there are certain aspects to motion controllers and cameras that are hard to overcome. They are not impossible to overcome, but hard.
Input lag is a twofold issue. the wiimote simply doesn't have a very fast connection. 100 frames a second. Information just doesn't get to the system as fast as a button press on a 360 controller.
Input lag is more than just how fast an accelerometer reading gets to the system. Games that require complicated gestures simply can't determine if you have done the gesture, until you have finished the gesture. In this situation the input lag is tied to the time it takes you to do a gesture. what the game does in the meantime could be just wait there, or maybe play some generic, "you are gesturing" animations. The connection speed can be improved through tech. this gesture lag issue is more of a design thing.
There is no tactile feedback. In the games i make, i notice players will continue to tilt the wiimote to the left even though all onscreen cues indicate the character is not turning left any faster. People sometimes even tilt so far that the accel might start reading right again and the turning left slows. It makes it hard to require precise input on the part of the player. Haptics and force feedback are in their infancy. i'm sure this can be improved, but not in the very near future.
Coupling the lack of tactile feedback with either a slow interface or a system that needs to wait for you to complete a throw to know you threw creates the perception of a non responsive system. The wii made up for this by isolating the input to the bare minimum. it doesn't matter how you swing, the batter or tennis player will swing. people swing it like it's a tennis racket, but don't have to. The games so far have been simplified to compensate for the weaknesses of the input.
those are largely issues seen in the wiimote though. it became apparent that simply an accelerometer and a camera are not enough to make the sword fighting games people seem to want. the camera isn't fast enough to follow rapid arm movements, likewise, the accelerometer has no frame of reference really, and it's easy for an adult to simply pin it at max reading all the time.
to improve the system, you need a faster connection, faster processing of the input, and some way to determine both position relative to some reference, and orientation of the controler.
I had a chance to play the playstation's system at GDC. It's definately a step up from the wiimote. for one it samples faster and provides information on orientation as well as relative position to the screen. Most of the games i tried were about weilding some implement in your hand. None of them were really gesture based. They updated the position of your in game implement fairly accurately, but still there was noticable lag at times. I think it's possible to make games that feel more skill based with it. Additionally, i think the wii motion plus improves the base wiimote. however, we are still a little ways off from the day when executing a hadoken movement with your hands produces the same movement in your character and a fireball right when you want it.
dude! one time at a phish concert, i thought i had some bad Mike & Ike. The mellow sweetness turned to burning and pain and i ran around screaming. Nobody could figure out what was wrong, but it turns out someone slipped some Hot Tamales into my Mike & Ike.
from now on, i'm only getting my Mike & Ike when i'm in Amsterdam where they can control the stuff.
When i first started wow, i felt that sense of adventure. I talked to the quest givers. I epathized with their plights. I went into the low level instances with a nervous band of friends actually looking to give those dreadful pirates what-for. I had fun.
Then it became a level race. instances were lead by a high level char who told me, "stay here while i kill this guy." After a while, i was like, "WTF am i doing?"
I wasn't having adventures anymore. i was just racing through everything. I wasn't savoring. I was leveling up and realizing that i hadn't felt like i saved the world in months.
i agree. there was something "real" about UO. The experiences in it felt more dynamic and unique compared to the manufactured experiences of Wow and the MMOs that lead to it.
Yeah, there were griefers and horrible fuck ups and oversights on the part of the devs. However, i've always felt it grew into a stable and fair system. Near the end of my time with the game i felt like i knew all the tricks to keep myself alive and my stuff in my posession.
even with the griefing, i remember it as being not so bad. at one point, prior to the housing fixes, when a key to your house was all that gave you ownership, my buddy and i got our house stolen. it sucked. it was my buddy's fault too. eager to impress everyone with our new house, he invited people in, got his pocket picked of the key, and what followed was a weeklong battle to reclaim the house.
In the end, we never got the house back, but my character became a vagabond. i wandered the world in search of adventure, and found it. It seemed to me, not unlike something that another game would script and force everyone through. In fact it's quite common for your character's motivation for adventure to be the loss of everything dear to them. Except in UO, this was totally unscripted and unique to my character.
i know some people find that kind of thing aggrivating. i'm not saying my zen approach to the game is for everyone, but if i want to have stuff nobody can have, i can just draw it in photoshop or blender. nothing wrong with that. I play games to do something interesting. often interesting == challenges that i didn't see coming. If it's an mmo, i like feeling like i have a unique story. i've just never felt that wow and it's ilk give me that.
While i agree my opinion of the original trilogy is heavily colored by nostalgia, you can't just wave away arguments that the first three films were better.
There are other films that i loved as a kid that don't do it for me now. I absolutely loved Disney's The Black Hole. I've seen it recently and it's not good. It does feature some pretty impressive spacecraft models though. I thought Krull was the coolest shit ever, eh, it's not so good anymore. I think we can recognize when something was good vs when something was just overwhelming us as kids.
When i watch star wars, yeah, it's nostaligic. It ruled my childhood. But it looks dated. The setpieces are stuck in the 70's. the acting is often stilted and hamfisted. However there's also a solid, if simple, story there. The motivation for the characters makes sense. There is a sense of danger and discovery. I think it's a better film than the prequels, weather i'm a kid or not.
Star Wars wasn't just popular with kids either. It captured the imagination of the world. Adults were seeing it again and again. It's imagery was showing up in adult settings like sports events and SNL.
It probably continues to influence movies today. The reboot of star trek seems to be aimed at making it more star wars like with dog fighting spacecraft and sword fights.
It's not citizen kane, but i think it was a very revolutionary and influencial film. The prequels were not.
The iphone was revolutionary because it packed a lot of functionality into a device that i needed. I need a phone. the fact that i can have a phone that does other stuff and plays cool games makes it a killer platform. It successfully combines my phone and my DS into one unit that i will always have.
I also need a computer. the macbook does a wonderful job there. it's portable, it's powerful, i can make stuff on it.
The ipad is just this thing that sits there and you would only pick it up occasionally. i'm sure it's a nice e-reader, though i can't wait for kindle for osx. i don't have problems reading on my macbook. It would be neat if it had a comprehensive tv remote and my tv somehow worked over wi-fi. my iphone could do that too though.
To decide where these devices fit in my life, i imagine packing for a trip. I would take my phone. I need my phone, and hey, i can play some games on it and check emails, etc. I would probably take my macbook. i still like to putz around in blender and unity on vacation. the ipad obviously isn't going to work well for content creation. at this point, i have no reason to bring the ipad. the ipad seems to have a permanent spot sitting next to my couch. That seems like a stupid thing to spend $500 on.
On the other hand, i think in the future we will have tons of these devices. Your microwave door will be a transparent display that is all one big touch surface. it will display info about what's inside via little labels that appear to hover over your food. Your car's instrument panel will probably be the same. Something like the ipad will cost much less. You will take it for granted. You won't think twice about packing it because you can always get another if it breaks, etc. You won't feel like you wasted a bunch of money on a thing that just sits by your couch or bed because that's all you will expect of it.
I think those future devices had to start somewhere. technically, i think they started on phones, but this is another step towards that future. Magical and revolutionary? Probably not. Another step towards appliance computing? maybe.
I'm not running out to get one now. In 5 years why wouldn't i spend $50 on one?
considering it's a 5" - 10" screen, i'd say the scale of the depicted hands is positively impish. I'm fairly certain those were not drawings of human hands.
I think a lot of grammatical errors i make on slashdot are the result of hurried composition. I'm especially vulnerable to the "loose" vs "lose" mistake. i think "lose", but my hands fire out "loose". I sort of feel like my typing is faster than my thinking. If i were writing it by hand, i'd probably have time to notice my hand was about to start on a second "o".
I also never capitalize i. I think of it as humility.
I've never been a proponent of e-readers. I'd love to get all my books in an e format, but i'd like to just read them on my laptop. If someone wants to spend $200 - $700 on a dedicated reader, i don't care. My 13" macbook is a fine platform for reading. I already have it, the screen is fine for reading. I can make stuff on it. i don't need or want to spend $500 on something that i don't find as functional as what i already have.
Now i do know some people who are in the market for a kindle dx. apparently a good e-reader costs at least $489 (boggle). To them, the people who were going to buy the kindle dx, i say, "really? there's kindle for windows, and kindle for osx is coming, but if you just have to spend that money, the ipad seems neater to me than a kindle."
i think apple has this vision of the future where most people's general purpose computers are replaced with a locked down device. I don't think their vision is one of stamping out the general purpose computer. You still need a computer with a c compiler to make software for the locked down device. Their vision seems to be people who need computers to program computers will have computers. people who don't need that flexibility won't.
along with thier locked down devices, apple has released improvements to their freely available xcode environment and sdks. They continue to crank out new macbooks and desktops that run a general purpose OS.
in many ways, i'm torn on this vision. My dad probably doesn't need the complexity of his system. he can't comprehend folders and files and stuff. He needs a device that just shows his pictures to him and holds his hand. However, i'm not sure my generation or later generations will grapple with computing concepts the way my dad does (i grapple with stuff like facebook). And i certainly don't want to live in a future where the real computers are only available to the devs working at apple, the rest of us just get our dumb terminal ipads that show us what apple wants.
I'm an iphone dev. It's been lucrative for me this past year. I went to wwdc and got tipsy on the apple kool-aid. I have a love hate relationship with them now.
I have no problem with paying a subscription to be able to submit apps to the app store. It's apple's service. apple runs the infrastructure, apple wants to maintain quality (or something). It's reasonable that apple control it.
Now, they don't seem to have the best record of protecting people from apps in the app store. They've had a couple of incidences over the past year of nearly malicious apps getting through the app store. But in theory they are providing a service of policing the app store.
What i think is unreasonable is that i need a subscription to submit apps to my own iphone/ipod/ipad touch. It's my device! i should be able to do whatever i want with it. According to apple, we're not even allowed to jailbreak it. That's just wrong.
TFA makes that point. It's not an article about bad games, it's an article about failed games. Some of them are pointed out as having failed from being bad, others failed because the market wasn't there, or bad luck, or whatever. When the games failed, they took whole companies with them.
Slashdot Mirror
Input lag is a twofold issue. the wiimote simply doesn't have a very fast connection. 100 frames a second. Information just doesn't get to the system as fast as a button press on a 360 controller.
Input lag is more than just how fast an accelerometer reading gets to the system. Games that require complicated gestures simply can't determine if you have done the gesture, until you have finished the gesture. In this situation the input lag is tied to the time it takes you to do a gesture. what the game does in the meantime could be just wait there, or maybe play some generic, "you are gesturing" animations. The connection speed can be improved through tech. this gesture lag issue is more of a design thing.
There is no tactile feedback. In the games i make, i notice players will continue to tilt the wiimote to the left even though all onscreen cues indicate the character is not turning left any faster. People sometimes even tilt so far that the accel might start reading right again and the turning left slows. It makes it hard to require precise input on the part of the player. Haptics and force feedback are in their infancy. i'm sure this can be improved, but not in the very near future.
Coupling the lack of tactile feedback with either a slow interface or a system that needs to wait for you to complete a throw to know you threw creates the perception of a non responsive system. The wii made up for this by isolating the input to the bare minimum. it doesn't matter how you swing, the batter or tennis player will swing. people swing it like it's a tennis racket, but don't have to. The games so far have been simplified to compensate for the weaknesses of the input.
those are largely issues seen in the wiimote though. it became apparent that simply an accelerometer and a camera are not enough to make the sword fighting games people seem to want. the camera isn't fast enough to follow rapid arm movements, likewise, the accelerometer has no frame of reference really, and it's easy for an adult to simply pin it at max reading all the time.
to improve the system, you need a faster connection, faster processing of the input, and some way to determine both position relative to some reference, and orientation of the controler.
I had a chance to play the playstation's system at GDC. It's definately a step up from the wiimote. for one it samples faster and provides information on orientation as well as relative position to the screen. Most of the games i tried were about weilding some implement in your hand. None of them were really gesture based. They updated the position of your in game implement fairly accurately, but still there was noticable lag at times. I think it's possible to make games that feel more skill based with it. Additionally, i think the wii motion plus improves the base wiimote. however, we are still a little ways off from the day when executing a hadoken movement with your hands produces the same movement in your character and a fireball right when you want it.
I wholly support your endeavor. I wish you the best of luck getting funding.
That's almost large enough to be a CAT!
yeah, but they are free and open fart apps without all the drm. farts should be FREE!
I never blamed Blizzard. On the contrary, I feel they made an excellent game.
i blame my friends, but mostly I blame me for not having the same motivations as them.
in the end, wow isn't for me. I've talked to people who have found guilds that play at a slower place. That sounds fun, but I've moved on.
How much would it cost if it were developed for a government contract?!
Falcon's not in the vehicle! It's all a publicity stunt!
Oh, was TFA on a different Falcon?
dude! one time at a phish concert, i thought i had some bad Mike & Ike. The mellow sweetness turned to burning and pain and i ran around screaming. Nobody could figure out what was wrong, but it turns out someone slipped some Hot Tamales into my Mike & Ike.
from now on, i'm only getting my Mike & Ike when i'm in Amsterdam where they can control the stuff.
When i first started wow, i felt that sense of adventure. I talked to the quest givers. I epathized with their plights. I went into the low level instances with a nervous band of friends actually looking to give those dreadful pirates what-for. I had fun.
Then it became a level race. instances were lead by a high level char who told me, "stay here while i kill this guy." After a while, i was like, "WTF am i doing?"
I wasn't having adventures anymore. i was just racing through everything. I wasn't savoring. I was leveling up and realizing that i hadn't felt like i saved the world in months.
i agree. there was something "real" about UO. The experiences in it felt more dynamic and unique compared to the manufactured experiences of Wow and the MMOs that lead to it.
Yeah, there were griefers and horrible fuck ups and oversights on the part of the devs. However, i've always felt it grew into a stable and fair system. Near the end of my time with the game i felt like i knew all the tricks to keep myself alive and my stuff in my posession.
even with the griefing, i remember it as being not so bad. at one point, prior to the housing fixes, when a key to your house was all that gave you ownership, my buddy and i got our house stolen. it sucked. it was my buddy's fault too. eager to impress everyone with our new house, he invited people in, got his pocket picked of the key, and what followed was a weeklong battle to reclaim the house.
In the end, we never got the house back, but my character became a vagabond. i wandered the world in search of adventure, and found it. It seemed to me, not unlike something that another game would script and force everyone through. In fact it's quite common for your character's motivation for adventure to be the loss of everything dear to them. Except in UO, this was totally unscripted and unique to my character.
i know some people find that kind of thing aggrivating. i'm not saying my zen approach to the game is for everyone, but if i want to have stuff nobody can have, i can just draw it in photoshop or blender. nothing wrong with that. I play games to do something interesting. often interesting == challenges that i didn't see coming. If it's an mmo, i like feeling like i have a unique story. i've just never felt that wow and it's ilk give me that.
You can totally go to those vacation spots. You can go next year!
While i agree my opinion of the original trilogy is heavily colored by nostalgia, you can't just wave away arguments that the first three films were better.
There are other films that i loved as a kid that don't do it for me now. I absolutely loved Disney's The Black Hole. I've seen it recently and it's not good. It does feature some pretty impressive spacecraft models though. I thought Krull was the coolest shit ever, eh, it's not so good anymore. I think we can recognize when something was good vs when something was just overwhelming us as kids.
When i watch star wars, yeah, it's nostaligic. It ruled my childhood. But it looks dated. The setpieces are stuck in the 70's. the acting is often stilted and hamfisted. However there's also a solid, if simple, story there. The motivation for the characters makes sense. There is a sense of danger and discovery. I think it's a better film than the prequels, weather i'm a kid or not.
Star Wars wasn't just popular with kids either. It captured the imagination of the world. Adults were seeing it again and again. It's imagery was showing up in adult settings like sports events and SNL.
It probably continues to influence movies today. The reboot of star trek seems to be aimed at making it more star wars like with dog fighting spacecraft and sword fights.
It's not citizen kane, but i think it was a very revolutionary and influencial film. The prequels were not.
I'm betting the AI will win the Nobel Prize for "killing all humans".
halflife? Prey and Doom are clearly not based on reality, but when i played Halflife that first time, i SWORE i was riding on a train.
The iphone was revolutionary because it packed a lot of functionality into a device that i needed. I need a phone. the fact that i can have a phone that does other stuff and plays cool games makes it a killer platform. It successfully combines my phone and my DS into one unit that i will always have.
I also need a computer. the macbook does a wonderful job there. it's portable, it's powerful, i can make stuff on it.
The ipad is just this thing that sits there and you would only pick it up occasionally. i'm sure it's a nice e-reader, though i can't wait for kindle for osx. i don't have problems reading on my macbook. It would be neat if it had a comprehensive tv remote and my tv somehow worked over wi-fi. my iphone could do that too though.
To decide where these devices fit in my life, i imagine packing for a trip. I would take my phone. I need my phone, and hey, i can play some games on it and check emails, etc. I would probably take my macbook. i still like to putz around in blender and unity on vacation. the ipad obviously isn't going to work well for content creation. at this point, i have no reason to bring the ipad. the ipad seems to have a permanent spot sitting next to my couch. That seems like a stupid thing to spend $500 on.
On the other hand, i think in the future we will have tons of these devices. Your microwave door will be a transparent display that is all one big touch surface. it will display info about what's inside via little labels that appear to hover over your food. Your car's instrument panel will probably be the same. Something like the ipad will cost much less. You will take it for granted. You won't think twice about packing it because you can always get another if it breaks, etc. You won't feel like you wasted a bunch of money on a thing that just sits by your couch or bed because that's all you will expect of it.
I think those future devices had to start somewhere. technically, i think they started on phones, but this is another step towards that future. Magical and revolutionary? Probably not. Another step towards appliance computing? maybe.
I'm not running out to get one now. In 5 years why wouldn't i spend $50 on one?
I hate having to click a window once to bring it into focus, then again to select something within it.
Hopefully if it's all one window it will bypass osx's quirky window focusing behavior.
considering it's a 5" - 10" screen, i'd say the scale of the depicted hands is positively impish. I'm fairly certain those were not drawings of human hands.
WTF?
i say tomato. you say tomato.
huh. that kinda loses it's impact in type.
I think a lot of grammatical errors i make on slashdot are the result of hurried composition. I'm especially vulnerable to the "loose" vs "lose" mistake. i think "lose", but my hands fire out "loose". I sort of feel like my typing is faster than my thinking. If i were writing it by hand, i'd probably have time to notice my hand was about to start on a second "o".
I also never capitalize i. I think of it as humility.
I've never been a proponent of e-readers. I'd love to get all my books in an e format, but i'd like to just read them on my laptop. If someone wants to spend $200 - $700 on a dedicated reader, i don't care. My 13" macbook is a fine platform for reading. I already have it, the screen is fine for reading. I can make stuff on it. i don't need or want to spend $500 on something that i don't find as functional as what i already have.
Now i do know some people who are in the market for a kindle dx. apparently a good e-reader costs at least $489 (boggle). To them, the people who were going to buy the kindle dx, i say, "really? there's kindle for windows, and kindle for osx is coming, but if you just have to spend that money, the ipad seems neater to me than a kindle."
i think apple has this vision of the future where most people's general purpose computers are replaced with a locked down device. I don't think their vision is one of stamping out the general purpose computer. You still need a computer with a c compiler to make software for the locked down device. Their vision seems to be people who need computers to program computers will have computers. people who don't need that flexibility won't.
along with thier locked down devices, apple has released improvements to their freely available xcode environment and sdks. They continue to crank out new macbooks and desktops that run a general purpose OS.
in many ways, i'm torn on this vision. My dad probably doesn't need the complexity of his system. he can't comprehend folders and files and stuff. He needs a device that just shows his pictures to him and holds his hand. However, i'm not sure my generation or later generations will grapple with computing concepts the way my dad does (i grapple with stuff like facebook). And i certainly don't want to live in a future where the real computers are only available to the devs working at apple, the rest of us just get our dumb terminal ipads that show us what apple wants.
I'm an iphone dev. It's been lucrative for me this past year. I went to wwdc and got tipsy on the apple kool-aid. I have a love hate relationship with them now.
I have no problem with paying a subscription to be able to submit apps to the app store. It's apple's service. apple runs the infrastructure, apple wants to maintain quality (or something). It's reasonable that apple control it.
Now, they don't seem to have the best record of protecting people from apps in the app store. They've had a couple of incidences over the past year of nearly malicious apps getting through the app store. But in theory they are providing a service of policing the app store.
What i think is unreasonable is that i need a subscription to submit apps to my own iphone/ipod/ipad touch. It's my device! i should be able to do whatever i want with it. According to apple, we're not even allowed to jailbreak it. That's just wrong.
so only cost $399 999 for the attorneys? that's a good deal then.
TFA makes that point. It's not an article about bad games, it's an article about failed games. Some of them are pointed out as having failed from being bad, others failed because the market wasn't there, or bad luck, or whatever. When the games failed, they took whole companies with them.