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Lewin, Gareth | 2 Aug 2004 19:12
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RE: Criterion bought by EA

> when you consider this along with the fact that they cancelled this
year's versions of their popular sports games etc and i 
> think you could look at it like EA recognizes that they are in
trouble, have been unable to evolve to the point they can 
> keep up with the larger players in the current cycle - ie sony &
microsoft, and have decided to make a move to try and stay 
> 'in the loop' to to speak.

Eh? Which games have we candled this year? For obvious reasons I can't
comment on what _is_ going on at EA, but your theory that EA have
decided they can't 'keep up with the larger players' is ridiculous, EA
is one of the 'larger' players, if not the largest. Admittedly both MS
and Sony are bigger companies, but their market share in the games
market is not proportional, they have other businesses groups.

Regards, Gareth Lewin
EA Employee

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Lewin, Gareth | 2 Aug 2004 19:14
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RE: Criterion bought by EA

Cancelled, not Candled. I'm pretty sure EA have candled no games this
year either though! 

_________________________________________
Gareth Lewin - http://www.garethlewin.com

"Facts are useless. You can use facts to prove anything that's even
remotely true. Facts shmacts!" -- Homer Jay Simpson.
-----Original Message-----
From: Lewin, Gareth 
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 10:12 AM
To: sweng-gamedev <at> midnightryder.com
Subject: RE: [Sweng-gamedev] Criterion bought by EA

> when you consider this along with the fact that they cancelled this
year's versions of their popular sports games etc and i 
> think you could look at it like EA recognizes that they are in
trouble, have been unable to evolve to the point they can 
> keep up with the larger players in the current cycle - ie sony &
microsoft, and have decided to make a move to try and stay 
> 'in the loop' to to speak.

Eh? Which games have we candled this year? For obvious reasons I can't
comment on what _is_ going on at EA, but your theory that EA have
decided they can't 'keep up with the larger players' is ridiculous, EA
is one of the 'larger' players, if not the largest. Admittedly both MS
and Sony are bigger companies, but their market share in the games
market is not proportional, they have other businesses groups.

Regards, Gareth Lewin
(Continue reading)

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Parveen Kaler | 2 Aug 2004 19:35
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Re: Criterion bought by EA

Mike wrote:
> I just find it amusing that they bought criterion because EA is rumoured 
> to have a huge tools division here in canada for their in-house 
> titles...perhaps they couldn't evolve fast enough to keep up with a 
> dedicated middleware company and have gone this direction to attempt to 
> just a generation.
> 

It's also well-known that they will be doubling the number of employees 
(from about 1500 in the Vancouver area) in the next 5 years or so.  Just 
walk into the lobby of their office and look at the plan to go from 1 
building to a campus with 4 buildings.

A simple linear extrapolation.  If they produce about 60 titles now, 
that means they will be producing 120 different titles in the future.

How many of those do you guess will be sports titles?  Not many, would 
be my guess.  They've got most of that market covered.  Purchasing 
Renderware is probably a step towards building a content pipeline for 
non-sports games.

So somebody who has licensed Renderware in the past should do the math. 
  At what point does it make sense to stop purchasing licenses and just 
purchase the company.

I suspect an accountant sat down with a pencil and paper and did the 
math above and said, "Umm...why don't we like...just buy them and 
stuff?"  And somebody else said,  "Cool.  I just found all this extra 
money sitting in my underwear drawer and stuff. Let's do it."
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Andrew Grant | 2 Aug 2004 20:00

RE: Criterion bought by EA


Ultima?

-----Original Message-----
From: sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com-admin <at> lists.midnightryder.com
[mailto:sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com-admin <at> lists.midnightryder.com] On
Behalf Of Lewin, Gareth
Sent: 02 August 2004 18:15
To: sweng-gamedev <at> midnightryder.com
Subject: RE: [Sweng-gamedev] Criterion bought by EA

Cancelled, not Candled. I'm pretty sure EA have candled no games this year
either though! 

_________________________________________
Gareth Lewin - http://www.garethlewin.com

"Facts are useless. You can use facts to prove anything that's even remotely
true. Facts shmacts!" -- Homer Jay Simpson.
-----Original Message-----
From: Lewin, Gareth
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 10:12 AM
To: sweng-gamedev <at> midnightryder.com
Subject: RE: [Sweng-gamedev] Criterion bought by EA

> when you consider this along with the fact that they cancelled this
year's versions of their popular sports games etc and i 
> think you could look at it like EA recognizes that they are in
trouble, have been unable to evolve to the point they can 
> keep up with the larger players in the current cycle - ie sony &
(Continue reading)

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phil_wilkins | 2 Aug 2004 20:55
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RE: Criterion bought by EA


> Ultima?

Wasn't that more euthanasia, than canning?

I thought the original comment was talking about the sports games, which
was pretty perverse, since EA pwnz the pro-team-sports genre at the moment.
The competition has either pulled back for a year, or slashed prices. It's
also worth noting, that EA are the largest games publisher out there.
They're consistently in the #1 slot of the top-ten publisher list, and have
been for a while now.

Cheers,
Phil

PS Have to admit, I'm not really sure this is the forum for this sort of
discussion though.

PPS ...and I suppose it's worth noting that I do not speak for my employer.

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Lewin, Gareth | 2 Aug 2004 23:18
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RE: Criterion bought by EA

They candled Ultima? :)

I actually meant Sports games, EA have ofcourse canned some games this
year, EA publish too many to not have any canned at some stage.

And no, I do not speak for EA in any way. No more than Phil talks for
Sony that is :) 

_________________________________________
Gareth Lewin - http://www.garethlewin.com

"Facts are useless. You can use facts to prove anything that's even
remotely true. Facts shmacts!" -- Homer Jay Simpson.
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrew Grant [mailto:agrant <at> climaxgroup.com] 
Sent: Monday, August 02, 2004 11:01 AM
To: sweng-gamedev <at> midnightryder.com
Subject: RE: [Sweng-gamedev] Criterion bought by EA

 
Ultima?

-----Original Message-----
From: sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com-admin <at> lists.midnightryder.com
[mailto:sweng-gamedev-midnightryder.com-admin <at> lists.midnightryder.com]
On Behalf Of Lewin, Gareth
Sent: 02 August 2004 18:15
To: sweng-gamedev <at> midnightryder.com
Subject: RE: [Sweng-gamedev] Criterion bought by EA
(Continue reading)

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Noel Llopis | 3 Aug 2004 06:02

Re: Re: Criterion bought by EA

On Monday 02 August 2004 10:35 am, Parveen Kaler wrote:

> It's also well-known that they will be doubling the number of employees
> (from about 1500 in the Vancouver area) in the next 5 years or so.  
[...]
> A simple linear extrapolation.  If they produce about 60 titles now,
> that means they will be producing 120 different titles in the future.

I doubt that. If they're just doubling their staff, they're probably going to 
cut down their number of titles down to 40 or so based on the staff needs of 
next-generation hardware.

--Noel
Games from Within
http://www.gamesfromwithin.com

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Parveen Kaler | 3 Aug 2004 08:35
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Re: Criterion bought by EA

Noel Llopis wrote:
> On Monday 02 August 2004 10:35 am, Parveen Kaler wrote:
>>A simple linear extrapolation.  If they produce about 60 titles now,
>>that means they will be producing 120 different titles in the future.
> 
> 
> I doubt that. If they're just doubling their staff, they're probably going to 
> cut down their number of titles down to 40 or so based on the staff needs of 
> next-generation hardware.

Well, maybe I should have said *very* simple linear extrapolation.  We 
can only speculate on the number of titles.

I think my main point still stands.  At some point it becomes cheaper to 
purchase Criterion than to license Renderware.

-- Parveen

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Ian McMeans | 31 Aug 2004 07:21

types and serialization

Hi, I've got a question about networking, but it really applies to 
serialization in general.

How do you serialize type information? In a network game, a new Ork is 
constructed. How do you then transmit the type (Ork) and the neccesary 
data (the arguments to the constructor) to each client, so that they can 
create the same Ork client-side?

Right now in my little network-game prototype, I have an enum defined 
that lists all the types of game objects, and then a few big switch 
statements. So when a new Ork is created, it sends the char 'O', then 
the Ork constructor is called on the client. The Ork recieves it's 
relevant data separetely (as part of an "entity update" message instead 
of an "entity creation" message), so that I don't have to worry about 
passing variable arguments to the constructors.

This approach feels ugly to me, having the enum and the giant switch 
statements. ('O' is for Ork, 'G' is for Goblin, etc). This approach 
sucks because it's so brittle, the enum and the switch statements need 
to be modified every time a new type of game object is added to the 
source code. But is there a better approach? I was thinking of using 
typeid's instead of an enum type, but that doesn't solve the whole problem.

But what about actually constructing the new objects? What is a better 
alternative than a giant switch statement that needs to be modified 
every time I add a type? I could have a big ugly system of factory 
objects that register themselves with a GameObjectFactoryManager, then 
the manager queries all the factories to find out which one is 
appropriate (each factory knows it's associated GameObject typeid)... 
but this feels like overengineering, and doesn't seem much more
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Ivan-Assen Ivanov | 31 Aug 2004 07:47
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Re: types and serialization

> But what about actually constructing the new objects? What is a better
> alternative than a giant switch statement that needs to be modified
> every time I add a type? I could have a big ugly system of factory
> objects that register themselves with a GameObjectFactoryManager, then
> the manager queries all the factories to find out which one is
> appropriate (each factory knows it's associated GameObject typeid)...
> but this feels like overengineering, and doesn't seem much more
> appealing than the switches and enums.

We have a big ugly system of factory objects that register themselves.
I wouldn't call it overengineering, as it's far from ugly, and not
that big - less than 100 lines of code. Each class that will be
persisted through this system must register itself, and provide a
GetTypeID function. TypeIDs are fourcc's - 32-bit integers, specified
in the horrible non-portable 'abcd' syntax, so they are both small
enough and fixed-sized to index efficiently by them, and somewhat
user-readable.

Registration happens via the constructor of a utility template object
at global scope:

RegisterPersistentObject<EvilMonster> _rpo_em;

It theoretically won't work on some platforms/compilers/linkers, since
the compiler is allowed to execute global object constructors in a
dynamically loaded module later than the start of _main(), but I can
live with this theoretical problem :-)

The great advantage of this system is that each class is registered
locally, there is no single persisttypes.h file which must be changed
(Continue reading)

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Gmane