Posts by Skjalg

very nice interview indeed. one of the best from carmack. absolutely worth your time.

Seeing as, in machinarium, he impersonated the guard by dressing up, instead of using a trashcan with sticks on the sides, I'd say they are very different.

Oooh dux is getting married

Was there really any interesting dialogue in that scene? It was mostly just learning about his character and his motivations. Nothing really story driven

Thank you Thrik for explaining it so much better than I did, even though I tried 18 times (This is why I didn't become a teacher.)

The second thing I think is slowing games development down is the fact that everyone tries to make and use their own tools. Most people dont really understand the time and complexity that a good and decent tool takes to make. Even something as small as a software that plays music is hard to write correctly. Even though there are basically millions of them, but the vast majority of people only use maybe the top 5 (Spotify, Itunes, winamp etc).

Usually in games production the tools are made and worked upon until they are "working alright (there are known bugs, but the tools does it job if you use it right)", and all the designers and artists needs to learn how to NOT use the tools in order to NOT break them, because the programmers dont have time to fiddle around with the tool as long as its working if you dont fuck it up. Because they have to work on the game now because that has a ship date and the tools dont.

This problem is a huge part of why I love Unity. They are not a game studio, but they are just making the software to make games, and they are just concentrating on this task. I know that some obscure upcoming title isn't going to steal away their focus on Unity3d.

Purchasing an engine is very costly, I know, but there is a reason for that. There are so many that think slapping together an engine is really fast because they have their OpenGL test scene up and runing in no time, but the huge problem isn't the engine itself (even though that is a problem), its all the little tools that make up the asset production itself. All the tools involved from the artists mind into the fully lit and playable scene inside the engine. I cant for the life of me understand why almost every game company out there insists on doing it their own way when there are so many commercially available game engines that can suit their needs.

I can fully understand the need to modify an engine to suit your special games need.

But come on, how engine-special is your game?

Quote from Vilham

So your saying you don't want to talk to people but you still regularly check your email and bugs? Sounds rather contradictory to me (and doesn't sound like what most programmers do, if I don't personally ask for a fix in person you can bet im going to be waiting several weeks at which point its a bit late). If the tools/game are broken so that I can't work whatever other feature you may be making is at that point irrelivent. If I can't do my work anyway then what is the point in making a new feature?Anyway remind me how we got off on this tangent

Hehe we got off on this tangent when I posted the ted talk about how to get work done

I'm not saying that we should take everything to extremes here and that most coders prefer to be left alone in their caves, never to be bothered. I usually check my mail pretty often, but the key thing to notice here is that I check them when it fits me. There is nothing worse when being really deep into your code, thinking about methods here, classes there and be really into something only to be disturbed because someone is asking you what your progress is on that very thing you are working on. The problem with people showing up at my doorstep every time there is something wrong is that they usually come at times when it doesnt fit me. I know it sounds very bad, and not very social, but consider the fact that it takes me 20~30 minutes in order to pick up where I left off after we've had our conversation. So even if your problem is very little, it will usually grab 30 minutes out of my time that wasnt necessary. And that is 30 minutes I could have spent fixing that one thing you are at my doorstep to complain about.

Think of it like reading a book, only every time you leave it you dont have a bookmark. You just close the book and think about somethign else. Then a few days later you open the book again and try to find where you left off; you'll most likely remember that you were somewhere in the middle of the book, but not the exact page number so you quickly start reading the first sentence on every page that you have read before to get back to where you left off, then you encounter a page that you didnt quite remember and all of a sudden you have read a few complete pages only to realise you've read this part and the search continutes for about 20~30 minutes before you are at the point where you originally left off. This is essentially wasted time.

Hehe no I'm not confusing those two, insta

If the font colour is wrong, post it on the bug tracker if its not already there.

If the game wont start up and gives you a weird error, then post it on the bug tracker if its not already there, except this time you can use that nifty litle drop down where it sais "URGENT" or "CODE RED" or "VOLATILE" or whatever your bug tracking software uses for "FIX THE FUCK NOW".

Also, if its the latter, and the game is not working at all, its probably already being worked on by 12 monkeys in the basement already and have been all night because the coders have probably noticed themselves. ;D

edit;

I fully endorse the beer-problem solving!

Quote from Vilham

bla bla bla

bipedi bla bla

We're driving into maybe land here, but maybe the features you are waiting for to be fixed would be fixed if you had no-talk thursdays?

I spend almost 30 minutes before I delve into the groove where I can code really effectively. And if I am alloved to code straight for even 3 hours without any interruptions like IM/mail/people knocking at my office door then I can produce so much more than a whole week filled with interruptions.

The whole point im trying to get across here is that pestering people with "hey have you fixed problem/feature/tool x so that i can work on task y" will not make things go faster, it will have the opposite effect. Which is why a no-talk thursday is a good idea. Pester your coders on thursday mornings and let them work thursday aftersnoons. Its not that bad to leave someone alone for 3~4 hours one day per week. Remember that when a coder have to reply to 12938429083742934 of these pesterings every day he gets no work done.

or maybe what you're really saying is that you got hired to pester the coders so that no work gets done and you really dont want to lose your job hahahaha ;D

Your pretty much agreeing with me there, I said earlier that if its not important you shouldn't be there, reminding someone isn't important as it is their responsibility to remember and get it done. Telling them of a new bug that stops your work dead is a good reason to interupt someone.

No, because this is where I dont agree with you. You dont go and tell your programmer about a new bug when you find it, you file it in the bug tracking system so that the programmer can look at it when he has the time. If people ran to me every time they found a bug I'd delete the bug tracking system and rename my position from programmer to bug tracker.

Also, even if you dont have a bug tracker, and you live in a world where programmers are supposed to remember every bug, but they dont, so you need to remind them. it probably wouldnt hurt to not bother them half a day per week. on a company-wide basis

Quote from Vilham

And thats something you cant deal with with a full week of preparation for the upcoming no talk thursday? really?

You cant even work on something different for 4 hours?

Considering the vast majority of a designers time is waiting for people to fix features/tools so they can actually implement stuff, no. Seriously the whole no talk thursday is probably one of the worst ideas I have ever heard. Replacing face to face talks with IM is one of the biggest problems with communication within a company.

I get so many people talking to me by IM asking questions that without looking at the issue I can't answer nor explain over an IM. They end up wasting a whole 15-20 minutes of my time rather than talking to me at my or their machine and solving the issue in 5 minutes.

We're driving into maybe land here, but maybe the features you are waiting for to be fixed would be fixed if you had no-talk thursdays?

I spend almost 30 minutes before I delve into the groove where I can code really effectively. And if I am alloved to code straight for even 3 hours without any interruptions like IM/mail/people knocking at my office door then I can produce so much more than a whole week filled with interruptions.

The whole point im trying to get across here is that pestering people with "hey have you fixed problem/feature/tool x so that i can work on task y" will not make things go faster, it will have the opposite effect. Which is why a no-talk thursday is a good idea. Pester your coders on thursday mornings and let them work thursday aftersnoons. Its not that bad to leave someone alone for 3~4 hours one day per week. Remember that when a coder have to reply to 12938429083742934 of these pesterings every day he gets no work done.

or maybe what you're really saying is that you got hired to pester the coders so that no work gets done and you really dont want to lose your job hahahaha ;D

Quote from Vilham

If you are poking someone and its not important then you shouldn't be there anyway. Management chasing you up every 5 mins, bad. You going and speaking to a programmer because a feature you need right now is completely fucked, good.

And thats something you cant deal with with a full week of preparation for the upcoming no talk thursday? really?

You cant even work on something different for 4 hours?

How can you say that desk to desk interactions are the worst, then say that no talk thursdays is a bad idea?

I mean, its not that hard if everyone agrees that after lunch on thursday, noone talks to each other. Noone sets up meetings and you are not allowed to poke anyone and if you do then it better be RALLY important.

M&M's (Meetings and Managers).

Warby posted that on mapcore;

http://www.ted.com/talks/jason_fried_wh ... _work.html

Its an awesome watch that is very related to this.

NO TALK THURSDAYS!

Now that I think on it, this is perhaps the reason why Funcom decided to move to canada. They probably couldn't stick to the norwegian overtime rules (there were a bunch of former employees making a fuss in the media a while back that funcom mistreated their employees).

Here in norway there are laws and regulations regarding overtime. Dont quote me 100% on this but it goes something like this:

You have the right to half an hour (unpaid) lunch if your workday is over 5 hours or something.

37.5 hours is one weeks worth. (this is really a 40 hour week because of the half an hour lunch)

If you are allowed/adked to work overtime you are entitled to 150% income on that. (this means that if you work saturdays that is all 150% income).

The rest here might just be special to our work, but I doubt it:

on holidays or on sundays after 2pm you are entitled to 200% income if you are working (this is overtime)

If you are working 2 hours or more overtime you get free dinner (half an hour), and this time it is counted as work time.

We dont have any dental plans (not customary in norway), but we have life insurance and we can purchase stocks for 80% of the market price once a year.

Now that I think about I must be an idiot for leaving this place next week (not really)

No talk thursdays

Raise up your hands if you used quark?

yeah I read it was play for free as well, but you had to use money to purchase gadgets.

fps's like that move to fast for the generic player base. And its that player base that is required to keep a game alive so that the pros have someone to own at all times.

(its the easy to get into, hard to master thing). Quake is not easy to get into; all you do is die. ALL the time (if you are a newb at it).

Day9 daily is cool sometimes, and he is very good as a caster as well, he just hasn't found a good sidekick yet. I haven't been paying a lot of attention to the US-games so far, but I hear things there are starting to get interesting and that Idra is a good caster.

HoN and SC2 are the only two games I pay attention to these days (watch and play on a regular basis), but I suck at both games, because I'm busy with work and girlfriends and keeping in touch with my mates

I agree completely with the unrelated rant that Duff-e posted about commentators trying to act professional ruining it. Casters should be cool, but also do nerd jokes and be gamers themselves. And not just talke for the sake of talking, that is really frustrating. I watch a lot of GomTV and they have two very excellent casters (I'm of course talking about the casting archon tastosis), but they also have two very terrible casters (that cast the sub-par leagues), and I cant force myself to sit through a game casted by them, no matter who is playing