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A Peek At the Origin of PS3's New Visualizer
Folks at the Gamasutra network had a quick sitdown with the Q-Games team, the people behind the PlayStation 3's new Gaia music visualizer. They discuss the origins of the project, as well as some possible plans for the future. "McLaren explains: 'This representation of the earth is a 3D model with some shaders and SPU trickery going on. We tried to accurately model the earth's atmosphere and have all the correct highlights on the oceans, etc. The texture data is sourced from the NASA Blue Marble project.'"
Peak = top, summit Peek = look
If you have a few spare gigs and a crapload of bandwidth you can get a similar open source project which wasn't as impressive looking last time I ran it but which will let you use the full blue marble dataset:
http://www.andesengineering.com/BlueMarbleViewer/
The Milkdrop plugin for WinAmp is positively insane...especially if you have a fast video card with a nice widescreen LCD monitor...crank up the resolution, FSAA, and texture size in the options and it looks unbelievable
Living With a Nerd
actually, it goes a bit further than that. developing a game for the PS3 is way more expensive than developing one for the Wii. Google "development costs wii ps3" and you'll find plenty of articles about PS3 games costing up to 4 times the price of a wii game. Lower population but higher costs are not an incentive to develop games (but apparently it is for music visualizers .. go figure ..)
"DRM is like the Ford Pinto: it's a smooth ride, right up the point at which it explodes and ruins your day."-C.Doctorow