14 replies to this topic

[rouncer]

i just worked out how pathetic it is to think your intelligent for making video games, or anything else.
any idiot can do it its so patheticly easy, i think your an idiot if you think a retard cant do it.
so now i feel to continue would just be for the love of the art of it, and no respect for any skill involved whatsoever.
and why the hell is devmaster dieing, when they updated it, everyone stopped posting, and it sucks.

[Tottel]

And have you ever made a video game?

[fireside]

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i just worked out how pathetic it is to think your intelligent for making video games, or anything else.

It's easier to write a game than ever, but it's still hard to write a good game. And it's still hard to write any kind of game if you include the artwork, design, and programming. Most people have skills, but not the right combination.

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and why the hell is devmaster dieing, when they updated it, everyone stopped posting, and it sucks.

It's game sites all over. I'm not sure what the deal is, but it doesn't have anything to do with the redesign. I don't know if it's late winter/early spring blues or what, but I don't feel like working on them lately. I think I just like playing with the engines and modelers more than writing games to be honest. I started learning Sketchup when I'm not very good at Blender. It's just something different to play around with. I think people that are really serious don't post that much. They're too busy. If you're serious, you have a direct goal and you are working on it constantly, partly for the money. I'm pretty sure the vast majority find out how much work it is and move on. They start out thinking they're going to make this huge MMO and when they find out they can only make a little indy game, they go back to playing MMO's. Maybe they all figured it out, now, because you don't see many anymore.

[mrjones]

rouncer, it's not as easy to make a full game. I am yet to see an idiot who has successfully made one. There has always been a limited percentage of people who can program or even carry on a task as complex as making a game long enough to make one. Maybe I am an idiot to think that, but still seems to be so. I am not saying that making "standard" games hasn't become easier. It has and a lot of work has been put into engines to make things simpler, but making a unique game is still as difficult as ever.

Just throwing a bunch of not necessarily strongly correlated ideas here to make my point: There are infinite worlds of strange physics uncovered. Not just amalgams of usual 3d-gravity-collision. I mean games one can't have a ready-made engine for. And even with ready-made engines skill matters a lot. Being able to organize a world into something interesting is not a simple task. Making pre-scripted NPCs may be easy, but how about making not pre-scripted NPCs? Plenty of unsolved problems there.

As to the second point I think that devmaster dying has plenty to do with redesign. Before, if I remember correctly, I could see dates of latest posts etc directly at devmaster.net. I don't even know why these seem important, but now these are hidden away and it bothers me. Before, there were links to interesting articles (if my memory doesn't cheat) - now there is a slider with huge images taking most of the screen. Pretty, but hides interesting information. Same goes for menu - all links that made devmaster interesting are hidden under DevDB. Sorry, maybe my memory cheats again, but I think these used to be visible immediately? Bottom line here: now devmaster looks like any other of the 1000 sites that try hard to be pretty, but at least on first glance seem to not contain interesting information. It gives sort of corporate vibe. Might just be me, but that's why I barely visit this place any more. Not that I was ever an active poster, but I did lurk quite regularly until the redesign.

[fireside]

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As to the second point I think that devmaster dying has plenty to do with redesign.

I have to admit, there are a few things they did that make no sense at all to me, like going to recent topics instead of recent updates. That's just almost purposely forcing people to look around for what people are talking about it. A lot of time I've completely missed conversations going on with older topics. Dropping image of the day was kind of dumb also. It didn't get used that much, but it was a reason to check the site more often for me, since I'm into modeling, etc. Now I hardly bother with the front page anymore, and I think the forum is kind of cumbersome in a lot of ways for telling what's new.
I'm kind of changing the way I feel about games though. They don't seem like they are as important anymore. It's one more game coming out. One more platformer, shooter, rpg, whatever. It's probably mainly that winter is almost over and I need something else to do for a while.

[Reedbeta]

fireside, do you use the "VIew New Content" button in the upper-right corner of the forum pages? That should be displaying all updates to threads since the last time you visited, just like the "new posts" button used to in the old design.

[fireside]

No, I didn't see that. That does improve things a bit.

[rouncer]

i kinda worked out i stopped wanting to learn, i just got turned off it.
i dont want to be smart, and i actually think programmers are fuckwits, its just what i think.

[.oisyn]

fireside, on 13 March 2012 - 07:53 AM, said:

No, I didn't see that. That does improve things a bit.

It improves things A LOT^*. I absolutely hated the "new posts" feature of the old forum software, because it filtered threads that you have already read. And the "today's posts" only shows threads from that day. The "view new content" is how I'd like to browse forums - just a list of aggregated threads of all subforums, sorted by last post date. You can even filter by forum

[Dia]

The goal of the site redesign was mainly geared towards allowing more community involvement. For example, you can now directly submit articles to the site. If you own an entry in DevDB, you can now edit it directly without having to go through the moderation process, etc. There's still a long way to go, but I believe it's a step in the right direction.

However, I do have to admit that there's somewhat a disconnect between the forums and the rest of the site. The forums seems to be operating as an independent part of the site. Since community interaction and discussion seems to be such an integral part of Devmaster, I'm starting to believe that the front page should just be a user-ranked list of interesting forum discussions/questions (based on user votes) as well as user-submitted news links. In this model, the main entry point to the site becomes devmaster.net as opposed to devmaster.net/forums. Essentially, it's similar to the reddit + Stackoverflow model: an amalgamation of discussions topics + articles + news links + Q/A, all sorted by user votes.

[Reedbeta]

I think that's definitely a good idea to explore. One thing I've noticed is that I typically use the "View New Content" button to see the latest forum posts, but it doesn't show me anything about new articles/newsposts, or even comments on articles, so I tend to miss those parts of the site.

[tyree]

to rouncer a couple of things in relation to games have become easier. take sculpting anyone can make whatever they want in a sculpting program. without much skill, but in a modeling program. it takes a little more knowledge. anyone can make a car game or a 1st person shooter. but a 3d fighting game isnt so simple or an adventure game, not so simple. and you can always do something smart in the process of making a game.

you can create a new technique or process in your 3d program or in your engine. there are a lot of things, you can do, in the process that can seperate you. so that your game isnt something that anyone could do. if you have a unique process, you may end up with a unique game. and not just anybody can do that

[Stainless]

When Microsoft exploded onto the world, a seed change in computer games started.

Prior to Microsoft, a games programmer was trying to get a gallon from a pint pot. We had a floppy disc, or a cassette tape onto which all the game had to fit. We had a slow processor, a few K of ram, rarely had any sound hardware, rarely had any graphics hardware, and always worked in machine code.

Then Microsoft changed the environment, now we have a whole generation of people who think nothing of having huge textures, 44KHz sound, polygon counts in the millions because desktop machines have got more powerful, with more memory, graphics hardware, dsp's, etc. etc. etc.

But the world has changed yet again. The arrival of mobile devices as a mass market, the use of televisions and set top boxes as gaming machines, the explosion of new platforms that is happening at the moment brings a new challenge.

Now a whole sector has opened up where we don't have a couple of gig of ram, we don't have a DVD to store the game on, we don't have a 16 core CPU with 2 million line GPU's

You want a real challenge? Start working in this market.

Try and get Mass Effect 3 onto a mobile phone as a 10 meg download.

Try and get Modern Warfare III ported, or any modern AAA game working.

Now that's what's going to sort out the quiche eaters from the hackers.

[fireside]

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i kinda worked out i stopped wanting to learn, i just got turned off it.
i dont want to be smart, and i actually think programmers are fuckwits, its just what i think.

That's a growth stage. At some point you realize that you are attaching too much importance to things that aren't very important, so you tend to wander aimlessly, wondering what you should do with your remaining years. You'll then have an epiphany and go back to what you were doing, but with a different view of life.

[.oisyn]

Awww our little boy rouncer is growing up