I retired at the age of forty-two after working as a consultant who offered value to businesses at the cutting edge of a handful of hot areas that were crazy with competition. I was able to do it without an advanced education by taking advantage of the state of their technology and their markets and how they were emerging and morphing quickly and in ways that were simply too confusing for them to visualize. It was during a period when even the best and smartest among them struggled to keep up with it all while also doing their jobs. So I made of point of familiarizing and then positioning myself to be able to offer them a helping hand.
Firstly, and without rancor : congrats on doing well enough to retire at 42, that's a great achievement. One which most of us would be envious of, no doubt. I would certainly love to achieve that. I've got 15 years before I can say I failed to, of course, but that doesn't lessen the impressiveness of your feat any. Well done.
That being said, to recap, you were a tech-savvy business analyst who helped companies see strategic opportunities and ways to be more efficient. Nothing wrong with that at all. Now, which part makes you qualified to tell me my understanding of software design and principles is flawed/less than your own?
If your argument is that you see a
business opportunity for a game which is endlessly adaptable and customizes itself continuously to provide endless adventure, well, I agree. I also see a market for that hypothetical piece of software. I also see a market for holiday resorts on the moon. Doesn't make them feasible. Possible, yes, most ideas are conceptually possible. Feasible right now? No. Don't tell people who don't think your idea feasible that they "just don't get it" until you know the exact extent of what you are describing. It's fairly ironic.
Like me, I imagine some of them might smile at the idea of you looking down your nose at them, especially the way you did it.
The thought of these hypothetical individual's hypothetical amusement is deeply mortifying to me. I consider myself humbled. Hypothetically.
You devoted thirty-seven words to discussing the actual point, all of them dismissive, and about a thousand words to your other point, insisting they were the same. You refused to get off your soap box, even after finally catching and considering your mistake. Yeah, I was talking about a great big project. I’m a fan. That’s what I want. That's how I’ve described it in the first place and what I meant when I told you I was talking about something much bigger than you were describing.
Oh no you don't. You don't get to cherry-pick the parts of my posts which you think support your points and dismiss the rest as nonsense.
And I don't think you understand what I meant by incredibly time consuming, expensive and driven by human effort. I mean expensive like building a moon resort is expensive. Not just doubling or tripling the usual game budget, I mean that the solution you were talking about would cost a good percentage of the games original price, both money and time,
each time the user selects different preferences. To make it so the code was "completely different and uncrackable each time the user selected different options, resulting in totally different versions!" would require restructuring and then rebuilding the bloody thing each time, as I indicated with the car-music cd example. By programmers. If you build it in modular chunks that are simply shuffled around, the hackers simply figure out ways to identify the modules, build a tool to automate the process of identifying the shuffled modules and bam, easily cracked each time.
No, what you want is something different, you want the whole thing to morph structure each time, so it's just as difficult for the hackers to crack time X as it is time X+1. That's a job that cannot be automated at this time or in the near future, if it was almost all programmers would be out jobs right now. So let's be clear, we're talking a good percentage of the
total cost to make the game
every time the player changes out mods, if we are theorizing about your pipedream. Does your finely trained business mind see this as viable, commercially?
It's not 10 times the cost for 10 times the content. It's a multiple of the cost
every time the user chooses to customise the experience. If one user does that 15 times, it's 15 multiplied by X, where X is the cost in time and money to rebuild the game. On top of your original 10x.
Argue your point all you want, and you're right, but only the same way Lou Costello was right about Who being on first.
I cannot be bothered to google this reference. I assume you're being hypocritical by being dismissive of my points even when you complained that I was dismissive of your ideas previously?
I'll go over it again slowly:
Aye-aye chief. Thog try read real hard now, but read hurt Thog brain.
Imagine a game maker and his efforts over the course of creating ten games. But instead of making ten individual games, he created ten greatly-different versions of the same game.
Right, with you so far. So that is 10x the cost of basic development so far, for one game. Which means you
need massive returns.
And he did it cleverly in a modular fashion where he was able to swap pieces of each version with the others.
Right, so vastly different, but with swappable pieces that magically fit together perfectly? Ahahah, sorry, no. If the pieces fit together that means they have common interfaces and means to communicate. Which means that hackers can easily use that to identify the pieces, despite your shuffling.
You know games are already built in a modular fashion, right? Or did you think you came up with the idea? Open up one of your game directories, note all those dlls? Those are sound libraries, physics libraries, security modules and rendering engines. All cleverly modular and able to be shuffled out if needed. It's not hard to figure out how the pieces connect and communicate.
Once they know what piece they are looking for they can find it again fairly easily, perhaps even automate the process. Remember, it's one small thing they need to change, not all the shuffled pieces. They simply need to break the security check code. Which means, once it's cracked the first time, they simply need to be able to find it again. Your shuffling isn't going to be enough to stop them doing that quickly, even automating the process.
But lets say you wanted to do it so they didn't have common interfaces and means to communicate but they were still magically swappable like you describe. Well, now we're talking magic pixie dust. We're talking rebuilding the game (practically making a new game each time) by hand at a percentage of the base cost each and every time the player chooses different settings. Months of work and vast expense, each and every time. Of course, we're assuming players will all sit around happily waiting while the programmers rebuild them their "car" from so they can play another "music cd". And that a company with say 30 programmers will have the capability to do that for lets say 2000 players! Lol! But lets go on.
After having finished all that, he then continued making new swappable pieces.
The ones which hackers will have an easy time subverting because they can figure out the interfaces and calling procedures or the magic pixie dust ones?
If that developer were then to offer customers access to what he made (and was continuing to make) in exchange for monthly payments, what position would that put him in and how might he proceed from there?
I dunno. In case A he is in trouble because all his clever pieces will be downloaded, cracked and distributed on torrents in days/weeks, and his development costs are at minimum 10x normal. Hmmm, he'd be pretty f*cked I think. In case A.
In case B : I dunno, what's the cost of pixie dust? Depends on income vs expenses, after all. Business 101, that. We'd have to look at the exchange rates with the Fairy Kingdom at that time.
I think that is clear.
Let's stop for a reality check.
No, no, I'm getting the hang of this now. Let's talk about holiday resorts on the moon next please. Let's go tell reality developers and civil engineers that they "don't get it!" and then proceed to lecture them about the advantages of moon holidays.
This is a fan site, a place where gamers discuss their views and opinions, including their dreams for the future. A fan asking a dev to understand him correctly isn't an argument for being technically correct. Reasonably, you’d think a dev would be especially good at understanding the point being made.
Lol, jokes aside, when you enter a thread about my ideas and proceed to tell me I "just don't get it", you lose all rights to play wounded dove whose innocent ideas were shot down by the mean ol' ninja. Sorry Squeeker. You weren't asking me to understand. You weren't asking anything at all. You were
telling us all how it should be. And calling people who didn't think your idea feasible dumb/blind.
But fear not, I have taken the time and
do understand you. 100%, give or take 0.74%.
Earlier in this thread you claimed to be a highly-trained and experienced software engineer. Maybe. But I see someone with a big mouth who pounces on opportunities to leverage his own knowledge to bully people outside his field who disagree with him. Based on my own experience, I suspect you're just a guy who's never succeeded at anything, despite his education.
Lol, of course you do. You don't like me at all Squeek, that is fairly obvious, so of course you want to believe that I have no worthwhile qualities nor have I achieved anything of worth. Don't worry, I understand and am not offended. Vent away my good hamster/gerbil/whatnot.
Exactly. That barks up the same tree as mine, and I agree completely. If I'm right, then that points out the difference between my thought and Ninja's take on it.
Now ask him how much time and effort it would take to create a game patch which "completely changes the game code". Most game patches are things which make tiny changes designed to fix a few bugs in the code, and even those take a month/months of development. And a code restructure is a completely different story to the game patches you are thinking about Squeek, vastly more complex and time consuming.
Again, that's exactly the sort of thing I imagined. I'm sorry I threw that in at this point, because it turned out to be a big source of confusion. See my above post about my main idea.
Lol, or rather you just think it is. Take a second to imagine what happens if modders got access to source code instead of just data files and game scripts...you know you cannot tell a modder from a hacker offhand, yeah? You have now given them the source, the "blueprints", made the game dramatically easier to crack, not harder.
Also, have you paid attention to the open source scene? Open-source games? Have you noted how it
isn't a flood of never-ending adventure and new content? It's like the modding scene, a few gems and a whole bunch of cruft/unfinished stuff. But with a higher barrier to entry, technical skill-wise. So I'm fairly certain it's not going to be this endless stream of adventure you imagine.
Especially since the devs who are actually skilled with the engine are going to be spending vast amounts of time making sure the amateurs haven't completely screwed everything up/added legions of bugs/slipped viruses and trojans out to their user-base in the engine code. Imagine the great PR that would generate, haha! And doing all this while rebuilding the game code for each and every change in mod loadout.
But hey, I hear the weather on the moon is lovely this time of year.
