We’re a little more positive this week. It’s not all doom & gloom. People can and do get jobs in this industry, and some of them even make a living at it.
And now for the stuff that wouldn’t fit into the column:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Experienced Points: So You Want to Be a Game Developer, Part 2”
Enjoy this extra-long Diecast where we try to cover as much of the GDC news as we can. Thanks to Josh for editing this one while I nursed my computer back to health.
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Show notes:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Diecast #96: Valve, Game Engines, Windows 8”
The only reason this post exists is because the previous posts are dangerously negative and I hate to have that much bellyaching sit on top of the site for too long. So… yeah. Let’s talk about some positive stuff:
Not much left of the weekend, but enjoy it anyway. I’ve got work to catch up on.
Apologies for two days of ranting. But it’s either this or nothin’, because this is my whole life right now. Also, writing about this is amazingly therapeutic. If the post becomes overwhelmingly bleak or angry, return here to the top and look at the kittens until you feel better.
Here we go, I shove the Windows 8 install disk in and…
During install, a bright red line appears, right down the middle of the monitor. I’ll come back to this later, but just bear in mind that while all of the following is going on, I’m also trying to find out what this red line is and why it’s there.
It asks me what drive to put Windows 8 on. Crap. I have four physical drives, some of which are broken into multiple partitions. For whatever reason, it’s not showing me the VOLUME LABELS, but only the drive and partition numbers. I could understand if these were drives from a foreign OS, but aside from the one Linux partition it’s all Windows. Since the installer is about to NUKE a drive, it’s inexcusable that it doesn’t give me a way to SEE WHAT I’M DOING.
Deep breath. Okay. I know the old Windows Partition was 250GB. And here’s a partition about that size. And it’s drive zero. This is clearly it, but I’d feel so much better if I had a way to make sureLooking back, I could have booted into Linux and figured it out from there. You know, if I didn’t mind doing everything all over..
Let’s do this.
(Hum showtunes while the files copy.)
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “My First Hour With Windows 8”
No, this post is not a repeat. It’s a sequel.
OH MY GOSH these notifications are getting on my nerves. Windows update keeps popping up in the corner, telling me I need to update. So then there’s this break in my workflow where I have to mouse down there and hit the teensy-weensy ‘x’ to make the bubble piss off for another random interval. But if I miss, then I click on the bubble and instead of the bubble going away I get a popup window telling me about all the stupid shit Windows has for me to worry about. I could swear I turned these stupid notifications off.
So now on top of all the other crap I have to do, I have to ALSO find that setting and reset it to “I’m an adult and I know what I’m doing. I’m a busy man and I’ll do my upgrades on my timetable, not yours, Windows. You asshole.” (I think it’s actually labeled something else.)
At some point it downloaded some of the waiting updates. So now I get a popup, “You have downloads waiting to be installed.” So I dismiss that and INSTANTLY get another one telling me about updates NOT downloaded.
Sigh. Fine. Just to stop this constant irritation I’ll do the damn update. Just about the time I settle back into work, Windows popups up agin because OF COURSE it needs to reboot. I can either reboot now, or it can pester me until I give in. Fine. Get it over with.
So Windows goes quiet for a long time, like Deep Thought except really, really unlike Deep Thought, if you see what I mean. Then it blue screens, reboots, and is dead.
Shit!
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “An Evening of Failure and Stupidity 2: Stupid Harder”
We finally get to the good stuff. The discussion below contains a lot of the reasons I wanted to do this write-up in the first place.
Link (YouTube) |
Yeeeessss.
This might seem trivial to a lot of people. This is basically just a fix for the std::vector<int> name; problem I discussed earlier in this series. We use arrays everywhere in our code. We’re constantly building lists of data. C++ offers tons of ways to do this, and somehow they all suck.
The lazy way:
Continue reading ⟩⟩ “Ideas about a new programming language for games, Annotated: Part 4”
My column this week is some advice to the young people considering a career in AAA videogame-making.
Something I really wanted to put in the column:
A couple of years ago I saw an ad for Full Sail University or one of the other game colleges. It said something like, “80% of graduates find a job in the industry within a year!” I was dumbfounded. Given the cost of going to one of these places (the price of a house and a couple of the most valuable years of your life) those are horrendous odds. The cynic in me read that as, “1 in 5 of the people who come to our school find the whole thing was for nothing.” I would never risk two precious years of my life on anything that risky.
I didn’t put it in the column because I can’t find the source anywhere. The game colleges apparently no longer offer post-grad placement info beyond, “We will help you!”
Also the anecdotes suggest a system where the college develops a relationship with a studio (stuff owned by EA, usually) where they just send them waves of grads who will work crunch-mode hours (80+) for months on end until they burn out, at which point there’s another wave of grads chomping at the bit, waiting for their turn at living the dream. So even if the placement rate was 98%, it would still be a horrible gamble, since leaving the industry in disgust and disillusionment is arguable worse than not getting a job at all. The actual success rate – the number of people who find good jobs with hours and pay that allow for a normal life – is probably really tiny.
But I can’t begin to back any of that up, and I didn’t want to build a point around a single barely-recalled data point. I mean, I can’t back any of it up, but I tried to stick with stuff that’s more or less accepted as common knowledge.
Also: If you DO work in the industry then please tell your story. If it was awesome, say so. If it was horrible, say so. Young people are making life-changing decisions and the only information we have are the gushing promises of game colleges and the occasional “development hell” scandal. Your story might change someone’s life.
An attempt to make a good looking cityscape with nothing but simple tricks and a few rectangles of light.
A novel-sized analysis of the Mass Effect series that explains where it all went wrong. Spoiler: It was long before the ending.
Here is a 13 part series where I talk about programming games, programming languages, and programming problems.
My picks for what was important, awesome, or worth talking about in 2011.
This is a horrible narrative that undermines the hobby through crass stereotypes. The hobby is vast, gamers come from all walks of life, and you shouldn't judge ANY group by its worst members.
Why spend millions on visuals that are just a distraction from the REAL game of hotbar-watching?
Ever wonder how seemingly sane people can hate popular games? It can happen!
Did you anticipate the big plot twist of Batman: Arkham City? Here's all the ways the game hid that secret from you while also rubbing your nose in it.
People fault EA for being greedy, but their real sin is just how terrible they are at it.
You know how videogames sometimes do that thing where it's preposterously hard to go through a simple door? This one is really bad.
T w e n t y S i d e d
