i think that we're all missing somehting. sure code output sucks at 80hrs a week, but it doesnt just suck then it takes me about two weeks to get back to normal after a few 80hr stints. and those two weeks (at normal hours) are at even lower productivity than the 80hr stints.
For starters, I don't understand why there is a necessity to constantly re-invent the wheel and create gaming engines from scratch just about each time a new game is released. Surely it would be better to throw out the source code to current gaming engines to the Internet community to see what enhancements get added as a result - sure, keep the level design, textures, etc. for a specific commercial game that uses that engine under wraps so that, as a game company, you can make money from it.
technology, and data representation techniques move to fast for it to be remotely feasble to write a completly reusable engine, after all at some point code needs to decend from a nice abstract reusable layer and touch something concrete. and the more layers you have, the less performance your going to get.
engines are usually based around core technologies, once they go out of date, or the next big thing comes along, its time to throw out a lot of the code and refactor in the new stuff. but i dont think game companies, or greed drive this. in my opinion, its the customers expectations of constant graphical, ai, sound and gameplay improvements. lets face it, no one's going to take a new game built around the quake 2 engine seriously are they? technology and techniques move on, even in the space of a few short years the way you need to represent, store and manipulate data tend to change dramatically.
for example, 5 years ago, curved surfaces were a big wow point, now we've got normal maps to improve lighting while keeping poly counts low, next theres opengl2.0 and this XNA stuff, then maybe we'll eventually get to realtime raytracing, thats going to require different approaches to geometery and spatial representation, who knows.. maybe the real problem is that programmers, cheat to make things look as good as possible, and when the hardware gets to the point where you just dont have to use cheat A anymore, they can just implement it as intended, and move on to cheat B?.
the memory manufacturers can say " RDRAM cost us this much more per stick to produce, the additional startup costs were X, our market reserach said that the projected sales would be Y, so all up, the cost of production rambus was Z. and as we figured that we could sell more SDRAM at a lower price, and make way more money as we dont have to change our current tooling too much, we did".
but what happens if all of the manufacturers came to the same conclusion, independently, at the same time? its not a very unusual business decision process. and how is it possible to prove collusion this way? unless they have some concrete evidence to suggest that there was a meeting by high level execs of memory companies and at that meeting they decided "lets fsck this rambus crap right off" together, then it sounds to me like rambus is trying to sue the memory manufactures for not procuding enough of its patented product...
if apple, are helping mircosoft (their main rival) get a kernel running on what is their flagship hardware they are commiting the most blatant, stupid, idiotic form of coporate suicide.
interesting, but wouldnt it be funny if there was both the suggested push, and the classical pull? now that would account for both phenomena in a very weird and probrably unlikely way.
isnt the main barrier to voxel acceleration memory?
a single cube can take up as little as
72 bytes (48 bytes for all verticies + 24 bytes for surface descriptions).
a single solid 10 x 10 voxel cube with no compression would take 200 bytes
a single solid 100 x 100 voxel cube with no compression would take 20000 bytes
okay.. so the figures arent entirely accurate, but they demonstrate the point, which is that while its a good technology for providing internal details of an object, its still heavily bloted when your only going to ever need say 10% of the data stored.
but hey, the more tools the better, the trick will be in being able to combine the two seamlessly and quickly...
given the right conditions.. god becomes redundant
life started on this planet aproximatly 1 and 2 billion years after the conditions became suitable for it to start... life didnt happen overnight..
go read the blind watchmaker...
and anyway.. religion is all about control.. not god.. get people to fear something, and youve got them, thats why the church was in such a position of power for so long.. religion != faith.. you can have faith without the religion.. i belive in god, i dont belive in a religion
dms0
Postscript more widely used in print houses
on
From Paper To PDF?
·
· Score: 1
Postscript is the choice of most print vendors and print houses rather than PDF
why? because xerox havent got their act together and produced a PDF compliant printer controller
(and if youve used the PS ones.. there like someones uni project gone HORRIBLY wrong.. awful interface)
At lower resolutions, games become CPU dependant (see benchmarks for geforce 2 v geforce in quake3 at 640x480) this just means that windows is hogging more cpu than linux is.. which points to 'immature'* drivers for the platform at higher resolutions *ie: no offence to the very talented driver developers.. but their windows compadre's have had quite a number of years headstart.
now this is an interesting idea.. beat them at their own game.., the other thing that can be done is masq all ip addresses in order to keep things completly anon.
however this might lead to problems with certain organisations wanting access to ip logs...
im working on it
my new project (no 19123798424) is how to f*#@ the RIAA and get the $$ back to where it belongs (the artists)
Okay first off, copyright material is copyright material, but is the data youve collected on napster users 'distributing' your copyrighted material actually legal? if i was to play one of your songs over the telephone (ignoring bandwith issues here) while you were wiretapping the line, the evidence would be inadmissable in court due to the lack of a federal warrant. yet youve collected information on 330k users without them knowing or any court based approval. do you think this style of information gathering is legal? or any different to existing intrusion measures (phone tapping, bugging etc)
Secondly, whats your take on services like mp3.com that provide unsigned acts and musicians a place to showcase their work?
okay.. all this is is sony, and the japanese government blocking the exporting of more than one psx2 unit out of the country (the article explicitly states 2 due to the minimum $ amount being 475$ for exporting restrictions)
right.. so what this does is effectivly stop grey importing of units en masse, personal exporting is still possible. as soon as they are ready to do a us/world release.. the japanese government will sign the piece of paper which allows sony to export them at will, until then sony wish to stifle the grey import market in order to get more money from shipping the 'real' console, rather than the importers (ie they can sell more of the console at a greater cost on release).
who controls who? the government or the multinational?
its not about munitions.. its about blocking grey imports.. expect the dolphin from nintendo to fall under exactly the same controls when it comes out in 18mths or so...
the drivers are loaded onto the PSX2 memory card. hence the furor when ridge racer V wrote over the DVD decoder drivers all this will do is overwrite the existing drivers on the memory card.. simply buy a new card. (or 4) make a copy send the CD back and laugh a lot...
someone should give these guys a quick brief on closed systems and entropy:)
to the MPAA... doesnt it suck when one of your MEMBERS (hello sony?) ships something that can play supposedly blocked regions? why not just bite the bullet and do away with region blocking.. i want to be able to watch dodgy HK action films without waiting for your *ahem*members*ahem**cartel* to release it in my region.
im going to buy a dvd player shortly before the hardware locks are enforced at a manufacturer level (1 july) so i can get either get it modded or use a software hack and watch whatever the hell i want.. dvd is a great format..pity about the money/power hungy people driving it.
interesting thing is... while looking around at dvd players.. a good 80% sell pre-modded units.. and mainly pre-modded units.. the region blocking ISNT working
Dms0
the revolution will not be televised, or released in your region..
Slashdot Mirror
burnout is worse than the burning out period
dms0
its obvious isnt it?
the game, is going ot be setup with a queen bee (ai?) a whole bunch of drones, and you trying to save the world?
its pretty cool actually, i like that sort of stuff
dms0
technology, and data representation techniques move to fast for it to be remotely feasble to write a completly reusable engine, after all at some point code needs to decend from a nice abstract reusable layer and touch something concrete. and the more layers you have, the less performance your going to get.
engines are usually based around core technologies, once they go out of date, or the next big thing comes along, its time to throw out a lot of the code and refactor in the new stuff. but i dont think game companies, or greed drive this. in my opinion, its the customers expectations of constant graphical, ai, sound and gameplay improvements. lets face it, no one's going to take a new game built around the quake 2 engine seriously are they? technology and techniques move on, even in the space of a few short years the way you need to represent, store and manipulate data tend to change dramatically.
for example, 5 years ago, curved surfaces were a big wow point, now we've got normal maps to improve lighting while keeping poly counts low, next theres opengl2.0 and this XNA stuff, then maybe we'll eventually get to realtime raytracing, thats going to require different approaches to geometery and spatial representation, who knows.. maybe the real problem is that programmers, cheat to make things look as good as possible, and when the hardware gets to the point where you just dont have to use cheat A anymore, they can just implement it as intended, and move on to cheat B?.
dms0
the memory manufacturers can say " RDRAM cost us this much more per stick to produce, the additional startup costs were X, our market reserach said that the projected sales would be Y, so all up, the cost of production rambus was Z. and as we figured that we could sell more SDRAM at a lower price, and make way more money as we dont have to change our current tooling too much, we did".
but what happens if all of the manufacturers came to the same conclusion, independently, at the same time? its not a very unusual business decision process. and how is it possible to prove collusion this way? unless they have some concrete evidence to suggest that there was a meeting by high level execs of memory companies and at that meeting they decided "lets fsck this rambus crap right off" together, then it sounds to me like rambus is trying to sue the memory manufactures for not procuding enough of its patented product...
which is just seriously fscked up
dms0
if apple, are helping mircosoft (their main rival) get a kernel running on what is their flagship hardware they are commiting the most blatant, stupid, idiotic form of coporate suicide.
dms0
that probrbaly has more to do with the crippleware on the cd :)
dms0
yeah, ive got a 30gig 75gxp still running along. a few sectors click, but it seems to be ok.
ive relegated it to holding the backup of my cd collection (which itself is backed up to dvd) as im expecting it to die one of these days....
dms0
damn spelling.. with our coffee
dms0
no we drink real beer*
*not necessarily with out coffee
dms0
no one in australia drinks fosters
why do you think we send it overseas?
dms0
dms0
dms0
a single cube can take up as little as
72 bytes (48 bytes for all verticies + 24 bytes
for surface descriptions).
a single solid 10 x 10 voxel cube with no
compression would take 200 bytes
a single solid 100 x 100 voxel cube with no
compression would take 20000 bytes
okay.. so the figures arent entirely accurate,
but they demonstrate the point, which is
that while its a good technology for
providing internal details of an object, its
still heavily bloted when your only going to
ever need say 10% of the data stored.
but hey, the more tools the better, the trick
will be in being able to combine the two
seamlessly and quickly...
dms0
on board that thing?
and given the pressures and heat of jupiters
atmosphere.. umm wont it go bang?
hmmm
*ponder*
dms0
and dont try to tell me that any religious
connection is fact..
were all ears dude
dms0
given the right conditions .. god becomes redundant
life started on this planet aproximatly 1 and 2 billion years after the conditions became suitable for it to start... life didnt happen overnight..
go read the blind watchmaker...
and anyway.. religion is all about control.. not god.. get people to fear something, and youve got them, thats why the church was in such a position of power for so long.. religion != faith.. you can have faith without the religion.. i belive in god, i dont belive in a religion
dms0
why? because xerox havent got their act together and produced a PDF compliant printer controller
(and if youve used the PS ones.. there like someones uni project gone HORRIBLY wrong.. awful interface)
*shrug*
dms0
At lower resolutions, games become CPU dependant (see benchmarks for geforce 2 v geforce in quake3 at 640x480) this just means that windows is hogging more cpu than linux is.. which points to 'immature'* drivers for the platform at higher resolutions *ie: no offence to the very talented driver developers.. but their windows compadre's have had quite a number of years headstart.
however this might lead to problems with certain organisations wanting access to ip logs...
im working on it
my new project (no 19123798424) is
how to f*#@ the RIAA and get the $$ back to where it belongs (the artists)
suggestions/thoughts?
dms0
Secondly, whats your take on services like mp3.com that provide unsigned acts and musicians a place to showcase their work?
Cheers
dms0
right.. so what this does is effectivly stop grey importing of units en masse, personal exporting is still possible. as soon as they are ready to do a us/world release.. the japanese government will sign the piece of paper which allows sony to export them at will, until then sony wish to stifle the grey import market in order to get more money from shipping the 'real' console, rather than the importers (ie they can sell more of the console at a greater cost on release).
who controls who? the government or the multinational?
its not about munitions.. its about blocking grey imports.. expect the dolphin from nintendo to fall under exactly the same controls when it comes out in 18mths or so...
hence the furor when ridge racer V wrote over the DVD decoder drivers
all this will do is overwrite the existing drivers on the memory card.. simply buy a new card. (or 4) make a copy
send the CD back and laugh a lot...
dms0
go to the largest supplier of hi-fi goods
buy one toshiba dvd player (about 700$ au)
ask them to do the mod (included in price)
im not going to name the chain that ive been looking at.. but they will do it.. almost all their toshiba players are chipmodded when sold..
dms0
from my poking around looking at dvd players
the aggrement is that all players are shipped
with *hardware* blocking from 1st july
of course.. i could be wrong.. but thats from a
few high end stero/video outlets over here in good ole AU
Dms0
to the MPAA... doesnt it suck when one of your MEMBERS (hello sony?) ships something that can play supposedly blocked regions? why not just bite the bullet and do away with region blocking.. i want to be able to watch dodgy HK action films without waiting for your *ahem*members*ahem**cartel* to release it in my region.
im going to buy a dvd player shortly before the hardware locks are enforced at a manufacturer level (1 july) so i can get either get it modded or use a software hack and watch whatever the hell i want.. dvd is a great format..pity about the money/power hungy people driving it.
interesting thing is... while looking around at dvd players.. a good 80% sell pre-modded units.. and mainly pre-modded units.. the region blocking ISNT working
Dms0
the revolution will not be televised, or released in your region..