I hope you’re recovering alright from the punches and enjoying GDC nonetheless :P

If Apple approves the iPhone app, they’ll be there.

There’s also a private calendar for my friends and colleagues – if you can find me (or one of them) and be nice to them, you can get on that too / instead. Slightly different information.

Fujian White Crane

Sorry this happened. I hope the rest of GDC goes better for you.

Sorry you got mugged BTW… It’s never a good experience (I’ve been there a couple of times)

Sounds like you’ve been abused by crazy people. I m talking in general about doing business. The idea of just ignoring a business voice message – and emails is all to prevalent.

If what you are referring to about people sending inane images and spam, well then you have a legitimate complaint.

So maybe we are talking about two different types of voice messages?

My complaint is working with people — doing real business. Waiting for a reply to a specific assignment or request for a product that has been ordered, etc.

For me, as product manager with full reliance on others to complete their time line assigned task. Such as waiting to know whether a certain supplier has a particular product in stock or has to be ordered. The waiting for a reply that often does not come is what causes delays and extra costs and frustration.

Carlos

Give me your cell number. I promise I will only phone you every five minutes, 24/7, with inane ideas, and to read our to you the URL of random LOLCATZ images I just found and thought you’d like.

When you’ve given up, and asked your cell provider to block my incoming calls, and I’ve changed to a different number so I can *still* spam you…

…then we’ll come back to this conversation, and see if you still feel so strongly that everyone has a “right” to *force* other people to listen to them / read them whenever and however they (the spammer) wishes.

Think about it. Your ideal is unworkable.

The same who also ignores emails? yes, I suspect you are. Likely though after your client has already paid you a deposit or more. Or are you just sabotaging everyone else with your power of ignoring.

How typical of our ‘new’ culture. Are you an IT guy?

Excellent news re: speakers getting a free one too.

Also – I remember the same deadline extensions Adam does, but I didn’t keep any of those emails either, as I considered them annoying, desperate spam. Sorry.

I have played the game World of Warcraft now 3 years (legitimately). I, at present, have 9 level 80 toons… all of which have good gear that I’ve worked for. One has the tundra mammoth (price 14,000 wow gold) and 5 have their epic flying mounts ( 4200 gold each) not to mention the many various riding ground mounts and most have level 450 professions ( I have no idea of how much wow gold I’ve spent here) . All this done legitimately via Instances, questing and grinding for months sometimes as was in the case for the Tundra Mammoth. All this and much more happening even after Blizz went after glider.

All my life I’ve played games from simple games such as Old Maid when I was a young child, through Monopoly, various sports games and the list goes on. The point is, that in every one of them, there was someone trying to (so called) cheat. But like everything, that word cheat is dependent upon the individual’s perspective.

For instance in the Game of Monopoly, some people, when they play the game, put money owed via the community chest and chance cards, in the middle of the board. This can accumulate to a substantial amount and can be had if one lands on “Free Parking”. I have seen some say that doing this, since it wasn’t in the rules, is cheating and the money has to go to the bank as per the rules. I have seen it said that is is unfair to those that aren’t lucky enough to land on free parking. Of course the simple argument to that is that everyone has the same chance, simply because each player gets a turn at rolling the dice.

Moving alone:

Some don’t like or feel cheated if someone uses a bot such as Glider and some feel cheated because in the World of Warcraft game, they can’t spend as much time in game as some others or because they aren’t fortunate enough to have gotten picked to do a particular raid no matter how many times they have put their name in the raid hat. All can be felt as being cheated. Personally the only qualms I have about bots, are those used via the web site gold selling companies. Most of them design /wrote their own bot program and are not affiliated with Glider (though I have heard that some smaller gold selling websites had used glider too) or any other bot out there. And even if they don’t use a bot, all they need to do, is get 25 people together that know the game of WoW, each buy an account and then go level their toon ( I can can level a toon from 0 to 80 in 16 days legitimately), then start running the various raids. Or they can go to one of the many online websites and each purchase an already geared level 80 toon and do it that way. They cheated because they bought a toon from another player via a web site right! They can run those raids, get the loot, either sell it on the AH or like so many do, build a web page and offer wow goods for real dollars.

All I see here is that Blizzard wants to be a supreme deity (or dictator) and they found what they perceive as a demon that they created because of the way they built the game.

So I echo the other guy, its Blizzards fault for the problems in the game and not anyone else’s. Not the bots, it’s not the people that for whatever reason can sit and play the game everyday all day. It’s not the various groups of people that can do the latter of what I said above. It’s all Blizzards own fault for trying to play a deity of which they simply don’t seem to have the knowledge to do nor the expertise. But they sure have what it takes to be a dictator! That can be easily seen by anyone that hasn’t closed their eyes to it.

I am not developing this any more.

I suggest you try OpenFeint or AGON. There are some annoying things they force upon you, and they lack some major features, but for now they’re the best (free) option I can see.

Thanks.

I wish! If you find one, please let me know :)

Apple’s culture of secrecy and poor software-engineering means they don’t reveal this info publically. I’ve heard rumours that they also don’t make much (if any) use of Unit tests internally – which is partly why we tend to see such buggy core code from them.

So … any list of regression tests would have to come from developers, as a community project.

Is there a list somewhere with other (regression) bugs?

Thanks again.. both article and following discussions everyone.

for eg – A simple game with 3 subsystems called renderer, physicsSim and input. The game has 2 entities floating about. Both entities have a physics component, a renderable component and input component set up in the database.

The work the subsystems do is just the renderer just renders the renderable components, the physics just simulates the physics components and the input just updates the input components with the state of input. But where is the part that the input subsystem has to tell the physics system to apply forces based on input or the physics system to tell the renderer the transform to render at.

Is it ok to do a querry in the renderer to look for a physics component with the given entity id to get the transform to render at, if so I cant see the benefit and think this will cause threading issues or am I just still thinking in the wrong way to solve this problem?

Many thanks and I look forward to the next article.

Having said that, I agree the special holiday deal ($100 off from the price through 1/23/09 to 01/08/10) _felt_ like the dates were extended.

Thanks. But please note: that is NOT an iPhone App – that’s a simple web frontend hacked on using iUI or similar to “pretend” to look like an iPhone App.

Since it is not an app, it’s got all the problems of a bookmarked webpage, e.g.:
– cannot provide the graphs from the website (since these are all Flash-based)
– cannot permanently remember account info (Apple’s safari automatically deletes this for websites periodically)
– requires full reload every time you access it, rather than merely downloading the “changed” data
– cannot cache the last-read data – requires a live internet connection to view stats (again, safari deletes the cache often, out of your control)
– cannot provide historic data beyond the few simple queries that the website already supports
- …etc

It’s definitely pretty, but (having used it) it’s not very useful. In the end, I actually found the main website version more useful – even on the iPhone!

I’m afraid I’ve deleted the emails that announced this, otherwise I’d copy/paste them here.

Off the top of my head, this year, I received:
– November: reminders of Alumni discount end
– December: reminders of early-bird discount end … extension of alumni discount … bonus discont code for non-alumni
– January: extension of early-bird discount … extension of bonus discount code … and a second bonus discount code when the first one finally stopped

Of those, most of them are “normal”, they happen every year. I do not remember the “new year’s discounts” from previous years. Im sorry if I’ve misunderstood, or misremembered.

Thanks for the corrections. I should have searched for some official stats when writing the post – I’m sorry.

However, at the same time, those figures sound very very different from the direct experiences of myself and everyone I talked to during the conference.

I’m not disagreeing with your figures, but I wonder if we can find an explanation for the discrepancy.

Interestingly, over the years, I’ve had CMP / TS staff quote (with absolute sincerity) wildly divergent figures for the same year. e.g. *for the same year* figures as divergent as “34,000″ and “22,000″, or “24,000″ and “15,000″. I believe this is due to different people counting “attendees” differently – and that everyone was correct.

So, I wonder if the overall figure for 2009 was almost level, but the figure for the core conference was down a lot, and the figure for the expo was up a lot?

My reference points:
– number of people inside lecture rooms
– number of people in primary meeting places (the W hotel, etc)
– number of people at parties (I go to approx 10 parties each year, so a fairly broad sample)
– named people I know who usually go to GDC but aren’t there that year
– number of people on the expo floor

For the past few years, I’ve gone to all 5 days of the conference.

At first, I thought 2009 was the same as 2008, despite a lot of my colleagues claiming that it was very quiet. I looked around and realised that they were right – major meeting places that were usually stnading room only were half empty. Then we got to day 3 (when the main conference starts), and the number of attendees didn’t seem to swell much at all, unlike most years.

The only thing that seemed as busy as normal, or more so, was the expo floor – but I haven’t spent much time on the expo floor for the past couple of years, so I’m only going by the impression I got from 20 minutes or so, and peeking in through the doors every time I walked past.

Also: ‘The marketing materials for the GDC this year have been unusually big on the discounts, with not just one but two public extensions of the discount deadlines.’ I don’t recall this, and I oversee the GDC team. I actually don’t remember any date extensions at all this year. We have tried to make passes more affordable to people by making lunches optional, as mentioned above. If that’s what you mean?

In general, I love you to bits, Adam, but you seem to just drift along crowbar-ing in facts to support the general gist of your rants, heh.

Sorry if I wasn’t clear – I meant that it was clearly the suppliers who were screwing the conference-organizers. “Cost price” of $40 is outrageously high.

But the price point on the food, you shouldn’t pick on actually. The Moscone has an exclusive caterer that all event organiser has to use as part of the use of the facility.
Exclusive Caterer. Offer. Demand.

GDC wasn’t making money on the food and that’s the very reason they move to the “bring your on food” policy. Otherwise, they would have stuck to the price and the margin.

As a sidenote, the GFG was a great event with a really good selection of speakers – mainly because they invited people they wanted to hear rather than opened for submissions.

The guy from ELSPA was Mike Rawlinson

and “Dawn” was Dawn Hallybone, a teacher and strong advocate of VG-based learning in classrooms.

Reasonably sure that the “Shadow Culture Minister” to whom you refer is Ed Vaizey.

Other than that, top notch job, very grateful for the resource to refer back to (my own notes from Monday don’t hold a candle to yours!)

Good point; although I wasn’t explicit, I was mainly thinking about commercial events.

However, most of the non commercial ones are run along the same lines.

I’ve also noticed that there are always special case exceptions, eg for keynote speakers (sometimes) and special speakers from minority attendee groups (eg westerners at Asian conferences and vice versa) – ie people who wouldn’t come at all otherwise.

Personally, i would prefer fewer conferences, higher quality.

But then again … With GDC being charged $40 for $5 of food in San Francisco each day (as revealed by this years “buy your own food at cost price” option) … Its clear that there’s a lot of flaws in the ecosystem of running conferences.

Anyone making a margin on the event is not paying. The reason is obvious and doesn’t bother me that much anymore.

There’s plenty I could usefully speak on, but I’ve done nothing new in games since last year, so why bother?

Really, I probably won’t be at GDC again until / unless the industry grows up and starts reimbursing speakers as standard. It’s sad and pathetic that no conference in the industry pays their speakers costs, let alone pays them for their time for speaking.

It’s possible that I may find myself at a large corporate again in the future who has the money and good enough reason to pay for me to travel to GDC, but otherwise I think not…

Do not mind me as I am just off to pirate one of your games seeing as you think it is OK; I hope the RIAA or the BPI tracks your ip and brings you to court.
Shame on you.

No, I hadn’t – but thanks for that. It’s an interesting game, and quite fun.

But … it’s not (IMHO) a Twitter game.

I’ve been plotting a real Twitter game recently with a friend, and I’ve been very disappointed by waht’s out there. A lot of it is just excuses for spam, and even the “quality” stuff like fallenlondon is really only using Twitter as a spam-channel, not as part of the game – which I think is sad.

Have you seen any data on market penetration for Unity’s plugin? After all, Daniel James @ Three Rings went away from Java and towards Flash because of the loss of users due to “click to install”… a very important factor for any browser game.

I have reiterated on your article at our development-blog at coobico.com — I am making the point that your thoughts actually apply to *every* serious browser-game: with the advent of new browser-plug-ins like Unity and others, the bar for good-looking browser-game-graphics is raised dramatically. The more people playing such 3D-games, or using services like Gaikai and OnLive during he next years, the higher the expectation will be how a “good-looking” browser-game should look like.

Cheers,
Lutz Winter

We felt that TR was by design a PvE game, and should have stayed that way despite it’s desire to attract a larger player base and more revenue. Design and development on end-game content versus PvP instances would have been more successful, in our opinion, in maintaining and attracting players. It’s similar in many respects to writing an essay about a particular point – if you try to include too many points in your discussion, you lose focus and dilute the potency of the argument. My wife and I therefore concluded that TR suffered primarily from an identity crisis trying to be too much to too many people.

Overall, we felt TR was a good game with great potential, and were very disappointed to see it end. While there were certainly other contributing factors to this besides the identity crisis I outlined above (e.g. R. Garriott, corporate politics, etc.), maybe this humble perspective from a couple of loyal players might be remembered when design and development decisions are made in future MMOs.

P.S. We thank everyone who worked on Tabula Rasa and allowed us to experience the journey with you, even if only briefly.

Have you looked at http://www.fallenlondon.com? First “Twitter game” / pure HTML game I’ve played for more than 30 seconds or so. It’s nice, and it uses the medium well IMO.