Slashdot Mirror
First Review of Halo
The Halo Guy writes: "Voodoo Extreme has posted the first review of Halo, the new first person shooter from Bungie Software that's an Xbox launch title and will be ported to the Mac and PC later next year. Included are some very cool high resolution Xbox game captures too." I guess buying the bundle will be a little less painful if you get good games with the system.
"had the game chugging along nicely on a Pentium 2 powered 300Mhz PC equipped with a TNT2 graphics accelerator"
How come games like this can not be designed to run on older pc's. As these graphics look like they would need at lease 600mhz running on a normal pc.
Cruise TT
And how many people remember Bungie promising over and over that Halo would not become a console game? Or, later, that it would be released for the XBox and (PC or Mac) simultaneously? Oh well. Here's to waiting for the port.
Look at the headlights on that dune buggy. Nice(if it is an actual sreenshot). These shots remind me of the Final Fantasy movie.
Speaking as an underpaid person who can't afford every new system out there, I think I'll stick with PC ports. Most stuff eventually makes it there anyway.
I'm not buying either a cube or box until I see a good comparison of Metroid vs. Halo.
Then I'll make a decision...
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
Finally some competition worth looking into in the console market. It's seems the Console Wars are back on and much better than ever. Time to see if Nintendo's rehashed ideas and Sony's "old" PS2 can compete with the X-Box.
_______
I just wish I could c:\format Internet
The game was originally designed to run on a Mac.
does anyone else keep reading this as "Master Chef" ? Maybe it's just the influence of certain Steven Segal movies or South Park, or the lack of caffeine in my breakfast.
-f
www.blackant.net
I used to have a Macintosh, so when everyone was talking about Duke Nukem and Quake and all that I was left out in the cold, but then Marathon came along. I used to go to my friend's house and play his shoot 'em up games on his PC, so I knew the type, but Marathon just blew them all away. I even snuck a copy to our high school computer lab and setup some network games for us "geeks" while the rest of the class was still working on their assignments. It was the coolest game as far as fluidity of game play and ease of use. If Halo follows in that tradition then it must be pretty good. It's unfortunate though that it's only released on the XBox as of yet, I mean it's a shame that the first release is going to be tainted by the "blue screen of death."
On a side note, Bungie has a cool product page with a little more info.
~ now you know
...I dunno. I thought the controls for the game were pretty painful, but then again I have yet to play a console-based FPS whose controls I find as intuitive as keyboard+mouse.
Granted, I didn't get to take the XBox home and hook it up to my Wega, but graphics didn't even come close to blowing me away.
MS is supposed to be spending half a billion promoting the XBox, right? Ads and demo machines are pretty sparsely dropped, so I guess we know where that money earmarked for advertising found its way to, hmm? Not saying that there's payola going on here, but "better single-player than Half-Life" has more than a tinge of that bought-and-paid-for hyperbole.
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
I noticed the author said he played through it a few times. If he means fully then this must be some short game. Also console games don't have the same life span as PC games since at the moment, no mods/maps/etc. (although getting closer to this).
So your life span is cut short, and as for the graphics, well, with Unreal 2 and Doom right around the corner, I doubt this will hold the crown for too long in first person shooters.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad to see a kick ass fps on a console's launch and I've noticed Halo since its birth, but for some reason I doubt people will play Halo as long as they did (and still do) Half Life, Quake and Unreal.
Is it just me, or does anyone else have a hunch that this might take off the same way Doom did sometime back?
Doom was a revolution. Halo, sadly, is Another Quake/Unreal type game with slightly better graphics. Business as usual.
Honestly, the fall from a multiplayer, persistant, war story of epic proportions down to a simple action shoot-em-up with a hint of multiplayer is truly a fall form grace.
Quite likely it had nothing to do with Microsoft. This looks like a classic case of a game developer promising too much--a game that would require 10 years to implement properly--and having to scale back in order to actually finish the thing without going out of business. This is very common. It's easy to talk about or show movies of games that would never really work.
Yeah - I noticed this shortly after the first screenshots of the blade-equipped Covenant forces came out.
I'm witholding judgement. But the first time I hear some Covenant grunt yell "En Taro Adun," I'm calling Blizzard's lawyers.
Regards,
Marc
So the reviewer says its the most gorgeous and awesome first person shooter he has ever had the pleasure to be completely engrossed in and... your response is that it has not lived up to its hype.
*scratches his head in confusion*
Oh, wait.. nm
Jeremy
Those screenshots are supposedly from the XBox version, then how are they so big? I didn't catch the actual resolution of them, but they filled up my 1600 x 1200 monitor quite nicely. I know the XBox can't push resolutions like that (it would be pointless because TVs don't go that high) so where dod the really grap those screen shots?
sin(6cos(r)+5A)
I think there is a better review over at TeamXbox check out their review.
Yeah, except that the game was to be released years ago, and it was the Xbox holding up development, not Bungie. The e3 alpha version ran on a 266 with a tnt2. They were doing fine, it was going well, it wasn't "the project that wouldn't die". Oh, well.
They are releasing it for PC and MAC. Check out http://carnage.bungie.org/haloforum/halo.forum.pl? read=76648
You mean this?
It was reported last year that someone ported MAME to the Xbox. Unfortunately, since it is not an approved Microsoft title of any sort, it will never be made available for general use.
[Yes this is a duplicate post, I hit the wrong link when replying last time]
You should never take life too seriously - You'll never get out of it alive.
actually, that was some snowboarding game on the xbox.
I guess I've never liked first person shooters on consoles. My brother had doom for Play Station and I didn't really like the control. Maybe the new controlers will work better. I still think it will work better with mouse/keyboard.
I just don't know. Halo was big news a couple years ago (they did a demo at mac-world..). Then bungie got bought by MS the game was delayed and now seems to be Xbox only. Like the mac world needed one less game developer developing for them....
No, that was Microsoft
Wake up, people. M$ is making money off this. Don't be tempted. Stay strong. Buy a Gamecube 3 days later. The less money they have, the sooner there will be parity in the marketplace. The same goes for keyboards and mice, too. Sure, their mice are nice but Logitech and others make good ones, too. Don't be sucked in! Stay strong.
(I can't tell if this is begging, sarcasm, funny, or insightful. Probably just flogging the old dead horse. Either way, I'm not buying one.)
Suck it up, Bungie. MS stole your soul and your ability to innovate.
Alternatively, MS provided the hard cash and commercial expertise to keep Bungie in business to work on wildly-overambitions projects.
Not everything in life is a conspiracy by Microsoft against the entire world, you know.
I looked at the terrible screenshots and made up my mind. :)
I don't think the screenshots are real.. If the gateway tv/computer taught me anything is that the resolutions of tv's is not high
about a year ago, when first previews with more than just some marketing hype came around, Halo was the next step in FPS gaming.
let's see - it had a persistent, massive-multiplayer online world, a solid storyline driving an amazing outdoor graphics engine. and there were rumours that it was going to be released for windos, Mac and Linux - simultaneously.
then, bungie got bought.
when Halo finally comes to the PC in summer 2002, it will be yet another FPS, as all the really innovative concepts have been removed. the graphics will also be much less amazing given the amount of time that has passed.
all that wouldn't be catastrophic, if it weren't for the fact that 90% of those who were starving for Halo earlier this year have been alienated.
first the Mac and Linux users by bungie being acquired by none else then microsoft. the bungie forums were aflame in Mac users who felt somewhere between sold and raped.
then, all those looking for the "next generation" game were pissed of by waiting about a year longer than was originally said, during which time Halo's graphics and physics engines have dwindled from "revolutionary" to "quite nice".
and finally, everyone looking for the next step in FPS gaming, in the sense of more depth in gameplay than just kill-em-all, will have to look for some other place. sorry, Halo is just another shooter, try again next year.
frankly, selling the game as part of a bundle is, IMHO, the only chance it has to break even. some idiot has systematically destroyed its fanbase, and because of the early marketing offense, almost everyone who'd pay money for Halo *was* a part of the fanbase.
let's hope someone takes that which has been taken out of the game, i.e. all the *really* great parts, such as the persistent world, and makes a game around those.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
has played their Dreamcast online with "Alien Front Online", "Outtrigger", "NFL2k1", etc...will notice that when using one of these "New Fangled" machines it will be like taking a big step in the reverse direction. Is it not sad that when the bar gets set to a certain level -- todays competition does not match up to yesterdays inovation. Just wait until all these people buy Halo and are able to "own" the AI of the machine -- and are left with nowhere else to turn for competition.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Here are some other xbox bundles that Slashdotters may want to take a look at.
Remember, Bungie was jumping into the Linux games market, with titles like Myth 2 (way cool game!).
Now we'll never see a port of this for Linux.
Although, I just bought a slew of Loki games, and I'm still playing Terminus.
Stop. Wait. Pause for breath.
Don't speculate that this is faked up, or a bought review, or that it rocks, or sucks, or is the best thing since sliced Tomato Demon.
Just wait. Wait until you've played it in a store, or your excited friend plays it, or a plethora of reviews from many independent sources are available.
Anything other reaction is just buying the hype, either Microsoft's bought hype or that of the anti-Microsoft crusaders.
Make the decision now to wait until after this Christmas to buy an Xbox. It'll still be there, and it's still be as good or as bad as it is on the day it ships.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How do you get hi res screen shots from a game designed to run on a device that uses a TV for output? Smells fishy, but that could just be my lunch.
I'm going to go back in my box and will think within the limits of my box: MS Sucks Linux Good I read too much Slashdot.
Tony Hawk 3 is also out for GameCube launch, but there's no review of that version of it up yet.
My other
As a longtime mac user, I was (and still am to a lesser degree) a huge fan of Bungie. Starting with the original Marathon, they've always put a lot of love and technical detail into their games, and their storylines were some of the most complex and intriguing in the industry. Even now, the Marathon story is still a matter of discussion. Hopefully, all that and more carried over into Halo (which is a spin-off of the Marathon story). But considering what we've lost already - the game was originally to be played from a third-person perspective to enhance the storytelling - I'm a little doubtful it will live up to our original impression. Well, here's hoping the mac version will run on my new powerbook.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
I've been boycotting Microsoft products for years. I don't see any reason to stop now. It amazes me to see the M$-bashing Slashdot crowd suddenly cooing all over the newest Microsoft baby.
I don't think Microsoft is inherently evil. Windows XP would be their first decent "for-home-machines" OS if it wasn't for all the crappy business practices such as tying it to Passport. Their business practices have been so damaging to the technology industry that I refuse to buy their products.
You all should think about that before you run out to buy their new toy. There are other toys on the market.
include $sig;
1;
In all fairness, designing non-humanoid aliens is a tricky business. Yes, the knees do resemble those of the protoss, but how many ways are you going to design legs besides those of humans? Protoss/Covenant knees resemble those of a number of different animals (albeit of the 4-legged variety). My point is, if you're going to design a realistic creature, there are significant limitations. It's debatable whether nature will even allow many bodyforms wholly different from those you already see in the natural world.
As for the rest of the body, they're not that similar, and although they're using an energy blade it's not like that of the Protoss.
---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Granted the XBOX has a powerfull graphics chip, but isn't the biggest trick in the bag -- that the resolution of the TV is *soooo* much lower then the pc its trivial to render for compared to the (standard) 1024x768?
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
Any one of the Iron Chefs could beat this Master Chef.
Except Bungie itself announced recently that it will, indeed, be a PC and Mac title next year.
Get your facts straight before you FUD.
Bungie also said it's would launch PC/Mac/X-Box titles at the same time. They also said they wouldn't change the game went they moved ot MS. They also said HALO would still be multiplayer on the X-Box to showcase that the X-Box is a network gaming platform.
I'll beleive it when I SEE it. So get your facts straight before you start selling vaporware.
Bad Mojo
"If you can't win by reason, go for volume." -- Calvin
Exactly. Does anyone remember how Quake was first described? It was nothing like the warned-over Doom with better graphics and still more dull, brown labyrinths it ended up as.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
- It's a first-person-shooter
- It's for the console
First-person shooters, in general, are IMHO the lowest class of games. Regardless of smart enemy AI, semi-deformable terrain, etc., the gameplay is almost always the same: "aim for the face". That's it. Just run around, look at the nice backgrounds, and shoot demons in the head. It gets boring after about 5 minutes. The notable exceptions for this rule are HalfLife and Deus Ex, both of which introduced story elements and puzzles into the braindead shooter genre. The ultimate continuation of this trend is System Shock 2, which has actually caused my college grades to drop a couple of points, and gave me nightmares for years to come. Unfortunately, it looks like Halo is sticking with the stale old formula: shoot monsters in the face, and that's it.As if this wasn't bad enough, Halo is a shooter game for the console. There are 2 reasons why FPS games for consoles rarely work. First of all, consoles have no mouse. It's hard to aim without the mouse. When the sole purpose of the game is to aim for the face, the lack of a good aiming mechanism becomes troublesome. Second of all, consoles rarely have good Internet access support. This means that multiplayer games (i.e., deathmatch) are hard to pull off. Actually, the Xbox may be able to overcome this limitation - we'll have to see.
In general though, I wouldn't buy Halo even if it was released for the PC. Not because of some kind of a religious anti-Microsoft passion, but simply because I expect the game to be boring. In case anyone remembers, Max Payne was also hyped as the best forst-person shooter game ever - and it turned out to be a glorified rail game with a cool graphics effect that you get to watch over, and over, and over, and over again.
Unfortunately, modern games seem to be focusing more and more on graphics, and less and less on actual gameplay (works of art such as Ico are rare exceptions). I, for one, will note use my hard-earned cash as a vote to continue this sad trend.
>|<*:=
The PS2 A/V outputs are better than "Just Enough". It supports DTS, has an optical out (though really all DVD players have that, so it's not saying much) but also component output (and I think progressive scan at that).
I seem to remember a number of reviews when it came out saying that the video quality output from DVD's was equal to some higher end players.
Now the DVD control features, there I'd have to say the system is lacking big time. They could have had an amazing array of control features but instead really do have an almost less-than-minimal set. It will be interesting to see if the XBox improves on that or has the same lame set.
I use the PS2 as my only DVD player for the moment (having given away the other ones to family), and at no point has the A/V quality been an issue. It't certainly better than an Apex DVD player I bought a bit ago with a bad tendancy to stutter at times. Now THAT is annoying.
As for MS selling a million units (you didn't specify a timeframe, but I assume you meant "before CHristmas" and not "ever"!), it could be possible but they have some brutal competition. I'm preordering a Gamecube just for Rogue Squadron, and some of the other Gamecube games look equally amazing. The PS2 has come into its prime with multiple fantastic games, and will probably dominate THIS Christmas. Now next Christmas, that's anyone's guess but it will probably come down to the best set of unique games are around for each platform. So many games now are developed for all the machines there are only a small set of games that make each platform unique.
One last note - have you forgotten that Panasonic (at least I think it was Panasonic) is coming out with a DVD playing version of the Gamecube? If I knew the feature set was better I'd get that instead of the base gamecube.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Curves aren't impossible, but they're a complete pain to code and the maths involved requires way more computing power than we currently have.
Main problems vs. polygons are the fact that you need to do some nasty calculus to work out how the surface normal and lighting effects change *for every single pixel*. Also, when you render a polygon, the mapping from screen to polygon co-ordinates is trivial. For an arbitrary curved surface, it is very difficult, since a line from the camera could hit the curved surface at various points.
In general, it is much easier to render 100 simple polygons than one curved surface, so most games end up doing it that way. Any curved surface can be approximated to arbitrary accuracy by dividing it up into enough polygons.
This may change in the future, but we're still years off, and it may never happen becuase the power used to calculate curves could just be used to draw ever-smaller polygons. Once the polygons start hitting 16,777,216 colours.
Of course, curved surfaces are still commonplace in raytracing and CSG where accuracy counts and you don't have to draw the screen in 1/100th of a second....
Hmmm.... slashdot still can't handle "greater than" and "less than" in plain text mode.
The last sentence of the penultimate paragraph should have read "Once the polygons start hitting less than 10 or so pixels in size, there probably isn't any visible advantage to using curves and we'll stop caring, rather like the way that we stopped bothering about greater than 16,777,216 colours."
You're asking why newer games can't be designed to run on older PCs?
Are you on crack? Do you know just how much new, graphics-laden games would royally suck if they were designed with, say, a Pentium 90 in mind?
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
The simple fact is the screenshots are about 1280x965 pixels. I TV has a theoretical maximum of 525 horizontal dots of resolution (and somewhat fewer vertical lines).
That means these are not screenshots. They're manufactured by some other means. Only MSFT knows for sure. Certainly not the reviewer.
Whatever else is faked is left to our imagination...
A beginners' guide to Portland, OR?
You know, I've followed this game's development pretty rabidly since the first rumors of "Project Blam" started surfacing in 1998. I think you're remembering selectively: Halo was never pitched as a persistant multiplayer-only game. It was always going to have a primary single-player component.
I suspect you're confused because all of the initial demos were of the multiplayer side. At the time, Bungie took pains to explain that this was a result of their internal development schedule, which slotted the engine and multiplayer sections for completion long before the single-player campaign was even demoable, much less finished. (The reasons for this kind of schedule should be pretty self-evident: artists, writers and voice-actors work on different time scales than engineers.)
The big change that did occur around the time of the MS buyout was a shift from third-person to first-person perspective, but I don't see any reason to not take their word that that was a gameplay and control issue brought out by playtesting.
Christ, grow up, will you?
First of all, in all likelihood, Microsoft saved Bungie from bankruptcy. If you cast your mind back to 1998, Bungie was on the tail end of a very ambitious expansion program that had produced mixed results at best. Myth and Myth II had gotten uniformly excellent reviews, but were far from best-sellers. They were having amply-documented (by themselves, at length, on their website) problems getting their boxes onto store shelves. They had sunk an unknown but presumably significant amount of money into opening up a California office to produce a game (Oni) that at the time of the MS buyout was over a year behind schedule and still slipping, and they had just started development on an insanely ambitious title (Halo) that was, at best, not going to ship for another two years. Add it all up, and you get a company in desperate need of funding, not to mention some marketing muscle.
Second, pissing and moaning about how a finished game diverges, a little or a lot, from whatever rabid speculation some of the designers indulged in while it was still in pre-alpha form only shows how little you understand about the development process. Here's the nutshell version: Shit happens. You start out with a design doc that says the game will have perfect realtime raytraced voxels and will also make you coffee and fetch your slippers. A year later all of your hair is missing because BigHardwareCo's graphics APIs are an undocumented mess, the playtesters insist that they want tea, not coffee, and half of the company's monitors explode during a cutscene in level 10 for no reason that you can determine. You have a finite amount of money to spend, a finite amount of time you can take before the online game sites lose interest in your screenshots, and a finite amount of prozac you can dispense to your engineers. All of those airy promises you made a year ago are now completely irrelevant. You fix the problems that are fixable, remove the parts that can't be done, polish what does work until it shines, and save the fifty great ideas you had to abandon for the sequel. Assuming there is s sequel. Assuming, of course, you ship at all.
Companies do not run on good intentions alone, and designers don't make games for their own amusement: they make them so that other people can see them. (And so they can get paid.) Given a choice between slowly slipping under the waves and suddenly getting a very, very large wad of cash from a company that was also going to market my product like nobody's business, I know what I, and any other adult, would choose in a heartbeat.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
Every game seems to use this effect now, and they all put it in their screen shots. But why do they use it so much? Does anybody feel that this enhances gameplay or even the graphics in any way whatsoever?
Lens flare is not experienced with your eyes in real life. It's an effect of a camera lense. So in a game where the creator wants to make it look at real as possible, and make it appear as you're in the action, why would they use an effect that makes it feel like you're behind a camera?
The only purpose I could see using for is maybe in a sports sim that allows replay, or possibly in some cinematic sequences where you'd be looking at a TV within the game.
Although Microsoft now owns the whole of Bungie, as part of the deal, Take 2 Interactive (who used to own 19.9% of Bungie) have acquired all the rights to Oni and Myth, as well as the rights to build two titles based on the Halo engine.
Bungie have also been quoted as saying that they will remain autonomous within MS, and may continue to develop titles for non-MS platform (e.g. Mac), although it remains to see how long that lasts. I suspect that Mac titles may be allowed to continue for a little while, but PlayStation 2 titles will be knocked right on the head in favour of X-Box.
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
Wake up, people. M$ is making money off this. Don't be tempted. Stay strong. Buy a Gamecube 3 days later. The less money they have, the sooner there will be parity in the marketplace.
Actually, Microsoft loses money on every XBox console that anyone buys. The exact figure is unknown, but it's estimated at $200 per unit.
More than one wag has suggested that MS-haters might want to buy lots of XBoxes this christmas, just to put a big ol' dent in Bill's bottom line.
Of course, what they do make money on is the software, which is why they're trying to force those awful multi-game bundle deals on everybody. But if you can find an unbundled xbox and a single copy of Halo, you can have a pile of gaming goodness and still pick Bill's pocket while you're at it.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
I was only discussing the graphics which I saw in the photo.
I was not discussing gameplay.
Isn't that the same Adobe lens flare effect that people complained about months ago on /.?
Do really dense people warp space more than others?
FWIW, I've played all of the major shooters from Wolfenstein through today's HLCS/UT/Q3/Wolf2. I'm not a PC-only type, either, I have also spent hundreds of hours in front of consoles.
I spent an hour at e3 playing Halo. Not looking, playing. First off, it is truly beautiful. Nothing I've seen compares with the look of the game. Driving around in a car adds something I've wanted to do (and failed with mods) for a long time.
Know anyone who plays Counterstrike with a Sidewinder? There is a reason people use mice and keyboards for FPS games-- it evolved over years of trial, research, and all sorts of goofy 'solutions' from joysticks to headbands.
Halo is simply unplayable on the Xbox. Anyone who has tried Doom or Quake or UT on any console will attest to this. Yes, you can spend 20 hours learning how to cope with the lack of a mouse, and you can get close to the speed required to play a FPS. But not close enough.
I'll wait for the PC version on this one, and it looks to kick ass. As an added bonus, I can't wait to pound fool Xbox users who join PC multiplayer games. You'll be able to spot them easily, they'll be the ones with no points.
That Microsoft is making Halo their launch title really shows Microsoft's lack of knowledge about consoles and gaming. FPS games on consoles are about the worst-selling type of console game-- they aren't even a category. Treating a console like a PC does not make it one.
When I look a historic come from nowhere successful launches, say, PlayStation, I see awesome console games and strong differentiation from competition at launch. PlayStation had kick-ass console games at launch - Toshinden, Ridge Racer, Tekken. Saturn was a very weak contender. The only thing I see that *might* be worth a look is Oddworld, but that isn't worth buying a console. I'll just wait for the PC version, or the Gamecube version.
I just don't see strong differentiation for Xbox. I don't see powerful, must-have titles that are exclusive on the Xbox.
OTOH, Gamecube has some awesome games that I won't be able to get anywhere but Gamecube. Rogue Squadron, Luigi's Mansion, etc. Those games are sweet.
-B
Actually alot of XBOX games that aren't available for PS2 look better than PS2, but everytime I've looked at games that are for both systems (Test Drive, Soul Caliber to give a couple examples) they looked remarkably the same.
Remember, Bungie was jumping into the Linux games market, with titles like Myth 2
Bungie was hardly "jumping into" the Linux market. They licensed Myth II to Loki well over a year after the PC and Mac versions shipped.
Even before the MS buyout, Bungie never said a word about a Linux port of Halo, probably because Loki never sold more than a handful of even their most popular titles.
News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters? Like hell.
IK has already been used in several PC games such as Hitman. While a nice effect if you look for it, it hasn't proven to be a real groundbreaker.
I'm a huge fan of the emergent behaviour that IK and rigid body physics systems can add to games. Unfortunately, it isn't being picked up very quickly by developers, and tends to be just a "gimmick" effect rather than a part of the gameplay. The collossal failure of Trespasser, the flagship "real physics" game, probably didn't help either.
How long do ya'll think it'll take till someone
writes an emulation app for xbox games?
In comparison to writing an N64 or PlayStation emu (which have both been done), emulating the very PC-like xbox on an PC should be a piece of cake.
Are there any such projects in the works yet?
C-X C-S
I'm sorry to say that Ringworld is just a version of a Dyson Sphere created by Freeman Dyson.
We're all standing on the shoulders of previous giants.
Does Halo take place on a Ringworld? Looks that way in the screenshots, but they got the perspective all wrong. By the time the curvature of ringworld brings the arc into view over the horizon, it should appear MUCH more narrow and farther away than it does in those screenshots.
This ringworld looks to be maybe a couple hundred miles in diameter and perhaps 50 miles in width, Niven's Ringworld was 180 million miles in diameter, and 1 million miles wide. The walls at the edge were 1000 miles high.
This screenshot also seem to show that the sun is offset from the center of the ring. I am having a hard time accounting for the shadow on the visible part of the ring, given the position of the sun.
Edith Keeler Must Die
You should get the official Sony Remote for PS2. Updates the DVD drivers and adds several features to the playback.
5 4§ion=MoviesEntertainment
http://www.beststuff.com/article.php3?story_id=23
Men believe what they want. - Caesar
It does add some features (though I've never really used a-->b much anyway).
However, what I'm really missing is variable FF/REW. 2x just does not cut it when you are looking through a really long chapter, I used to love the 2x-40x range my old Toshiba DVD player offered - that's really the only feature I miss.
The other feature I don't really miss but does seem to be included on a number of players is "Zoom". I always thought the PS2 could probably have a very cool variable zoom instead of the fixed zoom offered by everyone else, after all it has all that processing power it could devote to video alteration...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Hmmm.... slashdot still can't handle "greater than" and "less than" in plain text mode.
Hmmm.... some of us still haven't figured out what Slashdot's posting modes mean, so I'll say it again: the trick is that the names of the modes are sort of "backwards" with respect to their meanings, but there's a logical reason for it, and if you think about it for a couple of minutes you'll stop being confused.
Here's the big secret: the names of the modes refer to the way the text you type in the box will be inserted into the HTML source for the page, NOT the way the text will be displayed in the browser. Think about the HTML document that is being built -- do you want your text inserted directly into the HTML source, or do you want some translation applied to it first?
Hence, "Plain Old Text" means that what I type in the box just gets pasted directly into the document with no pre-processing (*1) so any tags I type will be interpreted as such and the text will be displayed accordingly -- of course this also means that it eats your "<" sign unless you're clever and use the "<" escape sequence.
This is the exact opposite of the text being displayed "plain" with markup ignored, which seems to be what so many people expect it to mean -- that's actually what the other modes do. I don't know or care exactly what the difference between them is, but "HTML Formatted" does some translation, and "Extrans" translates even more aggressively. The rationale is that here the text is formatted into suitable HTML so it can be displayed as you typed it.
I prefer "Plain Old Text" because it lets me both type tags directly if I want to use them to adorn my text and use escapes if I want to display a tag instead of its effect, or display special characters.
*1 Except that it adds a "<BR>" wherever I hit "Enter", because it's "obvious" that I'd want that. Also, I guess it strips out non-permitted tags that would do something harmful to the resulting document, like a </TABLE> for example.
David Gould
main(i){putchar(340056100>>(i-1)*5&31|!!(i<6)<< 6)&&main(++i);}