itsamoose

Well in this case, you're basically asking developers to make less money on their game--I don't see Microsoft or Sony willing to take less of a cut. Part of the reason this isn't the case are the costs associated with digital games (patches, licensing, etc), at least on consoles anyway. It may not seem like it, but it is incredibly difficult to make money on a game, and reducing the price because there isn't a physical medium makes those margins even smaller. On the other hand, keeping the prices the same allows you to more easily share profits with the development team, get physical retailers to participate in your marketing, and has some ancillary benefits. This probably isn't a popular opinion, but I don't see the need to artificially lower a game's price, particularly since that is what lead to the whole race to the bottom we see on mobile. In fact I'd go as far as to say that the margins on digital sales are what have kept game prices as low as they are.

For me it's more that most of my time is spent looking for gear and materials to get to level 34. I get wanting to play it for the fun of it, I was thinking more along the lines of whether or not it is worth running daily bounties and looking for better loot. I'm still at the point where I'm grinding loot so I can do the highest level stuff with some friends, and at this point it seems like for someone in my position it's better to just wait a bit.

I think the argument here is that you can't "lose" it, for example I lost the second disc in ME2 halfway through playing it. Also you don't have to worry about a digital copy getting scratched, and finally the whole retail space thing for physical copies. I would imagine the reason digital games don't go down in price is because at some point they become the only way to find the game, and companies just don't see a reason to lower the price on a game that probably isn't a real money maker for them anymore. Though nowadays basically all online stores have sales, which seem to be the digital version of a price markdown.

Personally I wouldn't consider AAA games to be $60 USD. DLC is often planned as part of, or even before the main game is designed, and often times this is released pretty close to launch. I think that of game prices had increased in the last 25 years this wouldn't be the case, but at the moment it seems to be the model. What really frustrates me are mobile game prices, where people will give your game a low rating for no other reason than you had the gall to charge $5 for it. The bottom is also starting to fall out on indie game prices, or perhaps more studios are transitioning into mid size studios. Ultimately I hate this. Movies are all of a pretty standard size, as are music albums, or they at least scale appropriately. Games can vary to such a degree that I think the whole idea of a standard price doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I wish games were priced more like books or art, where there isn't a need to design your game for a particular price point.

This is the part that I'm not clear on. The updates mention the old content is going to be brought into the taken king mold, plus the additional cutscenes and voice acting they're adding. I played destiny a bit at launch, then took a break from it until about a month ago and have enjoyed the game much more as a result. My friends that play with me seem to be of the opinion that I had a better experience with the game having come in later once the progression was less frustrating. I wonder if it's worth doing the same thing again with TTK, or possibly even tossing all my exotics in the vault and starting over. Right now I've got a fatebringer and some other guns I'm levelling up, but with these changes it seems like I'm better off just waiting for a bit.

So with all the changes coming with the taken king, is there any point to continuing to run all the weekly stuff anymore? I got back into destiny recently and have managed to get a bunch of cool gear, but from what I understand this will all get essentially set back to zero.

Yemen has been a mess for years, but only recently seems to be spilling over the borders. I haven't kept up with it as much as I should have, but for something like a decade now the US has been conducting airstrikes in northern Yemen with the consent of the ... legitimate? Government. I've done some reading on it recently, but it's hard to get a sense of what the situation on the ground is like. In places like Syria/Iraq and Afghanistan there are distinct regions where the conclict takes place, but in Yemen, where the fighting happens seems to be spread out all over the country.

I only messed around with it a bit, but StarCraft 2 has a pretty powerful level editor. Calling it a level editor might even be an understatement, people have used it to create third person games and all kinds of crazy stuff. Also Dragon Age Origins released their toolset way back when, and from what I understand has a pretty active mod community to this day. The best place to look is on steam, basically anything that supports steam workshop. By the way, are you looking for something more for creating Scenarios with a set of mechanics or something closer to a game engine where you can define the mechanics?

I appeared on a podcast with the artist I worked with talking about our game and what it is like to develop games in Unity. The site is generally a pretty good resource for anything Unity related, as well as some general game development stuff. http://u3dnews.com/hang-out-with-lifespark-rack-n-ruin-developers-tyler-hunter-and-micahel-leone/

I came across this article today, and it got me thinking-- what are some of the opinions of the US around the world? I tend to hear arguments in both directions, but these are generally made for the purpose of supporting some foreign policy position. I get easily frustrated by the way the US interacts with countries around the world, mainly in that we provide money in exchange for social change that never comes, or construction projects that never start, and more often than not end up lining the pockets of dictators. So thumbs around the world, what do y'all think of us? https://news.vice.com/article/kenyan-cartoonists-and-media-are-questioning-obamas-visit-to-africa

you should be able to disable rotation setting for a few frames to get around that, though that will likely have gameplay implications you may not want. It's hard to say what the issue is without being familiar with your input and movement logic, but I've had similar issues that could be fixed by adjusting the parenting hierarchy. Usually adding a dummy parent on top of the animation that contains all the gameplay relevant code on it will fix things like that, though making the character move based on animations is a bit trickier. Essentially the dummy parent becomes your character and the art just a representation of it's movement, as opposed to the animation driving the movement. I'd try throwing a print statement into the console that shows the direction of the characters' movement throughout the course of the animation and see if you can pick up any anomalies.

How are you handling movement for the character? Based on that bug I would guess it's some kind of root motion controller interfering with the directionality of the movement. What does the object hierarchy look like?

I played a ton of Mass Effect spending most of my time trying to climb near vertical cliffs and do jumps with the Mako. My favorite thing was to find packs of guys and sideswipe them. Didn't work so well on the thresher maw though.

I have a friend who insists uber is pronounced "uh-brr" instead of "oo-ber". Drives me nuts. That is all.

I agree this is shitty, and generally speaking game personalities aren't even the worst offenders (fashion bloggers being paid for instagram photos and such). I think TB tends to think of himself as either a critic or a commentator, but then does this weird turn (which is unique to him as far as I know) where he refuses to admit what he does has any impact on the world at large. The distance he places between himself and the things he covers is probably a good thing, it's more the distance he places between himself and what he does that I find odd. He has one of the biggest channels on youtube, not just considering gaming channels, but can't seem to admit he has any influence he doesn't want to have. He's fine talking about how influential youtubers are, but doesn't seem to extend this observation to his own work. I don't know exactly what my point is here, but it's fucking weird.

I think that snarky field of view comment a while back pretty much nails TB. He isn't malicious and doesn't seem to have bad intentions, he just doesn't think through what he is doing. He sees himself as an observer rather than a participant, and in his mind should be removed from any criticism and detests being involved other than to provide some commentary. Contrast him with people like Angry Joe, who has a following he addresses directly, and I think TB ends up being a somewhat unique beast on youtube. Sure he's obnoxious, but I don't think I could name 5 youtube personalities who aren't. When he does something like this, it seems as though his intent is to throw something out into the community and see what happens, or perhaps provide some perspective on the matter without himself getting involved. I just don't know how you go about explaining to someone like that who simply refuses to see themselves as part of something they created.

I caught the Reluctant Fundamentalist last night on netflix. It follows the story of a Pakistani guy who comes to the US to work as a financial analyst before 9/11 and what happened to him afterward. It was a fantastic movie--I I highly recommend checking it out. I don't want to say too much more because the movie generally goes to places and covers things you wouldn't expect, as well as some you would.

"This group is a purely objective list and nothing more. It passes no judgments and expresses no opinions." Aside from the opinion that games locked at 30 FPS should be marked and are in need of policing. Once again he vindicates the principle and ignores the action. Not to belabor the point here, but I just don't see how a guy who spends his days evaluating games based on their implementation doesn't apply the same rubric to his own actions.

I think what frustrates me about the whole situation is that there are good reasons to lock your game's framerate at 30, and not all of them performance related. Not to mention rendering rate vs. game update rate being two different things in some cases. For whatever reason TB saw fit to declare bad, or somehow a bug needing to be fixed, what is effectively a game dev tactic for no other reason than it offends his sensibilities.

He created a situation where people would be motivated to request, or what happened (as previously with TB), threaten developers to include this feature. He pointed out all the games that do something he didn't like, sure his intention was to figure out ways around that thing, but he's been down this road before. He should have known what would happen, because it has happened before. He gets people fired up about something with a lot of high minded language and then is seemingly surprised when it all goes wrong. He puts out a video advertising the curation on his youtube page (2 million subscribers), his primary and largest audience, and released the response to what happened on soundcloud (23k followers), twitter (450k followers) and the steam group (63,000 members). Assuming for a moment that every one of those followers in all cases were made aware of each instance, and assuming zero overlap between soundcloud, twitter, and steam, more than 3x as many people were made aware of the curation page than the response to what happened after. Those numbers certainly aren't exact, but look at the sizes of the audience he was speaking to in each instance. This is the equivalent of a news source doing a 20 minute long TV segment on something that later turns out to be false, and printing a retraction in their blog somewhere. The guns comment was meant to be read as TB setting up the environment for something horrible to happen, then refusing to take responsibility when it does. Or as he more often does, vindicates the principle of what he was doing and ignores the specifics.

TB seems to routinely do this kind of thing. He creates the environment for it to happen, and when it inevitably does he puts out a statement about how his actions were co-opted or misunderstood. I mean the name alone is confrontational, he could have changed it. Alternatively, instead of highlighting games that don't live up to his expectations he could have highlighted ones that do. Instead he continues to foster negativity, it then gets away from him, and he puts out an indignant and finger pointing statement that peripherally acknowledges the problem but spends most of the time vindicating himself.I just don't buy the sincerity of his statements and warnings. He is handing out guns and telling everyone not to shoot them. His initial action is always public, where the most eyes can see it, and the response is always on a lower traffic place.

I feel like at this stage the US is never not going to be active in [insert middle eastern country here]. The whole situation is just so god damned weird, particularly considering the US's relationship with middle eastern and african countries. During the Iraq war we worked with Kurdish forces, who just so happened to be affiliated with what the US government considered at the time, and still does, a terrorist group. We're forever trying to do this balancing act, placating one country while bombing another, and negotiating with another on behalf of the one we are bombing. Nelson Mandela was on the terrorist watch list until 2008, Narendra Modi (India's prime minister) is the only person on a watch list in an attempt to show muslim nations that we care about violence against muslims, We send aid to Afghanistan in the form of military equipment that then gets broken down and sold as parts to the very forces they were meant to fight, and the insanity goes on. We continue to arm one hand only to shoot the other, all while talking about how to create a lasting peace that no one's actions seem to indicate they actually want. In an attempt to create sustainable governments the only thing we seem to create are governments who are dependent on us to be sustainable. An army ranger friend told me once that the middle east is the only place in the world where the enemy of my enemy is my enemy, and I think this chart sums up how ridiculous and complicated the situation is.

Most likely due to a lack of needing to pass a cert process, and it didn't crash in some automated and cursory testing. In terms of testing a game, you generally have a lead platform which you do most of the testing on (maybe 75%) and then run the game on other platforms just to make sure you haven't created a crash bug.Also, somewhat related to this, I don't think the word "port" really describes a version of a game anymore (most stories about arkham knignt seem to use this language). In modern game engines the porting process is just making some platform specific changes to assets and code, and then going through the exact same build process as with your lead platform. The purpose of having a lead platform is to have a consistent basis to test against, and to create a control to evaluate performance.

What is your goal in coming up with this pitch? If it is to sell it, buzzwords might actually benefit you quite a bit, or the typical meets-meets-meets breakdown. Personally when working on a project I like to create a focus statement that describes the feel of the game. This should be a short phrase that describes the main focus of the project, which helps guide your development as well. For example Rock Band's Focus statement was "Rock Music World", and Mass Effect's was "Jack Bauer in Space". I think if you can nail that down you'll have an easier time coming up with a description. My advice would be to not focus on the specifics of the game, but rather try to paint it in broad strokes.

Syria I don't think is going to improve any time soon, it has become the mother of all proxy wars. In some cases the rebel groups are worse than Assad, and with so many countries in and around the conflict there is no hope of the UN getting involved other than to provide small amounts of aid. I've only followed Syria for about a year or so, but even in that time I haven't managed to get a grasp on what could be done to fix it. There only seems to be bad options, unless the world powers could agree to put their interests aside for a time, but I'm not going to hold my breath.