Until a year and a half ago, I hadn't thought about space and (real) rockets since I was a kid.
Hey, somebody has to get us off this rock. I'm fairly sure you're nuts (manned rocket flight in two years?) but it still sounds cool as hell.:) Wish I had the personal bandwidth to help out!
A high-resolution video signal takes several hundred MHz of bandwidth (think of the clock rate of your video DAC times 3 channels). It's not impossible, given high-quality coax and interconnects, but it's not gonna be cheap either.
You could theoretically build a wireless link for monitors, but to keep the FCC off your back in the US, you'd probably need to use a carrier frequency somewhere north of 10 GHz. Not exactly commodity stuff, and not good at all for passing through walls.
Don't make everybody buy a Porsche just because you want one. That is, in essence, what will happen if you deprecate PCI in favor of some incompatible multigigabit Bus From Hell.
Actually, I missed the part where you explained why everyone who buys a PC needs to subsidize your "servers with large storage arrays, SANs, or most types of clusters."
What you want is a new, optional bus for connecting extremely high-bandwidth devices. Such a bus would be available on... *gasp!* servers. Joe User should not have to pay for, replace his hardware because of, or otherwise be inconvenienced by, your specialized requirements as a Server Guy.
What this article is talking about is obsoleting and replacing the PCI standard. That, IMHO, is an extremely inappropriate idea whose time will probably never come.
You're right, the distinction between ISA slots and the ISA bus is an important one. The bus itself isn't dead by a long shot.
I'm mostly bemoaning the lack of even a single ISA slot on the newer motherboards I've seen. Like a great many other people, I have applications for the ISA slot that are not easily replacable with a PCI or USB solution.
Indeed! Keep in mind professionals use something more than a meer tv-tuner-card and will need something better than PCI.
Then let the professionals pay for it. 99% of the user base doesn't need another internal bus. PCI is not a bottleneck for anything but graphics at this time, and AGP addresses that.
Unfortunately, MS's PC98 standard has pretty much done ISA in. Even the off-brand developer machines we've been getting from AMD no longer have any ISA support.
Which really hoses people like myself who like to run SoftICE on an MDA monitor.:(
Thanks! I suspect U5 was the biggest, most complex consumer application (not just game, but app) ever built for an 8-bit micro. A few games (like Time Zone) shipped on more disks, but U5 had a heck of a lot more code than anything else I ever saw on the Apple.
U5 was initially developed on Apple IIGS machines, to run on the//e and later models. The C64 and other ports followed.
Like most of the Origin programmers at the time, I was hired as a result of offering them my Ultima clone to publish.:) There actually have been a couple of more-or-less accurate books about the early Ultimas' development... if I remember correctly, this one has some good background on the people involved.
In her review she gave an example of a pair of secret doors in Skara Brae that lead to nowhere
Hmm, I'll have to look back at the Skara Brae map in the clue book. Don't remember any dead-end doors, but there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then! Mostly, I just remember a lot of bellyaching about the Underworld's relative emptiness.
U6 predates MSS by quite awhile, actually. What's the file suffix? I'd guess they're just uncompressed 8-bit unsigned PCM files, maybe with a header. You could email me one or two of them if you like, and I'll see if anything around here can deal with them.
I was basing on the reviews of U5 when it was released, such as Scorpia's review in CGW that commented on the unfinished areas in the game. I also remember Ultima V was rather late from its originally announced ship date. If I am misremembering both those facts than I apologize.
You're probably thinking of the Underworld portion of the game. It consisted of a map the same size as the main Britannian world, but which was (as you'd expect of a newly-revealed subsurface continent) only sparsely populated with cool stuff.
Some of our more vocal players and reviewers, including Scorpia, evidently felt that their $49.95 entitled them to a certain amount of entertainment value per square foot of real estate. The Underworld was never intended to look like some kind of underground Disneyland (or whatever these people were expecting), so it was a disappointment to some. But it most assuredly was complete as shipped.:-)
Which design direction? I can come up with at least three different designs U9 went through: the one that Mike McShaffry said gave him the chills it was so good, the Del Castillo one, and the one we finally got in the released version.
True, but note that none of the principal designs emphasized the Jumping Jews of Jerusalem routine that U8 demanded of its players.
I believe RG has said a number of times that each Ultima has sold more copies than the prior Ultima.
That was true up until U5. I'm not sure if U5 outsold U4 at the end of the day, although they were both very successful products relative to their budget. U6 was a much more expensive product to build, and it was where the profitability curve really started to break down.
U2 sold more than twice what U1 sold; ditto U3 versus U2. I'm pretty sure U4 eventually outsold U3, but not by a factor of 2. Hopefully someone who's more up to date on the real numbers will correct my assumptions where necessary, but the bottom line is, the market for Ultima-style RPGs showed distinct signs of saturation as early as the U3/U4 era.
If the sales of the series has remained essentially flat since U3, then I really have problems with his _management_ abilities (but not his creative abilities). Being able to hit a deadline is a part of what you are paid for as a manager.
Richard may or may not be a decent manager these days -- I honestly couldn't say. We had a very small, highly-motivated, and largely self-managing team on U5. But he is certainly an impressive living example of the difference between a "manager" and a "leader." If you worked for Richard, you'd follow him into Hell to collect nifty glowing rocks, just like the rest of us did.:-)
My understanding from what Mike McShaffry said in the infamous CGW interview, U8 was exactly what they set out to create.
Right... an Ultima that they were hoping would find a broader audience.
I've always understood that Richard was less involved in U8's design than in most of the other titles in the series. My impression is that, for better or for worse, some of the people who did have a lot of creative input weren't necessarily among the "old-school" types that I was referring to.
Though if you could I would be happy to see you give it a shot.
Let's just say that the erstwhile Lord British is not the only one with an upcoming Project X....
And this might just shock you, but I honestly think you can't have an Ultima without RG's input.
Ultima V shipped unfinished because they had no other choice.
Really? What a fascinating assertion. I don't recall many complaints along these lines from U5's players, and (having been the lead programmer on the project) I seem to be missing the usual feelings of resentment and anguish that accompany the forced shipment of an unfinished game. Can you refresh my memory here?
When RG decided that expanding the market for the Ultimas was more important than anything else we got the action/RPG abortion called Ultima VIII: Pagan.
Not to apologize for U8 -- I wasn't involved in it, and never got around to playing it -- but you're being a little dramatic with your Monday-morning quarterbacking. From Richard's point of view, it was scary as hell to watch his dev budgets climb supergeometrically with each successive title, while sales figures remained pretty much where they peaked in U3. By the time Origin started work on U8, it was clear that drastic changes were required to keep the series financially viable.
My understanding is that U8 actually sold pretty well, but few of the old-school people, including Richard himself, were ever happy with the final product.
After that flopped, instead of accepting that he made a big mistake in abandoning the existing Ultima fanbase he blamed EA.
I believe Richard has expressed his regrets and taken responsibility for U8's problems on more than one occasion. Certainly the design direction in U9 (bugs notwithstanding) took U8's criticism to heart.
EA gave him five years to create Ultima IX and he still screwed it up.
Making Ultimas is hard. Try it sometime.
:sigh: When I was playing the original Ultima on my Apple ][ and waiting for Ultima ][ I never realised that one RG would make himself into a John "Daikatana" Romero.
CNN Interactive has two "Pauls" reviewing films: Paul Clinton and Paul Tatara. Clinton is actually a pretty decent reviewer. I don't always agree with him, but his opinions are intelligently presented and at least it's always clear that we saw the same movie.
OTOH, Tatara (of Matrix fame) can be counted on to offer the most vapid, content-free analyses imaginable. He treats his column as a vehicle for his own political or philosophical biases, and he rarely if ever manages to deliver any meaningful critical or thematical insights on any films above the Disney level.
Tatara is living proof of the Peter Principle. It's simply astonishing that his career in the entertainment industry has extended beyond asking his clientele if they would like butter on their popcorn.:(
I think the secret to living with the C1 is to appreciate it for its strengths. Sure, its keyboard sucks, but it's a lot better than no keyboard at all. That's going to be the new MS tablet's biggest weakness... answering email by handwriting is not my idea of a good time.
It's possible to get used to the C1's keyboard, but it's more of a user-attitude adjustment than a practice-makes-perfect routine. Just keep asking yourself if you'd rather be using a Palm Pilot.:)
... and it'll take you about 20 seconds to get used to the Trackpoint device's virtual-resolution feature.
In short, RTFM before flaming the PCG-C1VN. It's easily the coolest toy I've run across in the last 5 or 6 years. If it helps, don't think of it as a PC with a small screen -- think of it as a PDA with a huge screen.
Don't sell the Vaio C1 short. I have one with an Orinoco 802.11 card, and it rocks. All Sony really needed to do to make truly-portable computing practical was get the size and weight down without compromising on features, and they got it right with the C1. When your computer weighs only 2.2 pounds, all sorts of interesting things become possible.
It sounds like TabletPC is basically the same thing with even better ergonomics. It's going to be interesting to see if I feel like trading my C1 for one of them.
I was working at Origin Systems in Austin when Dungeon Master came out. We were still coding for Apple IIs for the most part, but there were a couple of Atari STs in the office, and Dungeon Master brought the whole place to a standstill.
Technically speaking, DM was indeed a souped-up Wizardry clone. But it was one of the first games that looked real. It heralded several sea changes in the industry:
1) Programmers alone couldn't write graphically-competitive games anymore. "Programmer art" was considered good enough for most purposes at the time, but you had to have some serious professional art talent on staff to compete in Dungeon Master's league. We'd already pretty much gotten that particular clue at Origin by then, but most other game companies hadn't.
2) User interface is every bit as important as any other aspect of game design. It's no exaggeration to say Dungeon Master's UI was a revolution. DM demonstrated that you didn't have to force your users to memorize an entire keyboard map to play a game. Believe it or not, this was by no means obvious at the time, especially at Origin.:-) Richard Garriott, in particular, revamped his whole user-interface philosophy after playing Dungeon Master. It was probably the single largest influence behind the "icon-oriented" GUI implemented, for better or worse, in Ultima VI. Richard didn't spend a lot of time playing other peoples' games, but DM was an exception.
3) DM was among the very first mainstream titles to show off the graphical capabilities of the next-generation consumer machines at the time (Atari ST, Amiga, and Apple IIGS). Consequently, it showed us how first-person games were going to look for years to come, on platforms like the IBMs, color Macs, and later-generation consoles. Again, you have to remember that DM was one of the first games that looked like the real world. Hell, as far as I'm aware, it was the first game that looked like the real world.
Even though the first wave of machines that could run games like Dungeon Master were all hopeless flops in the marketplace, DM's overall look and feel proved very durable. SSI's Eye of the Beholder series was basically the same game, with strong sales as late as 1992-1993. Later Wizardry titles revealed some cross-pollination as well, not to mention the heavily-iconic Ultima Underworld.
In short, DM kicked major ass throughout the game industry. FTL did everything right on that one.
Slashdot Mirror
Until a year and a half ago, I hadn't thought about space and (real) rockets since I was a kid.
:) Wish I had the personal bandwidth to help out!
Hey, somebody has to get us off this rock. I'm fairly sure you're nuts (manned rocket flight in two years?) but it still sounds cool as hell.
(and our site is slashdotted)...
Per aspera ad astra, right?
Same here. Just got 5 points, and I hadn't even finished burning the last set all the way.
Weird.
... now come free inside each specially-marked box of Froot Loops.
Because there's no moderation option for "unsupported FUD"?
A high-resolution video signal takes several hundred MHz of bandwidth (think of the clock rate of your video DAC times 3 channels). It's not impossible, given high-quality coax and interconnects, but it's not gonna be cheap either.
You could theoretically build a wireless link for monitors, but to keep the FCC off your back in the US, you'd probably need to use a carrier frequency somewhere north of 10 GHz. Not exactly commodity stuff, and not good at all for passing through walls.
A better analogy, perhaps.
Don't make everybody buy a Porsche just because you want one. That is, in essence, what will happen if you deprecate PCI in favor of some incompatible multigigabit Bus From Hell.
Actually, I missed the part where you explained why everyone who buys a PC needs to subsidize your "servers with large storage arrays, SANs, or most types of clusters."
What you want is a new, optional bus for connecting extremely high-bandwidth devices. Such a bus would be available on... *gasp!* servers. Joe User should not have to pay for, replace his hardware because of, or otherwise be inconvenienced by, your specialized requirements as a Server Guy.
What this article is talking about is obsoleting and replacing the PCI standard. That, IMHO, is an extremely inappropriate idea whose time will probably never come.
You're right, the distinction between ISA slots and the ISA bus is an important one. The bus itself isn't dead by a long shot.
I'm mostly bemoaning the lack of even a single ISA slot on the newer motherboards I've seen. Like a great many other people, I have applications for the ISA slot that are not easily replacable with a PCI or USB solution.
Indeed! Keep in mind professionals use something more than a meer tv-tuner-card and will need something better than PCI.
Then let the professionals pay for it. 99% of the user base doesn't need another internal bus. PCI is not a bottleneck for anything but graphics at this time, and AGP addresses that.
Unfortunately, MS's PC98 standard has pretty much done ISA in. Even the off-brand developer machines we've been getting from AMD no longer have any ISA support.
:(
Which really hoses people like myself who like to run SoftICE on an MDA monitor.
Thanks! I suspect U5 was the biggest, most complex consumer application (not just game, but app) ever built for an 8-bit micro. A few games (like Time Zone) shipped on more disks, but U5 had a heck of a lot more code than anything else I ever saw on the Apple.
U5 was initially developed on Apple IIGS machines, to run on the //e and later models. The C64 and other ports followed.
:) There actually have been a couple of more-or-less accurate books about the early Ultimas' development... if I remember correctly, this one has some good background on the people involved.
Like most of the Origin programmers at the time, I was hired as a result of offering them my Ultima clone to publish.
In her review she gave an example of a pair of secret doors in Skara Brae that lead to nowhere
Hmm, I'll have to look back at the Skara Brae map in the clue book. Don't remember any dead-end doors, but there's been a lot of water under the bridge since then! Mostly, I just remember a lot of bellyaching about the Underworld's relative emptiness.
U6 predates MSS by quite awhile, actually. What's the file suffix? I'd guess they're just uncompressed 8-bit unsigned PCM files, maybe with a header. You could email me one or two of them if you like, and I'll see if anything around here can deal with them.
But, U5, now there was a game. Wow!
U5 and U2 have always been my favorites. But I haven't played any of them since U6 all the way through, to be fair....
Tons of other cool stories, but basically, U4 and U5 are the games that got me interested in how they're done, instead of just playing them.
Yeah, they were all very hackable. I learned 6502 assembly by poring over monitor listings of ULTIMA2.OBJ, myself!
I was basing on the reviews of U5 when it was released, such as Scorpia's review in CGW that commented on the unfinished areas in the game. I also remember Ultima V was rather late from its originally announced ship date. If I am misremembering both those facts than I apologize.
:-)
:-)
You're probably thinking of the Underworld portion of the game. It consisted of a map the same size as the main Britannian world, but which was (as you'd expect of a newly-revealed subsurface continent) only sparsely populated with cool stuff.
Some of our more vocal players and reviewers, including Scorpia, evidently felt that their $49.95 entitled them to a certain amount of entertainment value per square foot of real estate. The Underworld was never intended to look like some kind of underground Disneyland (or whatever these people were expecting), so it was a disappointment to some. But it most assuredly was complete as shipped.
Which design direction? I can come up with at least three different designs U9 went through: the one that Mike McShaffry said gave him the chills it was so good, the Del Castillo one, and the one we finally got in the released version.
True, but note that none of the principal designs emphasized the Jumping Jews of Jerusalem routine that U8 demanded of its players.
I believe RG has said a number of times that each Ultima has sold more copies than the prior Ultima.
That was true up until U5. I'm not sure if U5 outsold U4 at the end of the day, although they were both very successful products relative to their budget. U6 was a much more expensive product to build, and it was where the profitability curve really started to break down.
U2 sold more than twice what U1 sold; ditto U3 versus U2. I'm pretty sure U4 eventually outsold U3, but not by a factor of 2. Hopefully someone who's more up to date on the real numbers will correct my assumptions where necessary, but the bottom line is, the market for Ultima-style RPGs showed distinct signs of saturation as early as the U3/U4 era.
If the sales of the series has remained essentially flat since U3, then I really have problems with his _management_ abilities (but not his creative abilities). Being able to hit a deadline is a part of what you are paid for as a manager.
Richard may or may not be a decent manager these days -- I honestly couldn't say. We had a very small, highly-motivated, and largely self-managing team on U5. But he is certainly an impressive living example of the difference between a "manager" and a "leader." If you worked for Richard, you'd follow him into Hell to collect nifty glowing rocks, just like the rest of us did.
My understanding from what Mike McShaffry said in the infamous CGW interview, U8 was exactly what they set out to create.
Right... an Ultima that they were hoping would find a broader audience.
I've always understood that Richard was less involved in U8's design than in most of the other titles in the series. My impression is that, for better or for worse, some of the people who did have a lot of creative input weren't necessarily among the "old-school" types that I was referring to.
Though if you could I would be happy to see you give it a shot.
Let's just say that the erstwhile Lord British is not the only one with an upcoming Project X....
And this might just shock you, but I honestly think you can't have an Ultima without RG's input.
I wouldn't disagree with that for a nanosecond.
Ultima V shipped unfinished because they had no other choice.
:sigh: When I was playing the original Ultima on my Apple ][ and waiting for Ultima ][ I never realised that one RG would make himself into a John "Daikatana" Romero.
Really? What a fascinating assertion. I don't recall many complaints along these lines from U5's players, and (having been the lead programmer on the project) I seem to be missing the usual feelings of resentment and anguish that accompany the forced shipment of an unfinished game. Can you refresh my memory here?
When RG decided that expanding the market for the Ultimas was more important than anything else we got the action/RPG abortion called Ultima VIII: Pagan.
Not to apologize for U8 -- I wasn't involved in it, and never got around to playing it -- but you're being a little dramatic with your Monday-morning quarterbacking. From Richard's point of view, it was scary as hell to watch his dev budgets climb supergeometrically with each successive title, while sales figures remained pretty much where they peaked in U3. By the time Origin started work on U8, it was clear that drastic changes were required to keep the series financially viable.
My understanding is that U8 actually sold pretty well, but few of the old-school people, including Richard himself, were ever happy with the final product.
After that flopped, instead of accepting that he made a big mistake in abandoning the existing Ultima fanbase he blamed EA.
I believe Richard has expressed his regrets and taken responsibility for U8's problems on more than one occasion. Certainly the design direction in U9 (bugs notwithstanding) took U8's criticism to heart.
EA gave him five years to create Ultima IX and he still screwed it up.
Making Ultimas is hard. Try it sometime.
Okey-dokey, then.
Hailstorm sounds fantastic as a concept
So did Bob.
CNN Interactive has two "Pauls" reviewing films: Paul Clinton and Paul Tatara. Clinton is actually a pretty decent reviewer. I don't always agree with him, but his opinions are intelligently presented and at least it's always clear that we saw the same movie.
:(
OTOH, Tatara (of Matrix fame) can be counted on to offer the most vapid, content-free analyses imaginable. He treats his column as a vehicle for his own political or philosophical biases, and he rarely if ever manages to deliver any meaningful critical or thematical insights on any films above the Disney level.
Tatara is living proof of the Peter Principle. It's simply astonishing that his career in the entertainment industry has extended beyond asking his clientele if they would like butter on their popcorn.
"Bad games."
I've forgotten who said that, but s/he pretty much nailed it.
I think the secret to living with the C1 is to appreciate it for its strengths. Sure, its keyboard sucks, but it's a lot better than no keyboard at all. That's going to be the new MS tablet's biggest weakness... answering email by handwriting is not my idea of a good time.
:)
It's possible to get used to the C1's keyboard, but it's more of a user-attitude adjustment than a practice-makes-perfect routine. Just keep asking yourself if you'd rather be using a Palm Pilot.
... and it'll take you about 20 seconds to get used to the Trackpoint device's virtual-resolution feature.
In short, RTFM before flaming the PCG-C1VN. It's easily the coolest toy I've run across in the last 5 or 6 years. If it helps, don't think of it as a PC with a small screen -- think of it as a PDA with a huge screen.
Don't sell the Vaio C1 short. I have one with an Orinoco 802.11 card, and it rocks. All Sony really needed to do to make truly-portable computing practical was get the size and weight down without compromising on features, and they got it right with the C1. When your computer weighs only 2.2 pounds, all sorts of interesting things become possible.
It sounds like TabletPC is basically the same thing with even better ergonomics. It's going to be interesting to see if I feel like trading my C1 for one of them.
I was working at Origin Systems in Austin when Dungeon Master came out. We were still coding for Apple IIs for the most part, but there were a couple of Atari STs in the office, and Dungeon Master brought the whole place to a standstill.
:-) Richard Garriott, in particular, revamped his whole user-interface philosophy after playing Dungeon Master. It was probably the single largest influence behind the "icon-oriented" GUI implemented, for better or worse, in Ultima VI. Richard didn't spend a lot of time playing other peoples' games, but DM was an exception.
Technically speaking, DM was indeed a souped-up Wizardry clone. But it was one of the first games that looked real. It heralded several sea changes in the industry:
1) Programmers alone couldn't write graphically-competitive games anymore. "Programmer art" was considered good enough for most purposes at the time, but you had to have some serious professional art talent on staff to compete in Dungeon Master's league. We'd already pretty much gotten that particular clue at Origin by then, but most other game companies hadn't.
2) User interface is every bit as important as any other aspect of game design. It's no exaggeration to say Dungeon Master's UI was a revolution. DM demonstrated that you didn't have to force your users to memorize an entire keyboard map to play a game. Believe it or not, this was by no means obvious at the time, especially at Origin.
3) DM was among the very first mainstream titles to show off the graphical capabilities of the next-generation consumer machines at the time (Atari ST, Amiga, and Apple IIGS). Consequently, it showed us how first-person games were going to look for years to come, on platforms like the IBMs, color Macs, and later-generation consoles. Again, you have to remember that DM was one of the first games that looked like the real world. Hell, as far as I'm aware, it was the first game that looked like the real world.
Even though the first wave of machines that could run games like Dungeon Master were all hopeless flops in the marketplace, DM's overall look and feel proved very durable. SSI's Eye of the Beholder series was basically the same game, with strong sales as late as 1992-1993. Later Wizardry titles revealed some cross-pollination as well, not to mention the heavily-iconic Ultima Underworld.
In short, DM kicked major ass throughout the game industry. FTL did everything right on that one.
Not liquid-fuel rockets, which is what Goddard pioneered.
We hear a lot of calls, in slashdot as well as elsewhere, that people should stand up, should focus attention on the evils, etc
You don't hear them from the owners of the site, nota bene.