that's exactly what my experience with the crytek games has been. people kept saying, "OMG! You have to play Far Cry! You are totally free to use whatever tactics you want!"
However, everytime i play i find, i can only sneak up on certain guys. I can't sneak up on a guy and pull him off the back of a car, i can't climb into a boat, i can't start anything on fire without shooting stuff. All i really notice is all the freedom is an illusion. At least in Quake2, the freedom to strafe left or right felt real. Hell, even doom seemed to offer more freedom as you could try to get the monsters to shoot each other, fight, and ignore you.
the freedom in a game like crysis feels more like the freedom to do whatever the developers decided you could do.
The iPad has everything that any other computer has...
You mean like USB ports, the ability to create and run your own software, the ability to chose your own OS, the freedom to download software from anywhere you chose, Flash support, the ability to export and import files at will, etc.?
that device already exists. it's called the netbook, or the notebook, or the desktop, or the tablet depending on the level of portability you want. And there's hundreds of them. i don't know why everyone bitches about the ipad not being a notebook.
In terms of cars, it's like bitching that your ferrari doesn't have a trailer hitch. If you want to tow a boat, you don't get that car.
Apple clearly felt the market was saturated with fully functional extensible computers. They wanted to create a new market for closed computers with limited functionality. I don't know if they will succeed with this new market. Personally, i railed against the ipad until i got one. I find i really like having something that just shows me stuff. If i want to make stuff, i'll do it on one of my other computers piled on my desk.
additionally, why anyone would want to do development right on the ipad is a mystery to me. It absolutely sucks for extended data entry. It would especially suck if you had to type in objecttive-c with all the punctuation. It's good for looking at stuff. If you are trying to do anything else with it, you are using the wrong tool for the job.
I don't know if manufactures are conspiring to control people. They just want to make money. Many manufacturers, including Apple, adopt a strategy of figuring out what the minimum required functionality is to sell to their target audience. Apple additionally wants to make good on the "it just works" pitch. They do this by limiting what the device can do.
They don't particularly care if you don't want their product. you aren't their target. They aren't trying to tell you what you can do with an ipad since they aren't really selling it to you. they are selling it to people who don't want to tinker. they are selling it to people who just want to start it up and have it do some basic stuff.
There's probably a market for someone else to sell a device that is just a couple of microcontrollers duct taped to an oled screen, no os, and unlimited potential if you can figure out how to embed a linux build on it.
He's not a game critic. He's a MOVIE critic. He's watched trailers of games and commented on them with the perspective of a movie critic. Did he play portal? Did he play Braid? Did he play bioshock? Did he play WACO? No.
Now i'm going to play the part of the snob. Even if he did, he's unqualified to judge them. Roger Ebert does not understand the vocabulary of gaming. He hasn't played enough FPS to judge the waco game as an experience beyond you run and shoot people.
Not that i'm defending the waco game as art. i've never played it myself. I don't go into it thinking the point of the experience is to shoot people however. shooting people is common place to gamers. to someone who has played a number of FPS games, they are likely not paying much attention to the fact that they are shooting people. Someone who doesn't instinctively control an fps is likely to spend more time trying to figure out how to move, how to shoot, than to absorb any kind of message or mood the game is trying to convey.
Having gone to art school, i know that art snobs think the knowledge you bring to viewing the art is important in critiquing it. Having a thorough knowledge of principles of design and color theory is essential to being an art snob. Games have their own vocabulary and history, and if you don't posess it, you are just a schmoe saying, "i could have put a red square on a black canvas."
i don't know. I wasn't a big proponent of the iPad when it was announced. I made fun of apple calling it magical and revolutionary. I pointed out that it wasn't a replacement for smartphones or full computers or netbooks. It instead was a third device and i didn't need it.
Now i have one (I was lucky enough to get one from work, so i didn't have to shell out $500), and i love it. I was wrong, i do like having this third device. reading on it is a joy. It's the first device that i've felt i actually liked better than a book. I love browsing web pages with it. Honestly, i now wonder why i liked looking at the web prior to having this device.
Did it deliver on being revolutionary? well, it didn't deliver any new content to me, or really create new ways of doing anything. It sucks for typing. But it did leave me feeling like in the future i want to hold websites and books in a convenient form. Maybe that's a revolution.
Just so i don't sound too much like a fanboy, i'd like the see the google offering. I'm not running out to by an iPad of my own just yet. But i don't particularly care about the openness of this kind of device. it's an appliance. i'd expect it to hold my books, and let me see stuff online. nothing more. If the google device is as snappy, and cheaper, i'll be all over it.
I really want to see how content aware fill deals with missing text. What happens when it tries to reconstruct half of a no parking sign or a billboard? i bet it does some funkly things when it has to add in a face.
i'm not picking on it. i just think the results would be interesting and amusing.
intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps
Right. That's why all those games built with engines and level editors and scripting tools always suck. C'mon apple. You have to allow unity. You can't want games but require everyone to make them from scratch.
Afraid that cool unity game will show up on pc, wii, xbox, android, Mac, myspace? It'll be just like the 90's when the pc was gaming heaven and mac users got to play marathon for 11 years.
I assumed both participants in the video had played grand theft auto. How do they know their experience with grand theft auto didn't contribute to them performing better than someone who had never been exposed to driving from 3rd person. It looks pretty hard, but for all i know, they might have been amazing for their first time driving a real car this way.
I don't think anyone questions that digital simulations can improve real world skills. Most of our airline pilots seem to gain valuable skills from a sim.
I also wonder how they would fare if they had an xbox/ps3 controller instead of the standard car interface.
no kidding. my brothers and i play the variant where players use their fingers to flick tiles at the heads of opposing players. Scoring is based on the tile values with multipliers for entering orifaces.
I don't recal reading this in the scrabble book, but it hasn't kept us from playing it.
We also enjoy the variant of pool where you just shoot the balls back and forth as fast as you can with your hands. The first guy to get his fingers caught between 2 looses.
I think the ipad IS a cool device. However, i don't think it's a stand alone replacement for a pc/mac. I guess it will work on it's own, but without a host computer to sync to, you won't get OS updates, you can't back up, and you can't put photos from your digital camera on the device.
Hopefully your neighbor's old windows machine is running at least winXP SP2.
It's more than a shadow dimension. Objects can extend into any of 4 dimensions, x,y,z,w. it's a game of visualizing how an object is shaped while only seeing 3 of those dimensions. The shadows are a hint of what's in the unseen dimension. At any point, that unseen dimension could be x,y, w, or z.
when you are manipulating the objects, it's not like the shadow world in zelda where a door might simply not be there. that shadow world is like a parallel world in the same dimensions. This game is all about one world in 4 dimensions. You have to hold in your head, a 4 dimensional image of what the volume of the object actually looks like. Often the puzzles involve manipulating the objects through many dimensions.
It bears a lot of similarity to the paper mario games, except it's easy to imagine and hold a 3 dimensional model of the world in your head. the 4th dimension is (for most people) hard to visualize.
try imagining a cube in x,y,z, then imagine that it has some planes extending out in the z,w and x,w planes. wtf does that look like? Where do you need to be in x,y,w to be standing on the right plane in x,z,w?
it's 4 dimensional objects projected into a 3 dimensional space projected onto a 2 dimensional plane.
it's like a 3d analog of the orthogonal front side and top views in a CAD or 3D Modeling program. You can view the world in any 3 of the 4 dimensions at any given time.
i think the ring example is a bit complicated. It's not very intuitive so i think people's instincts are to dismiss it as video game trickery. I've seen better, simpler demos where the player sidesteps a seemingly insurmountable obstacle (say a wall that extends really far in x,y, and z) by moving around it on the w axis.
i've seen this game in person a couple times. it confuses the hell out of me and makes my head hurt.
This looks like something from CSI. Couple that with infinite zoom and 4 huge monitors in a dark room and you could reconstruct court admissible evidence with ease!
i can't wait till someone is convicted of murder because content aware fill draws them in a picture taken next to an alley where the crime took place!
eye tracking is cool, but the description of this use of it sounds lame. Most of this functionality already exists in the user's head. I already form visions of what i'm reading. i already ignore words that i am not looking at. The bookmark part when i look away sounds mildly useful, but the rest sounds like the kind of overzealous anticipatory systems we have today.
my iphone constantly switches to landscape if i so much as pivot while looking at it, but refuses to flip when i legitimately turn it. Predictive text and autocompletion on my phone and in office suites screw me constantly by replacing legitimate words with what the application thinks i really meant. I'm leary of any computer system that tries to anticipate my desires or predict my actions. To my experience they are usually wrong and a hinderence more than a help.
That said, i do think eye tracking is cool. And i don't know what this research will ultimately yeild. If they discover that this paradigm sucks, it's time well spent.
The OP was pretty accurate about what choices are available to us at each turn. However, i think the analogy of democracy is wrong. The communism analogy isn't right either.
Open Source is Anarchy. Anyone can take the source and do anything they want at anytime. If our political system were open source, and you didn't like the new healthcare bill, you could just declare yourself soverign. That's anarchy. Just like in the real world, only the most skilled leaders can order the chaos through charisma or force or some combination of both.
big projects are like countries. They have their own takes on politics. some might be more democratic than others. The nice thing is it's all very abstract and Mark Shuttleworth hasn't threatened to imprison or kill anyone for forking Ubuntu.
Also, it would display a photo of every person it was comparing the DNA or Fingerprint scan to. It's not really a bottleneck to spend time drawing images when it could be searching the database. Without that speed bump, the system would clearly return a positive result faster than dramatic pacing allows for.
Slashdot Mirror
that's exactly what my experience with the crytek games has been. people kept saying, "OMG! You have to play Far Cry! You are totally free to use whatever tactics you want!"
However, everytime i play i find, i can only sneak up on certain guys. I can't sneak up on a guy and pull him off the back of a car, i can't climb into a boat, i can't start anything on fire without shooting stuff. All i really notice is all the freedom is an illusion. At least in Quake2, the freedom to strafe left or right felt real. Hell, even doom seemed to offer more freedom as you could try to get the monsters to shoot each other, fight, and ignore you.
the freedom in a game like crysis feels more like the freedom to do whatever the developers decided you could do.
You mean like USB ports, the ability to create and run your own software, the ability to chose your own OS, the freedom to download software from anywhere you chose, Flash support, the ability to export and import files at will, etc.?
that device already exists. it's called the netbook, or the notebook, or the desktop, or the tablet depending on the level of portability you want. And there's hundreds of them. i don't know why everyone bitches about the ipad not being a notebook.
In terms of cars, it's like bitching that your ferrari doesn't have a trailer hitch. If you want to tow a boat, you don't get that car.
Apple clearly felt the market was saturated with fully functional extensible computers. They wanted to create a new market for closed computers with limited functionality. I don't know if they will succeed with this new market. Personally, i railed against the ipad until i got one. I find i really like having something that just shows me stuff. If i want to make stuff, i'll do it on one of my other computers piled on my desk.
additionally, why anyone would want to do development right on the ipad is a mystery to me. It absolutely sucks for extended data entry. It would especially suck if you had to type in objecttive-c with all the punctuation. It's good for looking at stuff. If you are trying to do anything else with it, you are using the wrong tool for the job.
I don't know if manufactures are conspiring to control people. They just want to make money. Many manufacturers, including Apple, adopt a strategy of figuring out what the minimum required functionality is to sell to their target audience. Apple additionally wants to make good on the "it just works" pitch. They do this by limiting what the device can do.
They don't particularly care if you don't want their product. you aren't their target. They aren't trying to tell you what you can do with an ipad since they aren't really selling it to you. they are selling it to people who don't want to tinker. they are selling it to people who just want to start it up and have it do some basic stuff.
There's probably a market for someone else to sell a device that is just a couple of microcontrollers duct taped to an oled screen, no os, and unlimited potential if you can figure out how to embed a linux build on it.
or better yet go here just build your own ipad.
He's not a game critic. He's a MOVIE critic. He's watched trailers of games and commented on them with the perspective of a movie critic. Did he play portal? Did he play Braid? Did he play bioshock? Did he play WACO? No.
Now i'm going to play the part of the snob. Even if he did, he's unqualified to judge them. Roger Ebert does not understand the vocabulary of gaming. He hasn't played enough FPS to judge the waco game as an experience beyond you run and shoot people.
Not that i'm defending the waco game as art. i've never played it myself. I don't go into it thinking the point of the experience is to shoot people however. shooting people is common place to gamers. to someone who has played a number of FPS games, they are likely not paying much attention to the fact that they are shooting people. Someone who doesn't instinctively control an fps is likely to spend more time trying to figure out how to move, how to shoot, than to absorb any kind of message or mood the game is trying to convey.
Having gone to art school, i know that art snobs think the knowledge you bring to viewing the art is important in critiquing it. Having a thorough knowledge of principles of design and color theory is essential to being an art snob. Games have their own vocabulary and history, and if you don't posess it, you are just a schmoe saying, "i could have put a red square on a black canvas."
omg! not only did apple get free advertising? but they managed to get ten grand as well?
all the students had the line
for(int i = 0; i < 128; i++)
in their comp-sci assignment.
i don't know. I wasn't a big proponent of the iPad when it was announced. I made fun of apple calling it magical and revolutionary. I pointed out that it wasn't a replacement for smartphones or full computers or netbooks. It instead was a third device and i didn't need it.
Now i have one (I was lucky enough to get one from work, so i didn't have to shell out $500), and i love it. I was wrong, i do like having this third device. reading on it is a joy. It's the first device that i've felt i actually liked better than a book. I love browsing web pages with it. Honestly, i now wonder why i liked looking at the web prior to having this device.
Did it deliver on being revolutionary? well, it didn't deliver any new content to me, or really create new ways of doing anything. It sucks for typing. But it did leave me feeling like in the future i want to hold websites and books in a convenient form. Maybe that's a revolution.
Just so i don't sound too much like a fanboy, i'd like the see the google offering. I'm not running out to by an iPad of my own just yet. But i don't particularly care about the openness of this kind of device. it's an appliance. i'd expect it to hold my books, and let me see stuff online. nothing more. If the google device is as snappy, and cheaper, i'll be all over it.
I really want to see how content aware fill deals with missing text. What happens when it tries to reconstruct half of a no parking sign or a billboard? i bet it does some funkly things when it has to add in a face.
i'm not picking on it. i just think the results would be interesting and amusing.
intermediate layers between the platform and the developer ultimately produces sub-standard apps
Right. That's why all those games built with engines and level editors and scripting tools always suck. C'mon apple. You have to allow unity. You can't want games but require everyone to make them from scratch.
Afraid that cool unity game will show up on pc, wii, xbox, android, Mac, myspace? It'll be just like the 90's when the pc was gaming heaven and mac users got to play marathon for 11 years.
I assumed both participants in the video had played grand theft auto. How do they know their experience with grand theft auto didn't contribute to them performing better than someone who had never been exposed to driving from 3rd person. It looks pretty hard, but for all i know, they might have been amazing for their first time driving a real car this way.
I don't think anyone questions that digital simulations can improve real world skills. Most of our airline pilots seem to gain valuable skills from a sim.
I also wonder how they would fare if they had an xbox/ps3 controller instead of the standard car interface.
no kidding. my brothers and i play the variant where players use their fingers to flick tiles at the heads of opposing players. Scoring is based on the tile values with multipliers for entering orifaces.
I don't recal reading this in the scrabble book, but it hasn't kept us from playing it.
We also enjoy the variant of pool where you just shoot the balls back and forth as fast as you can with your hands. The first guy to get his fingers caught between 2 looses.
I think the ipad IS a cool device. However, i don't think it's a stand alone replacement for a pc/mac. I guess it will work on it's own, but without a host computer to sync to, you won't get OS updates, you can't back up, and you can't put photos from your digital camera on the device.
Hopefully your neighbor's old windows machine is running at least winXP SP2.
It's been at GDC the last 2 years.
It's more than a shadow dimension. Objects can extend into any of 4 dimensions, x,y,z,w. it's a game of visualizing how an object is shaped while only seeing 3 of those dimensions. The shadows are a hint of what's in the unseen dimension. At any point, that unseen dimension could be x,y, w, or z.
when you are manipulating the objects, it's not like the shadow world in zelda where a door might simply not be there. that shadow world is like a parallel world in the same dimensions. This game is all about one world in 4 dimensions. You have to hold in your head, a 4 dimensional image of what the volume of the object actually looks like. Often the puzzles involve manipulating the objects through many dimensions.
It bears a lot of similarity to the paper mario games, except it's easy to imagine and hold a 3 dimensional model of the world in your head. the 4th dimension is (for most people) hard to visualize.
try imagining a cube in x,y,z, then imagine that it has some planes extending out in the z,w and x,w planes. wtf does that look like? Where do you need to be in x,y,w to be standing on the right plane in x,z,w?
it's 4 dimensional objects projected into a 3 dimensional space projected onto a 2 dimensional plane.
it's like a 3d analog of the orthogonal front side and top views in a CAD or 3D Modeling program. You can view the world in any 3 of the 4 dimensions at any given time.
i think the ring example is a bit complicated. It's not very intuitive so i think people's instincts are to dismiss it as video game trickery. I've seen better, simpler demos where the player sidesteps a seemingly insurmountable obstacle (say a wall that extends really far in x,y, and z) by moving around it on the w axis.
i've seen this game in person a couple times. it confuses the hell out of me and makes my head hurt.
Drivers cause the most crashes now. That might not be the same when the proportion of driverless to driven cars is a little higher.
it's totally safe as long as they only drive in dark rooms illuminated only by red, green, and blue lights at fixed positions.
Nobody is going to have any sympathy for you, but you won't be punished.
However, if they happen to find the person who stole your bike in possession of your bike, they can be punished.
This looks like something from CSI. Couple that with infinite zoom and 4 huge monitors in a dark room and you could reconstruct court admissible evidence with ease!
i can't wait till someone is convicted of murder because content aware fill draws them in a picture taken next to an alley where the crime took place!
eye tracking is cool, but the description of this use of it sounds lame. Most of this functionality already exists in the user's head. I already form visions of what i'm reading. i already ignore words that i am not looking at. The bookmark part when i look away sounds mildly useful, but the rest sounds like the kind of overzealous anticipatory systems we have today.
my iphone constantly switches to landscape if i so much as pivot while looking at it, but refuses to flip when i legitimately turn it. Predictive text and autocompletion on my phone and in office suites screw me constantly by replacing legitimate words with what the application thinks i really meant. I'm leary of any computer system that tries to anticipate my desires or predict my actions. To my experience they are usually wrong and a hinderence more than a help.
That said, i do think eye tracking is cool. And i don't know what this research will ultimately yeild. If they discover that this paradigm sucks, it's time well spent.
The OP was pretty accurate about what choices are available to us at each turn. However, i think the analogy of democracy is wrong. The communism analogy isn't right either.
Open Source is Anarchy. Anyone can take the source and do anything they want at anytime. If our political system were open source, and you didn't like the new healthcare bill, you could just declare yourself soverign. That's anarchy. Just like in the real world, only the most skilled leaders can order the chaos through charisma or force or some combination of both.
big projects are like countries. They have their own takes on politics. some might be more democratic than others. The nice thing is it's all very abstract and Mark Shuttleworth hasn't threatened to imprison or kill anyone for forking Ubuntu.
Anytime google says, "china", it's going to be front page news on slashdot.
Also, it would display a photo of every person it was comparing the DNA or Fingerprint scan to. It's not really a bottleneck to spend time drawing images when it could be searching the database. Without that speed bump, the system would clearly return a positive result faster than dramatic pacing allows for.
I wonder how many toolbars and trials Italy had to install to defeat this boss?
are you really having sex in public if nobody can see you?