...they relied on story, clever dialog and had *heart* - so, the same reason everything of quality (books, music, movies) is appreciated decades or centuries later.
I just finished playing Day of the Tentacle with my wife and two kids last night, and they all enjoyed it thoroughly.
I always got the feeling that the script was pretty good, but the delivery of many of the lines and the overall direction and execution fell a bit flat.
Rasterizing triangles and the "first intersection" on a ray tracer actually give exactly the same result for a triangle mesh.
Ray tracing has a more obvious mapping onto the rendering equation, but rendering geometry or even first order reflections offers very little advantage (and several disadvantages) over rasterization techniques. Shadows are more implicit in ray tracing, but they don't look "better" until you have area light sources and start shooting a LOT of rays.
And that's really the problem. Most of the cool things you might want to do with ray tracing (soft shadows, photon mapping or other global illumination) involve shooting multiple-orders-of-magnitude more rays than simply drawing a game level.
If I had a fast hardware ray tracer, I'm sure I could find some very cool stuff to do with it, but wasting a ton of cycles doing what rasterization is perfectly adequate at is a bit pointless. It seems like a solution in search of a problem. If we could rasterize a scene normally, but do multiple raycasts in the pixel shader to determine light occlusion (shadows), we might be on the right track.
People keep complaining about this, and having finished the game, I think they should just shut up and play the game.
Let's put this simply: "Can't die" == "Auto-restore to the last safe point"
You can fail, exactly the same as you would have with a death mechanic. Over and over and over until you get it right. You just don't have to quicksave/quickload every time you screw it up, and get a nice animation instead.
It's a minor semantic/presentation difference, and everyone bitches like it's the end of the world.
Out of six billion people on the planet, and all the billions who have lived throughout history, exactly one of them gets this unique window on the world that I call "me".
Out of all the computers in the world, the one I'm typing on happens to be the one called "mine." I think you're making the error of assuming that there actually needs to be a reason beyond the fact that everything that has gone before has led to the way things are now.
That reminds me of something from Douglas Adams: ". . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. " (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams)
A coherent set of ideas that create a whole more than the sum of their parts, that ebb and flow as technical issues come up and are dealt with, that might be worth something.
A game idea is worth nothing. Execution is everything.
Game development is a series of events, where the people who make the money are in it for the duration.
Most of the complaints about flying cars seem to revolve around the idea that flying is complicated, and trying to deal with 3D navigation is well beyond the training of people who can barely handle 2D.
Most of the imagine situations I've seen with flying cars actually impose some sort of lanes on airborne vehicles. Presumably this would make the control of such a vehicle no more difficult than a car, but at least we'd be able to get all of the traffic off the ground, and add additional "roads" merely by updating whatever electronic navigation system would be used to automate the 3rd dimension.
Flying cars aren't without other problems, of course. Any collision in the sky has a pretty real chance of crashing into something fairly important on the ground, so it either needs to be really safe, or you don't really get to reclaim the land use under the flight paths.
If the human brain is simply a computing device, then problems such as the halting problem should apply to it.
The human brain is involved in a feedback loop with the environment around it. The complexity of this feedback loop is significant enough that it might not actually be predictable (giving the illusion of free will) but that doesn't mean that it's not deterministic.
Of course, this study would suggest that, not only is it deterministic, but is constrained to few enough parameters that it may also be predictable if you watch the right variables.
Having programmed the various SB cards in DOS, I can tell you there was no driver, I had to write everything myself. The SB16 did take 16-bit samples, what it did with them internally in the DAC I couldn't say.
Now, I recall the Adlib Gold was only 12 bits, although I don't entirely recall if it ever saw the light of day.
I thought they were stealing music? Or at least, failing to give money. That sounds like they're accusing downloaders of actual theft of actual money. I would hope that sort of (false) accusation would land the accuser in serious legal trouble.
It was probably a Commodore PET that my dad used in teaching college finance courses (which would be how I got into computers, and how I eventually got into game development). I have no idea what the first game would have been... probably something from here, maybe Space Invaders, AFO or Lunar Lander. There was also a gold mining game and a dam buster game.
I took a look at several of them again on an emulator a year ago or so, and was struck with two interesting thoughts. First, disregarding graphical limitations, almost all of the genres we see today were represented in some way (shooter / action, sports, adventure, simulation, strategy). Second, some of the game design was very good, some was an exercise in frustration.
In particular, the dam buster game was just annoying. Your airplane flies from right to left across the screen. You need to drop a bomb at just the right time, and with enough passes you can break the dam. Fine, that might have almost been a good game, or the core of one. But they put in a gun that shoots at you. There is no way to control the plane, no way to choose your altitude (which seems to be chosen randomly) and absolutely nothing you can do about whether you get shot down or not. In fact, odds are excellent that you will be shot down randomly enough that it is simply impossible to win before you run out of planes most of the time, regardless of your skill at the game.
I like to believe that game designers have learned from this mistake. That causing the player to randomly die helplessly and hopelessly is bad. That making the player the hero is rewarding for the player, and that frustrating the player by not providing enough information for them to succeed or killing them randomly without recourse is something we have learned is Not Fun in the last 25 years. But really, you still see it all the time in various forms. I find it fascinating that, on one hand, game design has changed so much over the last 25 years, while on the other hand, so much of it is still the same.
The only complaint I ever hear about it is that it's too short. And really, if it were any longer, some part of it would probably fail to achieve the utter perfection and balance of game design, art design, level design, character design, pacing, humor and storytelling. The cynical among us can probably bitch about some aspect of those, but that they all hang together so well is a greater accomplishment than any one part.
We will likely not see its equal in originality and execution for some time.
You know something... now that I pause to think about it for a moment, my company probably represents a comparable number of nationalities, but I had never really considered it before.
I won't suggest that attitude is universal, but to me at least, that is what it means to be Canadian.
Someone recently posted (here on Slashdot I believe, but no, I'm not going to go find it) the most reasonable view of this I've ever seen.
Basically, you can rate games relative to all other actual games, or you can rate games relative to all theoretically possible games.
Relative to all other actual games, you should get a nice bell curve centered on 50%.
Relative to all theoretically possible games, as long as there is some effort being applied to make the game good, you would expect scores to be greater than 50% on average.
I have a hard time figuring out what the article is supposed to mean. OK, there might be a correlation with aggressive behaviour, but the implication is that's bad. So, we're supposed to (moral judgement) watch bland entertainment and be sheep?
I have two kids. I see them act out great battles. They're also just acting, in Real Life they're good, maybe even a little timid.
As a game developer, I heard the term SKU used when I entered the industry about 9 years ago. It's actually a very useful term when you consider that games are translated into different languages and have different technical requirements for different parts of the world, so although from the outside it might look like you have one "game," you are actually creating many different versions of the same product. We call each different "flavor" a SKU, because they are all different.
It's not terribly common in everyday language, but it does illustrate one thing - many game players are very in tune with the industry that makes their products, to the point where the industrial jargon actually becomes quite commonplace in the user community. You can see this with all sorts of hardware discussion as well. Personally, I think that's kind of cool, but it does add a bit of a learning curve to anyone who wants to talk to the hardcore gaming crowd.
There is only one thing that has prevented me from buying a player: There is no single format supported by all of the movie studios. Give me that, and I'd be much more willing to buy in.
Unfortunately, this is a step away from that. As usual, it's all about the software, not the technology. Unless the software I want is available in the format I want, I can convince myself to keep waiting. I'm inclined towards HD-DVD, but this doesn't help motivate me.
The losses from the attacks themselves were largely confined to 3000 innocent lives, two skyscrapers, and four downed airliners.
Three skyscrapers. WTC7 collapsed for what appears to be inadequately explored reasons.
I remember the day of 9/11. I remember not being as hell-bent on revenge as everyone else. I remember desiring a detailed investigation into the crime and calm, measured action being taken. I remember being very concerned that the politicians would use it as the catalyst to finally take away the freedoms they had been poised to for so long.
We have a few hundred years,if that, of "modern" science under our belts. In a few million years, our level of knowledge will be a lot closer to a caveman then a scientist. Never say never.
I've heard that statement a number of times, and while I sincerely hope it's true, is there actually any reason to believe that is the case?
The problem is that we don't know exactly how much stuff we don't know about the fundamental mathematics of the universe. We seem to be pretty close to a complete picture, but there's not really any way to tell whether we're almost there, or whether we're as mistaken about being close to the answer as people were at the end of the 19th century were about Newtonian physics being close to a full theory of the universe.
If we are close to a complete and correct theory, it may be the scientific method has already produced all of the "easy" answers, or that a complete theory may demonstrate as many limitations as it provides answers.
I like to believe that scientific progress will continue at a linear or exponential pace, but it doesn't seem to be certain.
As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico.
I am very skeptical about alien life having visited Earth, however...
Crossing interstellar space is a completely different problem from entering an atmosphere. I can believe that an inter-stellar craft could make it to Earth, but the landing craft that had been in storage for decades had a problem.
The ability to build a great project doesn't mean you won't make mistakes. Are you suggesting that if humans ever made it to another planet, there is no possible way we could screw up the landing? Aliens only have a magical perfection in our imagination.
The odds of it happening in New Mexico are not really any different from the odds of it happening anywhere else...
Slashdot Mirror
...they relied on story, clever dialog and had *heart* - so, the same reason everything of quality (books, music, movies) is appreciated decades or centuries later.
I just finished playing Day of the Tentacle with my wife and two kids last night, and they all enjoyed it thoroughly.
Can't Tell The Difference Between Reality And The Onion.
I always got the feeling that the script was pretty good, but the delivery of many of the lines and the overall direction and execution fell a bit flat.
If it wasn't taboo, though, why would it be in the news in any way at all?
I can still take movies without incessant racket, right?
Rasterizing triangles and the "first intersection" on a ray tracer actually give exactly the same result for a triangle mesh.
Ray tracing has a more obvious mapping onto the rendering equation, but rendering geometry or even first order reflections offers very little advantage (and several disadvantages) over rasterization techniques. Shadows are more implicit in ray tracing, but they don't look "better" until you have area light sources and start shooting a LOT of rays.
And that's really the problem. Most of the cool things you might want to do with ray tracing (soft shadows, photon mapping or other global illumination) involve shooting multiple-orders-of-magnitude more rays than simply drawing a game level.
If I had a fast hardware ray tracer, I'm sure I could find some very cool stuff to do with it, but wasting a ton of cycles doing what rasterization is perfectly adequate at is a bit pointless. It seems like a solution in search of a problem. If we could rasterize a scene normally, but do multiple raycasts in the pixel shader to determine light occlusion (shadows), we might be on the right track.
People keep complaining about this, and having finished the game, I think they should just shut up and play the game. Let's put this simply: "Can't die" == "Auto-restore to the last safe point" You can fail, exactly the same as you would have with a death mechanic. Over and over and over until you get it right. You just don't have to quicksave/quickload every time you screw it up, and get a nice animation instead. It's a minor semantic/presentation difference, and everyone bitches like it's the end of the world.
Out of all the computers in the world, the one I'm typing on happens to be the one called "mine." I think you're making the error of assuming that there actually needs to be a reason beyond the fact that everything that has gone before has led to the way things are now.
That reminds me of something from Douglas Adams: ". . . imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, 'This is an interesting world I find myself in, an interesting hole I find myself in, fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!' This is such a powerful idea that as the sun rises in the sky and the air heats up and as, gradually, the puddle gets smaller and smaller, it's still frantically hanging on to the notion that everything's going to be alright, because this world was meant to have him in it, was built to have him in it; so the moment he disappears catches him rather by surprise. I think this may be something we need to be on the watch out for. " (http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Adams)
You could do what we do: don't hire them.
Ideas are cheap.
A coherent set of ideas that create a whole more than the sum of their parts, that ebb and flow as technical issues come up and are dealt with, that might be worth something.
A game idea is worth nothing. Execution is everything.
Game development is a series of events, where the people who make the money are in it for the duration.
Most of the complaints about flying cars seem to revolve around the idea that flying is complicated, and trying to deal with 3D navigation is well beyond the training of people who can barely handle 2D. Most of the imagine situations I've seen with flying cars actually impose some sort of lanes on airborne vehicles. Presumably this would make the control of such a vehicle no more difficult than a car, but at least we'd be able to get all of the traffic off the ground, and add additional "roads" merely by updating whatever electronic navigation system would be used to automate the 3rd dimension. Flying cars aren't without other problems, of course. Any collision in the sky has a pretty real chance of crashing into something fairly important on the ground, so it either needs to be really safe, or you don't really get to reclaim the land use under the flight paths.
If the human brain is simply a computing device, then problems such as the halting problem should apply to it.
The human brain is involved in a feedback loop with the environment around it. The complexity of this feedback loop is significant enough that it might not actually be predictable (giving the illusion of free will) but that doesn't mean that it's not deterministic.
Of course, this study would suggest that, not only is it deterministic, but is constrained to few enough parameters that it may also be predictable if you watch the right variables.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Princess_and_the_Frog
Having programmed the various SB cards in DOS, I can tell you there was no driver, I had to write everything myself. The SB16 did take 16-bit samples, what it did with them internally in the DAC I couldn't say.
Now, I recall the Adlib Gold was only 12 bits, although I don't entirely recall if it ever saw the light of day.
I thought they were stealing music? Or at least, failing to give money. That sounds like they're accusing downloaders of actual theft of actual money. I would hope that sort of (false) accusation would land the accuser in serious legal trouble.
It was probably a Commodore PET that my dad used in teaching college finance courses (which would be how I got into computers, and how I eventually got into game development). I have no idea what the first game would have been... probably something from here, maybe Space Invaders, AFO or Lunar Lander. There was also a gold mining game and a dam buster game.
I took a look at several of them again on an emulator a year ago or so, and was struck with two interesting thoughts. First, disregarding graphical limitations, almost all of the genres we see today were represented in some way (shooter / action, sports, adventure, simulation, strategy). Second, some of the game design was very good, some was an exercise in frustration.
In particular, the dam buster game was just annoying. Your airplane flies from right to left across the screen. You need to drop a bomb at just the right time, and with enough passes you can break the dam. Fine, that might have almost been a good game, or the core of one. But they put in a gun that shoots at you. There is no way to control the plane, no way to choose your altitude (which seems to be chosen randomly) and absolutely nothing you can do about whether you get shot down or not. In fact, odds are excellent that you will be shot down randomly enough that it is simply impossible to win before you run out of planes most of the time, regardless of your skill at the game.
I like to believe that game designers have learned from this mistake. That causing the player to randomly die helplessly and hopelessly is bad. That making the player the hero is rewarding for the player, and that frustrating the player by not providing enough information for them to succeed or killing them randomly without recourse is something we have learned is Not Fun in the last 25 years. But really, you still see it all the time in various forms. I find it fascinating that, on one hand, game design has changed so much over the last 25 years, while on the other hand, so much of it is still the same.
Has to be Portal for me.
The only complaint I ever hear about it is that it's too short. And really, if it were any longer, some part of it would probably fail to achieve the utter perfection and balance of game design, art design, level design, character design, pacing, humor and storytelling. The cynical among us can probably bitch about some aspect of those, but that they all hang together so well is a greater accomplishment than any one part.
We will likely not see its equal in originality and execution for some time.
You know something... now that I pause to think about it for a moment, my company probably represents a comparable number of nationalities, but I had never really considered it before.
I won't suggest that attitude is universal, but to me at least, that is what it means to be Canadian.
Someone recently posted (here on Slashdot I believe, but no, I'm not going to go find it) the most reasonable view of this I've ever seen.
Basically, you can rate games relative to all other actual games, or you can rate games relative to all theoretically possible games.
Relative to all other actual games, you should get a nice bell curve centered on 50%.
Relative to all theoretically possible games, as long as there is some effort being applied to make the game good, you would expect scores to be greater than 50% on average.
I have a hard time figuring out what the article is supposed to mean. OK, there might be a correlation with aggressive behaviour, but the implication is that's bad. So, we're supposed to (moral judgement) watch bland entertainment and be sheep?
I have two kids. I see them act out great battles. They're also just acting, in Real Life they're good, maybe even a little timid.
As a game developer, I heard the term SKU used when I entered the industry about 9 years ago. It's actually a very useful term when you consider that games are translated into different languages and have different technical requirements for different parts of the world, so although from the outside it might look like you have one "game," you are actually creating many different versions of the same product. We call each different "flavor" a SKU, because they are all different.
It's not terribly common in everyday language, but it does illustrate one thing - many game players are very in tune with the industry that makes their products, to the point where the industrial jargon actually becomes quite commonplace in the user community. You can see this with all sorts of hardware discussion as well. Personally, I think that's kind of cool, but it does add a bit of a learning curve to anyone who wants to talk to the hardcore gaming crowd.
There is only one thing that has prevented me from buying a player: There is no single format supported by all of the movie studios. Give me that, and I'd be much more willing to buy in.
Unfortunately, this is a step away from that. As usual, it's all about the software, not the technology. Unless the software I want is available in the format I want, I can convince myself to keep waiting. I'm inclined towards HD-DVD, but this doesn't help motivate me.
The losses from the attacks themselves were largely confined to 3000 innocent lives, two skyscrapers, and four downed airliners.
Three skyscrapers. WTC7 collapsed for what appears to be inadequately explored reasons.
I remember the day of 9/11. I remember not being as hell-bent on revenge as everyone else. I remember desiring a detailed investigation into the crime and calm, measured action being taken. I remember being very concerned that the politicians would use it as the catalyst to finally take away the freedoms they had been poised to for so long.
I am sad now.
We have a few hundred years,if that, of "modern" science under our belts. In a few million years, our level of knowledge will be a lot closer to a caveman then a scientist. Never say never.
I've heard that statement a number of times, and while I sincerely hope it's true, is there actually any reason to believe that is the case?
The problem is that we don't know exactly how much stuff we don't know about the fundamental mathematics of the universe. We seem to be pretty close to a complete picture, but there's not really any way to tell whether we're almost there, or whether we're as mistaken about being close to the answer as people were at the end of the 19th century were about Newtonian physics being close to a full theory of the universe.
If we are close to a complete and correct theory, it may be the scientific method has already produced all of the "easy" answers, or that a complete theory may demonstrate as many limitations as it provides answers.
I like to believe that scientific progress will continue at a linear or exponential pace, but it doesn't seem to be certain.
As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico.
I am very skeptical about alien life having visited Earth, however...