In article <43a2umF1m70unU1@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
Dirk Bruere at Neopax <dirk.bruere@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>Well, we have to start somewhere and that might as well be with the
>company that can provide the biggest slice of the market. From our
>POV it will not be cheap providing them with prototypes they can
>play with. At present it would be something like $50k per shot
>pre-production. We cannot multiply that by 100.
On re-reading your post, if you're that far from actual production,
then it's going to be much, much harder to get game companies to add
sup****t in. While your hardware guys may swear up and down that it is
perfect and ready for public use, the reality of your situation is
that you have (at best) beta hardware, and beta drivers for it. It's
going to take some time to really shake out all the issues.
>What we need is someone who can get into the source code of (say)
>Call of Duty 2, modify the code and then re-release it as an
>upgrade. That's not likely to be someone we employ.
As I said in my pervious post, just-released games are much harder
to go back in and modify, because most of the staff and QA team have
moved on to the 'next' project. If there's no chance consumers will
see a benefit when the patch/update/upgrade is released, most
companies will be a *lot* more skeptical. Also, because you probably
still have immature drivers, it will require a lot more QA time to
find issues, and then programmer time to drill down and figure out
what the real source of any issue is.
Thinking about this some more, if you just want to verify that your
hardware works as advertised, and to provide a side-by-side comparison
to show off the benefits of your product, it'd be better to take a
game that has had its source code released, and *you* modify
that. Look at a site like http://www.liberatedgames.com/
, where you
can find dozens of games that have had their source code
released. Quake III: Arena is probably one of the best-known and most
recent commercial titles on the list. You'll usually still have to
pick up a copy of the full game to get all the assets, but going this
route is probably best for pre-production hardware like yours.
As a programmer, if I was asked to investigate adding in sup****t
for any hardware, in an ideal world I'd ask to see how many lines of
code, and how much work was involved in tweaking such a commercial
game. In short: the fewer the better. If your product really is a
drop-in (and you publish diffs to prove it), then you'll get a lot
better reception.
Nathan Mates
--
<*> Nathan Mates - personal webpage http://www.visi.com/~nathan/
# Programmer at Pandemic Studios -- http://www.pandemicstudios.com/
# NOT speaking for Pandemic Studios. "Care not what the neighbors
# think. What are the facts, and to how many decimal places?" -R.A.
Heinlein
|
