i would imagine yes. Warden (wow's anti-cheat spyware) has been known to flag players running wine as exploiters/botters. I don't believe blizzard intends to shut out linux users. At one point, i believe, there was a sticky on the forums detailing how to use wow with linux. Rather that flags go off when warden sets off alarms because it doesn't recognize its surroundings in linux. I have no idea if blizzard has rectified the issue, but i'm sure if they had the desire they could find out how many linux machines were running wow. Additionally i would be absolutely shocked if they didn't know the ratios of win xp/2k/vista and mac os machines running, that'd just be bad business.
wow and i thought apple over charged for laptops. Even without using any solid state drives or software you can easily get the price of that thing over $6k
it doesn't take hundreds of hours to switch in wow either. A few clicks and you're done.
What you probably meant was it takes 100s of hours to reach the same power level. Well the same thing is true in tf. Someone who spends all their time playing one class in tf will take time learn a new one. Maybe not as much time, but any game with some level of complexity will have a learning curve.
no he did not say he's mined about half the data. The person who reported about it on world of raids made that claim.
go look at the actual site: http://okoloth.blogspot.com/
All he has stated is that he's mined about 4.5m records, and has updated them since 2.2. That's it. nothing more. Nothing about the actual size of the player base.
most:
-adjective, superl. of much or many with more as compar.
1. in the greatest quantity, amount, measure, degree, or number: to win the most votes.
2. in the majority of instances: Most operations are successful.
3. greatest, as in size or extent: the most talent.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/most
Blizzard does not make 'most' mmos. Most mmo clients are glorified chat programs. They preform minimal calculations, such as collision detection, but very rarely anything more. The final decision almost always lies with the server, especially in the case of things like players being in range and the actually damage they do to each other. You can even see this in wow. When you run towards someone your client will mark an action as in range, but using the action will return an out of range error. This is because the server waits to synch you and your opponent before allowing the action to proceed, even though the client is telling it otherwise. The primary reason that wow has warden is to detect programs snooping wow's memory space. Wow's major vulnerability is that collision detection is done almost entirely client side.
In the case of predicting other player's actions (ie, the point of TFA) you couldn't gain an advantage by hacking the neural network. The player would actually still have to be a valid target(in range, hostile, flagged, etc) according to the server for you to do anything to them
how could you possibly get an unfair advantage? all the actual calculations are still done server side. Most mmo clients are nothing more than a glorified chat program, the servers do most of the work.
The current standard calls for 4096 pixels of width at 24 fps according to the article you sited, it also mentions that 4K projectors have already been installed in over a dozen locations. Even if Cars was not made at that resolution, it's where rendering is currently. Also, when cars was being rendered no console on the market could support 1080p resolution.
That's really besides the point anyways. Film rendering and RT rendering are completely different beasts. Of course pixar would be interested in faster ray tracing algorithms or better hardware support for ray tracing.
They key phrase there is 'as long as people want more polygons...'. There is an upper limit on how detailed things can get and still have it make a difference. There's no point making something so detailed that the polygons you are rendering become smaller than individual pixels on your screen. Furthermore there's a point at which the human eye will not be able to tell the difference in screen resolutions. Eventually the race for 'more polygons, more texture detail' will end, and then youll have to improve how the things get rendered instead of what is being rendered so that they look more realistic.
Pixar and other movie studios optimize for picture quality, where as a game designer optimizes for frame rate. This is true of both the software doing the rendering, and the modelling techniques used by the designer. You're also forgetting that the images for a movie have to be generated at much larger resolutions(up to 4096 pixels across). While cars object for object at movie theater resolution may not be close to possible, a cars like experience at desktop resolutions might be possible by using poorer quality models and good use of graphical tricks.
I don't believe i claimed that it would be possible using current technology or techniques, just that such a method would drop the number of possible moves from somewhere in the 10^120 range by many orders of magnitude. Admittedly the set of winning conditions is still very large, and that calculating 8-12 moves away from that point would be even larger, but compared to the original total i'm sure you'd be looking at many many orders of magnitude smaller. Many of these states would also be similar, and even more of them might be simply rotated 90 or 180 degrees from other states. I'm sure that smarter/more dedicated minds could find plenty more ways to weed the numbers down. Again, i'm not trying to imply this is currently or even in the near future possible, just that saying chess is unsolvable because it has 10^120 solutions is absurd.
Hate to break it to you, but "No [anything computational] will ever be able to duplicate this feat.", Machines or otherwise. This is due to the fact that the complete tree of moves (i.e. all possible plies of the entire game from starting position) has on the order of 10^120 nodes to evaluate, which is slightly bigger than the number of atoms in the known universe. You don't have to evaluate every node because some are clearly not going to result in victory. If you look at how they 'solved' checkers, they didn't actually analyze every move, they analyzed every possible position once the board had only 8 pieces left. Obviously this is much harder in chess as the finished state of the game can happen with 3 to 32 pieces on the board, but the set of final moves is definitely much smaller than 10^120 and working back 5, 10, 15, 20 moves from those points would also be significantly smaller. It may still be outside the realm of possibility, but i'm sure smarter minds than mine will find ways to reduce the number of relevant states so that eventually a program can be written that cannot be beaten.
genre defining and revolutionary are not necessarily the same thing. You need to look no further than starcraft to see a perfect example. There are very few i would really consider in both categories.
blizzard has never really made revolutionary games nor have they been particularly afraid of going into saturated markets. What they are good at is making very solid games that are accessible to just about anyone with a computer made in the last half decade. Starcraft is a perfect example. The game would not do well on a comparison chart of features to other RTS of its time(most notably Total Annihilation), it was released into a gaming world flooded with RTS games, but it was just plain fun, well balanced, and had a compelling story.
The point is,for many people, the sense of accomplishment you get from a completing a task. Think about it like a high school graduation. Just about anybody can complete this task, but that doesn't take the sense of accomplishment out of doing it. Obviously that is not the only reason people play, but i'd imagine it's a large contributor.
The thing is most people who play these games do it for the advancement. The fun is in the sense of accomplishment. You don't get that when the advancement is secondary. Then you've got an entirely different game entirely. Not all games are for all people. MMORPGs are really for people who are all about the destination. For people who are about the journey there are a lot of other options.
I'm sure that in a perfect world where developer time was limitless you could actually make an MMO without timesinks or grinds that provided compelling content for years at a time to players. We, however, do not live in such a world. Making content takes time. There is simply no way to produce unique, enjoyable, and quality content at the same rate at which it is consumed by players. This is further exacerbated by the fact that your player base will be fragmented amongst many differing play styles which in all likelihood will not overlap.
as has been pointed out several times, that only works if you are making something to defeat a generic bot. If a bot is custom tailored to defeat a site this approach wouldn't work. You must have a random element (probably a very large one so that guessing would require extreme luck) to the system or it's trivially defeatable by someone who thinks its worth the time to do so.
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i would imagine yes. Warden (wow's anti-cheat spyware) has been known to flag players running wine as exploiters/botters. I don't believe blizzard intends to shut out linux users. At one point, i believe, there was a sticky on the forums detailing how to use wow with linux. Rather that flags go off when warden sets off alarms because it doesn't recognize its surroundings in linux. I have no idea if blizzard has rectified the issue, but i'm sure if they had the desire they could find out how many linux machines were running wow. Additionally i would be absolutely shocked if they didn't know the ratios of win xp/2k/vista and mac os machines running, that'd just be bad business.
wow and i thought apple over charged for laptops. Even without using any solid state drives or software you can easily get the price of that thing over $6k
it doesn't take hundreds of hours to switch in wow either. A few clicks and you're done. What you probably meant was it takes 100s of hours to reach the same power level. Well the same thing is true in tf. Someone who spends all their time playing one class in tf will take time learn a new one. Maybe not as much time, but any game with some level of complexity will have a learning curve.
no he did not say he's mined about half the data. The person who reported about it on world of raids made that claim. go look at the actual site: http://okoloth.blogspot.com/ All he has stated is that he's mined about 4.5m records, and has updated them since 2.2. That's it. nothing more. Nothing about the actual size of the player base.
most: -adjective, superl. of much or many with more as compar. 1. in the greatest quantity, amount, measure, degree, or number: to win the most votes. 2. in the majority of instances: Most operations are successful. 3. greatest, as in size or extent: the most talent. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/most Blizzard does not make 'most' mmos. Most mmo clients are glorified chat programs. They preform minimal calculations, such as collision detection, but very rarely anything more. The final decision almost always lies with the server, especially in the case of things like players being in range and the actually damage they do to each other. You can even see this in wow. When you run towards someone your client will mark an action as in range, but using the action will return an out of range error. This is because the server waits to synch you and your opponent before allowing the action to proceed, even though the client is telling it otherwise. The primary reason that wow has warden is to detect programs snooping wow's memory space. Wow's major vulnerability is that collision detection is done almost entirely client side. In the case of predicting other player's actions (ie, the point of TFA) you couldn't gain an advantage by hacking the neural network. The player would actually still have to be a valid target(in range, hostile, flagged, etc) according to the server for you to do anything to them
how could you possibly get an unfair advantage? all the actual calculations are still done server side. Most mmo clients are nothing more than a glorified chat program, the servers do most of the work.
The current standard calls for 4096 pixels of width at 24 fps according to the article you sited, it also mentions that 4K projectors have already been installed in over a dozen locations. Even if Cars was not made at that resolution, it's where rendering is currently. Also, when cars was being rendered no console on the market could support 1080p resolution.
That's really besides the point anyways. Film rendering and RT rendering are completely different beasts. Of course pixar would be interested in faster ray tracing algorithms or better hardware support for ray tracing.
They key phrase there is 'as long as people want more polygons...'. There is an upper limit on how detailed things can get and still have it make a difference. There's no point making something so detailed that the polygons you are rendering become smaller than individual pixels on your screen. Furthermore there's a point at which the human eye will not be able to tell the difference in screen resolutions. Eventually the race for 'more polygons, more texture detail' will end, and then youll have to improve how the things get rendered instead of what is being rendered so that they look more realistic.
Pixar and other movie studios optimize for picture quality, where as a game designer optimizes for frame rate. This is true of both the software doing the rendering, and the modelling techniques used by the designer. You're also forgetting that the images for a movie have to be generated at much larger resolutions(up to 4096 pixels across). While cars object for object at movie theater resolution may not be close to possible, a cars like experience at desktop resolutions might be possible by using poorer quality models and good use of graphical tricks.
I don't believe i claimed that it would be possible using current technology or techniques, just that such a method would drop the number of possible moves from somewhere in the 10^120 range by many orders of magnitude. Admittedly the set of winning conditions is still very large, and that calculating 8-12 moves away from that point would be even larger, but compared to the original total i'm sure you'd be looking at many many orders of magnitude smaller. Many of these states would also be similar, and even more of them might be simply rotated 90 or 180 degrees from other states. I'm sure that smarter/more dedicated minds could find plenty more ways to weed the numbers down. Again, i'm not trying to imply this is currently or even in the near future possible, just that saying chess is unsolvable because it has 10^120 solutions is absurd.
you could make flash files with notepad or your IDE of choice using the flex 2 compiler which is free.
genre defining and revolutionary are not necessarily the same thing. You need to look no further than starcraft to see a perfect example. There are very few i would really consider in both categories.
blizzard has never really made revolutionary games nor have they been particularly afraid of going into saturated markets. What they are good at is making very solid games that are accessible to just about anyone with a computer made in the last half decade. Starcraft is a perfect example. The game would not do well on a comparison chart of features to other RTS of its time(most notably Total Annihilation), it was released into a gaming world flooded with RTS games, but it was just plain fun, well balanced, and had a compelling story.
The point is,for many people, the sense of accomplishment you get from a completing a task. Think about it like a high school graduation. Just about anybody can complete this task, but that doesn't take the sense of accomplishment out of doing it. Obviously that is not the only reason people play, but i'd imagine it's a large contributor.
The thing is most people who play these games do it for the advancement. The fun is in the sense of accomplishment. You don't get that when the advancement is secondary. Then you've got an entirely different game entirely. Not all games are for all people. MMORPGs are really for people who are all about the destination. For people who are about the journey there are a lot of other options.
I suggest you actually look up the definition of an economy.
I'm sure that in a perfect world where developer time was limitless you could actually make an MMO without timesinks or grinds that provided compelling content for years at a time to players. We, however, do not live in such a world. Making content takes time. There is simply no way to produce unique, enjoyable, and quality content at the same rate at which it is consumed by players. This is further exacerbated by the fact that your player base will be fragmented amongst many differing play styles which in all likelihood will not overlap.
as has been pointed out several times, that only works if you are making something to defeat a generic bot. If a bot is custom tailored to defeat a site this approach wouldn't work. You must have a random element (probably a very large one so that guessing would require extreme luck) to the system or it's trivially defeatable by someone who thinks its worth the time to do so.