Path: chuka.playstation.co.uk!news From: Mark Green Newsgroups: scea.yaroze.freetalk,scee.yaroze.freetalk.english Subject: Re: Net Yaroze 2 ? Please. Date: Thu, 06 May 1999 10:50:44 +0100 Organization: PlayStation Net Yaroze (SCEE) Lines: 52 Message-ID: <373165F4.C04F8970@reading.ac.uk> References: <7gaug1$2mq3@scea> <7gpfti$iko2@chuka.playstation.co.uk> <37304b8c.2367490@www.netyaroze-europe.com> <7gqkr0$iko4@chuka.playstation.co.uk> NNTP-Posting-Host: ssfmse3.rdg.ac.uk Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5 [en] (WinNT; I) X-Accept-Language: en Xref: chuka.playstation.co.uk scea.yaroze.freetalk:1350 scee.yaroze.freetalk.english:3986 Nick Ferguson wrote: > Hey all, :) > > I'm with Rob on this one. It strikes me as pretty rich that so many people > clamouring for a NY2 on this group haven't really turned out a substantial > demo on their current Yaroze. If you're struggling (either due to your > technical ability, or the amount of time you have to spend on it) with the > current machine, what makes you think having a PlayStation 2 to fool about > with will make things any easier? If anything, it will only be more > difficult! What I would hope for is that a Yaroze 2 would be a bit friendlier to start with :) When I first joined the Yaroze program, I was writing little games on DOS PC in C or Pascal with a few assembler subroutines and a sprite compiler I hacked together. It was quite hard work, but was enjoyable, and I was trying a few strange designs (mostly adjusted puzzle games). I hoped that the Yaroze would provide a platform where design ideas and original implementation techniques could be tried out relatively easily, with the libraries providing many of the basic functions games required. I was not disappointed - until I actually tried to use it. The real disheartening side was seeing that the most Yaroze demos being produced *AT THAT TIME* were not there to show new game ideas or effects or similar. The challenge wasn't to make new ideas - the challenge was to claw through the documentation and example code and try and figure out how to do ANYTHING. Now, of course, developing on *any* platform requires going through a learning phase, but the Yaroze documentation made the learning phase incredibly long and convoluted, often without much in the way of return, and meant that developing anything took several times the amount of time it would have taken elsewhere. I *far* prefer the Yaroze libraries to the DirectX ones, and yet the DirectX ones I was able to get things to start working relatively quickly, whereas the Yaroze ones took a lot of work before I could even get a sprite showing. > As a brief aside (i.e. rant) - although new technology drives the industry > forward, there are really only a handful of developers who push for advances > in game design, rather than just make old games with prettier visuals. > Unfortunately, there seems to be plenty of evidence that the same disease of > "pure techno-lust without intelligent application" exists on this newsgroup. > Maybe that's just a result of the sort of people drawn to Yaroze..? I think a lot of people do have techno-lust. A lot of people also want jobs in the game industry, and if what they are doing is making old games with prettier visuals, then unfortunately that's what we must do if we want jobs with them. > see. And by "quality" I don't mean knocking off a clone of some game with > nicer graphics (or 100 trees), but coming up with something new and > different that you would never see in the commercial scene anymore. Well agreed.