UK Games Industry Over the Hill? 314
Tinkle writes "A games industry campaign group has warned the UK is falling behind on coding skills because university courses are not up to scratch. But this article includes an interview with an industry coding veteran who believes a lack of creative home computing hardware (think: Atari ST) is more likely to be at the root of the skills shortage, and explains why Britain's games coders are getting a bit long-in-the-tooth."
UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labour (Score:5, Informative)
The UK IT industry is notoriously tight fisted. They expect high standards from their employees but often pay barely above school-leaver wages for graduate positions.
There is no skills shortage in the UK. There is a shortage of decent employees, so all the skills are fucking off to the US and Canada where they can support themselves in the game industry without being a bartender in their spare time.
Re:UK IT bosses whinging at the lack of slave labo (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm a game programmer (Score:5, Informative)
That is the quality of programmer you saw because that is the quality of programmer the industry is willing to pay for.
As a British (ex-ish)coder I can't really convince you that I'm any good because the bioinformatics project I am currently temping on is not mine to show. However, I assure you once you get out of the world of coding for tuppence there are plenty of solid British coders - its just that most of them have enough sense to not work for British wages.
Re:Games just take too long to make (Score:5, Informative)
Ehm, GTA IV from Rockstar North based in Edinburgh? Scotland is still part of the UK at present afaik
Re:Games just take too long to make (Score:5, Informative)
Um, you do know GTAIV was made by a British studio, don't you?
Re:Games just take too long to make (Score:3, Informative)
GTA IV was made in Britain wasn't it?
Coding in the UK (Score:3, Informative)
1. Wages in the computer games programming market are very far behind what you can get doing a 9-6 mainstream programming job.
2. Younger programmers in the UK have very different aspirations to those of my youth, they are looking for a decent 'middle-class' career, not working in entertainment industry or being scientists.
3. Who the hell wants to work in the middle of freakin' nowhere. Tons of games companies moved out of the big cities to rural backwaters to get there costs down, but now the employees that had to move with them have left nobody wants in.
4. Games designers don't have to be programmers. It used to be that you had a great idea, wrote the code and $$$ profit. But now designers come through the level designer route and so don't fill out the junior programming positions.
I'd love to work back in the games industry but I have a life to support.
Re:BAD THINKING ;) (Score:5, Informative)
Re:It's not a university problem, it's people leav (Score:5, Informative)
* 34.3% of developers expect to leave the industry within 5 years, and 51.2% within 10 years.
* Only 3.4% said that their coworkers averaged 10 or more years of experience.
* Crunch time is omnipresent, during which respondents work 65 to 80 hours a week (35.2%). The average crunch work week exceeds 80 hours (13%). Overtime is often uncompensated (46.8%).
* 44% of developers claim they could use more people or special skills on their projects.
* Spouses are likely to respond that "You work too much..." (61.5%); "You are always stressed out." (43.5%); "You don't make enough money." (35.6%).
* Contrary to expectations, more people said that games were only one of many career options for them (34%) than said games were their only choice (32%).
And this was also my experience when I was working as a game developer.
ZX Spectrum (Score:3, Informative)
Re:BAD THINKING ;) (Score:4, Informative)
It was a 32-bit computer.
A lot of games on the Atari ST came from well known english companies (The Bitmap Brothers, Psygnosis, etc...).
The Amiga had more games coming from other countries (like the Turrican serie from Germany).
Symptomatic of UK iT (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Who the hell... (Score:3, Informative)
As one of those ST games programmers... (Score:4, Informative)
...I'll take issue with "tiny bit".
Some programming is very formulaic (eg. data processing, accounting...) but games programming or any type of programming where you're interacting with humans takes a lot of creativity and imagination.
The "art" in a game is in the interaction with the user. You can't see it, you can only feel it.
Yes, you need to know calculus, etc., to be able to implement your ideas but even then you can't just do it in a formulaic way because you need to wring every last cycle out of the machine and the formulaic way is rarely the fastest way.
Put another way, games programming takes talent. Not everybody can do it. If it were uncreative then that wouldn't be true - monkeys could be trained to do it.
Re:Games development "degrees" are a joke (Score:2, Informative)
It's like the difference between getting a degree in physics and a degree electrical engineering -- the physics degree gives you the science, but the EE degree gives you the the application.
Yeah, there is. I have such a degree. It's called 'Computer Information Systems' or 'Business Information Systems' or 'Management Information Systems.' These courses teach coding and application development methodologies used in business. Again, CIS is the application, while CS is the science.Re:BAD THINKING ;) (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but they'd be wrong ;) The 68k has 32-bit wide registers, 16-bit wide ALU, and 16-bit wide external data bus. Its ISA had instructions that would operate on 32-bit wide data (add.l, for example). The 68008 was the same processor (internally) as the 68000 except it only externalized an 8-bit wide data bus to save on pin count. You could actually build a machine around the 68k with 8-bit wide memory (the address/data buses allowed this) and it would have "looked" like a 68008.
The people who would have classified the 68k according to its external data bus width would have classified the original Pentium as a 64-bit processor ;) and it was clearly a 32-bit processor (at least, I have never seen anyone try to assert that it was 64-bit). People did try to say the i386SX was a 16-bit processor because it externalized a 16-bit data bus while being, internally, an i386 (complete with 32-bit wide registersr and ALU).
I owned an Atari 1040STf at one point and really liked the machine. My friends all had mixes of Atari STs and Amigas and the Amiga was a bit neater but the ST was still pretty neat.
Re:Think ZX Spectrum... (Score:3, Informative)
The XGameStation is a good example of a programable console a person could learn inside out.
http://www.xgamestation.com/
The problem (Score:5, Informative)
It's partly the universities, mainly the schools but in the end it also comes down to the coders and their equipment at home.
1) Most people who go in for CS degrees know bugger-all about computers. It's sad but true. These people will probably NEVER program again once they leave, they will end up either typing in data all day, fixing computers or (in very rare instances) coding trivialities. I can name five top ICT teachers who programmed in COBOL and all sorts of exotic languages and who NEVER did it again for any reason. I can name twenty of the same who now specialise in English or Science or some other non-related subject.
Student's knowledge of algorithms is purely a memory aspect in order to pass the exams. This is because they are taught in school that "computers are the future" and "you should learn computers", so they fiddle on a machine and install iTunes and think they could be the next ID Software. Most teaching staff in schools have absolutely no idea what's involved in CS and just recommend those who "are good at computer stuff" to get a CS degree if nothing else beckons. Many of these people hate mathematics and drop out quite quickly. Most of the rest of the students just think it's cool to get better access to the computers and mess about on them for three years.
2) Of those that *do* end up programming, there are two types: those who probably started programming long before anybody "taught" them how to do it. Those types (we'll call them the hobbyists) probably know more languages, constructs and algorithms before they start a CS course than everybody else does *after* the course. The other type are those that find they can knock up a program "good enough". These types of people are rarely interested in coding as a hobby and will usually go on to make business apps, if anything. The hobbyists would *love* to code games all day long.
3) You don't get many of these "hobbyist" programmers at all because most of them code for years before being taught, by which time they "think they know better", or they have something missing: Access to hardware, languages, artistic teams, etc. There is no hobbyist programming platform anymore (like the ZX Spectrum, etc.) - to get started on programming for a simple device you either have to use extremely high-level "games-creators", or you're into setting up development environments on "hacked" or "chipped" hardware, or buying expensive development suites. Most of these things you end up paying money for, one way or another. There is no "pick up and program" system any more where back in the days of Codemasters, etc. it was ALL that was available. Every computer you found could be easily programmed without having to do ANYTHING to it. They came with languages BUILT-IN. The IBM PS/2 - turn it on, you're in BASIC. Programming tools just don't come with computers anymore - it's all development kits, seperate programs, etc.
4) The fun of programming was in fun languages, with crappy interfaces, horrible programming principles, and low-level techniques that required you to use your brains in order to squeeze the most out of a pittance of cpu-cycles - misuse goto and save yourself twenty cycles. You found most things out by accident or experiment and you would program a game just for the hell of it.
Nowadays, anyone can knock up a program in minutes but they don't know how/why it works, or how to make it better - it's all just libraries and "magic boxes". Take away their development environment and they wouldn't be able to write a batch file, let alone a program in C (and in fact most kids, even the computer-geeks, know bugger-all that isn't available in a GUI anymore, for instance. Tell them to write a progam and they go looking for the "Write a program" icon - DOS is a mystical thing to them that they won't bother to learn). These kids just don't care - they don't see how the games are written, they have no patience to write their own and they have no help.
Killing the command-line, BASIC and similar languag
Re:Home coding on the Atari ST? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Games just take too long to make (Score:3, Informative)
So he's made a double fool of himself.
Re:BAD THINKING ;) (Score:2, Informative)
I wasn't disagreeing with you... I thought I was supporting you :) The ISA supported 32-bit operations but the ALU was 16-bits wide. The add.l would use two passes of the 16-bit ALU to complete the operation (effectively an add.w on the lower 16-bits followed by an addx.w on the upper 16-bits, but slightly more efficient). However, for the programmer, it certainly appeared to be, and behave like, a 32-bit processor (personally, I considered it a 32-bit CPU because the programmer's model was 32-bit... 32-bit registers, 32-bit operands for instructions... if it looks like one and smells like one, it probably is one).
The ST definitely seemed to stand for S(ixteen)T(hirty-two). The follow-on machine was the Atari T(hirty-two)T(hirty-two) based on the 68030.
Re:Think ZX Spectrum... (Score:3, Informative)
You forget one of the real biggies: Rockstar North (nee DMA Design) who created the Grand Theft Auto series.
Re:Think ZX Spectrum... (Score:3, Informative)