Re: [Plib-devel] Re: KobayashiMaru & plib

[Wolfram K. <w_...@rz...>]

Steve wrote:

>Finally, sort your vertices in a vertex array so that the first one in the array
>is the most important, and the last is least significant.  

Yes. A friend of mine wrote a program using software-rendering a long
time ago that also sorted the polys according to importance. Each
frame, when the "time slice", for example 1/50 of a second, was up, it
simply stopped rendering. This is not like LOD, since the unimportant
polys were simply missing, there were holes. Still, it looked very
good, even if half of the polys were thrown away.
He did this only when the scene or the camera changed, and rendered
the complete models once everything was static. The program was
similar to PPE and he could draw the 3D-cursor without rendering the
rest (when drawing the 3d-cursor, he saved the pixels underneath).
Anyway, I guess THIS method (not LODs though) is slightly outdated.


>THere have been long threads on the LGDG (Linux Games Developer Group) about
>the lack of motivated artists who'll work for nothing.  

This could lead to a thread about which professionals might work for
nothing :-). I am not sure there are many besides programmers.

>Response from the
>artists strongly suggests that what few of them WILL help are not likely to
>jump into just any project - they are going to look for projects with experienced
>programmers with a proven track-record.

Of course. Artists can choose their project and they want to
participate in successful projects, so they will choose.

>If you are *REALLY*
>lucky, you may find an artist who will be interested in designing things like 
>spaceships or big-breasted aliens women with three heads and forked tongues...but
>they are unlikely to be interested in doing these kinds of silly little jobs.

Yes. Yesterday I was at an ex-artists (we call them technical
draftsman) of ours who now works free-lance (sometimes for us). He is
prepared to work on a free project if he has time. But "only" to learn
new stuff that will advance him and that the industry needs. The
biggest need in the game and film industries seems to be characters
(humans, monsters, animals etc), so if he would do sthg it would be
characters.
BTW, I was there to look at things in 3D Studio that we might use in
PPE, more on the PPE list.


>Let me tell you about Tux-A-Quest-for-Herring.
>
>It was the first *ever* 3D game for Linux.  

Yes - a very interesting thing. I would probably have contributed if I
had heard about it beforehand, but I was not in the linux community.

>I got:
>
>  150,000 people visiting the web site over the first 12 hours.
>   15,000 people downloaded it in the first 12 hours.
>    1,500 emails complaining/complimenting/thanking me for TuxAQFH
>          within the next week or so.
>   ...one year later...
>      150 people are subscribed to the Tux mailing lists.
>       15 people have *ever* offered to help with artwork/music/models.
>      1.5 (OK...2 actually) other people have actually contributed
>          *anything* to Tux *ever*. One piece of unusable music - and a
>          couple of unusable models.  No significant chunks of code at all.
>    *NONE* of those things has ever been useful enough to distribute with
>          the game.

Wow, that's even worse than I thought :-(. It seems many want to start
a new project (see all the modelers on Sourceforge) and few want to
contribute to the project of other people :-(.

>Remember - it took 100 people working full-time 5 years to create
>Mario'64.  You have about three times that amount of work.  You should
>be finished in about 1500 years.

Well, out of the 100 people there are many managers, advertisement
people, manual writers etc. 
But of course it is not possible to compete with the commercial games
writers except MAYBE under the best conditions (many knowledgable
contributors with much time and motivation that work together well)
or of course by programming simple games that work because of the
idea, a la Tetris.


Bye bye,
Wolfram.