Gender Diversity / Politics in games (was Tropes Vs. Women)

[NEG]

[TehStu]

Making a video and speaking into it takes a little longer than text on a forum, so perhaps there's that. (why spent effort on a video your wrong about)

Fox News reckon Obama is a socialist, and it's true because they've gone to the trouble of saying it on air, with fancy graphics and everything.

The rebuttal in a plain text post on a forum wasn't convincing in the slightest.

[Tourist]

Don't want to derail the discussion or anything but somehow I fell down Harold Bloom/Naomi Wolf's rabbithole and came upon this:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/feb/26/gender.uk

It seems to be like Gamergate but for books, and that link contains some of the most catty sniping I have seen in print.

[Alex W.]

rubix cube

[Dudley]

Yeah that's the point he lost me.

[John0]

Has everyone's brain dribbled out of their ears yet?

*slowly raises hand*

[b00dles]

IDG the rubix cube thing but the 'give the audience what it wants' is bonkers.

An audience of people that think you're a fucking idiot isn't much of an audience but I've never understood the point in trolling really so who knows.

[Rowan Morrison]

Don't want to derail the discussion or anything but somehow I fell down Harold Bloom/Naomi Wolf's rabbithole and came upon this:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/feb/26/gender.uk

It seems to be like Gamergate but for books, and that link contains some of the most catty sniping I have seen in print.

Man alive, that Cosmo editor pulled out all the stops there, up to and including Nazis. She'd be a natural GG pundit.

Julie Burchill wins that one (an unexpected phrase) for bringing spite to a spite fight.

[Nick R]

Just to show I'm sticking to my side of the deal...

Actually quite enjoying it. So at least someone has got something out of this exchange so far!

S0L doesn't have a copy of the PC version of the first Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing?

[Broker]

You've got to give the audience what they want guys! Unless what they want is for you to shut up and fuck off. Because there's just no chance at all of that filling whatever pathetic need for attention inspires trolls.

[robdood]

IDG the Rubik's cube thing

[Clipper]

Is he going back to being the forum's Colin Hunt yet? Because this new incarnation is dull

[b00dles]

IDG the Rubik's cube thing

Oh right, I realised it was spelled wrong but I just thought there was something else to it and it was an intentional typo.

[Sledge]

S0L doesn't have a copy of the PC version of the first Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing?

Well they never did actually bother to fix it did they. Why clutter up your hard-drive with your own broken game when you can spend the dirty lucre on stuff that works?

[robdood]

Well they never did actually bother to fix it did they. Why clutter up your hard-drive with your own broken game when you can spend the dirty lucre on stuff that works?

I think he meant it's not even there with the other 'not installed', greyed-out games.

[Broker]

Well they never did actually bother to fix it did they. Why clutter up your hard-drive with your own broken game when you can spend the dirty lucre on stuff that works?

It sounds like someone is pretty upset about that £3 they wasted.

Would you like a pint glass for that bitter? (wi-fi)

[NEG]

Just booted, Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing works fine for me. (Windows 10)

and of course, so does it's sequel.

[S0L]

S0L doesn't have a copy of the PC version of the first Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing?

I have a non-Steam PC DVD and a version on 360. Never got round to rebuying it on Steam, amazing as it may seem

Well they never did actually bother to fix it did they. Why clutter up your hard-drive with your own broken game when you can spend the dirty lucre on stuff that works?

What doesn't work? It worked fine for me last time I played it which was admittedly a while a go. YMMV vary based on hardware, OS, what other programs you're running and any other millions of PC compatibility issues.

I'm not sure how either of these things relate to the thread in question of course! Except perhaps for the portrayal of the female characters in anything we've done which now on reflection perhaps could be said to be entirely tropes video adherent in places purely as a result of us attempting to stick to the original designs.

We did manage to put the only 'original' female character we did (Danica Patrick in All-Stars Transformed) in a fire proof racing suit in an extremely cool 6 wheeled formula one vehicle, rather than in a bikini racing the modern equivalent of Penelope Pitstop's glammed up sports car so I mostly sleep OK at night.

As for filthy lucre, I don't see a penny of any sales nor do I get any form of royalty share. So it's not like I'm sat in the pub every night laughing as I set fire to one of your well earned fivers

[Sledge]

I think he meant it's not even there with the other 'not installed', greyed-out games.

Yes, that's exactly what he meant.

It sounds like someone is pretty upset about that £3 they wasted.

Would you like a pint glass for that bitter? (wi-fi)

I'd like, when companies sell stuff, for that stuff to work, and when it's pointed out that something doesn't work their response not to be "Waah waah, shaders are ha-rd" because they're supposed to be, y'know, professional. There clearly is someone at the company who knows how to develop PC software because Transformed works fine by all accounts -- there's absolutely no excuse for leaving the original broken.

Just booted, Sonic and SEGA All Stars Racing works fine for me. (Windows 10)

and of course, so does it's sequel.

The original game continually recompiles its shaders at the point they're required (ie mid-game) on AMD cards. This isn't some weird outlier hiccup, it's a known issue with a slew of hardware configurations. Honestly, need I make any case against Sumo beyond the fact that NEG is defending them at this point? He literally comes with a 99.9999999% guarantee of being wrong on any issue.

Fix your shit, devs.

[Sledge]

As for filthy lucre, I don't see a penny of any sales nor do I get any form of royalty share. So it's not like I'm sat in the pub every night laughing as I set fire to one of your well earned fivers

I don't hold you personally responsible (I hope my use of "lucre" was humorous enough to convey that) but we can't very well go around saying "Developers should make their games work... oh except for S0L's company" can we? Well Broker can, perhaps.

I agree, through, we've wafted off topic. Danica Patrick in Transformed was/is exemplary, I thought.

[NEG]

I could have noted that I'm on a Nvidia card, fair enough. A bajillion configurations out there like S0L noted.

[S0L]

At the risk of straying further off-topic, it also does this on Nvidia cards (rebuilds shaders as needed) and builds a cache of these once built so they're there for future runs of the game. We are by no means the only game to have even done this, for example it does exactly the same thing on Elite Dangerous both at boot and during play.

Whilst I'm totally fine with accepting part of the blame that this can't be improved, this is also down to the way the AMD drivers work. We worked around it as best as we could, but it's not something we can ever entirely solve. We're not dealing with fixed console hardware, we're dealing with multiple GPU's that have a mix of hardware abilities, where the drivers can and will replace some features by software. Which differ per driver revision (we can only test with the drivers available at the time of development) and which can and do break games with optimisations made after the date of release as they're attempting to speed up the most recent 'GPU selling title that marketing decided needed to be supported'.

This is the beauty and curse of the PC platform. You accept you get cheaper games and you can have wonderful high resolutions and amazing framerates, but you are at the mercy of the drivers for your given choice of GPU. If you want to avoid it, honestly, buy an Nvidia card as the drivers are generally better and this is what most devs (us included) use. Or, get a console, where the hardware is fixed, the GPU interface will never change and so it's a known quantity in terms of abilities, performance and optimisation.

We spent bloody hours optimising the game across the major suite of GPU's, with multiple versions of drivers, on different OS's and configurations and SEGA spent just as long testing it.

Even if we could fix it, it'd need SEGA to commission the work. I don't think I'd be able to convince them to do so as the cost to them vs number of additional sales would probably arrive at a large negative figure.

End of the day, I can't fix the drivers, much as I'd like too. I'm sorry the game doesn't/didn't run perfectly on your choice of hardware, but we did everything we could to make it as good as possible within the limitations we had to work with.

[Spacehost]

There clearly is someone at the company who knows how to develop PC software because Transformed works fine by all accounts -- there's absolutely no excuse for leaving the original broken.

You'd probably imagine that both games share a significant codebase, being sequels and from the same folk and all that, and therefore it'd be a question of applying the lessons of the second to the first, but I'd bet that there's actually not a lot of shared code between the two games in the places that would matter, and the reason Transformed works fine is actually because of a raft of differences that mean fixes simply can't be backported onto the original.

[S0L]

Amusingly Transformed uses a completely different new engine with a totally different way of doing shaders, partly explicitly to work around the 'generate shaders on the fly' way they worked. Previously we used the same (increasingly) modified 'Sunshine' engine for OutRun2, OutRun2006, Virtua Tennis World Tour, Virtua Tennis 3, SEGA Superstars Tennis and VT2009.

We can't backport the engine, they're totally different from the ground up. It'd not be a cheap endeavour either!

[Broker]

I don't hold you personally responsible (I hope my use of "lucre" was humorous enough to convey that) but we can't very well go around saying "Developers should make their games work... oh except for S0L's company" can we? Well Broker can, perhaps.

I'm not making excuses, I was pointing out that you share a portion of the blame for trusting Sega with your money, even if someone competent was on dev duties. I understand that the way they behave as a company is unfair to their customers, but the only way to communicate that to them is with your wallet. I don't get posting passive aggressive messages about the unspecified company you're angry with in a thread where you know a developer from one of the companies that made it is reading.

[Rev]

It's a shame that it's impossible to change graphics cards in a PC when the brand you've got is causing problems. Although, to be fair, it has only been six years so maybe a bit soon even if you could.

[Alex W.]

It's a shame that it's impossible to change graphics cards in a PC when the brand you've got is causing problems. Although, to be fair, it has only been six years so maybe a bit soon even if you could.

[feltmonkey]

What is going on here? NEG comes in, spends weeks getting things wrong and annoying people, then finally watches all the Tropes videos and shows some understanding of the topic, and now suddenly everyone's talking about Sonic! Has he cast some kind of spell on you all?

[Spacehost]

What is going on here? NEG comes in, spends weeks getting things wrong and annoying people, then finally watches all the Tropes videos and shows some understanding of the topic, and now suddenly everyone's talking about Sonic! Has he cast some kind of spell on you all?

[John0]

NEG's current status: