BaRRaKID

On the other hand one can argue how meaningful Carmack and id are on todays game industry. The last game id developed was Doom 3 (in 2004) and before that it was Quake 3 arena (in 1999), Rage is their first new ip since 1996 (when they released the first Quake). Even if we look at how meaningful their game engines are idTech 4 was only used in 8 games (Doom3, Doom3: RoE, Quake 4, Prey, ET:QW, Wolfenstein, Brink and Prey 2, so it was basically an in house engine) as opposed to the 20+ games in which idTech 3 was used, and the amount of games and engines that spawned from the Q1 and Q2 engines. To me this looks like a company (and by extent a man) that it's living in it's own shadow and that has hardly any relevance today. This means that, first, I doubt that what Carmack said will have any impact in the industry, and second, it all just sounds like an excuse for a company that is out of touch, doesn't know what their clients want, and that released an average game hoping it would be the next big thing. It we look at companies like Valve, Crytek, Blizzard, EA, Konami, Eidos, BioWare, Codemasters, and many others, it's true that they are all releasing their games on consoles, but they are also releasing some of the best PC Games of the last decade, and they are all polished, mostly bug free, and proper pc games. I'm a PC gamer, I don't own any of this gen consoles, and I played many great games and had great experiences in this last few years, the only differences are that now I'm more selective, I only buy games that I know are good, and I buy almost all of my games trough steam, all the rest feels the same as it felt 10 years ago.

I'm not sure if this is the case, but nvidia used to (still does?) pay developers to have early access to the games so that they could release working drivers much earlier than ATI. Every game that has the nvidia intro will almost always work like shit on ATI cards at release.

That sounds like their load balancers are broken. Usually with services like this you've several physical servers (a server farm). In order to avoid having the clients connect directly to these servers the clients instead connect to a load balancer that in turn redirects those connections to one of the servers in the farm (usually the one being less used). If the load balancer fails in the middle of a big download the client might get a download completed message when in fact only part of the file is completed. In other words it seems like EA misjudged the amount of load that their servers would have to handle, or that they are using cheap hardware. Steam is actually very efficient in this area. They've several servers all across the world, when you start a connection you connect to a primary load balancer that uses a geospatial service to determine what's the server farm closer to you, it then redirects you to the load balancers of that farm which redirect you to the best server available in that farm at the moment. I'm guessing that they also have several load balancers per farm to provide more redundancy in case one of them fails.

30 bucks? Really? FFS if you go to any hardware store you can get a piece of wood with better quality, twice that size and half the price. It might be because my dad is a carpenter, but I would never pay that much for something as simple as that when i could do it myself for a fraction of the price, and I'm not a particularly handy guy. Most hardware stores will even cut the wood to any size you want for free, you just need to polish it (which is not that hard, just get a brush, a small can of polish, give it a couple of coats) and place it on the wall (hardware stores also sell L shaped supports, you just need a drill and some screws).

If any of you are still using GoDaddy, please stop. They introduced a new policy called Selective DNS Blackout, which means that they will without warning block connections from certain DNS servers, because they're shitty servers apparently can't handle all requests. Read more here: http://rscott.org/dns/GoDaddy_Selective_DNS_Blackouts.htm Besides that Godaddy has always been the most evil web host/registrar, with loads of retarded policies and shady business practices. I had a couple o domains registered with them a few years ago and went through hell when I wanted to transfer them to another service (which with any other registrar is has simple as getting the transfer code). Also their website is made so that you sign up for stuff that you don't need/want without you even realizing, so if you do have to use their services read everything twice and be very careful on what options you choose. But If do have a choice and if you care please don't support them just because of boobs. About decent hosts, since i have to use Windows servers i use SoftsysHosting.com, they provide dedicated and shared hosting, VPS and cloud backup servers. Their pricing plans are really simple, with no hidden costs, and really cheap considering what you get and the quality of their service. They have their own Datacenters (unlike most hosting companies that use rented servers) located in Denver and Chicago, and the best uptime I've seen. Their shared hosting plans start at 42$/Year with 1Gb of disk space and 10Gb of bandwidth, and go all the way up to 20Gb of disk space and 200Gb of bandwidth for 400$/year. If you need more then that you can choose one of their VPS plans which are the best I've seen so far (the cheaper one costs 35$ a month for 30Gb/300Gb), or Dedicated servers (which tbh are a bit expensive...).

It seems like they released the Dev build on Steam instead of the final build: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/09/06/ultra-oops-dead-island-dev-build-released/

It was really dumb of them to release a trailer when the game is still so unpolished and far way from being released. I'm betting that many of the issues pointed out already will be fixed, but most people that see this video won't understand that and will start caring less about the game. This is CS, besides Quake it's the game with the most hardcore and over protective community, and this trailer will just fuel their nerd rage. Nevertheless I'm loving the new look of the maps, the detail is great, and I'm curious to see what the new game modes will be (looks like TDM or some sort o CTF)

That's was my point actually, It's all a big mess, it would be better if we didn't made the separation between a mod and a indie game. By your own definition the only difference is in the distribution of the games (the need to have the game the mod is based on installed), it I start a mod and later a acquire a license to the engine that allows me to distribute the game as a stand-alone product I suddenly stop being a modder to become a indie developer, but the work I'm doing is still the same, so is the game. It seems that not even wikipedia has a clear definition of what indie games are: The problem with this definition is that almost every mod fits in the description of indie, so following this we could say that modding is a sub category of indie development that has it's own subcategories (like total conversion, map pack, add-on, patch, etc). BTW I hope that it doesn't look as if I'm trying to push a POV, I'm just really enjoying having this discussion

I would say that 90% of Source mods don't fit in your definition of what a mod is, the only ones that fit are those CS zombie and deatmatch mods and map packs for HL, Portal or L4D. It seems like the true definition is that if the engine was made by one of the AAA developers it's modding, if not it's it's Indie, but they are all still modifying an existing engine. NS is another good example on how it's all just semantics. It just seems pointless to distinguish between modding and indie unless you're creating a new engine from scratch.

I think that the difference between indie and modding is in most cases just semantic. If for example you're creating a game in Unity, you're modifying an existing engine, so in it's essence it's still modding. You could argue that it's not modding because you're not starting from an existing game (just the engine) but if that was true you couldn't call total conversions mods. If Insurgency was made in Unity instead of Source would that make it a indie game? Why?

I don' know much about UDK, and this might be a stupid answer, but it seems like you're double clicking. It happens to me a lot due to a a problem I've in my hand that makes my finger twitch without me realizing after using the mouse for too long, but it can also happen if your mouse is broken. You could try using a different mouse, or ask someone else to try to reproduce the problem on your computer to make sure it's not your finger twitching lol

To be fair if you watch any recent skate video you'll see that almost everyone is doing underflips. Underflip is the new 360flip

It might be just me but I would love to see ME as a GTA style sandbox. Having a game with a free-running mechanic just begs for a open city environment to play in.

GitHub is even more user friendly (of course it still has a bit of a learning curve) and it's faster than SVN. You can read more about it at these links: https://git.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/GitSvnComparison http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Git_%28software%29 Please also note that GitHub is just one of the solutions available for working with Git, SourceForge for example also uses Git, but GitHub is the one used the most. Besides that all the cool kids (like jquery, mootools, ruby on rails, node.js, linux, django, yui, sinatra, mongodb, facebook, apache, mozilla, twitter, phpbb, google, etc) use Git these days

Does it really have to be SVN? If not try looking at GitHub (github.com) they have free and paid plans (from $7 to 200$ a month) and it has better features than SVN.

lol it seems like I should had worded my last post differently What i meant is that the guys working on this are really talented and can do amazing stuff. If the work made on Nightfall five or so years ago was great, then Canvas will be even better.

Really great work, looking forward to play this. I think it's worth mentioning that the founder and part of the team that are working on canvas, where also responsible for the, now dead, NightFall mod. So, for me at least, the expectations are high

While looking at the video I couldn't stop thinking of how much it reminds me Final Fantasy, I'm still not sure if this is a good thing or not...

I think one of the reasons people are not as prolific these days is that the current technology is less limited than it was before (weird i know, let me explain). Back then when we started a project we always had a big and ambitious idea in the back of our heads on how the map should be, but then while developing it we would start cutting some of those ideas out of the project because they weren't possible (or reasonable possible) to accomplish, or toke too much effort. These days you can do pretty much all you want, so after all those years of "good enough, but not as good as i hoped" projects it's hard to get out of the endless cycle of wanting to add more and more detail to a map.Theres also the issue of players wanting to see more. In the "old days" you could just put a wall texture with windows painted on it in a flat surface and players will be happy with it, you could maybe even make a indented rectangle around the window, and maybe clip the edges to make it look more round if you really wanted to make you map stand out. Nowadays you have to actually create a model of that window with all its details to make players happy. You need to add depth to something that was just flat before. Same thing with lights, you usually would add a environmental light and then a couple of spot lights or textured lights in certain areas that the environmental light couldn't reach or wasn't effective enough and call it a day. Now you need to add dynamic lights, HDR, some fog, a 3D skybox, blend all the lights and skies colors, which adds to compile time, which makes you hate your map every time you play test it and realize you forgot to add something, etc, etc. So to make it shor it is a mixture of the players wanting more, and the technology actually letting you do more. This is also the reason why it's kind of refreshing to go back and work in older game engines, you get more satisfaction of of doing less, by doing something that is good enough instead of being perfect.

This isn't true. All web services have an IP that can be accessed through a computer at least, and PSN has a website anyway. There's also the Media Go service for downloading Playstation/PSP things on a PC for people who don't have their systems set up to connect to the internet. And there's a really big difference between an external exploit, like cracking offline copyright protection, or flooding a server's bandwidth with a million connection attempts, and getting internal access to a website's server and its easily readable data. Nobody has ever stolen credit card numbers from Steam, Amazon, or Visa. News has already come out that PSN did not have any dedicated security staff or really knowledgeable IT guys and they had to hire external security to investigate this issue. I can guarantee you that they had some super weak shit going on that the hacker(s) exploited. Sorry, i don't own a PS3 so i was under the impression that the PSN was only accessible using the console. And I don't want to keep pushing this subject since Sony failed again, but, just because a service has an IP address (PSN probably has more than one, but whatever) it doesn't mean you can access it through a computer. That's only true if it allows connections trough a known protocol, which is probably not the case here, since almost any domestic router firewall can block traffic from protocols that can be exploited. Even if you could use one of those protocols to access the server you would need to have a zero-day exploit (considering that all the servers are patched) that allowed privilege escalation (since you usually need administrator privileges to access a database), and those are rare and hard to find, and if the hacker did have one there's nothing that a security expert could due since you can't protect yourself against something that you don't even know exists. Second if they had a PSN website, i really doubt that it was on the same server as the rest of the PSN content. You usually use a server dedicated to storing all the website files, and then have several other servers to handle the more heavy services (like for example databases) behind a load balancer. Finally I never said that people stole CC numbers from Steam, what i said was that non steam shows that Steam isn't a "reasonably secure" service, and Visa did have data stolen a couple of years ago by a known hacker who used a type of man in the middle attack where he could listen to all transactions made between a know retail chain and the Visa servers, and using that data he managed to steal millions of dollars by creating fake CC. He was later caught and hired by the FBI as a security expert, but double crossed them and ended up in jail, it'«s a great story actually

PSN was reasonably protected, actually comparing to most online services it was really well protected since it could only be accessed trough a black box (the PS3) which had many hardware and software security blocks in place that where really hard to bypass. Of course they should had anticipated that the PS3 would eventually be hacked, but this doesn't seem like it was an ordinary attack, it was something more sophisticated, so it was kind of hard for their security team to predict it would happen. Also how many web services do you know that are "reasonably protected"? You talked about Valve but there's Non-Steam which bypasses the encryption and protection that Steam uses, and people cheat and hack steam games all the time (although to be fair not as much as in other games/plataforms). Not to mention Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, and even Visa, they all had their own security problems/breaches in the past. Even if your application implements all of the security best practices, hackers can still get inside using social engineering, in fact most of the big security breaches we've seen lately are due to social engineering, so reasonably secure, its probably not secure enough these days.

Apparently there's already someone trying to sell the CC numbers: http://www.tgdaily.com/security-features/55643-over-2m-credit-card-numbers-up-for-sale-after-sony-hack It doesn't really matter if Sony encrypted the CC numbers because they are just 16 digits long, and they almost always start with 4, that means that there are around 800.000.000.000.000 possibilities for a CC number (it's actually much less since the Issuer and Bank identification numbers are much smaller than 9999). Considering that 10 chars long passwords, which using a case sensitive algorithm have something like 80.000.000.000.000.000 (that's 80.000 times more than a CC number) possible combinations, are considered unsafe these days, decrypting CC numbers is a walk in the park. The question here is if the hacker knows the encrypt algorithm used, and if Sony used a slow or fast algorithm. If they used something like MD5, SHA (which are fast algorithms) then I'm sure that all the numbers will be exposed, if they used a slow algorithm like for example BCrypt than it will be much harder, the difference being that with for example MD5 it takes about 40seconds (using a brute force attack, for CC numbers you can use an Hash table, which is much faster) to decrypt a 6chars long password and with BCrypt it would take around 12years. Tl;dr: Sony should have never stored the CC numbers.

It's doable with the wait command. The wait command delays the execution of the next task for a given number of frames, so you just have to estimate how many seconds each task will take, then multiply it by your average fps. With some of the commands just adding wait 1 will probably work since no new frames are being drawn.

You can probably put those commands in a config file and then just run the config file from the dev console, or create a bind.

I understand that those who worked on this game might be mad, but to be honest this looks more like a marketing stunt than a real leak, there are many signs that suggest this was intentional. The biggest one is that people who usually leak media do it for money. They work in some place that has early access to the media, and they sell it to a top release group, who then try to profit somehow from it (this can involve blackmailing the creator, selling physical copies on flee markets, re-selling it to private trackers, etc). It's really rare for a leak to show up on the web without passing trough these "official" channels. In this case the leak didn't came from any well known release groups, the proof being that there are many small groups claiming that they own the leak, and a dozen of repacks (some of them with malware in them, so if you download the game be careful). Another issue is that the original source of this news seems to be the EA web site. Usually with real leaks, the news show first on web sites connected with the release groups, since in theory the more they publicize the leak the more they will profit from it, and the company that owns the leaked media tries to do damage control instead of publicizing it even more. Since the news showed up on EAs web site,it seems like it was all made by EA in order to try to get more sales (let's be honest here, there wasn't that much media coverage of the game before the leak), and the latest news show that they got what they wanted, pre-orders sky-rocketed since the game leaked. The timing is also weird since leaks usually happen closer to the release date, when physical copies of the media start being made and are out of the control of the creator, so they are easier to steal. The other option would be someone hacking into Cryteks servers but It's hard to believe that someone would do that steal a unfinished copy of the game, more than a month before the official release to get nothing in return. Hackers don't usually work for free, not on this scale (I'm guess that after what happened with Crytek before they have a fairly secure infrastructure). And if that was the case i expected EA/Crytek to do what Valve did, go after the hacker and get him arrested, which hasn't happened in this case yet (or at least it was not reported yet).