Promit's Ventspace

Screw Degrees! Right?

A few months ago, I pushed for GameDev.Net to add a new forum, Breaking into the Games Industry. Overall, this has been a great place and some excellent discussion has happened there. I’ve noticed one particular trend though, and I wanted to discuss it a little bit. Basically, there’s a surprisingly large number of people who are either dubious of a degree (computer science or otherwise), or actively believe it’s not needed. This particularly eloquent fellow may have summed it up best:

sure stay in school for your deplomas, in my apionon unless you wanting to work for others its a complete wast of valuable time.

I’d like to provide some commentary, as someone who actually got a game industry job without a degree, and who just finished his degree. Number one: Why do you deserve the job over someone who has a degree? Typically people explain how passionate they are about games, and frequently how they’ve been working on some game X. All of this entirely misses the point, and presupposes that college students aren’t doing the same exact thing. College students aren’t (necessarily) dispassionate robots. Unlike the younger kids, a lot of them have had plenty of opportunities to develop much more complete games, usually as part of a group and working with tight time constraints – all while juggling quite a lot of other work. These are critical abilities for someone who does this stuff professionally, and also indicates a base level of maturity. The non-degree people almost without fail have nothing to show but half-baked solo efforts, built slowly and poorly over the course of many months. And yes, this is partly because spite for a degree usually shows a general lack of maturity, and therefore ability on the job. Given completely equivalent scale demo projects from a high school graduate and a recent college graduate, the latter is actually vastly more impressive.

Douchebag Defined

Recently, a developer (hereafter referred to as “Moron”) posted a tirade about how much better OpenGL is than DirectX. This moron of course got himself linked by another group of morons known as “Slashdot”, and probably some adjunct groups of particularly stupid (but not quite moronic) people such as “Digg”. You’ll note that I am unlikely to be honored by either community. I’m also not going to link this post, because there’s no point generating the trackback or sending any more traffic.

Do cinematic video games need judder?

Just a thought. I’ve been learning a lot about television technology lately, and one of the tricky things about it is the difference between video and film. It’s generally well known that movies and film are at 24 fps, supposedly because that’s the frame rate at which we can’t distinguish it from real motion. (That’s bullshit by the way, and has nearly nothing to do with why film is at 24 fps.) Video, on the other hand, is run at 25/50 fps (PAL interlaced or progressive) or 30/60 fps (NTSC interlaced or progressive). This means that video has a very distinctly different look from film, and film never ends up looking quite right on normal televisions. The introduction of 120hz LCD TVs on the market is partly intended to combat this problem, and show film sources at their true frame rate.

Free Software is not Free

I’m looking right now at a library called FFTW (link deliberately omitted), used for computing fast Fourier transforms on various types of data. I’m sure it’s a very good piece of work at a technical level, but the reality is it’s a load of crap.

FFTW is a C subroutine library for computing the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) in one or more dimensions, of arbitrary input size, and of both real and complex data (as well as of even/odd data, i.e. the discrete cosine/sine transforms or DCT/DST). We believe that FFTW, which is free software, should become the FFT library of choice for most applications.

This seems reasonable until you realize that FFTW is not free software. It’s an example of the abomination known as Free Software, GPL license and all. Now they are free to choose whatever license they want for their work, but I feel equally free to call them out for it. Especially when their homepage manages to be so pompous despite having so little text.

IE Integration in Windows 7 Sucks

I’m not sure who thought this was a good idea or why. I’m also wondering who on the QA team passed this feature, because it’s catastrophically broken even from a technical standpoint.