My biggest fear of doing gamedev on a pro-level with this approach, is that SO MANY of these companies have clauses, that if you produce something successful; they have some backdoor way of completely taking over your intellectual property, claiming it as some kind of "union due" to your job, or something to that effect.

Yes, that's a pretty standard part of the contract. Whether it's legally enforceable is a distinctly grey area, and how seriously that clause is taken varies wildly from company to company. It's a fun thing to ask about in job interviews. You have options:

1 - Talk to the company about having that clause removed, or re-worded. Probably you'll be told "no", but if you don't ask, you don't get.

2 - If you have no luck getting the contract sorted, consider speaking to your boss to figure out how seriously the company takes the clause. It might be the case that they really do want you to run every creatively-aroma'd fart you emit by the legal department, but it might also be the case that so long as they don't feel like you're competing directly with them or nicking trade secrets or using work time or equipment, they're happy to be supportive. Sometimes it's in-between: they're happy for you to do stuff outside work, but you've got to run each project past the legal team to make sure it's okay. It's a big game of compromises, basically.

3 - If the conversation from 2 isn't fruitful (or, you think, possible), do what everyone else does and lie. Work on your stuff under a pseudonym, don't let your employers catch wind of what you're doing. Certainly don't talk about it around the water cooler. If they don't know that it was you who wrote the next Indie hit, they can't sue you...

4 - ... And if they do try to sue you, appeal to The Internets to see what they can provide in terms of legal advice and/or funding. As I say, that clause is a legally grey area, and you might just win.

5 - If you lose, and your employer ends up owning your IP, they might want to release it themselves (they thought the game was worth going to court over, after all). I have no idea whether they'd still want you involved in the game after the whole court battle thing, but hey: your game is going to get released!

Works fine in Firefox and Safari as well as Chrome. As far as I know it doesn't have anything to do with HTML5, though. It's JavaScript.

Glaiel, you can turn that off. One of the first things I change on a fresh Windows install. I forget the exact procedure, and I daresay it differs on different versions of Windows, but search help (or Google) for something like "disable error reporting".

y yall mad tho?

No seriously guys, I don't get the outrage. What happened is that someone couldn't play Dragon Age 2 for a day. Yes it was dumb to ban him and I'm not defending EA, but there's really no need to inflate this into some sort of "scandal". I wasn't EA being an Evil Greedy Corporation That Hates Its Customers™, it was a moderator being an idiot.

I wasn't trying to stir outrage by posting this thread or pretending like this little fuck up is a huge deal (it is and it isn't at the same time). But people should be more aware of what companies do to their customers. This dreadful fact about EA's forum and many others in this thread convinced me that Dragon Age 2 won't be worth my time, saving me 60 dollars.

But ya people shouldn't get mad, get even. Spend your money elsewhere 

This.

I think it's important not to downplay what happened here - an entertainment corporation took money from a customer, and then banned that customer from playing it because they dared to criticise the corporation (and didn't even have the courtesy to offer the customer a refund for their troubles). Bull. Shit. If I buy a game, I own it, and I get to play it when and how I want. You want to monkey with the terms and conditions, claim that I'm just licensing the software? Fine - I'll give you like $5 to "rent" your game, but I won't pay $60.

I think the issue is worth getting angry over, but bottling pent-up anger is unhealthy. Best thing to do is not buy the game, and go spend the money on something which will bring joy into your life and which you want to support.

Every post in this thread is better than the last. This is my new favourite piece of the Internet.

Is films games? Because if not, it can fuck off.

BioWare has responded to reports that Electronic Arts smuggled SecuROM onto retail PC discs of Dragon Age II, denying the presence of the notorious DRM. According to the studio, the SecuROM alarm bells sounded due to a another Sony-branded DRM measure, Release Control.

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck...

[really]

Seen the latest?

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2011/03/dragon-age-ii-features-hated-securom-despite-previous-ea-claims.ars

They really don't want people to buy this game, do they?

Ty The Tasmanian Tiger 2: Bush Rescue.

I can't even remember how or why it ended up in my possession. I certainly didn't buy it. But I completed it. Nothing earth-shattering, but a thoroughly pleasant romp.

Banned guy:

On EA Live Chat they told me that that I said: "Have you sold your souls to the EA devil?"

Bioware Guy:

2. EA Community bans come down from a different department and are the result of someone hitting the REPORT POST button. These bans can affect access to your game and/or DLC.

Because the BioWare community now operates under the same umbrella as all EA Communities, community members here have all explicitly agreed to abide by and be governed by both sets of rules. Consider it an added incentive to follow the rules you say you're going to follow.

Translation:

Yes, we have sold our souls to the EA Devil. Fuck you very much.

To have collected those exact words, and arranged them in that exact order is a towering achievement that elevates our whole species. Hamletz, Super(b) Joe - congratulations 

I don't understand.

You say you're "working from home". If you mean you're working from home as an employee of a company, they should cover the cost of Visual Studio - in fact, if they've paid for you to have a copy of it at work, that license should automatically cover a second copy at home, since you can only physically be using one copy at any given time. If you mean that you are a freelancer, or in some other way self-employed, just pay the money. £700 is a pretty negligible expense in business terms.

If you're an indie, or a hobbyist, you've got two choices: Use the freebie version (Visual C++ Express, is it?) and live without Visual Assist and pay for the upgrade when your product is finished, about to launch and you're confident you'll be making money back, or use one of the different, free IDEs. Seriously, last time I checked, Microsoft's freebie Visual C++ thing was pretty fully featured (barring the ability to add Visual Assist to it - hey, I love it too, but you can't have everything).

Failed my math exam.

First up, BIG FUCKING I HEAR YA HUGS 

Disclosure: I've never failed a Maths exam, but I suck at maths. Maths exams for me represent some of the darkest and bleakest times in my past, times when I have done nothing but weep openly over past papers for months. I utterly despised maths, and hated myself for my deficiency in it. It's only after leaving education, getting a job as a games programmer, realising that actually it doesn't involve that much maths really, but that the times when maths is involved, it's actually pretty cool, that I have learned to not hate it.

So: Secondly. What do you actually want to do with yourself? Is maths a big important part of that? If your career choice is "mathematician", you might have a problem. If it's "programmer", chances are you'll be able to wing it, so long as you try hard. If it's anything less maths-centric, you'll be good. There is much, MUCH more to life than grade point averages, and if that's the cause of your woes, I would gently and kindly advise you that perhaps a change of perspective might be in order.

This isn't an area of C I've looked into particularly deeply, and none of the references I have seem to explicitly list pros and cons with variable argument lists, so take all of this with a pinch of salt...

It would certainly seem that you can't guarantee any type safety with variable argument lists - even with printf you can pass it any old garbage to try to format. I could also believe that there might be some performance issues too, unless the compiler is doing something particularly special. The code to iterate through the arguments is a bit fiddly as well, I suppose, but nothing too horrible.

I suspect the main reason they're not used is because there's not much call for them. I see them used fairly frequently in functions that work with strings like printf does (for assert/error messages, or for printing text onscreen via a font renderer, for example), but aside from that I've never seen a need for variable arguments anywhere else. Unless your compiler only supports C, you should be able to use C++ style default arguments, which can do a similar job of allowing you to be more flexible in the parameters you pass (or don't pass) to functions. Default arguments aren't as flexible as the varargs stuff, but they're pretty good and they're type-safe.

I'm not sure if I agree that TNT (well, gunpowder) should be available on Peaceful mode (Bonemeal and string aren't available either, and both are useful) - I like that there's a reason to play with creepers or ghasts and to work for your resources a bit. Just building a monster trap is an interesting challenge, even if you do the building on Peaceful and then switch to Normal to let it run. I found that the designs were a lot more complex and harder to get right than I thought, so it becomes and interesting engineering challenge.

Diamond was what did my head in. It's hard to find, comes in tiny quantities, and whilst it is a lot more durable than other substances, it's still not sufficently durable that I was ever able to get over the shortage of pickaxes and swords and actuall own an item of armour made from the stuff. And I spent HOURS mining for diamonds.

Hi,

You need to introduce yourself:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45.0

And you need to move this post to the "Unpaid Collaborations" section:

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=10787.0

You are a disgraced engineer who works in the bowels of a city monitoring it's sewage and treatment facilities. While attempting to repair and unclog pipes due to all the crap people flush and throw into storm drains, you notice a dead body in a pipe. Now you have to search the pipes for other clues to figure out who was murdered by whom and why.

All while avoiding crocodiles.

I would totally play that game. In fact, if I had a magic button that could generate the mythical Spare Time, I would use some of it to make that game, if nobody else was doing it. Crime! Mystery! Exploration! Crocodiles! Poop!

Visual Assist.

Um, that's about it.

Loved it. In particular, I loved how accurate it is at simulating what it's like being a cephalopod trying to maintain the illusion of being human, which is obviously a pretty universal experience.

*checks URL - damn, this isn't SquidSource! Wrong forum...*

Okay, so maybe not all of the rest of you are octopi. But yeah, the game does nail that feeling of being a big gangly overgrown kid, uncomfortable and clumsy in your own skin, trying to pass yourself off as a Sensible and Wise and Responsible Adult, and it does it in a way that's amusing rather than harrowing. So that's good Looking forward to seeing where Octodad goes after this.

XCode is the bane of my damn entire existence. LONG LIVE VISUAL STUDIO KING OF COMPILERS AND IDE's!

This.

My experience of Macs in general is kinda "meh" - not the massive Holy Light shined upon my life that the fanboys would have you believe, and not any more stable or free from the oddities of a suitably-configured Windows box, but not bad either. In terms of developer tools and IDEs, however, Visual Studio is light years ahead of XCode. It's a wonder anybody has managed to develop anything nontrivial at all with that piece of garbage.