Sure was; got to watch that roll through pretty much just in time for me to leave my office in Madison.
Good to know on Wal-Mart. Looks like I'll be doing what I did when I picked up my 360 (albeit a couple months after launch): find a Wal-Mart that's halfway out in the sticks and take my chances. I expect 20 Wiis to last a lot longer in, say, Dousman than in Madison.
That's all well and good, to be sure...but what does it have to do with my comment, that Nintendo's criticism only applies to the PS3, not to both the PS3 and the 360, as the blurb indicates?
Honestly, I don't think it's the "proprietary" nature of it that's irksome in itself, it's that it's proprietary in an effort to lock you in outside the realm of the console. A proprietary format that was only going to be used for PS3 games would probably draw some ridicule (see the GameCube's disc format), but not such contempt.
The problem is that Sony appears to be pushing a format that makes the console more expensive, that is suspected of not particularly enhancing the games, but that they're pushing for reasons of their own. It makes people feel cheated, like they're being asked to foot the bill for Sony's strategy in the movie industry when all they want is to buy a games consol.
This level of vitriol didn't exist for previous consoles because Nintendo (for example) didn't try and sell movies on cartridges. So at least, insofar as you were paying for the proprietary format, you were paying for it solely for how it affected the gaming experience.
This is a fair point, and you're certainly not wrong. But I think there's some value in the comment, since I'm pretty sure the penetration of computers running XP is three orders of magnitude higher than the penetration of the XBox 360.
So, yes, it's only cheapest if you already own a PC running XP, but that includes an awful lot of people - most of whom don't have 360. So, for them, it could be the cheapest HD-DVD player available.
Nonetheless, you're right; presenting it as an absolute statement is poor logic.
But you're comparing the PS3 to the HD-DVD add on, which just doesn't hold water. If Blu-Ray fails, the PS3 is still a great games machine. If HD-DVD fails, the 360 is still a great games machine.
What you're doing is equivalent to: "if Blu-Ray fails, the PS3 is still a great games machine, but if HD-DVD fails, your Toshiba HD-DVD player is a useless piece of plastic." The two statements are unrelated, except that the HD-DVD add on for the 360 is cheaper than the Toshiba was in the first place - so, if anything, you're better off with the add on (assuming you've got a 360).
Sony opened themselves up for this by including the Blu-Ray drive as part of the core machine. MS avoided this by making it an add on. By the same token, of course, Sony has set themselves up to be successful if/when game developers start utilizing the extra storage capacity of the format, while MS has precluded themselves from so doing.
I don't see how M. Trépanier's comments qualify as "taking shots at both companies." He's saying that forcing unproven, proprietary formats on consumers is a bad decision. As far as I know, only Sony is "forcing" such a format. The HD-DVD add on to the 360 is just that, an add on, and won't even be used for game content (unless there's been news to the contrary that I've missed...?). So the 360 is using DVD as the medium for its core functionality (games), just like the Wii is.
(Or is it "Wii are"?)
Either way, I'm going to be one of the losers in line hoping for a Wii this weekend. Hopefully, the combination of deer season and a Wisconsin November will keep them short for me.
Procedural textures are not bitmaps. The fact that you think they're the same shows just how little you understand about the subject at hand.
Anything you display on the screen is a bitmap. There's memory inside the computer, see, made up of "bits", that "map" to pixels on the screen.
This is a bitmap. And if you're going to show the artist the texture, which I predict most artists are going to want, then you're going to generate a bitmap.
I don't give a flying fuck if it's mapped to a sphere, a toroid, a spatula, or a p-brane: if you're showing it on the screen, it's a bitmap.
The phrase "lauded for its great games, ease of development, and superior online service" is meant to apply to the DC/360, depending on whether you're in the PS2 or PS3 column.
I think the "ease of development" was referring to the 360.
But yeah, the price point argument really struck me that way, too. If the best you can say about your price is that it's no higher than what the scalpers and scam artists were able to squeeze out of a gross mismatch between quantiy supplied and quantity demanded last time around, I don't think you've managed a ringing endorsement of your value.
You know, I think that typo may have just added a word to my personal dictionary. Advertisign: the telltale indicators showing you're being marketed to.
a) The point is that the ars article was nowhere near as negative as the/. blurb. b) Vista is no different in this regard than XP, while the blurb implies that it's worse.
The $500 machine should be enough for 90% of users
Unfortunately, it's only going to be 20% of production, so 63% of the 90% that could get by with the $500 box are going to have to get the $600 box or get nothing.
I've solved this problem in other posts by referring to the price of the PS3 as $580, the average of the two prices weighted by production volume.
At this point with a clean install, we can recommend any of the tested systems for basic usage [snip] For a great experience, we would pack all of the systems with at least 1GB of RAM. We make the same recommendation for XP today. (bold added)
And this turns into "Vista is extremely RAM hungry" in the blurb? Nice.
Then that's also an answer to the question - artists can use their current tools, they'll just shift texturing from one current tool (Photoshop) to another current tool (Maya).
If this is the kind of knowledge the mainstreme consumer has about the PS3, it doesn't bode well...
You're right. And it's Sony's fault. Sony has clearly not done enough to explain to the average consumer what the console can do. I think a story like that says more about how little people, so far, care about HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, or even HDTV in general - which really calls further into question the wisdom of putting the Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 (given all the problems I/we assume it has caused for pricing and production).
On the other hand, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe Sony is only trying to sell to the hardcore gamers, and all of them/us know what's actually going on with the console (whether or not we approve of it is something else entirely).
I question the wisdom of this, certainly in relation to their obvious hopes for Blu-Ray penetration, but more importantly: are current PS2 owners primarily hardcore gamers? I was under the impression there were a lot of more casual PS2 purchases, but perhaps I'm wrong.
And why exactly would you bolt large amounts of bitmap manipulation tools to a procedural texture designer? Making it a Photoshop plugin adds nothing to a procedural texture designer that can't be done with the black art of copy and paste.
True - but the original question wasn't whether Photoshop would be the ideal tool for technical reasons, but whether it could be incorporated into Photoshop because that's the tool artists already know how to use. Or, more generally, the question was: are procedural textures something current artists could learn to create fairly easily, or would they have to become "programmers lite"? If the former, then procedural textures could start cropping up in titles. If the latter, the uptake will be a lot slower.
While Photoshop would add nothing to the procedural texture designer, it might still be worthwhile from a UI/learning curve standpoint.
You're trying and trying to make a point, but, like a poor marksman, you just keep missing the target.
The simple fact is that you're going to need an artist to design the procedural texture. That artist is going to need a tool to do so. This is the question the original poster posited: will the tool be something that artists are already or could easily become comfortable using, as opposed to an obscure set of formulas to apply or equations to solve. You describe a tool with sliders and gizmos, which is the answer he was looking for.
We're talking about creating the textures without generating a bitmap at any point in the process.
This, though, I don't believe in the slightest, since it would mean that the artist would never get to see the results of her work. I don't think that's going to cut it in the art creation world. And if you're going to show images on the screen (AKA bitmaps), then suddenly it seems a lot closer to Photoshop's core functionality than writing a memo does.
Do you download wordprocessor plugins for Photoshop as well?
And, incidentally, I'm pretty sure you can do text handling in Photoshop. Just like you can do drawing in Word.
Believe me, for my uses, acquiring the discipline to wear them isn't a problem. Firing my Mosin-Nagant M44 is pretty damn loud even when you're wearing softies and over-ear protection. I don't even want to think about what it would sound like without ears on.
(When you can feel the overpressure of the muzzle blast from five feet away, you know it's no good for your ears)
No, that's not what happens. The sound is simply reflected. The speaker membrane acts as a rock-solid wall to the incoming sound waves because the current through the voice coil is just right to prevent the membrane from moving. Or in a different way: behind the speaker, the incoming wave and emitted wave cancel each other out. But on the opposite side of the speaker, away from you ear, a wave is emitted.
Huh. That makes perfect sense. I'd always just assumed you ended up with heat, because whenever it looks like energy has been lost, increased heat is a safe bet.
But you're saying that the wave emitted on the "outside" of the speaker, you get a reflected wave that now has all the energy of the incoming wave and the cancellation wave, right? Cool. Thanks for explaining that.
I'm not an artist, so I could be way off on this, but - I would think that the level of per-pixel detail you're talking about isn't necessary for a lot of textures used in games. How much control do you need to have over the specific wood grain of a door, for example? Wouldn't it be good enough to specify that it's a mahogany tone, with a range for grain tightness, with the grain running vertically?
Essentially, what they did with the trees in Oblivion - it doesn't matter for almost any of the trees that they look a specific way, just that they look like various flavors of deciduous tree.
I would think an awful lot of textures could be like that - anything plantlike, marbles, anything with an actual repetitive pattern (screen doors, cyclone fence, brick walls, etc). Sure, there are no doubt plenty of textures that need to be just so, but an awful lot of the game world is stuff that doesn't matter at the degree of detail you're talking about - as long as there actually is detail there.
But again, I don't do texture creation for games, so maybe I'm way off base. But the fact that it was definitely used for Oblivion, and both MS and Sony have said that they tried to design into their machines facilities to handle procedural textures more easily lead me to believe that it's not the lost cause you make it out to be.
You're still missing the point. Procedural textures are procedural. There is no bitmap to edit, only a set of parameters to pass to the function of your choice. Converting the result of the procedure to a bitmap would be superfluous, as it would defeat the size gains provided by doing procedural texturing!
But unless you want your game levels to be made up of completely random textures, someone still needs to decide/design what the textures will look like. And the question is, can they do that in Photoshop. Of course, you know that, since your next paragraph is:
What you usually find in procedural texturing is a tool with various sliders and controls to modify the parameters (e.g. roughness, marbling, scaling, color, etc.) of the texture. When the artist obtains the look he's going for, he saves those parameters out.
Which is exactly what the original poster was asking about, and sounds like it could easily be a Photoshop plugin.
So, like Sean Connery on SNL Celebrity Jeopardy, despite your best efforts, you've answered the question. I'm sure the OP appreciates it.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure was; got to watch that roll through pretty much just in time for me to leave my office in Madison.
Good to know on Wal-Mart. Looks like I'll be doing what I did when I picked up my 360 (albeit a couple months after launch): find a Wal-Mart that's halfway out in the sticks and take my chances. I expect 20 Wiis to last a lot longer in, say, Dousman than in Madison.
That's all well and good, to be sure...but what does it have to do with my comment, that Nintendo's criticism only applies to the PS3, not to both the PS3 and the 360, as the blurb indicates?
Honestly, I don't think it's the "proprietary" nature of it that's irksome in itself, it's that it's proprietary in an effort to lock you in outside the realm of the console. A proprietary format that was only going to be used for PS3 games would probably draw some ridicule (see the GameCube's disc format), but not such contempt.
The problem is that Sony appears to be pushing a format that makes the console more expensive, that is suspected of not particularly enhancing the games, but that they're pushing for reasons of their own. It makes people feel cheated, like they're being asked to foot the bill for Sony's strategy in the movie industry when all they want is to buy a games consol.
This level of vitriol didn't exist for previous consoles because Nintendo (for example) didn't try and sell movies on cartridges. So at least, insofar as you were paying for the proprietary format, you were paying for it solely for how it affected the gaming experience.
At least, that's my take on it.
+1 Good use of "Great Scott"
This is a fair point, and you're certainly not wrong. But I think there's some value in the comment, since I'm pretty sure the penetration of computers running XP is three orders of magnitude higher than the penetration of the XBox 360.
So, yes, it's only cheapest if you already own a PC running XP, but that includes an awful lot of people - most of whom don't have 360. So, for them, it could be the cheapest HD-DVD player available.
Nonetheless, you're right; presenting it as an absolute statement is poor logic.
But you're comparing the PS3 to the HD-DVD add on, which just doesn't hold water. If Blu-Ray fails, the PS3 is still a great games machine. If HD-DVD fails, the 360 is still a great games machine.
What you're doing is equivalent to: "if Blu-Ray fails, the PS3 is still a great games machine, but if HD-DVD fails, your Toshiba HD-DVD player is a useless piece of plastic." The two statements are unrelated, except that the HD-DVD add on for the 360 is cheaper than the Toshiba was in the first place - so, if anything, you're better off with the add on (assuming you've got a 360).
Sony opened themselves up for this by including the Blu-Ray drive as part of the core machine. MS avoided this by making it an add on. By the same token, of course, Sony has set themselves up to be successful if/when game developers start utilizing the extra storage capacity of the format, while MS has precluded themselves from so doing.
I don't see how M. Trépanier's comments qualify as "taking shots at both companies." He's saying that forcing unproven, proprietary formats on consumers is a bad decision. As far as I know, only Sony is "forcing" such a format. The HD-DVD add on to the 360 is just that, an add on, and won't even be used for game content (unless there's been news to the contrary that I've missed...?). So the 360 is using DVD as the medium for its core functionality (games), just like the Wii is.
(Or is it "Wii are"?)
Either way, I'm going to be one of the losers in line hoping for a Wii this weekend. Hopefully, the combination of deer season and a Wisconsin November will keep them short for me.
allowed the common man to do math beyond with the former elite accounts could do
You've obviously never tried to get correct change at a fast food place.
Procedural textures are not bitmaps. The fact that you think they're the same shows just how little you understand about the subject at hand.
Anything you display on the screen is a bitmap. There's memory inside the computer, see, made up of "bits", that "map" to pixels on the screen.
This is a bitmap. And if you're going to show the artist the texture, which I predict most artists are going to want, then you're going to generate a bitmap.
I don't give a flying fuck if it's mapped to a sphere, a toroid, a spatula, or a p-brane: if you're showing it on the screen, it's a bitmap.
The phrase "lauded for its great games, ease of development, and superior online service" is meant to apply to the DC/360, depending on whether you're in the PS2 or PS3 column.
I think the "ease of development" was referring to the 360.
But yeah, the price point argument really struck me that way, too. If the best you can say about your price is that it's no higher than what the scalpers and scam artists were able to squeeze out of a gross mismatch between quantiy supplied and quantity demanded last time around, I don't think you've managed a ringing endorsement of your value.
Now that's what I call bootstrapping: you'll be able to get online only after you get online to download the patch.
Er...I'm pretty sure Live is an online service, and I'm reasonably certain the 360 has it. At least I hope it does, becaause I'm paying $50/yr for it.
then start advertisign
You know, I think that typo may have just added a word to my personal dictionary. Advertisign: the telltale indicators showing you're being marketed to.
Two responses:
/. blurb.
a) The point is that the ars article was nowhere near as negative as the
b) Vista is no different in this regard than XP, while the blurb implies that it's worse.
The $500 machine should be enough for 90% of users
Unfortunately, it's only going to be 20% of production, so 63% of the 90% that could get by with the $500 box are going to have to get the $600 box or get nothing.
I've solved this problem in other posts by referring to the price of the PS3 as $580, the average of the two prices weighted by production volume.
HTH.
HAND.
From TFA:
At this point with a clean install, we can recommend any of the tested systems for basic usage
[snip]
For a great experience, we would pack all of the systems with at least 1GB of RAM. We make the same recommendation for XP today. (bold added)
And this turns into "Vista is extremely RAM hungry" in the blurb? Nice.
(One of the systems tested had 512 MB RAM)
Then that's also an answer to the question - artists can use their current tools, they'll just shift texturing from one current tool (Photoshop) to another current tool (Maya).
If this is the kind of knowledge the mainstreme consumer has about the PS3, it doesn't bode well...
You're right. And it's Sony's fault. Sony has clearly not done enough to explain to the average consumer what the console can do. I think a story like that says more about how little people, so far, care about HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray, or even HDTV in general - which really calls further into question the wisdom of putting the Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 (given all the problems I/we assume it has caused for pricing and production).
On the other hand, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe Sony is only trying to sell to the hardcore gamers, and all of them/us know what's actually going on with the console (whether or not we approve of it is something else entirely).
I question the wisdom of this, certainly in relation to their obvious hopes for Blu-Ray penetration, but more importantly: are current PS2 owners primarily hardcore gamers? I was under the impression there were a lot of more casual PS2 purchases, but perhaps I'm wrong.
And why exactly would you bolt large amounts of bitmap manipulation tools to a procedural texture designer? Making it a Photoshop plugin adds nothing to a procedural texture designer that can't be done with the black art of copy and paste.
True - but the original question wasn't whether Photoshop would be the ideal tool for technical reasons, but whether it could be incorporated into Photoshop because that's the tool artists already know how to use. Or, more generally, the question was: are procedural textures something current artists could learn to create fairly easily, or would they have to become "programmers lite"? If the former, then procedural textures could start cropping up in titles. If the latter, the uptake will be a lot slower.
While Photoshop would add nothing to the procedural texture designer, it might still be worthwhile from a UI/learning curve standpoint.
You're trying and trying to make a point, but, like a poor marksman, you just keep missing the target.
The simple fact is that you're going to need an artist to design the procedural texture. That artist is going to need a tool to do so. This is the question the original poster posited: will the tool be something that artists are already or could easily become comfortable using, as opposed to an obscure set of formulas to apply or equations to solve. You describe a tool with sliders and gizmos, which is the answer he was looking for.
We're talking about creating the textures without generating a bitmap at any point in the process.
This, though, I don't believe in the slightest, since it would mean that the artist would never get to see the results of her work. I don't think that's going to cut it in the art creation world. And if you're going to show images on the screen (AKA bitmaps), then suddenly it seems a lot closer to Photoshop's core functionality than writing a memo does.
Do you download wordprocessor plugins for Photoshop as well?
And, incidentally, I'm pretty sure you can do text handling in Photoshop. Just like you can do drawing in Word.
Believe me, for my uses, acquiring the discipline to wear them isn't a problem. Firing my Mosin-Nagant M44 is pretty damn loud even when you're wearing softies and over-ear protection. I don't even want to think about what it would sound like without ears on.
(When you can feel the overpressure of the muzzle blast from five feet away, you know it's no good for your ears)
No, that's not what happens. The sound is simply reflected. The speaker membrane acts as a rock-solid wall to the incoming sound waves because the current through the voice coil is just right to prevent the membrane from moving. Or in a different way: behind the speaker, the incoming wave and emitted wave cancel each other out. But on the opposite side of the speaker, away from you ear, a wave is emitted.
Huh. That makes perfect sense. I'd always just assumed you ended up with heat, because whenever it looks like energy has been lost, increased heat is a safe bet.
But you're saying that the wave emitted on the "outside" of the speaker, you get a reflected wave that now has all the energy of the incoming wave and the cancellation wave, right? Cool. Thanks for explaining that.
I'm not an artist, so I could be way off on this, but - I would think that the level of per-pixel detail you're talking about isn't necessary for a lot of textures used in games. How much control do you need to have over the specific wood grain of a door, for example? Wouldn't it be good enough to specify that it's a mahogany tone, with a range for grain tightness, with the grain running vertically?
Essentially, what they did with the trees in Oblivion - it doesn't matter for almost any of the trees that they look a specific way, just that they look like various flavors of deciduous tree.
I would think an awful lot of textures could be like that - anything plantlike, marbles, anything with an actual repetitive pattern (screen doors, cyclone fence, brick walls, etc). Sure, there are no doubt plenty of textures that need to be just so, but an awful lot of the game world is stuff that doesn't matter at the degree of detail you're talking about - as long as there actually is detail there.
But again, I don't do texture creation for games, so maybe I'm way off base. But the fact that it was definitely used for Oblivion, and both MS and Sony have said that they tried to design into their machines facilities to handle procedural textures more easily lead me to believe that it's not the lost cause you make it out to be.
You're still missing the point. Procedural textures are procedural. There is no bitmap to edit, only a set of parameters to pass to the function of your choice. Converting the result of the procedure to a bitmap would be superfluous, as it would defeat the size gains provided by doing procedural texturing!
But unless you want your game levels to be made up of completely random textures, someone still needs to decide/design what the textures will look like. And the question is, can they do that in Photoshop. Of course, you know that, since your next paragraph is:
What you usually find in procedural texturing is a tool with various sliders and controls to modify the parameters (e.g. roughness, marbling, scaling, color, etc.) of the texture. When the artist obtains the look he's going for, he saves those parameters out.
Which is exactly what the original poster was asking about, and sounds like it could easily be a Photoshop plugin.
So, like Sean Connery on SNL Celebrity Jeopardy, despite your best efforts, you've answered the question. I'm sure the OP appreciates it.