itsamoose

I know very little about how voicework goes into games, so this might seem stupid, but what do they mean by residuals? I could understand a profit sharing agreement, which requires the game make it's money back at least, but in some cases the 2 million sale mark could mean the voice actors get some form of royalty payments when the developers don't. Also how do they plan to track the sales count? From what I gather this information is typically given voluntarily if at all. I'd be interested in knowing how they hope to police this arrangement (assuming it goes through) given how games are constructed. It's easy to know if ABC airs a particular episode of a show, but it's pretty difficult to make this comparison to games or even get the data to make such a comparison.

This article focuses on Putin, but I imagine this kind of thing will be happening just about everywhere. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/09/russia-putin-revolutionizing-information-warfare/379880/

Maybe I've had a unique experience with that word. I grew up on Cape Cod in Massachusetts, where at first everyone called them freedom fries (even the school cafeteria) and then lived in Florida where I saw the term more often than not even until I left in March. It may have fallen out of favor at the moment, but I still see it every now and then. Anyway, a not insignificant number of people still haven't forgiven France for making essentially the correct decision 12 years ago.

Clyde and Mangela are right to point out the legal issues, but for the most part I think the American citizen angle comes from a nationalistic attitude. In US politics you almost always hear a topic discussed regarding killing or crime and punishment, then at some point the question changes to "well what if X happened to an American citizen" as though it were an entirely different issue, or bound by a different moral code. We spied on Angela Merkel for no good reason and no one in the US seemed to give a shit because they found out that the government is also collecting metadata about their activities. Honestly I think part of it comes from WW2, where some people still think of European countries based on their roles in the war and use that to justify their opinions. For example, we call french fries freedom fries now because France vetoed our UN security council resolution to invade Iraq in 2003 despite the fact that most Americans disagree with the war, or at least acknowledge it's folly. I don't know if it's any different elsewhere, but it's probably louder here. Also I can't say for certain if most Americans believe this kind of thing, but the ones who get elected seem to, which is a whole other topic in itself.

The simplest thing would be to pick a conversation system from a game you like and just try to make a copy of it. That should give you an idea of what needs to be done. Whatever you decide you'll likely need - a conversation section class that contains the line, audio file, speaker, localized text, etc - a way of transitioning between conversation sections via input or however you like - some way of displaying the information via a menu panel, which can be used to start and end conversations Attached are some images of a basic conversation system I wrote, which just cycles through conversation sections from the start to the end of the array. The first image is the inspector and what the classes look like, and the second is the in game result.

I played the raid last night and made it to golgoroth, while the team was in the 280s in light. It's definitely doable up to that point, but I can't speak for beyond since it was late and we kept messing up golgoroth's gaze mechanic. The one theme with the new raid seems to be that there is very little room for error, where even one person going down can lead to a wipe. I'd say don't bother trying the raid until you've finished most of the quests since those seem to give you enough gear to be competitive.

I would say racism is a type of "fear of the other", not necessarily something that intersects with it. There is a great article I can't find at the moment, which basically describes the fear of the other as a coalescing of a person's fears such that they target a group as their cause. For example we are afraid of death, loss of employment, disease, injury, loss of social status, etc, and rather than go through the process of handling these fears individually we are more likely to see these fears as a sundering of the self by the other. Rather than admit we are afraid of something we can't necessarily combat we blame someone or something. History is full of this from post civil war America blaming the newly freed slaves for their problems to the holocaust to islamophobia today.In relation to the whole reverse racism thing, I think this is really just a construct used to justify unjustifiable actions. The kid was accused of bringing a bomb to school, but the school wasn't evacuated, bomb squad wasn't called, the " bomb" wasn't separated from people, and it rode back to the station in the car with the officers. When your actions aren't justifiable on their own you look to other, purposefully nebulous but seemingly unique concepts to justify them. Reverse racism or reverse discrimination sound like a real, separate thing to anyone who doesn't really want to recognize the meaning of those words. You can also see this with religious groups and same sex marriage, where they essentially contend that taking away their ability to discriminate is discrimination.

So what is caucasian heritage, exactly? This whole section got me thinking about a friend of mine from college. He is from Spain, and what most people would consider to be a person of color, but he told me that he and people from his country consider themselves caucasian. Another friend most would consider black based on his appearance, considers himself latino, and another who is white considers himself black (his father is black). As mangela mentioned, for some reason that I've never been able to fully understand, there is often a distinction made between being Jewish and White. What I find insidious about this is that many of the opinions are coming from the viewpoint that whatever heritage a particular group selects from an individual must be their heritage, regardless of that individual's circumstances. I think the transgender comparison is apt in this regard, in that it is a conclusion arrived at by the individual regardless of what the group determines their gender to be, but ultimately making this comparison misses the point. Cultural identities are the product of a particular understanding of a particular part of history at a particular time in history as Gormongous described. Though practically speaking, the assumed rigidity of these identities takes the place of considering the individual's circumstances, and seems to suggest there is one "correct" understanding of heritage whose conclusions are unassailable. Given this, instead of making hard and fast rules one way or the other, shouldn't we consider the malleability of these categorizations? This is, I believe, where the problem lies. The french person mentioned above transforming his identity into a southerner seems fine, but Rachel Dolezal assuming an identity as a means of redressing some perceived wrong at the expense of others isn't. I don't think it's acceptable to say this practice is absolutely wrong or right, but you have to consider the situation in which it occurred, and what the results of that are.

If you're looking for specifically C# tutorials, there are a few channels on youtube you can check out I've found helpful. One guy in particular went through a step by step implementation of his own , implementing all the methods you would find in the standard C# class. Edit: I should note however, in order to follow along in that video you'll at least need to have an understanding of generics and arrays, which he has covering.

I picked this up last night after quitting the game for a bit, and I am right back in. The new heroic strike playlist is fantastic--the strikes have a lot of variation and more importantly they aren't a guaranteed win. The loot changes with infusion are such a great addition, the dreadnaught has a lot more going on, really just improvements across the board. The new content seems to have an incredible emphasis on movement, particularly with the boss fights, and the taken's combination of enemies makes the game much more dynamic. Really only some minor complaints so far, but I don't think they're really worth mentioning. If you're on the fence about the expansion but liked the promise of year one, go ahead and pick it up.

As I understand it the criticism isn't that microagressions don't exist, but that the response to them isn't proportional, and they are unfairly levied. Like the example in the article of the student being upset at a particular word being used, and then proceed to voice her grievance in the most visible place that would hear it. The criticism I have of it personally is that it tends to justify aggressive responses based on the perception of another's aggression, which seems to be exacerbated by the conditions present on a college campus (or at least all the articles about it would seem to think so). One person says something that is perceived as aggressive, or perhaps is aggressive, and this leads to a cycle where each person is responding as they would to an aggressor rather than treating the situation like what it is--a miscommunication. Edit: It's worth pointing out my read on this comes from a book that had a profound effect on me I read in college, which has since spawned the school of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy. The first half of the book is an exhaustive breakdown of how and where communication fails, with one particular example being an argument between a husband and wife. The argument begins with a particular communication being filtered through a perception, then a response being given to the perception, and then a response to the response based on a perception, etc. I think the practical elements of how microaggressions are treated, either by the institutions or people themselves, are basically having this kind of an argument.

Could you elaborate on this? It sounds like you are responding to the image accompanying the article, which to me seems was placed there as a comment on how "duels" are fought in the modern sense. She spends a good portion of the article making the point that previously remarks such as these would lead to outbursts of violence, and nowadays tend to spawn long protracted arguments about nothing. From my reading it didn't seem she was advocating violence, just describing her views on how the expression of that violence has changed. Namely that it is no longer desirable to be the aggressor, or the winner of the duel so to speak, but the one who is reacting to an aggressor. Like some of the other articles posted in relation to this topic, the complaint seems to be that microagressions are treated like some kind of argumentative holy grail, and it's virtually impossible to make the distinction between what speech is aggressive vs. what is unintentional, therefore everything can fairly be labeled aggressive. If I had to guess the thesis of the article seems to be that it's one thing to want to make the world more emphatic, but when the expression of that empathy leads to a stifling of a particular opinion, is empathy really being enhanced?

I finally got a chance to check out the version 2 changes, and I'm really impressed so far. Some of the new exotic perks on weapons and armor seem like they will allow for much more varied play styles or spawn new ones that weren't available before.

Gamergate has gotten some support from conservative sites like Breitbart (the conservative Huffington post basically) but the articles I come across there are more or less in the same vein as all their liberals are ruining the world type articles. It seems to me like gamergate has persisted long enough to where they have become a useful tool for anyone who wants to take a jab at progressives, and these pedophile accusations serve that narrative nicely. There is a tendency to cast the opposition not just as wrong, or even amoral but entirely anti-moral or evil.

I'd be very skeptical of any claims that the world is less violent, namely due to the lack of accurate information and the re-labelling of what is violence. Even so, I don't think the problems of the world are necessarily the result of violence so much as they are a sundering of free expression, which leads to violence. Protest movements are regularly moved to places where they won't be as noticeable (free speech zones in the US for example) and propaganda is now virtually indistinguishable from the things it emulates. Things we used to see as clear evidence of corruption, or as undesirable are now either tolerated or moralized. Things people used to be jailed for have been codified in law, with no real push back because they are buried under a mountain of bullshit or don't have a face to them that people can recognize. The NFL and FIFA are notoriously shitty organizations, but people like the sports so they are tolerated. I can't speak for other countries but in the US there has been a large, concerted effort to rewrite history that focuses on downplaying everything from slavery to the Native American genocide. We buy this nonsense on some nebulous claim that it furthers our interests or makes us more secure, but never ask for proof of these claims. Ultimately the article may prove out in the end, but what concerns me far more than anything else is that, undeniably, willful ignorance is at an all time high. Edit: As an example of this, I came across this quote some time ago that I think bears repeating. http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/225444-more-girls-were-killed-in-the-last-50-years-precisely

I had very much the same reaction to the article, as I have with almost all of Zizek's works. He quite elegantly describes the problem of advocating for progressive change while at the same time subscribing to the systems that prevent it. If you have the time I highly recommend reading Welcome to the desert of the real, and checking out the Pervert's Guide to Ideology (currently on Netflix). In recent years, given all that has been going on in the world, I have found myself believing more and more in the urgent need for all of humanity to start not just thinking about policy, but of how to redesign our societies. I don't know if the conditions of the world are significantly different today than they were previously, or we are simply more aware, but either way those conditions are not something we can simply continue to ignore or fail to foresee.

Slavoj Zizek is still one of the greatest minds in the world today. Most of the article he spends talking about something I think we've long suspected--that the conditions of the middle East today aren't an aberration so much as they are the new normal. http://inthesetimes.com/article/18385/slavoj-zizek-european-refugee-crisis-and-global-capitalism

I have some less than flattering thoughts on this regarding Nintendo's intentions, but to be honest I can't quite decide what they hope to get out of the Creator's Program requirement. Do they want to control their content? While I get the desire here, I don't see what having this control gains them. Is it just about the money? From what I understand youtube pays out something like $25 USD for every 1k views, so the juice just doesn't seem worth the squeeze here. I get the sense that Nintendo is probably the only company that could get away with something like this as the occupy a pretty unique space in games, but I don't see what all this effort gets them besides animosity and less coverage of their games. I feel like there is a major piece of the story that Nintendo just isn't sharing with the rest of us that makes this all make sense.

To some extent I think so. I can't speak definitively for anyone but myself, but comparing our PS4 release, we sold around 800 units on the back of a lot of press coverage and what not over the course of about a month. Then basically nothing for a time (1-3 copies a day), and then 1400 during a 2 day sale on PS4. In terms of platforms, what just about everyone told us has come true, in about week on steam we've sold about the same as we did in over 4 months on PS4. I would add that I think something about the $5 price point will convince people to purchase who otherwise never would have, so a sale isn't necessarily a silver bullet. Interestingly on our steam page we have about 3x as many people wish listing the game than purchasing it, which is another feature Xbox and PS4 need to adapt.

This might be the result of them not having any sales, or pushing those sales when they happen, or being a part of any bundles as well as the above mentioned points. For example our game released about a week and a half ago, and we did a 40% off sale for the first week. During that period we never sold fewer than 200 copies in a day, and each day since we haven't sold more than 50. I don't know if it's the actual price point, or the idea that people are just more likely to buy something when they see a sales tag, but other devs I've spoken to have seen similar results.

I feel like this (article below) shouldn't surprise me given the almost fetishistic way pro life politicians go out of their way to diminish abortion rights. I got into a bit of an argument with a religious friend of mine who was even rationalizing the further restrictions currently being placed on abortion terms, based on a study that fetuses can be essentially placed on life support at 20 or 22 weeks and survive. Frustratingly, And predictably, enough none of the bills placing further limitations on abortion terms have any provisions related to ensuring hospitals have the necessary equipment to actually have such a life support system. http://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/8085692

Coheed and Cambria is the only band that listening to makes me want to go over and listen to all their work again. A note about the video, there are some strobe effects if that kind of thing affects you at all.

If anything I support the licensing fee idea, though I don't think in general going after streamers' revenue is worth the time. Aside from the legality of the matter, there isn't really a reward there and other personalities are less likely to cover your game if it means they make less on it. Yeah it probably sucks for someone who sees very few sales and tons of play throughs on YouTube, but the developer has to take responsibility for this. When you sell any kind of art the onus is on you to understand the environment you are selling into, and either find a way to make the most of that or simply make peace with that reality.

I would imagine so, but it's hard to say. Class B stock is a weird phenomenon, mainly because it often sounds like a secondary preferred stock but can sometimes provide a greater influence on voting than class A stock. So 20% sounds like a lot, but without knowing the remaining ownership breakdown and voting rights it provides could mean anything from him having effectively 1/5th the voting power to next to nothing. It's possible that he could end up being a tiebreaker in the decision making process in the future, which probably scares the shit out of Activision.

On the twitch side of things, for those who take the position devs should ask for a cut of the streamer's ad revenue, should they also get a cut of the streamer's tips?