Applaud to All Developers Out There

[aaronchow]

I downloaded and read Sychonized Magazine's last issue (so sad...), and the first article is detailing how Jason Goldman has spend un-countable hours to code his flight simulator. Although this program has been postponed because of various reasons, I've learned a lot from it.

I've never thought how hard and time-consuming it is just for squeezing a tiny bit for FPS out of the Palm is, and I'm amazed at how much research he's spend on optimizing his code such as: re-coding part of his code into Assembly, minimizing data structors, changing algorithms, etc. just for as little as 20th of a second.

He also enlightens me with words and phrases that I've never heard of before. Matrix Math? What the hell is that?

Anyway, it is such a great article to read, and I strongly recommend everyone to read it.

Applaud to Every Developers Out There!

[iebnn]

Matrix math is like having a table of data and adding or multiplying them with other matrices or getting their inverses etc. Like


2 5 8 2 4
5 2 4 2 3
9 2 4 4 0


or an identity matrix,


1 0 0 0
0 1 0 0
0 0 1 0
0 0 0 1



stuff like that

[iebnn]

And, thank you for the applaud towards all of us developers :)

I'm working on a game that currently takes around a minute to render one frame. I have to get that down to at most 1/20 of a second or so. (of course, I have completely unoptimized code at the moment)

[xlr8]

I will applaud the developers when they start making in-depth games that are actually worth the $15. Part of programming is tweaking so it is a nesicary phase, so i cant really applaud them unless that are doing it for their own personal gain (maybe a buck on the side) but not the other way around then charge exoprbitant amounts

[ayasin]

Originally posted by xlr8
I will applaud the developers when they start making in-depth games that are actually worth the $15. Part of programming is tweaking so it is a nesicary phase, so i cant really applaud them unless that are doing it for their own personal gain (maybe a buck on the side) but not the other way around then charge exoprbitant amounts

What an appropriate signature you have. The market for Palm games is _very_ small and the market for games in general is incredably speculative. Charging $15 for a game is hardly excessive when it costs you several thousand to make. In the PDA market your lucky to get by much less get rich. If you take a look at palmgear and find popular games, they probably have about 33% download/registration ratios. In addition theres the issue of hackers who put cracks of your software on warez sites. I'm glad that developers take the time and effort to bring cool programs to the market. They price them based on demand. If you don't think a game is worth the money, then don't buy it. If you keep playing it but don't buy it then your part of the reason that it costs so much.

Stepping off the soapbox,
Amir

[pocketscience]

I think most developers would love a 33% download/rego ratio! :-)

As for xlr8's comments... well he obviously has no idea what it takes to develop an application or a game - when he does I'll listen more closely to him...


Off the soapbox as well,
Gavin.