Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!scea!greg_labrec@interactive.sony.com From: "Chris Blackwell" Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.programming.3d_studio Subject: Re: Getting texture maps onto the Yaroze Date: 31 Jul 1997 05:59:58 GMT Organization: SCEA Net Yaroze News Lines: 63 Message-ID: <01bc9d77$96573d20$29af35c6@islandnet.com.islandnet.com> References: <33DFBC50.156@sprintmail.com> <01bc9d55$aead3860$e44231a2@DonThomas.interactive.sony.com> <33E0087C.5A96@sprintmail.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: i3-41.islandnet.com X-Newsreader: Microsoft Internet News 4.70.1155 Jack Bowman wrote in article <33E0087C.5A96@sprintmail.com>... > Nowhere in any documentation does the term "hobbiest-grade" occur. We > only see that one after paying our money and accessing the web site. I To come to Sony's defense on this one, if you look at the url http://www.scea.sony.com/ (which is a public, free of charge web site) you see it clearly stated that: "This website provides information on the video game hobbyist's development kit that allows anyone to write game programs for the Net Yaroze PlayStation game console" and also in the What is Net Yaroze on http://www.scea.sony.com/net/what.htm , the very first answer is: "What is Net Yaroze(TM)? A hobbyist's development kit that allows anyone to write game programs to run on the special Net Yaroze PlayStation." In fact, the only place which does not mention that the NY is not a hobbyist system is the documentation, which you receive after you payed for the system, and have hopefully read about first on the web page (it pays to be an informed consumer :-) > Actually, I would like to know how many of us Net Yaroze "members" paid > out the $800-$900 for a "hobbiest" system without any intention of at > least eventually developing a "professional" (i.e, commercial) > application. If we're taking votes, I for one purchased a Yaroze without any intention of developing a commercial product. Why you ask? Several reasons. First off, I'm already a professional game programmer. I enjoy my job, but my job consists of creating games based on other peoples expectations. Customers, marketing, designers, producers, you name it. Yaroze gives me a chance to just play, with no outside pressure and no deadlines. I love programming, and Yaroze gives me the chance to do what I love just for the sake of doing it. I also get the satisfaction that I might be able to share my work and my knowledge with others. As to the price, I think $900 is very reasonable for a high speed 3d machine with a complete development environment. My PC certainly doesn't give the same satisfaction, and I'm not really keen on forking out ten grand for an SGI. Anyway, I guess my point is, Yaroze is indeed a grassroots, hobbyist system. It depends not only on Sony's support, but also our support to make it a fun and enjoyable experience. It's our job as its users to fill in the gaps. There's nothing wrong with voicing our opinions to Sony (see my C++ page), but let's back our opinins with ideas to solve the problems, rather than just bashing Sony. So Sony doesn't provide a 3ds converter. Solution: write your own. When I found out that Sony wan't interested in supporting C++, and Metrowerks didn't include the best support for it on the new release, we as a group, took it upon ourselves to fix the problem by writing our own new and delete code, exception handlers, and other things. When we found out that Yaorze supported only DOS, we took it upon ourseleves to write a full suite of Win95, Amiga and even linux native tools. So, friend Bowman, I urge you to take this opportunity to impress us and commit yourself to the NY community. Chris Blackwell