a.d.venturer - Slashdot User

Comment Re:And what about talented amateurs? (Score 1) 438

by a.d.venturer on Friday July 30, 2010 @11:46PM (#33092816) Attached to: Sometimes It's OK To Steal My Games

The article implicitly assumes both that game developers only make games for the money, and that a front-loaded payment model is the only way to go; both of which are not necessarily true. For example, Tarn Adams (Dwarf Fortress) earns his living entirely through donations.

Fixed that for you. Tarn Adams is the only example of a game developer living entirely through donations. Not even Jason Rohrer, who lives a minimalist lifestyle in the middle of nowhere, is capable of sustaining himself on donation only income.

Compare that with the overwhelming number of game developers who make a living through getting paid by people buying games.

3D Displays May Be Hazardous To Young Children 386

Posted by kdawson on Saturday June 26, 2010 @08:31PM from the don't-look-at-me-that-way dept.

SchlimpyChicken writes "Turns out 3D television can be inherently dangerous to developing children, and perhaps to adults as well. There's a malaise in children that can prevent full stereopsis (depth perception) from developing, called strabismus or lazy-eye. It is an abnormal alignment of the eyes in which the eyes do not focus on the same object — kind of like when you watch a 3D movie. As a result, depth perception is compromised. Acting on a hunch, the guys over at Audioholics contacted Mark Pesce, who worked with Sega on its VR Headset over 15 years ago — you know, the headset that never made it to market. As it turns out, back then Sega uncovered serious health risks involved with children consuming 3D and quickly buried the reports, and the project. Unfortunately, the same dangers exist in today's 3D, and the electronics, movie, and gaming industries seem to be ignoring the issue. If fully realized, 3D just might affect the vision of millions of children and, according to the latest research, many adults, across the country." The Audioholics article is a good candidate for perusing with Readability — the pseudo-link popups are blinding.

Comment Re:Two senses of "closed." (Score 1) 850

by a.d.venturer on Thursday May 06, 2010 @09:51PM (#32120954) Attached to: Flash Is Not a Right

Your arguments and comparisons are predicated on Apple being a monopoly in a space. Smartphones, tablets/netbooks, whichever. This is not currently even close to the case.

Apple had 99.4% market share of the mobile application market in 2009.

Ars Technica

Which part of that doesn't qualify as a monopoly?

Andrew

Comment Re:Done (Score 1) 114

by a.d.venturer on Sunday April 25, 2010 @01:40AM (#31971834) Attached to: IEEE Introduces Mario Level-Generation Competition

Yep, those Chess levels sure get uninteresting after a while...

"Once you start recognizing individual elements, then it really doesn't matter how the level's put together, and it stops being fun any more."

You're assuming a certain type of game where the level layout is relatively unimportant. Mario isn't one of those games.

Even a relatively simple level generation algorithm like in, say, Angband is enough to keep people playing the game for fifteen+ years - because the level layout matters and every move can be the difference between winning the game and having to start over.

Andrew

Comment Re:Great Points (Score 1) 918

by a.d.venturer on Saturday March 28, 2009 @05:48PM (#27373377) Attached to: With a Computer Science Degree, an Old Man At 35?

What changes every 5 years is the business process that makes you money. Selling hardware -> breakfix services -> managed services -> whatever is profitable in a cloud computing world.

Submission + - Fossilized sea scorpion was larger than a person (www.cbc.ca)

Submitted by hereisnowhy on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @11:50PM

hereisnowhy writes: A giant fossilized claw discovered in Germany belonged to an ancient sea scorpion that was much bigger than the average man, an international team of geologists and archaeologists reported Tuesday. In a report in the Royal Society's journal Biology Letters, the team said the claw indicates that sea scorpion Jaekelopterus rhenania was almost 2.5 metres long, making it the largest arthropod — an animal with a segmented body, jointed limbs and a hard exoskelton — ever found. In the report, the authors said the scorpion exceeds previous size records for arthropods by almost half a metre.

Submission + - Why do games still have levels? (blogspot.com) 1

Submitted by a.d.venturer on Tuesday November 20, 2007 @11:46PM

a.d.venturer writes: Elite, the Metroid series, Dungeon Siege, God of War I and II, Half-Life (but not Half-Life 2), Shadow of the Colossus, the Grand Theft Auto series; some of the best games ever (and Dungeon Siege) have done away with the level mechanic and created uninterrupted game spaces devoid of loading screens and artificial breaks between periods of play. Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal, Team Fortress 2), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Nethack, Angband)? Why do games still have levels?

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