Continued thoughts: (sorry, shouldn't have hit post!:P is there a way to edit/. ? Now I feel super noobish)
I mean, some equations can seem pretty creative, but where would science be if we allowed patents on, say, the Fourier Transform?
Credit for discovering that and all, but you can't lock it up and claim its yours now. If you didn't find it, eventually, unless humanity gives up on academia or dies off, some other mathematician would come to the same equation. They are merely representations of that which is already out there, what is part of our world, and cannot be owned.
I dunno, this doesn't sound like an algorithm that would take years to develop. It seems fairly straightforward, applying common algorithmic practice to a new media. The same sort of things have been done in image recognition all over the place. And TFA says nothing about how long it took them.
This sort of thing is exactly why algorithms SHOULDN'T be patentable; you can reduce them to basic lambda calculus. They're just logic and math. The very nature of a program is taking a problem and breaking it down into the smallest, simplest of steps. If those simple steps exist, and they're simple enough for a computer to follow, then how are they not innate science? It seems that other people would eventually come to the same conclusion.
I can't think of any algorithms that seem otherwise. I'd love to consider some counterexamples.
An engineer buddy of mine was doing reverse-engineering work on the Skype protocol for a job he had a few years back, he would come to me with shock
and tell me about how dumb and insecure the Skype clients are and how trivially easy it is to get any Skype client to work as an invisible proxy for you without that person's knowledge by just using the skype protocol.
If they're making such a huge deal about it, you have to wonder why. They've got some problems and they'd rather have security through obscurity. *sigh*
Does the DMCA really prevent cleanroom / chinese wall reverse-engineering? Damnit politicians just have no clue...
Very good point! I remember buying the N64 upgrade cart or whatever they called it for Donkey Kong 64 which if memory serves required it.
Nintendo's always been much more open to that sort of thing than Nintendo or Sony. They've had ports for expansions (SNES floppy disk, N64DD, etc.) that often don't even end up getting used. The original gameboy had an infrared port; did ANY game ever actually use it? You had to use a link cable for everything. But they tried.
You're absolutely right about RAM, the 360 and PS3 both have a pitifully small amount of memory. But I was talking about the Cell-broadband engine, multithreaded games applications, and the PS3 and Xbox360 development kits. I haven't worked on 360 or PS3 myself first hand, but what I've heard makes it sound like things are far from perfected and fully utilized.
Rage actually looks better on 360 than PS3, purely because the PS3 just doesn't have enough RAM to hold the art assets to render a single scene at a time
Xbox 360 has 512 MB of RAM and integrated graphics. PS3 has 256 MB of RAM and 256 MB of dedicated VRAM. Why again doesn't the PS3 have enough RAM?
John Carmack has said so, and I trust him. Something about the PS3 only giving you access to some of it.
Games usually try to target console first, and then just port to PC
Why is this the case, as opposed to aiming higher with PC exclusives?
It would be nice if game companies targeted PC, but other than genres that demand it (RTS, turn based, etc.) the PC gets largely ignored.
I think the reasons are twofold: they believe that they can target the console, port to pc, and get away with it, still selling the game and making everybody happy, even if PC gamers could do better, and because of the belief that on PC there is rampant piracy whereas on console there is not.
The second point is pretty wrong, and studios are slowly realizing it. Console piracy is pretty huge, but largely ignored. Its not too hard to burn a downloaded game to a disc and then use a modchip or a swap disc to get your disc to play region-free. Especially with consoles with integrated harddrives, you can flash the OS and play games right off the drive, no need to burn a disc! This is seen as more difficult than pirating PC games, so PC piracy is seen as a bigger issue.
Many have realized that the old business models are failing, and that is the real problem. Valve is trying out all kinds of things on steam, TF2 is free now, but actually makes them more money than it used to. What? They put games on sale, and they expect the sale to make 2x the normal income and instead it makes 40x the normal income. We just do not understand the market behavior of games and the best business model for games yet. We're still discovering.
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/
and they're not about to redo the entire game's graphic design for a port.
They already do for ports to Wii and ports to DS.
A game that is also on Wii or Gameboy is NOT a port. Try playing both games; they're fundamentally different. Its a marketing ploy that they use the same name and they advertise "on 360, ps3, wii and DS" but thats a damn lie. "ports" to DS will usually completely rethink the game, new gameplay that fits for a more casual experience in shorter bursts, and better fits the controls that you have on a DS instead of a 360 controller. The wii is the same, games are different completely, use completely different engines.
Why don't they do that for PC? Make a completely different game, new engine? It comes down to money. They must not think its worth the investment.
Making a wii or DS "port/version" of a game is going to be cheaper than the main, AAA version of the game meant for 360. The graphics are going to be simpler, the game is going to take less time to develop. On the PC, however, it would be the other way around. You would have MORE work to do, you'd need a more impressive engine with higher quality models than the 360 version, and for what feels like less sales and profit. So they feel the DS port is worth the cost, but a proper high quality PC port would not.
Agreed. The PS3 has so little RAM for its processing power that it feels crippled now. Rage actually looks better on 360 than PS3, purely because the PS3 just doesn't have enough RAM to hold the art assets to render a single scene at a time, it has to constantly stream to disk. I understand they're trying to cut costs, but when you're already shelling out $200-300, an extra $20 for an additional GB stick of RAM would go a LONG WAY to making gaming better.
The real heartbreak is because consoles have so little RAM, videogames are getting held back across the board, even on PCs. Games usually try to target console first, and then just port to PC, and they're not about to redo the entire game's graphic design for a port. They aim low (the lowest common denominator between 360 and ps3) and then get that to work on all three. Its rather unfortunate, because PCs have left consoles in the dust and have continued the advance for the last six years or whatever, and are capable of so much more.
The next generation of consoles are the PS3 with Move and the XBOX360 with Kinect. Both the 360 and the PS3 still aren't being completely utilized to their full processing potential, the move/kinect just opened up a whole bunch of new gameplay options, and NOBODY wants to drop $400 on a brand new console when their current one isn't being utilized enough. The market isn't ready at all for a new generation of consoles, and Microsoft & Sony realize this. They've been planning for it.
MMOs are new and shiny when they first come out, but buggy and rough around the edges.
In the first few patches and expansions, the game grows a lot. It changes, it becomes a new thing.
But then the curve slows down. Subscribers are only going to keep dropping off of WoW over time. Blizz pretty much has to release more and more expansions to try to keep interest going until WoW 2. So yes, they are desperate, but thats kind of how the business model goes for subscription MMOs. Look at everquest, they're pushing expansions out like nobody's business.
The biggest savings would come from ending funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and holding steady spending across the entire Department of Defense.
RTFA
I'll agree that gameplay should always come first in games, and everything else should support the gameplay. Otherwise, just make a movie.
That said, I still feel like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, plenty of fun experiences can be had from "watching a simulator tick along", so who is to say that isn't a game? There's lots of different niches.
Generally gameplay ideas that requires vast amounts of time to design or explain are usually not very good ones. Most good games have really simple gameplay at their core.
Fixed that for you.
If gameplay ideas that take vast amounts of time to implement are not very good, then there is no such thing as a remotely good game.
Maybe angry birds?
What is a vast amount of time for you, a century? Even super mario would take months to code from scratch.
Because people are very silly and like making up as many buzzwords as they can think of. So far I have yet to find a practical difference between Hogel (shouldn't it be hologel?) and voxel (which should technically be volgel, but that sounds awkward). Some people are saying that a Hogel stores "perspective information for multiple angles" but that would be easily calculated from voxel data... I guess a hogel is a voxel with levels of detail and separate angle images prerendered instead of rendered in real-time? That sounds awfully space intensive, to store every angle of every pixel in memory... I guess calculating 360 degrees of 60 fps rendering is monumentally time intensive, so you might want to prebake it, but I don't know how much you can do on just a pixel level... hrm..
though even if we develop the AI first, it'll still be nifty to have the 3D display to watch what the hell the computer is doing, or to interface with the AI.
Slashdot Mirror
Continued thoughts: (sorry, shouldn't have hit post! :P is there a way to edit /. ? Now I feel super noobish)
I mean, some equations can seem pretty creative, but where would science be if we allowed patents on, say, the Fourier Transform?
Credit for discovering that and all, but you can't lock it up and claim its yours now. If you didn't find it, eventually, unless humanity gives up on academia or dies off, some other mathematician would come to the same equation. They are merely representations of that which is already out there, what is part of our world, and cannot be owned.
I dunno, this doesn't sound like an algorithm that would take years to develop. It seems fairly straightforward, applying common algorithmic practice to a new media. The same sort of things have been done in image recognition all over the place. And TFA says nothing about how long it took them.
This sort of thing is exactly why algorithms SHOULDN'T be patentable; you can reduce them to basic lambda calculus. They're just logic and math. The very nature of a program is taking a problem and breaking it down into the smallest, simplest of steps. If those simple steps exist, and they're simple enough for a computer to follow, then how are they not innate science? It seems that other people would eventually come to the same conclusion.
I can't think of any algorithms that seem otherwise. I'd love to consider some counterexamples.
An engineer buddy of mine was doing reverse-engineering work on the Skype protocol for a job he had a few years back, he would come to me with shock and tell me about how dumb and insecure the Skype clients are and how trivially easy it is to get any Skype client to work as an invisible proxy for you without that person's knowledge by just using the skype protocol.
If they're making such a huge deal about it, you have to wonder why. They've got some problems and they'd rather have security through obscurity. *sigh*
Does the DMCA really prevent cleanroom / chinese wall reverse-engineering? Damnit politicians just have no clue...
He never ever learned to play guitar so well
But he could read a reaction just like ringing a bell
Go go! Go johnny go!
Not in red/blue, but I guess it was the gameboy color and you could with gold/silver so yeah. Nevermind :P
Very good point! I remember buying the N64 upgrade cart or whatever they called it for Donkey Kong 64 which if memory serves required it. Nintendo's always been much more open to that sort of thing than Nintendo or Sony. They've had ports for expansions (SNES floppy disk, N64DD, etc.) that often don't even end up getting used. The original gameboy had an infrared port; did ANY game ever actually use it? You had to use a link cable for everything. But they tried.
I played OoT for the first time this year.
This is blasphemy! This is madness!
You're absolutely right about RAM, the 360 and PS3 both have a pitifully small amount of memory. But I was talking about the Cell-broadband engine, multithreaded games applications, and the PS3 and Xbox360 development kits. I haven't worked on 360 or PS3 myself first hand, but what I've heard makes it sound like things are far from perfected and fully utilized.
Only novel game mechanics could induce me to buy a new system. What game mechanic is going to use a gig of RAM?
Still rocking the Nintendo 64 huh?
Rage actually looks better on 360 than PS3, purely because the PS3 just doesn't have enough RAM to hold the art assets to render a single scene at a time
Xbox 360 has 512 MB of RAM and integrated graphics. PS3 has 256 MB of RAM and 256 MB of dedicated VRAM. Why again doesn't the PS3 have enough RAM?
John Carmack has said so, and I trust him. Something about the PS3 only giving you access to some of it.
Games usually try to target console first, and then just port to PC
Why is this the case, as opposed to aiming higher with PC exclusives?
It would be nice if game companies targeted PC, but other than genres that demand it (RTS, turn based, etc.) the PC gets largely ignored. I think the reasons are twofold: they believe that they can target the console, port to pc, and get away with it, still selling the game and making everybody happy, even if PC gamers could do better, and because of the belief that on PC there is rampant piracy whereas on console there is not. The second point is pretty wrong, and studios are slowly realizing it. Console piracy is pretty huge, but largely ignored. Its not too hard to burn a downloaded game to a disc and then use a modchip or a swap disc to get your disc to play region-free. Especially with consoles with integrated harddrives, you can flash the OS and play games right off the drive, no need to burn a disc! This is seen as more difficult than pirating PC games, so PC piracy is seen as a bigger issue.
Many have realized that the old business models are failing, and that is the real problem. Valve is trying out all kinds of things on steam, TF2 is free now, but actually makes them more money than it used to. What? They put games on sale, and they expect the sale to make 2x the normal income and instead it makes 40x the normal income. We just do not understand the market behavior of games and the best business model for games yet. We're still discovering. http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/
and they're not about to redo the entire game's graphic design for a port.
They already do for ports to Wii and ports to DS.
A game that is also on Wii or Gameboy is NOT a port. Try playing both games; they're fundamentally different. Its a marketing ploy that they use the same name and they advertise "on 360, ps3, wii and DS" but thats a damn lie. "ports" to DS will usually completely rethink the game, new gameplay that fits for a more casual experience in shorter bursts, and better fits the controls that you have on a DS instead of a 360 controller. The wii is the same, games are different completely, use completely different engines. Why don't they do that for PC? Make a completely different game, new engine? It comes down to money. They must not think its worth the investment.
Making a wii or DS "port/version" of a game is going to be cheaper than the main, AAA version of the game meant for 360. The graphics are going to be simpler, the game is going to take less time to develop. On the PC, however, it would be the other way around. You would have MORE work to do, you'd need a more impressive engine with higher quality models than the 360 version, and for what feels like less sales and profit. So they feel the DS port is worth the cost, but a proper high quality PC port would not.
Even if they let you install an alternate OS, they'll just change their minds in a firmware update a few weeks later.
Agreed. The PS3 has so little RAM for its processing power that it feels crippled now. Rage actually looks better on 360 than PS3, purely because the PS3 just doesn't have enough RAM to hold the art assets to render a single scene at a time, it has to constantly stream to disk. I understand they're trying to cut costs, but when you're already shelling out $200-300, an extra $20 for an additional GB stick of RAM would go a LONG WAY to making gaming better.
The real heartbreak is because consoles have so little RAM, videogames are getting held back across the board, even on PCs. Games usually try to target console first, and then just port to PC, and they're not about to redo the entire game's graphic design for a port. They aim low (the lowest common denominator between 360 and ps3) and then get that to work on all three. Its rather unfortunate, because PCs have left consoles in the dust and have continued the advance for the last six years or whatever, and are capable of so much more.
The next generation of consoles are the PS3 with Move and the XBOX360 with Kinect. Both the 360 and the PS3 still aren't being completely utilized to their full processing potential, the move/kinect just opened up a whole bunch of new gameplay options, and NOBODY wants to drop $400 on a brand new console when their current one isn't being utilized enough. The market isn't ready at all for a new generation of consoles, and Microsoft & Sony realize this. They've been planning for it.
MMOs are new and shiny when they first come out, but buggy and rough around the edges.
In the first few patches and expansions, the game grows a lot. It changes, it becomes a new thing.
But then the curve slows down. Subscribers are only going to keep dropping off of WoW over time. Blizz pretty much has to release more and more expansions to try to keep interest going until WoW 2. So yes, they are desperate, but thats kind of how the business model goes for subscription MMOs. Look at everquest, they're pushing expansions out like nobody's business.
"ending funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan"
Then again, it's a lot more fun to get indignant!
And you've just hit the political nail on the head.
The biggest savings would come from ending funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and holding steady spending across the entire Department of Defense.
RTFA
I'll agree that gameplay should always come first in games, and everything else should support the gameplay. Otherwise, just make a movie.
That said, I still feel like you're throwing the baby out with the bathwater, plenty of fun experiences can be had from "watching a simulator tick along", so who is to say that isn't a game? There's lots of different niches.
EA games aren't made on short schedules. They're made by cramming normal schedules into short periods by forcing devs into constant overtime.
Generally gameplay ideas that requires vast amounts of time to design or explain are usually not very good ones. Most good games have really simple gameplay at their core.
Fixed that for you. If gameplay ideas that take vast amounts of time to implement are not very good, then there is no such thing as a remotely good game.
Maybe angry birds?
What is a vast amount of time for you, a century? Even super mario would take months to code from scratch.
So? Its BALLMER. The guy who said that iPhones probably aren't going to sell at all, and windows phone and zune are going to do fantastic.
Nostradamus would be more relevant to modern tech predictions than Steve Ballmer.
Crap, my mod points just expired. Somebody?
Because people are very silly and like making up as many buzzwords as they can think of. So far I have yet to find a practical difference between Hogel (shouldn't it be hologel?) and voxel (which should technically be volgel, but that sounds awkward). Some people are saying that a Hogel stores "perspective information for multiple angles" but that would be easily calculated from voxel data... I guess a hogel is a voxel with levels of detail and separate angle images prerendered instead of rendered in real-time? That sounds awfully space intensive, to store every angle of every pixel in memory... I guess calculating 360 degrees of 60 fps rendering is monumentally time intensive, so you might want to prebake it, but I don't know how much you can do on just a pixel level... hrm..
though even if we develop the AI first, it'll still be nifty to have the 3D display to watch what the hell the computer is doing, or to interface with the AI.
It's a low-rez 3d pixel - see minecraft!
You mean a Voxel? Which is exactly what Parent said?