This is a quote from the postscript in ESR's article on Quake Cheating (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/quake-cheats.ht ml):
>There's just no getting around the fact that the execution path on the client machine is going to be under the client-user's control. Thus, good security has to be designed as though any code on the client side is open.
My observation is that this is only strictly true if the client game executable is complete (in the game content sense) and available apriori.
I think that in the future we'll see games that have a light client 'shell' engine which handles content generation (procedural), i/o, graphics, sound, and so forth, but does NOT contain the multiplayer game code. The game content code itself will be written in a scripting language (Lua is a good canidate) and downloaded from the server at play time.
Thus the server could impose dynamic language and protocol changes to running clients so as to make them unhackable (in any useful sense) during the game. A given piece of code could be reverse engineered and/or modified after the fact, but by that time it is useless, since you'd never run the same game code twice.
The clients then MUST be running the server supplied code, or they would quickly become unplayable by whatever means the game creator has deemed appropriate.
was set conservatively to Feb 25 in early Jan while they were still doing the final regression testing. Since they've finished it plenty early, it's not at all unlikely that we might see it on store shelves in about a week or so, although Feb 25 is being kept as the official CYA release date.
to slaving at a capital-driven game that you hate is to make something better yourself.
Hello? We are still here on Slashdot, correct? Ok, just checking.
A good place to start might be something like the Worldforge project: www.worldforge.org
Moonbase Commander is amazing
on
Games of the Year
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I picked up 2 copies on a whim monday for $10 ea at Best Buy. Just now I finished my first evening of online play (the gamespy service is decent) - and I'm totally hooked. Our final game was a 4-player (2 teams) 4 hour marathon, with some seriously surprising twists. It eventually ended due to Internet disconnects. I can't really compare MBC to anything else, it has a very unique feel. Easy to pick up, hard to put down, and really tough to master. Turn based but fast paced, and very intense.
There's a downloadable demo, but I'd even recommend just buying it outright. If you like strategy games, you won't regret it.
is the name of a knowledge feather in "Vurt" by Jeff Noon. Do check it out. He is one of the most interesting scifi authors I've had the pleasure of reading in recent years. His works might be described as hyper-fairytale cyberpunk. Noon has interesting ways with language.
Read also: the sequels "Pollen," and "Nymphomation," his transforming poetry in "Cobralingus," and his amazing short stories in "Pixel Juice." His Alice in Wonderland followup, "Automated Alice," was ok, but don't take it as representative of the rest of his work. Also, "Needle in the Groove" has been recently published in the UK, with a corresponding CD album, but is not available stateside yet.
Since home game systems have caught up with arcade hardware at low cost, there isn't a sufficient technology advantage to keep arcade gaming advantageous and afloat.
Serious holographic displays on arcade machines would be fantastic, and home consoles wouldn't be able to touch it for many years since TV/monitor standards are so slow and entrenched.
Note: please allow 3+ years for development and adoption, and keep your fingers crossed that arcades still exist then.
The technology used in games will always improve, just as our machines get faster and software gets better. This is a fact.
What needs more forward compatability (scalability and adaptivity) is game content. (see my previous post: The future of game content http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=36256&cid=3907 008 ). Specifically, content is going to be increasingly user-centric and user-generated, especially as driven by in-game online connectivity (see the recent Will Wright interview about Sims Online, read about the bit where users will interact with other player's in-game scenarios via the automatic networked feedback).
One of the things burns me most about the 'classic' game development models is that the fixed-platform approach to content invites the reinventing of engines from scratch every few years. This is a vicious cycle: old fixed content doesn't scale to new technology, so the technology is replaced, requiring new from-scratch fixed-platform content. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is one of the fundamental reasons why we end up buying the same games over and over: we're paying for the recreation of content and technology since the system is constantly reinventing the wheel.
When the content in games becomes inherently scalable and platform/technology-independant (adaptive), the internet will make an even bigger difference in being able to cross-pollinate development of rich user-driven game environments.
As I'm fond of point out: The next John Carmack won't be a game engine guy, he'll be a game CONTENT engine guy.
This is laughable. I appreciate the sentiment, but the market reality behaves otherwise.
The console game market totally dwarfs the PC game market. Technology is only part of it, and while the latest PC will always shortly outpace the latest console, the constant cost and hassle of the endless upgrade path is part of what drives people to consoles instead. Console development costs are lower because the platforms are fixed, and console player costs are lower because the platforms are fixed. Over a long period, buying a $300 console every 4 years is an order of magnitude cheaper than keeping hot PC up to date in the same time.
The real winner would be a console system that's silently self upgrading at no cost via an inherently programmable architecture. If it could double a console's lifetime performance-wise, it would own the market on cost alone.
In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.
The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.
The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.
One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.
I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.
The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.
Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]
Now lets discuss the (theory of the) technology briefly.
Most current content authoring tools are specialized data manipulation facilities. "Isn't everything on a computer data?" Right, but manipulating what is essentially the output data directly, even from a high level, is more than a little stupid. It's what's done because it has always been deemed necessary, but it's not very smart.
To start working with procedural content, you need content tools that are about modeling processes. Now, not everyhing can be a runtime process (yet) because things like radiosity computation are freaking slow. But, and this is important, fun game content that's interactive and interesting is several orders of magnitude more important than having the prettiest most "realistic" (don't make me laugh) game content. This should probably be enshrined as BIG IMPORTANT RULE #1 or some such.
Anyway, modeling processes that 'create' the content is not entirely different from modeling the physical processes of how that content came to exist in the game world. It really is a form of simulation, that while not necessarily anything like the 'real' physical processes that shape our world, that will give life to games that just can't be manufactured by hand.
The computational process of simulating the modeling processes will be the next big thing.
Traditional content development is a long arduous pipeline. Skilled artists trained extensively in high end proprietary software packages create fat content chunks that get ground through this pipeline and end up in a game, presented via the engine, as polygons with textures or music or what have you. It's expensive, wasteful, and a prohibitive barrier to entry for indie developers.
Ultimately, the only part of the pipeline meaningful for a gamer is the output - what's in the games. But, the more flexibility and power a content pipeline is imbued with, the bigger the payoff is for gamers and developers.
So, the question then is how to we get from the grinding fixed pipeline to something elegant and useful. The best possible future is for content creation to change in a few major ways: to be immediate and in realtime, to be in the game engine itself, and to be mostly procedural to satisfy these constraints. This isn't simple, but here's a quick outline.
Part one requires the pipeline be as short as possible. Instant game feedback means no extra turnaround time for revisions.
Part two is to have our realtime zero-length pipeline in the game engine itself, so the game, which is the game content, is a self supporting environment. The engine becomes not only the output method, but the development host. The best way to change a game world is obviously from within the game itself (sound familiar? that's how the real world works).
Part three is the magic that makes this possible. Procedural content capability changes the entire outlook of what is possible to do in a game engine. Procedural content is more flexible (since it's programmable), more lightweight (since the descriptions are effectively code - even if you model them through a different interface), more distributable, more scalable, more unique, more immediate... the list goes on.
The next John Carmack won't be a game engine guy, he'll be a game CONTENT engine guy.
And that, temporarily, is the end of this story. Game content creation is basically in the dark ages because these parts haven't fallen into place yet. Nobody has this together yet. Someday this will be real, and we'll look back and think of current content as being like coding assembly instead of using high level languages.
When game content is capable of really expressing what's in gamers' imaginations and dreams, well, then we'll have quite a party on our hands.
when there are standardized EULA's for proprietary software. Free software is way ahead of the game here. Sooner or later, users will demand something reasonable from the proprietary majority as well. Someday I hope something akin to a software users' bill of rights lets us all sleep better at night.
when I'm coding and don't want to break for food, I usually end up eating junk (and regretting it) and getting a real meal later.
It would be great to have a decent food source I could just heat, but I haven't come across anything suitable that has a very long shelf life and doesn't need refrigeration. I've considered some canned goods, but they generally require a bit of cleanup.
Until then, it's dead trees all the way. The *tactile* experience is the key to our dead-tree attachment. When you can have the same feel from an E book because it's in our preferred form factor, and the E-ness is a benefit instead of a pain, then they'll sell.
since these are portable devices, it stands to reason that they are quite likely to be going somewhere. lots of partially completed transfers aren't so useful. this issue might need addressing.
also, I don't know about you, but it would scare the hell out of me to drive on a highway full of porn archiving tailgaters trying to maintain connections and find better loot. yikes.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a quote from the postscript in ESR's article on Quake Cheating (http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/quake-cheats.ht ml):
>There's just no getting around the fact that the execution path on the client machine is going to be under the client-user's control. Thus, good security has to be designed as though any code on the client side is open.
My observation is that this is only strictly true if the client game executable is complete (in the game content sense) and available apriori.
I think that in the future we'll see games that have a light client 'shell' engine which handles content generation (procedural), i/o, graphics, sound, and so forth, but does NOT contain the multiplayer game code. The game content code itself will be written in a scripting language (Lua is a good canidate) and downloaded from the server at play time.
Thus the server could impose dynamic language and protocol changes to running clients so as to make them unhackable (in any useful sense) during the game. A given piece of code could be reverse engineered and/or modified after the fact, but by that time it is useless, since you'd never run the same game code twice.
The clients then MUST be running the server supplied code, or they would quickly become unplayable by whatever means the game creator has deemed appropriate.
errr, sorry. So, the latest SciFi mini-series was pretty good huh? I wonder if they'll follow it up with another.
But man, who know Christopher Walkin could dance like that?!
Crazy stuff.
by Joel Spolsky, describes exactly this problem.
t ra ctions.html
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbs
was set conservatively to Feb 25 in early Jan while they were still doing the final regression testing. Since they've finished it plenty early, it's not at all unlikely that we might see it on store shelves in about a week or so, although Feb 25 is being kept as the official CYA release date.
with one of these things? I can just see it now (in approximate NetHack-ese):
...
Hey, I'm finally going to win! Here comes Rodney, I'll label the real amulet so I can recover it when he steals it.
"You remove your Amulet of Life Saving"
What the hell? I'll put it back on.
"You wear the Amulet of Yendor. The Wizard of Yendor summons Demogorgon."
Oh crap. I'll engrave Elbereth to protect me.
"You burn 'Rlberrth' into the ground with your wand of fire. Demogorgon poisons the hell out of you."
!@#$%. I have to teleport myself away. Where's my wand
"You zap yourself with a wand of Polymorph, and are turned into a newt. Demogorgon laughs his @$$ off. You have died of sickness."
it might be somewhat like this one:
www.staticbeats.com
to slaving at a capital-driven game that you hate is to make something better yourself.
Hello? We are still here on Slashdot, correct? Ok, just checking.
A good place to start might be something like the Worldforge project: www.worldforge.org
I picked up 2 copies on a whim monday for $10 ea at Best Buy. Just now I finished my first evening of online play (the gamespy service is decent) - and I'm totally hooked. Our final game was a 4-player (2 teams) 4 hour marathon, with some seriously surprising twists. It eventually ended due to Internet disconnects. I can't really compare MBC to anything else, it has a very unique feel. Easy to pick up, hard to put down, and really tough to master. Turn based but fast paced, and very intense.
There's a downloadable demo, but I'd even recommend just buying it outright. If you like strategy games, you won't regret it.
is the name of a knowledge feather in "Vurt" by Jeff Noon. Do check it out. He is one of the most interesting scifi authors I've had the pleasure of reading in recent years. His works might be described as hyper-fairytale cyberpunk. Noon has interesting ways with language.
Read also: the sequels "Pollen," and "Nymphomation," his transforming poetry in "Cobralingus," and his amazing short stories in "Pixel Juice." His Alice in Wonderland followup, "Automated Alice," was ok, but don't take it as representative of the rest of his work. Also, "Needle in the Groove" has been recently published in the UK, with a corresponding CD album, but is not available stateside yet.
when my beautiful 21" CRT is flat?
[yes, it's a joke]
in the arcades where it belongs!
Since home game systems have caught up with arcade hardware at low cost, there isn't a sufficient technology advantage to keep arcade gaming advantageous and afloat.
Serious holographic displays on arcade machines would be fantastic, and home consoles wouldn't be able to touch it for many years since TV/monitor standards are so slow and entrenched.
Note: please allow 3+ years for development and adoption, and keep your fingers crossed that arcades still exist then.
so I'll probably never buy one.
RIP: "crushed to death by an exploding drawbridge"
"The Internet changes everything"
7 008 ). Specifically, content is going to be increasingly user-centric and user-generated, especially as driven by in-game online connectivity (see the recent Will Wright interview about Sims Online, read about the bit where users will interact with other player's in-game scenarios via the automatic networked feedback).
The technology used in games will always improve, just as our machines get faster and software gets better. This is a fact.
What needs more forward compatability (scalability and adaptivity) is game content. (see my previous post: The future of game content http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=36256&cid=390
One of the things burns me most about the 'classic' game development models is that the fixed-platform approach to content invites the reinventing of engines from scratch every few years. This is a vicious cycle: old fixed content doesn't scale to new technology, so the technology is replaced, requiring new from-scratch fixed-platform content. Lather, rinse, repeat.
This is one of the fundamental reasons why we end up buying the same games over and over: we're paying for the recreation of content and technology since the system is constantly reinventing the wheel.
When the content in games becomes inherently scalable and platform/technology-independant (adaptive), the internet will make an even bigger difference in being able to cross-pollinate development of rich user-driven game environments.
As I'm fond of point out: The next John Carmack won't be a game engine guy, he'll be a game CONTENT engine guy.
is The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon.
We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
This is laughable. I appreciate the sentiment, but the market reality behaves otherwise.
The console game market totally dwarfs the PC game market. Technology is only part of it, and while the latest PC will always shortly outpace the latest console, the constant cost and hassle of the endless upgrade path is part of what drives people to consoles instead. Console development costs are lower because the platforms are fixed, and console player costs are lower because the platforms are fixed. Over a long period, buying a $300 console every 4 years is an order of magnitude cheaper than keeping hot PC up to date in the same time.
The real winner would be a console system that's silently self upgrading at no cost via an inherently programmable architecture. If it could double a console's lifetime performance-wise, it would own the market on cost alone.
you haven't seen anything yet.
In terms of scalability, the uber-parallel-processing-pipelined PS2 makes a lot of sense, and will continue to get more powerful in the future as its software improves. In terms of usability though, the PS2 has irked a lot of console developers because it's an entirely different beast and doesn't behave like a PC when you get down to performance bottlenecks.
The PS3 and beyond can only continue this trend. Sony hopefully won't make the same mistake ease-of-use wise, but the PS3 will be getting tantalizingly close to the "do everything you ever cared to do in a game" performance.
The future of this technology is hugely dependant on software capability to make sense of and utilize it. This will be the biggest hurdle, and clearly nothing like it really exists today.
One of the next big steps may be carbon-nanotube based computing, because it will enable architectures with massive hierarchical processing power and near limitless involatile stupidly fast memory, all embedded everywhere. Carbon (and other) nanotubes will be used for both logic and memory (as well as actual display surfaces), and ultimately be laid out more like a brain than a serial system.
I look foward having a complete system in a display where you push morphing procedures in one end which ultimately get streamed into content on the output side.
The networked aspect will be important too, but not how it's colored in this article. Your games will ineveitably run graphics processing on your local machine, with non-realtime and background tasks offloaded to others on the network. However, distributed simulation of gaming environments will only really make sense when players become the content producers and the worlds expand procedurally to simulate whatever ideas of interest their imaginations have conjured.
Then I just have to ask, when game consoles power the realization of our imaginations, whose world are we going to be living in? [hint: this is rhetorical, don't answer, just think about it]
Please have some respect.
Now lets discuss the (theory of the) technology briefly.
Most current content authoring tools are specialized data manipulation facilities. "Isn't everything on a computer data?" Right, but manipulating what is essentially the output data directly, even from a high level, is more than a little stupid. It's what's done because it has always been deemed necessary, but it's not very smart.
To start working with procedural content, you need content tools that are about modeling processes. Now, not everyhing can be a runtime process (yet) because things like radiosity computation are freaking slow. But, and this is important, fun game content that's interactive and interesting is several orders of magnitude more important than having the prettiest most "realistic" (don't make me laugh) game content. This should probably be enshrined as BIG IMPORTANT RULE #1 or some such.
Anyway, modeling processes that 'create' the content is not entirely different from modeling the physical processes of how that content came to exist in the game world. It really is a form of simulation, that while not necessarily anything like the 'real' physical processes that shape our world, that will give life to games that just can't be manufactured by hand.
The computational process of simulating the modeling processes will be the next big thing.
depends on the future of game content tools.
... the list goes on.
Traditional content development is a long arduous pipeline. Skilled artists trained extensively in high end proprietary software packages create fat content chunks that get ground through this pipeline and end up in a game, presented via the engine, as polygons with textures or music or what have you. It's expensive, wasteful, and a prohibitive barrier to entry for indie developers.
Ultimately, the only part of the pipeline meaningful for a gamer is the output - what's in the games. But, the more flexibility and power a content pipeline is imbued with, the bigger the payoff is for gamers and developers.
So, the question then is how to we get from the grinding fixed pipeline to something elegant and useful. The best possible future is for content creation to change in a few major ways: to be immediate and in realtime, to be in the game engine itself, and to be mostly procedural to satisfy these constraints. This isn't simple, but here's a quick outline.
Part one requires the pipeline be as short as possible. Instant game feedback means no extra turnaround time for revisions.
Part two is to have our realtime zero-length pipeline in the game engine itself, so the game, which is the game content, is a self supporting environment. The engine becomes not only the output method, but the development host. The best way to change a game world is obviously from within the game itself (sound familiar? that's how the real world works).
Part three is the magic that makes this possible. Procedural content capability changes the entire outlook of what is possible to do in a game engine. Procedural content is more flexible (since it's programmable), more lightweight (since the descriptions are effectively code - even if you model them through a different interface), more distributable, more scalable, more unique, more immediate
The next John Carmack won't be a game engine guy, he'll be a game CONTENT engine guy.
And that, temporarily, is the end of this story. Game content creation is basically in the dark ages because these parts haven't fallen into place yet. Nobody has this together yet. Someday this will be real, and we'll look back and think of current content as being like coding assembly instead of using high level languages.
When game content is capable of really expressing what's in gamers' imaginations and dreams, well, then we'll have quite a party on our hands.
when there are standardized EULA's for proprietary software. Free software is way ahead of the game here. Sooner or later, users will demand something reasonable from the proprietary majority as well. Someday I hope something akin to a software users' bill of rights lets us all sleep better at night.
"Does this mean that Duke Nukem Forever is overdue for its "Game Of The Year" award?"
um, what about "game of the years" instead?
"Just for those who don't know, disK is for magnetic media, and disC is for optical media."
ummm, I'd say disK is for disKette, being a disc in a little box, and disC (like discus) for any which are round in their normal use form.
when I'm coding and don't want to break for food, I usually end up eating junk (and regretting it) and getting a real meal later.
It would be great to have a decent food source I could just heat, but I haven't come across anything suitable that has a very long shelf life and doesn't need refrigeration. I've considered some canned goods, but they generally require a bit of cleanup.
any suggestions?
when they are on E paper.
Until then, it's dead trees all the way. The *tactile* experience is the key to our dead-tree attachment. When you can have the same feel from an E book because it's in our preferred form factor, and the E-ness is a benefit instead of a pain, then they'll sell.
since these are portable devices, it stands to reason that they are quite likely to be going somewhere. lots of partially completed transfers aren't so useful. this issue might need addressing.
also, I don't know about you, but it would scare the hell out of me to drive on a highway full of porn archiving tailgaters trying to maintain connections and find better loot. yikes.