Comments for Mark Cooke's G-Mixer

Comment on Fashion I Like: Heddie Lovu (Part 1) by Silver Wardrobe

Silver Wardrobe — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 20:52:01 +0000

Silver Wardrobe…

[...]Fashion I Like: Heddie Lovu (Part 1) « Mark Cooke’s G-Mixer[...]…

Comment on The Future of Game Content Delivery by Mark Cooke

Mark Cooke — Fri, 18 Nov 2011 00:32:36 +0000

I used to put a big premium on owning and collecting games but as I’ve aged I now put more value on simplicity in my life. One of the things that means for me is owning less stuff. Not owning a physical object that holds the bits of the game doesn’t bother me if it is priced appropriately. For example, I pay for the all-you-can-eat streaming services Netflix and Spotify but don’t mind that I don’t own any of the content.

OnLive is currently selling access to new games for $50. At that price, losing my investment if the service disappears is a bigger deal, so I agree that is problematic.

On the flip side, they are also offering options like “play for three days for $4.99″. That option is clearly priced as a rental which, to me, works very well for this type of service.

Comment on The Future of Game Content Delivery by Brandon

Brandon — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 22:29:29 +0000

I share the same view. I’ve been looking at this technology since a few years back, and was pleasantly surprised when I started using it. The biggest selling point for me is instant gratification – where I can demo/play a game instantly without waiting despite my hardware limitations (I run it on an almost 2-year-old macbook pro). I can launch AAA titles quickly, play for 10 minutes, and then go back to what I was doing. I keep the window open sometimes just so that I can jump into a game quickly for a quick break. The convenience of these services is the best feature for me personally.

My biggest concern however is in the ownership of the product. It seems to me that people who pay to play on these services only own the right to play the games on these specific services – kind of like rental to me. So if the service stops operating, players wouldn’t be able to play the games they paid for.

But for now, I am just happy that I can play the latest Batman on my laptop :)

Comment on The Future of Game Content Delivery by Mark Cooke

Mark Cooke — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:50:08 +0000

@Chris – good point, I don’t know much about that side of the tech/business. Is streaming that much data cost prohibitive at scale or technically impossible? I’m not sure.

Assuming it does work, even if hardware becomes continually cheaper I think there is still a lot of consumer value in the convenience a cloud-based solution provides. In particular, the ease and speed of acquiring content (no big download) along with accessibility from anywhere are big selling points to me.

@Tim – Thanks! Give OnLive a try if you haven’t already. There are numerous free game demos where they give you 30 minutes to try out a title.

Comment on The Future of Game Content Delivery by Tim Miller

Tim Miller — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 16:51:43 +0000

Good article, Mark. I haven’t followed OnLive or Gaikai since they were originally announced and just assumed that they’d never fly due to input latency and graphics issues as you mentioned. It’s nice to hear that they’re doing well and might be part of our gaming future.

Comment on The Future of Game Content Delivery by chris charla

chris charla — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 10:13:31 +0000

I agree with your points, and I’ve also been very impressed by both services. But, I worry that these services are a little like electric cars. They look more efficient, but if you look at the whole system, you waste a lot of energy moving electricity around, when you could just generate it more efficiently at the car.

Given the cheapness and ever cheapening of graphics hardware, and the increasingly precious nature of bandwidth (due to an infinite number of cloud services appearing, all of which assume an infinite amount of free bandwidth in their business models), does it make sense — long term — to be streaming bandwidth-intensive graphics from the cloud?

I totally believe in the everything-connected-everywhere future, I’m just not sure if streaming graphics is the right thing to do, when you get good enough quality so cheaply at the box-connected-to-the-TV level.

But I’d be happy to be wrong, and anyone who doubts these services work should try them!

Comment on Scripting cocos2d-iPhone actions with XML, part 2 by Mark Cooke

Mark Cooke — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:59:48 +0000

I looked into what it was going to take to make this happen on my side and realized it was a bigger job than I expected when it came to packaging up everything, removing bits of code that point to project-specific classes, etc. I was planning on getting to it though of course I understand you needed a solution more quickly.

Hope it works out for your project!

Comment on Scripting cocos2d-iPhone actions with XML, part 2 by Peter

Peter — Tue, 08 Nov 2011 00:32:01 +0000

Hi Mark

I’m too impatient. I’ve written my own now.

Thanks anyway.

Peter

Comment on Scripting cocos2d-iPhone actions with XML, part 2 by Peter

Peter — Wed, 02 Nov 2011 00:07:22 +0000

Hi Mark

That would be brilliant! I’m more than happy to accept whatever you’re happy to share. It would still save me a lot of the initial startup work.

I would of course hand back to you a copy of what I do to it as my intent is to make it easy to drop into a small project so that my designers can tweak a running app on the fly.

Regards

Peter

Comment on Scripting cocos2d-iPhone actions with XML, part 2 by Mark Cooke

Mark Cooke — Tue, 01 Nov 2011 23:48:14 +0000

Hi Peter,

The code is definitely not in a pretty state and is overly tied to the two projects I’ve used it in. I’d have to spend some time cleaning it up to make it easy to use.

That said, if you think it would be useful I could look at doing a partial dump of the code. It wouldn’t compile or be setup to work in a general way suitable for you without modification but still might help? Let me know.