's employer and questioning one's career course is frighteningly common in the game industry. That being the case, it seems natural that elements like emotional detachment, anxiety and a lack of fulfillment make their way, even subtly, into the products the industry creates and into the ecosystem around the industry and its audience. 'Because of the secrecy and competition, a lot of development teams end up having a siege mentality — batten down the hatches and refuse to come up for air until the game's done,' says [an] anonymous developer. 'Game development has a way of taking over your life, because there's always more that can be done to improve perceived quality. I've seen a lot of divorces in my time in the game industry. I feel like it's much greater than average, but I have no statistical evidence.'"
GUI

MIT Offers Picture-Centric Programming To the Masses With Sikuli 154

Posted by timothy from the mind's-eye dept.
coondoggie writes "Computer users with rudimentary skills will be able to program via screen shots rather than lines of code with a new graphical scripting language called Sikuli that was devised at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a basic understanding of Python, people can write programs that incorporate screen shots of graphical user interface (GUI) elements to automate computer work. One example given by the authors of a paper about Sikuli is a script that notifies a person when his bus is rounding the corner so he can leave in time to catch it." Here's a video demo of the technology, and a paper explaining the concept (PDF).
Mars

NASA Will Crowdsource Its Photos of Mars 66

Posted by timothy from the find-waldo-win-a-shuttle-main-engine dept.
tedlistens writes "NASA is asking the public to suggest subjects for the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment, or HiRISE, its super powerful camera currently orbiting Mars. Since it arrived there in 2006, the HiRISE camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has seen more success than that lost lander, recording nearly 13,000 observations of Martian terrain, with each image covering dozens of square miles and revealing details as small as a desk. By letting the public in on the Martian photo shoot, scientists aren't just getting more people excited about space exploration. They're hoping that crowdsourcing imaging targets will increase the camera's already bountiful science return. Despite the thousands of pictures already taken, less than 1 percent of the Martian surface has been imaged."
Graphics

Disney Releases 3D Texture Mapper Source Code 83

Posted by timothy from the nice-of-them dept.
dsavi writes "Ptex, Walt Disney Animation Studio's cutting-edge 3D texture mapping library which was first used on nearly every surface in the 2008 animated feature Bolt, was released under the BSD license on Friday. Quoting the announcement on monophyl.com: 'We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under disneyanimation.com. It will include links to our open source projects as will as a library of recent publications.' This looks good for open source 3D graphics."
Businesses

Failed Games That Damaged Or Killed Their Companies 397

Posted by Soulskill from the cause-or-symptom dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Develop has an excellent piece up profiling a bunch of average to awful titles that flopped so hard they harmed or sunk their studio or publisher. The list includes Haze, Enter The Matrix, Hellgate: London, Daikatana, Tabula Rasa, and — of course — Duke Nukem Forever. 'Daikatana was finally released in June 2000, over two and a half years late. Gamers weren't convinced the wait was worth it. A buggy game with sidekicks (touted as an innovation) who more often caused you hindrance than helped ... achieved an average rating of 53. By this time, Eidos is believed to have invested over $25 million in the studio. And they called it a day. Eidos closed the Dallas Ion Storm office in 2001.'"

Submission + - How do you volunteer professional services? 4

Submitted by keefus_a
keefus_a writes: My wife and I usually take a week long vacation in the Spring and I tossed out the idea of volunteering abroad. Neither of us has a problem with doing manual labor, or whatever task is needed. However, I thought it might be of some value, and substantially more rewarding than our daily grind, if we could volunteer our professional services (I'm a network guy and my wife has a master's degree in counseling). The problem is that I haven't found any resources for doing so on a short-term basis. So I ask Slashdot. Has anyone ever done short-term volunteer work in your professional field? What organization did you contact? Or are we better off donating money to a particular cause and just working on a tan?
It's funny. Laugh.

Scambaiting Gets Comical; Internet Scammers All Dressed Up 178

Posted by timothy from the made-in-the-shadenfreude dept.
Nurse Nasty writes "Scambaiting is a fun and relaxing full-contact email sport. It's all about baiting Internet and email scammers into exposing themselves and sharing that humiliation with the entire world. Recently I baited four different groups of Internet scammers into being comic book action super-heroes, and then giving them their own 10-page graphic novel. It's a bit of fun and eduction through entertainment." (Warning: The comic contains a bit of naughty language.)
Earth

Yellowstone Supervolcano Larger Than First Thought 451

Posted by timothy from the even-superer dept.
drewtheman writes "New studies of the plumbing that feeds the Yellowstone supervolcano in Wyoming's Yellowstone National Park shows the plume and the magma chamber under the volcano are larger than first thought and contradicts claims that only shallow hot rock exists. University of Utah research professor of geophysics Robert Smith led four separate studies that verify a plume of hot and molten rock at least 410 miles deep that rises at an angle from the northwest."

Comment Tell your boss about this here chart (Score 1) 1019

by NailerNforce (#30413072) Attached to: Music While Programming?
Take a look at this chart. http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3015/3039778526_e5637e8d97.jpg Can you see that to get in the zone you will have to have high skills and high challenge? I believe, that at least when writing boilerplate code, the distraction of your mind makes you go from "BORING" to "The zone". I have also found one other factor: Listening to new music, distracts more than music you have heard over and over again. Especially new lyrics will tie up your brain in a disruptive way. So, listen to familiar music, or to music without lyrics.

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