Categories
computer games games industry web 2.0

What Web 2.0 means for the games industry

“In reality, one size has never fit all, but when players didn’t have so many choices, they had to put up with it. Now they don’t. No longer can publishers rely on retailing strategies designed to make money by forcing players to buy what the publishers want them to buy, when and where the publishers want them to buy it. These strategies are aimed more at wooing retailers with slotting and promotion allowances than at wooing customers, and they just won’t fly anymore. In the future, retailing strategies are going to have to be like those of Amazon.com or the one-hour eyeglass shops, which are designed to sell the consumers what they want to buy. And they do it by making it easier, better, less cumbersome to do so.”

Categories
games design massively multiplayer networking system architecture

Entity Systems are the future of MMOG development – part 3

Also known as: Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!

(because I’m now deviating from the original schedule I outlined in Part 1; what the heck, it was only a rough agenda anyway…)

Questions, questions…

First of all, there’s a bunch of good questions that have been raised in response to the first two posts:

  • what data and methods are stored in the OOP implementation of an entity?
  • where does the data “live”?
  • how do you do object initialization?
  • what does the ES bring that cannot be accomplished with an AOP framework?
  • what’s the link between entity systems and SQL/Relational Databases? (OK, so that one’s my own question from last time)
  • what, exactly, is an entity?

Let’s start with that last one first.

Categories
conferences web 2.0

Nothing to see here, unless you care about culture?

Too busy to write at the moment (if I weren’t, I’d be working on followups to the entity systems posts).

So, in the meantime, go listen to the ever-brilliant Lawrence Lessig. I’ve just been listening to his 2006 talk on Free Culture. There are too many memorable, insightful, or funny elements for me to be able to sum it up; I’ll just say it’s one of my favourite LL talks amongst those I’ve seen.

“This is not about (quote) “piracy”. If I thought this fight was about your right to get access to Britney Spears music for free, I’d be on the other side, because I don’t think you should get access to Britney Spears music … at any price”

Categories
maintenance

Spam Karma 2 rocks

(just because it’s brilliant, and I wanted to say thank you)

Still using Akismet? Why?

You do know that Akismet rejects genuine posts, don’t you? Sure, it’s not its fault – spam filtering is hard.

But since Spam Karma is free, integrates easily with WordPress, and offers much safer filtering of spam, with multiple levels of fallback, isn’t it time to try an upgrade?

Categories
bitching

An example of how NOT to do software updates

I upgraded Firefox only a few days ago (I didn’t get a choice – it was set to autoupdate, and updated when I was halfway through doing an install on my new computer; it broke most of the plugins I was halfway through installing because the new version wasn’t backwards compatible) and now a new upgrade just appeared. I wondered what could necessitate such a sudden new upgrade, so I clicked on the “View more information about this update” link in the dialog box.

This took me to a page which said nothing other than:

“Stability Update:
This release corrects a problem that was found in the previous release, Firefox 2.0.0.10.”

WTF? How did that even seem to them to be a reasonable explanation? So, I sent them some feedback. Which will no doubt get filed in /dev/nul

Someone at firefox needs to reconsider the messages they’re sending out. It’s as bad as Microsoft in the bad old days of System Updates that had no reason beyond “critical”, or “this update is necessary to ensure your copy of windows continues to function correctly”.

Considering how dangerous updates are for the user (c.f. the fact that the last one nuked most of my plugins :(, and there’s no way to downgrade – for some reason, they don’t support that, and they don’t allow you to download old, working, versions, only the latest, even-if-its-broken, version), this approach to forcing them on users without explanation is both antagonistic and irresponsible.

/me is now forcing firefox to “never” upgrade, and will refuse to run any more upgrades of it.

I’m sure this is the complete opposite of what they intended, as my machines will now theoretically be vulnerable to every security flaw that comes along, but I think I’ll use MSIE 7 as my main browser, despite it’s many flaws, and stop using FF for everything except testing, rather than suffer more of this stupidity from the Mozilla Foundation. I never thought they’d manage to force me into the hands of Microsoft :).