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Posts: 3,428 | Thanked: 2,856 times | Joined on Jul 2008
#213
Originally Posted by Fargus View Post
I am a technical director of, amongst other things, a reasonably sized games company (80+ employees) so I think I know what is involved in the production. I also have another company producing commerical software. The aspects that are often not understood by the larger world is the QA and interaction requirements of commercial software - if your game crashes then you are rightly annoyed, but if your commercial software crashes and you loose business then the results are more important to you.

Commercial software requires graphic artists too if they have a GUI and also a serious amount of 'storyboarding' around the typical use of an application by end users.

Game software can also often get away with unsupported techniques (banging the metal) when commercial software has to play nicely and also work with upgrades in the underlying operating system too. game software also tends to be single use and then a sequel carries forward only library code if relevant. Backwards compatibility with the previous incarnation is not expected - would you expect to load the saved game file from a previous release? All of these issues have to be accoutned for.
Which is all fine and dandy.. you still haven't addressed my original question.

Why can I find (1000's arguably) excellent open source variants to "commercial" software... but maybe 10, if I'm lucky, proper and decent Open Sourced 3D games?

There's the difference. Difficulty be damned ( I don't want to get into a pissing match between cultures here.. personal bias and/or emotions are not the way to discuss something ) - what matters is what the end user can get.

I can get OSS that will replace my commercial needs... I can't get OSS software to replace my gaming needs.
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