gnoupi

Since this article is only about the technical side, let's add to this.

Another game has the same issue with loading times and general performance: The Sims series, until the 3rd. The Sims 2 was excruciatingly slow when you had lot of elements on screen, even of fast computers. The reason? It's a game in which people make their own "levels", by adding items, which can even be of external source. So it's hard to really scale for it like for other video games.

The Sims 3 is faster, improved performance a lot, mostly because it is streaming as much as it can, now. Most of the time you will see dirty loading polygons, blurry textures, before it loads. Because that's the only way to deal with a level on which you have no control.

The issue is the same with SL, with the increased fact that people can really create anything, import meshes, make objects from thousands of polygons. And they can run scripts in each of these polygons, potentially able to launch scans of the whole area several times per second.

I'm not saying that this is as optimized as it can get. But it's far from being a "laziness" issue. The basic problem doesn't really have an "easy solution".

Yes, but the title is enough for people to agree before clicking. Good choice, I guess.

Myself I was also expecting a more detailed article about the economy, the communities... And it's just a basic rant about the time it takes to load items.

dupe : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2570829

Actually, nowadays, you know game designers, more than actual programmers, at least for the big industry. You know the programmers for most indie games, though (but there they are often designers themselves).

Besides, true that you don't really know the "big shot programmer" in games anymore, mostly because there is not anymore one programmer, you see a full team creating an engine. so they blend in the product.

About Carmack and Romero, I guess it also helped that Romero made a fool of himself after the "breakup".

Probably because he worked on things which were entertaining, and not "tools" to people, simply. You can find plenty of famous people in the video game industry, recognized for their work. But you can be a wonderful tool programmer, make wonderful databases, webservers, and else... Ultimately, those are only tools. And people don't have especially respect or excitement for tools, they just use them.

Same for programs. You can have the most sophisticated and optimized algorithm in the backend, if your frontend has too much clutter and is not easy to use, it doesn't matter. I will use another program, especially if it is easily replaceable.

The search engine market started before all the "serious people" started coming to the Internet, I think.

I think it is harder nowadays to make a fame with a name like this.

I see the interest in promoting DDG, but the "let me take your hand and do that for you" is and will always be a bit condescending.

You can tell about a great search engine without that kind of approach, in my opinion. Because if your intention is good, this way is hardly the best, I think. Most will use it like others used lmgtfy, or a more strict "RTFM", years ago: as a "search yourself noob" end of discussion.

Oh, great, one more condescending way to answer people when you are too lazy to provide a real answer but want to be """funny""".

Yay.

Seriously, if you are concerned that someone didn't make an appropriate search on Internet before asking for information, there are nicer ways to suggest that than that kind of sites.

They indeed only needed to be the almost only free alternative to IE for a while, on Windows. Anyway, this "using government" is as good for Firefox as for Opera, no need to be condescending.

What is "surprising", however, is the rush to release this version. I mean, it was a process for months, of alpha, beta versions... Then RC came 3 days ago, and hop, gold already, even if still some bugs.

Surprising, but understandable, as the "browser choice ballot screen" they fought for is released this week. It's their chance to propose a "perfect" browser, the moment they will be the most exposed. So I can understand this decision, but I hope that there won't be too high bugs in it, lowering the image. Because it's easy to give up on a new browser on the first error.

Other than that, I have to admit that this new version is amazing, much faster and more pleasant to use.

Note that someone made an implementation of such race as an actual game: http://www.texasexpat.net/posts/wikirunner.html. Quite nice to play in my opinion.

Nope, I use Opera ;)

The iPhone is a smartphone with a touch screen, The Nexus is a smartphone with a touch screen, Therefore the Nexus is an iPhone :)

I guess one just had to make his "counter-article" to the flow of "wow, amazing google phone!!" we see recently.

Of course in itself it's pretty much only a rant, with fallacious arguments, but it fulfills its goal of generating a lot of "how can you say that it's stupid" answers.

I mean, I even clicked on it just for the sake of the title, like probably many did. Mission accomplished, so, people click and react on it.

Actually, a lot of people have it as a start page. Usually not power-users, but many regular users have it this way.

Actually, the 10.10 is because of the Unite component. When they released the official new version, 10, they didn't have Unite ready yet, it was on another branch, the 10.10 (they reserved a few numbers for hotfixes for the version without Unite).

Actually, Opera has already the ad blocker, named "content blocker", for some versions already. Find more details at this address: http://my.opera.com/Tamil/blog/ad-block

There was a story already about it, about a month ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=909396

Not sure Steve Jobs's tendency to criticize is specific to in-house prototypes, though.

I'm not sure if competition is great on such sites. You want one place to find answers for one topic, like programming-> StackOverflow, sysadmin -> ServerFault.

How is community going to benefit from two sites based on the exact same framework, on the exact same topic ? It will only be duplicating eachother.

Last time I checked, EE was hiding all actual answers to visitors. It doesn't really qualify as a useful link, then.

It actually works, when you put 5.99, you see "5" in the confirmation, even putting the amount yourself, you feel like spending less. (Plus, years of such prices everywhere)

It's really pity that people nowadays consider that there are "blockbuster" games, to pay 50-60 dollars for, and "cheap games", to pay for a cup of coffee price.

Originally, the term "indie" was just this, independent developers, without a publisher, and most likely people working on new concepts, interesting ideas that you can't do on the mainstream game industry.

Unfortunately, marketers are now abusing the "indie" label, for any "little game". And thanks to that, "indie" is now slipping to "cheap". So if a game is not the latest "Gears of Halo 2010", most of people will say it's only worth a few dollars.

That's sad.

Did you make this total counting Paypal fees ? For example, all 0.01$ orders went only to Paypal, not to them.

Unless, I guess, a few who will take this occasion to put their lucky numbers.

You can make as private as you want, but if a message is only for a part of the team, or only like two people, a forum doesn't help.

A forum doesn't pop in your mailbox, I would say, simply? And it's not personal, it's public.

Fully true, but how many times you will be able to justify that refactoring to the ones who asked ?

Most of times, all they want in a "fast, small new important feature to put in a new menu item". It's hard to make them realize that because you add new features, most of times the dynamic of the UI has to be rethought.

And it ends usually in an application with countless menus and modes even for these menus. So redesign is important, but how do you justify to your marketing (or head programmer) that they have to "pay" for a redesign of what they "paid" already months ago, just for one feature ?

And again a link for which the only interest is the short, attracting and more or less controversial title.