Progress Bar Illusions

Progress Bar Illusions

by John Biggs on December 31, 2010
Tags: progress bar, video

I always wondered why OS X progress bars had an odd ripple effect and now we know: rippling progress bars seem to move faster across the screen, making you think stuff is getting done faster.

How the PK Mafia Ruins Business

How the PK Mafia Ruins Business « MMO Tidbits

No, I don’t mean gankers. The PK mafia I refer to is that school of game design which believe that the only “true” PvP game is the one where PvP death has a real penalty. The proponents typically urge very harsh penalties, as found in Darkfall (where all your possessions fall to the ground for the enemy to loot).

Some years back a school of thought argued that a “true” role-playing experience required fully open PvP (anyone can kill anyone else). The leaders of Funcom’s design department for Age of Conan must have been believers, since the only “official” RP server for Conan is also a PvP server. Curiously, I never saw a single PK on that server result from RP, despite spending months in a bloodthirsty, hardcore RP guild. I did see plenty of casual killing and suffered a predictable dose of gankings. Nobody bothered to “dress it up” with roleplay. They were too busy ambushing the next victim or getting to a safer spot ASAP. The only RP PvP fight I saw was a carefully arranged event by people who knew each other, like a virtual world LARP.

Case Study: Fully Distributed Scrum

Fully Distributed Scrum - Agile2009, Schoonheim & Sutherland, Xebia India TBD case | Xebia Blog

Guido Schoonheim shares a case study about "fully distributed scrum". The study describes a project which involved 200 developers, located in India and the Netherlands. You can find the slides at the end of the article, interesting read.

"What is Fully Distributed Scrum?

Offshoring classically is performed in a waterfall process fashion, meaning that one party writes specifications and chucks them over the wall to the other party who then chucks a software product back after a period of time. When evolved to Agile software development, this is the last thing you want to do. However you do need to deal with the distance between your local staff and your talent in an offshore location.

The only way to get the benefits of both Agile development (hyperproductivity with high quality and motivated people) and the benefits of offshoring (lower costs, availability of talent, up/downscaling with no risk) is to apply Agile to the offshoring dilemma. Xebia has made this the core practice and differentiator of our offshored development"

Scrum FAQ

Scrum for Team System - Process Guidance

A good FAQ, should work nicely in combination with "scrum in 5 minutes" by Jeff Sutherland if you want to intend to introduce SCRUM to a team or manager/director who is not familiar with SCRUM yet. Good questions, good answers.

"This Scrum FAQ section contains a transcript of Ken Schwaber answering commonly asked questions about Scrum."

agile best practices | offshore best practices | distributed Scrum

Ignite Outsourcing :: Israeli Scrum conference | agile best practices | offshore best practices | distributed Scrum methodology

When Scrum was first conceived, back in 2001, distributed software development and global teams where not as common as they are today. In this lecture, Aviram Eisenberg elaborates the main contradictions between Agile best practices and offshore best practices, and how can they be combined to create a successful distributed Scrum development methodology

Coconut Revolution (Bougainville: Our Island, Our Fight)

This is an incredible modern-day story of a native peoples' victory over Western globalization.

Sick of seeing their environment ruined and their people exploited by the Panguna Mine, the Pacific island of Bougainville rose up against the giant mining corporation, Rio Tinto Zinc. The newly formed Bougainville Revolutionary Army began fighting with bows and arrows and sticks and stones against a heavily armed adversary. In an attempt to put down the rebellion the Papua New Guinean Army swiftly established a gunboat blockade around the island.
But with no shipments allowed in or out, how did new electricity networks spring up on the island? And how were the people of Bougainville able to drive around the island without any source of petrol or diesel?

Watch as the world's first eco-revolution unfolds within the blockade. A David and Goliath story for the 21st century. A multi-award winning documentary

Behaviour-Driven Development

BehaviourDrivenDevelopment - Behaviour-Driven Development

Behaviour-Driven Development (BDD) is an evolution in the thinking behind TestDrivenDevelopment and AcceptanceTestDrivenPlanning.

It brings together strands from TestDrivenDevelopment and DomainDrivenDesign into an integrated whole, making the relationship between these two powerful approaches to software development more evident.

It aims to help focus development on the delivery of prioritised, verifiable business value by providing a common vocabulary (also referred to as a UbiquitousLanguage) that spans the divide between Business and Technology.

It presents a framework of activity based on three core principles:

1.Business and Technology should refer to the same system in the same way - ItsAllBehaviour
2.Any system should have an identified, verifiable value to the business - WheresTheBusinessValue
3.Up-front analysis, design and planning all have a diminishing return - EnoughIsEnough

Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

Google TechTalks March 17, 2006 Dave Astels Dave Astels (co-author of "A Practical Guide to eXtreme Programming" and author of Jolt Award winning "Test-driven Development: A Practical Guide") has over 2 decades of experience in the software field, most of that involved with object-oriented technologies and techniques. Dave has been studying, practicing, teaching, evangelising, and coaching XP and Agile Processes since 1998. Dave's experience ranges from embedded process control systems to consumer products (both consumer electronics and shrinkwrapped software) to energy trading systems. Dave is an independant software consultant specializing in the areas of agile process, programming practices, and object design/architecture. Dave is one of the thought leaders in the area of TDD, and now BDD. ABSTRACT Test Driven Development (TDD) has become quite well known. Many developers are getting benefit from the practice. But it is possible that we can get even more value. A new practice is getting attention these days: Behaviour Driven Development (BDD). BDD removes all vestiges of testing and instead focuses on specifying the behaviour desired in the system being built. This talk will be focus on Ruby and will introduce a new BDD framework: rSpec. The ideas, however, are language independent.

The Brain that changes itself

Amazing video about the capacity of the brain to "rewire" itself. The player is quite simply shite, but it is definitely worth watching. You can find the video here.

high quality free people search engines

25 Free People Search Engines to find Anyone in the World | FinderMind

high quality free people search engines to help you reconnect with friends, family, school friends or any other person from your past.

Illegal downloads and dodgy figures

Bad Science: Illegal downloads and dodgy figures | Ben Goldacre | Comment is free | The Guardian

You are killing our creative industries. "Downloading costs billions," said the Sun. "MORE than 7 million Brits use illegal downloading sites that cost the economy billions of pounds, government advisers said today. Researchers found more than a million people using a download site in ONE day and estimated that in a year they would use £120bn worth of material."
...

So where do these notions of so many billions in lost revenue come from?
...
The report was commissioned by a government body called Sabip, the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property. On the billions lost it says: "Estimates as to the overall lost revenues if we include all creative industries whose products can be copied digitally, or counterfeited, reach £10bn (IP rights, 2004), conservatively, as our figure is from 2004, and a loss of 4,000 jobs."
...
I hunted down the full Ciber documents, found the references section, and followed the web link, which led to a 2004 press release from a private legal firm called Rouse who specialise in intellectual property law. This press release was not about the £10bn figure. It was, in fact, a one-page document, which simply welcomed the government setting up an intellectual property theft strategy. In a short section headed "background", among five other points, it says: "Rights owners have estimated that last year alone counterfeiting and piracy cost the UK economy £10bn and 4,000 jobs." An industry estimate, as an aside, in a press release. Genius.
...
In any case, that's £175 a week or £8,750 a year potentially not being spent by millions of people. Is this really lost revenue for the economy, as reported in the press?
...
Oh, but the figures were wrong: it was actually 473m items and £12bn (so the item value was still £25) but the wrong figures were in the original executive summary, and the press release. They changed them quietly, after the errors were pointed out by a BBC journalist.

I asked what steps they [Sabip, note by sambris] took to notify journalists of their error, which exaggerated their findings by a factor of 10 and were reported around the world. Sabip refused to answer questions in emails, insisted on a phone call, told me that they had taken steps but wouldn't say what and explained something about how they couldn't be held responsible for lazy journalism, then, bizarrely, after 10 minutes, tried to tell me retrospectively that the call was off the record. I think it's OK to be confused and disappointed by this. Like I said: as far as I'm concerned, everything from this industry is false, until proven otherwise.

How Pirates Shook European Politics

How Pirates Shook European Politics

With 7.1 percent of the vote, the Swedish Pirate Party has shocked its critics and secured a seat in the European Parliament. The Pirates received more votes from those under 30 than any other party in the European elections yesterday, and this was celebrated with pints of rum and loads of pirate chants.

Phill Harrison no longer director of Atari

Harrison out as Atari president // News

"Because of a shift of business operations to the US, Phil Harrison will move from the role of president to that of non-executive director of the group. As all board members, he will continue to assist, support and guide the company's strategy," said Atari.

Atari just recently announced net losses of 226 million€ for last year.

The limits of microtransactions

Tobold's MMORPG Blog

In the battle of business models for MMORPGs the monthly flat fee subscription model has one decisive advantage: It is extremely simple to understand, and has only one variable, cost per month. A statement that a particular game is going to be Free2Play and financed by microtransactions is not really telling you much; there are lots of parameters on what exactly is for sale, and how much it costs.

"Intellectual property is dead" by Eric von Hippel, Professor of Management at the MIT Sloan School of Management (2007)

EndOfIntellectualProperty < Main < Reprap

"The whole concept of intellectual property is only stable when copying is difficult and legal penalties mean significant losses for those who would copy. Make copying easy and undetectable (as computers have for music) and the very idea of intellectual property starts to fade.

But creativity doesn't fade with it. There is now an outpouring of music all over the whole world unmatched since that in late eighteenth century Vienna. This is happening because the same technology that is eliminating music copyright allows anyone to make music and to try to find an audience for it. Most musicians don't compose because they have rationally calculated that it is a good way to get rich, they compose because they are driven by an inner compulsion. And an inner compulsion is exactly what you'd expect from an evolutionarily-selected mating trait."

I recommend reading the entire article...

2008 Game Developer Salary Survey

Gamasutra - News - 2008 Game Developer Salary Survey Reveals $79,000 Average Income

Programming: programmers are the highest paid talent next to high-end businesspeople, with an average annual salary of $85,024. Experience pays in this role, as those with greater than six years of experience earned 26% more than the average annual salary.

Art & Animation: artists – averaging a $69,532 salary, nonetheless, 28% of art directors reported lower salaries than the previous year. But these more experienced, higher status artists also tend to earn at least 35% more than those with less experience and lower title.

Game Design: averaging $67,379, design positions sprouted an average $3,730 over last year. As with many roles, region makes a difference, given that West Coast designers make on average $8,283 or 12% more than the rest of the game designers in the country.

Production: of all the game development disciplines, production – with a salary average overall of $82,905 – is the most welcoming to women, with 21% of the workforce made up of females – more than twice the industry average. The discipline as a whole saw a strong $4,189 bump from last year.

10 Game Design Process Pitfalls

Gamasutra - Features - 10 Game Design Process Pitfalls

Game designer Fisch looks into the process of making games, suggesting the ten biggest reasons why a game's production doesn't end up working out quite as hoped, and possible fixes for those issues.

Optimize Your Pipeline Through Usability

Gamasutra - Features - Game Tools Tune-Up: Optimize Your Pipeline Through Usability

There are probably tools in your pipeline that could benefit from usability techniques, but as a developer, you'll want to know which tools would benefit the most before investing in them.

In this article, I'll discuss how to find the bottlenecks holding up your production, measure the usability of your tools using proven techniques and streamline your entire development process.

Publisher side product owners

Agile Game Development

"Product owners for a video game project using Scrum are usually a member of the development team. The reason for this is that unlike projects outside the game industry, product owners are needed to provide a much higher level of subjective feedback. Does the control of the player feel right? Is a mechanic “fun enough”? This feedback requires daily engagement with the team.

However, in some cases the publisher will require that product ownership be placed in the hands of someone on their staff. This could be an executive producer or someone who works directly with a licensee. In some cases this makes sense. If a licensee wants to maintain oversight or the publisher wants to make sure that their franchise is well tended, then product ownership at the publisher level makes sense.

Unfortunately this usually means that the team loses the day-to-day involvement of product owner. This can lead the project down bad paths. These projects can lead to “iterative and incremental death marches” when there is a reckoning between what the game provides and what the license or franchise owner sees much later.

A solution is to divide up the Product Owner roles..."

Developmag: The 2009 UK Games Development Salary Survey

The 2009 UK Games Development Salary Survey | Game Development | Interview by Develop

Earlier this year, games industry professionals that read developmag.com and mcvuk.com were invited to take part in an extensive salary and career survey. 528 people, from all sectors of interactive entertainment, took part. Here, Michael French analyses the answers given by developers…