Intially develop the entire project in a langauge you can develop fast. Once it works (and you're sure it does what the client wants), find out where the most CPU time is spent, then optimise those bits. "Optimise" may just mean having a good look at your code and working out a better way of doing it, or it might mean writing a library in assembler. Either way, optimise last.
why the game industry is making better games today than it was twenty years ago, despite the complaints of the nostalgic to the contrary.
Yeah, that's not actually what was said. He said:
"The ratio of gems to crap then was probably about the same as the ratio is now."
To which I, as a collector of old video games, agree.
"On the bright side, video games today are way, way more polished than they ever have been, and the production values are sky high."
This, I do not agree with. Many modern games are cookie-cutter crap with the same lack of attention to detail as ever. 3D models passing through walls and other 3D models is a good example. Production values were probably highest just before the Playstation was released.
"Multiplayer games of all kinds are much more fun now than they were 20 years ago."
If you want to go back 20 years that might be the case, but I was playing Populous over a null-modem cable 15 years ago and it was just as fun as many multiplayer games are now. My current multiplayer fav is Diablo II -- four years old in a month. Give me a good few rounds of hunt over any FPS any day.
then that Formula 1 game came out with FOUR PLAYERS!
You know what's stupid? The GBA can support four players, but often doesn't. Case in point; Lord of the Rings: Return of the King. Let's face it people, it's a Diablo II clone. The more people the better. Now, I have noticed some slow down in multiplayer when the number of critters on the screen goes up, but surely they could have found some way to support four players.
Any reason this wouldn't benefit all the networking code, not just wireless?
This new technique is a way of dealing with errors as efficiently as possible. A wireless NIC on the edge of the access point's range sees a lot of noise, while few cabled connections get anywhere near the run length limit of a Cat5 cable. I would assume it would also be of limited benefit to a strong wireless connection with few if any errors and no congestion.
Re:Not that his effort isn't appreciated but...
on
WiFi On Two Wheels
·
· Score: 1, Flamebait
He's got his own connection via a mobile phone. (But I like your idea better.)
Indeed. I hadn't got to the firmware/software option by the time I made my original reply. Now I just need Netgear to issue firmware upgrades for all the 802.11b stuff I have of theirs.
Standing back a bit, this is pretty shiney. A "simple" firmware update has the potential to double the throughput of existing equipment, so long as there's a bit of spare processing power available. I love anything that can use spare CPU time to double storage or throughput, especially in embedded systems.
You'll get sucked back in. Some app you find will benefit dramatically from a big upgrade and you'll be whacking in new CPUs and extra RAM like the old days.
For me, it was BeTwin. With BeTwin you can split one Windows PC into multiple workstations. Very sociable for small LAN parties. So all of a sudden your hardware needs to run two copies of your favourite LAN game smoothly. Fortunately I only needed to keep Diablo II running smoothly, but it was still A$500 in upgrades, including a CPU that's the maximum the motherboard can cope with.
I/we upgraded to XP because of 98's limitation when handling large amounts of RAM. Not saying that couldn't have been addressed by a third-party memory manager, but XP really did give a performance and stability boost when dealing with our resource-hungry database, given that the lowliest PC had 384MB of RAM (and the new ones are being bought with a Gig).
Interesting question. I would assume that any given existing 802.11b adapter can receive packets of any size, given that there's a protocol to packets that lets the receiver know how big they should be or when they've finished. Thus you could just deploy a new access point and get a boost from it to the computers. Similarly, you could install a new NIC in a particular PC and boost the transfer rate from it to the access point. For benefits in both directions you'll have to upgrade both ends.
Okay. 2 Episodes per DVD. One was a clip-show, using a kangaroo court theme. The other was simply insane and impossible to follow.
The real shame with the clip-show is that Andromeda's first one was so brilliantly conceived and executed that it's been used as an example of the best you can hope for in a clip show.
Hmm my sentiments exactly. I got into Andromeda first, liked the first season dvd's immensely, then got introduced to firefly and now Andromeda just seems... tired, or tiresome.
Snap. I'm almost ashamed to have the Firefly box set in the same media tower as Andromeda.
In anycase I've bought all the Andromeda dvd's. The most recent one that came out was 3.4 though, so how do you get access to season 4 dvds??
Apparently Australia has been getting DVDs the fastest. Might have something to do with the fact that no free-to-air station will touch it. I think cable hasn't even started showing season four here.
And Andromeda...starts out with this gimmick of a holographic hot chick representing the ship (sort of a video version of Star Trek's talking female ship voice). Then they drop all pretense and somehow she becomes a walking talking hologram. And then later, I'm not sure, but did she end up turning into a real girl somehow?
There are three distinct versions. A screen-only, all-business personality. A cynical hologram. And a modified "we robots don't have emotions and sometimes that makes me really sad" robot. It is to Lexa Doig's credit that she unflinchingly maintained these three distinct versions of the same character through all the bad scripts and questionable editing.
You're thinking of the space battles. There were only about 4 space battles that were rendered and the rest a remixes with the same 3D graphics. There were some "girl of the week" episodes that hardly had any space battles. But it is a worry that a show only as tenth as good as DS9 could go on for half as long.
Science fiction fans may have be dismayed when they learnt that Firefly was being cancelled, but I buy the DVDs of Andromeda here in Australia and I'm far from dismayed. Not saying I know when it jumped the shark, but I almost stopped buying it at DVD 4.6.
I agree. I work at an educational institution that needs to send frequent messages to over 1,000 students. We're almost at the point where we won't accept Hotmail addresses. We've actually started a project to collect IM account information as the last option for contacting students, so much email never makes it to the recipient.
If that's all you want 7-zip for, use IZarc. You only need to use 7-zip itself if you want the 32MB window "Ultra" compression mode (warning, do not attempt with less than 512MB of RAM).
...I do setup new PCs a bit more rapidly than most, so here's a list
Mozilla
Proxomitron
Eudora
7-zip
VNC
OpenOffice.org
Nero Burning
Pop-Mouse and Xmouse2k, but not on a gaming PC
MusicMatch (for my iPod)
Diablo II
And some anti-virus software. The last two bullet points are more for home PCs than anything I might setup at work. I also have a C:\programs folder of applications that don't need to be installed, just copied onto the hard drive. That folder just gets copied across wholesale.
I'm looking for a good WinXP disk defrag utility if anyone can suggest one.
Just as a closing comment, why do some people feel the need to re-install Windows so often? All of my Windows XP PCs are still using the first install. The oldest is just under two years old.
On every PC you use, have a different keyboard and mouse. Particularly mouse. Change the mouse on at least one PC every six months. I've been using computers for what feels like forever (~25 years give or take), but because I'm always swapping between different hardware, seating and posture I don't have any problems.
Nintendo are only afraid of flash carts because they allow consumers to find out how crap many of the GBA games are before they buy them.
On the flip side, a flash cart can restart a stalled interest in buying GBA games. Before I got mine, I'd bought a batch of crap titles that I'd barely played for 10 minutes each. I wasn't intending to buy any more commerical GBA games ever but given the opportunity to try LotR:TT and LotR:RotK, I bought both. (Meanwhile, given the opportunity to try the Simpsons: Road Rage, I took back all the bad things I said about Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride.)
Slashdot Mirror
Intially develop the entire project in a langauge you can develop fast. Once it works (and you're sure it does what the client wants), find out where the most CPU time is spent, then optimise those bits. "Optimise" may just mean having a good look at your code and working out a better way of doing it, or it might mean writing a library in assembler. Either way, optimise last.
- "The ratio of gems to crap then was probably about the same as the ratio is now."
To which I, as a collector of old video games, agree.- "On the bright side, video games today are way, way more polished than they ever have been, and the production values are sky high."
This, I do not agree with. Many modern games are cookie-cutter crap with the same lack of attention to detail as ever. 3D models passing through walls and other 3D models is a good example. Production values were probably highest just before the Playstation was released.- "Multiplayer games of all kinds are much more fun now than they were 20 years ago."
If you want to go back 20 years that might be the case, but I was playing Populous over a null-modem cable 15 years ago and it was just as fun as many multiplayer games are now. My current multiplayer fav is Diablo II -- four years old in a month. Give me a good few rounds of hunt over any FPS any day.He's got his own connection via a mobile phone. (But I like your idea better.)
Standing back a bit, this is pretty shiney. A "simple" firmware update has the potential to double the throughput of existing equipment, so long as there's a bit of spare processing power available. I love anything that can use spare CPU time to double storage or throughput, especially in embedded systems.
For me, it was BeTwin. With BeTwin you can split one Windows PC into multiple workstations. Very sociable for small LAN parties. So all of a sudden your hardware needs to run two copies of your favourite LAN game smoothly. Fortunately I only needed to keep Diablo II running smoothly, but it was still A$500 in upgrades, including a CPU that's the maximum the motherboard can cope with.
I/we upgraded to XP because of 98's limitation when handling large amounts of RAM. Not saying that couldn't have been addressed by a third-party memory manager, but XP really did give a performance and stability boost when dealing with our resource-hungry database, given that the lowliest PC had 384MB of RAM (and the new ones are being bought with a Gig).
Interesting question. I would assume that any given existing 802.11b adapter can receive packets of any size, given that there's a protocol to packets that lets the receiver know how big they should be or when they've finished. Thus you could just deploy a new access point and get a boost from it to the computers. Similarly, you could install a new NIC in a particular PC and boost the transfer rate from it to the access point. For benefits in both directions you'll have to upgrade both ends.
A few seconds on Google and I found nVidia's mobile offering. A few more seconds and I found this. Undoubtedly ATI has something similar.
The real shame with the clip-show is that Andromeda's first one was so brilliantly conceived and executed that it's been used as an example of the best you can hope for in a clip show.
You're thinking of the space battles. There were only about 4 space battles that were rendered and the rest a remixes with the same 3D graphics. There were some "girl of the week" episodes that hardly had any space battles. But it is a worry that a show only as tenth as good as DS9 could go on for half as long.
Science fiction fans may have be dismayed when they learnt that Firefly was being cancelled, but I buy the DVDs of Andromeda here in Australia and I'm far from dismayed. Not saying I know when it jumped the shark, but I almost stopped buying it at DVD 4.6.
I agree. I work at an educational institution that needs to send frequent messages to over 1,000 students. We're almost at the point where we won't accept Hotmail addresses. We've actually started a project to collect IM account information as the last option for contacting students, so much email never makes it to the recipient.
Neither 7-zip nor IZarc will write rar files.
- Mozilla
- Proxomitron
- Eudora
- 7-zip
- VNC
- OpenOffice.org
- Nero Burning
- Pop-Mouse and Xmouse2k, but not on a gaming PC
- MusicMatch (for my iPod)
- Diablo II
And some anti-virus software. The last two bullet points are more for home PCs than anything I might setup at work. I also have a C:\programs folder of applications that don't need to be installed, just copied onto the hard drive. That folder just gets copied across wholesale.I'm looking for a good WinXP disk defrag utility if anyone can suggest one.
Just as a closing comment, why do some people feel the need to re-install Windows so often? All of my Windows XP PCs are still using the first install. The oldest is just under two years old.
On every PC you use, have a different keyboard and mouse. Particularly mouse. Change the mouse on at least one PC every six months. I've been using computers for what feels like forever (~25 years give or take), but because I'm always swapping between different hardware, seating and posture I don't have any problems.
It's strongly implied, but not actually stated. :)
On the flip side, a flash cart can restart a stalled interest in buying GBA games. Before I got mine, I'd bought a batch of crap titles that I'd barely played for 10 minutes each. I wasn't intending to buy any more commerical GBA games ever but given the opportunity to try LotR:TT and LotR:RotK, I bought both. (Meanwhile, given the opportunity to try the Simpsons: Road Rage, I took back all the bad things I said about Crazy Taxi: Catch a Ride.)