I hate what Sony's turned into with the PS3, but there can be no doubt that the PS2 is the console to beat. Sure, it's the least powerful console of the last generation (XBox, GameCube, PS2), but oh boy does it have the software library. If you had no gaming console and you were going to buy one, the PS2 would be the one to get.
I personally love my XBox 360 but it certainly can't match the breadth and depth of the PS2 library. Sold off my original XBox and Gamecube because they were useless.
Unless you want portable, then the DS rules the roost.
It's because of DirectX - and not just the graphics, but DirectSound, DirectInput, etc.
I've written games under Windows and Linux (and way back on the Mac) and it's just easier on Windows because unless you're really stressing the system with new-fangled graphics wowness all the awful nasty bits of interfacing with sound, graphics, mouse, etc. are abstracted away and taken care of for you. This was the brilliance of Alex St. John at MS, and something Linux users and Apple have never seemed to understand; or perhaps the Linux users understand but aren't in a position to do something about it as unilaterally as a small team at MS was. Almost by definition they can't - as soon as you create a standard someone will come up with a competing 'superior' standard. We (Linux users) can't even agree on sound drivers.
I do have fun writing 2D cross-platform stuff with PyGame (based on SDL) and Python. SDL is a good shot at providing the equivalent of cross platform DirectX, but it certainly doesn't have all the features you'd want, because who has as much money and resources as MS? The sound stuff is particularly limited, and you still have the Linux sound driver nightmare (perhaps too harsh a word - 'unpleasantness'?) to deal with.
So gaming on other computer platforms will never be as good as gaming on Windows, because nobody else understands just how much gaming drives hardware sales and platform acceptance and is willing to invest that much into making games easy to create on their platform. Apple has been particularly schizophrenic about this, variously embracing and rejecting gaming. Linux users seem to realize that gaming is important, but it's such a huge amount of work it tends to just end up in denial ('Why would anyone need anything more than Nethack?'). Kudos to LGP and Tuxgames, who are going the extra mile.
One thing not really mentioned in the preview is that they definitely seem to have the memory under control finally. I've had up to 30 tabs open (only a dozen now) and have been using it all day and it's only using 75MB of memory. FF1.5 would be hovering around 250MB after the same use.
It also feels much snappier in general, if only because it's not sprawling all over the paging file (I don't know what other speed tweaks it has).
All my extensions except undoclosetab updated automatically (and that's built in now) so that was probably the smoothest upgrade I've ever had. Though I use the LittleFox theme and I was on version 1.5, which looked very strange in FF2.0. But after a manual 'look for updates' for themese it found LittleFox 1.7 which looks great.
I'm sure a big reason for this is that the latest 11n draft routers and cards perform horribly. Worse than 11g in most (though not all) cases. I'm not sure exactly what happened going from pre-draft, where 11n performed very well, to draft. Perhaps this is part of the rumored fix to keep 11n from stomping all over any 11g/11b equipment in the area.
I'd only bother with the 11n equipment at this point if your 11b/g environment is hugely saturated. And you might want to try switching channels first - most people don't seem to realize that 11 is usually open, and as long as everyone is at or below 6 as per default there should be no interference.
I didn't see any bashing in here. All his points are well taken as he swats Microsoft or Apple appropriately. They both steal whatever they think is best - the huge difference being that Apple can actually deliver something on a reasonable time schedule.
Of course if you're one of Steve's Commandos type of Mac owners I can see where this article is Pearl Harbor all over again, especially where he alludes to the RDF.
Remember when the name Peter Norton meant something (good)? Not any more. I've used NAV for years but finally got fed up with the increasing amount of bloat, the way it bogged everything down, and the occasional bluescreen. I was never hit with a virus that it missed, but it was just such a pig.
I switched over to NOD32 which is tiny, fast, almost no system impact, and never takes down the entire machine. It's never even crashed as far as I can tell. It's supposed to detect better than Norton too, though I have so few hits I can't really compare the rates.
After this I visited my parents and stripped everything Norton off their 1.8ghz Celeron XP Home system and installed NOD32 instead. It's like a whole new machine! My parents are still gushing about how fast I made their computer when all I did was take the millstone off its back.
I know NOD32 is kind of pricey (the software is free, the subscriptions are $30 a year though) for some people, but if you can afford it it'll make a huge difference in your computing experience. And you won't be feeding more money to the Symantec mediocrity machine.
Everyone spent millions or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars (apiece) to be there - and all everyone wanted to do was play with the Wii. That was probably the final straw.
Also I imagine Sony pitched a gargantuan fit after they tanked like a Sherman that's thrown its treads.
I've really been considering switching to Mac when the Core 2 Duos come out rather than deal with the looming hell of Vista for my desktop machine (my servers will still be running Debian). With Norton long gone to uselessness, Sysinternals was one of my top places for getting tools that MS should have provided and didn't. Just one more nail in the coffin.
(Yes I realize that Apple is just a mini-MS as far as being evil where they can, but that seems to be mostly in the iPod stuff and going after the press. On the desktop side 10.5 looks far, far more appealing than Vista.)
8khz to 16Khz is fine, but that's not usually the problem we encounter with VOIP. It's latency and dropped packets, which this will just make worse. But if you're doing this on your own network only then I can see where this would be neat.
Since this is down at the bottom of the article, guaranteeing that only 5% of you (if that) will actually read it, and it summarizes the Judge's intent nicely...
"Further, to the extent that plaintiffs attempt to argue that Aaron's conduct was purely out-of-school conduct, the undisputed evidence establishes that the icon was a threat to kill a teacher at the school, that Aaron circulated it among classmates for three weeks; that he had no reasonable expectation that it would not come to the attention of school officials; that when it did so, it caused a substantial disturbance at the school; that it is reasonable that it should have done so; and that Aaron had reason to expect that it would do so."
'Of all the popular programming languages now in use, Perl is perhaps the best suited for writing utilities'. I would probably agree with this - you can very easily hack out a very simple utility to do something with less effort and code than in Ruby or Python. Of course if you ever need to read it again, or god forbid extend it, then the extra effort you put in up front may pay off.
Yes, I know you can write very readable maintainable perl. In theory. The only example of this I have ever seen is the Calcium web calendar. But whenever our perl guy writes something it looks more like
($l=join("",))=~s/.*\n/index($`,$&)>=$[||print$&/g e; (stolen from http://www.antipope.org/charlie/attic/perl/one-lin er.html) and if he has to touch it again a month later it's a dangerous thing.
This is nothing new in game development, even at large companies. 'agile' (with a little A) has been used for at least a decade. You just can't possibly build a good game with the waterfall model and we've known that forever. I think it's a bit like every generation thinking they invented sex.
We use nightly builds (a single day without a working build is a huge hit). Getting the framework working so your designers and texturers (and gameplay folks) can start trying stuff in-engine, then fleshing out features. Midding sized time periods (2-4 weeks) between major builds. Unit testing. Though we have to bring in humans to really break it when it's all put together.
Now if you mean Agile with a capital A, then it's not the next big thing, it's just the same bullcrap it was when it was called eXXXtreme Programming. We like to write things down and design a lot of things up front, which clashes with Agile (and don't tell me it doesn't, even with the lip service) - you need at the very least a production bible for large project games to keep everyone together. Parts of the design will sometimes not survive actual implementation and will be tossed, but in general they keep things on track and usually only need some tweaking (everything gets tweaked during playtest time).
If you don't do this sort of thing you end up with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Lords, which is what you get with a Agilely (with a capital A) developed game. It shipped only half complete with no internal cohesion at all and still isn't finished. But the great thing is that you can use your Methodology to justify it all.
I'm definitely interested to see what people come up with for the Wiiiiiii. I'm willing to bet Crawford doesn't own a DS, since there are great games like Kirby's Canvas Curse that are completely unique thanks to the touch screen. The Wii should really open things up as well, so that'll be fun to see what designers come up with.
Much as I respect Crawford in some ways (I own his books) I have to think he's a bit insulated. There certainly is progress, it's just slow and bursty as usual. Back in the 80s it was all Pac-Man clones, Space Invader clones, generic platformer, and generic shooter. With the occasional gems.
I go online to get reviews in a timely fashion, but prefer to read mags like Game Informer and Edge 'offline' while on the exerbike. The articles tend to be more in-depth and better written than the online stuff (not always, certainly) and the screenshots are often better quality. And of course it's a better use of time than sitting in front of the computer and paging through horribly designed websites (Gamespot and IGN, I'm looking at you).
The price is nothing to be concerned about unless you're paying store price. You can get subscriptions to just about any gaming magazine for a dollar an issue - they're happy to do this to get more advertising out there.
I find it amusing that this guy still thinks EGM is better than Game Informer when EGM for me is completely symptomatic of the 'short sound bites for illiterate ADHD teens' target audience (though PSM is the absolute worst for that). But since he's had some good history with EGM that kind of nostalgia is understandable.
Pretty soon. MS Studio/Published games will be DX10 only... and DX10 will only be on Vista because they need every trojan horse they can get to force you to 'upgrade' to this bloated Edsel of a 'Clippy the OS'.
Third party games should still be DX9 for a while. After that... well screw it. Console only.
This is like the old slam on Apple fanboys, where Steve could crap in a box and call it iShit and people would buy it in droves. Please don't flame on whether this is 'accurate' or not about Apple users, it's just the insult that immediately came to mind when I read this.
He's basically saying they could crap in a box, label it PS3, and you'd pay $600 for it.
No, you're right, I didn't try it on Proud. By the time I'd decided that it was a little too easy I was too far along in the game to want to start over again. Maybe if I let it sit a while I'll want to play it all over again.
Okay, it was too easy - I can see why they did that. And a little stretched in a few places. But it was fun. And mostly: A Non-whiny Square hero (Sora) for the win. Heck, they even made fun of emo-kid Cloud.
I hope Oblivion on a PSP is hugely reworked to just preserve the essentials (like the Oblivion mobile phone game). Otherwise, mostly due to the excruciatingly slow access times, I view jamming Oblivion into a PSP much as I view cramming a an entire magnum bottle of fine wine up my ass.
These are the guys who right after (before?) Jim gave his interview with Game Informer about how Lucas Arts was now rededicated to bringing out Quality Games forced Obsidian to kick Knights of the Old Republic 2 out the door with the entire ending chopped off (much of it still buried away in the distribution!) and a severely disappointing half-assed ending tacked on.
And then of course there's Star Wars Galaxies but everyone's mentioned that. Lucas Arts is hardly the brown coffee stain of quality. They make crappy games that they hope the mass market will buy because of the Star Wars name. And occasionally a game that doesn't completely suck like Empires at War makes it out anyhow. Presumably because at least some of the developers have some pride and that didn't clash with the budget numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
I hate what Sony's turned into with the PS3, but there can be no doubt that the PS2 is the console to beat. Sure, it's the least powerful console of the last generation (XBox, GameCube, PS2), but oh boy does it have the software library. If you had no gaming console and you were going to buy one, the PS2 would be the one to get.
I personally love my XBox 360 but it certainly can't match the breadth and depth of the PS2 library. Sold off my original XBox and Gamecube because they were useless.
Unless you want portable, then the DS rules the roost.
It's because of DirectX - and not just the graphics, but DirectSound, DirectInput, etc.
I've written games under Windows and Linux (and way back on the Mac) and it's just easier on Windows because unless you're really stressing the system with new-fangled graphics wowness all the awful nasty bits of interfacing with sound, graphics, mouse, etc. are abstracted away and taken care of for you. This was the brilliance of Alex St. John at MS, and something Linux users and Apple have never seemed to understand; or perhaps the Linux users understand but aren't in a position to do something about it as unilaterally as a small team at MS was. Almost by definition they can't - as soon as you create a standard someone will come up with a competing 'superior' standard. We (Linux users) can't even agree on sound drivers.
I do have fun writing 2D cross-platform stuff with PyGame (based on SDL) and Python. SDL is a good shot at providing the equivalent of cross platform DirectX, but it certainly doesn't have all the features you'd want, because who has as much money and resources as MS? The sound stuff is particularly limited, and you still have the Linux sound driver nightmare (perhaps too harsh a word - 'unpleasantness'?) to deal with.
So gaming on other computer platforms will never be as good as gaming on Windows, because nobody else understands just how much gaming drives hardware sales and platform acceptance and is willing to invest that much into making games easy to create on their platform. Apple has been particularly schizophrenic about this, variously embracing and rejecting gaming. Linux users seem to realize that gaming is important, but it's such a huge amount of work it tends to just end up in denial ('Why would anyone need anything more than Nethack?'). Kudos to LGP and Tuxgames, who are going the extra mile.
Please see http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=202228&cid=165 53166
The short version is that memory seems much more under control.
One thing not really mentioned in the preview is that they definitely seem to have the memory under control finally. I've had up to 30 tabs open (only a dozen now) and have been using it all day and it's only using 75MB of memory. FF1.5 would be hovering around 250MB after the same use.
It also feels much snappier in general, if only because it's not sprawling all over the paging file (I don't know what other speed tweaks it has).
All my extensions except undoclosetab updated automatically (and that's built in now) so that was probably the smoothest upgrade I've ever had. Though I use the LittleFox theme and I was on version 1.5, which looked very strange in FF2.0. But after a manual 'look for updates' for themese it found LittleFox 1.7 which looks great.
So far I'm very pleased with it.
It's built in!
Options -> main -> startup -> when firefox starts -> show my windows and tabs from last time.
I know slashdot always runs behind digg by a few days or even a week or two, but this is ridiculous.
I'm sure a big reason for this is that the latest 11n draft routers and cards perform horribly. Worse than 11g in most (though not all) cases. I'm not sure exactly what happened going from pre-draft, where 11n performed very well, to draft. Perhaps this is part of the rumored fix to keep 11n from stomping all over any 11g/11b equipment in the area.
I'd only bother with the 11n equipment at this point if your 11b/g environment is hugely saturated. And you might want to try switching channels first - most people don't seem to realize that 11 is usually open, and as long as everyone is at or below 6 as per default there should be no interference.
I didn't see any bashing in here. All his points are well taken as he swats Microsoft or Apple appropriately. They both steal whatever they think is best - the huge difference being that Apple can actually deliver something on a reasonable time schedule.
Of course if you're one of Steve's Commandos type of Mac owners I can see where this article is Pearl Harbor all over again, especially where he alludes to the RDF.
Remember when the name Peter Norton meant something (good)? Not any more. I've used NAV for years but finally got fed up with the increasing amount of bloat, the way it bogged everything down, and the occasional bluescreen. I was never hit with a virus that it missed, but it was just such a pig.
I switched over to NOD32 which is tiny, fast, almost no system impact, and never takes down the entire machine. It's never even crashed as far as I can tell. It's supposed to detect better than Norton too, though I have so few hits I can't really compare the rates.
After this I visited my parents and stripped everything Norton off their 1.8ghz Celeron XP Home system and installed NOD32 instead. It's like a whole new machine! My parents are still gushing about how fast I made their computer when all I did was take the millstone off its back.
I know NOD32 is kind of pricey (the software is free, the subscriptions are $30 a year though) for some people, but if you can afford it it'll make a huge difference in your computing experience. And you won't be feeding more money to the Symantec mediocrity machine.
Everyone spent millions or at least hundreds of thousands of dollars (apiece) to be there - and all everyone wanted to do was play with the Wii. That was probably the final straw.
Also I imagine Sony pitched a gargantuan fit after they tanked like a Sherman that's thrown its treads.
People even do this on text based mu*s. It's got to be nearly as old as the internet.
You could almost say this is a step towards equality though it's inequality in exploiting uncomfortable (if true) gender stereotypes.
I guess the only question left is whether women playing men are more likely to give stuff to female characters.
I've really been considering switching to Mac when the Core 2 Duos come out rather than deal with the looming hell of Vista for my desktop machine (my servers will still be running Debian). With Norton long gone to uselessness, Sysinternals was one of my top places for getting tools that MS should have provided and didn't. Just one more nail in the coffin.
(Yes I realize that Apple is just a mini-MS as far as being evil where they can, but that seems to be mostly in the iPod stuff and going after the press. On the desktop side 10.5 looks far, far more appealing than Vista.)
8khz to 16Khz is fine, but that's not usually the problem we encounter with VOIP. It's latency and dropped packets, which this will just make worse. But if you're doing this on your own network only then I can see where this would be neat.
Anything labeled an '[X] Killer'... won't.
More seriously, it means you're being reactive instead of disruptive.
Since this is down at the bottom of the article, guaranteeing that only 5% of you (if that) will actually read it, and it summarizes the Judge's intent nicely...
"Further, to the extent that plaintiffs attempt to argue that Aaron's conduct was purely out-of-school conduct, the undisputed evidence establishes that the icon was a threat to kill a teacher at the school, that Aaron circulated it among classmates for three weeks; that he had no reasonable expectation that it would not come to the attention of school officials; that when it did so, it caused a substantial disturbance at the school; that it is reasonable that it should have done so; and that Aaron had reason to expect that it would do so."
'Of all the popular programming languages now in use, Perl is perhaps the best suited for writing utilities'. I would probably agree with this - you can very easily hack out a very simple utility to do something with less effort and code than in Ruby or Python. Of course if you ever need to read it again, or god forbid extend it, then the extra effort you put in up front may pay off.
g e;n er.html) and if he has to touch it again a month later it's a dangerous thing.
Yes, I know you can write very readable maintainable perl. In theory. The only example of this I have ever seen is the Calcium web calendar. But whenever our perl guy writes something it looks more like
($l=join("",))=~s/.*\n/index($`,$&)>=$[||print$&/
(stolen from http://www.antipope.org/charlie/attic/perl/one-li
This is nothing new in game development, even at large companies. 'agile' (with a little A) has been used for at least a decade. You just can't possibly build a good game with the waterfall model and we've known that forever. I think it's a bit like every generation thinking they invented sex.
We use nightly builds (a single day without a working build is a huge hit). Getting the framework working so your designers and texturers (and gameplay folks) can start trying stuff in-engine, then fleshing out features. Midding sized time periods (2-4 weeks) between major builds. Unit testing. Though we have to bring in humans to really break it when it's all put together.
Now if you mean Agile with a capital A, then it's not the next big thing, it's just the same bullcrap it was when it was called eXXXtreme Programming. We like to write things down and design a lot of things up front, which clashes with Agile (and don't tell me it doesn't, even with the lip service) - you need at the very least a production bible for large project games to keep everyone together. Parts of the design will sometimes not survive actual implementation and will be tossed, but in general they keep things on track and usually only need some tweaking (everything gets tweaked during playtest time).
If you don't do this sort of thing you end up with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeon_Lords, which is what you get with a Agilely (with a capital A) developed game. It shipped only half complete with no internal cohesion at all and still isn't finished. But the great thing is that you can use your Methodology to justify it all.
I'm definitely interested to see what people come up with for the Wiiiiiii. I'm willing to bet Crawford doesn't own a DS, since there are great games like Kirby's Canvas Curse that are completely unique thanks to the touch screen. The Wii should really open things up as well, so that'll be fun to see what designers come up with.
Much as I respect Crawford in some ways (I own his books) I have to think he's a bit insulated. There certainly is progress, it's just slow and bursty as usual. Back in the 80s it was all Pac-Man clones, Space Invader clones, generic platformer, and generic shooter. With the occasional gems.
I go online to get reviews in a timely fashion, but prefer to read mags like Game Informer and Edge 'offline' while on the exerbike. The articles tend to be more in-depth and better written than the online stuff (not always, certainly) and the screenshots are often better quality. And of course it's a better use of time than sitting in front of the computer and paging through horribly designed websites (Gamespot and IGN, I'm looking at you).
The price is nothing to be concerned about unless you're paying store price. You can get subscriptions to just about any gaming magazine for a dollar an issue - they're happy to do this to get more advertising out there.
I find it amusing that this guy still thinks EGM is better than Game Informer when EGM for me is completely symptomatic of the 'short sound bites for illiterate ADHD teens' target audience (though PSM is the absolute worst for that). But since he's had some good history with EGM that kind of nostalgia is understandable.
Pretty soon. MS Studio/Published games will be DX10 only... and DX10 will only be on Vista because they need every trojan horse they can get to force you to 'upgrade' to this bloated Edsel of a 'Clippy the OS'.
Third party games should still be DX9 for a while. After that... well screw it. Console only.
This is like the old slam on Apple fanboys, where Steve could crap in a box and call it iShit and people would buy it in droves. Please don't flame on whether this is 'accurate' or not about Apple users, it's just the insult that immediately came to mind when I read this.
He's basically saying they could crap in a box, label it PS3, and you'd pay $600 for it.
And he might be right.
No, you're right, I didn't try it on Proud. By the time I'd decided that it was a little too easy I was too far along in the game to want to start over again. Maybe if I let it sit a while I'll want to play it all over again.
Okay, it was too easy - I can see why they did that. And a little stretched in a few places. But it was fun. And mostly: A Non-whiny Square hero (Sora) for the win. Heck, they even made fun of emo-kid Cloud.
I hope Oblivion on a PSP is hugely reworked to just preserve the essentials (like the Oblivion mobile phone game). Otherwise, mostly due to the excruciatingly slow access times, I view jamming Oblivion into a PSP much as I view cramming a an entire magnum bottle of fine wine up my ass.
These are the guys who right after (before?) Jim gave his interview with Game Informer about how Lucas Arts was now rededicated to bringing out Quality Games forced Obsidian to kick Knights of the Old Republic 2 out the door with the entire ending chopped off (much of it still buried away in the distribution!) and a severely disappointing half-assed ending tacked on.
And then of course there's Star Wars Galaxies but everyone's mentioned that. Lucas Arts is hardly the brown coffee stain of quality. They make crappy games that they hope the mass market will buy because of the Star Wars name. And occasionally a game that doesn't completely suck like Empires at War makes it out anyhow. Presumably because at least some of the developers have some pride and that didn't clash with the budget numbers.